Normative Work Research Articles

Deliberate environmental and legal risk: law enforcement and normative aspects

Relevance. Numerous environmental problems, overlapping with legal reality, transform the established legal order, introducing elements of uncertainty into it. In such circumstances, specific participants in legal relations do not always have a clear idea of how their model of behavior should be implemented in a legitimate way, which is why they quite consciously have to rely on risk. In its most general form, risk is a derivative of uncertainty. In the realities of environmental and legal uncertainty, situations are common where the subject of normative or law enforcement activities, relying on risk, does not have a clear forecast of the success of his legally significant decisions, but another behavior option that is not based on risk is either excluded altogether or difficult to implement. Such trends determine the need for a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the phenomenon of premeditation of subjects of lawmaking and law enforcement activities in the context of environmental and legal risk.The purpose is to identify the key features of the premeditation factor in relation to the law enforcement and rule-making aspects of legal activity in the context of environmental and legal risk.Objectives: to reveal the essence of premeditation as such, to consider the law enforcement and rule-making sides of premeditation of an ecological and legal nature in a risk-oriented model of legal relations, to identify the forms of manifestation of such premeditation.Methodology. To solve the tasks set, methods of interpretation of normative and law enforcement acts, analysis, synthesis, concretization and abstraction were used. The results of the study were data characterizing the features of intentional environmental and legal risks in law enforcement and rule-making environments. Conclusion. The existence of deliberate environmental and legal risks is a consequence, firstly, of general environmental problems and, secondly, of defects in the field of legal regulation. Premeditation in the context of environmental and legal risk is expressed by the conscious will of the subject to achieve a certain useful result. Sometimes, in the format of normative or law enforcement work, such a risk is acceptable, but its use should be extremely careful.

Deadly Matters: Disciplinary Dilemmas in Aesthetic IR

Abstract International Relations (IR) has long been imagined as the discipline of somber, serious, “deadly” matters. This imagination constitutes a regime of visibility, intelligibility, and exigency—or, in the terms of Jacques Rancière, a disciplinary distribution of the sensible—that has profoundly shaped the manner in which popular culture has been constructed as an object of inquiry for aesthetic IR. The primary consequence of this distribution of the sensible is the tendency to reduce popular culture to its harmful effects. The benefit of this strategy is to establish aesthetic IR as a distinctive approach to world politics, in terms of its substantive focus on popular culture artifacts, as well as to popular culture, in terms of revealing the normative and ideological work popular culture does at the intersection of the everyday-local with the global-systemic. However, this successful incorporation of aesthetic IR into IR has reproduced the onto-epistemic distinctions that have consecrated IR as the discipline of “deadly matters,” chiefly that between the knowing IR scholar and the “knowledge-poor” that are the objects of her analysis. This creates an epistemic, methodological, and deontological dilemma, in that the necessary focus on “deadly matters” renders invisible the many subjects of popular culture, which contradicts the stated mission of aesthetic IR to make visible the multiplicity of knowledges and subjectivities constitutive of international politics.

Normative identity work: exploring Erich Fromm’s perspective on self and society

This article explores the potential of normative identity work to foster humanistic transformation, drawing from Erich Fromm’s social theory. By engaging with Fromm’s insights into the interplay between individuals and societal structures, the analysis demonstrates how identity work – understood as an ongoing process of self-construction within social contexts – can confront what Fromm terms the ‘pathology of normalcy’. Central to the discussion are Fromm’s reflections on identity and its relationship to the human needs for rootedness, relatedness and the construction of a frame of orientation. The article integrates Fromm’s views on identity with contemporary identity research, illustrating the tensions between conforming to societal expectations and the pursuit of self-realisation. It introduces the ‘normative ABC of identity work’, a model structured around three key dimensions: agency, belonging and coherence. This model offers a lens to examine the various ways societal forces shape identity work, influencing individuals in directions that may either align with societal norms or open pathways towards humanistic growth and transformation. In the conclusion, the article emphasises the relationship between identity work and Fromm’s concept of social character, highlighting how social character can reflect and reinforce societal patterns while also pointing to the transformative potential embedded in humanistic values. This synthesis provides a critical framework for understanding how identity work can both sustain and challenge existing social norms and power structures.

Online monitoring activism: civic surveillance practices as a reaction to the rise of the far-right in the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT The rise of far-right movements during the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a new form of individual digital activism: online monitoring activism (OMA). During the pandemic, online monitoring activists systematically collected, processed and published information from far-right Telegram channels and groups. Against the theoretical background of concepts like the monitory democracy and surveillance culture, we conducted eight semi-structured interviews with German online monitoring activists, investigating their motivations, roles, and the intricacies of their monitoring practices. Our findings reveal that online monitoring activists are driven by a sense of duty to counteract anti-democratic tendencies, which they perceive as inadequately addressed by institutional power. They gain localized and thematically specialized expertise that they share within loose networks of like-minded others. We highlight the activists’ liminal identity oscillating between virtuous citizenship and vigilantism, as well as the broader societal implications of their actions. On the one hand, they fulfill the role of active citizenship in monitory democracy; on the other, they also reinforce the transparency imperative and the wish for far-reaching security and control inherent to surveillance culture. The transparency potential afforded by their adversaries’ online connective action and mobilizing efforts legitimizes their surveillance and demands surveillance. Further normative work is needed to critically examine the extent and desirability of increased social control introduced to liberal democracy by online monitoring activism.

The Social Value Misconception in Clinical Research

Clinical researchers should help respect the autonomy and promote the well-being of prospective study participants by helping them make voluntary, informed decisions about enrollment. However, participants often exhibit poor understanding of important information about clinical research. Bioethicists have given special attention to “misconceptions” about clinical research that can compromise participants’ decision-making, most notably the “therapeutic misconception.” These misconceptions typically involve false beliefs about a study’s purpose, or risks or potential benefits for participants. In this article, we describe a misconception involving false beliefs about a study’s potential benefits for non-participants, or its expected social value. This social value misconception can compromise altruistically motivated participants’ decision-making, potentially threatening their autonomy and well-being. We show how the social value misconception raises ethical concerns for inherently low-value research, hyped research, and even ordinary research, and advocate for empirical and normative work to help understand and counteract this misconception’s potential negative impacts on participants.

How to decide what to do: Why you're already a realist about value

AbstractMetaethical realists and anti‐realists alike have typically assumed that deliberation about what to do is, at least sometimes, properly settled by the agent's evaluative attitudes—what she wants, likes, or values—rather than by any objective source of value out in the world. I argue that this picture of deliberation is not one that the deliberating agent herself can accept. Seen from within the first‐person perspective, the agent's own evaluative attitudes are not encountered as descriptive psychological facts, but are rather “transparent” to the external world, conceived as a place already suffused with normative significance: they are her finding the relevant parts of the world to be desirable, valuable, and so on. And from the agent's own point of view, these attitudes can do the normative work involved in settling deliberation only because and insofar as they are understood as in this way a warranted response to this desirability or value. Attitudes that the agent does not experience as transparent in this way are attitudes from which she is alienated, and as such she cannot understand them as authoritative over her deliberation. What this means, I argue, is that deliberation about what to do involves a commitment to a particularly substantive form of metaethical realism.

Adults with cerebral palsy exhibit uncharacteristic cortical oscillations during an adaptive sensorimotor control task

Prior research has shown that the sensorimotor cortical oscillations are uncharacteristic in persons with cerebral palsy (CP); however, it is unknown if these altered cortical oscillations have an impact on adaptive sensorimotor control. This investigation evaluated the cortical dynamics when the motor action needs to be changed “on-the-fly”. Adults with CP and neurotypical controls completed a sensorimotor task that required either proactive or reactive control while undergoing magnetoencephalography (MEG). When compared with the controls, the adults with CP had a weaker beta (18–24 Hz) event-related desynchronization (ERD), post-movement beta rebound (PMBR, 16–20 Hz) and theta (4–6 Hz) event-related synchronization (ERS) in the sensorimotor cortices. In agreement with normative work, the controls exhibited differences in the strength of the sensorimotor gamma (66–84 Hz) ERS during proactive compared to reactive trials, but similar condition-wise changes were not seen in adults with CP. Lastly, the adults with CP who had a stronger theta ERS tended to have better hand dexterity, as indicated by the Box and Blocks Test and Purdue Pegboard Test. These results may suggest that alterations in the theta and gamma cortical oscillations play a role in the altered hand dexterity and uncharacteristic adaptive sensorimotor control noted in adults with CP.

Legal Pluralism as a Category of Analysis

AbstractA debate has raged for decades over legal pluralism and its value for the study of law. Much of this back and forth has resolved to a fight over what law “is” and push-and-pull between legal centrists and pluralists. This introductory essay proposes a new framework for thinking about legal pluralism. Turning away from the centrist/pluralist binary, we instead ask what work legal pluralism as a category of analysis can do. The debate, we suggest, is a fundamental methodological disagreement about the normative work that categories of analysis do and the costs that historians should be willing to pay to reap the benefits of theoretically sophisticated frameworks of analysis which are interoperable between times and places. The debate about legal pluralism, we argue, can be productively reframed as a question about the benefits and drawbacks of the legal pluralist framework.

On the Term “Environmental Refugee”: Normative Assumptions and Empirical Realities

Activist groups debate the complex connection between climate change and migration but generally agree on the normative value of describing those migrants as “environmental refugees.” They argue that using such a term, even though unrecognized under international law, might increase the urgency of this issue in the eyes of the public. Does the term do the normative work that has been assumed? To our knowledge, the idea has not been subject to empirical confirmation. In this research note, we present data from two experimental surveys conducted in the UK and the Netherlands (N = 2261) directly addressing that question. The findings significantly undermine the assumption that “environmental refugee” is normatively persuasive outside activists and academic circles. We demonstrate that using “environmental refugees” frames compared to “environmental migrants” does not increase the urgency of the climate migration problem in the eyes of the public, and as our results show, such frames may slightly lower perceptions of urgency. Yet, this result is rather negligible.

What’s Fairness Got to Do with it? Fair Opportunity, Practice Dependence, and the Right to Freedom of Religion

The right to religious liberty as for instance set out in the European Convention of Human Rights protects acts of religious observance. Such protection can clash with other considerations, including laws aimed at protecting other state interests. Religious freedom therefore requires an account of when the right should lead to exemptions from other laws and when the right can legitimately be limited. Alan Patten has proposed a Fair Opportunity view of the normative logic of religious liberty. But Patten’s view faces several problems. The normative work in his view is mainly done by added accounts of reasonable claims and of justifiability. So, the Fair Opportunity view in itself does not provide a normative criterion. Defenses of the Fair Opportunity view must therefore turn on the theoretical preferability of its structural features. But the Fair Opportunity view has the wrong form to capture the right to freedom of religion. The form of the right to freedom of religion is due to how its point is to address how states limit the liberty of citizens. Given a practice dependent approach, which assigns importance to the point and purpose of the right to freedom of religion, Patten’s theory is thus problematic.

Research on the International Sustainable Practice of the Taiwanese Food and Agricultural Education Law under the Current Global Food Security Challenges.

On 19 April 2022, in order to overcome a succession of recent global food health and agriculture safety (FHAS) incidents, the Taiwanese government instituted and announced 20 comprehensive Articles under the Taiwanese Food and Agricultural Education Law (TFAEL) for regulating the Taiwanese FHAS in order to completely construct the international strategies under the current global food security challenges of the FAHS. As a result, this research study firstly employs the learning community model (LCM) of the learning theory to measure the implementing depth of the international sustainability practice of the 20 Articles of the Taiwanese FHASE from a learning performance analytical perspective. Then, the social learning theory (SLT) of the educational theory is applied to consolidate the individual behaviors of the relative stakeholders, the organizational management of the relative industries and the socialized consent of the multilateral organization performance assessment network (MOPAN) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). After completing quantitative and qualitative analyses, the two most valuable conclusions and findings were as follows: (1) Not only Article 12, but also Articles 3, 4 and 5 of the new law can empirically facilitate strategic management for supporting and promoting the Taiwanese FHAS educational policy dialogue at a global, regional and country scale in order to effectively advance the international sustainable compatibility of the TFAEL. (2) Articles 6, 11 and 16 of the new law can completely construct operational management for building normative and standard-setting Taiwanese FHAS educational works in order to efficiently advance the international sustainable compatibility of the TFAEL. Therefore, beyond the analytical results of this research, the international sustainable compatibility of the TFAEL provides a direction for the development of sustainable food systems, food policies, agricultural food markets and food chains in order to overcome the various contemporary global food security challenges.

We need a field of educational ethics

During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers faced numerous ethical questions in biomedical science, public health, educational policy, and education practice. Bioethicists were key partners in informing decision-making in their areas of expertise; educational ethicists, on the other hand, had to fight our way to the table if we got in the building at all. How did bioethics go from non-existent as a field in 1960 to ubiquitous a half-century later, and how could normative work in and about education make the same leap? This article uses bioethics as a foil to argue for why we need a new field of educational ethics, what such a field could accomplish, and how it might do so. It describes the kinds of problems that bioethics was created to address and the different roles that bioethicists play. The article argues that edethicists can and should address the same kinds of problems as well as play similar scholarly, clinical, and policy-oriented roles.

Analysis of the assessment and improvement of working conditions for drivers of technological vehicles on the example of the mining and transport complex of the Udachny MPP of AK Alrosа

Working conditions of drivers of technological transport on the example of the depot of Alrosа AK were assessed, effective management solutions aimed to reduce their professional risks based on improving the labor protection system of transport enterprises of mining complexes were developed. The mining transport system of the Udachninsky MPP of Alrosa was characterized, the units of technological transport of the carpool were described; the structure of management of the carpool of technological transport was analyzed. The working conditions of drivers of the mining and transport system were studied based on the results of a special assessment of working conditions for 2021. The harmful production factors and the reasons for reducing their exposure levels were evaluated. Measures that allow the company to maintain acceptable working conditions for workplaces with the presence of harmful production factors were developed. The management decisions of Alrosa ensuring safe working conditions for drivers were presented. They can be implemented through large annual financial investments in personal protective equipment, periodic audits in the occupational health and industrial safety system and three-level control, and innovative technologies. The advanced methods of creating normative working conditions with minimal health risks were studied. The strategic management decisions that improve the industrial safety and labor protection in all divisions of this enterprise were described.

The Need for Practicable Normative Right-based Social Work Practice in Secure and Forensic Mental Health Services

Abstract We (both author and reader) will explore the need to develop a practicable evaluative human rights-based approach to the care, treatment and discharge of forensic mental health patients. It can be argued that patients in secure and forensic services are potentially the most marginalised and extensively stigmatised of all patient cohorts, and that the extent to which they are discriminated against should not be underestimated. We will consider the concept of right-based practice in secure and forensic mental health settings, and how the quality of practice can be strengthened. We will ground our exploration in the lived experiences of secure and forensic mental health patients and seek through the lens of lived experience to envisage what could constitute fairer and more supportive systems of care.

The 10 Elements of Agroecology interconnected: Making them operational in FAO’s work on agroecology

Since 2014, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has played a leading role in facilitating agroecology discussions and dialogues among many different regions and stakeholders. FAO’s engagement with agroecology as one promising way of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was confirmed in 2018 with the launch of the Scaling Up Agroecology Initiative. FAO’s function is of a dual but interconnected nature: that of normative operational work. This is reflected in FAO’s work on agroecology, which combines the normative and operational aspects to create synergies through their linkages, thus creating a policy bridge for transformation. Undergirding this work is the framework of the 10 Elements of Agroecology, which was approved by FAO Governing Bodies in November 2019 and has been expanded to include its use in visual narratives to describe plausible theories of change to facilitate food systems transformation. The 10 Elements serve as the foundation for the normative and operational aspects of the Scaling Up Agroecology Initiative (SUAI), which include various tools, knowledge pieces, projects, policy initiatives, and sharing platforms. Nowhere is this foundation of the 10 Elements clearer than in the Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE), a tool for assessing the multidimensional performance of agroecology. TAPE relies upon the 10 Elements to characterize the level of agroecological transition of production systems in agriculture at scale and in time. Upon this snapshot of transition, criteria of quantitative performance are assessed. Recent utilization of TAPE across the globe has strongly shown how TAPE can help actors make data-driven decisions to elicit transformational change at all levels of the territory, when it is linked to the other aspects of the SUAI underpinned by the 10 Elements, thus effectively bridging policy and praxis.

Technology-assisted supplemental work: A meta-analysis

Due to the increasing digitalization and connectivity of work, more and more employees engage in technology-assisted supplemental work (TASW). TASW refers to the performance of work-related tasks after regular work hours with the aid of technological tools. Based on a conceptual model of TASW, we present a comprehensive meta-analysis of potential antecedents and outcomes of TASW (K = 89 independent samples, N = 39,085 employees). Results showed that TASW is associated with social normative work context characteristics, such as availability expectations after work (ρ¯ = 0.45), and work characteristics, such as job demands (ρ¯ = 0.32). Associations were also found between TASW and person characteristics, such as work identity (ρ¯ = 0.35) and segmentation preference (ρ¯ = −0.20). Moreover, TASW is related to important employee outcomes, including recovery-related outcomes, such as psychological detachment (ρ¯ = −0.38); well-being outcomes, such as job strain (ρ¯ = 0.12); nonwork-related outcomes, such as work nonwork conflict (ρ¯ = 0.32); as well as attitudinal and performance-related outcomes, such as organizational commitment (ρ¯ = 0.16) and work performance (ρ¯ = 0.27). We also found TASW to be related to certain demographic characteristics, such as male gender (ρ¯ = 0.11) and job-level (ρ¯ = 0.23). Exploratory moderator analyses further revealed that gender moderated the relationship between job demands and TASW, such that the relationship was stronger for samples with a higher percentage of females. We conclude by discussing potential directions for future research to advance the understanding of TASW.

The Nature of Desert Claims: Rethinking What It Means to Get One's Due

Many philosophical books about desert start with the same observation: desert-talk is prevalent in our everyday conversations, but desert plays second fiddle in the philosophical literature. To this regularity, Kevin Kinghorn's new book about deserts is no exception. He notes in the introduction that ‘it remains a surprise to me that not more philosophers have explored why it is that people think desert does so much normative work—as well as exploring the meaning and nature of desert’ (p. 2). Kinghorn's aim in this book is to remedy the gap between people's intuitions about desert and the philosophical literature by offering a new, general account of desert that explains the common ‘concern’ that ‘people have in mind when making desert claims’ (p. 2). Given the variety of contexts in which desert claims are made, this is an admirably ambitious project that results in one of the most significant contributions to the desert literature in recent years.

Guest editorial IJSCN special issue on 3GPP NTN standards for future satellite communications

Guest editorial IJSCN special issue on 3GPP NTN standards for future satellite communications

Crisis Management Tasks in Dutch Nursing Homes During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Longitudinal Interview Study.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit long-term care, and particularly nursing homes hard. We aimed to explore how crisis management goals and tasks evolve during such a prolonged crisis, using the crisis management tasks as identified by Boin and 't Hart as a starting point. This longitudinal, qualitative study comprises 47 interviews with seven Dutch nursing home directors and a focus group. We identified two phases to the crisis response: an acute phase with a linear, rational perspective of saving lives and compliancy to centralized decision-making and an adaptive phase characterized by more decentralized decision-making, reflection, and competing values and perspectives. This study confirms the usability of Boin and 't Hart's typology of crisis management tasks and shows that these tasks "changed color" in the second phase. We also revealed three types of additional work in managing such a crisis: resilience work, emotion work, and normative work.

La Rochefoucauld's "Maxims" in the Literary and linguistic context of the Epoch

The subject of the study is "Maxims and moral reflections" by Francois IV de La Rochefoucauld — a collection of aphorisms, first published in 1665 and became one of the most significant works of French classical literature of the XVII century. The question of the originality of this work, as well as its place in the literary tradition of the era, remains, nevertheless, open. The purpose of this article is an attempt to synthesize existing points of view on the originality of "Maxim". The method of research is the lexical and stylistic analysis of the collection and its correlation with the traditions of the era, as well as the requirements for form and content imposed on classical works. A special contribution of the author to the study of the topic is the appeal to a wide range of works and the multidimensional nature of the study of the issue. Although many researchers still turn to the history of the genre and the historical context to find sources that influenced the content of the collection, quite little remains said about the language design of "Maxim" and their relationship with the normative works of the era. In the course of this analysis, we have established that, although the "Maxims" correspond to the canons of a classic work, they are the result of a complex synthesis of a wide range of phenomena. Their writing was influenced by the historical context, beliefs and habits of the French secular elite, the literary tradition of the previous era and the philosophical works of the author's contemporaries. Thus, we come to the conclusion that La Rochefoucauld's specific vision of the world, which in some aspects does not correspond to the generally accepted worldview of the era, is more than a tribute to fashion or a simple imitation.