Strategic Debate Research Articles

Factors Influencing the impact of nurse practitioners' clinical autonomy: a self determining perspective.

To explore factors that influence the impact of nurse practitioners' clinical autonomy with a self-determining perspective. Worldwide, there is a significant demand for healthcare professionals such as the nurse practitioner in meeting some healthcare needs across patients' lifespans. Factors influencing nurse practitioners clinical autonomy can impact the full utilisation of the role in practice. Limited evidence exists that describes or researches nurse practitioner clinical autonomy. Instead, there is a focus in the literature on strategic debates, role confusion and nurse practitioners reporting the straddling between nursing, allied heath professionals and medicine in the provision of healthcare services. A cross-sectional study design was used in a purposive sample in a national sample of nurse practitioners in Ireland across a full range of healthcare settings. Additionally, the survey included open comments sections to capture qualitative comments by the nurse practitioners themselves. Self-determination theory is rooted in an organismic dialectical stance. This study used a convenience sample of n = 148 from a total sample of n = 448 (33%) of the population. The Dempster Practice Behavioural Scale and an initially validated advanced nursing practice clinical autonomy scale were used. Open comments were analysed by thematic analysis. STROBE Standards guidelines for cross-sectional studies were followed, and COREQ guidelines were followed for writing qualitative research. The study findings demonstrated that the more clinical experience the nurse practitioner had, the higher their levels of clinical autonomy. The previous length of nursing experience did not impact nurse practitioner clinical autonomy levels. However, average experience of nurse practitioner' in this study was 3-10 years. No significant differences existed between the reported gender, nurse practitioners' clinical autonomy and decision-making. 1:40 female and 1:9 male nurse practitioners undertook a doctorate or PhD-level education. No advanced nurse practitioner identified as non-binary. Gender and organisational culture considerations can influence nurse practitioners clinical autonomy. This study highlights intrinsic motivators that support nurse practitioners in providing innovative healthcare: competence, relatedness and clinical autonomy. Countries credentialing, regulations professional standards and healthcare policy positively influence nurse practitioner clinical autonomy. Nurse practitioners' clinical autonomy is championed when health policy and organisational stakeholders intrinsically collaborate. A disconnect between health policy organisational culture extrinsically influences lower levels of nurse practitioners' clinical autonomy. The findings underline the positive impact of nurse practitioner clinical autonomy. A recommendation of this study is to continue to measure impact of clinical autonomy anddevelop nurse practitioners' self-determination strategies around the role and integrity of their levels of intrinsic clinical autonomy.

Mobilizing for the Mind: Veteran Activism and the National Mental Health Act of 1946

AbstractWithin a year of World War II’s end, the United States federal government passed the National Mental Health Act of 1946. This bill was the country’s first significant foray into the realm of psychological health. Many studies have examined the act and its legacy, including the creation of the National Institute of Mental Health. Fewer studies, however, have investigated the significant roles of veterans and veterans’ organizations in the passage of this legislation. This essay delves into these various roles and argues that veterans, from various professional backgrounds, united by creating strategic arguments to lobby for this act. Their motivations ranged from the desire to destigmatize mental health issues to discovering methods for the prevention and treatment of psychiatric problems among American society. Ultimately, these veterans helped the nation revolutionize its approach to mental health policy and paved the way for future servicemembers to take a stand and become political actors.

Basic income as a pandemic social protection instrument: Lessons from Maricá, Brazil

AbstractThis article explores the connection between two related but distinct models of basic income proposals in the context of a pandemic emergency. While COVID‐19 appears to have increased interest in basic income, this often ended up taking the form of a temporary emergency basic income (EBI) instead of a permanent universal basic income (UBI). In this article we argue that the “dial up/dial down” model of basic income allows us to link EBI and UBI in a way that offers both a practical response to important implementation challenges in emergency policy making and a strategic argument in favour of UBI as a pandemic policy instrument. We illustrate our argument by contrasting the Renda Básica de Cidadania (RBC) in the municipality of Maricá, Brazil, with two comparable programmes in the same region.

Reform versus Transformation: Reflections on the Legacy of Corbynism’s Economic Programme

Abstract In the context of divisive disagreements about how the British left should orient itself towards the current Labour Party, this intervention uses the Gorzian category of non-reformist reforms to critically evaluate the 2017–19 policy programme developed by the Corbyn-led Labour Party and draw out the implications for current strategic debates. It argues that the radical core of the Corbynite economic programme lay in its proposals for widening ownership and extending economic democracy, but that there was a tension between commodified and decommodifying visions of these proposals. Exploring the different conceptions of political transformation implicit within each vision, the paper argues that only the latter had the potential to be non-reformist in the Gorzian sense. However, Gorz was concerned not merely with a reform’s content but also with how it was formulated and pursued. The paper ends by arguing that the transformative potential of the economic programme was not reflected in its political strategy and that this has important lessons for strategy today.

Alternative futures of Finnish comprehensive school

Inevitable and constant change is challenging school systems worldwide, and COVID-19 has further intensified the debate on the future. This article examines the possible futures of Finnish comprehensive schools through three scenarios generated by analysing data from a Delphi panel of 30 Finnish experts in the field of education. This study contributes to two major intertwining debates: first, who or what determines the content and goals of the curriculum. The study’s theoretical framework builds on the curriculum as a social practice model, which views curriculum work as interwoven layers and sites of practice. Another topical debate concerns the tension between powerful knowledge and competences in the curricula. This is explored through Young and Muller’s model of three types of knowledge: knowledge of power, tacit knowledge and powerful knowledge. The results show that Finnish comprehensive schools have various substantially divergent trends. In the three scenarios, the role of the teacher as a curriculum maker varies from non-existent to a strong interpreter. International policy flows can be transferred to schools to varying degrees. The three types of knowledge included in Young and Muller’s model can be recognised in the three scenarios. Competences can be identified as learning outcomes in all scenarios, but the intensity varies. Scenarios are not predictions of the future or policy recommendations but an efficient tool for provoking strategic debate, generating new visionary thinking and considering the need for system-wide change in education.

Achieving Legitimacy Through Gender Equality Policies

The academic literature has shown some positive effects of gender equality policies’ development on the companies’ performance. However, often companies are not promoting this type of policies. This research analyzes the effect of corporate gender equality policies from an institutional perspective. Using a structural equation model, based on 150 questionnaires, the results have empirically demonstrated that gender equality policies positively influence four dimensions of organizational legitimacy: pragmatic, moral, regulatory, and cognitive. These results extend our knowledge of the effect of corporate social responsibility policies on organizational legitimacy, underlying that gender equality strategies are very useful for improving organizational legitimacy. Furthermore, these results provide new strategic arguments for managers to manage the organizational change and to develop gender equality policies and foster the decrease of the gender gap.

Developing a grounded practical theory of engaged communication scholarship: theorizing communities of practice in NCA journals

ABSTRACT This study analyzes use of the terms ‘engaged scholarship’ and ‘engaged research’ in all 11 NCA journals to develop a grounded practical theory (GPT) of engaged communication research. We find that the practice of engaged scholarship is defined by tensions between role identity goals of scholar and practitioner; relational goals of expertise and partnership; and outcome goals of theory and practice. To manage these tensions, engaged scholars (1) discursively construct themselves in dual roles of academic-community member; (2) advocate for researcher reflexivity to manage power dynamics; and (3) privilege theory-practice integrative outcomes. Underlying these tactics, engaged scholars intimate moral and strategic arguments for the practice of engaged scholarship. We discuss the implications of these situated ideals for assessing ‘what counts’ as good scholarship among researchers working at the intersections of theory and practice.

La cuestión de la vía democrática al socialismo

The text aims to highlight some of the core aspects of the capitalist State, of political power and of the State apparatus, in order to discuss Nicos Poulantzas thesis regarding a “democratic road to socialism”. The presence of several governments qualified as popular or progressive, particularly numerous from the beginnings of 21st century in the region, motivates this discussion. The point is not to question the relevance of left-wing forces pursuing electoral triumphs and reaching significant positions within the State apparatus as part of their fights. The spirit is to adress the knots that those experiences face, in a context of weakness of the strategic debates in both regional and global left.

NATIONAL INTEREST: PERSPECTIVES AND PRACTICES

“The objectives of foreign policy must be defined in terms of the national interest and must be supported with adequate power.”– Hans J. Morgenthau
 Even though, national interest is one of the most developed concepts of IR scholarship, yet it remains under the debate in academic and policy circles. Various scholars and institutions contextualize and categorize national interests varyingly. There are five main issues under deliberation: first, the interplay of power and morality in formulation and pursuit of national interests; second, longevity, durability and permanency of national interests; third, the interaction between national and public interests, and the process of interest adjudication, which is the function of the political system; fourth, Islamic perspective on national interest; and fifth, the future of national interest in the wake of growing power of the non-state actors, which have started challenging the notion of national interest. This paper revisits the concept and context of national interest with strategic arguments on different debates on national interest. Important attributes of the power potential affecting national interests are considered and conceptualized by the author. The research is descriptive, explanatory, analytical and perspective in nature.

Small Hydropower—Small Ecological Footprint? A Multi-Annual Environmental Impact Analysis Using Aquatic Macroinvertebrates as Bioindicators. Part 1: Effects on Community Structure

The increasing incentives stemming from many international initiatives that target sustainable energy production have led to the global success of small hydropower plants. However, there is a growing debate about the actual environmental impact these structures have on riverine ecosystems, to the extent that some researchers argue that they could have a proportionally greater impact than large hydropower plants; nevertheless, an empirical evaluation applying a long-term true “Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI)” approach has never been conducted. In a true “BACI” experiment applying generalized linear mixed models, we assessed changes in benthic macroinvertebrate communities—taxonomic composition, spatial and temporal β-diversity, and possible indicator taxa—along 6 sites located in a glacier-fed stream in the Italian Alps before and after the installation of a small “run-of-river” hydropower plant. The “BACI” results over the 5-year study showed no significant variation in the benthic macroinvertebrate communities stemming from the activity of the hydropower plant. Moreover, spatial β-diversity showed, in relation to the “control” site, a constant dissimilarity pattern throughout all the sampling years, exhibiting a constant increase proceeding downstream. On the other hand, temporal β-diversity showed changes in the benthic macroinvertebrate communities, but these changes were largely caused by variation in densities and not by the appearance or disappearance of new taxa. In summary, we were unable to detect a significant impact of the small “run-of-river” hydropower plant on the benthic macroinvertebrate communities of the glacier-fed stream under study. Despite the need of further studies that consider the different features and operational measures of small hydropower plants, our findings illustrate that, when correctly managed, small hydropower plants and the energy they produce may represent an added resource for strategic debates on energy planning processes, especially in light of the commitments at the international level of many countries in developing strategies toward a “carbon-neutral” energy sector.

International Crisis Termination and Presidential Approval

AbstractPrevious research has extensively analyzed the existence and extent of rally effects following crisis initiation with respect to United States public opinion and presidential approval. Relatively less known is how crisis termination affects presidential approval. The theory presented in this article suggests that crisis terminations are prime for rally effects. They are salient, demonstrate competence, and thus activate a significant boost of executive approval akin to rally effects at crisis onset. Insofar as executives might use them as diversionary tools, crisis terminations overcome the strategic conflict avoidance argument and require less cynical assumptions about leaders’ self-interest than the conventional domain of diversionary theory, crisis initiations. We test the claim that crisis terminations have significant ‘‘halo effects’’ using monthly US presidential approval data during forty-eight international crises between 1953 and 2016. Results demonstrate that crisis termination has consistently positive effects on presidential approval. In addition, these surges are conditioned by the degree and disposition of public attention. The findings indicate that US public opinion is quite sensitive to the whole trajectory of an international crisis.

Japan’s international cooperation to Latin America and the Caribbean in the changing development landscape

Japan has been a proactive contributor to development cooperation, ranking among the top five OECD donors worldwide. Latin America and the Caribbean have been traditional recipients of Japan’s ODA due to their long-standing relationship. However, the U.S. interests, and recently, the rise of China, have influenced Japan’s aid to the region. This paper aims to study how the influence of foreign interests, especially those of the U.S., and the rise of China as a nontraditional donor has challenged Japan’s ODA to Latin America and the Caribbean during the 21st century. Since this is hermeneutical research, the analyzed documents were selected based on impact criteria, and the contents were grouped following a chronological evolution. The findings unveil that even though Japan’s ODA has been influenced, at some periods, by pre-established U.S. guidelines, in other cases, it has relied on different reinterpretations to those suggested by the U.S. This dynamic turns into a set of ideas and concepts that, despite seeming unrelated, have Japan’s national interests as the fundamental principle and translate into diverse strategies of Japan’s ODA to the region. Japan’s approaches to global and regional contexts bring a strategic debate on how the elements that characterize its ODA were adapted to the needs in the period under study. This debate is still unfolding and allows Japan’s ODA not to lose its identity. Thus, even though China has taken the lead in some developmental initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean, the core elements of Japan’s ODA remain valid.

Preventing What for Whom?: EU Conflict Prevention Efforts in Pursuit of Autonomy

Conflict prevention has formed an integral part of the European Union’s (EU’s) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) since the early 2000s, with investments in civilian peacebuilding and conflict prevention competences suiting well with the Union’s ‘civilian’ or ‘normative’ power role. The transforming international order is, however, changing the strategic environment also for the Union’s and its Member States’ conflict prevention and peacebuilding efforts. This article analyses the implications of the evolving strategic autonomy debate for the EU’s role conception and concrete action in the realm of conflict prevention. While the search for a more capable EU in security and defence does not automatically counter the Union’s selfconception as a conflict preventor and peacebuilder, it does appear to introduce meaningful shifts in the core objectives and values guiding its external action in conflict situations. An analysis of the EU’s rhetoric and concrete uses of its institutional conflict prevention and peacebuilding tools in recent years in Africa suggests a growing centralization of security and geopolitical considerations at the expense of the core ethos of conflict prevention. EU, Conflict prevention, Strategic autonomy, CFSP- Arica, Instrument contributing to stability and peace (IcSP)

Hollywood and the hourglass war: cinematic images of drug cartels and conflict on the US-Mexican border

ABSTRACT This paper examines the cinema of the US-Mexican border in the context of an escalating drug war. It looks at movies released since the early 1980s and argues that Hollywood has supplied a large number of cinematic images of the ‘war on drugs’ that has more helped shape wider political and strategic debates. Using insights from strategic analysis, this paper seeks to show how cinema has represented the conflict between drug cartels, the Mexican state as well as various US security agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and DEA. The paper explores how these cinematic depictions straddle national boundaries and have evolved from being an extension of the western border genre in the 1980s into a more recent phase of action and war movies.

The Proper and Orthodox Way of War: Henry Stimson, the War Department, and the Politics of U.S. Military Policy During World War II

Traditional accounts of the Allied grand strategic debates during World War II stress the divergence between the American and British approaches to waging war against the Axis. In these interpretations, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and their military chiefs were the primary shapers of grand strategy and policy. However, these studies have focused too much on certain figures and have relatively marginalized others who played crucial roles in shaping these debates. One of those comparatively overlooked figures was U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who was a vital player on the American side in influencing the politics of U.S. strategy and pushing it toward launching a second front in Western Europe. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were often internally divided over how to win the war and struggled to influence policy accordingly. The lack of focused political coordination between the War Department and the JCS made it difficult to convince Roosevelt to adopt a cross-Channel attack, which opened the door to following the British Mediterranean strategy for defeating Germany, starting with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa.

Effective and scalable legal judgment recommendation using pre-learned word embedding

Legal professionals strongly demand an automatic and convenient legal document recommendation system (LDRS) to identify similar judgments for preparing the advantageous and strategic arguments in the Court. Doc2Vec excellently learns semantically rich embedding (i.e., vector) space from the textual information of judgment corpus. During Doc2Vec learning, the practice of prior domain-specific knowledge can potentially enhance the embedding representation. This research thus proposes a pre-learned word embedding based LDRS (P-LDRS) that learns the Doc2Vec embedding using Legal domain-specific pre-learned word embedding possessing the Legal semantic knowledge. However, learning the judgment embedding from existing substantial Legal documents turns out to be a scalability issue for Doc2Vec. The proposed P-LDRS also provides additional functionality to learn the judgment embedding distributedly over the cluster of computing nodes using frameworks like MapReduce and Spark to address the scalability issue. The empirical analysis is performed with a non-distributed and a distributed variant of the proposed P-LDRS to validate the effectiveness and scalability. Experiment results showcase that proposed non-distributed P-LDRS perform significantly better than traditional Doc2Vec based LDRS with an Accuracy of 0.88, F1-Score of 0.82 and MCC Score of 0.73. They also demonstrate that the proposed distributed P-LDRS improves the time efficiency and achieves stable Accuracy of approx 0.88, F1-Score of approx 0.83 and MCC Score of approx 0.72, with an increasing number of nodes.

Structured Discomfort

We know that teaching sociology can be difficult in an era of extreme polarization. By engaging “structured discomfort” as a teaching strategy, we can empower students to think critically about how multiple social institutions interact and interlock to create social inequality. This approach uses three key organizing principles to activate learning on controversial topics: 1) build intentional classroom culture that promotes respect and empathy; 2) cultivate critical thinking by scaffolding sociological studies, multimedia, and other creative works; and 3) use high- and low-stakes assignments, strategic debates, and community interviews to explore a controversial topic from multiple sociological vantage points.

Radical democracy, the commons and everyday struggles during the Greek crisis

Set against theoretical and strategic debates about theories of radical democracy, left populism and the commons, this article analyses and evaluates everyday struggles in Greek politics after the global financial crisis. It focusses on the cases of Vio.Me – the first workers’ recuperated factory in Greece – and the Metropolitan Community Clinic at Helliniko, which is the largest social solidarity health clinic in Greece. Viewed from the perspective of commoning practices, the article identifies the logics that sustain the beliefs, values, infrastructures and institutions developed at an everyday grassroots level, finding traces of an incipient radical democratic ethos and rationality at work. The new initiatives highlight crucial and often neglected organisational, prefiguring and subjective prerequisites for radical democracy, while challenging elements of left populist political strategy. Our evolving perspective also problematises their political limitations and strategic dilemmas as they struggle to constitute a viable hegemonic alternative to neoliberal rationalities and governance.

Casting the atomic canon: (R)evolving nuclear strategy

AbstractLooming decisions on arms control and strategic weapon procurements in a range of nuclear-armed states are set to shape the international security environment for decades to come. In this context, it is crucial to understand the concepts, theories, and debates that condition nuclear policymaking. This review essay dissects the four editions of The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, the authoritative intellectual history of its subject. Using this widely acclaimed work as a looking glass into the broader field of nuclear security studies, we interrogate the field's underlying assumptions and question the correspondence between theory and practice in the realm of nuclear policy. The study of nuclear strategy, we maintain, remains largely committed to an interpretive approach that invites analysts to search for universal axioms and to abstract strategic arguments from the precise circumstances of their occurrence. While this approach is useful for analysing the locutionary dimension of strategic debates, it risks obscuring the power structures, vested interests, and illocutionary forces shaping nuclear discourse. In the conclusion, we lay out avenues for future scholarship.

A Great Success Story: Galiani's Dialogues sur le commerce des blés in Spain (1774-1802)

The year 1775 witnessed the publication of the Spanish translation of Ferdi-nando Galiani's Dialogues sur le commerce des blés (1770). Although there is evi-dence that the book was very successful during the Spanish Enlightenment, the purpose of this work is to analyse in detail the impact of Galiani's Dialogues on late eighteenth century Spanish literature, using citation count methodology. The work concludes that Galiani's book was a decisive work in the shaping of econom-ic culture in Spain during the Spanish Enlightenment. Not only it was profusely quoted, but all its main economic theses were well received among the Spanish po-litical economists. Beyond the strategic debate on the grain trade, the book deci-sively contributed to outline central questions of the mainstream of the Spanish Enlightenment, such as those related to economic methodology and growth strate-gy. All this confirms that the Dialogues triumphed in Spain due to their powerful power of influence in the arena of economic policy.