The Ethics of Engagement in an Age of Austerity: A Paradox Perspective

Our contribution in this paper is to highlight the ethical implications of workforce engagement strategies in an age of austerity. Hard or instrumentalist approaches to workforce engagement create the potential for situations where engaged employees are expected to work ever longer and harder with negative outcomes for their well-being. Our study explores these issues in an investigation of the enactment of an engagement strategy within a UK Health charity, where managers and workers face paradoxical demands to raise service quality and cut costs. We integrate insights from engagement, paradox, and ethic of care literatures, to explore these paradoxical demands—illustrating ways in which engagement experiences become infused with tensions when the workforce faces competing requirements to do 'more with less' resources. We argue that those targeted by these paradoxical engagement strategies need to be supported and cared for, embedded in an ethic of care that provides explicit workplace resources for helping workers and managers cope with and work through corresponding tensions. Our study points to the critical importance of support from senior and frontline managers for open communications and dialogue practices

A new technique enables dynamic replanning and rescheduling of aeromedical evacuation

We describe an application of a dynamic replanning technique in a highly dynamic and complex domain: the military aeromedical evacuation of patients to medical treatment facilities. U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) is the DoD agency responsible for evacuating patients during wartime and peace. Doctrinally, patients requiring extended treatment must be evacuated by air to a suitable Medical Treatment Facility (MTF). The Persian Gulf war was the first significant armed conflict in which this concept has been put to a serious test. The results were far from satisfactory-- about 60 % of the patients ended up at the wrong destinations. In early 1993, the Department of Defense tasked USTRANSCOM to consolidate the command and control of medical regulation and aeromedical evacuation operations. The ensuing analysis led to TRAC2ES (TRANSCOM Regulating and Command and Control Evacuation System), a decision support system for planning and scheduling medical evacuation operations. Probably the most challenging aspect of the problem has to do with the dynamics of a domain in which requirements and constraints continuously change over time. Continuous dynamic replanning is a key capability of TRAC2ES. This paper describes the application and the AI approach we took in providing thi