Managerial Work in a Practice-Embodying Institution - The role of calling, the virtue of constancy

What can be learned from a small scale study of managerial work in a highly marginal and under-researched working community? This paper uses the ‘goods-virtues-practices-institutions’ framework to examine the managerial work of owner-directors of traditional circuses. Inspired by MacIntyre’s arguments for the necessity of a narrative understanding of the virtues, interviews explored how British and Irish circus directors accounted for their working lives. A purposive sample was used to select subjects who had owned and managed traditional touring circuses for at least 15 years, a period in which the economic and reputational fortunes of traditional circuses have suffered badly. This sample enabled the research to examine the self-understanding of people who had, at least on the face of it, exhibited the virtue of constancy. The research contributes to our understanding of the role of the virtues in organizations by presenting evidence of an intimate relationship between the virtue of constancy and a ‘calling’ work orientation. This enhances our understanding of the virtues that are required if management is exercised as a domain-related practice

Virtue and Meaningful Work

This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents’ orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from the standpoint of MacIntyre’s account of the relationship between the development of virtuous dispositions and participation in work that is productive of goods internal to practices. This reframing suggests new directions for empirical and ethical enquiries

T cell metabolism drives immunity

Lymphocytes must adapt to a wide array of environmental stressors as part of their normal development, during which they undergo a dramatic metabolic remodeling process. Research in this area has yielded surprising findings on the roles of diverse metabolic pathways and metabolites, which have been found to regulate lymphocyte signaling and influence differentiation, function and fate. In this review, we integrate the latest findings in the field to provide an up-to-date resource on lymphocyte metabolism

Metabolic Adaptation of Human CD4+ and CD8+ T-Cells to T-Cell Receptor-Mediated Stimulation

Linking immunometabolic adaptation to T-cell function provides insight for the development of new therapeutic approaches in multiple disease settings. T-cell activation and downstream effector functions of CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells are controlled by the strength of interaction between the T-cell receptor (TCR) and peptides presented by human leukocyte antigens (pHLA). The role of TCR-pHLA interactions in modulating T-cell metabolism is unknown. Here for the first time we explore the relative contributions of the main metabolic pathways to functional responses in human CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells. Increased expression of hexokinase II accompanied by higher basal glycolysis is demonstrated in CD4+ T-cells; cytokine production in CD8+ T-cells is more reliant on oxidative phosphorylation. Using antigen-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cell clones and altered peptide ligands we demonstrate that binding affinity tunes the underlying metabolic shift. Overall this study provides important new insight into how metabolic pathways are controlled during antigen-specific activation of human T-cells

Anomaly Detection by Robust Feature Reconstruction

Autoencoders have become increasingly popular in anomaly detection tasks over the years. Nevertheless, it remains a challenge to train autoencoders for anomaly detection tasks properly. A key contributing factor to this problem in many applications is the absence of a clean dataset from which the normal case can be learned. Instead, autoencoders must be trained based on a contaminated dataset containing an unknown amount of anomalies that potentially harm the training process. In this paper, we address this problem by studying the impact of the loss function on the robustness of an autoencoder. It is common practice to train an autoencoder by minimizing a loss function (e.g. squared error loss) under the assumption that all features are equally important to be reconstructed well. We relax this assumption and introduce a new loss function that adapts its robustness to anomalies based on the characteristics of data and on a per feature basis. Experimental results show that an autoencoder can be trained by this loss function robustly even when the training process is subject to many anomalies

The man in the red coat: management in the circus

Praised by MacIntyre as ‘an admirable piece of work’ this reports an auto-ethnographic study applying MacIntyre’s concept of the practice-based community to the life of the travelling circus. It is the first empirical research paper, in the context of circus organization, published in an organization studies journal

A team approach to improving colorectal cancer services using administrative health data

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in Canada and accounts for 11.9% of all cancer-related mortality. Fortunately, previous studies have provided evidence of improved outcomes from access to timely and appropriate health services along the disease trajectory in CRC. As a result, the CIHR/CCNS Team in Access to Colorectal Cancer Services in Nova Scotia (Team <it>ACCESS</it>) was created to build colorectal cancer (CRC) research capacity in Nova Scotia (NS) and to study access to and quality of CRC services along the entire continuum of cancer care.</p> <p>Objectives</p> <p>The objectives of this paper are to: 1) provide a detailed description of the methodologies employed across the various studies being conducted by Team <it>ACCESS</it>; 2) demonstrate how administrative health data can be used to evaluate access and quality in CRC services; and 3) provide an example of an interdisciplinary team approach to addressing health service delivery issues.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>All patients diagnosed with CRC in NS between 2001 and 2005 were identified through the Nova Scotia Cancer Registry (NSCR) and staged using the Collaborative Stage Data Collection System. Using administrative databases that were linked at the patient level, Team <it>ACCESS </it>created a retrospective longitudinal cohort with comprehensive demographic, clinical, and healthcare utilization data. These data were used to examine access to and quality of CRC services in NS, as well as factors affecting access to and quality of care, at various transition points along the continuum of care. Team <it>ACCESS </it>has also implemented integrated knowledge translation strategies targeting policy- and decision- makers.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>The development of Team <it>ACCESS </it>represents a unique approach to CRC research. We anticipate that the skills, tools, and knowledge generated from our work will also advance the study of other cancer disease sites in NS. Given the increasing prevalence of cancer, and with national and provincial funding agencies promoting collaborative research through increased funding for research team development, the work carried out by Team <it>ACCESS </it>is important in the Canadian context and exemplifies how a team approach is essential to comprehensively addressing issues surrounding not only cancer, but other chronic diseases in Canada.</p