Job Anxiety, Work-Related Psychological Illness and Workplace Performance

This paper uses matched employee-employer data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2004 to examine the determinants of employee job anxiety and work-related psychological illness. Job anxiety is found to be strongly related to the demands of the job as measured by factors such as occupation, education and hours of work. Average levels of employee job anxiety, in turn, are positively associated with work-related psychological illness among the workforce as reported by managers. The paper goes on to consider the relationship between psychological illness and workplace performance as measured by absence, turnover and labour productivity. Work-related psychological illness is found to be negatively associated with several measures of workplace performance.job anxiety, stress, absence, labour productivity

Demagogic Populism and US Culture Industries: A Long Tradition

Frankfurt School conceptions of culture industry and demagogy are employed in a synoptic historical analysis of the relation between demagogy and US culture industries. A recent New York Times editorial critique of Donald Trump's demagogy is placed in a 'tradition' of tension between US high journalism and demagogy dating from the 1920s. This period saw the near simultaneous codification of professional editorial newspaper ethics and the rise of broadcast demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin. The tradition reaches its most famous conflict point in the now heroicized struggle between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy. The state sought to redress the rise of culture industry demagogy via communications regulation known as The Fairness Doctrine. The latter's demise enabled the 1990s return to prominence of demagogic speech within the culture industries. The article argues, however, that what was pivotal to this history was the facilitation of the commodification of mediated demagogic speech at the advent of broadcasting, a path apparently unique to the USA amongst the major democracies. Rather than a return to the contentious 'burden on speech' of a Fairness Doctrine, decommodification is thus the most plausible means of reducing US culture industry demagogy

Electrophysiological responses to alcohol cues are not associated with Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer in social drinkers

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Work-Related Health in Europe: Are Older Workers More at Risk?

This paper uses the fourth European Working Conditions Survey (2005) to address the impact of age on work-related self-reported health outcomes. More specifically, the paper examines whether older workers differ significantly from younger workers regarding their job-related health risk perception, mental and physical health, sickness absence, probability of reporting injury and fatigue. Accounting for the 'healthy worker effect', or sample selection – in so far as unhealthy workers are likely to exit the labour force – we find that as a group, those aged 55-65 years are more 'vulnerable' than younger workers: they are more likely to perceive work-related health and safety risks, and to report mental, physical and fatigue health problems. As previously shown, older workers are more likely to report work-related absence.endogeneity, fatigue, absence, physical health, mental health, healthy worker selection effect

Alcohol-induced risk taking on the BART mediates alcohol priming

Rationale Hazardous drinking has been associated with risk taking and alcohol priming effects. However, the potential relationship between risk taking and priming has not been investigated. The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) is a behavioural measure of risk taking which appears to be associated with drinking behaviour. However, alcohol's acute effects on BART performance are not clear, and the potentially mediating effect of alcohol-induced risk taking on priming has not been tested. Objectives To assess the effects of a priming dose of alcohol on BART performance; to determine the predictive utility of the BART on drinking habits; and to identify whether alcohol-induced risk taking mediates alcohol priming (urge to drink). Methods A total of 142 participants provided data on drinking habits and trait-like impulsivity and sensation seeking. The BART was then completed after consuming alcohol (0.6 g/kg) or placebo (between-subjects design). Baseline and post-drink measures of alcohol urge were also taken. Results Alcohol consumption increased urge to drink (priming) and risk taking on the BART. In the alcohol group only, risk taking on the BART predicted unique variance in weekly alcohol consumption and bingeing. Mediation analysis showed that risk taking following alcohol consumption mediated alcohol priming. Conclusions This is the first study to show that alcohol acutely increases risk taking on the BART. Results suggest that social drinkers susceptible to alcohol-induced risk taking may be more likely to drink excessively, perhaps due to increased urge to drink (priming)

The moment of Leveson: Beyond ‘First Amendment fundamentalism’ in news regulatory policies

Australian discussion of the Leveson Inquiry has started and finished at asking whether ‘we’ suffer from precisely the same ethical malaise that led to phone-hacking in the United Kingdom. Yet as Leveson has unfolded it has become clear that its report will have international significance as a watershed moment in content regulation in a multi-platform future. A 30-year-old neoliberal orthodoxy has promulgated the view that digital convergence would mean the expansion of newspaper models of self-regulation to all future platforms. Broadcast models of structural and content regulation would disappear along with spectrum scarcity and other ‘old media’ trappings. All that is now at serious risk. Instead, for the UK at least, the public service obligations placed on commercial broadcasters now appear a more evident success story in maintaining journalistic integrity. Convergence might mean instead that public service obligations should be applied to newspaper publishers. However, making sense of all this from Australia is rendered difficult by the failure of our regulatory regimes to set such standards for commercial broadcast journalism at even levels achieved in the US at its broadcast regulatory high watermark. This article thus weighs up recommendations of the Finklestein and Boreham reviews in this context