Vision zero: from accident prevention to the promotion of health, safety and well-being at work

There is growing attention in industry for the Vision Zero strategy, which in terms of work-related health and safety is often labelled as Zero Accident Vision or Zero Harm. The consequences of a genuine commitment to Vision Zero for addressing health, safety and well-being and their synergies are discussed. The Vision Zero for work-related health, safety and well-being is based on the assumption that all accidents, harm and work-related diseases are preventable. Vision Zero for health, safety and well-being is then the ambition and commitment to create and ensure safe and healthy work and to prevent all accidents, harm and work-related diseases in order to achieve excellence in health, safety and well-being. Implementation of Vision Zero is a process – rather than a target, and healthy organizations make use of a wide range of options to facilitate this process. There is sufficient evidence that fatigue, stress and work organization factors are important determinants of safety behaviour and safety performance. Even with a focus on preventing accidents these additional factors should also be addressed. A relevant challenge is the integration of the Vision Zero into broader business policy and practice. There is a continued need more empirical research in this area

Imagining transitions in old age through the visual matrix method: thinking about what is hard to bear

Dominant discourses of ageing are often confined to what is less painful to think about and therefore idealise or denigrate ageing and later life. We present findings from an exploratory psychosocial study, in a Nordic context into three later-life transitions: from working life to retirement, from mental health to dementia, and from life to death. Because, for some, these topics are hard to bear, and therefore defended against and routinely excluded from everyday awareness, we used a method led by imagery and affect - the Visual Matrix - to elicit participants’ free associative personal and collective imagination. Through analysis of data extracts, on the three transitions, we illustrate oscillations between defending against the challenges of ageing and realism in facing the anxieties it can provoke. A recurring theme includes the finality of individual life and the inter-generational continuity, which together link life and death, hope and despair, separation and connectedness

Psychosocial and symbolic dimensions of the breast explored through a Visual Matrix

This article explores knowledge about the breast in the psychosocial interplay of lived experience, addressing a gap in empirical research on this highly gendered cultural trope and embodied organ. We present findings from a study that used a free-associative psychosocial method – the Visual Matrix – in order to stimulate, and capture expressions of, tacit aspects of the breast that have evaded discursive representation, as well as to generate understanding of relations between embodied and enculturated experience. Little research has been conducted on women’s affirmative experience of breasts, possibly because their bio-psycho-sociocultural complexity affords an onto-epistemological and empirical challenge. Our data revealed how an aesthetic of the grotesque in one matrix allowed the mainly female group to use humour as a “creative psychic defence” against culturally normative and idealised aspects of the breast. This was expressed through sensual symbolisations of breasted experience, affectively delivered with exuberance and joy. There was an emphasis on the breast’s potency and its potential for both abundant nurturance and potent “weaponisation”. By establishing this feminine poetic mode, Visual Matrix imagery symbolised life and death as tolerable, inseparable yet ambiguous dimensions of breasts, thereby resisting anxious splitting. The breast’s life-affirming qualities included the sensual, the visceral and the joyful – a materialsemiotic knowing. This was in marked contrast to a second matrix where associations were weighted towards the spectacular breast of an ocular-centric culture that privileges heteromasculine looking. This matrix reflected a more ambivalent and sometimes troubled response among participants. Reasons for the difference between the two matrices are discussed in terms of how they responded to the tension between embodied and enculturated experiences

Out of control : A teacher's account

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. The definitive publisher-authenticated version; Ramvi, E. (2012) Out of control: A teacher's account. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 15(4), pp. 328-345, is available online at: DOI : 10.1057/pcs.2009.7This paper draws on data collected from my recent exploration of how teachers become competent in the area of relationships. In an interview, a student teacher, Kristin, voiced the challenges she faced: 'I think it is easy enough to get the knowledge the student needs. The problem is, in a way, when people are involved'. This paper presents an encounter between Kristin and a student after Kristin had started to work as a teacher. It shows the difficulty of being professional when 'people are involved', that is, when emotions are at work