Inauthenticity at Work: Moral Conflicts in Marketoriented Welfare Organizations

The number of employees who develop work-related problems due to stress and other mental tensions has increased in Europe during the last decades, especially among women. One explanation of the female dominance is that women more often than men work in the service and health care sector. Consequently, they are more involved in human relations at work, involving more “emotion work” or “interaction work”. Emotion researchers have described low well-being and mental disorders related to work stress in terms of inauthenticity, as suppressing one’s true emotions. In this article, a social constructivist and contextual perspective on the self is adopted. Based on case studies at Swedish work settings, the article explores the connection between authenticity and values attached to the self and the impact of the organizational setting for their realization in interaction work. Work-related stress is examined in the light of the implementation of new public management rationales and directives in welfare organizations, with particular focus on customer-orientated management. The main conclusion is that, regardless of gender, stress and mental problems could be seen as effects of feelings of inauthenticity, caused by experiences of being prevented from realizing interpersonal self-values in personal encounters at work. Women more often work in the welfare sector and are consequently more often subjected to these moral dilemmas, enhanced by customer orientation. These premises form the background for the article’s understanding of women’s more frequent development of mental stress symptoms. The article contributes to the understanding of women’s stress-related problems at work as a phenomenon in the intersection point between the individual and the organization and to the revealing of the interpersonal consequences of the increased customer orientation in the welfare area. Furthermore, by examining the contextual and situational dimensions of authenticity at work, the article adds to the knowledge about being authentic in today’s world

Coping With Moral Stress in the Swedish Public Services

This paper examines how today’s public workers cope with moral stress in organizations where new public management reforms have been implemented. More specifically, the interest is focused on examining which practices are developed in order to fulfill professional standards within the limits of inadequate resources in order to manage moral stress. Case studies at Swedish public work places are analyzed with the help of Lipsky’s theory about street-level bureaucrats’ coping behavior and theories about the elements of resistance in coping. The main result is the discernment of three dominant modificational strategies to manage stressful moral dilemmas in encounters with clients. The paper contributes to the understanding of coping with moral stress by highlighting that the detected coping forms among a varied group of public professionals imply an active adaption, reification, and opposition to the managerial reforms

Experimental Investigation of Volatiles-Bed Contact in a 2-4 MWth Bubbling Bed Reactor of a Dual Fluidized Bed Gasifier

The use of catalytic bed materials in fluidized bed gasifiers represents a promising primary measure to decrease the tar content of biomass-derived raw gas. For effective application of such in-bed catalysts, extensive contact must be established between the volatile matter released from the fuel particles and the bed material. However, the extent of the contact and, consequently, the potential of in-bed tar removal techniques are not well understood. In this work, the fraction of volatile matter that interacts with the bed in a large (i.e., throughput of 300-400 kg/h biomass) bubbling bed gasifier is quantified experimentally and the effect of fluidization velocity is investigated. The results show that a higher fluidization velocity enhances gas-solid contact, with 48-69% of the volatile matter coming in contact with the bed within the range of 6-10 times the minimum fluidization (umf)

EVALUATION OF FLUID DYNAMICS IN A HOT AND A COLD SYSTEM OF INTERCONNECTING FLUIDISED BEDS

Operation controllability and fluid dynamics were evaluated in a system of interconnecting fluidised beds. Results indicate that the solid circulation is controllable and possible to determine from pressure measurements. Sufficient gas tightness of the loop-seals and flexibility in controlling of solid fluxes was indicated

A Monte Carlo Calculation of Atmospheric Muon and Neutrino Fluxes

Production of muons and neutrinos in cosmic ray interactions with the atmosphere has been investigated with a cascade simulation program based on Lund Monte Carlo programs. The resulting `conventional' muon and neutrino fluxes (from $\pi ,K$ decays) agree well with earlier calculations, whereas the improved charm particle treatment used in this study gives significantly lower `prompt' fluxes compared to earlier estimates. This implies better prospects for detecting very high energy neutrinos from cosmic sources.Comment: 4 pages, uuencoded and gziped ps-fil

Exergy-based comparison of indirect and direct biomass gasification technologies within the framework of bio-SNG production

Atmospheric indirect steam-blown and pressurised direct oxygen-blown gasification are the two major technologies discussed for large-scale production of synthetic natural gas from biomass (bio-SNG) by thermochemical conversion. Published system studies of bio-SNG production concepts draw different conclusions about which gasification technology performs best. In this paper, an exergy-based comparison of the two gasification technologies is performed using a simplified gasification reactor model. This approach aims at comparing the two technologies on a common basis without possible bias due to model regression on specific reactor data. The system boundaries include the gasification and gas cleaning step to generate a product gas ready for subsequent synthesis. The major parameter investigated is the delivery pressure of the product gas. Other model parameters include the air-to-fuel ratio for gasification as well as the H<SUB>2</SUB>/CO ratio in the product gas. In order to illustrate the thermodynamic limits and sources of efficiency loss, an ideal modelling approach is contrasted with a model accounting for losses in, e.g. the heat recovery and compression operations. The resulting cold-gas efficiencies of the processes are in the range of 0.66–0.84 on a lower heating value basis. Exergy efficiencies for the ideal systems are from 0.79 to 0.84 and in the range of 0.7 to 0.79 for the systems including losses. Pressurised direct gasification benefits from higher delivery pressure of the finished gas product and results in the highest exergy efficiency values. Regarding bio-SNG synthesis however, a higher energetic and exergetic penalty for CO<SUB>2</SUB> removal results in direct gasification exergy efficiency values that are below values for indirect gasification. No significant difference in performance between the technologies can be observed based on the model results, but a challenge identified for process design is efficient heat recovery and cogeneration of electricity for both technologies. Furthermore, direct gasification performance is penalised by incomplete carbon conversion in contrast to performance of indirect gasification concepts

Integration aspects for synthetic natural gas production from biomass based on a novel indirect gasification concept

An innovative indirectly heated biomass gasification unit has been recently built at Chalmers University of Technology as an integrated extension of a standard circulating fluidised bed (CFB) boiler for heat and power production. The gasification medium can be varied between steam, oxygen, combustion flue gases or recirculated syngas. In this paper a process for production of synthetic natural gas (SNG) based on this biomass gasification technique is proposed and investigated with emphasis on evaluation of possible heat integration options. Special attention is given to possible options for cogeneration of heat and power. The increase in electricity production from the power cycle is achieved by two means: combusting the non-reacted char from gasification in the boiler and extracting high temperature excess heat from the syngas to SNG conversion steps. It is shown that the amine-based CO2 separation stage is a large heat sink. The reduction of the steam demand for the CO2 absorbent regeneration stripper is of crucial importance to have a maximum of high temperature excess heat available from the gasification process to be used in the steam power cycle. The cold gas efficiency for SNG production comparing biomass input to SNG output is about 60 % for the proposed process. This performance indicator however does not consider the electricity production increase. The balance between SNG yield and increased electricity production is mainly dependant on the gasification efficiency since the amount of char from gasification that is used in the boiler directly influences the yield of synthetic natural gas