Friendships under strain : the work-personal life integration of middle managers

Middle managers in today\u27s organisations have reported experiencing longer working hours and intensified work regimes. These increased pressures, in turn, have led to growing difficulty in addressing the integration of their work and personal lives. In an exploratory study of the daily workplace experiences of Australian middle managers and the impacts on their personal lives, one of the key themes to emerge was respondents\u27 concerns about the negative effects on their friendships. This paper discusses middle managers\u27 recognition of the value of friendships for their wellbeing, and the resultant anger and sadness reported at the strain on these relationships due to competing time demands. The significant role that friendships play in alleviating some of the stresses of work demands, while concurrently being impeded by these same demands, is an important issue for organisations to consider. These findings indicate the need for middle managers to truly have an ability to engage in activities - and friendships - which will aid them in their working lives. The study also indicates a need for further investigation into the development and maintenance of friendships for both middle managers and other groups of employees. <br /

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Multiorgan MRI findings after hospitalisation with COVID-19 in the UK (C-MORE): a prospective, multicentre, observational cohort study

Introduction: The multiorgan impact of moderate to severe coronavirus infections in the post-acute phase is still poorly understood. We aimed to evaluate the excess burden of multiorgan abnormalities after hospitalisation with COVID-19, evaluate their determinants, and explore associations with patient-related outcome measures. Methods: In a prospective, UK-wide, multicentre MRI follow-up study (C-MORE), adults (aged ≥18 years) discharged from hospital following COVID-19 who were included in Tier 2 of the Post-hospitalisation COVID-19 study (PHOSP-COVID) and contemporary controls with no evidence of previous COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antibody negative) underwent multiorgan MRI (lungs, heart, brain, liver, and kidneys) with quantitative and qualitative assessment of images and clinical adjudication when relevant. Individuals with end-stage renal failure or contraindications to MRI were excluded. Participants also underwent detailed recording of symptoms, and physiological and biochemical tests. The primary outcome was the excess burden of multiorgan abnormalities (two or more organs) relative to controls, with further adjustments for potential confounders. The C-MORE study is ongoing and is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04510025. Findings: Of 2710 participants in Tier 2 of PHOSP-COVID, 531 were recruited across 13 UK-wide C-MORE sites. After exclusions, 259 C-MORE patients (mean age 57 years [SD 12]; 158 [61%] male and 101 [39%] female) who were discharged from hospital with PCR-confirmed or clinically diagnosed COVID-19 between March 1, 2020, and Nov 1, 2021, and 52 non-COVID-19 controls from the community (mean age 49 years [SD 14]; 30 [58%] male and 22 [42%] female) were included in the analysis. Patients were assessed at a median of 5·0 months (IQR 4·2–6·3) after hospital discharge. Compared with non-COVID-19 controls, patients were older, living with more obesity, and had more comorbidities. Multiorgan abnormalities on MRI were more frequent in patients than in controls (157 [61%] of 259 vs 14 [27%] of 52; p&lt;0·0001) and independently associated with COVID-19 status (odds ratio [OR] 2·9 [95% CI 1·5–5·8]; padjusted=0·0023) after adjusting for relevant confounders. Compared with controls, patients were more likely to have MRI evidence of lung abnormalities (p=0·0001; parenchymal abnormalities), brain abnormalities (p&lt;0·0001; more white matter hyperintensities and regional brain volume reduction), and kidney abnormalities (p=0·014; lower medullary T1 and loss of corticomedullary differentiation), whereas cardiac and liver MRI abnormalities were similar between patients and controls. Patients with multiorgan abnormalities were older (difference in mean age 7 years [95% CI 4–10]; mean age of 59·8 years [SD 11·7] with multiorgan abnormalities vs mean age of 52·8 years [11·9] without multiorgan abnormalities; p&lt;0·0001), more likely to have three or more comorbidities (OR 2·47 [1·32–4·82]; padjusted=0·0059), and more likely to have a more severe acute infection (acute CRP &gt;5mg/L, OR 3·55 [1·23–11·88]; padjusted=0·025) than those without multiorgan abnormalities. Presence of lung MRI abnormalities was associated with a two-fold higher risk of chest tightness, and multiorgan MRI abnormalities were associated with severe and very severe persistent physical and mental health impairment (PHOSP-COVID symptom clusters) after hospitalisation. Interpretation: After hospitalisation for COVID-19, people are at risk of multiorgan abnormalities in the medium term. Our findings emphasise the need for proactive multidisciplinary care pathways, with the potential for imaging to guide surveillance frequency and therapeutic stratification

Illness, work and organization : postmodern perspectives, antenarratives and chaos narratives for the reinstatement of voice

This paper explores the possibilities that exist when the affirming aspects of a postmodern perspective are utilized to reinstate the voice of marginalized organizational members. Stories, specifically antenarratives (Boje 2001), are shared as fragments depicting difficult and disordered lives of working people with unseen chronic illness. Heideggerian phenomenology is introduced as the methodological and philosophical vantage point for a study where antenarratives have been sought to illustrate the postmodern working life of sick people. Boje's (2001) work with antenarratives, Frank's (1995) work with Chaos Narratives and Baudrillard's reflections on the simulucrum and the end of reality are drawn upon to illustrate the postmodern existence of life and work with an unseen chronic illness. It is hoped that Flax's (1990) ideas about thinking in fragments, and the need to stay engaged with the difficult questions, will allow organizations to move toward being places of acceptance of diversity, openness to multiple voices, inclusion, flexibility and respect - the just workplace

Writing what's relevant : workplace incivility in public administration - a wolf in sheep's clothing

Questions surrounding the relevance of what is written about for Public Administration (PA), what should be written, who reads it and what response there might be, are vital. I argue that much of the writing in the PA field ignores many questions of crucial relevance to individuals, groups and organizations, having been overtaken with the vast swathes of management rhetoric that PA scholars and practitioners believe they need. Articles abound about the importance of leadership, change management, teamwork, globalization, and efficiency and effectiveness, while much less is said about the stuff of organizational life that directly affects the lives of both those who work in PA and the people they serve. This article commences with an example of workplace incivility witnessed in a public hospital. I examine, as an example of what should be written about and is not, the problem of workplace incivility in PA (and the wolf it disguises, bullying, aggression and workplace violence). Workplace incivility is an increasing and troubling phenomenon in PA organizations, and one which has the capacity to disguise or trigger more sinister acts

Bounded grief at work : working and caring for children with chronic illness

This article highlights the problem of bounded grief in our workplaces. The article commences by making the case that grief does exist at work-- both grief from our personal lives brought to work, and grief emanating from workplace experiences. Then, I present a qualitative analysis that demonstrates grief that can exist in and around our workplaces; the grief of women who are in paid full time work while caring for a child with chronic illness. The findings reinforce that "there's always grief in the room." For these women, their grief is ongoing, recurring and multiple-sourced. Often we don't recognise grief experienced at work or how to best to respond to it in a workplace setting. Some suggestions are made as to how individuals might best respond to the grief experienced in the work setting

A guide to grief in public administration

One of the important questions to address when one considers the governance and bureaucracy of the future is: What about the individual? Traditional governance and bureaucracy focuses on rational features of organizations and groups, rather than the idiosyncrasies and essentials of being human, with hearts, desires, ambitions, emotions, perceptions, feelings, and life experiences that, ultimately, shape all that we do, say and feel. I urge readers to consider the specific needs of human beings--with all that they bring to organizational life--and speak specifically about the need to recognize grief and loss in the world of administration. This paper talks about grief: what it is; the forms it can take; what might spark it; and how organizations currently respond. The need to support grieving individuals in public administration (PA) organizations is discussed

"People first - always" : euphemism and rhetoric as troublesome influences on organizational sense-making : a downsizing case study"

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of euphemism and rhetoric in influencing organizational members'' constructions of reality and sense-making abilities. The discussion opens with a return to the role of the sociology of knowledge, before exploring the purpose and outcomes of euphemism and rhetoric. Heideggerian phenomenology was used to collect this particularly poignant story from Adrian (a pseudonym), who was made redundant from his workplace after heart bypass surgery. Weick''s theoretical exposition of sense-making in organizations is used to examine Adrian''s story, with the purpose of demonstrating that sense-making is highly influenced by the use of rhetoric and euphemism (K. E. Weick, 1995, Sense-making in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage). When the truth finally comes out, the outcome is seen to be serious—even life threatening

Reflections from an action researcher : why we do what we do

My reflections from the field are shared in an effort to assist others. I commence by describing a social problem that was the focus of an action research project. I then articulate the paradigmatic, methodological and method choices made. I share extracts of data collected during different stages of the project to illustrate cycles of learning, reflection, and the development of actionable knowledge. What is important for researchers who are contemplating choosing action research is to understand the philosophy behind their decisions; that they think carefully about "why we do what we do" in order to fully realise the outcomes of co-learning, developing actionable knowledge and, ultimately, making change

Chaos narratives to reinstate the voice of a survivor of mental illness : a (partial) life story

The life story of a woman diagnosed with Schizophrenia is shared (in part). Eighteen lengthy, poignant and demanding interviews reveal a "damaged life." Ellen's life-story, her recollections and shared experiences of life with mental illness, are shared to help us step into her shoes-however briefly. The ambivalence towards her illness is so poignantly demonstrated. The illness that, early on, made her so popular, funny, and full of life became instrumental in her demise. She describes her mania, delusions, hallucinations, and fear. It is hoped that the sharing of portions of Ellen's life story will help acknowledge her chaos narrative (Frank, 1995). It is only through others' acceptance of chaos narratives that the horror of her story might recede