A Position in the Field: Aboriginal Experiences of Cricket in Western Australia

This thesis explores the ways in which individuals make sense of and engage with social fields; revealing the role of habitus and disposition as animators of social experience and the field as lived experience that endures in memory, narrative and embodied practice. I show how ethnographic interviews, and their capacity to invoke the field and its contexts, are an effective way of engaging anthropologically with narrative lives, as a rich resource for exploring social practice

What do we need to do to sustain compassionate medical care?

The term ‘compassion’ is widely used, but what it requires is rarely analysed. It has been defined as understanding another’s suffering, combined with commitment to doing something to relieve this. It involves an emotional component – a personal reaction to the plight of another – and sensitivity to the personal meaning a condition may hold for the individual. An emotional response to tragic circumstance is by nature spontaneous. But compassion also requires deliberate responses – respect, courtesy and attentive listening. The human brain is hard-wired with the capacity to share the experience of others, including their emotions. So the potential for empathy and compassion is innate. However, this can be limited by repeated exposure to suffering, when the neural networks involved become down-regulated. In addition, an organisational culture geared to performance targets with diminishing resources can lead to exhaustion and burnout. This results in reduced capacity to attend to the needs of patients. The traditional solutions of education and further research may not be sufficient. A framework is proposed for doctors to contribute to compassionate medical care, taking account of organisational factors. The key elements are: awareness; self-care; attentive listening to patients; collaboration; and support for colleagues

Multidimensional decision analysis in public investment analysis: theory and practice

Most important investment decisions involve several criteria or dimensions, e.g. a weapon system could be judged by cost, portability, reliability and firepower. Moreover, the values of these dimensions that alternative courses of action will produce is rarely known for certain, because they will occur in the future or because analysis to obtain the information would be too expensive or too time- consuming. These comments apply to public sector investment particularly, because the market does not provide a price that incorporates several dimensions for public goods, and because much public investment is one-off, having rarely been done before, e.g., Medibank