Challenge and change: Police identity, morale and goodwill in an age of austerity

One of the largest pieces of independent research on police attitudes in England and Wales. The research, led by Dr James Hoggett from UWE Bristol (the University of the West of England, Bristol), looked at police attitudes to current reform proposals that may impact on the profession. 13,591 police officers across 43 forces in England and Wales responded to a questionnaire into attitudes and morale amongst officers. The response rate reflects the views of about 10% of all serving police officers in England and Wales. The attitude and morale data provided consistent messages across the sample with only minor variations between ranks of officer or between police forces

Identity, Life History and Commitment to Welfare

Using detailed extracts from two life histories, this article examines the nature of the personal identifications that often underpin the commitment of welfare workers to their jobs. We explore the paradox that it is those identifications such as class and gender, mediated through individual biography, that fix the ‘self as object’ and that also provide us with the resources for self-transformation. In this respect, the article not only throws light upon the psychical and emotional roots of commitment to the other, but also upon some of the impasses ‘identity theory’ currently finds itself in

Challenges for police leadership: Identity, experience, legitimacy and direct entry

© 2018, The Author(s). The police service in England and Wales has developed a new approach to police leadership where individuals from outside of the police service can now enter directly to leadership ranks. Previous research identified that officers place great value on being led by someone who has experience of being a police officer. Adopting a social identity perspective, the current paper reports on quantitative and qualitative data about police officer views on direct entry and existing police leadership captured as part of a wider national survey (N = 12,549) of police officers in England and Wales. The paper identifies the importance that shared identity and credibility play in police follower/leadership relationships. It argues that direct-entry police leaders face credibility issues linked to their lack of shared police identity but also that serving officers perceive existing leaders to be poor because they believe they have forgotten what it is like to be a police officer. This paper develops a new theoretical and empirical approach to police leadership utilizing social and organizational psychology theory and research. The paper suggests that if police leaders understand police identity, then they can create propitious conditions within which police officers will follow their leaders

Dimethyl fumarate in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised, controlled, open-label, platform trial

Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) inhibits inflammasome-mediated inflammation and has been proposed as a treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19. This randomised, controlled, open-label platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy [RECOVERY]), is assessing multiple treatments in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 (NCT04381936, ISRCTN50189673). In this assessment of DMF performed at 27 UK hospitals, adults were randomly allocated (1:1) to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus DMF. The primary outcome was clinical status on day 5 measured on a seven-point ordinal scale. Secondary outcomes were time to sustained improvement in clinical status, time to discharge, day 5 peripheral blood oxygenation, day 5 C-reactive protein, and improvement in day 10 clinical status. Between 2 March 2021 and 18 November 2021, 713 patients were enroled in the DMF evaluation, of whom 356 were randomly allocated to receive usual care plus DMF, and 357 to usual care alone. 95% of patients received corticosteroids as part of routine care. There was no evidence of a beneficial effect of DMF on clinical status at day 5 (common odds ratio of unfavourable outcome 1.12; 95% CI 0.86-1.47; p = 0.40). There was no significant effect of DMF on any secondary outcome

Politics, Identity and Emotion

This monograph analyses the role that social identities and collective emotions play in different aspects of political life

Conflict, ambivalence, and the contested purpose of public organizations

This article argues that public organizations are inherently more complex than private ones. Their complexity derives from two sources. The public sphere is the site for the continuous contestation of public purposes and this means that questions regarding values and policies saturate all public organizations, particularly at the point of delivery. Second, because government partly acts as the receptacle for the alienated subjectivity of citizens, public organizations have to contain much of what is disowned by the society in which they are situated. It follows that the fate of the public official, sometimes referred to as the 'street-level bureaucrat', is to have to contain the unresolved (and often partially suppressed) value conflicts and moral ambivalence of society. Such a perspective has implications for all of those who, in their different roles, seek to bring about change or development in public organizations. Psychoanalytic approaches to organizational consultation have not adequately understood the contested nature of public organizations and some key aspects of this approach, such as the concept of the organization's primary task, need to be reconsidered. Copyright © 2006 The Tavistock Institute ®