An investigation into how public sector and community-based practitioners authorise constructively awkward interventions.

The project investigated a practice question. How can public and third sector managers and clinicians develop their capability to be constructively awkward? That is, to confront and challenge while keeping relationships in tact. The literature on ineffective leadership links such out comes to a failure of followership and the loss of an individual and collective capacity to critically evaluate accepted ways of behaving and thinking and their consequences for self and others. The experience of leaders and practitioners is that while challenge is espoused by the leadership literature and frameworks, there is insufficient guidance on how to enact such challenge, belying the ambivalence towards challenge in the workplace. Ten people were interviewed, each with a reputation for constructive awkwardness and the ability to reflect on times when they had been silenced. The data was transcribed and analysed according to grounded theory principles and a Critical Realist ontology. The major elements of the theory to emerge were: the presence of a self-authorisation mechanism, constituents of which were reflexivity, holding a boundary position and having an explicit value base; a self-silencing mechanism reflecting the anxiety some felt in relation to looking stupid; and a reparation mechanism, that some used to backtrack when their emotive expression alienated the recipients of their challenge. The project theory was consistent with the finding of Archer (2003) and her study of reflexivity as the means by which personal concerns are negotiated with one’s social context. The project suggests that the capacity for self-authorisation was relied on more by community-based practitioners, who could not rely on professional and institutional derived authority. The project drew upon the insights into the causes of bad leadership and suggested how an active followership, described in the literature as necessary, could be practically enacted via a valid development activity. The conclusion notes the project’s shortcoming in relation to the lack of ethnic and cultural diversity in the interview group. This resulted in a lack of depth to the conclusion that community-based leaders may authorise their interventions differently. The conclusion ends with four propositions. It would be useful to: further develop the theory in relation to self-authorisation; to continue to explore the application of the concept of the psychological contract to understanding how one learns about how to manage feelings and challenge in the workplace; to test the assumption that community leaders authorise their interventions differently to public sector practioners and that there is a distinctive community-based leadership theory that is different to the public sector discourse that currently defines such leadership

Scaling Up: Bringing the Transitional Care Model Into the Mainstream

Describes features of an innovative care management intervention to facilitate elderly, chronically ill patients' transitions among providers and settings; the adopting organization; and the external environment that affect its translation into practice

Fourier Transform Spectroscopy of the submillimetre continuum emission from hot molecular cores

We have used a Fourier Transform Spectrometer on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope to study the submillimetre continuum emission from dust in three hot molecular cores (HMC). The spectral index beta of the dust emission for these sources has been determined solely within the 30 GHz wide 350 GHz (850 micron) passband to an accuracy comparable to those determined through multi-wavelength observations. We find an average beta = 1.6, in agreement with spectral indices determined from previous submillimetre observations of these sources and with those determined for HMC in general. The largest single source of uncertainty in these results is the variability of the atmosphere at 350 GHz, and with better sky subtraction techniques we show that the dust spectral index can clearly be determined within one passband to high accuracy with a submillimetre FTS. Using an imaging FTS on SCUBA-2, the next generation wide-field submillimetre camera currently under development to replace SCUBA at the JCMT in 2006, we calculate that at 350 GHz it will be possible to determine beta to +/- 0.1 for sources as faint as 400 mJy/beam and to +/- 0.3 for sources as faint as 140 mJy/beam.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Low Mass Stars and Brown Dwarfs around Sigma Orionis

We present optical spectroscopy of 71 photometric candidate low-mass members of the cluster associated with Sigma Orionis. Thirty-five of these are found to pass the lithium test and hence are confirmed as true cluster members, covering a mass range of <0.055-0.3M_{sun}, assuming a mean cluster age of <5 Myr. We find evidence for an age spread on the (I, I-J) colour magnitude diagram, members appearing to lie in the range 1-7 Myr. There are, however, a significant fraction of candidates that are non-members, including some previously identified as members based on photometry alone. We see some evidence that the ratio of spectroscopically confirmed members to photometric candidates decreases with brightness and mass. This highlights the importance of spectroscopy in determining the true initial mass-function.Comment: To appear in the 12th Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars Stellar Systems and the Su

An asymptotic expansion of the Kontorovich–Lebedev transform of damped oscillatory functions

AbstractAn asymptotic expansion valid for large positive values of s is constructed for the integral transformF(s)=∫0∞Kis(x)f(x)dxx,where Kis(x) denotes the modified Bessel function of the third kind of purely imaginary order. The expansion applies to functions f(x) that are analytic in the sector |arg(x)|⩽π/4 and that are exponentially damped and oscillatory as x→∞ in this sector