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The authors outline common problems in implementing the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which places specific requirements on UK employers to mitigate risks of stress at work. The authors discuss bullying and other negative acts in the UK ambulance service, highlighting concerns with some managerial practices. The article calls for a fundamental rethink of deficiencies in current organizational wellbeing measures and recommends ways of going beyond the provision of basic support for employees. This article analyses the risk to workplace experiences for staff in the UK ambulance service. Adopting a case study methodology following interviews with front-line and management employees, the authors investigated two UK NHS ambulance trusts, Blue Light (N = 1100) and Green Cross (N = 2093) and found that efficiency targets—whether time or 'dashboard', increased job demands and reduced resources create a double-whammy effect of heightened claims of bullying and harassment, alongside diminished staff resilience and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political pressure to reduce the number of higher education institutions in Wales has been sustained for over a decade by three successive ministers for education, two of whom, Jane Davidson and the current incumbent, Leighton Andrews, have left the Welsh sector in no doubt about the strength of their personal commitment to the policy of reconfiguration and collaboration. In this paper, an attempt is made to understand and explain how this policy was experienced by some of the people most closely affected by the recent merger between the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and the University of Glamorgan in South East Wales. Some of the lessons learned in this particular context are elucidated in the hope that they might be of assistance to both policy-makers and members of higher education institutions elsewhere that are contemplating merger. (Contains 3 figures.)

The place of humour in organisational interactions has been the subject of long-standing interest. Studies have considered the positive role of humour in increasing social contact and promoting group cohesion, while warning it can be a means for expressing hostility and excluding group members. However, more ambiguous uses of humour remain underexplored and under-theorised. Using a single case study of employee experiences at 'Hillside', a high-security prison in the UK, we address this gap. Adopting Julia Kristeva's 'theory of the abject', we conceptualise 'abject humour' as a disruptive activity, which is composite, shady and sinister. We show that, despite Hillside's adoption of Challenge It, Change It as a UK-wide safeguarding policy, the liminal spaces abject humour opens and occupies, are difficult to regulate. Those spaces trap both perpetrators and targets, and necessitate the use of avoidance, compliance, and retaliation strategies by the latter, as ways of coping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of shame within the context of workplace bullying. Despite a decade or more of international research into bullying at work, there is little or no evidence for explicit exploration of shame amongst those who have experienced bullying. Based on content analysis from the narratives of 15 college and university lecturers who were self-selecting victims of bullying we find clear evidence for feelings of shame which appear to last long after the bullying episodes have ended.

The authors examine the experiences of public sector workers in Ireland who had either been ill-treated or who worked to prevent ill-treatment and bullying in their organization. The authors demonstrate the limitations of providing a policy in the absence of understanding the need for implementation, and the need to understand how organizational culture is relevant to both the enactment and the amelioration of ill-treatment in the workplace. Training managers to be proactive and to be mindful of the need to ensure accountability is important, as well as communicating what is unacceptable in terms of behaviour and management style. ABSTRACT This paper explores the experiences of workers in a public sector organization in respect of workplace ill-treatment. The paper is based on 11 interviews which were part of the Irish Workplace Behaviour Study (2018). Workplace ill-treatment, and in particular workplace bullying, has been found to be more prevalent in public sector workplaces. Irish public sector workplaces have taken the brunt of severe austerity measures imposed by successive governments as part of the country's fiscal retrenchment policies between 2008 and 2016. The findings reported in this paper support Salin's (2003) model of 'Enabling, motivating, and precipitating structures', and are considered in the light of psychological contract breach in the context of New Public Management (NPM). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2007.00665.x Byline: DUNCAN LEWIS (1), ROD GUNN (2) Abstract: This paper reports the research findings of the experiences of public sector workers of bullying at work across 13 organizations in South Wales. The study explored the experiences of White and Ethnic minority respondents and found that there are significant differences in the type and frequency of bullying behaviours being experienced by the two groups. Ethnic minority respondents are more likely to label themselves as suffering from bullying behaviours than their White counterparts. The evidence presented in this paper demonstrates how line managers use different tactics when bullying Ethnic respondents compared to White respondents. Furthermore, when colleagues bully fellow colleagues, there are subtly different patterns of bullying behaviour towards White and Ethnic victims. Given the specific requirement to comply with the public duty for promotion of racial equality expected under the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000), it is important that these findings are recognized by UK public sector organizations. Author Affiliation: (1)Duncan Lewis is Acas Professor of Workplace Futures in the Glamorgan Business School (2)Rod Gunn is in the Welsh Institute for Competitive Advantage, in the Glamorgan Business School, University of Glamorgan. Article History: Date received 17 July 2005. Date accepted 30 January 2006.

Much-debated and researched, the subject of precarious work remains at the forefront of academic and policy discourses. A development of current interest is the reported growth of employment flexibility and increase in non-standard and atypical work, regarded by some as contributing to the emergence of a class-like 'precariat' of insecure and marginalised workers. However, this precariat framework remain largely untested and underexplored. Using in-depth narratives from 77 semi-structured interviews with workers from groups within the precariat spectrum, in this article the authors address this gap. The study finds that cohesion within and between these groups is overstated, and worker collectivisation far from apparent. As a result, this diversity of group dynamics, attitudes and experiences challenges not only negative conceptualisations of the precariat in the literature, but the theoretical validity of the precariat framework itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00725_6.x Byline: Duncan Lewis (1) Author Affiliation: (1)Glamorgan Business School, University of Glamorgan

Byline: Duncan Lewis Further and higher education in the United Kingdom (UK) have undergone radical change programs largely as a result of government policy and the opening up of these sectors to increased levels of competition. The speed with which these enforced changes have taken place have led to claims of bullying and 'macho-management' inside institutions by a range of different commentators including the news media and trade unions. In exploring the link between the accounts of bullying portrayed by the media and trade unions, this paper reports how a study of university and college lecturers reveals a marginal role for these moral agents of bullying in the social construction process. In exploring the relationship between information on bullying and respondents experiences of bullying, this paper illustrates that it is work colleagues who are the strongest constituent in the social construction process. It appears that work colleagues play a critical role with the identification of being bullied, as well as with the possible causes of bullying and are central to the generation of both meanings and labels for workplace bullying.

Byline: Duncan Lewis A range of different stories from different groups has helped fuel the discussion surrounding the relatively new phenomenon of workplace bullying. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study of workplace bullying in further and higher education colleges and the new universities in Wales where different information sources on bullying are examined for their impact on respondents' experiences and beliefs as to what causes workplace bullying. Despite the increasing attention given to the subject by the popular media and trade unions, this study finds little or no correlation between the majority of information providers on workplace bullying and the direct or indirect experiences of bullying of academic staff. Of all the sources available to respondents about bullying, it is the information provided by colleagues which provides a link to their experiences and to the labelling of causes. This is important in helping to understand how individuals construct their social realities. By using hierarchical cluster analysis, this paper also illustrates how bullying is viewed relative to other workplace conflicts such as racial and sexual harassment, sexual discrimination and conflicts associated with promotion. The results indicate that respondents' perceptions of bullying relative to these other workplace issues is a product of age, gender, length of service and employment status.

Using a spectrum of measures, this paper estimates some of the financial costs of bullying and harassment to the NHS in England. By means of specific impacts resulting from bullying and harassment to staff health, sickness absence costs to the employer, employee turnover, diminished productivity, sickness presenteeism, compensation, litigation and industrial relations costs, we conservatively estimate bullying and harassment to cost the taxpayer £2.281 billion per annum. The evidence in this paper indicates the importance of urgent material engagement to address bullying in the UK NHS. Existing staff surveys fail to capture the types of behaviours often attributable to bullying and this should be a focus to design pertinent interventions. Capturing bystander/witness experiences are undocumented, as are workplace incivilities and staff satisfaction with policy and procedures for tackling bullying. Policy change is vital for accurately capturing the costs of bullying associated with absenteeism, staff replacement, productivity reductions and to use these as mechanisms to manage organizations that fail to address bullying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]