Journal articles on the topic 'Accountant – Professional ethics – South Africa'

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a contextual analysis of the professional accounting education programmes in South Africa and India by benchmarking both programmes to the International Education Standards (IESs) of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). Design/methodology/approach – The research methodology is a qualitative archival approach extracting information from secondary data (Statements of Membership Obligations’ compliance questionnaires available on the IFAC web site and information from the web sites of the relevant professional accountancy bodies). Findings – With regards to the IESs, the study found that both countries comply with the standards, although important differences occur. In South Africa, most of the education takes place during the university phase; and while both countries cover the content requirements, India covers the acquisition of professional skills more formally; ethics is taught and examined in both countries; both countries require a three year training contract; both countries have a final examination but the content of the examinations are different; and South Africa requires more continuous professional development than India. These findings, when related to India's and South Africa's relative positions on certain of the Global Competitiveness Indices may indicate that India could learn from the South African accountancy education model in order to strengthen the Indian position with regards to auditing and reporting standards. Research limitations/implications – A limitation of the study is that it did not investigate the quality of the relative education programmes and it benchmarks both programmes at a single point in time. Practical implications – India could strengthen its accounting profession by implementing some of the South African aspects of its education model. South African could consider adopting the flexibility in the entry requirements in the Indian education model in order to increase the number of accountants in South Africa. These findings may also be useful to other developing countries to identify practices which could be adopted if suitable in their respective countries. Originality/value – The study is original as accountancy education programmes in India and South Africa have not been contrasted before. In view of their similar colonial background and the fact that both countries are major economic and political forces in their respective regions, the value of this study is that it provides useful and relevant information to India, South Africa and other countries with similar economic and social backgrounds.

ABSTRACT This case provides students with an opportunity to examine ethical issues and challenges encountered in public accounting. This real-life case occurred in South Africa, where wide-spread corruption and unethical behavior severely affected a global accounting firm. Due to the resulting negative publicity, the firm suffered significant reputational damage and underwent investigations by the audit regulator and professional accounting society. Consequently, the firm initiated major transformations of management, governance, and audit quality procedures. Students are required to research and analyze issues involving the accounting firm's South African activities. However, the matters addressed are universal and encountered by firms globally. The case learning objectives include improving understanding of the value of auditor independence, the importance of ethical behavior to a global firm's reputation, ways to promote ethical conduct, and how professional skepticism can identify ethical misconduct. The case is designed for auditing, forensic accounting, international accounting, accounting policy, and ethics courses.

In this article on the background of business ethics and business ethics education, the following important questions, discussions and issues will be addressed: Firstly, a brief overview on the development of philosophy will be provided since business ethics can be viewed as a subdivision of philosophy. An exposition of how business ethics links with philosophy will (among others) be provided. Due to the fact that this article largely concentrates on the accountancy and auditing professions, referral will also briefly be made to how the so-called “professional ethics” of the concerned professions fit into the comprehensive discipline of philosophy. The second aspect to be addressed will be regarding one of the main challenges in presenting business ethics courses, namely to keep the subject pragmatic and practically applicable – which may be difficult, possibly due to the discipline’s development from philosophy. If the pragmatic and practical focus is not maintained, business ethics may result in a mere philosophical and theoretical course that has little to do with ethical challenges encountered in the real accountancy profession and business world. Reasons are mentioned that may result in business ethics courses being irrelevant and impractical and therefore possible solutions to this problem are also suggested. Other challenges that may prevent lecturers from presenting business ethics courses in an optimal manner are also briefly discussed in this section.

Abstract Relevance and reliability are the two primary qualities that make accounting information useful for decision making. Therefore, an audit of financial statement is necessary, especially for a Tbk company. To maintain the trust of clients and users of financial statements, the public accountants should to have sufficient competence, such as professionalism, knowledge to detects errors, professional ethics and judgement of materiality level. Purpose of this study is to provide empirical evidence about affect of professionalism, knowledge to detect errors, and professional ethics to the public accountants judgement of materiality level with partial and simultaneous. Population in the study is a public accountant who worked at a Public Accounting Firm in South Jakarta. Sampling technique using convenience sampling method. Data obtained by questionnaire survey completed by the public accountant with 98 respondents from 9 Public Accounting Firm with primary data types. Design is causal research. The results showed that : 1) Professionalism affect of the judgement of materiality level. 2) Knowledge to detect errors did not affect of the judgement of materiality level. 3) Professional ethics affect of the judgement of materiality level. 4) Professionalism, knowledge to detect errors, and professional ethics affect of the judgement of materiality level. Keyword : Professionalism, Knowledge to detect errors, Professional ethics and Judgment of materiality level.

Keeping the diagnosis of a client confidential is one of the cornerstones of professional practice. In the case of a diagnosis such as HIV/AIDS, however, the ethics of this action may be challenged. Such a decision has a range of negative effects, for example, the blaming of others, supporting the denial of the client, and complicating the health education and care of the patient. It is suggested that the four ethical principles should be used to explore the ethics of such decisions, and that professional regulatory bodies and organizations should support professionals in situations where the client’s sexual partner is informed against the wishes of the client.

Purpose Accounting academics in the South African system understand their primary responsibility to be the teaching of prospective Chartered Accountants (CAs) rather than the advancement of knowledge through research. The purpose of this study is to determine what factors motivate accounting academics who are CAs to obtain doctorates in an environment dominated by the profession, where promotion is possible to Full Professor without a Doctorate but not without the professional qualification of CA. And did these doctoral CAs face challenges on their journey, such as resistance from colleagues? Design/methodology/approach A total of 22 academic CAs with doctorates and 18 academic CAs studying towards doctorates were surveyed to gain a deeper understanding of who they are, what their motivations were for undertaking the doctorate journey and what they experienced. Findings The main finding of this study is that the culture of accounting departments in South Africa is beginning to shift from being teaching orientated towards being more research orientated. The CAs are pursuing doctorates for the purpose of career progression and for intrinsic personal reasons. The main challenges that they faced on their journey were finding the time for family and a social life and a lack of support from colleagues and their institution. However, support seems to be improving. Research limitations/implications The change to a research-orientated culture in South African departments of accounting, as envisioned by Van der Schyf (2008), is only now starting to take place. These CAs with doctorates provide evidence of that change. Originality/value The value of this study is to provide accounting academics and the profession with a better understanding of, and a greater sensitivity to, accounting academics operating under the influence of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA). The study also adds to the limited amount of literature on the motives and experiences of doctoral students, especially accounting doctoral students.

The purpose of this article is to present a developmental history of formal professional ethics in psychology in South Africa. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between legislation governing the registration of psychologists and professional ethics. Current and future trends emphasising the need to transform professional structures in keeping with the democratic ethos of post-apartheid South Africa are also discussed.

In the second paper on the regulation of professional conduct the functioning of the Professional Board of Psychology with regard to ethical complaints and enquiries is examined. A relatively low number of complaints was lodged in the period 1974 to 1990, with 23 findings of guilt established. Complaints involving fees or accounts predominated, with advertising an important second category. Advertising complaints mostly were submitted by psychologists themselves, while members of the public are well represented in the other categories of complaint. The findings are discussed in terms of the functioning of a code of ethics in the professional domain: to maintain the appearance of professional vigilance for ethical transgressions, and to punish visible offences against the public more severely than intra-professional transgressions. It is concluded that codes of ethics are not particularly strong in acknowledging and enforcing the corporate obligations of a profession.

The South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) recently introduced a competency-based accreditation process for chartered accountants (CAs). This changed the structure of the practical training period or ‘articles’ (which is now called the CA 2010 training programme). The new training programme has an increased focus on developing ‘pervasive skills’ (which include personal and professional skills, such as leadership, communication and ethics), and allows trainees to gain detailed experience in a specific focus area. Students, who would be affected by these changes, were surveyed regarding their perceptions of this new training programme. The students were positive about the focus on pervasive skills. However, many felt that the changes (especially the elective focus area) were communicated too late, as they had already signed with auditing firms, and would be forced into an auditing focus area. Many students were worried about possible changes to Part II of the Qualifying Examination (QE 2).

Ethical issues and standards of property professions are being scrutinised. To date, no research has been carried out on the ethical standards in the property valuation profession in South Africa. This research compared the content of codes of ethics and professional conduct of the South African property valuation profession to international standards, and investigated the ethical standards and moral values held by registered valuers in South Africa. A self-administered survey, administered to 611 professional and professional associate valuers, was used. It measured five constructs of unethical behaviour layered into a survey adapted from Hoyt, Wright and Croft (2002). No statistically significant differences were found between different demographic factors in the ethical beliefs of South African valuers. A literature review comparing South Africa’s codes of conduct with those in the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand showed that the standards of ethics and professional practice in South Africa are not in line with international standards. South African valuers appear to be ethical and resist external pressures which could lead to unethical behaviour.

This article provides a brief history of the development of codes of ethics in two South African psychological associations. It also examines the patterns of complaints and enquiries forwarded to the ethics committees of these associations. Concerns about advertising dominated in a relatively low total number of complaints and enquiries over the years. Most of the complaints were lodged by psychologists themselves. The development of a code of ethics is linked to one aspect of professionalization: the certification of psychologists.

Today, companies are under increasing pressure to implement corporate social responsibility [CSR] programmes that account for the economic, social and environmental impacts of their operations. In addition to companies voluntarilywanting to be seen as responsible corporate citizens, the requirement for CSR reporting is being institutionalised by the King Code of Governance [King III] in South Africa. The application of King III is mandatory for all companies listedon the Johannesburg Stock Exchange [JSE], albeit on an 'apply or explain' basis. King III requires companies to not only disclose their CSR performance, but also to ensure that such disclosures have been independently assured. Irrespective ofthe underlying reason for companies disclosing their CSR performance and for providing independent assurance thereon, companies are moving away from simplistically applying the cliche attributed to Friedman that "the social responsibility of business was to use its resources to engage in activities that would increase profits". Companies that have traditionally provided financial reporting to shareholders, are now beginning to account for their non-financial performance to other stakeholders as well. This paradigm shift requires those charged with company governance and reporting (including accounting professionals usually associated with financial reporting), to re-examine their morals, values and ethical beliefs.

Background: Business management training is essential for success in the modern era. Health and medical professionals are exposed to knowledge that allows them to treat pathologies. However, their training does not prepare them to manage their practices as businesses and in a sustainable, effective, and efficient manner.Objectives: To investigate the business management training needs of registered South African Biokineticists. Methods: A quantitative and descriptive research design was used. Sixty-nine registered Biokineticists answered the emailed survey. The survey was sent out on two separate days, two weeks apart. Participants could only answer the survey once. The survey was sent out by the Biokinetics Association of South Africa (BASA). The sample in this study consisted of both male and female participants who graduated between the years of 1985-2019. The survey consisted of demographic questions about their study methods. It also included a 5-point Likert Scale where a score of 1 indicated an exceptionally low need and a score of 5 indicated a very high need for corresponding business processes. The business processes included accounting, business sustainability, corporate social responsibility, ethics, financial management, human resource management, leadership and managerial decision-making, marketing, operational management, and strategic management. A final open-ended question on what other business management training the participant needed was asked at the end of the survey. Results: Combined high to very high needs (X≥4 on the Likert Scale) for the business management processes explored were: accounting: 28%, business sustainability: 33%, corporate social responsibility: 23%, ethics: 55%, financial management: 35%, human resource management: 29%, leadership and managerial decision-making: 43%, marketing: 41%, operational management: 39%, and strategic management: 33%. Seventy-one percent of the participants who took part in the study suggested that they needed other business management training needs, providing suggestions in the final question. Of the 71% of participants who answered this question, the most important requests identified included information technology (17%), tax- related management and knowledge (19%) and medical aid training for ICD-10 coding (13%). The other 51% of the participants that answered the final question provided suggestions that could be categorised into the areas of business already reported on in the Likert Scale. Sixty-nine out of a possible ±1600 registered Biokineticists who were BASA members completed the survey. This represents a response rate of about 4%. Conclusion: Business management training needs exist for South African Biokineticists. By addressing these needs, it may lead to improvements in overall patient care, practice management and small business growth which in return can lead to the socioeconomic stimulation of the country.

Background: Primary healthcare (PHC) in South Africa often experiences crucial challenges that lead to patients’ negative experiences regarding their care, compromising the significant role that PHC services could play in health promotion and disease prevention. The primary purpose of implementing the Ideal Clinic (IC) in South Africa was to improve patients’ care quality at the clinics. There seems to be a paucity of studies determining professional nurses’ experiences when implementing the IC. Purpose: This study aimed to explore and describe professional nurses’ experiences regarding implementing the IC at three selected clinics in the Makhado local area. Study method: A qualitative phenomenological research design was used to explore professional nurses’ experiences regarding IC implementation. Purposive sampling was used to select 15 professional nurses working at the three selected clinics. Data were collected using semi-structured one-on-one interviews. Interviews were conducted until saturation was reached. Trustworthiness was ensured by applying Lincoln and Guba’s four criteria, i.e., credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. Ethical clearance was obtained from the University of Limpopo Turfloop Research and Ethics Committee, and permission to conduct the study was obtained from Limpopo Province Department of Health Research and Ethics Committee. Thematic analysis was used to analyze data. Results: The following themes emerged from the study findings: perceived benefits of the IC on the primary healthcare services provided to the community, challenges experienced by professional nurses when implementing the IC program, and challenges related to the supply of resources for implementing the IC. The study results revealed that, although the IC aimed to improve the overburdened PHC facilities in SA, the professional nurses still experienced some challenges when implementing the IC program. Some of the challenges faced were a lack of knowledge and training in the IC program, poor infrastructure and the shortage of equipment, and inadequate provision of support by line managers, all of which resulted in poor-quality patient care. Conclusion: This study revealed that the introduction and implementation of the IC can have potential benefits to the community and the primary healthcare system. However, it was not introduced and appropriately implemented, which resulted in professional nurses experiencing several challenges. The national department of health needs to strengthen the program’s implementation through proper training, consultation, and continuous support of the nurses. Provision of quality equipment and supplies is also recommended.

Ethical and legal decisions are made daily by healthcare professionals and personnel in the performance of their regular duties. However, fraud risk has become a threat to the sustainability of industries and organisations, including the healthcare sector. In the South African healthcare sector, losses due to fraud risk amounted to R13 billion during 2015(Bateman, 2015). The purpose of the study on which this article reports, was to assess whether private hospitals managed fraud risk effectively and in a cohesive manner. Failure to manage fraud risk threatens the sustainability of any hospital. Primary data was collected by means of a survey, which involved management staff at head office level and at hospital level. The findings suggested that South African private hospitals appreciate the significance of the management of fraud, but there is room for improvement. It is recommended that private hospitals follow a decentralised business model and decentralising risk ownership in order to manage fraud risk more effectively. Risk management training should be provided to staff members on a regular basis and a King-type regime should be adopted by private hospitals with regard to the management of risks.

One of the basic values and principles governing public administration enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (Chapter 10) is that “a high standard of professional ethics must be promoted and maintained. Ethics is a process by which we clarify right and wrong and act on what we take to be right, that is, a set or system of moral principles that are generally accepted. Ethics simply means what is right and wrong, what is acceptable or unacceptable and is intertwined with the value system of people. Ethics can also be seen as being relative, not absolute, as ethical behaviour is in the eyes of the beholder. Be that as it may, however, ethical conduct and behaviour normally refer to conforming with generally accepted social norms. Relative to ethics is professionalism, which entails a high standard of work and adherence to certain standards and principles pertaining to specific work to be done. Professionalism embodies skills, competence, efficiency and effectiveness. Public institutions exist for the public good and employ public servants to render services to ensure a better life for all. The public sector is characterised by unprofessional and unethical conduct. The article unearths these and suggests strategies/mechanisms to address this ‘ill’. Can an unethical, unprofessional public servant be trusted to deliver services? Can, for example, a debt-trapped public servant who survives on borrowing money from micro-lenders, who cannot manage personal finances, be trusted to efficiently manage public funds and thus enhance service delivery? Can an incompetent, corrupt, disloyal, unaccountable, shoddy public servant who flouts the principles of Batho Pele and the code of conduct be entrusted with the responsibilities of ensuring a better life for all? The answers to these questions constitute the core of this article.

In this paper the authors use the collaboration framework to explore the implementation of the School Feeding Scheme (SFS) in two primary schools within South Africa. The authors use a qualitative approach to gather data through individual and focus group interviews with two principals and eight teachers respectively. The feeding process was also observed. The authors found that despite recorded achievements, smooth implementation of the scheme was stifled by varied challenges. However, the current situation can be improved if principals initiate strategies that promote collaboration, while caterers and teachers are trained on collaboration and professional ethics. Monitoring and evaluation is encouraged to identify and resolve impending challenges.

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study that explored the causes of ethical turpitude in the four schools in Gauteng Province of South Africa. Semi-structured interviews were held with each school principal, eight heads of department and sixteen teachers. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the generated data. The findings suggest that most participants had pedestrian knowledge of ethical leadership and failed to demonstrate an appreciation of their agency role in promoting an ethical culture both in leadership and teaching despite the prescripts of the SACE Code of Professional Ethics and other laws governing their profession. Despite these negative findings, a minority of participants indicated how they promoted an ethical culture, integrity and honesty in their interactions with their learners. Amidst all the ethical challenges at the school level, the findings further suggest that there was minimal support by the Provincial Department of Education, SACE and teacher unions to equip the school management teams and teachers on ethical leadership and teaching. While numerous ethical turpitudes were unearthed, this study posits that the school management teams have agency and direct responsibility to address ethical challenges in their schools. While outside role-players have a supportive role to play, school management teams cannot give up and solely blame them for internal ethical turpitudes.

Current debates about legal education in South Africa have revealed the perception that the LLB curriculum does not adequately integrate various outcomes, in particular outcomes relating to the development of skills in communication, problem solving, ethics, and in general a holistic view of the law in practice. One mechanism that has been mooted as a potential remedy to this situation is capstone courses, which will consolidate and integrate the four years of study in the final year and build a bridge to the world of practice. A literature review on capstone courses and learning experiences (collectively referred to as capstones) indicates that these curriculum devices as modes of instruction offer particular pedagogical advantages. These include inculcating a strong perception of coherence across the curriculum and hence discipline in students, providing the opportunity for students to reflect on their learning during the course of the entire programme, creating an opportunity to engage with the complexity of law and legal practice, and guiding students through the transition from university to professional identity. An empirical analysis of the modes of instruction used in LLB curricula at 13 South African law faculties/schools indicates that there are six categories of existing modules or learning experiences that already exhibit elements of capstone-course design. These are clinics, internships, moots, research projects, topical capstones and capstone assessment. A further comparative study into foreign law curricula in especially Australia and the United States of America reveals four further noteworthy approaches to capstone-course design, namely problem-based learning, the virtual office, conferences and remedies courses. The empirical study suggests that capstones indeed hold the potential as learning experiences to address some of the challenges facing legal education in South Africa but that further development of this curriculum-design element is required.

Public institutions exist for the public good and employ public officials to perform duties aimed at providing a better life for all. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 requires that the public service maintains a high standard of professional ethics, use resources efficiently and effectively, and provide services equitably. When the new political dispensation came into being in 1994 in South Africa, the newly-elected government committed itself to ensuring a better life for all through the provision of services, for example water and electricity supply, sanitation, and houses, etc. To this end, policies and programmes were put in place. However, the challenge that faces the government is the implementation of these policies and programmes which largely remains unsatisfactory. Systems of reporting and performance are, in the main, weak. To address this short-coming, therefore, government came up with the concept of monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of policies and programmes to the extent of creating a new department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation in the Presidency. Key to the effective implementation of government policies and programmes is the introduction of a tool to ensure that such policies and programmes do not gather dust. This paper therefore, posits how such a tool can have potential benefits in the local government sphere and be a panacea to the ills of this sphere which is characterized by violent service delivery protests through which communities express their dissatisfaction at the non-delivery of essential services. <br /><br />

Background Universal health coverage (UHC) for all people, regardless of citizenship, is a global priority. Health care providers are central to the achievement of UHC, and their attitudes and behaviour could either advance or impede UHC for migrants. Using a social exclusion conceptual framework, this study examined the perspectives of health care providers on delivering health services to migrants in public health facilities in Gauteng Province, South Africa. Methods We used stratified, random sampling to select 13 public health facilities. All health care providers working in ambulatory care were invited to complete a self-administered questionnaire. In addition to socio-demographic information, the questionnaire asked health care providers if they had witnessed discrimination against migrants at work, and measured their perspectives on social exclusionary views and practices. Multiple regression analysis was used to identify predictors of more exclusionary perspectives for each item. Results 277 of 308 health care providers participated in the study–a response rate of 90%. The participants were predominantly female (77.6%) and nurses (51.9%), and had worked for an average of 6.8 years in their facilities. 19.2% of health care providers reported that they had witnessed discrimination against migrants, while 20.0% reported differential treatment of migrant patients. Exclusionary perspectives varied across the different items, and for different provider groups. Enrolled nurses and nursing assistants were significantly more exclusionary on a number of items, while the opposite was found for providers born outside South Africa. For some questions, female providers held more exclusionary perspectives and this was also the case for providers from higher levels of care. Conclusion Health care providers are critical to inclusive UHC. Social exclusionary views or practices must be addressed through enabling health policies; training in culture-sensitivity, ethics and human rights; and advocacy to ensure that health care providers uphold their professional obligations to all patients.

Geographical information systems (GIS) are potentially powerful devices for integrating, manipulating, and communicating information, and are acknowledged to be vulnerable to the abuse of that power. A significant debate during the 1990s has challenged GIS users to respond to the suggestion that their technology is restrictive, elitist, and antisocial. In practice, the response from the GIS profession has been muted, and the paper therefore comments on the way in which professional GIS implementation might be interpreted from different perspectives. Comparisons are drawn between analytical GIS in post-Apartheid South Africa and operational GIS in the UK public utilities. GIS is shown to be an operational or decision support engine fuelled by information flows, and in creating the organisational pathways to support these flows it unlocks gateways the defence of which has traditionally underpinned the authority of management and government. A dilemma thus emerges. On the one hand, GIS has unprecedented power to disseminate access to usable information. On the other hand, it still supports a division which generates a technocratic elite. It is suggested that information democracy lies not in information flow as a technical process, but in information management. As a consequence, it is concluded that a code of data ethics may be at least partially effective in allowing a professional response to the critics of GIS.

IntroductionHealth systems across the world are facing challenges with shortages and maldistribution of skilled health professionals. Return-of-service (ROS) initiatives are government-funded strategies used to educate health professionals by contracting beneficiaries to undertake government work on a year-for-year basis after their qualification. It is envisaged that once they have served their contract, they will be attracted to serve in the same area or government establishment beyond the duration of their obligatory period. Little is known about the processes that led to the development and implementation of ROS policies. Furthermore, there is no systematic evaluation of the strategies that demonstrate their utility. This research aims to evaluate the ROS initiatives, explore their efficacy and sustainability in five Southern African countries.Methods and analysisThis study will be conducted in South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho, Botswana and Namibia in a phased approach through a multimethods approach of policy reviews, quantitative and qualitative research. First, a review will be conducted to explore current ROS schemes. Second, a quantitative retrospective cohort study of ROS scheme recipients for the period 2000–2010 will be undertaken. Information will be sourced from multiple provincial or national information systems and/or databases. Third, we will conduct semistructured group or individual interviews with senior health, education, ROS managing agency managers (where appropriate) and finance managers and/policy makers in each country to determine managers’ perceptions, challenges and the costs and benefits of these schemes. Fourth, we will interview or conduct group discussions with health professional regulatory bodies to assess their willingness to collaborate with ROS initiative funders.Ethics and disseminationEthics approval for this study was obtained through the Human Research Ethics Committees of the University of New South Wales (HC200519), Australia; South Africa and Lesotho (065/2020); Eswatini (SHR302/2020); Namibia (SK001); and Botswana (HPDME 13/18/1). Relevant findings will be shared through presentations to participating governments, publications in peer-reviewed journals and presentations at relevant conferences.

Summary/Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic has plunged the world into turmoil and uncertainty. The academic world is no exception. In South Africa, due to a nationwide lockdown imposed by government, universities had to suspend all academic activities, but very quickly explored online teaching and learning options in order to ensure continued education to students. As far as Clinical Legal Education, or CLE, is concerned, such online options of teaching and learning could present problems to university law faculties, university law clinics and law students in general, as CLE is a practical methodology, usually following a live-client or simulation model, depending on the particular university and law clinic. This article provides insight into the online methodology followed by the Nelson Mandela University, or NMU. The NMU presents CLE as part of its Legal Practice-module and conventionally follows the live-client model. As the national lockdown in South Africa required inter alia social distancing, the live-client model had been temporarily suspended by the NMU Law Faculty Management Committee and replaced with an online methodology. The aim of this was an attempt to complete the first semester of the academic year in 2020. This online methodology is structured so as to provide practical-orientated training to students relating to a wide variety of topics, including drafting of legal documents, divorce matters, medico-legal practice, labour legal practice, criminal legal practice, as well as professional ethics. The online training took place in two staggered teaching and learning pathways in line with the strategy of the NMU, underpinned by the principle of “no student will be left behind.” In this way, provision had been made for students with online connectivity and access to electronic devices, students with online connectivity only after return to campus or another venue where connectivity is possible and electronic devices are available, as well as for students who do not have access to online connectivity and electronic devices at all. The reworked CLE-programme of the NMU, planned for the second semester of the 2020-academic year, will also be discussed in this article. The online methodology, followed by the NMU, should however not be viewed as definitive or cast in stone in any way. There might be – and there surely are – alternative methodologies, both online and otherwise, that may provide equally good or even better training to CLE-students during a global pandemic. Alternative suggestions in this regard will also be discussed in this article. It is hoped that this article will provide inspiration, as well as assistance, to university law faculties and law clinics that are struggling to engage with continued practical legal education during the testing and uncertain times brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is further hoped that this article may provide guidance in other difficult and unforeseen future instances that may await CLE. In this regard, it is important to remember that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is rapidly increasing its grip on the world and that CLE will have to adapt to the demands thereof.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is first to determine the competencies required of risk managers and second to consider the implications of such competencies in determining modules for inclusion in the curriculum framework of an undergraduate qualification in risk management. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative research approach was followed, involving risk management professionals in a focus group and making use of interactive qualitative analysis (IQA). Findings The competencies identified are managerial and risk management knowledge, attributes such as assertiveness and steadfastness and ethical values, as well as people and technical skills. These are explained in greater detail in this paper. Research limitations/implications The unique contribution of the current research was the innovative use of IQA for data collection, the removal of subjectivity and the rigour in analysing and presenting the results. The results provide a starting point for designing a curriculum that will both meet the requirements of the professional body and will equip graduates with the best possible combination of knowledge, attributes, values and skills needed by the risk management profession. The implications for further research include that a comparative IQA study of the competencies of risk managers using academics from the field could be undertaken, as well as a study of the design, benchmarking and validation of a proposed curriculum for an undergraduate degree in risk management. The purpose of this study was not to compile a curriculum for a new BCom (risk management). However, this was beyond the scope of the current study. IQA uses rigour and eliminates the bias of the researcher, and the one limitation of this research lies in the use of a focus group, which resulted in the findings not being generalizable as the case would have been with a representative sample used in the positivist paradigm and using appropriate statistical analysis. However, this study was exploratory and could serve as a valuable starting point for further research in this area to perform a comprehensive curriculum development. Practical implications This study found that constituents of the focus group perceived that the following competencies are required of risk managers, namely, knowledge, skills, attributes and values. These competencies correspond closely with the competencies indicated in the Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) Professional Core Competency Model, except that RIMS subdivides knowledge into three categories, namely, business, organisational and risk management knowledge. Similarly, RIMS distinguishes between management skills and technical skills. The attributes identified by the focus group of this study were similar to those identified by RIMS. However, the focus group emphasised values such as integrity, ethical conduct, respect and accountability. However, unlike RIMS, these were not perceived as one of the five core competencies, but rather as a stand-alone competency in its own right, which risk managers need to be successful. RIMS could consider reviewing its core competencies by allocating three closely related aspects, namely communication, collaboration and consultation to technical skills. Core competencies may be replaced by core values, which are literally at the centre of all the competencies required. Such core values are enhanced by the RIMS Code of Ethics (2019) and significantly contribute to the professionalization of risk management. RIMS could also consider providing guidelines to universities for those competencies that could be taught or learnt, to be included in their curricula and to accredit universities who meet such requirements. Social implications The findings of this study also serve as a starting point for the reintroduction of a BCom (risk management) degree by Unisa. Despite the requirements of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) and the Council for Higher Education (CHE), this study demonstrated that a specialised degree in risk management needs to be offered to meet the need expressed by IRMSA for professional risk managers in Southern Africa, and such a degree should ideally be curriculated based on the competencies identified in this article. The implication for public policy is that SAQA and the CHE need to reconsider their rigid stance about the composition of specialised qualifications, and rather set a range of 33-50% for subjects from the field of specialisation that must be included in the curricula of specialised degrees. As indicated by this research, a combination of subjects from different disciplines is required to enhance the competencies and employability of risk management graduates. Originality/value The use of IQA is a novel way of ensuring rigour and objectivity in arriving at the required knowledge, attributes, values and skills of risk managers, and aids in the compilation of a new curriculum for an undergraduate qualification in risk management, thus ensuring the qualification will provide a competency-based qualification that will meet the needs of the profession.

ISCPES stands for International Society for Comparative Physical Education and Sports and it is going to celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2018. Since the beginning (Israel 1978) the main goals of the Society were established under a worldwide mind set considering five continents and no discrimination of any kind. The founders wanted to compare Physical Education and Sports across the world, searching for the best practices deserving consideration and applied on the purpose of improving citizen quality of life. The mission still stands for “Compare to learn and improve”.As all the organizations lasting for 39 years, ISCPES experienced several vicissitudes, usually correlated with world economic cycles, social and sports changes, which are in ISS journal articles - International Sport Studies.ISS journal is Scopus indexed, aiming to improve its quality (under evaluation) to reach more qualified students, experts, professionals and researchers; doing so it will raise its indexation, which we know it is nowadays a more difficult task. First, because there are more journals trying to compete on this academic fierce competitive market; secondly, because the basic requirements are getting more and more hard to gather in the publishing environment around Physical Education and Sports issues. However, we can promise this will be one of our main strategic goals.Another goal I would like to address on this Editorial is the language issue. We have this second strategic goal, which is to reach most of languages spoken in different continents; besides the English language, we will reach Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. For that reason, we already defined that all the abstracts in English will be translated into Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese words so people can find them on any search browser. That will expand the demand for our journal and articles, increasing the number of potential readers. Of course this opportunity, given by Motricidade, can be considered as a good example to multiply our scope.In June 2017 we organized a joint Conference in Borovets, Bulgaria, with our colleagues from the BCES – Bulgarian Society for Comparative Educational Studies. During those days, there was an election to appoint a new (Portuguese) president. This constitutes an important step for the Portuguese speaker countries, which, for a 4th year term, will have the opportunity to expand the influence of ISCPES Society diffusing the research results we have been achieving into a vast extended new public and inviting new research experts to innovative debates. This new president will be working with a wide geographical diverse team: the Vice President coming from a South American country (Venezuela), and the other several Executive Board members are coming from Brazil, China, Africa and North America. This constitutes a very favorable situation once, adding to this, we kept the previous editorial team from Australia and Europe. We are definitely committed to improve our influence through new incentives to organize several regional (continental) workshops, seminars and Conferences in the next future.The international research is crossing troubled times with exponential number of new indexed journals trying to get new influence and visibility. In order to do that, readers face new challenges because several studies present contradictory conclusions and outcome comparisons still lacking robust methodologies. Uncovering these issues is the focus of our Society.In the past, ISCPES started its activity collecting answers to the same questions asked to several experts in different countries and continents across the world. The starting studies developed some important insights on several issues concerning the way Physical Education professionals approached their challenges. In the very starting documents ISCPES activity focused in identifying certain games and indigenous activities that were not understood by people in other parts of the world, improving this international understanding and communication. This first attempt considered six groups of countries roughly comprehending 26 countries from all the continents.ISCPES has on its archives several seminal works, PhD proposals and program proposals, which constitutes the main theoretical framework considered in some textbooks printed at the end of the sixties in the XXth century.The methods used mostly sources’ country comparisons, historic development of comparative education systems, list of factors affecting those systems and a systematic analysis of case studies; additionally, international organizations for sports and physical education were also required to identify basic problems and unique features considered for the implementation of each own system. At the time, Lynn C. Vendien & John E. Nixon book “The World Today in Health, Physical Education and Recreation”, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1968, together with two monographies from William Johnson “Physical Education around the World”, 1966, 1968, Indianapolis, Phi Epsilon Kappa editions, were the main textbook references.The main landscapes of interest were to study sports compared or the sport role in Nationalisms, Political subsidization, Religion, Race and volunteering versus professionalism. The goal was to state the true place of sports in societies.In March 1970, Ben W. Miller from the University of California compiled an interesting Exhibit n.1 about the main conclusions of a breakfast meeting occurred during the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation. There, they identified thirty-one individuals, which had separate courses in “Comparative and/or International Physical Education, Recreation and Sports”; one month later, they collected eighteen responses with the bibliographic references they used. On this same Exhibit n.1 there is detailed information on the title, catalogue description, date of initial course (1948, the first), credit units, eligibility, number of year offer, type of graduation (from major to doctorate and professional). Concluding, the end of the sixties can be the mark of a well-established body of literature in comparative education and sports studies published in several scientific journals.What about the XXIst century? Is it still important to compare sports and education throughout the world? Only with qualitative methods? Mixed methods?We think so. That is why, after a certain decline and fuzzy goal definition in research motivations within ISCPES we decided to innovate and reorganize people from physical education and sports around this important theme of comparative studies. Important because we observe an increasing concern on the contradictions across different results in publications under the same subject. How can we infer? What about good research questions which get no statistically significant results? New times are coming, and we want to be on that frontline of this move as said by Elsevier “With RMR (results masked review) articles, you don’t need to worry about what editors or reviewers might think about your results. As long as you have asked an important question and performed a rigorous study, your paper will be treated the same as any other. You do not need to have null results to submit an RMR article; there are many reasons why it can be helpful to have the results blinded at initial review”.https://www.elsevier.com/connect/reviewers-update/results-masked-review-peer-review-without-publication-bias.This is a very different and challenging time. Our future strategy will comprehend more cooperation between researchers, institutions and scientific societies as an instrument to leverage our understanding of physical activity and sports through different continents and countries and be useful for policy designs.Next 2018, on the occasion of the UE initiative Sofia – European Capital of Sport 2018 we - Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES) & the International Society for Comparative Physical Education and Sport (ISCPES) - will jointly organize an International Conference on Sport Governance around the World.Sports and Physical Education are facing complex problems worldwide, which need to be solved. For health reasons, a vast number of organizations are popularizing the belief that physical education and sports are ‘a must’ in order to promote human activity and movement. However, several studies show that modern lifestyles are the main cause for people's inactivity and sedentary lifestyles.Extensive funded programs used to promote healthy lifestyles; sports media advertising several athletes, turning them into global heroes, influencers in a new emerging industry around sports organizations. Therefore, there is a rise in the number of unethical cases and corruption that influence the image of physical education and sports roles.We, the people emotional and physically involved with sports and physical activity must be aware of this, studying, discussing and comparing global facts and events around the world.This Conference aims to offer an incentive to colleagues from all continents to participate and present their latest results on four specific topics: 1. Sport Governance Systems; 2. Ethics and Corruption in Physical Education and Sports Policies; 3. Physical Education and Sport Development; 4. Training Physical Educators and Coaches. Please consider your selves invited to attend. Details in http://bcesconvention.com/

Field-based research programs offer students a singular opportunity to understand that today there are no simple scientific, economic or socio-political answers to the complex questions facing governments, communities, and local organizations. Through their research, students can gain a first-hand appreciation that decision making in the real world is a mix of all these disciplines, and that they have a vital role to play in participating in this process. According to the most recent Open Doors report (2006), issued by the Institute of International Education, about 206,000 US students studied abroad in 2004/5. While about 55% studied in Europe, an increasing number studied in other host countries around the world. Social science and physical science students comprised about 30% of all US study abroad students in this period. While study abroad programs encompassing a field research component are still in the minority, an increasing number of home institutions and field-based providers are supporting and conducting these types of programs. As the student papers in this Special Issue of Frontiers demonstrate, there is high quality work being produced by undergraduates in settings as diverse as France, Thailand, Kenya, South Africa and Mali. For these students this opportunity was likely a new experience, involving living and studying in international settings; dealing with language and culture differences; matriculating in programs operated by host country universities, independent program providers, or their home institution’s international program; and learning how to conduct research that meets professional standards. Much has been written and discussed regarding pre-departure orientation of US students studying abroad, along with studies and evaluations of the study abroad experience. Less discussion and research has focused on the experiences of the on-site faculty and staff who host students and incorporate field-based research into their courses and programs. These courses and programs involving student research include the following types: • International university-based research, in which the student conducts research on a topic as part of a course or term paper; • Independent field-based research, in which the student identifies a topic, organizes the project, and conducts the field work, analysis, write-up, etc. for an overall grade; • Collective field-based research, in which students, working under the guidance of a professor (either US or international), conduct a research project as part of a US-based course, or complementary to the professor’s research focus; • Client-focused, directed, field-based research in which the research conducted is in response to, or in collaboration with, a specific client ranging from an NGO, to a corporation, to an indigenous community, or a governmental agency. The purpose of this article is to describe some of the issues and challenges that on-site faculty and staff encounter in preparing and supporting US undergraduate students to conduct formal research projects in international settings in order to maximize their success and the quality of their research. The perspectives described below have been gathered through informal surveys with a range of international program faculty and staff; discussions with program managers and faculty; and through our own experience at The School for Field Studies (SFS), with its formal directed research model. The survey sought responses in the following areas, among others: preparing students to conduct successfully their field-based research in a different socio-cultural environment; the skill building needs of students; patterns of personal, cultural, and/or technical challenges that must be addressed to complete the process successfully; and, misconceptions that students have about field-based research. Student Preparation Students work either individually or in groups to conduct their research, depending on the program. In either case on-site faculty and staff focus immediately on training students on issues ranging from personal safety and risk management, to cultural understanding, language training, and appropriate behavior. In programs involving group work, faculty and staff have learned that good teamwork dynamics cannot be taken for granted. They work actively with students in helping them understand the ebb and flow of groups, the mutual respect which must be extended, and the active participation that each member must contribute. As one on-site director indicates, “Students make their experience what it is through their behavior. We talk a lot about respecting each other as individuals and working together to make the project a great experience.” Cultural and sensitivity training are a major part of these field-based programs. It is critical that students learn and appreciate the social and cultural context in which they will conduct their research. As another on-site director states, “It is most important that the students understand the context in which the research is happening. They need to know the values and basic cultural aspects around the project they will be working on. It is not simply doing ‘good science.’ It requires understanding the context so the science research reaches its goal.” On-site faculty and staff also stress the importance of not only understanding cultural dynamics, but also acting appropriately and sensitively relative to community norms and expectations. Language training is also a component of many of these programs. As a faculty member comments, “Students usually need help negotiating a different culture and a new language. We try to help the students understand that they need to identify appropriate solutions for the culture they are in, and that can be very difficult at times.” Skill Building Training students on the technical aspects of conducting field-based research is the largest challenge facing most on-site faculty and staff, who are often struck by the following: • A high percentage of students come to these programs with a lack of knowledge of statistics and methods. They’ve either had very little training in statistics, or they find that real world conditions complicate their data. According to one faculty member, “Statistics are a big struggle for most students. Some have done a class, but when they come to work with real data it is seldom as black and white as a text book example and that leads to interpretation issues and lack of confidence in their data. They learn that ecology (for example) is often not clear, but that is OK.” • Both physical and social science students need basic training in scientific methodology in order to undertake their projects. Even among science majors there is a significant lack of knowledge of how to design, manage and conduct a research project. As a program director states, “Many students begin by thinking that field research is comprised only of data collection. We intensively train students to understand that good research is a process that begins with conceptualization of issues, moves into review of relevant literature, structures a research hypothesis, determines indicators and measurements, creates the research design, collects data, undertakes analysis and inference. This is followed by write-up in standard scientific format for peer review and input. This leads to refining earlier hypotheses, raising new questions and initiating further research to address new questions.” Consistently, on-site faculty have indicated that helping students understand and appreciate this cycle is a major teaching challenge, but one that is critical to their education and the success of their various field research projects. • The uncertainty and ambiguity that are often present in field research creates challenges for many students who are used to seeking ‘the answer in the book.’ On-site faculty help students understand that science is a process in which field-based research is often non-linear and prone to interruption by natural and political events. It is a strong lesson for students when research subjects, be they animal or human, don’t cooperate by failing to appear on time, or at all, and when they do appear they may have their own agendas. Finally, when working with human communities, student researchers need to understand that their research results and recommendations are not likely to result in immediate action. Program faculty help them to understand that the real world includes politics, conflicting attitudes, regulatory issues, funding issues, and other community priorities. • Both physical and social science students demonstrate a consistent lack of skill in technical and evidence-based writing. For many this type of writing is completely new and is a definite learning experience. As a faculty member states, “Some students find the report writing process very challenging. We want them to do well, but we don’t want to effectively write their paper for them.” Challenges The preceding points address some of the technical work that on-site faculty conduct with students. Faculty also witness and experience the ‘emotional’ side of field-based research being conducted by their students. This includes what one faculty member calls “a research-oriented motivation” — the need for students to develop a strong, energized commitment to overcome all the challenges necessary to get the project done. As another professor indicates, “At the front end the students don’t realize how much effort they will have to expend because they usually have no experience with this sort of work before they do their project.” Related to this is the need for students to learn that flexibility in the research process does not justify a sloppy or casual approach. It does mean a recognition that human, political, and meteorological factors may intervene, requiring the ability to adapt to changed conditions. The goal is to get the research done. The exact mechanics for doing so will emerge as the project goes on. “Frustration tolerance” is critical in conducting this type of work. Students have the opportunity to learn that certain projects need to incorporate a substantial window of time while a lengthy ethics approval and permit review system is conducted by various governmental agencies. Students learn that bureaucracies move at their own pace, and for reasons that may not be obvious. Finally, personal challenges to students may include being uncomfortable in the field (wet, hot, covered in scrub itch) or feeling over-tired. As a faculty member states, “Many have difficulty adjusting to the early mornings my projects usually involve.” These issues represent a range of challenges that field-based research faculty and staff encounter in working with undergraduate students in designing and conducting their research projects around the world. In my own experience with SFS field-based staff, and in discussions with a wide variety of others who work and teach on-site, I am consistently impressed by the dedication, energy and commitment of these men and women to train, support and mentor students to succeed. As an on-site director summarizes, essentially speaking for all, “Fortunately, most of the students attending our program are very enthusiastic learners, take their limitations positively, and hence put tremendous effort into acquiring the required skills to conduct quality research.” Summary/Conclusions Those international program faculty and staff who have had years of experience in dealing with and teaching US undergraduates are surprised that the US educational system has not better prepared students on subjects including statistics, scientific report formatting and composition, and research methodologies. They find that they need to address these topics on an intensive basis in order for a substantial number of students to then conduct their research work successfully. Having said this, on-site faculty and staff are generally impressed by the energy and commitment that most students put into learning the technical requirements of a research project and carrying it out to the best of their abilities. Having students conduct real field-based research, and grading these efforts, is a very concrete method of determining the seriousness with which a student has participated in their study abroad program. Encouraging field-based research is good for students and good for study abroad because it has the potential of producing measurable products based on very tangible efforts. In a number of instances students have utilized their field research as the basis for developing their senior thesis or honors project back on their home campus. Successful field research has also formed the basis of Fulbright or Watson proposals, in addition to other fellowships and graduate study projects. An increasing number of students are also utilizing their field research, often in collaboration with their on-site program faculty, to create professional conference presentations and posters. Some of these field-based research models also produce benefits for incountry clients, including NGOs, corporations and community stakeholders. In addition to providing the data, analyses, technical information, and recommendations that these groups might not otherwise be able to afford, it is a concrete mechanism for the student and her/his study abroad program faculty and staff to ‘give back’ to local stakeholders and clients. It changes the dynamic from the student solely asking questions, interviewing respondents, observing communities, to more of a mutually beneficial relationship. This is very important to students who are sensitive to this dynamic. It is also important to their program faculty and staff, and in most cases, genuinely appreciated by the local stakeholders. In essence, community identified and responsive research is an excellent mechanism for giving to a community — not just taking from it. An increasing interest in conducting field-based research on the part of US universities and their students may have the effect of expanding the international destinations to which US students travel. A student’s sociological, anthropological, or environmental interest and their desire to conduct field research in that academic discipline, for example, may help stretch the parameters of the student’s comfort level to study in more exotic (non-traditional) locales. Skill building in preparing for and conducting field-based research is an invaluable experience for the student’s future academic and professional career. It is a fairly common experience for these students to indicate that with all the classroom learning they have done, their study abroad experience wherein they got their hands dirty, their comfort level stretched, their assumptions tested, and their work ethic challenged, provided them with an invaluable and life changing experience. Conducting field-based research in an international setting provides real world experience, as the student papers in this edition of Frontiers attest. It also brings what may have only been academic subjects, like statistics, and research design and methodology, to life in a real-conditions context. On a related note, conducting real field-based work includes the requirement to endure field conditions, remote locations, bad weather, personal discomforts, technological and mechanical breakdowns, and sometimes dangerous situations. Field research is hard work if it is done rigorously. In addition, field work often includes non-cooperating subjects that defy prediction, and may confound a neat research hypothesis. For a student considering a profession which requires a serious commitment to social or physical science field work this study abroad experience is invaluable. It clarifies for the student what is really involved, and it is helpful to the student in assessing their future career focus, as they ask the critical question — would I really want to do this as a fulltime career? US education needs to bridge better the gap between the physical and social sciences. Students are done a disservice with the silo-type education that has been so prevalent in US education. In the real world there are no strictly scientific, economic, or sociological solutions to complex, vexing problems facing the global community. Going forward there needs to be interdisciplinary approaches to these issues by decision makers at all levels. We need to train our students to comprehend that while they may not be an ecologist, or an economist, or a sociologist, they need to understand and appreciate that all these perspectives are important and must be considered in effective decision-making processes. In conclusion, education abroad programs involving serious field-based research are not a distraction or diversion from the prescribed course of study at US home institutions; rather, they are, if done well, capable of providing real, tangible skills and experience that students lack, in spite of their years of schooling. This is the reward that is most meaningful to the international program faculty and staff who teach, mentor and support US students in conducting their field-based research activities. As an Australian on-site program director stated, “there are relatively few students who are adequately skilled in these (field research) areas when they come to our program. Most need a lot of instruction and assistance to complete their research projects, but that of course is part of what we’re all about — helping students acquire or improve these critical skills.” This is the real service that these programs and on-site faculty and staff offer to US undergraduates. Paul Houlihan, President The School for Field Studies

Teaching and teacher education in South Africa have emerged from a highly fragmented past. Teachers from diverse backgrounds, experiences and qualifications find themselves working together in schools where they do not necessarily have access to a common language of practice, nor a shared understanding of professional teaching practices. To address these challenges, the South African Council of Educators (SACE) has developed a set of professional teaching standards for use in the South African context. This is not the first time a policy framework has tried to articulate and direct teachers’ work. This paper analyses four other frameworks that have been used to regulate, monitor and evaluate the work of South African teachers over the past two decades. These other frameworks are The Roles of the Educator and Their Associated Competences, the SACE Code of Professional Ethics, the Integrated Quality Management System (IQMS) and the Basic Competences of a Beginner Teacher. Our analysis shows how these frameworks present teaching in ways that constrain teacher professionalism in some ways. They address some aspects of professional teaching while ignoring others. In particular, none of them adequately acknowledge the relations between knowledge, skills, judgement and the ethical orientations that underpin professional teaching. The ways in which previous frameworks have constrained teacher professionalism has important implications for SACE if its set of professional teaching standards is to more successfully enhance teacher professionalism in the South African context.

Background: The role of ethics in a medical context is to protect the interests of patients. Thus,it is critically important to understand the guilty verdicts related to professional standard breaches and ethics misconduct of physiotherapists.Aim: To analyse the case content and penalties of all guilty verdicts related to ethics misconduct against registered physiotherapists in South Africa.Methods: A mixed methods approach was followed consisting of epidemiological data analysis and qualitative content analysis. The data documents were formal annual lists (2007–2013) of guilty verdicts related to ethical misconduct. Quantitative data analysis focused on annual frequencies of guilty verdicts, transgression categories and the imposed penalties. Qualitative data analysis focused on content analysis of the case content for each guilty verdict.Results: Relatively few physiotherapists (0.05%) are annually found guilty of ethical misconduct. The two most frequent penalties were fines of R5000.00 and fines of R8000.00–R10 000.00. The majority of transgressions involved fraudulent conduct (70.3%), followed by performance of procedures without patient consent (10.8%). Fraudulent conduct involved issuing misleading, inaccurate or false medical statements, and false or inaccurate medical aid scheme claims.Conclusion: Unethical conduct by physiotherapists in South Africa occurs rarely. The majority of penalties imposed on sanctioned physiotherapists were monetary penalties.

Background: Many youth victims of violence report for treatment at the health care facilities in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. It was unclear what the youth expected regarding how they could be led towards wellness by health care professionals following an incident of violence (R1.1).Objectives: This study sought to explore and describe the expectations of the youth victims of violence with regards to health care professionals (R1.2) leading them to wellness in a selected rural community.Method: A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive and contextual design was used. Nine focus group discussions were conducted with 58 (23 males, 35 females) purposefully selected youth victims of violence between the ages of 15 and 19. Data analysis was done through open coding. Ethics clearance was received from the University Ethics Committee prior to the study being conducted.Results: Findings indicated that the youth victims of violence expect the health care professionals (professional nurses, doctors and social workers) working in their community to act as role models, demonstrate a professional attitude, provide health education, provide confidential counselling services, and establish school and community outreach programmes.Conclusion: This study provides evidence that youth victims of violence have important expectations from health care professionals concerning their wellness. Hence, health care professionals should focus on designing and implementing interventions targeting these expectations.

Education for healthcare professionals, including radiography, is focused on cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning. The aim of this article is to present and argue for the consideration of the HECAF model, which is designed to improve the teaching and learning of Ethics and Human Rights in the radiography undergraduate programme. This model was developed as a result of a qualitative study using action research as a research design. There were two phases, namely situation analysis and appreciative inquiry. The study used multiple data collection tools. Quantitative data was collected during phase one and qualitative data was collected in phase two. Content analysis was appropriate because it could be used for both quantitative and qualitative data. Participants were facilitators of learning, third-year radiography students and clinical supervisors from the eight higher education institutions that offer radiography education and training in South Africa. Ethical approval was granted. The HECAF model is presented as a strategy that can improve the teaching and learning of Ethics and Human Rights in the undergraduate radiography programme. HECAF is as an acronym for humanness, environment, core curriculum, assessment and feedback. It is argued in this article that the HECAF model can contribute to enhancing professional conduct and ethical behaviour in the clinical radiography environment.

Background: A shortage of nurses caring for older persons is experienced due to adverse working conditions. Resilience might empower nurses to persevere while caring for older persons. Research regarding the resilience of nurses caring for older persons is scarce.Objectives: The objectives were to explore and describe the strengths and coping abilities of nurses caring for older persons and to formulate recommendations to strengthen their resilience.Methodology: An explorative, descriptive qualitative research design was used. An allinclusive sample of nurses caring for older persons in an urban setting in the North West Province, South Africa, participated in the study. During phase one, demographic information was obtained, and narratives were written (n = 43). Four focus group interviews were conducted in phase two (n = 17) and recommendations were formulated in phase three. Content analysis was used.Principal results: Participants experienced adverse working circumstances while caring for older persons and they needed resilience to balance the emotional nature of the work, work ethics, staff shortages, physical demands of the work and the dependency of the older persons. These nurses used personal, professional, contextual and spiritual strengths to handle adverse working conditions.Conclusions: By applying their personal, professional, contextual and spiritual strengths, nurses could further enhance these strengths and possibly their resilience. The participants' identified strengths were used to formulate recommendations to strengthen resilience of nurses caring for older persons.

Abstract Migration has witnessed important development worldwide and in the Mediterranean region because of globalization, political and economic transformations and climate changes. Global agreements on trade in service in addition to deteriorating working conditions have facilitated movement of health professionals from countries of the south to countries of the north with dramatic implications on health systems. The middle east and North Africa region are presently hosting the highest numbers of refugees and migrants fleeing wars and civil strives in South East Asia, Sub Saharan Africa and Middle East. They live in difficult conditions and do not access quality health care services. The geostrategic position of Maghreb and North African countries and their historic ties with Europe imposes to build collaboration and solidarity to deal with the issue of migration and health. Refugees and migrants in Northern and Southern banks of the Mediterranean lack appropriate health and social services, often provided by generous civil society organizations with limited commitment from national governments. Also, their vulnerable status makes them easy targets for international and national human trafficking gangs. Professional associations and scientific societies and schools of public health have an important advocacy role through research and generation of evidence. Health professionals from countries of the southern Mediterranean countries are migrating at increasing pace for several reasons including worsening working conditions to countries of the north and mainly to Europe. Such uncoordinated migration is negatively impacting on health service delivery in countries and it is representing a serious challenge to health systems. Unfortunately, countries of the North, apart from Germany in relation to nurses migrating from Vietnam, are not applying the WHO code of ethics in international recruitment of health professionals. The objectives of the workshop are to: Document gaps in health and social services provided to refugees and migrants as well as issues related to human trafficking among refugees and migrants.Share experiences among countries of the region in provision of health and social services to migrantsAdvocate human right approach in access to decent health and social services to refugees and migrants in Europe and southern Mediterranean countries.Plea for the implementation of the WHO code of ethics in international recruitment of health professionals. Presentations during the workshop: Human trafficking among refugees and migrants in Tunisia: By Dr. Belgacem Sabri.Health promotion for migrants in Morocco: Progress, challenges et prospects, By Pr. Abderrahmane Maaroufi.Brain drain of Tunisian competencies: The case of health professionals: By Pr. Lassaad Laabidi, and Dr Belgacem SabriMapping of access of refugees and migrants in Tunisia in access to social and health care services by Pr. Chokri Arfa. Key messages Advocate human right approach in access to decent health and social services to refugees and migrants in Europe and southern Mediterranean countries. Plea for the implementation of the WHO code of ethics in international recruitment of health professionals.

The much-debated diagnostic report, the National Development Plan 2030 (NDP), paints a worrying picture about the state of the health system in South Africa. The NDP simply states that, “At institutional level, healthcare management is in crisis” (Republic of South Africa 2012, National Development Plan of 2030: 52). One of the remedial measures proposed by the NDP is the introduction of the National Health Insurance in South Africa (Republic of South Africa 2012, National Development Plan of 2030: 52). It is hoped that the National Health Insurance “will ensure that everyone has access to appropriate, efficient and quality health services” (Republic of South Africa 2012, National Development Plan of 2030: 4).The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 sets the benchmark and the ideals towards which public servants must strive as they deliver the much-needed services to the general populace (s 195(1)(a)−(i)). Among others, public servants must promote and maintain a high standard of professional ethics (s 195(1)(a)). Further, the Batho Pele Principles require it of government institutions to, inter alia communicate the level and quality of service, which the public must expect from them (Batho Pele Principles Principle 2). It is therefore not misguided to say that generally, people are aware of the standard of service they should expect from state institutions. As a matter of fact, people have gone to the courts of law to hold state institutions accountable. In this regard the medical fraternity has in the recent past witnessed an upsurge of court cases of negligence against the health department. This rise in litigation has led to a crisis of another kind. According to the Minister of Health, healthcare in South Africa is facing a crisis because some medical practitioners, particularly gynaecologists and obstetricians, have opted not to perform operations for fear of lawsuits.The concerns of the Minister notwithstanding, the daily experiences of people point to the fact that despite the lofty ideals in the Constitution and the Batho Pele Principles, the general public continues to receive sub-standard service from public institutions, especially from public hospitals. The case of Lushaba v MEC for Health, Gauteng (The original case) provides a good illustration of a nation, which is in a state of paralysis ethically. The case paints a picture of “state employees who could not be bothered to do their work” (The rule nisi case par 87). What is even more ominous is the observation by Robinson JA that shaming such public officials no longer has any effect (The rule nisi case par 90).The Lushaba case has all the hallmarks of the cost of indifference on the ethical values of a nation. Axiomatically, such a cost cannot only be measured in Rands and cents. Later in the discussion, we hope to make it clear that indifference impacts on the valuable time of the court and the plaintiff, the reputation of the various institutions involved, quality of life of the child born with cerebral palsy as a result of indifference, the dignity of both the mother and her son and, of course, the taxpayers’ money. These factors combined provide a good basis for reflection on the cost of indifference in this case. To provide some background, the facts of the Lushaba case are discussed briefly, after which the indifference of every role player in the events leading up to the two court cases are highlighted. In the process, our discussion also makes mention of the trajectory that the case followed from the court a quo all the way to the Constitutional Court (MEC for Health, Gauteng v Lushaba [2015] ZACC 16). In the Constitutional Court’s judgment, even the High Court judge came under scrutiny.

Researchers have grappled to speculate about why people in almost all societies share a concern with social justice and equity in education. It is increasingly recognized, internationally and in South Africa, that leading and managing teaching and learning is one of the most important activities for principals and other school leaders. This paper shows that managing teaching and learning are often inadequate, and largely fails to improve educational problems facing school communities. A lot was written about arguably the biggest challenge facing today’s teachers and principals. The question remains how schools could be made to work effectively and equitably for all learners in ever more diverse classrooms. This article will attempt to point the way to ensure that there is educational leadership in the creation and management of schools. Quality leadership skills and competencies for effective teaching and learning in schools are also highlighted. The rationale for this study is based on the growing concern that school leadership is not sensitive to the needs of the learners they serve and continue to experience unjustifiable expenditure in relation to community expectations in terms of teaching and learning. Equity theory underpinned this study. It is imperative to note that people feel most comfortable when their relationships are maximally profitable and they are giving and getting exactly what they deserve from their relationships; no more and certainly no less. The ethics of care theory is used as a lens to understand how principals lead and manage schools to improve learner performance. This theory is considered pertinent for this study due to the fact that leaders have authority and power over their subordinates. A leader should possess instructional leadership skills that emphasize the achievement of the core task, teaching and learning, in schools. Effective leaders understand their staff and learners’ unique needs, can create a supportive environment and engage in practices that build on employee self-confidence to enhance their performance. Ethics of care is deemed suitable for this study since school leaders should have a passion to care for teachers and learners they lead. Ethics of care is a suitable way to connect people and emphasize helping others. Leaders should go an extra mile to address, nurture and support the needs of the teachers. The role of caring in a school environment has a more specific aim, which is to establish an environment that is conducive to effective teaching and learning because an environment that is caring enhances productivity. An investigation was conducted to explore effective school leadership through teaching and learning. This effect presents an exhaustive review of the article and suggests a direction for future developments. Based on the study, a qualitative approach was employed to investigate effective school leadership practices as perceived by school leaders. The belief is that schools should be led by the quality of leaders in order to produce good results. It is on this backdrop that schools need effective, dedicated, responsible, accountable school leaders, and staff members, if they are to provide quality education for all learners. It became evident from the findings that effective principals locate learning at the centre of their daily activities and that this can only be achieved if the creation of a conducive environment plays a major role in developing a professional community of teachers who work as a team under effective instructional leadership. Recommendations evolved from the findings.

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944). It is worth revisiting the old boy’s grumpiness, because the rhetoric he so niftily skewers continues in our own time. Facebook features “Peace on Facebook” and even claims that it can “decrease world conflict” through inter-cultural communication. Twitter has announced itself as “a triumph of humanity” (“A Cyber-House” 61). Queue George. In between Orwell and latter-day hoody cybertarians, a whole host of excitable public intellectuals announced the impending end of materiality through emergent media forms. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Bell, Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler—the list of 1960s futurists goes on and on. And this wasn’t just a matter of punditry: the OECD decreed the coming of the “information society” in 1975 and the European Union (EU) followed suit in 1979, while IBM merrily declared an “information age” in 1977. Bell theorized this technological utopia as post-ideological, because class would cease to matter (Mattelart). Polluting industries seemingly no longer represented the dynamic core of industrial capitalism; instead, market dynamism radiated from a networked, intellectual core of creative and informational activities. The new information and knowledge-based economies would rescue First World hegemony from an “insurgent world” that lurked within as well as beyond itself (Schiller). Orwell’s others and the Cold-War futurists propagated one of the most destructive myths shaping both public debate and scholarly studies of the media, culture, and communication. They convinced generations of analysts, activists, and arrivistes that the promises and problems of the media could be understood via metaphors of the environment, and that the media were weightless and virtual. The famous medium they wished us to see as the message —a substance as vital to our wellbeing as air, water, and soil—turned out to be no such thing. Today’s cybertarians inherit their anti-Marxist, anti-materialist positions, as a casual glance at any new media journal, culture-industry magazine, or bourgeois press outlet discloses. The media are undoubtedly important instruments of social cohesion and fragmentation, political power and dissent, democracy and demagoguery, and other fraught extensions of human consciousness. But talk of media systems as equivalent to physical ecosystems—fashionable among marketers and media scholars alike—is predicated on the notion that they are environmentally benign technologies. This has never been true, from the beginnings of print to today’s cloud-covered computing. Our new book Greening the Media focuses on the environmental impact of the media—the myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources. We introduce ideas, stories, and facts that have been marginal or absent from popular, academic, and professional histories of media technology. Throughout, ecological issues have been at the core of our work and we immodestly think the same should apply to media communications, and cultural studies more generally. We recognize that those fields have contributed valuable research and teaching that address environmental questions. For instance, there is an abundant literature on representations of the environment in cinema, how to communicate environmental messages successfully, and press coverage of climate change. That’s not enough. You may already know that media technologies contain toxic substances. You may have signed an on-line petition protesting the hazardous and oppressive conditions under which workers assemble cell phones and computers. But you may be startled, as we were, by the scale and pervasiveness of these environmental risks. They are present in and around every site where electronic and electric devices are manufactured, used, and thrown away, poisoning humans, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. We are using the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes—print, film, radio, television, information and communications technologies (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE). This is not only for analytical convenience, but because there is increasing overlap between the sectors. CE connect to ICT and vice versa; televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; and so on. Cultural forms and gadgets that were once separate are now linked. The currently fashionable notion of convergence doesn’t quite capture the vastness of this integration, which includes any object with a circuit board, scores of accessories that plug into it, and a global nexus of labor and environmental inputs and effects that produce and flow from it. In 2007, a combination of ICT/CE and media production accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted around the world (“Gartner Estimates,”; International Telecommunication Union; Malmodin et al.). Between twenty and fifty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated annually, much of it via discarded cell phones and computers, which affluent populations throw out regularly in order to buy replacements. (Presumably this fits the narcissism of small differences that distinguishes them from their own past.) E-waste is historically produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeast Asia, and China. It takes the form of a thousand different, often deadly, materials for each electrical and electronic gadget. This trend is changing as India and China generate their own media detritus (Robinson; Herat). Enclosed hard drives, backlit screens, cathode ray tubes, wiring, capacitors, and heavy metals pose few risks while these materials remain encased. But once discarded and dismantled, ICT/CE have the potential to expose workers and ecosystems to a morass of toxic components. Theoretically, “outmoded” parts could be reused or swapped for newer parts to refurbish devices. But items that are defined as waste undergo further destruction in order to collect remaining parts and valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, and rare-earth elements. This process causes serious health risks to bones, brains, stomachs, lungs, and other vital organs, in addition to birth defects and disrupted biological development in children. Medical catastrophes can result from lead, cadmium, mercury, other heavy metals, poisonous fumes emitted in search of precious metals, and such carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, polyvinyl chloride, and flame retardants (Maxwell and Miller 13). The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2007 US residents owned approximately three billion electronic devices, with an annual turnover rate of 400 million units, and well over half such purchases made by women. Overall CE ownership varied with age—adults under 45 typically boasted four gadgets; those over 65 made do with one. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says US$145 billion was expended in the sector in 2006 in the US alone, up 13% on the previous year. The CEA refers joyously to a “consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.” In the midst of a recession, 2009 saw $165 billion in sales, and households owned between fifteen and twenty-four gadgets on average. By 2010, US$233 billion was spent on electronic products, three-quarters of the population owned a computer, nearly half of all US adults owned an MP3 player, and 85% had a cell phone. By all measures, the amount of ICT/CE on the planet is staggering. As investigative science journalist, Elizabeth Grossman put it: “no industry pushes products into the global market on the scale that high-tech electronics does” (Maxwell and Miller 2). In 2007, “of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life management, 18% (414,000 tons) was collected for recycling and 82% (1.84 million tons) was disposed of, primarily in landfill” (Environmental Protection Agency 1). Twenty million computers fell obsolete across the US in 1998, and the rate was 130,000 a day by 2005. It has been estimated that the five hundred million personal computers discarded in the US between 1997 and 2007 contained 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, three million pounds of cadmium, 1.9 million pounds of chromium, and 632000 pounds of mercury (Environmental Protection Agency; Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 6). The European Union is expected to generate upwards of twelve million tons annually by 2020 (Commission of the European Communities 17). While refrigerators and dangerous refrigerants account for the bulk of EU e-waste, about 44% of the most toxic e-waste measured in 2005 came from medium-to-small ICT/CE: computer monitors, TVs, printers, ink cartridges, telecommunications equipment, toys, tools, and anything with a circuit board (Commission of the European Communities 31-34). Understanding the enormity of the environmental problems caused by making, using, and disposing of media technologies should arrest our enthusiasm for them. But intellectual correctives to the “love affair” with technology, or technophilia, have come and gone without establishing much of a foothold against the breathtaking flood of gadgets and the propaganda that proclaims their awe-inspiring capabilities.[i] There is a peculiar enchantment with the seeming magic of wireless communication, touch-screen phones and tablets, flat-screen high-definition televisions, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on—a totemic, quasi-sacred power that the historian of technology David Nye has named the technological sublime (Nye Technological Sublime 297).[ii] We demonstrate in our book why there is no place for the technological sublime in projects to green the media. But first we should explain why such symbolic power does not accrue to more mundane technologies; after all, for the time-strapped cook, a pressure cooker does truly magical things. Three important qualities endow ICT/CE with unique symbolic potency—virtuality, volume, and novelty. The technological sublime of media technology is reinforced by the “virtual nature of much of the industry’s content,” which “tends to obscure their responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of efficiency” (Boyce and Lewis 5). Planned obsolescence entered the lexicon as a new “ethics” for electrical engineering in the 1920s and ’30s, when marketers, eager to “habituate people to buying new products,” called for designs to become quickly obsolete “in efficiency, economy, style, or taste” (Grossman 7-8).[iii] This defines the short lifespan deliberately constructed for computer systems (drives, interfaces, operating systems, batteries, etc.) by making tiny improvements incompatible with existing hardware (Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 33-50; Boyce and Lewis). With planned obsolescence leading to “dizzying new heights” of product replacement (Rogers 202), there is an overstated sense of the novelty and preeminence of “new” media—a “cult of the present” is particularly dazzled by the spread of electronic gadgets through globalization (Mattelart and Constantinou 22). References to the symbolic power of media technology can be found in hymnals across the internet and the halls of academe: technologies change us, the media will solve social problems or create new ones, ICTs transform work, monopoly ownership no longer matters, journalism is dead, social networking enables social revolution, and the media deliver a cleaner, post-industrial, capitalism. Here is a typical example from the twilight zone of the technological sublime (actually, the OECD): A major feature of the knowledge-based economy is the impact that ICTs have had on industrial structure, with a rapid growth of services and a relative decline of manufacturing. Services are typically less energy intensive and less polluting, so among those countries with a high and increasing share of services, we often see a declining energy intensity of production … with the emergence of the Knowledge Economy ending the old linear relationship between output and energy use (i.e. partially de-coupling growth and energy use) (Houghton 1) This statement mixes half-truths and nonsense. In reality, old-time, toxic manufacturing has moved to the Global South, where it is ascendant; pollution levels are rising worldwide; and energy consumption is accelerating in residential and institutional sectors, due almost entirely to ICT/CE usage, despite advances in energy conservation technology (a neat instance of the age-old Jevons Paradox). In our book we show how these are all outcomes of growth in ICT/CE, the foundation of the so-called knowledge-based economy. ICT/CE are misleadingly presented as having little or no material ecological impact. In the realm of everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the physical work and material resources that go into them, while the technological sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. In this sense, the technological sublime relates to what Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of the consumer, who lusts after them as if they were “independent beings” (77). There is a direct but unseen relationship between technology’s symbolic power and the scale of its environmental impact, which the economist Juliet Schor refers to as a “materiality paradox” —the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or nonmaterial cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources (40-41). We wrote Greening the Media knowing that a study of the media’s effect on the environment must work especially hard to break the enchantment that inflames popular and elite passions for media technologies. We understand that the mere mention of the political-economic arrangements that make shiny gadgets possible, or the environmental consequences of their appearance and disappearance, is bad medicine. It’s an unwelcome buzz kill—not a cool way to converse about cool stuff. But we didn’t write the book expecting to win many allies among high-tech enthusiasts and ICT/CE industry leaders. We do not dispute the importance of information and communication media in our lives and modern social systems. We are media people by profession and personal choice, and deeply immersed in the study and use of emerging media technologies. But we think it’s time for a balanced assessment with less hype and more practical understanding of the relationship of media technologies to the biosphere they inhabit. Media consumers, designers, producers, activists, researchers, and policy makers must find new and effective ways to move ICT/CE production and consumption toward ecologically sound practices. In the course of this project, we found in casual conversation, lecture halls, classroom discussions, and correspondence, consistent and increasing concern with the environmental impact of media technology, especially the deleterious effects of e-waste toxins on workers, air, water, and soil. We have learned that the grip of the technological sublime is not ironclad. Its instability provides a point of departure for investigating and criticizing the relationship between the media and the environment. The media are, and have been for a long time, intimate environmental participants. Media technologies are yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news, but rarely in the way they should be. The prevailing myth is that the printing press, telegraph, phonograph, photograph, cinema, telephone, wireless radio, television, and internet changed the world without changing the Earth. In reality, each technology has emerged by despoiling ecosystems and exposing workers to harmful environments, a truth obscured by symbolic power and the power of moguls to set the terms by which such technologies are designed and deployed. Those who benefit from ideas of growth, progress, and convergence, who profit from high-tech innovation, monopoly, and state collusion—the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex and multinational commandants of labor—have for too long ripped off the Earth and workers. As the current celebration of media technology inevitably winds down, perhaps it will become easier to comprehend that digital wonders come at the expense of employees and ecosystems. This will return us to Max Weber’s insistence that we understand technology in a mundane way as a “mode of processing material goods” (27). Further to understanding that ordinariness, we can turn to the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, who noted three decades ago “the failures of technocratic dreams [:] that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Such fantasies derived from the very banality of these introductions—that every time they took place, one more “technical apparatus” was simply “being made at home with the rest of our world’ (548). Media studies can join in this repetitive banality. Or it can withdraw the welcome mat for media technologies that despoil the Earth and wreck the lives of those who make them. In our view, it’s time to green the media by greening media studies. References “A Cyber-House Divided.” Economist 4 Sep. 2010: 61-62. “Gartner Estimates ICT Industry Accounts for 2 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions.” Gartner press release. 6 April 2007. ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867›. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. Seattle: Basel Action Network, 25 Feb. 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington. New German Critique 34 (1985): 32-58. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 816-33. Boyce, Tammy and Justin Lewis, eds. Climate Change and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Commission of the European Communities. “Impact Assessment.” Commission Staff Working Paper accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (recast). COM (2008) 810 Final. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 3 Dec. 2008. Environmental Protection Agency. Management of Electronic Waste in the United States. Washington, DC: EPA, 2007 Environmental Protection Agency. Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics. Washington, DC: EPA, 2008 Grossman, Elizabeth. Tackling High-Tech Trash: The E-Waste Explosion & What We Can Do about It. New York: Demos, 2008. ‹http://www.demos.org/pubs/e-waste_FINAL.pdf› Herat, Sunil. “Review: Sustainable Management of Electronic Waste (e-Waste).” Clean 35.4 (2007): 305-10. Houghton, J. “ICT and the Environment in Developing Countries: Opportunities and Developments.” Paper prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009. International Telecommunication Union. ICTs for Environment: Guidelines for Developing Countries, with a Focus on Climate Change. Geneva: ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division Policies and Strategies Department ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, 2008. Malmodin, Jens, Åsa Moberg, Dag Lundén, Göran Finnveden, and Nina Lövehagen. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.5 (2010): 770-90. Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3rd ed. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Mattelart, Armand and Costas M. Constantinou. “Communications/Excommunications: An Interview with Armand Mattelart.” Trans. Amandine Bled, Jacques Guot, and Costas Constantinou. Review of International Studies 34.1 (2008): 21-42. Mattelart, Armand. “Cómo nació el mito de Internet.” Trans. Yanina Guthman. El mito internet. Ed. Victor Hugo de la Fuente. Santiago: Editorial aún creemos en los sueños, 2002. 25-32. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007. Orwell, George. “As I Please.” Tribune. 12 May 1944. Richtel, Matt. “Consumers Hold on to Products Longer.” New York Times: B1, 26 Feb. 2011. Robinson, Brett H. “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts.” Science of the Total Environment 408.2 (2009): 183-91. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Malden: Blackwell, 1995. Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1984. Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials. Los Angeles: Academy Imprints, 2007. Weber, Max. “Remarks on Technology and Culture.” Trans. Beatrix Zumsteg and Thomas M. Kemple. Ed. Thomas M. Kemple. Theory, Culture [i] The global recession that began in 2007 has been the main reason for some declines in Global North energy consumption, slower turnover in gadget upgrades, and longer periods of consumer maintenance of electronic goods (Richtel). [ii] The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to the Western triumphs in the post-Second World War period, when technological power supposedly supplanted the power of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye Technology Matters 28). Historian Mario Biagioli explains how the sublime permeates everyday life through technoscience: "If around 1950 the popular imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, today’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self" (818). [iii] This compulsory repetition is seemingly undertaken each time as a novelty, governed by what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin called, in his awkward but occasionally illuminating prose, "the ever-always-the-same" of "mass-production" cloaked in "a hitherto unheard-of significance" (48).