We describe the structure, operation, and experience of the Massachusetts General Hospital ethics committee, formally called the Edwin H. Cassem Optimum Care Committee, from January 2007 through December 2013. Founded in 1974 as one of the nation's first hospital ethics committees, this committee has primarily focused on the optimum use of life-sustaining treatments. We outline specific sociode...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the institutional behaviour of incarcerated sex offenders. AIM To study the relationships between juvenile sex offending, thought psychopathology and institutional misconduct. METHOD We applied negative binomial regression and Area Under Curve Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUC-ROC) analyses to self-report and records data from institutionalised delinque...

The paper explores a phenomenon often observed in transition economies, when newly established institutions are misused, i.e., applied or resorted to for reasons which have little in common with their intended or anticipated purpose. In such incidences institutions become sources of private gains and lose their value-creation role and capacity. We offer a typology of institutional misuse (illus...

The notion of ‘culture’ as an essential attribute of individuals and groups, owed to national or ethnic background, is critiqued in this paper as unhelpful to the project of understanding how diverse participants in virtual learning environments (VLEs) individually and jointly construct a culture of interaction. An alternative conceptualisation of culture in VLEs is proposed, which views online...

The conceptualization of the relation between individual and structure is central to social science. After making some key definitions, this paper overviews some recent developments in the social theory of structure and agency, and makes a novel addition, based on a concept of habit derived from pragmatism and Veblenian institutional economics. Processes of habituation provide a mechanism of „r...

The conceptualization of the relation between individual and structure is central to social science. After making some key definitions, this paper overviews some recent developments in the social theory of structure and agency, and makes a novel addition, based on a concept of habit derived from pragmatism and Veblenian institutional economics. Processes of habituation provide a mechanism of ‘r...

A key challenge of institutions is how to guide their governing into being desirable. This is important from the perspective of an agent governed by an institution to maintain specific rights, and of cross-institutional policies that require institutions’ regulations to be coordinated (e.g. national legislations with supranational policy). This research addresses this problem by developing a fr...