Creating Clarity and Crew Courage: Preventive and Promotive Measures for a Maritime Industry Without Bullying and Harassment.

Seafaring shares many characteristics with contemporary working life ashore. However, a major difference is that seafarers can spend up to 12 months aboard a ship that constitutes a work, living and recreational environment. Onboard work includes many stressors that can potentially contribute to workplace bullying and harassment, which in turn can affect safety critical operations. The aim of this study was to identify underlying causes in the organizational and social work environment that can cause workplace bullying and harassment at sea, and to suggest appropriate preventive and promotive strategies and measures. Data were collected mainly through World Café workshops with 56 participants from the Swedish maritime industry. Seafarer occupational health, safety, and wellbeing is largely determined by interdependent factors at micro, meso, and macro levels, where different stakeholders play various roles. Strategies and measures starting at the individual seafarer, and gradually expanding outwards toward the maritime industry are suggested. It is important that a victim of bullying or harassment receives adequate support. Creating crew courage enables employees to both recognize troubling situations and know how to act and respond to a situation. To bridge the gap between policy and practice, the legislative framework needs translating into practical procedures to make sense to the middle manager at the sharp end, with limited knowledge, time, resources, and decision latitude. Future research should evaluate the effectiveness of work environment interventions - what works, for whom, and under which circumstances.

Ethical consumption: why should we understand it as a social practice within a multilevel framework?

This article discusses the importance of a multilevel and intertwined understanding of ethical consumption given its conjunction with other social practices. Although the literature on ethical consumption is vast, the role of sociotechnical regimes including technological and cultural elements, infrastructure, market and regulation has been mainly overlooked in this literature. This may be so because ethical consumption practices that refer to other-oriented consumption practices are mainly considered in the view of the motivations and preferences of individual consumers. Due to the insufficiency of individualistic approaches in explaining stimulators and inhibitors of ethical consumption, there might be "various constraints" and "competing demands" in society which limit the formation of "ethical consumption". Therefore, to avoid an oversimplified view of ethical consumption, this paper contributes with a theoretical discussion on combining social practice theory (SPT) with a multi-level perspective (MLP). Although the SPT is a very well-structured framework in consumption studies, the necessity of a combined approach concerns the often-insufficient attention paid to structural prerequisites of various consumption forms in social practice theories. By understanding ethical consumption practices according to a multi-level framework, the paper emphasizes the importance of structural factors at macro- and mesolevels. It also contributes attention to how ethical consumption grows due to dialectical processes between levels, showing that niche practices can simultaneously challenge and rely on existing regimes.

The Intermetallic Semiconductor ht-IrGa3: a Material in the in-Transformation State.

The compound IrGa3 was synthesized by direct reaction of the elements. It is formed as a high-temperature phase in the Ir-Ga system. Single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis confirms the tetragonal symmetry (space group P42 /mnm, No. 136) with a = 6.4623(1) Å and c = 6.5688(2) Å and reveals strong disorder in the crystal structure, reflected in the huge values and anisotropy of the atomic displacement parameters. A model for the real crystal structure of ht-IrGa3 is derived by the split-position approach from the single-crystal X-ray diffraction data and confirmed by an atomic-resolution transmission electron microscopy study. Temperature-dependent electrical resistivity measurements evidence semiconductor behavior with a band gap of 30 meV. A thermoelectric characterization was performed for ht-IrGa3 and for the solid solution IrGa3-x Zn x .

Social Relations and Everyday Consumption Rituals: Barriers or Prerequisites for Sustainability Transformation?

Macro-institutional structures and consumerist culture force and urge people to reproduce unsustainable levels of consumption. A crucial role for sociology, the article argues, is to address theoretically and empirically the intersection between social relations and (over)consumption. The purpose with this article is to address how social relations are involved in both reproducing and challenging consumer culture. This is done by emphasizing the intersection of consumer culture and socially integrating everyday rituals and drawing on literature on both voluntary and involuntary (the pandemic) disruption of consumer practices. The Covid-19 pandemic brings unexpected opportunities to highlight this intersection, as the pandemic offers a window of opportunity for lifestyle change. The review shows there are important lessons about both challenges and opportunities, gained from both voluntary and involuntary disruption of consumer practices.

Two-dimensional superdegeneracy and structure-magnetism correlations in strong ferromagnet, Mn2Ga5.

The ferromagnetic intermetallic compound Mn2Ga5 has been synthesized and characterized by single-crystal X-ray diffraction study and by magnetic property measurements. The compound, with the Mn2Hg5-type structure, exhibits a saturated magnetic moment of 2.71 muB per formula unit with T(C) approximately = 450 K. The electronic structure of the compound was analyzed by employing FPLO, LMTO, and the extended Hückel tight-binding calculations. The nonmagnetic electronic structure of Mn2Ga5 reveals remarkably flat degenerate (superdegenerate) bands in the vicinity of the Fermi level but only in the a*b*-plane of the Brillouin zone. The resulting high density of the states at the Fermi level, DOS(E(F)), is consistent with the Stoner condition for the observed itinerant electron ferromagnetism. Detailed orbital analysis shows an intriguing structure-magnetism correlation, as the superdegeneracy is found to be a consequence of the unique atomic arrangement and bond angles in the structure.

Structure of delta1-CoZn(7.8), an example of a phason pinning-unpinning transformation?

The novel structure of the delta1 phase in the cobalt-zinc system was determined by single-crystal X-ray diffraction. The structure features fused double icosahedra linked by edge- and face-sharing. The delta1-CoZn(7.8) structure is incommensurately modulated along the columnar b direction. The extent of the linear pentagonal antiprismatic intergrowth is limited to a maximum of two overlapping icosahedra because of geometric demands and radii relations. Even this limited fusion of icosahedra leads to strain that is believed to be the origin of the structural modulation. The compound was synthesized using a centrifugation-aided filtration method which yielded single crystals grown on cobalt pieces in a zinc-rich melt. The (3 + 1)-dimensional superspace group is F2/m(0beta0)s0 and the modulation wavevector was determined to q = 0.234b*. The partial amorphization of the sample when subjected to mechanical grinding is an indication of a metastable structure. The incommensurability of the structure may be seen as an ordered pinning of phasons.