Social scripts, like A gives a compliment, B says ‘thank you’, pervade and shape natural language discourse and social interactions. Scripts usually promote cooperation between conversational participants, but not always. For example, if A pays B a ‘compliment’ like ‘nice legs’, A puts B in a double bind of either abiding by the compliment script by saying ‘thank you’ and being humiliated, or breaking the script and risking escalation. In this paper, I take a philosophical lens to the notion of a social script. I give a theoretical overview of what it would mean to disrupt a social script and explain why and when it is prudential to do so. Then I give several examples of disruptions of social scripts. This essay makes four key contributions to the philosophical literature on social scripts: (1) it introduces a new distinction between interpersonal and structural scripts; (2) it illuminates how interpersonal social scripts can be pernicious by creating a double bind; (3) it analyzes what it is to disrupt a social script; and (4) in doing so, it challenges the orthodoxy about the relationship between cooperation and disruption in political action.

The history of indigenous peoples from across the globe is marked by constant aggression, persecution and conflict. In these times, they are being obliged to confront the consequences of economic interests in their ancestral lands and natural resources, which often take the form of extractive projects conducted by corporate actors with the permission of governments. These abusive practices have led to a number of social, legal and political disputes, many of which have resulted in violence. All of this reveals that indigenous rights cases cannot be omitted in the study of the interrelation between business, human rights and security, since these three elements are present in many of them. In particular, the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights needs to be closely examined, as it is considered to be the regional system of human rights protection that has played the most prominent role in delimitating indigenous property rights.

Incidents at sea between warships and military aircraft often involve more than provocative actions – they may be aggressive and can sometimes result in death and destruction. In view of the low threshold of a resort to armed force by one State against another that would bring an international armed conflict into existence, it is rather difficult to determine whether incidents at sea remain below that threshold. Similar, albeit less difficult problems arise with regard to forceful measures taken by States against foreign merchant vessels. Here it is important to clearly distinguish between law enforcement at sea and the exercise of belligerent rights.

Limited academic attention has been afforded to young workers relative to their adult counterparts. This study addresses a phase of the employment relationship for young people that is very infrequently examined – during or around the time when the relationship ends. It examines the relative frequency of different forms of dismissal and the circumstances preceding the dismissals via a content analysis of 1259 cases of employee enquiries to a community advocacy organisation in Australia. Results indicate that dismissal was most commonly associated with bullying, harassment, and taking personal leave. Young men, compared to young women, were disproportionately likely to report allegations of misconduct as preceding dismissal, while females experienced higher rates of sexual harassment and discrimination. The research highlights the types and circumstances of dismissal across a range of employment contexts and reveals the complexities of youth employment relationships which may differ from those of the general workforce.

This paper delimits and analyzes the effects of the harassment perpetrated by ETA's terrorist network in the Basque Country. The aim was to provide a taxonomy of the consequences of psychological violence and to validate this taxonomy, by means of a content analysis of 37 testimonies of victims of terrorist violence. The taxonomy of consequences of psychological violence is made up by four components: 1. the effects on the context of the persons affected, 2. on their emotional state, 3. on cognition and 4. on behavior. Results show a predominance of contextual consequences and negative cognitions. Intra-observer and inter-observer reliability analysis showed high stability and reproducibility coefficients. This study shows that harassment and psychological violence have major consequences not only for victims but also for family members, threatened collectives and even the society as a whole.

This article covers, and expands on, a presentation of the same name given at the BIALL Conference held in Brighton in 2010. The Health and Safety Executive Management Standards approach for tackling the cause of work-related stress was launched in November 2004. Since the launch, the HSE has worked with many thousands of organisations within the United Kingdom to implement the Management Standards approach. This work has provided the HSE with the opportunity to learn how best to manage the causes of work-related stress in the workplace.

The aim of this study is to determine the factors that affect the wellbeing at work of a particular group within the Victorian public sector: those who are directly responsible for the delivery of justice to offenders, namely corrections officers. Corrections staff, as front-line workers in the corrections system, have an important role in the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders. The study is based on data from The People Matter Survey 2005 that sought to measure Victorian public sector employees' perceptions of how well the public sector values and employment principles were applied within their organisations. In this study we used data from 230 employees from Corrections Victoria who participated in the survey and used multilinear regression to analyse the factors affecting the level of workplace wellbeing. This study found that the most important factors affecting workplace wellbeing of the workers are Fair and Reasonable Treatment (FRT), Accountability (AC), and Senior Management (SM). Other findings included that the levels of workplace wellbeing of bullied or harassed staff was less than non-bullied or harassed staff.

While the majority of households in England have become homeowners at the turn of the 21st century, some older people still struggle on low incomes in the less privileged sector of private renting. This article first explores the intertwining of the history of housing policy and provision with the lifecourse histories of individuals, seeking to describe the reasons why some older people are in the private rented sector. It then presents research findings that revealed how some older private tenants experienced different types and degrees of harassment and abuse by their landlords, from verbal and financial abuse to disrepair of property and illegal evictions. Both strands are brought together in looking beyond individual responsibility or culpability to the structural and lifecourse causes of the problems. People's housing choices and destinations are often shaped by a combination of their lifecourse circumstances and external (both economic and institutional) barriers. Where abuse is concerned, a two-tier tenancy system has made ‘regulated tenants’ vulnerable to their landlords; the legal remedies are endemically inappropriate; the housing benefit system is a major source of tension between landlords and tenants; and the modernised private rented sector has allowed no place for those who want secure long-term homes. In summary, this article examines how the law, housing policy and the housing market combine to produce particular problems for older private tenants.