Deadly Cultures

The threat of biological weapons has never attracted as much public attention as in the past five years. Yet there has been little historical analysis of such weapons over the past half-century. Deadly Cultures sets out to fill this gap by analyzing the historical developments since 1945 and addressing three central issues: why states have continued or begun programs for acquiring biological weapons, why states have terminated biological weapons programs, and how states have demonstrated that they have truly terminated their biological weapons programs.

This book is about the primary symptoms present in a dysfunctional culture that could have devastating outcomes for any organization. The book outlines each of the seven sins in each chapter. Each of the first seven chapters (Chapters 1–7) starts with a famous quote related to each of the sins and then immediately recounts stories ripped from the headlines describing well-known corporate failures but with a personal touch from former employees who experienced those stories from inside the company. (The sources for these stories are all cited in their Bibliographies.) The seven sins of organizational culture are linked with seven different corporate scandals that serve as a "lesson learned" as well as seven stories of organizations that have been successful with each respective organizational attribute as follows: Flawed Mission and Misaligned Values uses WorldCom as the lesson learned and Patagonia as the success case. Flawed Incentives uses Wells Fargo as the lesson learned and Bridgeport Financial as the success case. Lack of Accountability uses HSBC as the lesson learned and McDonald’s as the success case. Ineffective Talent Management uses Enron as the lesson learned and Southwest Airlines as the success case. Lack of Transparency uses Theranos as the lesson learned and Zappos as the success case. Ineffective Risk Management uses the 2008 mortgage industry collapse as the lesson learned and Michael Burry as the success case. Ineffective Leadership summarizes all of the foregoing sins as failures of Leadership. In each chapter and for each organizational sin, the author offers seven attributes of a healthy culture to counter the cultural dysfunction. The seven healthy attributes for each of the seven sins are all original content. In Chapter 8, the author offers an approach for assessing an organization’s culture by providing seven ways to measure the different drivers of organizational culture. The ideas for how to measure corporate culture is original content, with some references to existing frameworks (all cited in the Bibliography.) Finally, in Chapter 9, the author offers a step-by-step outline for transforming the culture. The chapter starts with a story about how Korean Air suffered multiple crashes due to their corporate culture but were able to successfully transform their culture. (The source for the Korean Air story is cited in the Bibliography.) There are seven appendices, most of which are by the author except for the maturity of risk management, which references an OECD (government entity) risk management maturity framework.

The life and chemical sciences are in the midst of a period of rapid and revolutionary transformation that will undoubtedly bring societal benefits but also have potentially malign applications, notably in the development of chemical weapons. Such concerns are exacerbated by the unstable international security environment and the changing nature of armed conflict, which could fuel a desire by certain States to retain and use existing chemical weapons, as well as increase State interest in creating new weapons; whilst a broader range of actors may seek to employ diverse toxic chemicals as improvised weapons. Stark indications of the multi-faceted dangers we face can be seen in the chemical weapons attacks against civilians and combatants in Iraq and Syria, and also in more targeted chemical assassination operations in Malaysia and the UK. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, and drawing upon an international group of experts, this book analyses current and likely near-future advances in relevant science and technology, assessing the risks of their misuse. The book examines the current capabilities, limitations and failures of the existing international arms control and disarmament architecture – notably the Chemical Weapons Convention – in preventing the development and use of chemical weapons. Through the employment of a novel Holistic Arms Control methodology, the authors also look beyond the bounds of such treaties, to explore the full range of international law, international agreements and regulatory mechanisms potentially applicable to weapons employing toxic chemical agents, in order to develop recommendations for more effective routes to combat their proliferation and misuse. A particular emphasis is given to the roles that chemical and life scientists, health professionals and wider informed activist civil society can play in protecting the prohibition against poison and chemical weapons; and in working with States to build effective and responsive measures to ensure that the rapid scientific and technological advances are safeguarded from hostile use and are instead employed for the benefit of us all.

A trenchant analysis of the dark side of regulatory life-making today In their seemingly relentless pursuit of life, do contemporary U.S. “biocultures”—where biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, hospital, and lab to everyday cultural practices—also engage in a deadly endeavor? Challenging us to question their implications, Deadly Biocultures shows that efforts to “make live” are accompanied by the twin operation of “let die”: they validate and enhance lives seen as economically viable, self-sustaining, productive, and oriented toward the future and optimism while reinforcing inequitable distributions of life based on race, class, gender, and dis/ability. Affirming life can obscure death, create deadly conditions, and even kill. Deadly Biocultures examines the affirmation to hope, target, thrive, secure, and green in the respective biocultures of cancer, race-based health, fatness, aging, and the afterlife. Its chapters focus on specific practices, technologies, or techniques that ostensibly affirm life and suggest life’s inextricable links to capital but that also engender a politics of death and erasure. The authors ultimately ask: what alternative social forms and individual practices might be mapped onto or intersect with biomedicine for more equitable biofutures?

This book considers how scientists, theologians, priests, and poets approached the relationship of the human body and ethics in the later Middle Ages. Is medicine merely a metaphor for sin? Or can certain kinds of bodies physiologically dispose people to be angry, sad, or greedy? If so, then is it their fault? Virginia Langum offers an account of the medical imagery used to describe feelings and actions in religious and literary contexts, referencing a variety of behavioral discussions within medical contexts. The study draws upon medical and theological writing for its philosophical basis, and upon more popular works of religion, as well as poetry, to show how these themes were articulated, explored, and questioned more widely in medieval culture.

Scholars, teachers, and practitioners of organizational, professional, and technical communication and rhetoric are target audiences for a new book that reaches across those disciplines to explore the dynamics of the Holocaust. More than a history, the book uses the extreme case of the Final Solution to illumine the communicative constitution of organizations and to break new ground on destructive organizational communication and ethics. Deadly Documents: Technical Communication, Organizational Discourse, and the Holocaust—Lessons from the Rhetorical Work of Everyday Texts starts with a microcosmic look at a single Nazi bureau. Through close rhetorical, visual, and discursive analyses of organizational and technical documents produced by the SS Security Police Technical Matters Group—the bureau that managed the Nazi mobile gas van program—author Mark Ward shows how everyday texts functioned as “boundary objects” on which competing organizational interests could project their own interpretations and temporarily negotiate consensus for their parts in the Final Solution. The initial chapters of Deadly Documents provide a historical ethnography of the SS technical bureau by closely describing the institutional and organizational cultures in which it operated and relating organizational stories told in postwar testimony by the desk-murderers themselves. Then, through examination of the primary material of their documents, Ward demonstrates how this Social Darwinist world of competing Nazi bureaucrats deployed rhetorical and linguistic resources to construct a social reality that normalized genocide. Ward goes beyond the usual Weberian bureaucratic paradigm and applies to the problem of the Holocaust both the interpretive view that sees organizations as socially constructed through communication and the postmodern view that denies the notion of a preexisting social object called an “organization” and instead situates it within larger discourses. The concluding chapters trace how contemporary scholars of professional communication have wrestled with the Nazi case and developed a consensus explanation that the desk-murderers were amoral technocrats. Though the explanation is dismissed by most historians, it nevertheless offers, Ward argues, a comforting distance between “us” and “them.” Yet, as Ward writes, “First, we will learn more about the dynamic role of everyday texts in organizational processes. Second, as we see these processes—perhaps inherent to all organized communities, including our own—at work even in the extreme case of the SS Technical Matters Group, the comforting distance that we now maintain between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is necessarily diminished. And third, our newfound discomfort may open productive spaces to revisit conventional wisdoms about the ethics of technical and organizational communication.”

Edited by a clinical psychologist who has been on the ground helping to develop psychosocial support for Ebola survivors in one of the hardest-hit regions of West Africa, this book explains the devastating emotional aspects of the epidemic and its impact on survivors and the population in West Africa, families in the diaspora, and people in the United States and other countries. It also describes lessons learned from past epidemics like HIV/AIDS and SARS, and valuable approaches to healing from future epidemics. While the devastating Ebola epidemic has been contained, the effects of this outbreak—referred to by the World Health Organization as "the most severe acute public health emergency seen in modern times"—have wreaked a tremendous emotional toll on the populations of West Africa as well as on families and survivors worldwide. This groundbreaking book covers the psychosocial needs, programs, and policies related to the Ebola epidemic and examines broader lessons of the outbreak, such as changes in the ways in which healing from future epidemics can be handled. Edited by Judy Kuriansky, PhD, a noted clinical psychologist and United Nations NGO representative with extensive experience helping after disasters worldwide, and direct experience gained from being "on the ground" in West Africa in the midst of the epidemic, this book identifies and explains universal psychological factors at play in all such crises. It debunks myths regarding Ebola and describes the resulting psychological and social harm caused by the epidemic. The chapters cover overarching emotional issues and problems as well as the long-term impact on at-risk groups, such as children, women, and health workers; the impact of emotional issues on social and economic life; responses of government officials, media, and various aid organizations; and solutions being offered by groups worldwide, including service and humanitarian organizations, politicians, policymakers, and public health education groups.

A fresh consideration of the enduring tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, showing its continuing post-medieval influence.