baibakova_i_gasko_o_fedorishin_m_red_getting_on_in_english_i

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dangerous personality change is found in the civil servant, in that it leads to legal negilism and premeditated violations of the law.

This deformity could be defined as a manifestation of the civil servant’s legal nihilism and acting unlawfully, distorted view of his/her performance as a public servant, simplification of professional stereotypes, along with weakening the reliability of the official’s morals and will. The main cause of such legal nihilism and unlawful conduct is the impunity and lack of public control over the bureaucrat’s performance.

An important sign of professional deformity is psychological instability. This is manifested in one’s inability to resist negative influences in the line of duty. These negative influences include unlawful pressure from law enforcement authorities, ranking officials (one’s immediate superior, business people, etc.) to make illegal decisions, and complicated external working conditions.

The third sign is the trend to distort requirements in terms of unbiased reflection of circumstances existing within the state: ignoring realities, weakened self-criticism, as well as an inability to view one’s work and external circumstances critically. Here it is not so much one’s inaptitude as the reluctance or loss of the ability to assess circumstances in an unbiased manner. Thus professional deformity consists not in the initial absence of qualities or lack of professional training but in their transformation or atrophy.

All this makes it possible for the public servant to retain confidence in the correctness of his actions and regard errors as an inevitable possibility, caused by external factors. Among typical techniques of self-justification are constant references to inadequate legislation and the pure formality of its requirements; objective circumstances and hardships, such as overloaded schedule, constant shortage of time; unlawful decisions motivated by national interests, instructions from above, the complexity of one’s duties, etc. total self-justification under any circumstances is the main symptom of civil servants’ professional deformity.

All these changes are determined primarily by the imperfect organization and bad conditions of professional activity. Such changes emerge and manifest themselves at various levels - processes, status, and personal qualities, conscious and subconscious. Often, the most important changes come down to the hypertrophy of vital professional traits. Thus, vigilance turns into suspiciousness, confidence into self-confidence, contentment into indifference, diligence into pedantry, and so on. Secondly, it means the emergence and development of negative traits: cruelty, vindictiveness, rudeness, permissiveness, and cynicism. A certain mental state like disillusionment, boredom, or irritability emerges and becomes dominant. Thirdly, it is the suppression and subsequent atrophy of certain traits that become objectively assessed as being of minor importance, or even unnecessary. There is a loss of confidence in citizens’ law-abiding conduct and in the effectiveness of struggle against lawbreaking, especially corruption.

Proceeding from all this, the apparent conclusion is that bribe-taking is only one of the signs of professional deformity in civil servants. Thus fighting corruption requires a more skillful and systematic approach, whereby its causes and conditions facilitating abuse of office could be eliminated, primarily within the social category of civil servants.

(The Day, December7y1999)

Text 8. SPYING IN BUSINESS FIRMS: A COMPETITIVE NECESSITY?

Is it ethical to spy on competitors? An increasing number o f American and foreign firms have corporate intelligence systems. Some people believe that unless a firm maintains a top-level corporate intelligence system, it can forget about being technologically competitive.

AT&T launched an on-line computer service referred to as AAA (Access to AT&T Analysts). It’s designed to help employees learnfrom the thousands of other employees with specialized insight about Competitors. Employees are invited to fill out questionnaires identifying their areas ofexpertise. Users can log in key words and receive a list of company experts on various technologies, along with theirjob titles and telephone numbers.

Employees also used AAA to share information about competitors. What are competitors doing? How successful is a new experimental product that a competitor is working on? Who’s on the competitor’s experimental development team?

American, German, and Japanese companies and others make it a policy for employees to visit trade shows to collect competitors’ literature. In sophisticated companies the literature, gossip, and anything else collected at the trade show are analyzed by intelligence experts. These experts also have employees to attend seminars, take visitation tours, and collect professional papers.

Is all of this intelligence activity ethical? Even if you believe it’s not, what are you going to do about intelligence or information gathering? If you ignore information, your firm may be at such a competitive disadvantage that it eventually goes out of business. Lobbying for new laws to control abuses in the intelligence area may not bear fruit for years. It takes years for laws to become operational.

Intelligence gathering poses many questions. It’s an ethical dilemma for firms that rely on technological and innovative progress to survive. Firms that don’t gather intelligence can be quickly knocked out of business.

(Adaptedfrom “The New Racefor Intelligence” by Richard S. Teitelbaum. Fortune, November 2. 1992. pp. 104-7)

Task 6.35. Read the following texts and express your opinion bn ethical or non-ethical issues contained in the newspaper features:

Minister: I’m giving up my £ 70k-a-year car

By Jonathan Oliver (DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR)

THE Minister for Patriotism is off to a model.start - he's given, up his official limo to save the taxpayer £50,000 a year.

Instead of the chauffeur-driven car that normally comes with a ministerial job, Michael Wills, the man in charge of Gordon Brown's Britishness' agenda; uses public transport and taxis - setting an example that his colleagues will come under pressure to follow.

The annual bill for ministerial cars and their drivers is around £7 million, or £70,000 per Minister.

_ Ministers justify the perk in a variety of ways. Some cite security, while others say they need a car to transport their red boxes containing sensitive documents.

However, Mr Wills's sacrifice proves they can do without.

He uses the Tube, buses and taxis to get around London. And he takes the train to visit his Swindon North constituency.

Officials say the annual cost of his work-related journeys is around £20,000 - a net saving of £50,000. A friend of Mr Wills said: 'Michael was offered the car, but he saw it as a waste of money for the taxpayer and he reckons he can get around just as easily by other means.

Junior Ministers usually use Toyota Priuses, Ford Mondeos or Rover 75s. The perk comes on top of a generous £100,000 salary.

Mr Wills, 55, a former diplomat, was made deputy to Jack Straw in the Justice Department earlier this year.

He recently announced plans to consult the nation on a statement of ’British values'.

(From the mail on Sunday September 30, 2007p. 10)

Counting the Costner

Star admits: I’ve blown £20m on inventions that I thought would save the world

HOLLYWOOD actor Kevin Costner has squandered more than £20 million of his fortune on doomed investments to save the planet, he admits today.

The Oscar-winning Dances With Wolves star plunged the cash into 'green technology', forming two companies to develop his passion.

His first venture championed a revolutionary method to clean up major oil spills and the second tried to develop a successful non-chemical battery. But both projects failed and he lost the entire investment. He says in an interview in today's Live magazine: 'I've invested enormous amounts in technologies I thought would help the world.

’There’s nothing to show for the millions I’ve invested. My God, most people would want to die if they lost $1,000 or $100,000. I’ve lost $40 million plus.

’But I knew that if I was right it would change things in an incredibly positive way. Do I regret that? Yes. Has it changed my life one bit? No, because I haven't been moved by money. Costner, 52 - whose 1994 divorce from first wife Cindy Silva cost him £40 million - was first moved to action by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, when the tanker struck a reef and lost 11 million gallons of oil off Alaska.

Horrified by the primitive methods used to battle spillages, he set up Costner Industries Nevada Incorporated with his brother Dan. They discovered a technology used in the nuclear industry to separate chemicals by centrifugal force and set about adapting it. But the project failed.

Next, he created a subsidiary to launch a battery with a flywheel that could store four times the energy of an ordinary one. The firm even had a contract to make them for Nasa, but the deal lapsed.

Costner's movies, which also include box-office smashes The Bodyguard and Field Of Dreams, have grossed more than £1 billion.

But he has suffered bad luck in other ventures as well as his green projects. How­ ever the star remains philosophical. 'I’m not the shrewdest businessman, he admits. ’I’m more of a dreamer.'

• Read ourfull interview at www.mailonsundav.co. uk/kevin

fFrom the mail on Sunday September 30, 2007 p. 41)

Is this really what it’s like to be elderly in Brown’s Britain?

By Polly Dunbar

THE Government spin machine was accused of peddling a false view of old age last night after it was revealed it had paid a PR company to portray all pensioners as happy and carefree.

Organisations involved in the first UK Older People's Day tomorrow have been instructed only to use promotional images in which elderly people look affluent and active.

Out go pictures reflecting the reality of life for the majority of older people, including an older man and woman slumped in armchairs, presumably in a care home, and an elderly woman appearing distressed.

In come photos such as a youthful-looking couple laughing as they run across a beach, a woman about to work out in a gym, another woman happily gardening, a couple cuddling on holiday and a man enjoying a game of tennis.

The approved images are marked with a large tick, while those to be avoided are marked with a cross.

The instructions form part of a guideline pack sent to organisations involved in the Department of Work and Pensions’ Generation Xperience UK Older People's Day, which include the charities for the elderly Help the Aged, Age Concern and The Beth

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Johnson Foundation, as well as retail giants John Lewis and B&Q. The Government booklet, produced by PR company The Red Consultancy, urges: 'Any imagery used should be consistent with the upbeat, celebratory nature of the campaign. Avoid using images that reinforce incorrect stereotypes about older people's lifestyles.1

It continues: 'Contrary to common misconceptions, the UK’s over-50s now have greater opportunities to lead healthy, active and fulfilling lives than ever before, largely thanks to improvements in services and pension reforms.’

But critics said the chosen images were a far cry from reality for most older people at a time when more than a fifth live in poverty.

Nigel Waterson, Tory spokesman for pensions and older people, said: This just shows spin is alive and well under Gordon Brown.

’Lots of older people have no reason to look or be happy - two million are living in poverty, 125,000 have lost their pensions due to the Government and many are facing penury in old age.’

Some of the organisations backing the day have also criticised the images. Alan Hatton-Yeo, director of the Beth Johnson Foundation, said: ’I would not have chosen these pictures because they are clumsy and we are not using them.

'The Red Consultancy clearly didn't think carefully enough about the implication of the pictures. All the ones they have chosen seem to show middle-class people enjoying activities a lot of elderly people cannot participate in.'

Paul Bates from Help the Aged added: 'There’s nothing wrong with showing positive images of old people but at the same time, it must be recognised that many old people are not fortunate enough to have the finances or physical abilities to do active, fun things and take holidays.'

A spokeswoman for the Department of Work and Pensions said: 'GenerationXperience UK Older People's Day is about celebrating the huge contribution that older people make to society.

'Part of that is about tackling negative and outdated stereotypes of older people, the majority of whom see age as an opportunity - not a barrier.’

{From the mail on Sunday September 30, 2007 p. 42-43)

Rudeness rules... even the credit card man says I’ve got Alzheimer’s

THE words ’zero tolerance' were uttered at last week's Labour Party conference, a phrase we haven't heard since the Government’s first term in office.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was referring to a tougher stance on crime, but I think it's high time we applied that same edict to the soaring levels of rudeness which have infected this country.

Is it me, or has it become almost impossible to go about your daily business without being sworn at, or tooted at because you were one millisecond late in respond­

ing to an amber light on a Sunday? Unless you are an on-call heart surgeon, really, what is the problem?

Another idea, also mooted last week, was that foreigners learn how to form an orderly British queue before they can feel fully integrated into our society.

Have the people who come up with these daft schemes ever tried to board one of London's No 38 bendy buses on Piccadilly?

Never mind the scrum; that's the easy part.

Persuading the driver, hellbent on mowing you down, to please wait while you purchase a ticket at the kerbside machine always seems to elicit a stream of invectives before the doors are slammed in your face.

Taxis aren’t much better. I know I will never be picked up by a black cab again if I write this, but aren't all the notices inside, telling you off, a bit much, given how high the fares are?

1 always make the mistake of thinking the driver is talking to me when I hear him chirruping away and I politely try to join in, only to be told crossly he is 'on the phone'. Ah. Sorry.

In my local Sainsbury's, which I visit every morning to buy newspapers, I see the same trio of young women sitting chatting behind their tills.

Although I am sure they must vaguely be able to recognise me by now, they can never be bothered to interrupt their conversation to say ’hello', or mumble 'thank you' at the end of the transaction.

The only mantra they unfailingly recite, not once looking me in the eye, is the annoying: 'Do you have a Nectar card?'

I feel like screaming: ’No! I don’t! I didn't have one yesterday, and I haven't rushed out and applied for the wretched thing, whatever it is, in the brief passage of time since!'

Perhaps I am feeling particularly fragile having spent the past three weeks at fashion shows in New York, London and Milan,

But at least that exercise, where I have been made to 'step away from the red carpet’ by innumerable stony-faced morons in dark suits with walkie-talkies (and that was just the glossy magazine editors), has allowed me to conduct my own survey of which country really is the rudest in the world.

And I am afraid to say it is Britain.

Politeness is the glue that holds our society together, but it seems we have all retreated, clam-like, into our own tiny worlds, solicitous only of those we are frightened of. Anyone else is treated with contempt.

Why do people you live next door to fail to smile, or say hello? I'm sure new technology is a factor. How many times have you sat next to someone in silence while they fiddled with the Blackberry in their lap, or sent texts like a demented teenager?

How can anyone be that busy, unless they are the Prime Minister? And whatever happened to the customer being king?

After keying about a million digits into a phone before you can speak to someone who has a pulse, why do they always respond as if they are a robot?

I recently phoned my credit-card company to complain about two suspicious items on my bill, and the man on the other end told me I could be suffering from 'earlyonset Alzheimer's'.

Smells Kitchen New York neighbours say the,stench from Ramsay’s restaurant is unbearable

From Sharon Churcher

IN NEW YORK

GORDON RAMSAY is causing a stink in New York, where neighbours claim unbearable smells are wafting from his restaurant.

Residents in an elegant apartment block have complained to health inspectors about the stench of duck and bacon from a giant extractor fan.

They are also furious about noise from the fan and an air-conditioning unit in the kitchen.

The racket it makes has been measured at 57 decibels, they say -above the limit for local events such as rock concerts. They claim the row is ruining their sleep and hitting home values.

Shirley Lemmon, who is the head of the residents’ association, said: 'This is ruining lives. The fan is this giant contraption that looks like a praying mantis, almost two storeys tall, and the smells from it at times are horrifying.

’First thing in the morning on the weekend the smell of bacon permeates the air and we can’t open our windows.

’It also is particularly intolerable when they are preparing duck at 3am. His airconditioning unit sounds like you are riding in the back of a plane, and it can be on 24/7.

’We had one person who moved out and sold his apartment. Another who moved in before they turned the equipment on has been unhappy because this is hurting his property value. The city codes say the sound cannot be above 45 decibels. Gordon Ramsay's has been recorded at 57.’

Miss Lemmon said residents want the restaurant, which is set in the London NYC Hotel, to be given a formal code-violation notice. Ramsay is already under siege from unimpressed critics. The New York Times' Frank Bruni awarded his establishment two stars out of four, describing the food as 'predictable'.

A spokesman for Ramsay said the chef was unaware residents had any complaints.

(Front the mail on Sunday September 30, 2007 p. 50)

Ramsay the Scrooge gives staff P45s for Christmas

WITH A FLOURISHING television career, a much-talked-about restaurant launch in New York and eight Michelin stars to his name, Gordon Ramsay has every reason to celebrate this Christmas. Mandrake leams that the fiery Glaswegian chef has, however, left staff at one of his most celebrated London dining rooms worrying how they will cover their festive bills, after he informed them that they will all be made redundant in the New Year.

more than 50 of the chefs employees have been told that they will receive only minimal payoffs, apparently amounting in one case to £8,000 for a waiter who has worked at the restaurant for almost 30 years.

"There is a feeling that Ramsay has treated his staff appallingly. Although he is always boasting about how many restaurants he runs, he hasn't offered them jobs elsewhere and has told them that they will get only the statutory minimum. In most cases, that’s just a few weeks’ wages."

A spokesman for Ramsay, who has an estimated personal fortune of £60 million, says he "regretfully” decided to make the staff redundant. Derek Quinlan, the Connaught's Irish owner, had informed him that the hotel would be closing its doors in March for six months, for refurbishment. "It would be uneconomical for us to keep staff on," claims the spokesman.

Ramsay took over the restaurant, with many of its existing staff, in 2002. He owns eight more dining rooms in London and has great plans fpv expansion overseas. His spokesman said, however: "Our other restaurants are fully staffed."

This is not the first time that the 40-year-old chef has provoked anger with his treatment of experienced employees. In 2003, there was an outcry when I disclosed that Angelo Maresca was retiring after 25 years as the much-loved maitre d' of the Savoy Grill following Ramsay's takeover. He was promptly snapped up by Sir Rocco Forte at Brown’s hotel in Mayfair.

Anthony Lee, the general manager of the Connaught, clearly takes a different approach. "All the staff who work at the hotel [rather than Ramsay's restaurant] will be retained on full pay for the six months that we are closed," he tells me. "I am the custodian of the soul of the Connaught and, for me, our staff are the be-all and end-all."

(From the Sunday Telegraph December 24, 2006 p. 30)

And for Bono, a knighthood in recognition of service to Africa

OLGA CRAIG

BONO, the larger-than-life frontman of the Irish band U2 and Third World campaigner, has been awarded an honorary knighthood for services to the music industry and humanitarian work. It is the third time his work has been recognised in the past three years. In 2003, he was presented with the Legion d’Honneur by President Jacques Chirac on behalf of the French government and a year ago he was voted Time Person of the Year in recognition of his work promoting justice and equality.

The rock star, who follows in the steps of fellow Dubliner Bob Geldof in receiving the award, will not be entitled to use the title "sir" because he is not a British national. Geldof received his award in 1986 after raising awareness as well as millions of pounds for struggling third world countries through the Live Aid event Along with

Geldof, Bono, 46, was instrumental in ensuring the recent Live 8 concerts were a massive success.

Yesterday in a letter to Bono, Mr Blair said the musician had played an invaluable role in the run up to last year’s G8 summit, which focused on helping poor nations in Africa.

He said: ’’I know from talking to you how much these causes matter to you. I know as well how knowledgeable you are about the problems we face and how determined you are to do all you can to help overcome them. You have tirelessly used

"So thank you and I look forward to continuing to work together to maintain momentum on Africa, and ensure leaders around the world meet the promises they have

Last night a spokesman for the singer said he was extremely flattered to receive the award. Previous non-British recipients of the honour, which is granted by the Queen on advice of the Government include Bill Gates, Placido Domingo, Rudolph Giuliani and Steven Spielberg.

(From the Sunday Telegraph December 24, 2006 p. 3)