Originally presented at the National Injury Management and Prevention Conference: Transition and Change, on April 27, 2006, which was held at the Hyatt Regency, Adelaide, South Australia. Reprinted with the permission of the authors.

Work in the Australian construction industry is fraught with risk and the potential for serious harm. The industry is consistently placed within the three most hazardous industries to work along with other industries such as mining and transport (National Occupational Health and Safety Commission, 2003). In the 2001 to 2002 period, construction work killed 39 people and injured 13,250 more. Hence, more effort is required to reduce the injury rate and maximise the value of the rehabilitation/back-to-work process.

The present research examined the perceptions of Australian employees on dimensions of workplace stress. The sample included 664 male (n = 234) and female (n = 430) workers from the public (n = 559) and private (n = 105) sectors. Participants completed the Health and Safety Executive Indicator Tool as a measure of workplace stress. Results indicated that private sector employees rated their employers as being more effective in managing workplace stress, while employees in both sectors rated their employers as less effective in managing Job Content stressors than Job Context stressors. Compared with normative benchmarks, employees overall also reported risks of stress associated with Relationships and Role. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research were discussed.

Attribution theory was used to provide a conceptual analysis of how personal responsibility and blame are ascribed to fictional male and female offenders. Thirty drug and alcohol counsellors participated in the study; half read a description of a crime committed by a female and the other half read the same description of the crime but committed by a male. Counsellors rated the offence in terms of the attributional domains of internality, control, and stability and then listed potential treatment targets. Offender sex influenced differentially attribution of blame with counsellors tending to attribute less blame to an offender of the same gender. This effect was particularly pronounced in the case of female counsellors.

Burnout is an occupationally based syndrome that develops as a result of prolonged and cumulative stress. The experience of burnout has been documented in detail in a variety of human service professions. The purpose of this article is two-fold: to provide an alternative theoretical perspective on the development of burnout, which suggests it is not stressors per se that are responsible for burnout development; and, to use this alternative perspective as an explanation for burnout in the context of another human service profession — humanitarian work. Using the passion for activities notion conceptualised by Vallerand and colleagues (2003), it is explained how a lack of self-determination and autonomy leads to the development of an obsessive passion for an activity. Obsessive passion is linked to a variety of adverse cognitive and affective outcomes. This is then applied to the domain of humanitarian work, and it is suggested individuals with an obsessive passion are more likely to suffer adverse outcomes and consequently develop burnout when working in humanitarian crises. Some suggestions for future theoretical and empirical investigations regarding the relationship between obsessive passion and burnout are provided.