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This chapter examines why chronic diseases have risen so markedly over the past several decades. It begins by assessing the contribution of individual risk factors to the disease burden. It then evaluates the social and environmental context of these risks using a theoretical framework that spans individual and population levels. It provides a series of case studies to illustrate the importance of major societal changes to population risks of chronic diseases, including political choices in Eastern Europe's transition from communism, the sudden wealth of the Western Pacific islands, and the periods of prolonged economic hardship experienced in Finland, Japan's ‘double-dip’ recession, and Cuba's ‘Special Period’. The chapter concludes by revisiting the leading population theories of health, health transition, risk factors, and population ageing, in the context of the societal determinants of health.

This chapter traces the emergence of a new generation of scholars in Egypt. In the early years of its adoption, printing by and large reproduced the existing textual canon. But major societal changes were afoot, and soon the technology of print began to be used to publish very different kinds of works, works that had been forgotten and even almost lost. In Egypt, the agents of this wave of nontraditional book printing and editing represented a new class of intellectuals: elite bibliophiles and scholars who had at most one foot in the old scholarly tradition and the other in the structures and discourses of the rapidly modernizing Egyptian state. This new class of scribal intellectuals inaugurated a culture that valorized high-level Arabic, rare manuscripts, and philological accuracy.

If the 19th Century was about technological advances, the 20th Century was one during which a societal upheaval started whose effects remain unforeseeable. Most of humanity’s important inventions were conceived in the 19th Century, but this was a reactionary time in terms of societal change, seeing the reintroduction of a French monarchy, Victorianism in Britain, and Biedermeier in Germany. Eventually, society followed the 20th Century’s technological advances, with much resulting brutality. Cataclysmic changes during the past century still influence society today and are accelerated by new communication forms. Nevertheless, most of our institutions were established by the 19th Century, in which society was still a Ständegesellschaft (estate-based), having emerged from feudalism. These changes have especially powerful effects on museology, collections, and archives – especially those of private corporations. This article aims to give insight into the route archives can take to meet tomorrow’s demands. It also explains why archives are of growing importance, especially for young people.

This chapter focuses on the essential aspect of remigrant life: the family. It notes that in micro-level shifts, individual transformations are the source of the larger societal changes. In particular, remigrants have altered their values and their beliefs about family life and relationships between spouses, parents and children, and siblings — the core relationships in traditional Chinese culture. It reports that one study of women and divorce in Hong Kong found the divorce rate, which was 0.76 per 1,000 in 1984, jumped to 2.0 per 1,000 by 1999. Although the investigators suggest many possible explanations, one that they did not discuss is the fact that this was the exact time period of the largest return migration to Hong Kong. It explains that while divorce surely has multiple causes, the changes in expectations and individual aspiration, and the altered geographic arrangements of married couples returning to Hong Kong contributed to the escalation in the divorce rate.

This chapter documents the largely beneficial results of the lingua franca mandate on Rakuten over a period of five years, including the rise in international acquisitions, accelerated post-integration activities, centralized technical platforms, and knowledge sharing. An expanded and global talent pool changed hiring patterns within the Tokyo headquarters and worldwide, particularly in the engineering ranks. While many advances were made in the advent of the English language mandate, the chapter also highlights enduring challenges. In addition, it shows examples of Rakuten's influence beyond the confines of the organization. It chronicles how the prime minister of Japan tapped Mikitani to join a newly formed advisory body, the Industrial Competitiveness Council, to aid in developing a globalization agenda. A national language strategy was rooted in the actions that the council adopted. These activities demonstrate the role that companies can have in shaping societal growth and character.

The contribution of paramilitary prisoners to conflict transformation remains a surprisingly under-stated aspect of the Northern Ireland peace process. Former prisoners have utilised the organisational capacity and structures of paramilitary groups and developed these as agents of conflict transformation. ‘Management systems’ and structures evidently mobilised to engage in violence were reoriented towards developing positive community roles in respect of restorative justice, opposition to violence and reducing sectarian tensions at interfaces. Concurrently, former prisoners and their representative groups have developed client relations with the local state, in the search for funding for local conflict transformation and reconciliation projects. These radical developments have been facilitated by dialogue initiated by former prisoners, on an inter-communal basis through meetings with former prisoners on the opposing side and via intra-group dialogue. A combination of tactical flexibility, societal change, perceptions of victory or continuing change and outworking of the longstanding recognition of the limited utility of violence contributed to ceasefires and concentration upon politics.

This chapter looks at what will be required to rebalance the radiative balance of climate at a societally acceptable level, around 1.5°C to at most 2°C warming according to the Paris Climate Agreement. The chapter outlines the complex portfolio of measures needed to achieve this: emissions reduction, new emissions avoidance, greenhouse gas removal, and potential solar radiation management. It also shows how the relative proportions of these four different classes of measures will need to be flexible through time, in response to different needs, such as a high need for emissions reduction today that may decline with time as emissions approach zero. Flexibility will also be needed in response to the emergence of new breakthroughs, challenges, cost limits, and economic and societal constraints. The chapter considers key parameters with respect to societal change and the roles of government, corporations, and consumers, and discusses routes for channeling discontent and litigation.

This chapter clarifies how the Maryknollers and San Salvador's Archbishop, Óscar Romero, unsuccessfully tried to persuade Jimmy Carter to accentuate human rights in U.S.–El Salvador policy. It recounts El Salvador as a major conflict between the White House and the religious community by 1980. It also discusses the Salvadoran government that accused Maryknoll priests John Halbert and Ron Michaels of being “subversives.” The chapter describes priests, brothers, and nuns in El Salvador and the United States that played a crucial role in aiding Salvadorans' push for societal change. It talks about how Maryknollers approached the situation from a faith-based perspective, but their decision to side with the poor had political implications.

Pierse looks at the role of women writers who furnish important images of societal change and paint portraits that are vital for social history. Despite the marked lack of public clamour for artistic involvement in cogitation, diagnosis or prescription regarding two decades of rollercoaster ride from embryonic prosperity to economic austerity, the recent fiction by notable Irish women novelists has determinedly featured numerous depictions of women's experiences, actions and reactions during that time. Such fictional engagement evidences authorial concern with the shifting sands, and a sensitivity to readers’ preoccupations; with no area of life neglected, the novels and short stories furnish important images of societal change and paint portraits that are vital for social history. Perceived constraints, relationship difficulties, negotiation of economic, religious, educational and social environment, attitudes to family and children – all feature in fiction written in this millennium by Anne Enright, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Edna O'Brien, Belinda McKeon, Cláir Ní Aonghusa and others. This paper will consider the authors’ rendering of remarkable developments, elements of resistance, expression of doubt, and divergent attitudes to the fictional delineation of future prospects for women and humanity. As an exploration of gendered narrative enunciations of this period, this chapter offers some original insights.

This chapter discusses how social psychology can offer theoretical contributions for a better understanding of the relations between the institutional and public spheres and how this may impact change in ecological matters. First, it introduces the difference between natural and agreed—or chosen—limits to human action and draws on Sophocles’s Antigone to illustrate this and discuss how legitimacy has roots in the many heterogeneous values of the public sphere/consensual universe, while legality arises from the institutional/reified sphere. Recalling some empirical research in the area of social studies of sustainability, it then shows how a social representations perspective can help us understand the dynamic and interdependent relations between the institutional or reified sphere and the consensual or common sense universe—and their implications for social change and continuity.

Murui, a Witototan language spoken in southern Colombia and northern Peru, has at its disposal a number of linguistic features that mirror the structure of the Murui society, the Murui belief system, the environment the Murui people live in, and their means of subsistence. Demonstrable associations between linguistic and non-linguistic features (the so-called “integration points”) discussed here are: classifiers (and their significance in terms of the Murui beliefs, religion, spirits, and dreams, and the means of subsistence), possessive marking (vs. the relations within the Murui community, social hierarchies, and kinship categorization), spatial adverbs (vs. the means of subsistence and physical environment), and linguistic avoidance terms (vs. the beliefs, religion, spirits, and dreams). As the Murui people are gradually being drawn into the Colombian market economy and relevant cultural practises become obsolete, some correlations described here are more prone to disintegrate than others.

This chapter examines offers new directions for organizational scholarship based on the key concepts derived from transnational migration studies and applied to notions of self, culture and work. Fundamentally, transnational modes of thinking and analyzing require us to consider the composition and coming together of society rather than a reflection of the boundaries/boundedness of nation-states. They provide insights as to what citizenship means beyond an accident of birth and turn our gaze to the ways in which historical conjunctures impact contemporary economic arrangements, political debates and cultural institutions. For organization scholars who want to study diversity and cross-cultural management and attend to difference, transnational modes provide insights as to new ways of understanding people in the form of mobile subjectivities and move us to consider the question of who/what is the subject of management research? By relying on new ontologies and epistemologies available from a transnational migration studies framework, the chapter offers insights about how the social world is being made and remade and the consequences of such action and intention for the (organizational) lives of people around the world. In doing so, it opens up vistas for new research questions, agendas, and approaches to guide organizational scholars and scholarship.

This chapter explores seventeeth-century England and provides evidence to suggest that a lineage culture thrived, that local political relationships were largely shaped by kinship, and that these bonds and obligations were carried through into the civil war. It notes that court and electoral politics continued to be organized around noble clienteles that had kinship at their core. It further notes that emphasis was placed on kinship through the encouragement of family histories and genealogies as a primarily defensive psychological reaction to unwelcome societal change. It also argues that the greater part of Scotland's localities saw nobles mobilizing their kindreds. It was the covenanting revolution, with its increasingly fractured ideological divisions alongside engagement in a massive military enterprise throughout all three British kingdoms that ripped apart any vestiges of the Lowland kindred as the basis of a private army.

This chapter puts health inequalities into the wider context of welfare resources based on the Swedish case. It focuses on analysing, describing, and understanding health inequalities and how they are shaped, recreated, changed, and influenced by social stratification, societal changes, and public policy at the most general level. It discusses in detail the definition and measurement of welfare, health inequalities, and a number of key issues. It includes an overview of the data to be used and some of the more specific research questions. It notes that the field of health inequalities research has expanded considerably over the past twenty-five years or so and most of the questions and analyses are embedded in the field of research.

This article applies the concept of federalism as a multidimensional regime in a comparative approach to federal dynamics. Regardless of their varieties, federal regimes are characterized by tensions between unity and diversity, between centralization and decentralisation and between intergovernmental and intragovernmental politics. The particular institutional expression of tensions can be traced back to sequences of historical evolution shaping different dimensions in different times, and societal change affecting levels and institutions of government in different ways. The resulting incompatibilities of rules and practices in different institutions cause rigidity, but also drive constitutional policy of executives and parliaments. Interested in maintaining the performance of a federal system and their power, they cope with problems of incompatible structures either by adjustment of patterns of governance or by constitutional reform.

This chapter examines how, for the October 1991 launch, Disaster Action published a pamphlet setting out the organisation's origins and purpose. The descriptions of the disasters are stark, a shocking reminder of the human consequences that lie behind the bare facts. The issues common to all of them — a lack of responsibility and little understanding of the needs and priorities of those directly affected — gave rise to the three principle objectives — accountability, support, prevention — that continue to underpin the charity's activities. The words in the pamphlet were written only a short time after the disasters of the 1980s. They capture a moment in time in the history of the organisation, when the experiences were still raw and fresh in the minds of those affected. Disaster Action members were not prepared to accept the lack of resolution common to their experiences, however different the disasters had been in their cause and origin. How they set about translating these desperate moments in time into societal change truly began to evolve over the decade that was to follow, the 1990s.

This chapter outlines the recent developments in social security policy. The analysis starts with a review of key themes in welfare reform since 1997. It is argued that New Labour has considerably reformed the social security system, which was driven by the need to adapt to societal changes and economic policy concerns. It also examines the recent developments, which include the ones related to welfare to work, Incapacity Benefit, policies for lone parents, and pension reform. The chapter furthermore considers the emerging trends that can be translated into primary long-term reforms if Labour returns to office in 2005.