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In recent decades, childhood in Japan has undergone significant transformations. Government policies geared at boosting women's labor force participation, a declining fertility rate, rising costs of having children on the one hand, and increased spending on public childcare and support measures for families, on the other hand, contribute to these ongoing changes. Having only one child is becoming the norm while mothers' role in society is shifting. The traditional family structure is moving from the previously predominant male breadwinner model to more dual-earner families. Children now spend significant amounts of time in care and education institutions.

In this chapter, we analyze current configurations of early childhood in institutions and the family from a policy perspective and regarding children's predominant education and care arrangements. Drawing on various survey data sets and evidence from demographic statistics to pedagogical ethnographies, we look at how childcare policies and families reshape the organization of children's lives and outline how institutions and educators create learning experiences aligned with the values of a collectivist society. However, despite being deeply rooted in traditional child-rearing goals, many parents also subscribe to rigorous educational arrangements from early childhood onwards to prepare children for success in a competitive education system. The chapter finishes with an outlook on future directions of how policymakers and the ongoing institutionalization of childhood continue to change children's lives.

Equity is an issue that pervades all aspects of primary care provision for children and as such is a recurring theme in the Models of Child Health Appraised project. All European Union member states agree to address inequalities in health outcomes and include policies to address the gradient of health across society and target particularly vulnerable population groups. The project sought to understand the contribution of primary care services to reducing inequity in health outcomes for children. We focused on some key features of inequity as they affect children, such as the importance of good health services in early childhood, and the effects of inequity on children, such as the higher health needs of underprivileged groups, but their generally lower access to health services. This indicates that health services have an important role in buffering the effects of social determinants of health by providing effective treatment that can improve the health and quality of life for children with chronic disorders. We identified common risk factors for inequity, such as gender, family situation, socio-economic status (SES), migrant or minority status and regional differences in healthcare provision, and attempted to measure inequity of service provision. We did this by analysing routine data of universal primary care procedures, such as vaccination, age at diagnosis of autism or emergency hospital admission for conditions that can be generally treated in primary care, against variables of inequity, such as indicators of SES, migrant/ethnicity or urban/rural residency. In addition, we focused on the experiences of child population groups particularly at risk of inequity of primary care provision: migrant children and children in the state care system.

The prevalence of older people who use drugs is increasing in many countries, with evidence that some women continue or begin illicit substance use in midlife and older age. While research on older people who use drugs is limited, evidence of risk behaviours among older women who use drugs is particularly inadequate. Unsafe drug use and sexual practices that are prolonged and sustained over many years increase the possibilities for poorer health, leading to potentially greater morbidity and early mortality among older drug users. This chapter is a timely contribution to the extant literature and explores our current knowledge of the risk behaviours of older women who use drugs.

Although midlife is viewed as a transition period in the life course, the normative role expectations of midlife and older women run parallel to the stereotypes of women who use drugs. Furthermore, drug-using bodies are politically and culturally shaped through control and containment practices centred around notions of difference and risk. Acknowledging the intersection of age, race and gender, this chapter frames its position around the concepts of ‘risk’ and ‘edgework’. Utilising these theoretical concepts, this chapter argues that a shift towards a support-focussed model, rather than control of, older women who use drugs is required. The absence of a focussed, gendered analysis of the lives and experiences of older drug users, and older women who use drugs in particular, limits our understanding. Consequently, the chapter concludes with a call for well-designed studies of this increasing and largely hidden cohort of drug users.

Technology increasingly features in intimate relationships and is used by domestic violence perpetrators to enact harm. In this chapter, we propose a theoretical and practical framework for technology-facilitated harms in heterosexual relationships which we characterize as digital coercive control. Here, we include behaviors which can be classified as abuse and stalking and also individualized tactics which are less easy to categorize, but evoke fear and restrict the freedoms of a particular woman. Drawing on their knowledge of a victim/survivor's experiences and, in the context of patterns and dynamics of abuse, digital coercive control strategies are personalized by perpetrators and extend and exacerbate “real-world” violence.

Digital coercive control is unique because of its spacelessness and the ease, speed, and identity-shielding which technology affords. Victim/survivors describe how perpetrator use of technology creates a sense of omnipresence and omnipotence which can deter women from exiting violent relationships and weakens the (already tenuous) notion that abuse can be “escaped.” We contend that the ways that digital coercive control shifts temporal and geographic boundaries warrant attention. However, spatiality more broadly cannot be overlooked. The place and shape in which victim/survivors and perpetrators reside will shape both experiences of and response to violence. In this chapter, we explore these ideas, reporting on findings from a study on digital coercive control in regional, rural, and remote Australia. We adopt a feminist research methodology in regard to our ethos, research processes, analysis, and the outputs and outcomes of our project. Women's voices are foreground in this approach and the emphasis is on how research can be used to inform, guide, and develop responses to domestic violence.

Mainstream pornography is popular, freely accessible, and infused with themes of male dominance, aggression, and female subservience. Through depicting sex in these ways, mainstream pornography has the potential to influence the further development of harmful sexual scripts that condone or endorse violence against women and girls. These concerns warrant the adoption of a harms-based perspective in critical examinations of pornography's influence on sexual experiences. This chapter reports on findings from interviews with 24 heterosexual emerging adults living in Aotearoa/New Zealand about how pornography has impacted their lives. Despite a shared awareness among participants of mainstream pornography's misogynistic tendencies, and the potential for harm from those displays, men's and women's experiences were profoundly gendered. Men's reported experiences were often associated with concerns about their own sexual behaviors, performances, and/or abilities. Conversely, women's experiences were often shaped by how pornography had affected the way that men related to them sexually. Their experiences included instances of sexual coercion and assault which were not reported by the men. These findings signal the need for a gendered lens, situated within a broader harms-based perspective, in examinations of pornography's influence.

In this chapter, I propose an integrative framework for theorizing and empiricizing about talent management, based on the notion of “talent philosophies.” I believe that current debates about whether talent management should be inclusive or exclusive create the risk that our field will become fragmented, thereby undermining its social-scientific legitimacy. Nonetheless, this debate is absolutely correct in identifying the tensions between inclusive and exclusive approaches to talent management as a phenomenon. This, however, creates issues for talent management as a construct for scientific inquiry, as we need clear definitions and measures to create a cumulative body of research as a community. I propose that the solution lies in an expansion of our vocabulary as talent management researchers and identify four constructs that can help us structure and categorize our collective work: giftedness, talent, potential, and strength. Each of these constructs map logically onto different talent philosophies and talent management practices. In establishing “unity in diversity,” I believe talent management could finally make the transition into a more mature field of academic inquiry – although clearly phenomenon driven – characterized in equal parts by construct clarity, rigor, and relevance.