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Purpose: Online gaming (OG) has become an increasing societal phenomenon during the current Pandemic times. This is due to lockdowns and people being confined to home environments. This chapter sheds light on the attraction of OG, from the perspective of it being a virtual immersion tool of emancipation. There has been an increasing amount of working from home arrangements during Pandemic times and more time is being spent in virtual immersion. As discussed in the article, there is a potential conflict between individual accountabilities, for example, to attain a certain degree of work-related performance and the hedonistic pleasure attained from OG (which is the type of focus of virtual immersion in this chapter). OG bears personal, business and societal costs, which are discussed in this chapter.

Need for this study: This study provides a picture of the implications of an individual’s virtual reality immersion for the purpose of OG, from the perspectives of personal and social accountabilities in the virtual and physical worlds in the current Pandemic environment.

Methodology: This is a concise overview of the theoretical underpinnings, impacts on accountabilities and implications relating to OG. The chapter provides a survey and discussion of the literature on increasing trends of OG, profit-making potential of OG and the related accountability perspectives.

Findings: This chapter has extended on the Internet accounting and accountability research literature by considering OG accountabilities and costs and benefits. OG supports an individual’s emancipation. From the perspective of OG, there are numerous forms of emancipations that can be achieved and that may result in ‘sacrifices’ by others including other online gamers. There is a substantial risk of a lack of accountability towards the others in the online and real-life environment on behalf of the one who is emancipated through escape.

The purpose of the chapter is to give an overview of special education in Iceland, historically and with reference to modern use of terms, research, policy, legal trends and funding. Recent data is provided on demographic developments amongst children in Iceland and detailed account is given of practices in schools, including collaboration with parents and teacher education. Finally some issues and challenges are discussed that still remain to be solved with respect to meeting the special needs of students in school. One of the findings is that only 1.3% of students attend special schools and special classes and that the term special education has outlived its usefulness except perhaps in the context of the three segregated special schools that still remain in the country. Official papers have replaced it with the term special support. Despite a diversity of views and practices the main implication is that a new model of education is required, in line with that proposed by Slee where the needs of individuals are served in all schools and the binary thinking related to regular versus special education is no longer necessary.

The Scandinavian states are universally seen as very well-functioning bureaucracies with some of the lowest levels of corruption in the world. In scholarly debates on state building, Francis Fukuyama has used the Scandinavian countries and the phrase ‘getting to Denmark’ as a metaphor for the apparent mystery of how states can come to be governed by well-developed bureaucracies and highly functioning state institutions. This chapter presents a study of state institutions and bureaucracy in Denmark–Norway and Sweden over a 250-year period from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century. The study demonstrates how bureaucracies conforming to Weber’s later model were gradually established in the Scandinavian monarchies in this period. The chapter also presents the results of three empirical studies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which indicate how the level of corruption in the state administration had been limited by the middle of the nineteenth century. In Denmark, the institutional framework set up after the establishment of the absolute monarchy in 1660, along with continuing reforms to improve the administration in the period of absolutism between 1660 and 1849, came to form an important basis for an administrative culture based on the rule of law. In Sweden the rule shifted between absolutism and constitutionalism, but both the Danish–Norwegian and the Swedish monarchies saw the establishment of strong and comprehensive state hierarchies with a king at the top level who set out to guarantee the rule of law and attempted to be merciful to his subjects. Lutheranism played a decisive and durable role as moral backbone in Scandinavian societies and in the establishment of a shared political culture. These elements, in combination with the establishment of Weberian-type bureaucracy, had, by the end of the nineteenth century, worked to limit corruption in the state administration of the Scandinavian countries.

Contemporary categorizations of western-style welfare states distinguish a particular pattern of organizing social security mainly found in Scandinavian countries, and sometimes labeled as a “social democratic welfare regime.” This is characterized by general access of the population to a social security system organized and administered by public authorities. This categorization is widely acknowledged, but the Scandinavian “social democratic” model is rarely ever analyzed in detail.

While most health services are provided by public actors, it is often overlooked that health services in Scandinavian countries in certain fields are delivered to a substantial part by private actors. In Norwegian rehabilitation specialist health care, these private actors stand for more than 30% of all service delivery.

Based on a content analysis of publications of the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services we look into the relation between public and private actors in rehabilitation and relate our findings to classifications of Scandinavian welfare states into an institutional, social democratic model.