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With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

China’s foreign aid efforts in Africa remain contentious. Chinese foreign aid tends to be different from “traditional” development assistance in that it frequently involves firms as the implementing agents of projects. Firms bring unique resources to public–private partnerships (PPPs) formed with government agencies, but their possible self-interested nature also gives rise to concerns over their development impact. Yet, on a larger scale, little is known about the characteristics of Chinese PPPs in foreign aid. Using project-level data available for 1,308 Chinese aid projects in 50 countries across Africa, the author characterizes the projects undertaken by firms and government agencies in a PPP and contrasts them to those executed by Chinese government agencies without firm involvement. This exploratory data analysis suggests that important differences apply, as Chinese PPPs tend to target different sustainable development goals (SDGs), work on the basis of distinct aid conditions, and implement projects that tend to be larger than those that are solely run by government agencies. Such observations raise important questions of an ethical, theoretical, and international nature, and warrant further research. The author develops a research agenda that aims at issues particularly important for business ethics scholars, organization theorists, and international business scholarship.

In this chapter, we discuss menopause transition in the workplace and its implications for workplace well-being. This is an important work-life interface topic, given the increasing number of women who will work during transition. It is also a topic that we currently know relatively little about, particularly in relation to well-being. We present findings that demonstrate both that many women experience symptoms that are bothersome at work and that these frequently have negative effects for two elements of workplace well-being, job satisfaction and health well-being. We evidence that individual/job characteristics and workplace context can either improve or worsen experiences of transition symptoms and make recommendations on how organization and HR practice can be designed to support women in menopause transition. We argue that working with line managers to create a more supportive context is one of the most important strategies to implement. Our research is situated in the UK police service and has wider relevance across the Global North, where similar demographic patterns are experienced, and in other male-dominated organizations and sectors.

Racism occurs in many ways and varies across countries, evolving and adapting to sociocultural history, as well as contemporary economic, political and technological changes. This chapter discusses the multilevel dimensions of racism and its diverse manifestations across multiracial societies. It examines how different aspects of racism are mediated interpersonally, and embedded in institutions, social structures and processes, that produce and sustain racial inequities in power, resources and lived experiences. Furthermore, this chapter explores the direct and indirect ways racism is expressed in online and offline platforms and details its impacts on various groups based on their intersecting social and cultural identities. Targets of racism are those who primarily bear the adverse effects. However, racism also affects its perpetrators in many ways, including by limiting their social relations and attachments, and by imposing social and economic costs. This chapter thus analyses the many aspects of racism both from targets and perpetrators' perspectives.

This chapter traces the origin of racism and reviews the historical and contemporary debates around race and racialisation in western thought. There are persistent disagreements surrounding the origin and nature of racism. Because of the evolution of racist ideas, behaviours and institutional practices and policies, there are various views about the meaning and analytical application of racism. This chapter explores how ideas of race – understood as innate and immutable human differences that can be classified and ranked hierarchically based on race – has emerged in western history and evolved over time. It examines how this has influenced social and political practices and associated policies across the evolution of modernity. The chapter specifically discusses the Atlantic slave trade and how it shaped the historical development of race and racism within the context of colonialism. It concludes with a discussion and critical review of some of the racist systems and policies which have been enforced across different multiracial countries.