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The purpose of this paper is to examine and reinterpret information ecology in the context of the changing environment of services, which has been strongly affected by digitalisation and increasing citizen engagement. Here, information ecology refers to the interaction and co-evolution of technologies, human beings and the social environment.

The data consist of 25 thematic interviews conducted in a public Finnish organisation responsible for organising welfare services, and in its collaborating organisations. The interviews were analysed qualitatively. The analytical framework is based on Nardi and O'Day's five components of information ecology: system, diversity, co-evolution, keystone species and locality.

The analysis shows that these basic components still exist in the digitalisation era, but that they should be interpreted and highlighted differently, for example, stressing the openness of the information system instead of closed systems, as well as emphasising the increasing meaning of diversity amongst digitalisation, and the dynamic co-evolution between the elements of the system. New capabilities, such as the ability to combine various kinds of information and knowledge, are needed in this adaptation.

The study illustrates a wider, updated information-ecology concept with the help of empirical research. Technology affects care organisations' information ecologies in numerous – often invisible – ways, which this study brings into light.

So far, information-ecology research has overlooked social and healthcare, but this study provides findings concerning this societally important sector.

This paper aims to understand the opportunities and challenges to engage emerging adult gamers (aged 18–25) in adopting healthier diet behaviours through online games and related platforms such as esports and streaming. The study uses a socio-ecological approach to understand influences and suggests approaches to changing behaviours.

Purposive and convenience sampling were used to identify (n = 13) online gaming industry professionals and emerging adult (EA) gamers for interview. Qualitative thematic analysis of data using NVivo was undertaken.

Bi-directional influences were found that are potentially impacting EA diet behaviours. Food industry advertising and sponsorships were identified as dominant influences within the behavioural ecology, using microcelebrities and esports events to target EAs. The study identifies a need for social marketers to engage EA gamers in healthful behaviours through interventions across various levels of the behavioural ecology, including those upstream with industry and potential government regulation, to promote better health and balance food marketing. It also identifies future research avenues for engaging gamers in good health.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the impact of the gaming behavioural ecology on EA diet behaviour. It identifies new channels that social marketers can use to engage EAs, who are difficult to reach through more traditional marketing channels.

This chapter explores the protest self-immolations since 2009 of over 100 Tibetans in China. It investigates whether these events have ecological as well as social causes and may thus be relevant to the emerging discipline of ‘EcoHealth’.

Targeted literature review and reflective analysis, presented as a narrative.

Chinese citizens identifying as Tibetan have experienced substantial ethnically based discrimination for over 60 years, manifest as attempted cultural destruction, pervasive disrespect and linguistic suppression. Tibetans, now a minority in much of their former territory, have witnessed and at times been forced to participate in ecological destruction, much of it led by Chinese settlers, endorsed by occupying authorities. Tibetans have for decades protested against the Chinese they regard as invaders and occupiers, but Tibetan acts of protest self-immolation are a recent response. Academic analysis has been scarce, particularly by Chinese scholars. Until now, EcoHealth practitioners have also denied any relevance, as if in a waltz led by the Chinese government.

Attempts to identify rational causes for Tibetan self-immolation conflict with themes of liberation and fairness central to Communist Chinese ideology. Most Chinese analysis of Tibetan self-immolation is superficial, nationalistic and unsympathetic. Also disturbing is the reaction to these issues shown by the International Association of Ecology and Health. It is suggested that this illustrates a failure to translate rhetoric of ‘speaking truth to power’ to reality, a retreat from idealism common to many social movements.

Increasing human demand on a limited biosphere necessitates a deepened understanding of eco-social factors. Practitioners concerned with sustaining our civilisation are encouraged to explore the integrated dimensions revealed by this case study.

The goal of this chapter is to cultivate interest in the societal dynamic of ability expectations and ableism, a dynamic first thematized by the disabled people rights movement but which is also broadly applicable to the study of the relationship between humans, animals, and environments. Another aim of this chapter is to think about disabled people within ecosystem approaches to health through the ableism framework and to show that insights gained from disability studies are applicable to a broader study of health within contexts of environmental degradation. Building from this approach, the reader is invited to consider the utility of the conceptual framework of eco-ability “expectations” and eco-ableism as a way to understand health within coupled social-ecological systems.

This chapter uses an ability expectation and ableism lens and a disability studies and ability studies approach to analyze the relationship between humans, animals, and environments.

Certain ability expectations and ableism are responsible for (a) the invisibility of disabled people in ecological health discourses; (b) the standoff between anthropocentric and biocentric/ecocentric approaches to health; and (c) the application of scientific and technological advancements to address problems arising out of current relationships between humans, animals, and environments.

The reader is introduced to the concepts of ableism and eco-ableism, which have not yet been used in EcoHealth discourses and flags the need for further engagement with disability issues within the field.

Studies repeatedly have found social disparities of health at many levels of spatial aggregation. A second body of empirical research, demonstrating relationships between an area's racial and class composition and its environmental conditions, has led to the rise of an environmental justice movement. However, few studies have connected these two sets of findings to ask whether social disparities in health outcomes are due to local environmental disparities. This chapter investigates whether the association between racial and socioeconomic composition and multiple health conditions across New York City zip codes is partly mediated by neighborhood physical, built, and social environments.

This chapter will examine ideological debates currently taking place in academics. Anthropologists – and all academic workers – are at a crossroads. They must determine what it means to “green the academy” in an era of permanent war, “green capitalism,” and the neoliberal university (Sullivan, 2010). As Victor Wallis makes clear, “no serious observer now denies the severity of the environmental crisis, but it is still not widely recognized as a capitalist crisis, that is, as a crisis arising from and perpetuated by the rule of capital, and hence incapable of resolution within the capitalist framework.”

Drawing on the author's multi‐method research on the viability of specific ecotherapy practitioner training and curriculum design, this paper debates how the use of ecotherapeutic approaches can provide a two‐pronged system to achieve both individual health (at micro level) and public and environment health outcomes (at macro level). The research sought the views of service users, practitioners and educationalists through use of interviews, focus groups, a nominal group, and an ethnographic case study group. This research raised other considerations: namely, that people seeking personal recovery also, through stewardship of green spaces, may achieve unanticipated social capital and natural capital outcomes and thereby meet current multi‐disciplinary policy targets. This added social value has not been previously considered as an important dimension in people's well‐being and recovery from ill health or social exclusion. Such outcomes emerge from the idea of green spaces becoming a ‘product’ delivered to the community by people whose pursuit of personal recovery also directly contributes to improved public mental health.

This paper aims to provide principles and to give a case study of the application of Bateson's ideas to promote epistemological change in organisations to deal with problems which many governments in English speaking countries currently attempt to address by control through detailed performance indicators and top‐down monitoring. It suggests that epistemological change requires an approach that goes beyond rational argument and provides an example of the way that emotional engagement and story telling can be built into action research based on cybernetic ideas.

Bateson stresses the need for an epistemological change to embrace an understanding of the implications of circular causation to underpin our approach to problems and policy making. The case study shows how research using systemic principles can address epistemological change at all its stages including data collection and dissemination. In this way the research aims to become a conversation in which participants can reflect on the epistemological assumptions that underpin their actions.

Following Maturana and Bateson it is found that a reflexive conversation that engages participants through emotion and story telling as well as demonstrating reflection on the researcher's own assumptions can powerfully engage participants in changing how they see problems and what they do.

Whilst rational argument can be used to develop and expand a rational domain such as cybernetics, the paper suggests that the introduction of a systemic or cybernetic understanding to newcomers instead requires aesthetic seduction that can be achieved by promoting reflection on epistemological assumptions through story telling and emotional engagement.

This article begins with a reprint of interviews from the November/December 1995 issue of Planning Review (the previous identity of Strategy & Leadership.). In those interviews, four leading futurists — Ian Wilson, Oliver Markley, Joseph Coates, and Clement Bezold — discussed the critical issues they believed were facing business leaders in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, the strategic implications of these issues, and how business leaders should respond. Their original remarks are followed by their current thoughts about what progress has been made in five years and how the critical issues may have changed in that time.