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Many countries are developing primary care collaborative memory clinics (PCCMCs) to address the rising challenge of dementia. Previous research suggests that quality assurance should be a foundational element of an integrated system of dementia care. The purpose of this paper is to understand physicians’ and specialists’ perspectives on such a system and identify barriers to its implementation.

The authors used interviews and a constructivist framework to understand the perspectives on a quality assurance framework for dementia care and barriers to its implementation from ten primary care and ten specialist physicians affiliated with PCCMCs.

Interviewees found that the framework reflects quality dementia care, though most could not relate quality assurance to clinical practice. Quality assurance was viewed as an imposition on practitioners rather than as a measure of system integration. Disparities in resources among providers were seen as barriers to quality care. Greater integration with specialists was seen as a potential quality improvement mechanism. Standardized electronic medical records were seen as important to support both quality assurance and clinical care.

This work identified several challenges to the implementation of a quality assurance framework to support an integrated system of dementia care. Clinicians require education to better understand quality assurance. Additional challenges include inadequate resources, a need for closer collaboration between specialists and PCCMCs, and a need for a standardized electronic medical record.

Greater health system integration is necessary to provide quality dementia care, and quality assurance could be considered a foundational element driving system integration.

Stories govern the criminal justice system and consequently the millions of individuals under its control. In the US the harms experienced by those individuals, their families and their communities are massive. A prominent system-sustaining story is that antisocial persons, who are essentially different from the rest of us, get that way through negligent parenting. The story's moral oppositions rest on textual absences concerning crime, work, care, humanity and the mind of the scholar. In this chapter, first, I discern what goes unsaid via close analysis of the story of antisociality constructed by Gottfredson and Hirschi in their 1990 book A General Theory of Crime. Second, I offer a method for cataloguing what goes unsaid in stories that effect control, by (1) evaluating figurative language and other means of ambiguation; (2) assessing patterns of elaboration and explanation and (3) asking what and whose knowledge is missing. Rigorously deployed with a reflexive stance on one's position as to what should be said, the method can help uncover subtext, understatement and silencing.

Michael Holquist (1990), one of the commentators on Mikhail Bakhtin’s monumental work, stated flatly that “human existence is dialogue,” and Ivana Markova (2003) declared that “dialogism is the ontology of humanity.” Bakhtin (1985;1986) himself said that such dialogues are conducted by using “speech genres.” From another angle Kenneth Burke asked, “What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” and claimed – and showed – that this question can be best answered by using what he called the “grammar of motives,” which consisted of a hexad of terms: act, attitude, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. In this chapter, I examine, by using various examples, how the Burkean grammar is used in the construction of one speech genre or the other to achieve rhetorically effective dialogic communication.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to be as comprehensive as possible about what is known about mirror neurons at this time.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter offers a comprehensive critique including Churchland's hesitations about findings on mirror neurons (2011) which are balanced by Ramachandran's conviction that much of the research on mirror neurons is valid (2011). Following this is a summary of the results of the Mirror Neuron Forum (2011) wherein leading mirror neuron researchers exchange their views and conclusions about this subject.

Findings – The few single cells measures that we have show that they are much wider distributed throughout the brain than we have previously imagined. It should be stressed that single measures of mirror neurons have occurred albeit in limited situations. This establishes once and for all their relevance to humans.

Originality/value – The work on mirror neurons is a critical contribution from neuroscience to bringing the social brain into sociology and refining our understandings of intersubjectivity and of our biologically driven connections with others.

Purpose – Due to an absence of dialogue between sociology and the neurosciences, the scientific study of morality largely ignores cultural and structural influences. This chapter offers a synthetic approach integrating these separate disciplines to aid a more complete understanding of morality.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter reviews morality's bonding (a sense of groupness and belonging) and bounding (reproducing and reinforcing group boundaries) qualities across disciplines, and proposes three provisional principles to systematize an interdisciplinary model of morality. We then offer a preliminary illustration of how this model might be operationalized with functional MRI data.

Findings – Our proposed principles (as exemplified by our illustrative example) suggest that the sociology-neurology gap in understanding the domain of morality might shrink through an engagement with the underlying neural mechanisms that encompass issues of empathy, racial attitudes, and identity as potential platforms opening up a more “social” neuroscience.

Research limitations/implications – This chapter provides a starting-point for further research incorporating biological mechanisms into sociological theories in the area of morality. The illustrative case study should be replicated in a larger sample and/or in additional studies with different social groups.

Practical implications – This chapter is a useful source of information for sociologists seeking to find out more about the intersection of neuroscience and sociology as well as the neural dynamics of morality.

Originality/value – This chapter presents an introduction to an integrative approach recognizing our biological capacities for a socially constructed morality and the interaction between society and the mind. It includes one of the first sociologically oriented fMRI studies, offering avenues for new ways to bridge research disciplines.

Digital twins provide enormous opportunities for smart buildings. However, an up-to-date intellectual landscape to understand and identify the major opportunities of digital twins for smart buildings is still not enough. This study, therefore, performs an up-to-date comprehensive literature review to identify the major opportunities of digital twins for smart buildings.

Scientometric and content analysis are utilised to comprehensively evaluate the intellectual landscape of the general knowledge of digital twins for smart buildings.

The study uncovered 24 opportunities that were further categorised into four major opportunities: efficient building performance (smart “building” environment), efficient building process (smart construction site environment), information efficiency and effective user interactions. The study further identified the limitations of the existing studies and made recommendations for future research in the methodology adopted and the research domain. Five research domains were considered for future research, namely “real-time data acquisition, processing and storage”, “security and privacy issues”, “standardised and domain modelling”, “collaboration between the building industry and the digital twin developers” and “skilled workforce to enable a seamless transition from theory to practice”.

All stakeholders, including practitioners, policymakers and researchers in the field of “architecture, engineering, construction and operations” (AECO), may benefit from the findings of this study by gaining an in-depth understanding of the opportunities of digital twins and their implementation in smart buildings in the AECO industry. The limitations and the possible research directions may serve as guidelines for streamlining the practical adoption and implementation of digital twins for smart buildings.

This study adopted scientometric and content analysis to comprehensively assess the intellectual landscape of relevant literature and identify four major opportunities of digital twins for smart building, to which scholars have given limited attention. Finally, a research direction framework is presented to address the identified limitations of existing studies and help envision the ideal state of digital twins for smart buildings.

While technologies are often packaged as solutions to long-standing social ills, scholars of digital economies have raised the alarm that, far from liberatory, technologies often further entrench social inequities and in fact automate structures of oppression. This literature has been revelatory but tends to replicate a methodological nationalism that erases global racial hierarchies. We argue that digital economies rely on colonial pathways and in turn serve to replicate a racialized and neocolonial world order. To make this case, we draw on W.E.B. Du Bois' writings on capitalism's historical development through colonization and the global color line. Drawing specifically on The World and Africa as a global historical framework of racism, we develop heuristics that make visible how colonial logics operated historically and continue to this day, thus embedding digital economies in this longer history of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Applying a Du Boisian framework to the production and propagation of digital technologies shows how the development of such technology not only relies on preexisting racial colonial production pathways and the denial of racially and colonially rooted exploitation but also replicates these global structures further.

Cultural entrepreneurship research examines how actors upend the status quo by gaining the legitimacy and resources needed to advance novel ways of doing things. Extant studies, however, rarely spotlight an important tension: the pursuit of legitimacy and resources needed to advance adoption is often at odds with the desire to safeguard endeavors from external influence. While entrepreneurs are largely associated with the promotion of endeavors, they are also inclined to preserve meaningful values and practices, uphold family or ethnic legacies and traditions, and protect the integrity and authenticity of cultural products. Many of these valued outcomes are put at risk when endeavors diffuse beyond their cultural hearth and garner the interest of outsiders. How do entrepreneurs promote endeavors while protecting them from unwanted external influence? This paper sheds light on the motives, activities, and strategic approaches to entrepreneurship of actors that are both change-makers and culture-bearers. It elucidates trade-offs between evangelizing activities that promote rapid adoption of endeavors (i.e., the “hare”) and shepherding activities that safeguard the integrity of an endeavor (i.e., the “turtle”). It proposes and calls for research into alternative solutions that transcend the two approaches.

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) promised to reduce inequalities in insurance coverage between Latinos and non-Latinos by expanding coverage, it also excluded a large portion of noncitizen immigrants. Past research has demonstrated that among Latinos, further inequalities have developed between citizens and noncitizens after the ACA took effect, but it is unclear if this pattern is unique to Latinos or is evident among non-Latinos as well. I use data from the 2011 to 2016 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) (n = 369,386) to test how the relationship between citizenship status (native citizen, naturalized citizen, or noncitizen) and insurance coverage changed after the ACA, adjusting for health, demographic, and socioeconomic factors. I disaggregate the analysis by ethnicity to test whether this change differs between Latinos and non-Latinos. The analysis finds that after the ACA, naturalized citizens across ethnic groups moved toward parity with native citizens in health insurance coverage while the benefits of the ACA for noncitizens were conditional on ethnicity. For non-Latinos, lacking citizenship became less disadvantageous for predicting insurance coverage while for Latinos, lacking citizenship became even more disadvantageous in predicting insurance coverage. This bifurcation among noncitizens by ethnicity implies that while the ACA has strengthened institutional boundaries between citizens and noncitizens, this distinction is primarily affecting Latinos. The conclusion offers considerations on how legal systems of stratification influence population health processes.