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Purpose: The violent conflict in Ambon, Indonesia (1999–2002) – which claimed more than 2,000 lives – occurred when a dominant ethnic group (Ambonese) was challenged by new ethnic groups (non-Ambonese: Bugis, Butonese, and Makassarese). The conflict intensified and evolved into a religious one between the Christians (mostly Ambonese) and the Moslems, consisting of Ambonese and the non-Ambonese. The absence of a long-term societal re-integration strategy that emphasized on the management of group diversities had resulted in a pseudo or fragile integration that led to societal disintegration. Following the regime change in 1998, a violent communal conflict or “politics by other means” occurred since the conduciveness of the local situation was related to national politics.

Method: Using Ambon as a Case Study, the chapter analyzes the trajectory of the conflict and its resolution.

Findings: The conflict grew more extensive ever since the failure of the state, particularly the police and the military that became partisans in order to protect their families or to benefit from security businesses. The peace building efforts took in several stages involving various social organizations as well as governments at the local and the national level. These processes were facilitated by general election or “war by other means” that transformed the violent conflicts to non-violent competition or from bullet to ballot.

Improving the nutritious quality of diets for individuals and populations is a central goal of many public health advocates and intergovernmental organizations. Yet the outcome of healthy eating has been shown to systematically vary across individual-level socioeconomic lines, and across countries in different locations of the food system. We therefore assess variation in the association between eating nutritionally dense fresh fruits and vegetables and both self-rated health (SRH) and body mass index (BMI) across individual income and country locations in the food system.

We use nationally representative survey data from 31 countries drawn from the International Social Survey Programme’s 2011 Health module. We estimate the effect of the frequency of eating fresh fruits and vegetables using random-intercept, random-coefficient multilevel mixed-effects regression models.

We confirm that eating nutritionally dense fresh fruits and vegetables frequently associates with more positive health outcomes. However, this general conclusion masks substantial individual- and country-level heterogeneity. For both SRH and BMI, the largest beneficial associations are concentrated among the most affluent individuals in the most affluent countries. Moving away from either reduces the positive association of healthy eating.

Our results provide an important wrinkle for policies aimed at changing the nutritional quality of diets. Adjustments to diets without taking into account fundamental causes of socioeconomic status will likely be met with attenuated results.

We compare two important health outcomes across a wide variety of types of countries. We demonstrate that our main conclusions are only detectable when employing a flexible multilevel methodological design.

This study tests the first two tenets of the fundamental causes theory – that socioeconomic status influences a variety of risk factors for poor health and that it affects multiple health outcomes – by examining the associations between adverse socioeconomic circumstances and five measures of health.

We employ bivariate and logistic regression analyses of data from the Centers Disease Control and Prevention 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) to test the individual and cumulative associations between three measures of socioeconomic position and five measures of health risk factors and outcomes.

The analysis demonstrates support for the fundamental causes theory, indicating that measures of adverse socioeconomic conditions have independent and cumulative associations with multiple health outcomes and risk factors among U.S. adults aged 18–64.

The findings of this chapter are generalizable to adults aged 18–64 living in the United States and may not apply to individuals living outside the United States, older Americans, and children.

Adverse socioeconomic circumstances are not only associated with self-rated health but are also associated with the two leading causes of death in the United States (cancer and heart disease) and risk factors that contribute to these causes of death (smoking and high blood pressure). Improving access to socioeconomic resources is critical to reducing health disparities in leading causes of death and health risk factors in the United States.

Morality is primarily a system of values, meanings, convictions, beliefs, principles, and drivers of good behavior and good outcomes in any organization. Using systems thinking concepts and applications introduced and developed during the last 50 years or so by various scholars from MIT, Stanford, and Wharton, such as Chris Argyris, Russell Ackoff, G. K. Forrester, Peter Senge, Stephen Covey, and Jim Collins, this chapter seeks to explore various past and contemporary market systems and challenges in terms of specific inputs, processes, and outputs. Systems thinking reckons everything in the cosmos (usually classified as subjects, objects, properties, and events) as a system (composed of two or more interactive parts with individual and interactive effects) that is connected to every other system in the universe. Various systems thinking laws and archetypes that have been developed thus far by systems thinkers will be introduced in order to identify basic patterns, structures, and constraints of human thinking and reasoning that create market phenomena. The academic and managerial challenge is to identify, explore, and capitalize such nonobvious connections for creating and developing new markets and corporate growth opportunities in the highly turbulent markets of today. In a globalized, digitized, and networked planet and universe, systems thinking is a very effective tool for analyzing turbulent market systems holistically and in an inclusive and integrated manner, with their specific inputs, processes, and outcomes. Several contemporary market cases will be included to illustrate the contents of this chapter.

Business cycle theory is normally described as having evolved out of a previous tradition of writers focusing exclusively on crises. In this account, the turning point is seen as residing in Clément Juglar's contribution on commercial crises and their periodicity. It is well known that the champion of this view is Schumpeter, who propagated it on several occasions. The same author, however, pointed to a number of other writers who, before and at the same time as Juglar, stressed one or another of the aspects for which Juglar is credited primacy, including the recognition of periodicity and the identification of endogenous elements enabling the recognition of crises as a self-generating phenomenon. There is indeed a vast literature, both primary and secondary, relating to the debates on crises and fluctuations around the middle of the nineteenth century, from which it is apparent that Juglar's book Des Crises Commerciales et de leur Retour Périodique en France, en Angleterre et aux États-Unis (originally published in 1862 and very much revised and enlarged in 1889) did not come out of the blue but was one of the products of an intellectual climate inducing the thinking of crises not as unrelated events but as part of a more complex phenomenon consisting of recurring crises related to the development of the commercial world – an interpretation corroborated by the almost regular occurrence of crises at about 10-year intervals.

Systems thinking calls for a shift of our mindset from seeing just parts to seeing the whole reality in its structured dynamic unity and interconnectedness. Systems thinking fosters a sensibility to see subtle connections between components and parts of reality, especially the free enterprise capitalist system (FECS). It enables us to see ourselves as active participants or partners of FECS and not mere induced factors of its production–distribution–consumption processes. Systems thinking seeks to identify the economic “structures” that underlie complex situations in FECS that bring about high versus low leveraged changes. A system is strengthened and reinforced by feedback of reciprocal exchanges that makes the system alive, transparent, human, and humanizing.

In Part I, we explore basic laws or patterns of behaviors as understood by systems thinking; in Part II we examine the basic archetypes or structured behaviors of systems thinking; in both parts we strive to see reality through the lens of critical thinking to help us understand patterns and structures of behavior among systems and their component parts. In conclusion, we argue for compatibility and complementarity of critical thinking and systems thinking to identify and resolve management problems created by our flawed thinking, and sedimented by our wanton assumptions, presumptions, suppositions and presuppositions, biases, and prejudices. Such thinking will also identify unnecessary economic and political structures of the self-serving policies we create, which imprison us.