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Previous studies show that the implementation of gender equality encounters resistance in military organizations, but it is often invisible or seen as confined to anonymous structures or troubled individuals. This paper aims to show how the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) use organizational principles to resist implementing gender equality measures.

The study is a qualitative analysis of discursive strategies in the SAF’s 2013–2018 annual reports to government.

The organizing principles of instrumentality and distance, while existing in parallel with gender equality efforts, actually pursue logics that prevents the SAF from implementing gender equality. The principle of instrumentality in this context means that gender equality in the SAF is of secondary interest to organizational members. The principle of distancing from the problem includes strategies that alienate female from male officers.

The contribution of this paper is the finding that the use of organizing principles represents conscious organizational resistance to gender equality efforts. This kind of use needs to be revealed and criticized to change military organizations.

This chapter discusses work-life interface (WLI) issues for migrant-citizen older British women of South Asian heritage living in the UK. It shows how WLI issues are inevitably entangled with the active ageing agenda for the older workforce and that we need further attention from scholars exploring these issues across life courses to appreciate and understand how ageing across locations, times and contexts unveils unique aspects of WLI. The chapter discussion rethinks some of the existing constructs of WLI and introduces new ones to its periphery, including people’s social identities and the spatio-temporal nature of those identities. Such a rethinking process is supported by critical empirical evidence on the lived experiences of a group of older ethnic minority British women living in Greater Manchester, UK, who juggled between work and caring throughout their lives, and abruptly quit paid work due to unmanageable overlapping demands. The evidence indicates how migrant women from the global south struggle to navigate UK WLI norms/culture and their meanings, especially when irreconcilable differences exist between the community/family norms and the social norms in the host country. The chapter findings have implications for the future of an inclusive labor market as it recommends early planning, provisioning and addressing ageing migrants’ WLI issues to draw sustainable/inclusive future labor market policies.

High levels of child obesity alongside rising stunting and the absence of a coherent food policy have deemed UK’s food system to be broken. The National Food Strategy (NFS) was debated intensely in media, with discussions on how and who should fix the food system.

Using a mixed methods approach, the authors conduct framing analysis on traditional media and sentiment analysis of twitter reactions to the NFS to identify frames used to shape food system policy interventions.

The study finds evidence that the media coverage of the NFS often utilised the tropes of “culture wars” shaping the debate of who is responsible to fix the food system – the government, the public or the industry. NFS recommendations were portrayed as issues of free choice to shift the debate away from government action correcting for market failure. In contrast, the industry was showcased as equipped to intervene on its own accord. Dietary recommendations made by the NFS were depicted as hurting the poor, painting a picture of helplessness and loss of control, while their voices were omitted and not represented in traditional media.

British media’s alignment with free market economic thinking has implications for food systems reform, as it deters the government from acting and relies on the invisible hand of the market to fix the system. Media firms should move beyond tropes of culture wars to discuss interventions that reform the structural causes of the UK’s broken food systems.

As traditional media coverage struggles to capture the diversity of public perception; the authors supplement framing analysis with sentiment analysis of Twitter data. To the best of our knowledge, no such media (and social media) analysis of the NFS has been conducted. The paper is also original as it extends our understanding of how media alignment with free market economic thinking has implications for food systems reform, as it deters the government from acting and relies on the invisible hand of the market to fix the system.

This photovoice study aims to explore how cleaners experience dirty and invisible work in the workplace.

This research is twofold. The authors first used the photovoice technique, which is one of the visual data collection techniques, to elaborate on the phenomena. The data were obtained with the participation of seven people (four women and three men) from building cleaners working at two public universities in Turkey. Three photographs were requested from each participant and selected nine photographs were described and analyzed among the collected 21 photographs. In addition to photovoice research, five interviews gave insight into the cleaners’ experiences in the second stage of the study.

This research revealed that participating cleaners experienced invisible dirty work and they felt undervalued, despised, treated as “second class/low-level people” and stigmatized.

This study recommends that university administrations defend the rights and dignity of cleaners at work, provide services to support their inclusion and increase staff awareness.

This study sheds light into an understudied area which is the building cleaners’ invisible and dirty work experiences and how that impacts their lives via a photovoice research.

This paper aims to describe an experiential learning activity designed to sensitize students to the prevalence and challenges of disclosing invisible disabilities in the workplace. It provides an impactful learning experience about a widespread phenomenon that receives little attention in textbooks.

The exercise assigns a hidden disability to some participants who interact with others who act as trusted friends. The interactions help participants develop their ability to interact sensitively with those who may have hidden disabilities. They explore the advantages and disadvantages of disclosing hidden disabilities at work. Guiding questions help focus deliberations during which participants consider the influence of their assigned role.

A plenary discussion follows where students share the outcomes of the simulation. Debriefing questions and suggested answers help instructors deepen student learning on the topic. A follow-up assignment allows participants to summarize personal learning about the subject and solidify the learning outcomes.

Most workers with nonapparent disabilities hide them, although disclosing them may help their employers provide helpful accommodations. This learning activity helps increase awareness and understanding of hidden disabilities in work settings and supports learning about disclosing and accommodating disabilities in the workplace. Instructors can use the activity to support understanding of employee rights, equity and accommodations in large or small classes, in-person or online, synchronously or asynchronously.

This article aims to provide a new paradigm for thinking about disability, which can be applied to other social groups, historically invisible and whose rights have been violated. The Model of Communication and Legitimate Acknowledgement of Disability (MCLAD) tries to break with the logic of continuing to add terms and euphemisms around the issue. The author proposes a new line to think about relationships in democratic societies. Taking the step from inclusion to acknowledgment does not imply another way of naming the disability, but rather addressing the problem from concrete practices of recognition. In order to arrive at the proposal of the MCLAD, the author will make a journey that addresses how disability has been understood throughout history, according to the study of different authors.

Disability has been perceived over time in many different ways, which led some authors to build models in order to explain certain social approaches to the subject. This article traces a journey from the first model to the present. In turn, it proposes a new one: the MCLAD, which is characterized by a paradigm shift: moving from inclusion to acknowledgment. To substantiate this, three categories are presented: acknowledgment, distance and vulnerability. The different theories and concepts that support the model will also be presented. The purpose of the MCLAD is to deepen the idea of empowering people with disabilities as part of today’s diverse societies and closing historically constructed gaps which are still in force.

The MCLAD proposes three categories: acknowledgment, distance and vulnerability. In turn, in each of them, there is a link between three axes: person with disability/society/state, analyzing the dynamics of these relationships presented, will provide us with the necessary elements to understand the proposed turnaround.

Although the different models will be presented according to the chronological order of definition over time, all of them still coexist today, in many cases in hybrid and naturalized ways in social practices. Recognizing what practices and conceptions are behind each model, allows us to recognize and resignify the ways of communicating toward people with disabilities (PWD) and on the issue of disability. It also allows other specific recognition practices, such as the legitimization of public policies from the laws that protect them.

To replace the paradigm of inclusion for that of acknowledgment and to recognize how the three categories (acknowledgment, distance and vulnerability) are linked with the three issues (PWD – society and state) allowing specific relationship and practises of legitimate or not acknowledgement. When the author affirms that the MCLAD implies a paradigm shift, the author means that it provides some elements from legitimate acknowledgment to complement aspects which inclusion does not address, and that the other models did not take into account. These are: the self-acknowledgment of people with disabilities and the sense of responsibility linked to empowerment; vulnerability as a category of reconciliation, which is typical of every human being; the contribution of the Phenomenology of the Among to think about how relationships and practices actually occur in society and, finally, the role of the state, which must watch over all its citizens, avoiding the distance between discourse (laws) and practices and, above all, avoiding exclusion from the system due to lack of monitoring of actions.

It should be noted that the MCLAD starts from the idea of language as a constructor of realities and conceives communication as an enabler of the acknowledgment of the other, who is also subject to rights. At the same time, it vindicates the voice of people with disabilities as protagonists (“Nothing about us without us”) and fosters the need for PWD themselves to be active in their struggles, promulgating legitimate acknowledgment. At the same time, it points out that the empowerment of PWD implies not only that they are aware of their rights but also that they themselves know and fulfill their duties within the democratic societies of which they are a part of and which, at least discursively, are regulated by laws. In other words, being empowered is also being responsible for living in society.

The main contribution that the MCLAD has to offer is to replace the paradigm of inclusion for that of acknowledgment. And, throughout the path followed in this article, an attempt has been made to establish that the turnaround is not to capriciously install a new concept (acknowledgment), but to demonstrate that the new paradigm involves three categories that sustain and support a model that seeks to be the basis for effective public policies, for a society that values diversity and for people who feel worthy and contribute to dignify others.

Free banking theory, as developed in Adam Smith’s 1776 treatise, “The Wealth of Nations” is a useful tool in determining the extent to which the “invisible hand of the market” should prevail in regulatory policy. The purpose of this study is to provide a timely review of the literature, evaluating the theory’s relevance to regulation of financial technology generally and cryptocurrencies (cryptos) specifically.

The methodology is qualitative, applying free banking theory as developed in the literature to technology-defined environments. Recent legislative developments in the regulation of cryptocurrencies in the UK, European Union and the USA, are drawn upon.

Participants in volatile cryptocurrency markets should bear the consequences of inadvisable investments in accordance with free banking theory. The decentralised nature of cryptocurrencies and the exchanges on which these are traded militate against coordinated oversight by central banks, supporting a qualified free banking approach. Differences regarding statutory definitions of cryptos as units of exchange, tokens or investment securities and the propensity of these to transition between categories across the business cycle render attempts at concerted classification at the international level problematic. Prevention of criminality through extension of Suspicious Activity Reporting to exchanges and intermediaries should be the principal objective of policymakers, rather than definitions of evolving products that risk stifling technological innovation.

The study proposes that instead of a traditional regulatory approach to cryptos, which emphasises holders’ safety and compensation, a free banking approach combined with a focus on criminality would be a more effective and pragmatic way forward.

The vast bulk of the discourse surrounding reproduction is centered on women. Yet, the rate of childlessness in the United Kingdom (and much of the world) is higher among men. Recently, there has been an increased focus on fatherhood and fathering in academia, policy, practice, and the general media. However, data on men who do not become fathers has been excluded and their experiences minimized and dismissed. Infertility research has shown that failure to achieve the high social status of parenthood has the similar effects on mental and physical health as a diagnosis of life-threatening illness. In this chapter, I will draw on two qualitative research studies to show how not achieving the pronatalist ideal of parenthood impacts on men’s identity, sense of self, behaviors, health and well-being and social networks across the life course. The workplace is an arena where people who do not fit socio-cultural norms and expectations are overtly and/or covertly stigmatized and discriminated against through policy, working practices and everyday interaction between groups and individuals. I will argue that failing to acknowledge men’s experience of non-reproduction has a significant impact on both individuals and institutions alike.