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Historically, research on perceptions of health either converged upon the meanings created and proposed by specialists in the healthcare industry or focused on people who have medical conditions. This approach has failed to capture how the meanings and notions of health have been evolving as medicine extends into non-medical spheres and has left gaps in the exploration of how the meanings surrounding health and well-being are constructed, negotiated and reproduced in lay discourse. This paper aims to fill this gap in the understanding of the perceptions surrounding health by investigating consumers’ digitized visual accounts on social media.

Textual network and visual content analyses of posts extracted from Instagram are used to derive conclusions on definitions of health and well-being as perceived by healthy lay individuals.

Research demonstrates that digital discourse of health is clustered around four F’s, namely, food, fitness, fashion and feelings, which can be categorized with respect to their degrees of representation on a commodification/communification versus bodily/spiritual well-being map.

Our knowledge about the meanings of health as constructed and reflected by healthy lay people is very limited and even more so about how these meaning-making processes is realized through digital media. This paper contributes to theory by integrating consumers’ meaning-making literature into health perceptions, as well as investigating the role of social networks in enabling a consumptionscape of well-being. Besides a methodological contribution of using social network analysis on textual data, this paper also provides valuable insights for policy-makers, communicators and professionals of health.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

Knight's Industrial Law Reports goes into a new style and format as Managerial Law This issue of KILR is restyled Managerial Law and it now appears on a continuous updating basis rather than as a monthly routine affair.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

The meanings attributed to the quality of a person's illness experience result from important processes of co‐construction not only between healthcare professionals and patients but also among patients and caregivers. In the case of advanced cancer, new treatments extend patients’ lives but they raise the problem of the quality of this “renewed time”. Lay contexts of exchanges appear crucial for orienting the attribution of meaning to the time with cancer and for sharing practices to manage it. Furthermore, the internet is becoming an important space in which cancer patients meet and construct knowledge regarding their illness. The aim of this paper is to study knowledge‐ and practice‐construction among advanced cancer patients and caregivers, and to explore the suitability of online forums for analysis of these processes.

The paper discusses the results of a qualitative study based on one online forum for long‐term cancer patients (second relapse) and one for caregivers. The discussions explored show how patients and caregivers attribute meanings to their time with cancer. Verbatim transcripts of the discussions were analyzed according to the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) procedure.

The findings suggest the system of medical representations regarding health and illness should take greater account of other (lay) systems of representations and that the internet could be a valuable resource to support the development of spontaneous networks of patient and caregivers through which to organize health interventions and to involve patients and caregivers more closely in the care and cure process.

The study examines the experiences of a particular subset of patients/caregivers who were internet‐literate and might be considered more “active” in their coping with the disease over a fairly limited time span. These potential limitations are being remedied in continuing research projects.

The authors’ experience with this research design suggests qualitative research may be particularly valuable in casting light on emergent phenomena such as spontaneous social networks on the internet, and in encouraging more participative forms of research engagement.

These findings may orient therapeutic interventions to be more closely attuned to the needs of long‐term cancer patients and their caregivers. Online forums enable participants to disclose experiences, share knowledge, and co‐construct “good practices” for illness management.

This paper sets out to examine the degree to which General Finnish Thesaurus (GFT) and FinMeSH cover various semantic expressions of medical concepts in patients' questions and physicians' answers concerning cardiovascular diseases. The former represents lay persons' information needs.

A total of 50 question‐answer pairs were collected in a medical web site. Concepts and their expressions (terms) with their semantic relations were identified in questions and answers.

FinMeSH covered 65 per cent and GFT 41 per cent of all medical terms in texts. The expressions of patients and physicians matched better with FinMeSH than GFT regardless of the type of expression. The difference in favour of FinMeSH was typically about 25 per cent‐units.

The low fit with users' vocabularies makes GFT a poor tool for supporting searching, whereas the relatively high fit of FinMeSH suggests that it is a reasonable tool in assisting searching. Conclusions concerning the bridging of these two thesauri are discussed.

Prior studies have shown that terminology support can improve health information retrieval but have not taken into account the characteristics of the user performing the search. In this chapter, the impact of translating queries’ terms between lay and medico-scientific terminology, in users with different levels of health literacy and topic familiarity, is evaluated. Findings demonstrate that medico-scientific queries demand more from the users and are mostly aimed at health professionals. In addition, these queries retrieve documents that are less readable and less well understood by users. Despite this, medico-scientific queries are associated with higher precision in the top-10 retrieved documents results and tend slightly to generate knowledge with less incorrect contents, the researchers concluded that search engines should provide query suggestions with medico-scientific terminology, whenever the user is able to digest it, that is, in users above the lowest levels of health literacy and topic familiarity. On the other hand, retrieval systems should provide lay alternative queries in users with inadequate health literacy or in those unfamiliar with a topic. In fact, the quantity of incorrect contents in the knowledge that emerges from a medico-scientific session tends to decrease with topic familiarity and health literacy. In terms of topic familiarity, the opposite happens with Graded Average Precision. Moreover, users most familiar with a topic tend to have higher motivational relevance with medico-scientific queries than with lay queries. This work is the first to consider user context features while studying the impact of a query processing technique in several aspects of the retrieval process, including the medical accuracy of the acquired knowledge.

This paper aims to explore the socio-cultural meanings of functional foods for Tunisian consumers and to understand how these meanings shape their preferences and practices in the particular context of a Middle-East and North African (MENA) region.

A constructivist perspective based on multi-qualitative methods was designed allowing data collection in a natural setting through focus groups interviews, individual in-depth interviews and projective techniques among Tunisian consumers.

Findings show the complexity and importance of conscious and unconscious non-health-related socio-cultural factors in the construction and acceptance of functional foods by the Tunisian consumer. Common sense knowledge, social environment and tradition shape the constructions and practices of functional foods. These factors may act as a shortcut to compensate for unhealthy behaviour and as a social marker to reflect trendiness and identity.

The findings are specific to the Tunisian setting and may be not transferable to other settings.

The role of information is central in functional food acceptance. Communication on health effects should consider not only the formal nutritional health benefit but also lay knowledge.

The findings of this research contribute in the government’s understanding of Tunisian’s constructions of health and well-being by suggesting that besides health motives, non-health-related factors such as lay knowledge, social influences and conspicuous consumption play an important role in functional foods choice.

This paper contributes to extend functional foods literature by exploring the complex interconnected conscious and unconscious socio-cultural constructions behind functional food choice. It contributes also to the understanding of the food consumer behaviour in the specific cultural context of the Arab-Muslim MENA region, an under investigated setting.