Search results

The authors examine whether or not applicants and recipients of federal disability insurance (DI) inflate their self-assessed health (SAH) problems relative to others. To do this, the authors employ a technique which uses anchoring vignettes. This approach allows them to examine how various cohorts of the population interpret survey questions associated with subjective self-assessments of health. The results of the analysis suggest that DI participants do inflate the severity of a given health problem, but by a small but significant degree. This tendency to exaggerate the severity of disability problems is much more apparent among those with more education (especially those with a college degree). In contrast, racial minorities tend to underestimate severity ratings for a given disability vignette when compared to their white peers.

Racism occurs in many ways and varies across countries, evolving and adapting to sociocultural history, as well as contemporary economic, political and technological changes. This chapter discusses the multilevel dimensions of racism and its diverse manifestations across multiracial societies. It examines how different aspects of racism are mediated interpersonally, and embedded in institutions, social structures and processes, that produce and sustain racial inequities in power, resources and lived experiences. Furthermore, this chapter explores the direct and indirect ways racism is expressed in online and offline platforms and details its impacts on various groups based on their intersecting social and cultural identities. Targets of racism are those who primarily bear the adverse effects. However, racism also affects its perpetrators in many ways, including by limiting their social relations and attachments, and by imposing social and economic costs. This chapter thus analyses the many aspects of racism both from targets and perpetrators' perspectives.

The years following the 9/11/2001 terrorists attacks saw a marked increase in community and hospital emergency preparedness, from communications across community networks, development of policies and procedures, to attainment and training in the use of biological warfare resources. Regular drills ensured emergency and health care personnel were trained and prepared to address the next large-scale crisis, especially from terrorist and bioterrorist attacks. This chapter looks at some of the more familiar global health issues over the past two decades and the lessons learned from hospital responses to inform hospital management in preparation for future incidents.

This study is a narrative review of the literature related to lessons learned from four major events in the time period from 2002 to 2023 – SARS, MERS, Ebola, and COVID-19.

The initial search yielded 25,913 articles; 57 articles were selected for inclusion in the study.

Comparison of key issues and lessons learned among the four major events described in this article – SARS, MERS, Ebola, and COVID-19 – highlight that several lessons are “relearned” with each event. Other key issues, such as supply shortages, staffing availability, and hospital capacity to simultaneously provide care to noninfectious patients came to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic. A primary, ongoing concern for hospitals is how to maintain their preparedness given competing priorities, resources, and staff time. This concern remains post-COVID-19.

Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level arrangements are reflected in micro-level processes. This work uses radical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of “criminalized subjectivity” among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white university in the Midwest. I use semistructured interviews to explore the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction and how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. Findings demonstrate that Black university students are keenly aware of this particular stigma and its consequences in increasingly complex ways from the time they are school-aged children. They were aware of this stigma as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of themselves; said internalization was thwarted through strong self-concept and racial socialization. This increasingly complex awareness is also informed by an intersectional lens for some interviewees. I argue not only that the concept of stigma must be explicitly placed within these larger systems but also that understanding and identity-building are both rooted in ever-evolving processes of interaction and meaning-making. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and criminology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.

This chapter examines the concepts of race and racism, critically reviewing their historical and contemporary applications in everyday life as well as in academic and policy debates. Racism has been extensively researched, with various theories and conceptualisations developed across social science. However, there is a great deal of disagreement regarding its nature, contemporary significance and empirical validation. This chapter examines these and attempts to synthesise some of the common definitions of racism provided in the literature. It explores related concepts and underlying themes pertaining to expressions of race and racism. Furthermore, it unpacks current knowledge about racial issues and discusses recent advances in the conceptual understanding of various forms of racism. It also elucidates the social, political and analytical applications of racism as a concept and the significance of racism in contemporary societies. The chapter concludes by highlighting how racism is a dynamic phenomenon, continuously evolving with the social, political and technological transformations in contemporary societies.

Adapting to external and internal transformations is a difficult task that managers and scholars must face while attempting to keep their organisations alive and well-established. This chapter explores the various decision-making tools that can assist practitioners and scholars to improve their understanding of the external scenario to determine the contemporary appropriateness of these approaches for analysing the environment and their implications for various types of organisations. The chapter investigates the barriers and drivers of these methods and proposes existing alternative paradigms created by academics and practitioners to analyse and comprehend the context. It demonstrates how these decision-making tools can be implemented by providing examples and case studies.

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight how universities got into the predicament in which they currently find themselves in, or somewhat planned to be in, in the 2020s. The historical account outlines the purpose of higher education and who it was for throughout the last few centuries, before a more in-depth analysis of the last few decades will highlight how, and why, neoliberal and subsequently managerial aspects of leadership and performance metrics crept into universities before an analysis of the last 5–10 years, including the onset and consequences of COVID, will demonstrate that many ‘COVID recovery plans’ around staff cuts and course reforms were already in place before COVID, but it was COVID that allowed these plans in most cases to be escalated.

Those involved in the criminal justice system are very often some of the most marginalised in society and can have some of the most complex needs. Likewise, there is little in the literature on the use of peer support in prison. We begin the chapter by drawing on the literature to examine some of the outcomes associated with peer work in the criminal justice system. The change in identity that marks the desistence process is articulated throughout this chapter. Drawing on his experience of working as a peer in the prison setting, David brings some of these abstract concepts to life.

This chapter is focused on what we can learn from oppressive governance, in this case specifically relating to university governance in terms of vice chancellors and presidents, to the deputy vice chancellor and deputy president and down the ever-growing university hierarchy to deans and heads of schools and their deputies, from a Freirean perspective. Freire wrote at length about how leaders ‘controlled’ education and why they did so, but he also wrote at length about how governments control populations – himself being both a political prisoner and a person in exile to escape persecution. This chapter subsequently examines Freire's ideas around what techniques people employ to control populations and applies them to a higher education setting because the similarities are numerous and the tactics familiar.

Lived experience has increasingly been incorporated into service delivery across health and social care settings. One of the methods used to do this is through the provision of peer support work. While many people will have lived experience of an issue, condition and may even work in services, peers are markedly different insofar as they are employed specifically because they are using this lived experience to explicitly inform their way of providing an intervention. As we will see throughout this book, peers are not a homogenous group; however, they do use some of the same processes to engage and offer support to people with a variety of health and social vulnerabilities. This chapter contextualises these issues before delving into further chapters authored and co-authored by those with lived experience across multiple areas of peer support work.