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In early 2015, an Occupational Therapy led Operation Transformation healthy eating and exercise programme produced results suggestive of the value and need to promote and integrate physical activity interventions into mental health services.

In all, 41 clients with various mental illness diagnoses participated in the eight-week Operation Transformation programme. The outcome measures involved weekly weigh-ins and an end of programme evaluation form.

The quantifiable benefits – a total weight loss of nine stone ten and a half pounds – were mirrored in equally impressive qualitative impacts. Participants’ feedback via anonymous evaluation forms, echoed the findings of the articles appraised in the literature, including improvements in mood and energy levels, better sleep and increased motivation.

The organisers will benefit from lessons learned in this first experience, including overcoming logistical and organisational difficulties experienced in enabling clients’ full participation.

The evidence base points to the successful benefits of physical activity in promoting positive mental health. Occupational Therapists have a unique opportunity to drive forward the message of promoting physical activity via meaningful occupations.

Black women have traditionally occupied a unique position in the American economic structure – at the very bottom. The year 1920 is a unique historical moment to examine how this came to be. Economic prosperity immediately following World War I, the first wave of Black migration, and accelerating industrialization created occupational opportunities that could have enabled Black women to escape working poverty, as the majority of Black men did, but they were actively constrained. Historical narratives have extensively described Black women’s occupational restriction across regions to dirty work, such as domestic service, but not often in conjunction with a comparison to the expanding opportunities of Black men and White women. While intersectionality studies have honed in on the unique place of Black women, little attention has been devoted to this from a historical vantage point. This chapter examines the role that race, gender, and place played in shaping the experience of working poverty and integrates a consideration of queuing theory and Black population size to examine how variations might shape racial outcomes in the labor market in 1920.

Purpose – Generally speaking this chapter examines if Max Weber's theory of the protestant ethic helps explain socioeconomic progress currently seen in some communities in Latin America where Protestantism has advanced rapidly.

Methodology/approach – This chapter is a case study. It reviews the literature on San Pedro de Almolonga, a small indigenous town in western Guatemala, and presents the results of our ethnographic fieldwork in the town and its surroundings during January 2011.

Findings – Almolonga has become a very prosperous town through the production and commercialization of vegetables. Prosperity has emerged due to the high fertility of the soil, the entrepreneurial skills of its inhabitants, and the high market demand for vegetables. Protestantism has been an almost perfect complement that has made possible the maximization of Almolonga's economic potential.

In recent decades, processes of postindustrialization, economic restructuring, and globalization have been transforming the landscape of social and economic inequalities in general (Wade, 2003), and in urban settings in particular (Baum, 1997; Fainstein, 1990; Sassen, 1990a, 1991, 1998; Waldinger, 1996). The role of cities as strategic sites in the globalization process and as arenas of economic transformation is central in the literature of globalization and economic restructuring (Fainstein, 2000; Sassen, 1988, 1998).

Digital technology has changed how people interact with information and each other. Being able to access and share information ensures healthcare practitioners can keep abreast of new and ever changing information and improve services. The purpose of this paper is to present an information management-knowledge transfer (IM-KT) framework which emerged from a study looking at digital literacy in the occupational therapy profession.

The research was undertaken in three stages. First an in-depth literature review was undertaken, which enabled the creation of an initial conceptual framework which in turn, informed the second stage of the research: the development of a survey about the use of digital technologies. Occupational therapy students, academics and practitioners across five different countries completed the survey, after which refinements to the framework were made. The IM-KT framework presented in this paper emerged as a result of the third stage of the study, which was completed using the Delphi technique where 18 experts were consulted over four rounds of qualitative questionnaires.

The IM-KT framework assists individuals and groups to better understand how information management and knowledge transfer occurs. The framework highlights the central role of information literacy and digital literacy and the influence of context on knowledge transfer activities.

The IM-KT framework delineates clearly between information and knowledge and demonstrates the essential role of information literacy and digital literacy in the knowledge era. This framework was developed for the occupational therapy profession and may be applicable to other professions striving to keep up to date with best evidence.

The primary purpose of this paper is to highlight the utility of operationalising the concept of skill ecosystems, or more accurately “intermediate occupational skill ecosystems”.

This paper draws on the process and findings of an empirical study of intermediate occupations in Scotland which set out to explore changing systems of initial skill creation and related problems of skill by embedding these systems within the broader canvas of skill ecosystems.

Operationalising skill ecosystems not only provided a framework from which to explore and provide an explanation of changing initial systems of skill creation but also supported broader conjectures on the nature of developments and problems within intermediate occupations.

The operationalisation presented has relevance to policy makers and academics beyond the scope of this particular examination of intermediate occupations. For policy makers, it emphasises that better skills utilisation cannot be reduced to the level of the individual; that the supply, demand, development and deployment of skills are interrelated and not discrete; and that the roles and relative influences of actors in a position to help build and sustain better skill ecosystems are changing. For academics concerned with exploring changing systems of skill creation, this, or some similar, operationalisation, has potential practical application in terms of supporting key stages in the research process.

This paper's value centres around the proposition, and illustration, that it is possible to effectively utilise a simple operationalisation of the inherently “messy” concept of skill ecosystems without losing the essence and complexity of the relations and dynamics embodied in the concept.

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrollments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far-reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st century. Commissioned detailed German and US case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of seven selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. And to demonstrate how universal this could become, the cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the US with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities.

This chapter focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the recognition through discourses of essentiality, of low-status workers and more specifically of care aides as an occupational group that performs society’s ‘dirty work’. The pandemic appears as a privileged moment to challenge the normative hegemony of how work is valued within society. However, public recognition through political discourse is a necessary but insufficient element in producing social change. Based on the theory of performativity, this chapter empirically probes conditions and mechanisms that enable a transition from discourse of essentiality to substantive recognition of the work performed by care aides in healthcare organizations. The authors rely on three main sources of data: scientific-scholarly works, documents from government, various associations and unions, and popular media reports published between February 2020 and 1 July 2022. While discourse of essentiality at the highest level of politics is associated with rapid policy response to value the work of care aides, it is embedded in a system structure and culture that restrains the establishment of substantive policy that recognizes the nature, complexity, and societal importance of care aide work. The chapter contributes to the literature on performativity by demonstrating the importance of the institutionalization of competing logics in contemporary health and social care systems and how it limits the effectiveness of discourse in promulgating new values and norms and engineering social change.

A wave of technological change in the first decades of the twenty-first century is prefiguring a fundamental restructuring of society. Key among the driving forces behind such change are powerful technologies with the potential to exert major transformations on a range of human activities and, crucially, to do so without direct human intervention. The technologies collectively referred to as Artificial Intelligence, or AI represent a productive lens through which to investigate two interrelated transformations: the emergence of self-driving cars and the coming shifts in education. This is in particular because AI’s versatility has led it to be directly applied (and increasingly valued) both in new automated driving technologies, and in the development of new forms of instruction. From the educational perspective, this means that the same technologies that are transforming workforce conditions are also reshaping – directly and indirectly – the approaches, objectives, and experiences of students and educational institutions. This chapter lays out how these twin transformations are likely to play out in the case of the automotive industry and the educational pathways of two occupations closely associated with it: automotive engineers and repair technicians. Two key arguments underpin this examination. First, educational programs for these two occupations, (and beyond) should be broadened to develop versatility and adaptability through tools and perspectives that allow people to move vertically within organizations and laterally across industries in the face of rapid technological change. Second, these educational programs must explicitly tackle AI and the coming technological revolution from a variety of dimensions that connect technical skills acquisition with the context on how these technologies are incorporated in society, how they are governed, and what are the various responses to them. This will allow students and professionals to navigate a rapidly changing labor landscape better while endowing them with the vocabulary to actively participate in the debates that shape its construction.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature, transition and formation of occupational identity for those in recovery from eating disorders (EDs).

Semi-structured “episodic” interviews were carried out with six women, self-identifying in recovery from an ED. Narrative-type-analysis produced a distilled narrative of participants’ accounts, before use of thematic analysis compared and extracted pertinent themes.

During recovery from an ED, significant shifts occurred in occupational identities, moving from sole identification with the ED, to a greater understanding of self; facilitated by increased engagement in meaningful occupations, adapting occupational meaning, connecting with self and others and the importance of becoming and belonging.

This is the first known piece of research exploring occupational identity in relation to EDs. The findings are applicable to occupational therapists and add to the growing body of qualitative research into EDs.