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It is not surprising that the dominant cognitive frame through which most audiences view climate change is that of an environmental problem. However, this messaging strategy has proven susceptible to counter-attacks, defensing processing, and other cognitive biases. As such, many environmental advocates are switching gears. From Barack Obama to Pope Francis, the environment-as-public-health-concern narrative is increasingly found in climate change messages. This strategy involves making the abstract issue of climate change more concrete by tying it to negative health impacts, like asthma, heat-related illness, and the spread of disease. Understanding why and for whom this strategy is persuasive, particularly in a social media context where users often encounter persuasive climate change messages, can help advance theory and practice.

The purpose of this chapter is two-fold: 1.) Test the effects of climate message frame (damage to nature or damage to public health), message source (liberal or conservative organization), and the use of visual human exemplars (present or absent) in social media messages; and, 2.) Assess the predictive utility of different conceptual frameworks (personification, construal level theory, and moral foundations theory) as explanatory mechanisms for persuasive social media climate message effects. The results of a nation-wide experiment reveal that the use of visual exemplars matters when climate change is framed as an environmental problem, but otherwise message frame, source, and visual exemplar use have little impact on policy attitudes. Further analyses demonstrated that multiple conceptual mechanisms related to the aforementioned theories help explain social media effects on climate change attitudes.

Attempts to show the wider social impact of collective redundancy creating recruits for the “flexible” sector of the labour force, those on temporary contracts, part time and self employed. Considers the way collective redundancy has changed the demographic structure of the UK labour force including a sizeable number of older unemployed individuals and many female part time workers. Argues that this could be seen as limited empowerment, labour market enfranchisement for women or marginalization of the traditional older male worker.

Does flexibility in employment relations necessarily mean a polarisation into desirable and undesirable jobs? The Core/Periphery labour force structure was developed as the model which would facilitate the attainment of numerical, financial and functional flexibility. In particular, numerical flexibility is achieved via the expansion of the peripheral workforce as variations in the supply of non‐firm specific activities occur in response to the demands of the firm.

The aim of this paper is to assess whether employment insecurity/instability is a necessary consequence of operating as a self‐employed worker in the external labour market (ELM) and to examine the role for social capital to influence any such potential insecurity/instability.

A total of 124 workers in the UK construction industry – 78 self‐employed and 46 directly employed – and 12 employers were interviewed in a period spanning the New Construction Industry Scheme in 1999 to provide the empirical evidence for this research.

Belying the common assumptions of atomistic dependence in the face of employers hiring from a competitive and undifferentiated labour pool in an ELM, the results of this research clearly demonstrate a key role for social capital to influence the allocation of work in the ELM and thus minimise the importance of job tenure in determining perceptions of employment security/stability.

The role for social capital to influence the allocation of work has attracted increasing attention in recent years. This paper provides further evidence that job tenure by itself, cannot be used as a definitive measure of employment security/insecurity in both internal and ELMs.

There is relatively little empirical research on the role of social capital to influence the distribution of work; particularly in the ELM. This paper responds to the increasing call for research in this area to focus on micro/social action rather than on macro/structural variables and mechanisms.

Introduces the different types of inequality. Argues the distinction between inequality and differences. Asks if social inequality is important or a mistaken ideal? Briefly looks at the different forms inequality takes.

The cardinal point to note here is that the development (and unfortunately the likely potential) of area policy is intimately related to the actual character of British social policy. Whilst area policy has been strongly influenced by Pigou's welfare economics, by the rise of scientific management in the delivery of social services (cf Jaques 1976; Whittington and Bellamy 1979), by the accompanying development of operational analyses and by the creation of social economics (see Pigou 1938; Sandford 1977), social policy continues to be enmeshed with the flavours of Benthamite utilitatianism and Social Darwinism (see, above all, the Beveridge Report 1942; Booth 1889; Rowntree 1922, 1946; Webb 1926). Consequently, for their entire history area policies have been coloured by the principles of a national minimum for the many and giving poorer areas a hand up, rather than a hand out. The preceived need to save money (C.S.E. State Apparatus and Expenditure Group 1979; Klein 1974) and the (supposed) ennobling effects of self help have been the twin marching orders for area policy for decades. Private industry is inadvertently called upon to plug the resulting gaps in public provision. The conjunction of a reluctant state and a meandering private sector has fashioned the decaying urban areas of today. Whilst a large degree of party politics and commitment has characterised the general debate over the removal of poverty (Holman 1973; MacGregor 1981), this has for the most part bypassed the ‘marginal’ poorer areas (cf Green forthcoming). Their inhabitants are not usually numerically significant enough to sway general, party policies (cf Boulding 1967) and the problems of most notably the inner cities has been underplayed.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems.

The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts.

The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code.

In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail.

To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.

Clinical placement is an important formalised student activity for linking healthcare education and healthcare practices. The purpose of this study is to investigate the organising of clinical placements by examining conditions for collaboration between higher education and healthcare organisations.

The study is based on interviews with central actors at a university and two healthcare organisations with official duties of organising clinical placements.

The findings indicate that collaboration in the organising of clinical placements is a complex matter of interconnected actors in different organisational positions, at both strategic and operative levels. The university and the healthcare organisations approached the clinical placement with a shared commitment.

The findings provide important guidance for improving collaboration in the organising of clinical placements. This may have an impact on how contextual conditions of the educational framing and daily healthcare practices are viewed and how the interdependency between the long-term strategic issues and the short-term needs of healthcare organisations is approached.

This research emphasises the need for careful consideration of the collaborative practices on an organisational level between higher education and healthcare organisations as different needs, motives and logics have to be considered.

Grounded in Media System Dependency theory, this work investigates the impact of new media on political efficacy. It suggests that dependence on online resources affects people’s perceptions about the democratic potential of the Internet. Using structural equation modeling, the study tests the relationship between political attitudes and the perceived utility of the Web. The analysis employs measures that take into consideration the facilitating role of communication technologies. Results indicate that online political efficacy is associated with individual views about the comprehensiveness and credibility of new media. Efficacy is also linked to the perceived ability of online tools to aid the maintenance of ideologically homogenous social networks. The intensity of Internet dependency relations is found to be predicted by the perceived comprehensiveness – but not credibility – of online news.