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Interactions between customers and service providers are ubiquitous. Some of these encounters are routine, but many are characterized by conflict and intense emotions. This chapter introduces a new theory, service encounter needs theory (SENT) that aims to elucidate the mechanisms through which service encounter behaviors affect outcomes for customers and employees. Evidence is presented for the preeminence within these encounters of eight psychosocial needs, and propositions are advanced regarding likely antecedents to fulfillment and violation of these needs. Emotional experiences and displays are viewed as important consequences of need fulfillment and violation, as are numerous cognitive, behavioral, and health-related outcomes.

The sequence of stress, distress and somatization has occupied much of the late twentieth-century psychological research. The anatomy of stress can be viewed from interactional and hybrid theories that suggest that the individual relates with the surroundings by buffering the harmful effects of stressors. These acts or reactions are called coping strategies and are designed as protection from the stressors and adaptation to them. Failure to successfully adapt to stressors results in psychological distress. In some individuals, elevated levels of distress and failed coping are expressed in physical symptoms, rather than through feelings, words, or actions. Such “somatization” defends against the awareness of the psychological distress, as demonstrated in the psychosocial literature. The progression of behavior resulting from somatic distress moves from a private domain into the public arena, involving an elaborate medicalization process, is however less clear in sociological discourse. The invocation of a medical diagnosis to communicate physical discomfort by way of repeated use of health care services poses a major medical, social and economic problem. The goal of this paper is to clarify this connection by investigating the relevant literature in the area of women with breast cancer. This manuscript focuses on the relationship of psychological stress, the stress response of distress, and the preoccupation with one’s body, and proposes a new theoretical construct.

In recent years, two new approaches have bloomed in criminological thinking, narrative criminology and psychosocial criminology. Both have argued for a new consideration of offenders' narratives, which are investigated as a description of life events and choices, and of the decision to offend. An interview regarding the life and deviant career of an Italian football hooligan (‘ultras’) – a Bangladeshi–Italian boy trying to find his place in Italian society – will show how the two approaches can be combined in an analysis of the subject's often ambiguous narratives, in which both neutralisation techniques and defence mechanisms can be discerned. We will first describe the complex narrative strategies used. We will then try to explain how, through the use of complex defences and neutralisations, the subject can feel simultaneously integrated into both the deviant group and general society. In this case, despite antinomies and ambiguity, integration is achieved by keeping at bay the sense of guilt related to aggression towards parental figures.

Several decades of mental health research in the UK repeatedly report that people of African-Caribbean origin are more likely than other ethnic minorities, including the White majority, to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and related psychoses. Race-based inequalities in mental healthcare persist despite numerous initiatives such as the UK’s ‘Delivering Race Equality’ policy, which sought to reduce the fear of mainstream services and promote more timely access to care. Community-level engagement with members of African-Caribbean communities highlighted the need to develop culturally relevant psychosocial treatments. Family Intervention (FI) is a ‘talking treatment’ with a strong evidence-base for clinical-effectiveness in the management of psychoses. Benefits of FI include improved self-care, problem-solving and coping for both service users and carers, reducing the risk of relapse and re-hospitalisation. Working collaboratively with African-Caribbeans as ‘experts-by-experience’ enabled co-production, implementation and evaluation of Culturally adapted Family Intervention (CaFI). Our findings suggests that a community frequently labelled ‘hard-to-reach’ can be highly motivated to engage in solutions-focussed research to improve engagement, experiences and outcomes in mental health. This underscores the UK’s Mental Health Task Force’s message that ‘new ways of working’ are required to reduce the inequalities faced by African-Caribbeans and other marginalised groups in accessing mental healthcare. Although conducted in the UK (a high-income multi-cultural country), co-production of more culturally appropriate psychosocial interventions may have wider implications in the global health context. Interventions like CaFI could, for example, contribute to reducing the 75% ‘mental health gap’ between High and Low-and-Middle-Income counties reported by the World Health Organization.

The Traffic Safety Culture (TSC) approach has been applied primarily in high-income countries (HICs), yet the great majority of the burden of road trauma falls on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where it constitutes a humanitarian crisis. The UN Decade of Action for Road Safety established road safety in LMICs as a priority issue and launched a plan to address it. Road safety has subsequently been incorporated into the international development agenda via the Sustainable Development Goals. Characteristics of road user behavior, governance, infrastructure, enforcement, and health services in LMICs have led to assertions that many lack a “safety culture” or, more specifically, a “traffic safety culture.” While this invites the suggestion that a TSC approach would have value in LMICs, the question raised in this chapter is whether a psychosocial approach like TSC, developed and applied in HICs, is transferable to LMICs. This is first explored by examining the critique of the assumption that commonly studied psychological processes are universal, noting examples that are relevant to road safety. Cross-cultural psychology studies show that some of the psychological processes commonly studied in HICs differ in important ways in LMICs, while broader comparative research based on anthropology and sociology demonstrates the important influence of religious and cultural factors, economic and infrastructure conditions, institutional capacity and governance. The sociological construct of governmentality provides insight into why public compliance with traffic safety law may be lower in LMICs, and why this situation is likely to take a protracted period of time to change. Given the broader context of road safety in LMICs, the Road Safety Space Model (RSSM) provides a useful framework for identifying the economic, institutional, social, and cultural factors that influence a particular road safety issue in a particular country. This has implications for methodological approaches to TSC in LMICs, as less structured, more ethnographic methods are arguably more appropriate. An analysis of a typical TSC model, drawing on research from LMICs, demonstrates that the model assumes a particular hierarchy of elements (values, behavioral beliefs, normative beliefs, prototypical image, control beliefs), and relationships between them, which may not be true in LMICs. It is therefore more challenging to apply TSC in LMICs, particularly making the transition from identification of the TSC values and beliefs that lead to behavior to the development of an intervention to bring about changes in behavior. TSC is undoubtedly a promising approach in LMICs; however, its first steps should incorporate qualitative approaches and recognize the wide range of factors that are relevant to TSC; use of the RSSM would facilitate such a process. There is scope for further research to refine models of TSC, to determine the best mix of methods to use, and to explore the role of governmentality and its implications for TSC. In the interim, practitioners should strive to understand and take into account the broader social and cultural factors that influence behavior in the particular LMIC where they are working.

Purpose – To explore an ethics of entanglement in the context of mental health and psychosocial research.

Design/methodology/approach – To bring together debates within body and affect studies, and specifically the concepts of mediated perception and the performativity of experimentation. My specific focus will be on voice hearing and research that I have conducted with voice hearers, both within and to the margins of the Hearing Voices Network (see Blackman, 2001, 2007).

Findings – The antecedents for a performative approach to experimentation and an ethics of entanglement can be found within a nineteenth-century subliminal archive (Blackman, 2012).

Originality/value – These conceptual links allow the researcher to consider the technologies that might allow them to ‘listen to voices’ and introduce the non-human into our conceptions of listening and interpreting. This directs our attention to those agencies and actors who create the possibility of listening and learning beyond the boundaries of a humanist research subject.

Acute and chronic pain affects more Americans than heart disease, diabetes, and cancer combined. Conservative estimates suggest the total economic cost of pain in the United States is $600 billion, and more than half of this cost is due to lost productivity, such as absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover. In addition, an escalating opioid epidemic in the United States and abroad spurred by a lack of safe and effective pain management has magnified challenges to address pain in the workforce, particularly the military. Thus, it is imperative to investigate the organizational antecedents and consequences of pain and prescription opioid misuse (POM). This chapter provides a brief introduction to pain processing and the biopsychosocial model of pain, emphasizing the relationship between stress, emotional well-being, and pain in the military workforce. We review personal and organizational risk and protective factors for pain, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, optimism, perceived organizational support, and job strain. Further, we discuss the potential adverse impact of pain on organizational outcomes, the rise of POM in military personnel, and risk factors for POM in civilian and military populations. Lastly, we propose potential organizational interventions to mitigate pain and provide the future directions for work, stress, and pain research.

Bosnia-Herzegovina has recovered slowly from the war of 1992–1995 partly due to the fact that the Dayton Accord that ended the war created a consociational state segmented by the three majority ethnic and religious groups, the Bosniaks, the Serbs, and the Croats. These “constituent peoples” live in divided spaces, rule the country separately, and have not yet reconciled their differences, impeding the creation of national identity. Women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and women peacemakers are working toward reconciliation and peace through the construction of an alternative narrative to that of the government’s and creating an increasingly influential civil society. These NGOs, comprised of women “victims” who became “empowered leaders,” are fostering reconciliation and peace through the promotion of the human rights of five groups: (1) deceased victims of the war; (2) surviving victims of the war; (3) minority groups; (4) marginalized groups; and (5) women. By the construction of liminal space through civic art, psychosocial healing, and political action, these groups are creating a new future and building the momentum to push the country forward to a reintegrated society. Leadership of the groups is dispersed throughout the country and comprised of many ethnic groups who collaborate to meet the needs and demands of their followers, who, in effect, have created the leaders and lead inclusively with them. The chapter provides an interesting study of the power of women, who turned victimhood into social action, to build a grassroots civil society that is fostering reconciliation and peace.