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The purpose of this paper is to explore the pressing issues facing health and health systems governance in the Anthropocene – a new geological time period that marks the age of colossal and rapid human impacts on Earth’s systems.

The viewpoint illustrates the extent of various human induced global ecological changes such as climate change and biodiversity loss and explores the social forces behind the new epoch. It draws together current scientific evidence and expert opinion on the Anthropocene’s health and health system impacts and warns that many these are yet unknown and likely to interact and compound each other.

Despite this uncertainty, health systems have four essential roles in the Anthropocene from adapting operations and preparing for future challenges to reducing their own contribution to global ecological changes and an advocacy role for social and economic changes for a healthier and more sustainable future.

To live up to this challenge, health services will need to expand from a focus on health governance to one on governance for health with a purpose of achieving equitable and sustainable human development.

As cities and local governments work to create more healthy, just and sustainable communities in the years ahead, health systems need to join with them as partners in that process, both as advocates and supporters and – through their own action within the health sector – as leading proponents and models of good practice.

The deadhead subculture – centered around the band Grateful Dead – has been active for 50+ years. Despite its longevity, academic work is sparse compared to other music subcultures. Given its durability and resilience, this subculture offers an opportunity to explore subcultural development and maintenance. I employ a contemporary, symbolic interactionist approach to trace the development of deadhead subculture and subcultural identity. Although identity is a basic concept in subculture research, it is not well defined: I suggest that the co-creation and maintenance of subcultural identity can be seen as a dialectic between collective identity and symbolic interactionist conceptions of individual role-identity.

The purpose of this paper is to link theories on the meaning of work with the meanings participants in a public work scheme attribute to work, in a context of high national and local unemployment and precarious employment.

This study followed a qualitative strategy to allow participants to express their own meanings of work through a work-life history approach. Findings from eight interviews are substantiated by two focus groups and thematically analysed.

Analysis of the findings revealed a high correlation with Kaplan and Tausky’s typology of the meanings of work (1974). The implication of this grounded approach is that this study expands the typology from six to eight factors. In this manner, work in a public work scheme not only has meaning as an economic activity, a structured routine, intrinsic satisfaction, interpersonal experiences, social status and a morally correct activity, but is also gendered and an opportunity for training.

Apart from expanding Kaplan and Tausky’s typology on the meanings of work (1974), this study highlights the added-value of public work schemes, in that, by providing the unemployed with the opportunity to work, they also improve their quality of life in a number of aspects.

What is it about academia anyway? We profess to hate it, spend endless amounts of time complaining about it, and yet we in academia will do practically anything to stay. The pay may be low, job security elusive, and in the end, it's not the glamorous work we envisioned it would be. Yet, it still holds fascination and interest for us. This is an article about American academic fiction. By academic fiction, I mean novels whosemain characters are professors, college students, and those individuals associated with academia. These works reveal many truths about the higher education experience not readily available elsewhere. We learn about ourselves and the university community in which we work.

Motion pictures can serve as an educational tool to shed light on ethical issues in the health insurance industry. To the chagrin of the health insurance industry, this light has oftentimes been unfavorable, as illustrated in such motion pictures as: Damaged Care (Winer, 2002), John Q (Cassavetes, 2002), and The Rainmaker (Coppola, 1997). In reaction to this unfavorable portrayal, health maintenance organizations have taken action to cast themselves in a more positive light. The objectives of this article are: to demonstrate how motion pictures that feature the health insurance industry can serve as a vehicle to illustrate management concepts such as planning, decision making, ethics, and conflict resolution; and to underscore the interrelationships and mutual dependencies of the ethical decisions, the decision-makers, and the context of the ethical dilemmas. Suggestions on how environmental response strategies can be used to improve public perceptions of the health insurance industry are also provided. The teaching method proposed in this article can be used in undergraduate level and graduate level principles of management, organizational behavior, and ethics courses.