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This chapter addresses inequalities in the United Kingdom through the lens of health inequalities. Driven by inequalities in income and power, health inequalities represent a microcosm of wider debates on inequalities. They also play a role as the more politically unacceptable face of inequalities – where other types of inequality are more blatantly argued as collateral damage of advanced neoliberalism including ‘inevitable’ austerity measures, politicians are more squeamish about discussing health inequalities in these terms.

The chapter starts by depicting health inequalities in Scotland and summarises health policy analyses of the causes of, and solutions to, health inequalities. It then describes the concept of ‘proportionate’ universalism’ and sets this within the context of debates around universal versus targeted welfare provision in times of fiscal austerity.

It then turns to a small empirical case-study which investigates these tensions within the Scottish National Health Service. The study asks those operating at policy and practice levels: how is proportionate universalism understood; and, is it a threat or ballast to universal welfare provision?

Findings are discussed within the political context of welfare retrenchment, and in terms of meso- and micro-practices. We conclude that there are three levels at which proportionate universalism needs to be critiqued as a means of mitigating the impacts of inequalities in the social determinants of health. These are within the political arenas, at a policy and planning level and at the practice level where individual practitioners are enabled or not to practice in ways that might mitigate existing inequalities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore eighteenth‐century London retailers' attitudes to shoplifting and their strategies for countering customer theft.

The paper is based on an examination of contemporary documentary evidence, in particular a quantitative and qualitative analysis of shopkeeper practice drawn from trial transcripts of shoplifting prosecutions at London's highest criminal court, the Old Bailey.

The paper reveals that shopkeepers predominantly invested in preventative measures to control customer theft, rather than relying on prosecution. It demonstrates that improved shop fittings and new marketing methods served to reinforce the effectiveness of this strategy. The techniques that retailers employed are shown to directly reflect the nature and location of the risks they experienced, even to the extent of being a contributory factor in the withdrawal of women from the retail sector during this period.

The study is limited to a sample of London trials and the experiences of retailers who prosecuted.

This is the first study of shoplifting prevention in this period. It analyses retailer practice and illustrates how this interacted with their perception of the prevalence of criminality, demonstrating that their approach to stock protection anticipated that of modern retailers. It complements existing scholarship on eighteenth‐century retailing and marketing.

The proliferation of undergraduate paramedicine programs has led to a surge in demand for work integrated learning (WIL), placing pressure on domestic ambulance service placement capacity. The objective of this study was to establish a baseline understanding of international WIL in paramedicine university programs.

A cross-sectional study design was utilized to gather data from Australasian universities offering undergraduate paramedicine. A telephone survey was used to gather quantitative and qualitative data using a tailored questionnaire.

Of 15 eligible paramedicine programs, seven program leads participated. All offered international WIL, predominantly short-duration format in locations including United Kingdom, USA, Israel, Nepal, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, New Zealand, South Africa, Finland, Canada and Vanuatu. Two distinct models were identified: academic-accompanied, group “study tours” and unaccompanied individual placements. International WIL is common in paramedicine but placement models, rationale and expected learning experiences are diverse.

International WIL is an increasing component of paramedicine and other health discipline degrees, yet the pedagogical rationale for their inclusion and typology is not always clear. This paper provides an insight into the variance in international WIL typology in a single health discipline highlighting the heterogeneity and need for future research linking into the structure, support and assessment of international WIL.

This chapter examines four episodes of The Simpsons, paying particular interest to one, The Days of Wine and D’oh’ses to connect the notion of pastiche with a symbolic interactionist view of media representation. We use The Simpsons and episodes pertinent to alcoholism and alcoholic imbibing to show that pastiche, which does not deny the resolute qualities of a serious social issue, nevertheless provides ironic and fantastic imagery to merge the serious and even tragic with the comedic. We use the four episodes to depict alcoholism as a disease but also as focal point for humor, making the contrast between The Days of Wine and D’oh’ses and its classic alcoholism-film counterpart, The Days of Wine and Roses, central to the tragic-comedic connection. We further draw upon Denzin’s notions of the comedic drunk and the alcoholism alibi to discuss how pastiche both inspires attention to alcoholism as a serious medical disease and disease of the self and to alcoholism as pivotal to comedic character development and the emergence of pragmatic and creative selves.

This article provides an analysis of the gendering process in product innovation. Interwoven into this process is the encapsulation of a token position. The article expands and deepens the tokenism theory through a discussion of gender in the innovation process. The article draws from recent and classical theories of gender, ranging from gendering approaches to Acker's theory of gendered organisations and processes within organisations, and Moss Kanter's tokenism theory. The main objective of the article is to address this gap in the tokenicsm discussion and introduce a new concept of “processual tokenism”.

The article builds on an intensive single case study and uses a narrative methodology and approach in the analysis of the data of the case in question. The primary data used in the narratives consist of interview data. The article also uses documents and reports as secondary data in the narrative construction. The approach used is theoretical, interpretative and qualitative.

The article provides a detailed narrative of the intertwined nature of the gender position in an organisation and the invention process. One of the outcomes is that the gendering of a product is triggered by tokenism, and that gendering of a product can be interpreted also as a deliberate and successful process. The article contributes to the tokenism theorizing.

The limitations of the article may relate to the specificity of the innovation process in chemical industry that are different to other industrial fields.

The article does not have direct practical implications.

The article contributes to the theory of tokenism by providing an updated and extended version of tokenism and naming it as “processual tokenism”. Furthermore, the article contributes to the debates on gendered organisations by focusing on gendering through tokenism and the persistence of male dominance. Finally, the article contributes to gender theories by introducing the idea and analysing of how the gendering of a product innovation takes place.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel approach to the analysis of individual and co‐constructed change management narratives, utilizing a framework derived from the theory of complex responsive processes.

The research project explored change management through the analysis of narratives arising from participation in group conversation. This comprised a six‐month intervention with a group of six leaders from the Church of England. An action research method was employed that required the leaders to bring a case study from their work that required a change management intervention. The focus of the research study was not to “solve the problem” but to practice a particular method of conversation. Transcripts of the conversations were analyzed for change or continuity in the organizing narratives. The analytical framework employed comprises three paired categories of organizing narrative themes, namely Legitimate/Shadow; Formal/Informal; and Conscious/Unconscious.

The analysis focuses on both the interactions between these organizing themes and upon the iterations, over time, in the narratives. Following the theory of complex responsive processes, the practice of change management and its consequences are understood not as cause‐effect but rather as participation in emergent narratives. It is suggested that such narratives do not merely contribute to change management within an organization but that from the perspective of complex responsive processes theory such conversational life is change management.

The action inquiry method employed and the approach to data analysis from the perspective of complex responsive processes theory, together constitute a novel approach to researching and understanding change management.