Shedding light on current transformations in payment mechanisms and transparency of hospital performance data and prices, this volume of Advances in Health Care Management presents findings on hospital profitability, cost, and organizational structures. Divided into two sections: 'Reimbursement, Cost and Profitability' and 'The Move Towards Transparency', the chapters employ a variety of research methodologies to explore the impact of transformation in payment and debt structures, profitability, and horizontal or vertical integration on outcomes such as price, clinical outcomes, and health plan selection. The authors examine recent changes including the redesign of the U.S. health care system to achieve higher value, and the establishment of mechanisms that transform reimbursement models and promote consumerism through transparency of data. Additionally, the volume takes a look at the emerging trend of transparency between health care stakeholders such as patients, health care staff, hospitals, insurance companies, and the government, providing a valuable insight into how the future might look.

By studying six different aspects of culture in Canton in the period between the two World Wars, this book helps broaden our limited knowledge of the social and cultural lives of the common people in this largest city of South China. The author examines how the Cantonese in this period indulged in their imagined cultural superiority as "modern" citizens, ushering in a cult of the modern city. During this period, Cantonese opera was also emerging and evolving into a widely accepted form of commercialised mass entertainment. The process of social and cultural change and its impact on the development of this city and its people are revealed throughout the book. This book also aims to redress some major misconceptions of the socio-cultural realities as seen in official rhetoric or academic discourse on the matters of patriotism and anti-foreignism, gambling, prostitution, and opium consumption. Contemporary non-official and folk materials reveal that the common people were much more pro-Western than xenophobic in attitude, and the alleged social and political "calamities" of gambling, opium consumption and prostitution were more rhetorical than real. Understanding Canton provides us with, not only a fuller and more comprehensive picture of city life and popular mentalities, but also an important clue to understand how and why the social history of this city was distorted and constructed in ways that suited the political ideology and nation-building agenda of the ruling regimes.

The universality of health concerns and the complexity of dealing with them makes it increasingly important for professionals in sociology, health care, and policy making to become acquainted with the wide variety of strategies used in different social contexts. Although Israel is in some ways unique in its social problems and its approach to health care, many of its problems resemble those of other societies, and many of its solutions can be applied in other countries. Social Dimensions of Health looks at distinctive aspects of the Israeli health care system, while at the same time drawing comparisons with other societies.

Judith Shuval discusses the health and health behavior of a variety of groups in Israeli society that have not been systematically considered in other analyses: women, the elderly, alternative health care providers, immigrants, and Israeli Arabs. Shuval analyzes the critical influence of ultraorthodox parties on health policy in the context of a tenuously balanced coalition government, and shows how the pervasive conflict between Israel and the Arab world penetrates all aspects of social life, including health. Inequality in health is discussed with special reference to Israeli Arabs. The study concludes with a discussion of what can be learned from the Israeli experience, and how it can best be applied in other social contexts. Social Dimensions of Health will prove useful to scholars, health practitioners, and lay people seeking a broad understanding of the social factors underlying health and health care.

This next volume in Research in the Sociology of Health Care covers a variety of important social factors and their relationship to health and health care inequities both in the United States and the rest of the world. The authors of this volume explore issues related to infectious diseases and various chronic health problems. One section focuses on Covid 19 and issues of kidney disease, face masks and social values, pandemic experiences in rural parts of the United States, and in urban India. Other topics that are discussed focus on issues outside the United States such as in Nepal, Ecuador, and broader cross-national comparisons. Several papers focus on health care system issues within the United States including micro hospitals in Texas, evidence-based medicine, and trends in health disparities in the Latina population in the United States. Written from a sociological and broader social science approach, the papers provide important information both about broad trends in the US and other countries and some specific considerations of issues from a social perspective as linked to Covid 19.

Social interaction is the engine which drives an individual's psychological development and it can create changes on all levels of society. Social Relations in Human and Societal Development includes essays by internationally renowned academics from a range of disciplines including social psychology, international relations and child development.

Over the past 30 years, many social psychologists have been critical of the practice of using incentive systems in business, education, and other applied settings. The concern is that money, high grades, prizes, and even praise may be effective in getting people to perform an activity but performance and interest are maintained only so long as the reward keeps coming. Once the reward is withdrawn, the concern is that individuals will enjoy the activity less, perform at a lower level, and spend less time on the task. The claim is that rewards destroy people's intrinsic motivation. Widely accepted, this view has been enormously influential and has led many employers, teachers, and other practitioners to question the use of rewards and incentive systems in applied settings. Contrary to this view, the research by Cameron and Pierce indicates that rewards can be used effectively to enhance interest and performance. The book centers around the debate on rewards and intrinsic motivation. Based on historical, narrative, and meta-analytic reviews, Cameron and Pierce show that, contrary to many claims, rewards do not have pervasive negative effects. Instead, the authors show that careful arrangement of rewards enhances motivation, performance, and interest. The overall goal of the book is to draw together over 30 years of research on rewards, motivation, and performance and to provide practitioners with techniques for designing effective incentive systems.

New concepts, new ideas, and new objects diffuse through a society in a fairly predictable, multi-stage process over an indeterminate period of time. In recent years many social scientists representing various disciplines have accepted the methods and findings of diffusion research and it has attained legitimacy and prominence. To make these findings more easily accessible, Musmann and Kennedy have compiled a useful and timely bibliography which contains over 2,300 entries, most of which were published after 1970. Relevant articles and monographs in English were located by the compilers through systematic searches of online data bases and printed indexes. A few foreign language citations are also included here. The interdisciplinary nature of the diffusion model has allowed social scientists to document and illustrate social transformations in diverse fields. Recently, the processes of technology transfer and technological change have come under scrutiny by social scientists. Historically, technological innovations have played a major role in the development of advanced industrialized nations. Therefore, their diffusion, even in one society, often involves significant social changes to both habitat and economy, and should be a well-watched barometer. Following an illuminating introduction, thirteen separate chapters provide full bibliographical citations for studies in various disciplines including: anthropology, business and economics, geography, history, psychology, and technology, among others. Another chapter is devoted to bibliography and research methods, and author and subject indexes complete the volume. The most comprehensive document of its kind in print, Diffusion of Innovations should find a place in most libraries, especially those collecting materials in communications, education, sociology, and the health sciences.

A ground-breaking book that reveals why our human biases effect the way we receive and interpret information

Our lives are minefields of misinformation. Statistics, stories and studies lie to us on a daily basis. Not only this but, as Professor Alex Edmans reveals, our brains lie to us too. He argues that we need to acknowledge and understand the role that our own human biases play in interpreting and digesting the information that we consume. It's only when we do, that we can actively resist being manipulated, and make informed choices that improve our lives.

While current scholarly interest has assured Marshall McLuhan's (1911-80) foundational status as a media theorist, much room still exists for further exploration of his writings, which have taken on additional layers of significance in our contemporary digital moment. Holding that media were extensions of the human, McLuhan also posited that the human was a product of technology. Ranging across fields as diverse as art history, biotechnology, and beyond, this collection of essays considers McLuhan's ground-breaking approach within a number of new contexts and explores the distinguishing features of his media theory.

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"A growing number of scholars have helped us understand the law's impact on both the major events and the minutia of our daily lives. It's safe to say, however, that few do so with the provocative verve and vigor of Derrick Bell. This volume is a must read for long-time followers of Derrick Bell's work as well as casual readers looking for material that is both intellectually stimulating and entertaining."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., co-author of "The Future of the Race"

"Finally, the essence of Derrick Bell as a scholar, teacher, and activist is captured in the Derrick Bell Reader. Bell's remarkable career, as a civil rights attorney, scholar on race and justice, and activist promoting the rights of all citizens, is fully addressed. It is a great read."--Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., author of "All Deliberate Speed"

"Derrick Bell's impressive body of scholarship continues to inspire generations of readers by inviting them into an extended conversation between him and a community of people who gave life to his vision and generously shared their own wisdom in search of justice."--Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, co-authors of "The Miner's Canary"

"Biting, intense, full of dramatic surprises and brilliant insights, Bell's work is the antidote to all the feel-good narratives of racial change."--Duncan Kennedy, author of "Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy"

"For those who agree, or disagree, with Bell's radical departure from accepted racial notions, "The Derrick Bell Reader" offers plenty to dissect. The book could not have arrived at a better time."--Brian Gilmore, Howard University School of Law

Lawyer, activist, teacher, writer: for over 40 years, Derrick Bell has provoked his critics and challenged his readers with uncompromising candor and progressive views on race and class in America. A founder of Critical Race Theory and pioneer of the use of allegorical stories as tools of analysis, Bell's groundbreaking work shatters conventional legal orthodoxies and turns comfortable majoritarian myths inside out.

Edited and with an extensive introduction by leading critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, The Derrick Bell Reader reflects the tremendous breadth of issues that Bell has grappled with over his phenomenal career, including affirmative action, black nationalism, legal education and ethics. Together, the selections offer the most complete collection of Derrick Bell's writing available today.

For the majority of Americans, hard times have long been a way of life. Some work multiple low-wage jobs, others face the squeeze of stagnant wages and rising costs of living. Sociologist Celine-Marie Pascale talked with people across Appalachia, at the Standing Rock and Wind River reservations, and in the bustling city of Oakland, California. Their voices offer a wide range of experiences that complicate dominant national narratives about economic struggles. Yet Living on the Edge is about more than individual experiences. It's about a nation in a deep economic and moral crisis. It's about the long-standing collusion between government and corporations that prioritizes profits over people, over the environment, and over the nation's well-being. It's about how racism, sexism, violence, and the pandemic shape daily experience in struggling communities. And, ultimately, it's a book about hope that lays out a vision for the future as honest as it is ambitious. Most people in the book are not progressives; none are radicals. They're hard-working people who know from experience that the current system is unsustainable. Across the country people described the need for a living wage, accessible health care, immigration reform, and free education. Their voices are worth listening to.

This book is about how TV makers--notably writers, producers, and network programmers--are deeply influenced by public pressures outside their craft. Many scholars assume that the relationship between society and television is one-way, that the traffic of influence moves from the content of a program to the behavior of those who view it, and that if a show is too exploitative or violent or stereotypical, it transforms the minds of those who watch it in some manner. Authors Selnow and Gilbert maintain that the one-way influence is only half-true. Even as television makes its impact on viewers, viewers, society, and society's institutions make their impact on television, often with more noticeable effect.

Some of television's most influential and best known producers and programmers (including Grant Tinker, Norman Lear, Steven Bochco, and Gary David Goldberg) discuss the forces that affect their selection of themes and treatments, why they include or reject material, and how they view their opinion leader roles and their roles as members of the society that is so influenced by their products. Selnow and Gilbert examine many of the obvious as well as less apparent forces that affect content decisions: government regulations, interest groups, and advertisers. They argue that the rapid advancement in telecommunication technologies has as much to do with what we watch as any of the social forces. The authors look not only at the current control of content, but point toward the consortium of influences that will affect the medium as it evolves rapidly throughout the next decade.

Focusing on 45 military leaders from four continents and 13 countries, spread across four centuries, this study paints, for the first time, a collective, comparative portrait of high-ranking military officers. The authors develop an interactional theory of military leaders, stressing the interplay between sociodemographic variables, psychological dynamics, and situational factors. They examine age and birthplace, socioeconomic status, family life, ethnicity and religion, education and occupation, activities and experiences, and ideologies and attitudes. They find military leaders to be a remarkably coherent and homogeneous group of men propelled toward the military by a combination of nationalism, imperialism, relative deprivation, love deprivation, marginality, and vanity.

Recent developments in the European integration process have raised, amongst many other things, the issue of linguistic diversity, for some a stumbling block to the creation of a European democratic polity and its legal and social institutions. The solution to the 'question of language', involves an understanding of the role played by natural languages and the consequent design of policies and institutional mechanisms to facilitate inter-linguistic and intercultural communication. This is not an exclusively European problem, and nor is it entirely new, for it is also the problem of linguistic majorities and minorities within unitary nation-states. However, the effects of globalization and the diffusion of multiculturalism within nation-states have given renewed emphasis to the question of language in diverse societies. Facing the question anew involves reconsidering traditional ideas about social communication and the public sphere, about opinion-formation and diffusion, about the protection of cultural and linguistic minorities, and about the role that language plays in the process of formation of political and legal cultures. This volume is intended as a multidisciplinary contribution towards studying and assessing the range of problems that form the 'language question' in Europe and diverse societies.

This multidisciplinary analysis links epidemiologic, cultural, social, and medical analyses of cancer prevention, detection, and care. The contributors demonstrate that different ethnic groups and cultures have distinct concepts of cancer prevention and control. These ideas are dynamic, shaped by personal and group histories, social networks, technologies, politics, economics, religions, linguistics, and other environmental conditions.

Cross-cultural writings about cancer make this book useful to professionals and students in the disciplines of medicine, nursing, public health, sociology, anthropology, and social welfare. The 15 articles reveal that cancer knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors are diverse cross-cultural constructs resulting from distinct experiences. Ideas and behaviors about prevention and control may be shared or individual and idiosyncratic. The book is composed of three sections: I. Cancer Beliefs and Behaviors; II. Interventions in Review; III. New Strategies for Cancer Research. The authors, including anthropologists, epidemiologists, health educators, nurses, and physicians, explicate notions of prevention and control, and assess interventions and methodologies that illustrate generally ignored successes in decreased mortality and morbidity among members of specific populations.

While the defense of public image in political, corporate, and celebrity rhetoric has been widely studied, religious image repair has been largely ignored. "Divine Apology" considers the unique circumstances facing religious figures in need of restoring their reputations by examining a blend of historical and contemporary defenses offered by various figures and groups. The author covers apologia as advanced by the Apostle Paul, Justin Martyr, Martin Luther, Jimmy Swaggart, evangelical opponents of the Jesus Seminar, and conservative leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention. He concludes that strategies used for religious image repair often differ significantly from those employed by politicians, corporations, and other public figures.

In this unique volume, Miller demonstrates that religious groups and individuals are as motivated as anyone else to purify their public images. The issues prompting defenses, however, are more likely to focus on epistemological conflicts and clashes of worldviews than on inappropriate behaviors. As a consequence, religious apologists are more likely to associate attacks against their beliefs as assaults against their characters. This causes religious image restoration discourse to manifest itself as more transcendent than defenses in traditional situations involving laypeople. Miller posits that the presence of God and religious antecedents as salient audiences, as well as other factors concerning audience and context, work to shape a form of apology that is characteristically religious.

Marion Goldman and Steven Pfaff define a spiritual virtuoso as someone who works toward personal purification and a sense of holiness with the same perseverance and intensity that virtuosi strive to excel in the arts or athletics. Since the Protestant Reformation, activist virtuosi have come together in large and small social movements to redefine the meanings of spiritual practice, support religious equality, and transform a wide range of social institutions. Tracing the impact of spiritual virtuosi from the sixteenth century Reformation through the nineteenth-century Anti-Slavery Movement to the twentieth-century Human Potential Movement and beyond, Marion Goldman and Steven Pfaff explore how personal virtuosity can become a social force. Martin Luther began to expand spiritual possibilities in the West when he charted paths that did not require the Church's intercession between the individual and God. He believed that everyone could and should reach toward sacred truths and transcendent moments. Over the centuries, millions of people have built on his innovations and embarked on spiritual quests that offer new possibilities for sacred relationships and social change.

The past few years have seen an unexpected resurgence of street-level protest movements around the world, from the uprisings of the Arab Spring to the rise of the anti-austerity Indignados in Spain and Greece to the global spread of the Occupy movement. This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of these movements, setting them in international, socio-economic, and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts. As the most significant wave of mass protests in decades continues apace, this book offers an authoritative analysis that could not be more timely.

Over the past 50 years, the federal government's efforts to reform American public education have transformed U.S. schools from locally-run enterprises to complex systems in which federal, state and local actors jointly construct the educational environment of U.S. children. Through struggles over school integration, the growth of special education, the teaching of English learners and the rise of accountability politics, the federal role in U.S. education has meant a profound reconstruction of local expectations, roles and political alignments. Seeking to construct the federal schoolhouse - an educational system in which there are common national expectations and practices - has meant the creation of new modes of education within local institutions. The creation of this "education state " has also meant that federal educational initiatives have collided with - or reinforced - local political regimes in cities and suburbs alike. To the extent that "all politics is local, " the federal role in public schools has changed both the conduct and the norms of local educational politics. Building the Federal Schoolhouse examines how increasing federal authority over public education in the U.S. changes the practices of 'operational localism' in education and how local regime commitments implement, thwart, or even block federal policy initiatives. The book examines these issues through an in-depth, fifty year examination of federal educational policies at work within one community, Alexandria, Virginia. The home of T.C. Williams High School, memorialized in the Hollywood movie Remember the Titans, Alexandria has been transformed within two generations from a Jim Crow school system to a new immigrant gateway school district with over 20 percent of its students English learners. Along the way, the school system has struggled to provide quality education for special needs students, sought to overcome the legacies of tracking and segregated learning and simultaneously retain upper-middle class students in this wealthy suburb of Washington, DC. Most recently, it has grappled with state and federally imposed accountability measures that seek to boost educational outcomes. All of these policy initiatives have contended with the existing political regime within Alexandria, at times forcing the local regime to a breaking point, and at times bolstering its reconstruction. At the same time, the local expectations and governing realities of administrators, parents, politicians and voters alike have sharply constrained federal initiatives, limiting their scope when in conflict with local commitments and amplifying them when they align. Through an extensive use of local archives, contemporary accounts, school data and interviews, Reed not only paints an intimate portrait of the conflicts that the creation of the federal schoolhouse has wrought in Alexandria, but also documents the successes of the federal commitment to greater educational opportunity. In so doing, he highlights the complexity of the American education state and the centrality of local regimes and local historical context to federal efforts to reform education.

The creative citizen unbound introduces the concept of 'creative citizenship' to explore the potential of civically-minded creative individuals in the era of social media and in the context of an expanding creative economy. Contributors examine the value and nature of creative citizenship, not only in terms of its contribution to civic life and to social capital but also to various and more contested definitions of value, both economic and cultural.