Post-industrial Nations Research Articles

Christian religious identity and sexual behaviour in Canada today

Christianity has been an important social institution in governing sexual behaviour. However, like many post-industrial nations, Canada’s attachment to Christianity has been in decline since the 1960s. The proportion of the population affiliated with Christian churches has diminished, and the relationship between church and state has loosened. In addition, more variation has emerged within Christian religious organizations relating to sexual morality, creating greater possibilities for the acceptance of more expansive sexualities in some denominations. While scholars have long found that religious affiliation and religiosity are important determinants of sexual morality, sociological approaches to sexuality would suggest that the shifting social contexts of the past 60 years in Canada might loosen constraints on sexual behaviour, perhaps even among those who retain ties to Christian churches. To assess the relationship between Christian religious affiliation and self-reports of sexual activity, we analyze data from an original survey of sexual behaviour ( N = 2,126). The authors focus on two sexual activities that have been deemed immoral in some Christian teachings: masturbation and performing oral sex on a partner. They use ordinal logistic regression to compare the recency of participation in these sexual behaviours among those with several types of Christian affiliation, comparing each group with those who have no affiliation. They find that Catholics and mainline Protestants—the largest religious communities in Canada—do not significantly differ from those with no religious affiliation in how recently they engaged in these behaviours. However, the authors find that those with affiliations to Evangelical Christian religions are significantly less likely to report that they engaged in these behaviours recently. They argue that, in the current cultural context of dechristianization, some Christian communities engage in sexual activity in measurably different ways than others.

Smart as the new Urban Utopia in post industrial nations, case of Dholera, Gujarat

Contemporary cities are faced with a rising population due to rural to urban migration, significant demographic changes, climate risks, economic shifts and rapid technological change. The proposals for new cities and its development process is looked at as a “ready- made” finished fit for all model where the planning fails to acknowledge the existing demographics and friction on ground. This paper argues that there is a disparity between vision and planning for Dholera Smart city. It investigates the strategy cantered on land use adopted by the Dholera Special Investment Region and its land development mechanism to understand the process of city making. It critically reflects on the Town Planning scheme model of development and the idea of greenfield city planning. Investigating Dholera as a case for special investment region and it tries to position it in the theoretical understanding of paradigm shift in the model of urban governance. The paper critically reflects on the narrative of speculative urbanism and state rescaling in the case of Dholera greenfield city. This research argues that new cities by themselves are not an answer to the urbanization challenges that India is facing in contemporary times.

Type 2 diabetes

In the space of a few months in 1921, an acute and terminal disease—type 1 diabetes—became a manageable chronic condition. The discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and their colleagues captured a mood of therapeutic optimism, the hope that a new scientific medicine, rooted in the laboratory and working through the networks of industry and state health care, could find cures for all diseases. But insulin therapy, clinicians soon realised, was effective in only a minority of patients. The remainder had what since the mid-1970s has been called type 2 diabetes—a disease that has come to represent another face of modern medicine: complex chronic diseases associated with the social, commercial, and obesogenic environments of industrial and post-industrial nations. In appreciation of the peer-review heroes from 2015The Lancet is responding to the increased volume of high quality research by not only expanding the number of specialty journals within our family, but also by publishing more research studies. In 2015, we published almost 20% more research papers than in the previous year. And we did this more quickly, by offering the possibility of 10 + 10 rapid publication for randomised controlled trials sent for peer review. We also launched The Lancet Clinic, published highly clinical and global health Commissions, and Series on topics as diverse as radiation and religion. Full-Text PDF Acute myocardial infarction“You need a heart before you can have an attack”, growls the gumshoe Eddie Valiant in the 1988 cartoon-noir Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Valiant has a point, and not just the obvious one: our contemporary concept of an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) makes little sense outside a series of historical frames in which we have come to understand the function of the heart, the connection between symptoms and underlying pathologies, and the tensions between abstract analyses of risk and the experience of a heart attack. Full-Text PDF

An integrative risk and resilience model for understanding the adaptation of immigrant-origin children and youth.

We propose an integrative model for the adaptation of immigrant-origin children and youth that combines ecological with risk and resilience frameworks. Immigrant-origin children and youth are now, and will continue to be, a diverse and demographically important segment of all postindustrial nations' populations. Synthesizing evidence across psychological, educational, and sociological disciplines produced since the seminal publication of García Coll et al.'s (1996) model, along with significant events such as a global refugee crisis, a sociopolitical "deportation nation" climate, and heightened xenophobia, we provide a model for understanding the current conditions immigrant-origin children and youth encounter as they develop. This new integrative conceptual model for addressing positive frameworks for adaptation provides a culturally relevant approach for understanding both the risks and resilience of this population. The model was designed to inform practice and future research in the service of immigrant-origin children and youth. (PsycINFO Database Record

Ecologies of care: addressing the needs of immigrant origin children and youth

ABSTRACTImmigrant origin children and youth are now, and will continue to be, a diverse and demographically important segment of all post-industrial nations’ populations. In order to realize their potential, receiving contexts will need to find effective ways to integrate them into the fabric of their society. Using an ethic of care approach, we must begin by taking a comprehensive perspective on integration, which incorporates both a risk and resilience framework and an ecological perspective. A number of practices have emerged that have promise for positive implications for the schooling performance and educational integration of immigrant students These practices include 1 – short-term newcomer programs; 2 – specialized services for Students with Interrupted Formal Education; 3 – sustained services focused on new language development; 4 – services focused on heritage language development; 5 – providing explicit college pathway knowledge; 6 – summer and after-school academic enrichment programs; 7 – facilitating parental involvement (including translation and interpretation services); and 8 – advisory groups, after-school academic supports, mentoring and health services, and postsecondary supports. Providing the kinds of ecologies of care outlined here will go a long way toward helping these children and youth thrive and become the kinds of contributing members to their new society that will serve our collective future well.

Techno-environmental risks and ecological modernisation in “double-risk” societies: reconceptualising Ulrich Beck’s risk society thesis

ABSTRACTBy utilising a relatively underused framework developed by Maurie J. Cohen (1997. Risk society and ecological modernisation alternative visions for post-industrial nations. Futures, 29 (2), 105–119), this theoretical paper joins two of the most debated theories of environmental politics – ecological modernisation (EM) and Ulrich Beck’s risk society thesis – into a unified framework and problematises some of their implicit assumptions to theoretically introduce the notion of a “double-risk” society. In addition, it explains the differences between the traditional “Risk Society” theorised by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck and the newly introduced concept of a “double-risk” society. The arguments put forward in this paper provide some fresh perspectives facilitating the study of the techno-environmental risks and other ecological problems faced by “double-risk” societies. Theoretically, this paper adds to both EM theory and the risk society thesis as the generalisability of their existing versions is limited precisely because they fail to address some important social changes at the global structural level.

The new youth sector assemblage: reforming youth provision through a finance capital imaginary

The language of austerity has been widely used to characterize policy-making in post-industrial nations since the financial crisis. Youth services in England are a noted example of the effects of austerity, having suffered rapid and severe cuts following a period of record investment prior to 2008. In this article, I argue that ‘austerity’ is an inadequate conceptual basis for critical analysis of policy-making since 2008, and that youth services are better understood as an exemplar case of the reforming effects of a ‘late neoliberal regime’. The late neoliberal regime describes a regulation of production through a finance capital imaginary, as distinct from the productive capital imaginary of the quasi-marketising neoliberal regime. I argue that late neoliberalism has effected the disassembly of quasi-marketised youth services and simultaneously the emergence of a new youth sector founded on norms of investment and return. I trace the reforming force of this regime through the productive relations of capital distributions, policy discourse, and organizational forms.

Contextualizing educational differences in “vaccination uptake”: A thirty nation survey

This paper addresses the issue of public acceptance of vaccination with specific attention being paid to the role of education in vaccine uptake. Using Flash Eurobarometer 287 (2009) survey data and exploring it through the lens of Beck's reflexive modernization and Roger's protection motivation theories we examined how individual-level factors affect intention to get vaccinated, particularly aimed at examining whether higher education predicts more or less vaccination intention in different societies. The empirical results support an idea that at least for seasonal flu educational differences in vaccination uptake are contextual upon the reflexivity of the society in which respondent happens to live. Educated people living in more reflexive modernized countries tend to oppose vaccination against seasonal flu more that those highly educated living in less advanced societies, indicating that skeptical attitude towards science that is intrinsic to the modern post-industrial nations induces the immunization opposition among most informed and distrustful social group.

Late neoliberalism: Delineating a policy regime

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, policy-making in post-industrial nations has been widely characterised in terms of austerity. Yet this provides an insufficient basis for an understanding of social policy-making at this time. I argue for a ‘late neoliberal’ phase distinguished by a change in the regime governing the emergence of public service formations. I work from the example of UK policy discourse to demonstrate how in late neoliberalism austerity, social investment and localism operate in conjunction. Beyond fiscal constraint, this conjunction serves to move social policy on from ‘quasi-marketisation’ to reflect more closely the logic and forms of finance capital. The effects of this change can be seen in the reconstitution of ‘value’ in public services, how capital is distributed, and in the subjectivating force of policy. Ultimately late neoliberalism serves to sustain and reproduce familiar relations of domination.

Do overeducated individuals have increased risks of ill health?: a Swedish population-based cohort study.

Previous studies indicate that the increasing educational level in many post-industrial nations may imply that subgroups of the population work in occupations for which they are overeducated. We aimed to investigate whether overeducation is associated with future self-rated health and psychological distress. The analytical sample consisted of 21,159 participants from the Stockholm Public Health Cohort. Individuals with upper secondary or university education, who in 2006 or 2007 had occupations requiring less education, were considered overeducated. The outcomes were self-rated health (SRH) and psychological distress in 2010. Overeducated women had an increased risk of less than good SRH, compared to university-educated women in matching occupations (adjusted odds ratios (OR): 2.44 confidence intervals (CI): 1.32-4.51 for overeducated women with secondary school education), but not compared to less educated women in the same occupational class (adjusted OR: 0.87 CI:0.32-2.38 for overeducated women with secondary school education). We found no increased risk of less than good SRH for overeducated men, and no association between overeducation and psychological distress for either sex. The results indicate that overeducation is not per se associated with onset of less than good SRH or psychological distress in a short-term perspective, and the findings support education expansion as a means of improving public health.

Housing affordability, tenure and mental health in Australia and the United Kingdom: a comparative panel analysis

This paper contributes insights into the role of tenure in modifying the relationship between housing affordability and health, using a cross-national comparison of similar post-industrial nations—Australia and the United Kingdom—with different tenure structures. The paper utilises longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey and British Household Panel Survey to examine change in the mental health of individuals associated with housing becoming unaffordable and considers modification by tenure. We present evidence that the role of tenure in the relationship between housing and health is context dependent and should not be unthinkingly generalised across nations. These findings suggest that the UK housing context offers a greater level of protection to tenants living in unaffordable housing when compared with Australia, and this finds expression in the mental health of the two populations. We conclude that Australian governments could improve the mental health of their economically vulnerable populations through more supportive housing policies.

Latin American Inequality: Colonial Origins, Commodity Booms or a Missed Twentieth-Century Leveling?

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy have held the pessimistic belief in historical persistence—they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, and that it is the Iberian colonists' fault. Thus, modern analysts see today a more unequal Latin America compared with Asia and most rich post-industrial nations and assume that this must always have been true. Indeed, some have argued that high inequality appeared very early in the post-conquest Americas, and that this fact supported rent-seeking and anti-growth institutions which help explain the disappointing growth performance we observe there even today. The recent leveling of inequality in the region since the 1990s seems to have done little to erode that pessimism. It is important, therefore, to stress that this alleged persistence is based on an historical literature which has made little or no effort to be comparative, and it matters. Compared with the rest of the world, inequality was not high in the century following 1492, and it was not even high in the post-independence decades just prior to Latin America's belle époque and start with industrialization. It only became high during the commodity boom 1870–1913, by the end of which it had joined the rich country unequal club that included the USA and the UK. Latin America only became relatively high between 1913 and the 1970s when it missed the Great Egalitarian Leveling, which took place almost everywhere else. That Latin American inequality has its roots in its colonial past is a myth.

Creative Cities and the New Global Hierarchy

The world experienced three major urbanization processes between the eleventh and the twentieth century. All three periods of city growth were associated with revolutionary improvements in the logistical systems. In large parts of the world the third logistical revolution (the Industrial Revolution) has not yet come to an end. In industrializing countries and regions urbanization is thus very rapid. Concurrently, a new and fourth logistical revolution is changing the economic, social and regional structure of the post-industrial parts of the world, leading to the creation of a new Creative Society. A key aspect of this development is the increasing role of creative and innovative city regions with global linkages. These regions now form a new supranational rank-size distribution, which is centred on a few conurbations in Europe, North America and East Asia. Most post-industrial economic development is taking place in a small number of highly ranked creative regions, while other regions are suffering from the “creative destruction” of their traditional industries. One consequence of this restructuring is increasing regional income inequalities in the post-industrial nations.

How do amenity migrants learn to be environmental stewards of rural landscapes?

The changing socio-ecological dynamics in rural landscapes associated with amenity migration in post-industrial nations such as Australia has implications for environmental management. The number of non-farming landholders now occupying regions once valued primarily for agriculture has increased rapidly in the past decade, with property turnover rates in some rural Australian regions as high as 50 per cent. Given amenity migrants can shape rural ecologies through land management practice, it is vital that we understand how these management practices are informed. As such, we ask: how do amenity migrants learn to be environmental stewards of their land? We focus specifically on how the tangible interaction between landholder and landscape through experiential learning contributes to the emergence of environmental stewardship. We adopt a conceptual premise that recognises the agency of the biophysical landscape in the experiential learning process. To explore how amenity migrants learn about stewardship we undertook a qualitative case study in the hinterland regions of Melbourne, Australia. We found that initial struggles to implement land management informed by prior urban lifestyles saw landholders turn to experiential learning to fill a void of understanding about ecological processes and management practice. Over time, these experiences distilled into durable dispositions for environmental stewardship that directed either a passive (hands-off) or active (hands-on) approach to land management. Understanding how amenity migrants learn to be environmental stewards has implications for the location and timing of environmental policy engagements with new rural landholders.

Old Cells, Aging Bodies, and New Money: Scientific Solutions to the Problem of Old Age in the United States, 1945–1955

The aging population in Western industrial and postindustrial nations is among the chief demographic trends of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By 2050, the United Nations predicts one of every five individuals across the globe will be over sixty-five. In the 1930s and 1940s, scientists in the United States, aware of and concerned about this demographic upheaval, offered their own solutions to the “problem of old age.” This article examines how these scientists sought first to offer a holistic, rather than chronological, definition of old age, and then to transform the elderly from a problem to a social asset. Their initial interdisciplinary approach would quickly give way to a postwar climate bent on treating old age as a physical pathology with a medical solution.

Quality of Life Versus Quality of Care: Elderly People and Their Experience of Care in South Australian Residential Facilities

Residential aged care facilities provide care to elderly people but do they provide quality of life? Current issues such as the growth of the elderly population, increasing longevity and resulting complex health problems, financial demands, and policy inadequacies highlight the need for investigation into the aged care sector. In particular, residential care is seen as requiring analysis, due to the highly vulnerable nature of recipients. While nursing homes often profess to provide ‘holistic’ or ‘person-centred’ care to their residents, the evidence suggests that institutional goals will take precedence. Thus the research question for this study is ‘Does residential care in South Australia enable recipients to live to their full potential?’ The research method for this project will utilise in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a sample of 10 residents from two residential facilities. Findings reveal that while participants of the study are reasonably satisfied with the quality of care they receive, they are not able to live to their full potential. This has implications in many industrial and post industrial nations with ageing populations, for care home management and social work practice with older people living in residential care settings.

After the factory [post-industrial nations

Recent decades have seen the emergence in much of the developed world of so-called post-industrial nations. These are nations that are making the transition from having manufacturing-based economies to having service based economies, and this transition has brought some big economic and social problems. Economic problems include a big balance of payments deficit, and a major social problem is that, while a few people in a service-based economy can get very rich, many more people become poorer. One possible solution is a renewal of manufacturing in post-industrial nations. However, renewal cannot be achieved by trying to bring back on-shore the industrial manufacturing that has been off-shored. This is because the necessary industrial manufacturing expertise no longer exists back on-shore. Moreover, industrial manufacturing involves centralised production and long-distance transportation, both of which have high environmental costs that are now being regulated against. Accordingly, post-industrial nations need to innovate in their renewal of manufacturing. This can be achieved by combining manufacturing and services in new ways. One way is to establish design and production services that enable ordinary people to create their own goods. Another way is the production of goods that have microelectronic functionalities that enable ordinary people to create their own services.

Anti-Humanist curating: Finding a way further in

ABSTRACTAs a brief introduction to the new research project Anti-Humanist Curating, this essay focuses on the limits and problems of liberal Humanism, the prevailing ideological framework of our societies in the post-industrial Western nations, and how these limits and problems may be explored, expanded and exploded to consider new formulations of the politics of contemporary curatorial modalities. The contemporary operations of this ideology are interrogated as manifest specifically through the workings and ethics of contemporary curatorial practices: i.e. within the technologies that make art visible and the conditions of the reception of contemporary art. This introduction also discusses how curatorial practices might regain more stringent political valence for the production and reception of contemporary art more broadly.

Airway covering during bed‐sharing

Parent-infant bed-sharing is a common practice in Western post-industrial nations with up to 50% of infants sleeping with their parents at some point during early infancy. However, researchers have claimed that infants may be at risk of suffocation or sudden infant death syndrome related to airway covering or compression in the bed-sharing environment. To further understand the role of airway covering and compression in creating risks for bed-sharing infants, we report here on a sleep-lab trial of two infant sleep conditions. In a sleep-lab environment 20 infants aged 2-3 months old slept in their parents' bed, and in a cot by the bed, on adjacent nights. Infants' oxygen saturation and heart rate were monitored physiologically while infant and parental behaviours were recorded via ceiling-mounted infra-red cameras. Infants served as their own controls. Continuous 8-h recordings were obtained for covering of infant external airways, levels of infant oxygen saturation, infant heart rate, evidence of parental compression/overlying of infant, circumstances leading up to potential infant airway obstruction, and parental awareness of and responses to infant airway covering. The majority of infants (14/20) spent some part of the bed night with their airways (both mouth and nose) covered, compared with 2/20 on the cot night; however, no consistent effect on either oxygen saturation levels or heart rate was revealed, even during prolonged bouts of airway covering. All cases of airway covering were initiated by parents; 70% were terminated by parents, the remainder by infants. Seven bouts of potential compression were observed with parental limbs resting across infant bodies for lengthy periods, however, in only two cases was the full weight of a parental limb resting on an infant, both events lasting less than 15 s, both being terminated by infant movement. Although numerous authors have suggested that bed-sharing infants face risks because of airway covering by bed-clothes or parental bodies, the present trial does not lend support to this hypothesis.

Narrating the New World Domestic Order

A few decades ago, no one predicted that we would see a resurgence of paid domestic work, and that this resurgence would not only be played out on global scale, but that it would depend on mechanisms of globalization and international migration. Most observers confidently declared that nails were in coffin of paid domestic work. Not only have we seen a resurgence of private paid domestic work in United States, England, in Europe and Canada - the old industrialized North, but also in more newly industrialized, or post-industrial nations of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan; in oil rich nations of Middle East, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates (Israel has come on line as well). Particular parts of globe have emerged as places producing migrant domestic workers. We have witnessed internal and international migration of female domestic workers in and from Latin America, Asia, South Asia, and now formerly Soviet Eastern European countries. Not only as paid domestic work not gone away, we see that today it relies on global migration of women, among whom are many women who leave their families to do work.