Contemporary society

About: Contemporary society is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3991 publications have been published within this topic receiving 91755 citations.

[Healthcare rights: an invitation for reflection].

Abstract: This study focuses on changes and breaks in contemporary society relating to the right to healthcare as a universal value, in conformity with the guidelines provided by multilateral agencies and disseminated particularly since the 1990s. From the genesis of social rights and by tracing the interdependence between social and economic aspects of social citizenship in democratic capitalist countries, the study presents the two paradigms informing the approach to healthcare in the early 21st century: the full citizenship paradigm, according to which the right to healthcare is a universal value, and the paradigm of restricted social citizenship, according to which the right to healthcare is guided by the criterion of efficiency and economic rationalization. These propositions align with the health economy paradigm, which (i) defends focused resource allocation to attenuate poverty conditions, (ii) reduces the role of the state, (iii) recommends resource allocation to healthcare in association with social protection, and (iv) defines the market as the privileged regulator of healthcare actions.

The Lion’s Share

Abstract: This is the most in-depth analysis of inequality and social polarization ever attempted for a preindustrial society. Using data from the archives of the Venetian Terraferma, and compared with information available for elsewhere in Europe, Guido Alfani and Matteo Di Tullio demonstrate that the rise of the fiscal-military state served to increase economic inequality in the early modern period. Preindustrial fiscal systems tended to be regressive in nature, and increased post-tax inequality compared to pre-tax - in contrast to what we would assume is the case in contemporary societies. This led to greater and greater disparities in wealth, which were made worse still as taxes were collected almost entirely to fund war and defence rather than social welfare. Though focused on Old Regime Europe, Alfani and Di Tullio's findings speak to contemporary debates about the roots of inequality and social stratification.

Public Leadership : Perspectives and practices

Abstract: ‘Leadership’ is routinely admired, vilified, ridiculed, invoked, trivialised, explained and speculated about in the media and in everyday conversation. Despite all this talk, there is surprisingly little consensus about how to answer basic questions about the nature, place, role and impact of leadership in contemporary society. This book brings together academics from a broad array of social science disciplines who are interested in contemporary understandings of leadership in the public domain. Their work on political, administrative and civil society leadership represents a stock-take of what we need to know and offers original examples of what we do know about public leadership. Although this volume connects scholars living in, and mostly working on, public leadership in Australia and New Zealand, their contributions have a much broader scope and relevance.

Public relations and strategic management: Institutionalizing organization–public relationships in contemporary society

Abstract: Public relations is a critical profession in contemporary society, which is characterized by global interaction, relationships, and responsibility. Unfortunately, public relations has been institu- tionalized as a symbolic-interpretive activity that organizations use to exert their power over publics and to disguise the consequences of their behaviors from publics, governments, and the media. Th is article discusses an alternative role for public relations as a strategic management rather than a mes- saging activity. It presents a model of public relations in strategic management and examines research that elaborates segments of the model: environmental scanning, stakeholders and publics, issues and crises, scenario building, cultivating and evaluating relationships, tracing the eff ect of relationships on reputation, planning and evaluating communication programs strategically, and how digital media can be used to further the strategic management process. It concludes that research is needed on how public relations can be empowered and institutionalized as a strategic management activity.

Zur Mitte drängt sich alles (Teil 2).: Die Gegenwart im Lichte historischer Klassenstudien

Abstract: In public opinion and the social sciences, German post-war society has been interpreted as a ‘society beyond classes’, regardless of the fact that the class structure had not changed to a significant degree since the times of the Weimar Republic. This positive self-image was scientifically confirmed by Theodor Geiger’s study Society in the melting pot (1949) and Helmut Schelsky’s concept of a Leveled middle class society (1953). Even though in the last decades the level of inequality has risen, the mainstream of social and economic research in Germany keeps focusing on the income, living conditions and ‘anxieties’ of a widened and vaguely defined middle class – instead of reflecting the class structure of contemporary society as a whole. This kind of research and sociological thinking tends to focus on the distribution of wealth rather the causes of inequality stemming from the capitalist mode of production. Criticizing the dominant conception of middle classes on the basis of current examples, the author underlines the importance of a classrelated concept of modern capitalist society. The main groups of employees, even the more qualified ones, belong to the majority class of wage earners, not to an opaque ‘middle class’ unduly mixed of small business people, freelancers and dependent labour force. What is needed is a closer look at the changes in class structure and the growing influence of gender, habitus, milieus and ‘ways of life’ – but not at all the ideological and political segregation between the allegedly ‘old’ working class and the allegedly ‘new’ middle classes.