The labor market is evolving very rapidly in recent years, in Europe and worldwide. The fast and deep changes brought a brand-new context of challenges and occupational risks to the attention of stakeholders. The current global financial crisis has increased the economic pressures on companies and they in turn have intensified the effects on employees, particularly in terms of new competition contexts and a lot of stress and mental health issues. Concurrently, social, political, and environmental problems generate under-employment, over-qualification, over-education, low wages for skilled workers, and unmet demand for education. Consequently, both high skilled and low skilled immigrant workers are increasing. In addition, workplaces are continually changing in step with the introduction of new technologies, materials, and work processes, together with the changes in the labor market, the new forms of employment, and the new work organizations. These changes lead to new opportunities for employees and employers – but also to new risks or re-actualization of old organizational risks. According to the EU-OSHA, the key points that describe the evolution that is currently ongoing in the world of work are globalization, the technical innovation, and the aging population. On one hand, some older potential risks are reappearing in organizations: intensive fear and worries, organizational anxiety, boredom, physical violence, alienation, segregation, loneliness, and isolation. On the other hand, re-emerging perceived organizational features seem vital for organizations and more important today than ever. Central constructs in the study of organizational behavior and organizational health such as perceived organizational support, commitment in organizational context, socialization processes, change capacity of organizations, perceived organizational justice, ergonomics, and motivation, nowadays seem increasingly important and renewed.

This book presents an international review of the principle new post-modern narrative interventions in Guidance and Career Counseling. With contributions from the most important scholars in the field this volume presents new qualitative approaches and tools to assess the effectiveness of narrative interventions. It provides a critically needed review of case studies regarding the most innovative and updated interventions. This volume explores the field of Guidance and Career Counseling according to the most recent post-modern theories in career construction, life construction and life meaning, the psychology of working and the relational theory of working. It offers an international perspective for the application of effective post-modern Guidance and Career Counseling interventions to facilitate individuals’ life and career management. The volume serves as a fundamental instrument and reference for researchers, professionals, counselors, career counselors, professors, and students interested in the field.

This book explores a new area of psychology of sustainability and sustainable development with specific focus on organizations, and introduces a range of advanced perspectives for healthy business, harmonization and decent work. Split into two parts, the first half presents cross-cultural contributions that study in depth the benefits and drawbacks of sustainability, while the second half discusses theoretical approaches and empirical research that offer new prospects for innovation in prevention science. Gathering research from leading scholars and researchers from around the globe, this book offers an essential reference guide that will benefit researchers, professionals, students, and policy makers interested in promoting better business harmony and sustainability.

This handbook offers a comprehensive review on career guidance, with an emphasis on the applied aspects of guidance together with research methods and perspectives. It features contributions from more than 30 leading authorities in the field from Asia, Africa, America, Australasia and Europe and draws upon a wide range of career guidance paradigms and theoretical perspectives. This handbook covers such subjects as educational and vocational guidance in a social context, theoretical foundations, educational and vocational guidance in practice, specific target groups, testing and assessment, and evaluation.

This book examines a topic widely regarded as the most pressing in career counselling today, i.e., how to ensure that everyone receives career counselling and that all workers have the opportunity to engage in sustainable, decent work. The author holds that career counselling should not only advance workers’ self- and career construction, helping them design successful career-lives and make social contributions, and live purposeful lives – it should also expound new theoretical approaches and interventions. Furthermore, the book criticizes global society for overlooking the basic needs of many workers, especially the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. An important feature of the book is its emphasis on promoting a creative and innovative approach to career counselling so as to better answer contemporary career-related questions. It offers guidance on how to advance entrepreneurship and help workers develop critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and communication skills. In this way the book promotes innovation in career counselling and maps the way forward in a theoretical and practical manner that helps clients ‘flourish’ rather than merely ‘survive’ in turbulent times impacted by the fourth wave in psychology, career counselling, the economy, as well as the 4th industrial revolution (Work 4.0).

This book is the product of a series of reflections by career counseling and guidance specialists on a question central to society: "How can career and life design interventions contribute to fair and sustainable development and to the implementation of decent work all over the world? ". This question was formulated by Professor J. Guichard, the director of the UNESCO Chair in Lifelong Guidance and counseling at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. The researchers involved in this Chair’s activities proposed answers which form the chapters of this book. These reflections emphasize the need to focus on the study and implementation of certain central psychological processes which can enable individuals to face the main challenges of our society. The contributions also propose new avenues of intervention for career counseling and guidance. The entire book is the bedrock of a program of research and interventions to be implemented in order that the field of career counseling and guidance plays a key role for individuals who must design their lives in a rapidly changing, and ever more complex context. This book is therefore a major scientific contribution and marks a turning point for researchers and practitioners in career counseling and guidance, and for all professionals who support the self-construction of individuals in the 21st century. "The authors draw on a diverse range of disciplines and research traditions and offer readers a rich array of insights, helping them reflect on how career guidance can be mobilised to serve citizens in a world that is increasingly challenged by complex, seemingly intractable problems. A central, crosscutting concern is the ways in which career guidance can foster well-being by facilitating access to meaningful and fulfilling work in contexts that promote equity, social justice, and dignity for all. While engaging the micro-worlds of individuals, and throwing light on their valiant efforts to design a life that realises their hopes and aspirations, it is a commendable feature of many of these papers that they do not eschew the societal – indeed planetary – stage across which personal dramas are enacted.” Prof. Ronald G. Sultana, Director, Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research, University of Malta. "The primary strengths.....are the authors' capacity to provide forward thinking perspectives on the important issue of sustainable lifelong interventions and career design in its broadest sense. The volume offers depth in a way of thinking that is pertinent to the 21st century and provokes both an in interest in the further study of this domain as well as providing tools and references for novice and experienced researchers and professionals. The book is sure to become a major text in the field." Prof. Maurice Taylor, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Young adulthood - ages approximately 18 to 26 - is a critical period of development with long-lasting implications for a person's economic security, health and well-being. Young adults are key contributors to the nation's workforce and military services and, since many are parents, to the healthy development of the next generation. Although 'millennials' have received attention in the popular media in recent years, young adults are too rarely treated as a distinct population in policy, programs, and research. Instead, they are often grouped with adolescents or, more often, with all adults. Currently, the nation is experiencing economic restructuring, widening inequality, a rapidly rising ratio of older adults, and an increasingly diverse population. The possible transformative effects of these features make focus on young adults especially important. A systematic approach to understanding and responding to the unique circumstances and needs of today's young adults can help to pave the way to a more productive and equitable tomorrow for young adults in particular and our society at large. Investing in The Health and Well-Being of Young Adults describes what is meant by the term young adulthood, who young adults are, what they are doing, and what they need. This study recommends actions that nonprofit programs and federal, state, and local agencies can take to help young adults make a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. According to this report, young adults should be considered as a separate group from adolescents and older adults. Investing in The Health and Well-Being of Young Adults makes the case that increased efforts to improve high school and college graduate rates and education and workforce development systems that are more closely tied to high-demand economic sectors will help this age group achieve greater opportunity and success. The report also discusses the health status of young adults and makes recommendations to develop evidence-based practices for young adults for medical and behavioral health, including preventions. What happens during the young adult years has profound implications for the rest of the life course, and the stability and progress of society at large depends on how any cohort of young adults fares as a whole. Investing in The Health and Well-Being of Young Adults will provide a roadmap to improving outcomes for this age group as they transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.