While there may be consensus on the broader issues of the core objectives of the health care system, expectations differ between EU countries, and European national policy-makers. This book seeks firstly to assess the impact of the enlargement process and then to analyse the challenges that lie ahead in the field of health and health policy.

Exploring the capacity and impact of decentralization within European health care systems, this book examines both the theoretical underpinnings as well as practical experience with decentralization.

Part analysis of contemporary change and part vision of the future, post-Fordism lends its name to a set of challenging, essential and controversial debates over the nature of capitalism's newest age. This book provides a superb introduction to these debates and their far-reaching implications, and includes key texts by post-Fordism's major theorists and commentators.

Nature was central to the Wilhelmine German experience. Medical cosmologies and reform-initiatives were a key to consumer practices and lifestyle choices. Nature's appeal transcended class, confession, and political party. Millions of Germans recognized that nature had healing effects and was intimately tied to quality of life. In the 1880s and 1890s, this preoccupation with nature became an increasingly important part of German popular culture. In this pioneering study, Avi Sharma shows that nature, health, and the body became essential ways of talking about real and imagined social and political problems. The practice of popular medicine in the Wilhelmine era brought nature back into urban everyday experience, transforming the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. Sharma explores the history of natural healing in Germany and shows how social and medical practices that now seem foreign to contemporary eyes were, just decades ago, familiar to everyone from small children to their aged grandparents, from tradesmen and women to research scientists. Natural healing was not simply a way to cure illness. It was also seen as a way to build a more healthful society. Using interpretive methods drawn from the history of science and science studies, Sharma provides a readable and groundbreaking inquiry into how popular health and hygiene movements shaped German ideas about progress, modernity, nature, health, and the body at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

This book is about the contemporary city and its management. Relates the analysis of urban and regional change to challenges for urban governance. Explores the socio-spatial consequences of economic, social and political change as these impact on the urban city. It reviews the conceptual and empirical challenges of understanding the future of urban management.

The booming increase of the senior population has become a social phenomenon and a challenge to our societies, and technological advances have undoubtedly contributed to improve the lives of elderly citizens in numerous aspects. In current debates on technology, however, the »human factor« is often largely ignored. The ageing individual is rather seen as a malfunctioning machine whose deficiencies must be diagnosed or as a set of limitations to be overcome by means of technological devices. This volume aims at focusing on the perspective of human beings deriving from the development and use of technology: this change of perspective - taking the human being and not technology first - may help us to become more sensitive to the ambivalences involved in the interaction between humans and technology, as well as to adapt technologies to the people that created the need for its existence, thus contributing to improve the quality of life of senior citizens.

This volume includes the full Health Technology Assessment (HTA) report on effectiveness, appropriateness, safety and costs of homoeopathy in health care. The report was commissioned by the Swiss health authorities to inform decision-making on the further inclusion of homoeopathy in the list of services covered by statutory health insurance. Other studies carried out as part of the Swiss Complementary Medicine Evaluation Programme (PEK) caused a massive stir due to their schematic and exclusively quantitative (negative-)outcomes for homoeopathy. The present report, in contrast, offers a differentiated evaluation of the practice of homoeopathy in health care. It confirms homoeopathy as a valuable addition to the conventional medical landscape – a status it has been holding for a long time in practical health care.

Since the first edition of this book was published, the subject of sustainability has risen to the forefront of thinking in almost every subject within business and management. Tackling the latest developments and integrating practical perspectives with rigorous research, this new edition sheds light on a vital aspect of working life. Current trends reveal that increasing intensity at work has major consequences at individual, organizational and societal levels. Sustainability in work systems thus requires a multi-stakeholder approach, emphasising a value-based choice to promote the concurrent development of various resources in the work system. This sustainability grows from intertwined individual and collective learning processes taking place within and between organizations in collaboration. In exploring the development of sustainable work systems, this book analyzes these problems, and provides the basis for designing and implementing 'sustainable work systems' based on the idea of regeneration and the development of human and social resources. The authors, who are leading researchers and practitioners from around the world, consider the existing possibilities and emerging solutions and explore alternatives to intensive work systems.

Policy issues have grown ever more complex and politically more contestable. So governments in advanced democracies often do not understand the problems they have to deal with and do not know how to solve them. Thus, rational problem-solving models are highly unconvincing. Conversely, the Multiple-Streams Framework starts out from these conditions, which has led to increasing interest in it. Nevertheless, there has not yet been a systematic attempt to assess the potential of such scholarship. This volume is the first attempt to fill that gap by bringing together a group of international scholars to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Framework from different angles. Chapters explore systematically and empirically the Framework’s potential in different national contexts and in policy areas from climate change and foreign policy to healthcare and the welfare state.

Theories of the Policy Process provides a forum for the experts in policy process research to present the basic propositions, empirical evidence, latest updates, and the promising future research opportunities of each policy process theory. In this thoroughly revised fifth edition, each chapter has been updated to reflect recent empirical work, innovative theorizing, and a world facing challenges of historic proportions with climate change, social and political inequities, and pandemics, among recent events. Updated and revised chapters include Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, Multiple Streams Framework, Policy Feedback Theory, Advocacy Coalition Framework, Narrative Policy Framework, Institutional and Analysis and Development Framework, and Diffusion and Innovation. This fifth edition includes an entirely new chapter on the Ecology of Games Framework. New authors have been added to most chapters to diversify perspectives and make this latest edition the most internationalized yet. Across the chapters, revisions have clarified concepts and theoretical arguments, expanded and extended the theories’ scope, summarized lessons learned and knowledge gained, and addressed the relevancy of policy process theories. Theories of the Policy Process has been, and remains, the quintessential gateway to the field of policy process research for students, scholars, and practitioners. It’s ideal for those enrolled in policy process courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and those conducting research or undertaking practice in the subject.