Social Indicators Research Series - Böcker

South Africa's peaceful transition to democracy has gained it world recognition. This book gives a frank report on contemporary South African society and the challenges which the new nation faces. Sixteen social scientists, experts in fields as wide-ranging as economics, politics, and development planning, have compiled a social report on South Africa two years into democracy. The volume covers critical concerns which impact on the well-being of the average South African. The dozen chapters in the book present facts and figures as well as in-depth commentary on social issues which South Africa must address. The authors discuss the legacies of the past, including poverty and social inequality; problems of transition ranging from trauma to crime; and the hopes for the future which lie in economic growth and development, a deeper understanding of democracy, and a healthy dose of optimism. The book draws on information from a wide variety of sources including government statistics, independent social surveys, community research, and opinion polls.

The degradation of renewables, both land and freshwater, worldwide leads to conflict over access and distribution of these resources. However, not all conflicts become violent. Environmentally-caused violence is hardly found in relations between states. Today, mainly in developing countries, there is a correlation between environmental degradation and violent conflicts. This synthesis of 40 case studies indicates, there are different causal pathways of current violent conflicts and wars that can be traced to the environmental roots of the conflict. Rwanda is used as an example to demonstrate the interaction of ethnic, social, political and ecological factors. Whereas most studies in this field focus on classical security issues, the author here puts an emphasis on growing structural heterogeneity in agricultural societies which tend to discriminate chiefly against those rural producers who are the victims of bad resource allocations, unequal resource distribution, high dependence on natural capital, and bad state performance.One major conclusion to be discussed among scholars, teachers, and advanced students and to be taken seriously by professionals in international organizations is the following: competing land tenure systems, unclear property rights, large-scale farming, and nationalizing land by discriminating against small-holders, pastoralists and the landless. This provides a considerable potential for conflict and, thus, contributes to unsustainable resource use, social unrest, and political instability.

As Japan comes to grips with a decade of economic malaise after its post-war growth record, how will Japanese society react? Contributors to this volume examine the challenges ahead for Japan in the fields of politics, economics, sociology, environment and business. This multidisciplinary inquiry looks for areas of continuity and for new directions in government, business and social policy and practice.Also exam ined is how Western students should approach the study of Japan; what new directions should institutions take to ensure that students learn about the `real' Japan? Written by Canadian academics, the articles in this volume will be of interest to academics and policy-makers studying or teaching about contemporary Japan.

This volume is concerned with quality of life and focuses on subjective well-being (people's own evaluations of their lives in terms of happiness and satisfaction). The first section focuses on theories of subjective well-being, and on testing these theories. The second section concentrates on how work, unemployment and income influence subjective well-being. The third section concerns two important institutions that have an impact on people's well-being - the health care and political systems. Authors from diverse disciplines present their views and research concerning quality of life, and focus on subjective well-being. The chapters cover topics ranging from theories of happiness and data bearing on these theories, to the organization of the political system. Income, work, health care and leisure are considered as they influence well-being. The effects of temperament, people's values and goals and life events are also treated. There is an international dimension to the volume, with authors from several nations and data gathered from diverse societies.The findings of the volume are relevant to academic researchers as well as to those working in applied areas who want to improve quality of life.

Most Asian countries have shown a strong commitment to rapid economic development. Economists have argued that the fruits from economic development will be spread equitably throughout the population. In the absence of a strong tradition of social rights, social development in Asia has long been taken for granted. This collection documents social development in the Asian countries of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and India and concludes that social development has lagged behind economic development. This has given rise to "distorted development" in many countries. Serious development problems of poverty and inequalities have lingered even in the economically advanced countries of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. These problems have been exacerbated in the wake of the Asian economic crisis. In order to harmonize social development with economic growth, Asian states ought to be more proactive in their development agendas.

Michael Beyerlein University0/North Texas, Denton. Texas, UnitedStates Those of us in the process of advanced maturation are regularly called upon to the historical development ofcurrent practice and understanding ofwork teams is broad in scope emerging from a complex mix of historical sources. I am not aware of a published source that represents that history comprehensively; full treatment may require multiple publications. There are excellent sources that present useful coverage ofsome components ofthat history, such as the three anthologies that Trist and his colleagues edited for the Tavistock Institute between 1992 and 1997 (Trist, Emery, & Murray, 1997; Trist, & Murray, 1990; Trist, Murray, & Trist, 1993), sections of Kleiner's 1996 book on the history of organization development (OD), biographical works on the thought leaders, occasional collections (e. g., Davis & Taylor's Design ofJobs: Selected Readings, 1972; Susman's Autonomy at Work: A Socio-technical analysis of Participative Management, 1976; Pasmore & Sherwood's Socio-technical Systems: A Sourcebook, 1978; Pasmore, Francis, Haldeman, & Shani's Socio-technical systems, 1982: A North American reflection on empirical studies of the seventies; Glaser's Classic Readings in Se/f-Managing Teamwork, 1992; and French, Bell, & Zawacki's Organization Development and Transformation: Managing Effective Change, 1994), and occasional chapters and articles scattered throughout the literature on teams and organization design and change. This book consists of chapters that deliberately focus on key historical developments of work teams. The chapters were all written specifically for this book.

This test is an outcome of an innovative and unique endeavour: that of the international project "Measuring and Monitoring Children's Well-Being", which involved some 80 experts from 27 countries working together for four years to redefine the concept of children's well-being and to suggest new indicators - beyond survival and basic needs - to measure and monitor the status of children. The reader will find a sound rationale for conducting such studies and for a consistent and thorough attempt to study and monitor children's well-being. Furthermore, the book presents extensive analysis of the field of child well-being indicators and the various projects and studies that are under way. A newly defined context for children's well-being is presented, as well as a set of five "new" domains and some 49 indicators that are recommended for measuring and monitoring children's well-being. Finally, the book discusses how such indicators could be used in the communities where children are living and in the policy-making process in order to promote children's well-being.This book should appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, social psychologists, social workers, social paedagogues, social paediatricians and other child-related professionals.

This handbook seeks to provide students of quality-of-life (QOL) research with an understanding of how QOL research can be conducted from an ethical marketing perspective - a perspective based on positive social change. The handbook covers theoretical, philosophical, and measurement issues in QOL research. It also approaches selected QOL studies in relation to various populations in various life domains. The marketing approach is highly pragmatic because it allows social and behavioural scientists from any discipline to apply marketing concepts to plan social change and assess the impact of intervention strategies on the QOL of targeted populations.

Scholars of different schools have extensively analysed world systems as networks of communication under the fashionable heading "globalization". This collected research pushes the argument one step further. Globalization is not a homogenization of all social life on Earth. It is a heterogeneous process that connects the global and the local on different levels. Globalization is a metaphor for different border structures, new borderlines, and conditions of membership, which emerge in a global world-system. As a world-system expands it incorporates new territories and boundaries of the world-system. These frontiers or boundary zones are the locus of resistance to incorporation, ethnogenesis, ethnic transformation and ethnocide.

Based on large research material collected in Hungary, Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, this work explores the impact of transition from communism and war on the everyday life of women and men, as well as the way in which everyday life and gender-related changes affect women's vulnerability to domestic violence and trafficking in women. The book also explores the impact of micro level changes on development of civil society, women's movement and legal and policy changes regarding violence against women. The aim of the book is to look at violence against women as connected to oppression of both women and men. It argues that violence against women in post-communist and war affected societies is significantly connected to the increase of social stratification, economic hardship, unemployment, instability, uncertainty and related social stresses, changes in gender identity and structural inequalities brought by new world order. Using accounts of more than 100 interviewed people, the author shows vividly how, in post-communist societies, the contradictions of capitalism are interlaced with the mostly negative relics of communism.Moreover, the book shows how contradictory processes in post-communist societies have led to a rather paradoxical result: political pluralism and a capitalist economic system generated both violence against women and a women's movement, albeit not the conditions for a reduction of violence.

This text is a "how to" book for researchers and government offices wanting to start or improve their own "quality of life" (QOL) survey. It contains "best practices" from all over the world and discusses surveys that are being adopted by all countries in the European Union as a standardized measure of each country's progress. It also discusses how developing countries can begin the measurement of quality of life in ways that will increase political credibility and require smaller budgets. Other chapters describe policy applications of the quality of life surveys, including nations' health goals, smoking cessation, child welfare and poverty reduction. The authors of these chapters are some of the world's top experts on assessing quality of life. For example, the author of the first chapter is Sten Johansson, former Director of Statistics Sweden, responsible for creating the first comprehensive QOL assessment systems in the world, beginning in the 1960s. The author of the second chapter is Professor Ruut Veenhoven, known as the premier researcher on national happiness, having developed the largest database in the world on the subjective measures of well-being.Heinz-Herbert Noll is responsible for developing the unified quality of life measurement system for the European Union, where up to 25 countries will be assessed using the same methodology and questionnaires.This volume should be a useful resource for four groups of readers: to researchers interested in best practices for well-established surveys of living conditions, the papers by Boelhouwer, Noll, Vogel, and Berger-Schmitt will be of special interest; to researchers and policy analysts interested in establishing a living-conditions report in their country, the papers by Kamen, Moller and Dickow, Estes, Andersen and Poppel, May, Stevens and Stols and Aasland and Tyldum give information about developing credibility, consensus-building and survey design; for researchers interested in cross-national comparison, the papers by Hudler and Richter, and Delhey, Bohnke, Habich and Zapf describe the rich resources already available, as well as problems of different wording, interpretation, etc; and finally, for citizens wishing to effect changes in public policy, and for researchers studying that process, the papers by Ferris, Estes, Hagerty and Behrendt outline how organizations should select goals, utilize social indicators and develop programmes that improve the quality of life in their nations.

Global Instability: Uncertainty and New Visions in Political Economy presents a series of papers that address the political consequences of globalization for states and their populations, while exploring the issue of alternatives to the model of globalization we are presently experiencing. The focus moves from the world of international agreements to the national and sub-national dilemmas that are posed by attempting to manage a set of global developments within a given territory. The initial chapter, by Daniel Drache, explores a still-born post-war international organization, the International Trade Organization, that offers a different vision of how a globally integrated economy might operate. A number of papers then explore the challenges posed by today's globalization, including currency instability in an environment of financial deregulation, the rights conferred on investors by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the progressive liberalization of trade in services built into the General Agreement on Trade in Services. The difficulties faced by states are analyzed in a number of chapters that address industrial and social policy issues.A final group of papers explores some theoretical alternatives to a globalized world. Responses at the level of institutions as well as ideas are canvassed and the urgency of the problem is highlighted by Duncan Cameron's concluding article which argues that we are already living in which he terms a 'quasi-democracy.' The various chapters attempt to ground their analysis of instability, uncertainty and change in the real problems that globalization creates for states and peoples, and for those who might attempt to devise alternatives. As a group, these papers offer a unique and timely synthesis of key themes in the political economy of globalization suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate students in political science, economics, and business.

This volume examines the objective and subjective qualities of Korean life from both comparative and dynamic perspectives. It presents non-Western policy alternatives to enhancing the quality of citizens' lives, distinguishing Korea as an Asian model of economic prosperity and political democracy. The book is intended for academics, policy makers and the general public interestd in recent developments in Korea.

This title is concerned with the question of inequality, both within countries and internationally. It covers the tension between the rich and poor in less developed countries as well as within richer countries in the process of globalisation. The main topics are the scope of disparities between the rich and poor, people's perception of wealth and poverty, and the concomitants of inequality which shape this relationship and influence its socio-economic consequences. In the tradition of social reporting, the book brings together authors from 15 countries, documenting a broad range of the international inequality debate. The results are related to the trends of socio-economic development, to statistical problems of measuring inequality, and to socio-political problems of integrating society in the facing the challenge of dividing forces.

This work is concerned with the universality of wellbeing indicators. It provides substantial conceptual coverage on issues relating to the universality of subjective wellbeing including detailed discussion of central underlying mechanisms and processes involved in subjective wellbeing. The main topics covered include: the theoretical bases for the measurement of quality of life, the affective dimension in quality of life, the roles of homeostasis and personality in the processes of quality of life assessment and maintenance, the impact of factors including residential care, economic wealth, and work-related variables on subjective wellbeing.

The knowledge base in the domains of quality of life, well-being, and subjective well-being is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. In light of this growth, and the interest it reflects on the part of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers internationally, this book will play an important role in bringing scholars and students up to date on diverse topics and promoting and encouraging research in the field of quality-of-life (QOL) studies. Quality of life studies is an area broadly constructed to involve all of the social and health sciences. These papers reflect a diversity of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it contains material on: the monitoring, assessing, and modelling of quality of life; matters of policy, finance, marketing, and business; and papers devoted to the determinants and correlates of well-being and quality of life.

The aim of this text is to identify the variation in welfare regimes (distribution of responsibilities for welfare delivery between the labour market, the family and the welfare state) and the corresponding welfare outcome at the micro level. The research agenda of this report sets out from the tradition of the "social indicator movement" and recent regime research. Combining the data on "welfare production" provides insight into the way living conditions are monitored between the labour market, welfare state and family at national level. It also provides insight into the combined "welfare efficiency" of these institutions, with special focus on distributional features.

Since initiating the journal "Social Indicators Research" in 1974, Alex C. Michalos has been a pioneer in social indicators and quality-of-life research. This collection of 19 articles provides an overview of nearly 30 years of work, including papers drawn from diverse sources and papers never published before. Topics range over: the quality of life investigations connected to the problems of combining social, economic and environmental indicators; measuring the status of women in Canada; housing and migration; health and human well-being; older peoples' well-being; leisure activities and health; impact of public services, police services; criminal victimization; and feminism and ethnic relations on the quality of life. The final paper, on multiple discrepancies theory (MDT), is the author's contribution to an empirically testable new foundation for theories of utility, satisfaction and happiness.

Advances in Quality-of-Life Theory and Research is relevant to quality-of-life researchers working in the areas of Social Medicine, Sustainable Development, Social Indicators Research and Health Psychology/Behavioral Medicine. This volume contains 14 chapters that represent a culmination of programmatic research in the science of quality of life (QOL). Each chapter offers interesting findings in different areas of QOL research and, together, the chapters reflect the very basic premise that QOL research is a broad interdisciplinary topic explored in a multidisciplinary manner. The research methods and conceptual models used by the different authors are exemplary and can induce QOL researchers to conduct future research in QOL in other cultures, geographic areas, and different socio-economic and demographic groups as well as in different QOL domains.

At the risk of sounding frivolous, there is a good case to be made for the argument that women constitute the revolutionary force behind contemporary social and economic transformation. It is in large part the changing role of women that explains the new household structure, our altered demographic behaviour, the growth of the service economy and, as a consequence, the new dilemmas that the advanced societies face. Most European countries have failed to adapt adequately to the novel challenges and the result is an increasingly serious disequilibrium. Women explicitly desire economic independence and the societal collective, too, needs to maximise female employment. And yet, this runs up against severe incompatibility problems that then result in very low birth rates. Our aging societies need more kids, yet fertility levels are often only half of what citizens define as their desired number of children. No matter what happens in the next decade, we are doomed to have exceedingly small cohorts that, in turn, must shoulder the massive burden of supporting a retired baby-boom generation. Hence it is tantamount that tomorrow’s adults be maximally productive and, yet, the typical EU member state invests very little in its children and families.

At the risk of sounding frivolous, there is a good case to be made for the argument that women constitute the revolutionary force behind contemporary social and economic transformation. It is in large part the changing role of women that explains the new household structure, our altered demographic behaviour, the growth of the service economy and, as a consequence, the new dilemmas that the advanced societies face. Most European countries have failed to adapt adequately to the novel challenges and the result is an increasingly serious disequilibrium. Women explicitly desire economic independence and the societal collective, too, needs to maximise female employment. And yet, this runs up against severe incompatibility problems that then result in very low birth rates. Our aging societies need more kids, yet fertility levels are often only half of what citizens define as their desired number of children. No matter what happens in the next decade, we are doomed to have exceedingly small cohorts that, in turn, must shoulder the massive burden of supporting a retired baby-boom generation. Hence it is tantamount that tomorrow’s adults be maximally productive and, yet, the typical EU member state invests very little in its children and families.

This book is a compilation of cases of best work in community indicators research. The cases describe communities that have launched their own community indicators programs. Elements that are included in the descriptions are the history of the community indicators work within the target region, the planning of community indicators, the actual indicators that were selected, the data collection process, the reporting of the results, and the use of the indicators to guide community development decisions and public policy. Community planners, community indicators researchers and urban planning specialists will find this book very helpful in learning from communities that have done community indicators work and have done it well.

This title is a must-read for anyone interested in deepening their understanding of the behaviours of children and adolescents. It focuses on measurement issues related to the subjective well-being of children and adolescents as opposed to current objective measurements. The volume contains eight chapters that represent a significant advancement in our understanding of life satisfaction in specific age groups, behavioural context, and cultures. The first chapter provides a synthesis of assessment research directed at children and youth. The subsequent chapters offer an in-depth look at subpopulations of youth and specific behaviours. Together the chapters demonstrate the importance of considering the role of life satisfaction across age groups and situations. This volume will be of interest to researchers in government and academia, social psychologists, those working in the prevention sciences, and others who focus on assessing the quality of life and well-being of children and adolescents.

Wolfgang Glatzer Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitiit Franlifurt am Main, Germany ABSTRACT Challenges for the quality of life in the contemporary world were the focus of the Fifth International Quality of Life-Conference in Frankfurt am Main in the year 2003, hosted and organized by the Interna­ tional Society for Quality of Life Studies. The first part of this introductory article is concerned with a general assessment of contemporary quality of life research. At present, the concept of quality of life is a kind of umbrella which keeps together a reasonable number of international social scientists who have similar research interests. The second part of the introduction describes the topics of this book: The five chapters are concerned with the societal goal discussion on quality of life, the scientific monitoring of quality of life, the economic challenges for quality of life, its cultural challenges, and finally the options and restrictions for improving quality of life. Altogether, the contributions are related to present interna­ tional investigations and discussions of basic questions of quality of life. ATTENTION FOR QUALITY OF LIFE Challenges for the quality of life in the contemporary world were the focus at the Fifth International Quality of Life-Conference in Frankfurt am Main in the year 2003, hosted and organized by the International Society for Quality of Life Studies. There are new threats and new prospects for the quality of life in each generation, and securing and improving quality of life is a never-ending task.

The majority of studies on the quality of life have been conducted in Western contexts and are based on Western participants. Comparatively speaking, there are only a few studies that have been conducted in different Chinese contexts. Also, there are fewer QOL studies based on children and adolescents, or studies that examine the relationship between QOL and economic disadvantage. In addition, more research is needed to address the methodological issues related to the assessment of quality of life.This volume is a constructive response to the challenges described above. It is the first book to cover research in Chinese, Western and global contexts in a single volume. It is a ground-breaking volume in which Chinese studies on the quality of life are collected. The book includes papers addressing family QOL, quality of life in adolescents experiencing economic disadvantage, and methodological issues in the assessment of QOL. It is written by researchers working in a variety of disciplines.

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement was founded by Alex C. Michalos and published its first issue in March 1974. It has been the leading journal for scholarly research in its field for over thirty years. This volume is published in celebration of that record of accomplishment. The 19 articles assembled here are a selection drawn from the 34 (2.4%) most frequently cited articles in the journal’s history. An introductory essay written by Michalos explains the historical and scientific importance of each article in the development of social indicators or quality-of-life research. It provides a rare overview of the perceived scientific problems that researchers around the world addressed in the first three decades of exploration, as well as a view of some of the problems to be addressed in the future. A short essay describing the origins of the journal by its founder is also included. Anyone interested in having a single volume that contains some of the best research produced in this field will find this volume irresistible.

ROBERT C. GRANGER William T. Grant Foundation During the past 10 years or so, a number of researchers, policymakers, and prac- tioners have made important progress on the identi?cation and use of indicators of children’s well-being. The United States federal government, via the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health, as well as such private funders as the Annie E. Casey Foundation, have supported many of these efforts. During this time, the William T. Grant Foundation, who was not a primary funder of such activities, was nevertheless one of the many institutions bene?ting from the work. Fortunately, Asher Ben-Arieh, Larry Aber, and Bob Goerge persuaded us to support a working conference on how to assess the effects of indicator usage on policiesandprograms.Thisvolumeistheresultoftheirtalentsandtheclearthinking of many of their colleagues. It is my pleasure to introduce the volume with a few thoughts about its contributions and the questions that remain.

This book is the second in a series covering best practices in community quality-of-life (QOL) indicators. The first was published in 2004. The editors are M. Joseph Sirgy, Don Rahtz and Dong-Jin Lee. Volume 1 is a compilation of cases of best work in community indicators research. The cases describe communities that have launched their own community indicators programs. Elements that are included in the descr- tions are the history of the community indicators work within the target region, the planning of community indicators, the actual indicators that were selected, the data collection process, the reporting of the results and the use of the indicators to guide community development decisions and public policy. The chapters in Volume 1 are: Chapter 1: Vital Signs: Quality-of-Life Indicators for Virginia’s Technology Corridor by Terri Lynn Cornwell Chapter 2: The Sustainable Community Model Approach to the Development and Use of Multi-Dimensional Quality-of-Life Indicators by William T. Grunkemeyer and Myra L.

Environmentalissuescontinuedtoloomlargeinthelastdecadeofthetwentiethc- tury,especiallyenvironmentalproblemsrelatedtorisinglevelsofCO emissionsand 2 other greenhouse gases on the planet’s average temperatures and, subsequently, storm patterns. Floods and droughts, in combination with unseasonably high and low temperatures became the norm rather than the exception for large expanses of Africa,Asia and Oceania. Even large areas of Europe and NorthAmerica were s- jected to recurrent floods and droughts and experienced unseasonable extremes of hot and cold temperatures associated with man-made intrusions into the natural environment. And,still,aglobalplanofactiontohaltman-relatedpatternsofdef- estation, desertification, and over-fishing of the seas has yet to come into being. At the same time, the number of regional conflicts and civil wars increased and, with them, the lives of many women, children, old people and other n- combatants were lost in these conflicts. Increasingly, regional wars and conflicts had less to do with disputes over land or other natural resources but more with the differing social, political and religious identifications of the people engaged in these conflicts. Warnings of genocide and near-genocide conditions were commonly proclaimed to the world community but, sadly, the planet’s inter- tional security apparatus proved to be largely ineffective in containing many of the worst of these atrocities. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people, ev- tually millions, died while awaiting assistance from the global community to bring an end to their suffering.