This provocative, intellectually charged treatise serves as a concise introduction to emancipatory gerontology, examining multiple dimensions of persistent and hotly debated topics around aging, the life course, the roles of power, politics and partisanship, culture, economics, and communications. Critical perspectives are presented as definitions for reader understanding, with links to concepts of identity, knowledge construction, social networks, social movements, and inequalities. With today’s intensifying concentration of wealth and corporatization, precarity is the fate for growing numbers of the world’s population. Intersectionality as an analytic concept offers a new appreciation of how social advantage and disadvantage accumulate, and how constructions of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender influence aging. The book’s entries offer a bibliographic compendium, crediting the salience of early pioneering theorists and locating these within the cutting-edge of research (social, behavioral, policy, and gene–environment sciences) that currently advances our understandings of human development, trauma, and resilience. Accompanying these foundations are theories of resistance for advancing human rights and the dignity of marginalized populations.

With global wildlife populations and biodiversity riches in peril, it is obvious that innovative methods of addressing our planet's environmental problems are needed. But is “the market” the answer? Nature™ Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations.

Medicare's Quality Improvement Organization Program is the second book in the new Pathways to Quality Health Care series. Focusing on performance improvement, it considers the history, role, and effectiveness of the Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) program and its potential to promote quality improvement within a changing health care delivery environment that includes standardized performance measures and new data collection and reporting requirements. This book carefully examines the QIOs that serve every state as well as the national program that guides and supports them. In addition, it highlights the important roles that a national program with private organizations in each state can play in promoting higher quality care. Medicare's Quality Improvement Organization Program looks closely at the technical assistance role of the QIO program and the need to encourage and support providers to improve their performance. By providing an in-depth assessment of the federal experience with quality improvement and recommendations for program improvement, this book helps point the way for those who strive to create higher quality and better value in health care. Intended for multiple audiences, Medicare's Quality Improvement Organization Program is essential reading for members of Congress, the federal executive branch, the QIOs, health care providers and clinicians, and stakeholder groups.