This book explores how Lean – a global management doctrine – operates and is adopted in the real, corporeal, collective, and affective environments of health and social care services. During Lean implementation processes, knowledges, affects, skills, and materialities come together in manifold, complex ways. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and observation, and with empirical and theoretical rigour, the book provides an answer to the question of what happens to care work when processes become ‘Leaned’. As in many other fields, the predominantly female health and social care sectors suffer from devaluation in terms of wages and working conditions. The book explores how Lean management is ultimately lived in this gendered context of work and labour. Moreover, the book situates Lean and related management doctrines in the current mutation of capitalism – that is, biocapitalism – in which bios, life itself, becomes the core of value production. The book adds to the corpus of work, organisation, and management studies on Lean that have rarely focused on gender, affect, or sociomateriality. It provides scholars in Social Science, Management, and Gender Studies with a fresh outlook and a cross-disciplinary take on Lean management.

This multi-disciplinary and inclusive collection brings together theoretically informed and empirically focused research on sex, intimacy and reproduction in relation to young people and adults with life-shortening conditions. Advances in healthcare mean that increasing numbers of young people with life-shortening conditions are transitioning into adulthood. Issues such as sex and intimacy, dating and relationships, fertility and having children are increasingly relevant to them and to the people that support them, including families, carers, practitioners and professional education, health and social care agencies. This three-part book explores the relevance and significance of this field, examines everyday experiences, and highlights the challenges faced by individuals and organisations in addressing the needs of such people in daily life and in the context of practice. Drawing on perspectives from sociology, disability studies, epidemiology, health policy, psychotherapy, legal studies, queer studies and nursing, this ground-breaking volume is written by academics, policy makers, practitioners and experts by experience. It is an essential read for all those practising and researching in the fields of sexuality, chronic illness and disability and transition.

This book focuses on the paradoxical effect of social crises on mental health. When crises occur, there's an upsurge of mental suffering due to an intensification of such social insanities as violence, inequality, and insecurity. Paradoxically, there are positive consequences due to acts of kindness, cooperation, and the ability to cope and hope. Two interconnected categories of social crises are covered in the book. These are as follows: contagions (for example, the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous outbreaks of plague and smallpox since medieval times, and the 1918 influenza pandemic); conflicts (including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and aspects of world war such as the Holocaust, the use of nuclear bombs in the Second World War, and the climate emergency). What is also explored in the book is whether there is an amplification of everyday difficulties whereby having a ‘mental health problem’ has become normalised. The idea of ‘mental-healthism’ is introduced to explain the cultural shift towards this apparent normalisation of ordinary psychological suffering. The book will be of interest to students, practitioners, and researchers from sociology, psychology, nursing, social work, and psychiatry, among others.

The book investigates digitalisation in care for older people by giving insight into service users’ and professionals’ opportunities to digital agency in the context of European welfare states. With a focus on service users and providers experiences of digital care, the contributions address the manifold and often contradictory consequences of active ageing policies and innovation programmes. To assess digital agency of older people, ageism and co-creation in the innovation processes as well the use of digital platforms are addressed, while care professionals’ digital agency is examined through empirical cases that focus on the interaction between human and non-human actors in long-term care services, the temporality and spatiality of care, and the organisational requirements for successful implementation of digital technologies. From a variety of conceptual and theoretical viewpoints, the chapters provide a comprehensive and timely overview of ways to address the phenomena of ageing and digitalisation. The book provides critical vantage points to academic readership, health and social care professionals, policymakers, other stakeholders as well as the general audience on the effects of digitalisation in care for older people. "The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. The Open Access fee was funded by University of Jyvaskyla, Finland."

"A study for reading and interpreting disability and illness narrative and stigma within a neoliberal context. Uses HIV memoirs and interviews with women living with HIV to forward a new model or reading called differential reading"--

Weight stigma is so pervasive in our culture that it is often unnoticed, along with the harm that it causes. Health care is rife with anti-fat bias and discrimination against fat people, which compromises care and influences the training of new practitioners. This book explores how this happens and how we can change it. This interdisciplinary volume is grounded in a framework that challenges the dominant discourse that health in fat individuals must be improved through weight loss. The first part explores the negative impacts of bias, discrimination, and other harms by health care providers against fat individuals. The second part addresses how we can ‘fatten’ pedagogy for current and future health care providers, discussing how we can address anti-fat bias in education for health professionals and how alternative frameworks, such as Health at Every Size, can be successfully incorporated into training so that health outcomes for fat people improve. Examining what works and what fails in teaching health care providers to truly care for the health of fat individuals without further stigmatizing them or harming them, this book is for scholars and practitioners with an interest in fat studies and health education from a range of backgrounds, including medicine, nursing, social work, nutrition, physiotherapy, psychology, sociology, education and gender studies.

Oral health is integral to wellbeing and quality of life. This important edited volume brings together leading scholars to address global oral health and the multiple ways in which theory, practice and discourse have shaped it in the modern period. Structured around key themes, the book chapters draw on interdisciplinary perspectives in order to consider the role of the dental profession, the commercial sector, charities, the state, the media and patients in shaping oral health in the past and present. Collectively, the chapters consider the extent to which each of the studied groups and actors have sought to own and control the mouth. By adopting multiple perspectives, the book highlights the importance of cross-disciplinary work across the sciences, social sciences and humanities and provides a road map for a new interdisciplinary field focused on oral health and society. Drawing on perspectives from dentistry, sociology, history and the wider humanities, this book will interest students and researchers of dentistry, public health, sociology of health and illness, the medical humanities and history.