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Housing delivery systems have been classified as developmentally‐orientated or conventionally‐orientated. It has been claimed that a developmentally‐orientated approach to building procurement would encompass the parameters of community empowerment and participation in design, job creation via the development process, and economically and environmentally‐sustainable procurement (Taylor & Norval 1995). New building procurement systems display an increasing awareness of sustainability, but concentrate on economic and social sustainability, as opposed to environmental sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to document and evaluate the extent to which issues of environmental sustainability have been incorporated in the delivery of affordable housing in South Africa. The paper elaborates on a range of relevant principles for sustainable construction, which incorporate: minimisation of resource use; maximisation of reuse of resources; maximisation of use of renewable and recycled resources; use of non‐toxic materials; protection of nature; achievement of quality criteria; and promotion of labour intensive methods, skills training and capacity enhancement of local people. The authors examine the extent to which the principles of environmental sustainability have been applied, both in practice and in the formulation of South African housing policy. Finally, recommendations are made for the application of criteria for environmental sustainability in the delivery process of affordable housing in South Africa.

The aging population is growing rapidly, causing significant increases in the demand for public housing. Normally, the elderly rely heavily on the facilities available in their living environment to maintain their quality of life (QoL). However, most public housing is not purposely designed for the elderly, and, thus, has inappropriate facilities, which often have a negative impact upon the physical and psychological health of residents. This paper aims to investigate the relationships between the indoor facilities management (FM) of public housing and the QoL of elderly persons.

Based on an extensive literature review, a questionnaire has been designed and distributed among elderly residents of different public housing buildings. To investigate the impact of indoor FM on the QoL of the senior residents in public housing, statistical analysis methods including reliability analysis and multiple regression modeling were adopted.

The study identified 12 indoor FM factors and six QoL domains (i.e. overall QoL, physical and psychological health, independence, social relationship and living environment). The results also reveal that space planning and bathroom influence most QoL domains, including overall QoL, physical/psychological health, independence and living environment of the elderly; electricity and noise mainly affect physical health and independence, while noise is negatively related to elderly QoL; and supporting facilities (including windows and doors, indoor decoration, non-slip floors and accessibility) have a positive impact on psychological health and social relationships.

Based on the current findings, several practical recommendations are made for the designers and facilities managers, including wide corridors for individuals with wheelchairs, the installation of single-lever-type mixers to provide a stable hot water supply and a window designed to get as much natural light as possible.

This paper provides a clear picture about elderly special requirements on indoor FM and their QoL. It can assist architects, engineers and facilities managers in public housing to understand elderly needs and improve FM during design and operation stages for enhancing QoL of elderly residents in public housing buildings.

Effective teaching, while supplemented by best practice methods and assessments, is rooted in accurate, age-appropriate, and engaging content. As a foundation for history content, elementary educators rely strongly on textbooks and children’s literature, both fiction and non-fiction. While many researchers have examined the historical accuracy of textbook content, few have rigorously scrutinized the historical accuracy of children’s literature. Those projects that carried out such examination were more descriptive than comprehensive due to significantly smaller data pools. I investigate how children’s non-fiction and fiction books depict and historicize a meaningful and frequently taught history topic: Christopher Columbus’s accomplishments and misdeeds. Results from a comprehensive content analysis indicate that children’s books are engaging curricular supplements with age-appropriate readability yet frequently misrepresent history in eight consequential ways. Demonstrating a substantive disconnect between experts’ understandings of Columbus, these discouraging findings are due to the ways in which authors of children’s books recurrently omit relevant and contentious historical content in order to construct interesting, personalized narratives.

The effects of environmental change are becoming more noticeable in the Lower Mekong Basin, where there is growing pressure on the agriculture-based livelihoods of communities living along the mainstream of the Mekong River. This chapter presents an investigation of temporal seasonal variability in four communities of Kratie Province, Cambodia, including identification of locally developed strategies to adapt to temporal changes in weather patterns. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, combining historical hydrometeorological data with participatory seasonal calendars and daily routine diaries. Seasonal calendars were compiled from nine workshops across four villages in Kratie Province, and daily diaries were collected from seven individuals across three villages. The results indicate that patterns in rainfall, flooding and drought have become more variable due to the impacts of environmental change; a phenomenon that will likely continue into the future. Without effective, locally appropriate adaptation measures, changing weather patterns will likely continue to have adverse impacts on communities in the region due to their reliance on reliable seasonal rainfall and flooding events for crop cultivation. Households and communities in the study region have already developed a number of approaches to mitigate the adverse impacts of environmental change. This research also reiterated the importance of incorporating both local knowledge and scientific data to gain the most accurate understanding of the impacts of environmental change in a given region.

There is a common misperception that Michel Foucault either had nothing constructive to contribute to the relationship between the subject and the other, or that at best he portrayed intersubjective relations as riddled with power that tends to domination and subjection. This paper aims to counter such a fallacy.

The argument first highlights Foucault's concern with the status of the other, initially as a form of biopower that disciplines and regulates and, subsequent to the development of critical history, as a form of biopower that also constitutes the subject. It is then shown why this conception of the other in terms of relations of power/technoscience through which the subject is constructed is both an ethical and political question.

For organisations seeking to balance control with creativity for the purposes of fostering innovation, it is demonstrated how reflection upon Foucault's as yet unexplored work on the other, which proffers a notion of a subject who practices freedom in the context of disciplinary and regulatory power, might serve as a toolkit for managers who exercise control but who also seek to foster creativity from those subject to them.

A subject‐other relationship is put forth in terms of an account of how freedom that is agonistically articulated in the face of control is tantamount to creative resistance, which in turn is translated into a value to be fostered by organisations that pursue creative destruction.

This study aims to better understand the micro–meso–macro perspective in social marketing, through the examination of a transformative, primarily meso-level initiative aimed at developing more resilient communities in the face of disaster.

Research was oriented around two cases of community resilience planning. Relevant documents were reviewed, and a series of semi-structured interviews with the manager and advisors in an emergency management office were conducted, followed by in-depth interviews with 15 individual community participants.

The findings suggest a multilevel (micro–meso–macro) model of social change, incorporating fluid and interactive movement between the levels. In the context examined, community leaders were initially motivated to be involved due to their role, sense of altruism and curiosity. Their motivation to continue was encouraged, as misconceptions around emergency response were addressed and the value of community connections was highlighted. As planning progressed, greater involvement and empowerment resulted.

This study is limited in its focus on two communities, and the context of emergency preparation and response. However, it contributes insights into a leading initiative designed to help build community resilience and insights into a micro–meso–macro perspective of social change.

The study also suggests that social marketers, when implementing a meso-level initiative, will benefit from considering multiple levels, seeking the involvement and cooperation of meso-level leaders which will help facilitate downstream change.

Contributing to the discussion of the micro–meso–macro levels of social marketing, this research examines disaster preparation and response – a context not frequently examined in social marketing. Findings suggest that interactive, multi-level thinking, especially considering the individual implementers of meso-level change as a “target market”, will benefit social well-being initiatives.

In 1899 the medical practitioners of Dublin were confronted with an outbreak of a peculiar and obscure illness, characterised by symptoms which were very unusual. For want of a better explanation, the disorder, which seemed to be epidemic, was explained by the simple expedient of finding a name for it. It was labelled as “beri‐beri,” a tropical disease with very much the same clinical and pathological features as those observed at Dublin. Papers were read before certain societies, and then as the cases gradually diminished in number, the subject lost interest and was dropped.

We are over‐impressed just now by the importance of what are usually described as “the working‐classes,” as though there were any classes in this country which did not work with head or hand. There is “the middle‐class,” which is also a working class; and, if truth be told, probably the hardest working class. It knows nothing of the forty‐four hour week, of constantly rising incomes, or of ca' canny methods. This is the class which forms the backbone of the country, and its marked characteristics, as opposed to the manual workers, are its lack of class consciousness and its want of class cohesion. In years that have gone by, the assumption was, of course, that if anyone wore a black coat instead of fustian he must necessarily be in possession of a larger income than the ordinary working man. He became the target of every Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, nervous of offending the working‐classes, thought little or nothing of any injustice which he might place upon those who formed the middle‐class. That criticism bears upon no particular party, but upon all political parties. Correspondence which has recently appeared in our columns suggests that the middle‐class is beginning to realise the disabilities that patience and forbearance have brought upon it in cumulative measure. On the one hand, it forms a reservoir upon which the nation is always able to draw in times of emergency, as the Great War proved; and, on the other, its very pride and its cultivation of the virtue of individualism rob it of cohesion. As a rule, the man of the middle‐class is neither the direct producer of wealth nor even a minor captain of industry. He supplies, however, the intellect and industry without which Labour would be reduced to idleness and Capital would be denied its dividends. In addition, he and his fellows, besides “carrying on,” recruit the great professions, and are mainly responsible for the research which enables science to come to the aid of the manufacturer and workman. The secret of our prosperity is to be found less conspicuously in the foresight and courage of the Capitalist and the skill of the workman than in the trained intelligence and arduous and unremitting labours of those who constitute the middle‐class. We do not underrate the value of Capital or the achievement of Labour, but it cannot be doubted that the most important element in the community consists of those who occupy the midway position between the extremes. No one can enter a factory or an office without being impressed by the important functions which the great middle‐class performs. One of the greatest dangers associated with Sovietism is that its aim is to stamp out the middle‐class. As soon as Trotsky, Lenin, and their associates had successfully asserted their dictatorship, they turned upon what they described as the “bourgeoisie,” determined to extinguish it. What they did not realise was that without the middle‐class, with its trained knowledge, sense of discipline, and power of command, Russia would be reduced to misery. Soviet Russia is the theatre in which the follies of headstrong and ignorant men are illustrated to the world. We shall do well to take warning by its mistakes. The middle‐class in this country represents elements of strength which we cannot spare, and we trust that British statesmen will walk warily lest in these difficult times of financial stress and strain further burdens are pressed upon it which it cannot bear. — The Daily Telegraph.

SEPTEMBER sees the irrevocable passing of summer and the inevitable looking forward to autumnal plans. Such plans must be made, even in the shadows of this world situation, which as we write are as menacing as they have been since war began, and before these words appear another fourteen of the sixty days which Mr. Lyttleton warned us would be the gravest in our history will have elapsed. That leaves a formidable margin for possibilities. Librarians, as deeply involved as any people in the conflict, must nevertheless act as if the work of life will go on, even if not as in peace. Our difficulties do not lessen; more and more of our lads and girls, and some rather beyond the age these words cover, are being removed from libraries; the book situation worsens; and the demands for books increase, especially in what until recently were evacuation areas, to which many of our exiles have now returned.

This paper aims to analyze the risks faced by the Cambodian rice supply chain (RSC), including risk identification, risk investigation and risk management.

The first qualitative area of exploration from this exploratory sequential design is to identify the potential risks, in which the authors conduct in-depth interviews with ten different experts in Cambodia. Using the structural equation model (SEM) in AMOS and descriptive statistics analysis, this study investigates the risks that affect the RSC performance on an environmental, social and economic basis and subsequently proposes risk management strategies. The authors collect quantitative data from 200 Cambodian farmers through interviews and surveys.

The results illustrate that the farm households face 18 risk factors. The researchers consolidate 18 risk factors into four classifications: supply risks, production risks, demand risks and environmental risks. Nine experts out of the ten who were interviewed (90%) consider themselves “highly vulnerable” (with a rating of 4 or 5 on the Likert scale), while only one expert has a “neutral” stance (with a rating of 3 on the Likert scale); these results concerning risk identification are visualized in the likelihood effect matrix of the RSC. After investigating the risks, the authors found that RSC performance is significantly affected by the RSC risks. In particular, four groups are created, representing two different approaches to mitigate, avoid, transfer and cope with agricultural risks, i.e. exante and ex post risk management strategies.

This study fully answers research questions regarding risk identification, risk investigation and risk management.