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16 books match the query 'Quality of life'

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After the End of History

The Curious Fate of American Materialism

Robert E. Lane

University of Michigan Press, 2005

"Robert E. Lane is one of the most prominent and distinguished critics of both the human impact of market economies and economic theory, arguing from much research that happiness is more likely to flow from companionship, enjoyment of work, contribution to society, and the opportunity to develop as a person, than from the pursuit of wealth and the accumulation of material goods in market economies. This latest work playfully personalizes the contrast through a dialogue between a humanistic social scientist, Dessi, and a market economist, Adam. It is all too rare to have the two sides talking to each other. Moreover, in Lane's witty and literate hands, it is an open-minded and balanced conversation, in which neither side has all the answers. His unparalleled grasp of interdisciplinary social scientific knowledge is brought to bear on the largest questions of human life: What genuinely makes people happy? How should human society be organized to maximize the quality of human lives?"
--David O. Sears, Professor of Psychology and Political Science, UCLA

"Lane's deep knowledge of the sources of human happiness enables him to develop a powerful critique of economic theory."
---Robert A. Dahl, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Yale University

Robert E. Lane is the Eugene Meyer Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University. His previous publications include The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (2000) and The Market Experience (1991).

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All That Was Not Her

Todd Meyers

Duke University Press, 2022

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending.

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Austerities and Aspirations

A Comparative History of Growth, Consumption, and Quality of Life in East Central Europe since 1945

Béla Tomka

Central European University Press, 2020

This monograph provides an analysis of the economic performance and living standard in Czechoslovakia and its successor states, Hungary, and Poland since 1945. The novelty of the book lies in its broad comparative perspective: it places East Central Europe in a wider European framework that underlines the themes of regional disparities and European commonalities. Going beyond the traditional growth paradigm, the author systematically studies the historical patterns of consumption, leisure, and quality of life—aspects that Tomka argues can best be considered in relation to one other. By adopting this “triple approach,” he undertakes a truly interdisciplinary research drawing from history, economics, sociology, and demography.

As a result of Tomka’s three-pillar comparative analysis, the book makes a major contribution to the debates on the dynamics of economic growth in communist and postcommunist East Central Europe, on the socialist consumer culture along with its transformation after 1990, and on how the accounts on East Central Europe can be integrated into the emerging field of historical quality of life research.

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Creating a Human World

A New Psychological and Religious Anthropology In Dialogue with Freud, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard

Ernest Daniel Carrere

University of Scranton Press, 2006

In Creating a Human World, Trappist monk and scholar Ernest Daniel Carrere explores what it means to be fully human, to live in a shared world, and to resist the easy tendency to flee reality and seek pleasure in material pursuits. To do so he examines the writings of three great modern thinkers—Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, and Søren Kierkegaard—and proposes a new reading of their work in light of his own understanding of New Testament teachings.

Carrere elucidates the paradoxical spiritual truth that salvation lies not in an escape from humanity, but in embracing it. An interdisciplinary tour de force, this book will appeal to anyone interested in philosophy, psychology, religion, or cultural anthropology.

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Detroit Lives

Robert Mast

Temple University Press, 1994

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Environmentally Devastated Neighborhoods

Perceptions, Policies, and Realities

Greenberg, Michael

Rutgers University Press, 1996

Only 3% of all Americans believe they live in bad neighborhoods. But 30% to 45% of those who live in places with crime and illegal drug sales, rats and stray dogs, hazardous waste sites, factory pollution, and abandoned and blighted buildings rate their neighborhood as poor quality. Even when these neighborhoods have good schools, parks, and other amenities, their resident's ratings do not go up. This holds true no matter who is asked - young, old, men or women, middle class, working class, or on welfare. Local health and planning officials corroborate resident perceptions. It is particularly noticeable that stress from living near a toxic waste site - the hazard that gets the biggest attention in terms of dollars spent - is low on the resident's list of fears about their neighborhoods. They'd much prefer to see the money put to fixing the immediate dangers on their block. But because federal and state government policies for protecting public health, lowering crime, and saving the environment are divided into separate bureaucratic cubby-holes, effective planning to improve these stressed neighborhoods is difficult. Beginning with the call for a definition of "environment" that fits the realities of these places, the authors argue for and propose policy initiatives that address all the desperate needs of these beleaguered neighborhoods. This book is essential reading for students, academics, and professionals in environmental studies, public health, urban studies and planning, as well as grassroots community organizers.

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First, Do No Harm

Power, Oppression, and Violence in Healthcare

Edited by Nancy L. Diekelmann

University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

First, Do No Harm shows how health care professionals, with the best intentions of providing excellent, holistic health care, can nonetheless perpetuate violence against vulnerable patients. The essays investigate the need to rethink contemporary healthcare practices in ways that can bring the art and science of medicine back into sorely needed balance.
These ground-breaking studies by noted scholars question commonly held assumptions in contemporary healthcare that underlie oppressive power dynamics and even violence for patients and their families. The contributors discuss such topics as women and violence, life-support technologies, and healthcare professionals’ own experiences as patients. First, Do No Harm opens the discourse for reaching new understandings, from reassessing the meaning of "quality of life" to questioning the appropriateness of the very language used by healthcare professionals. It will be welcomed by healthcare workers and by scholars in nursing, medicine, and the allied health sciences.

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