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Social cohesion is beneficial to economic restructuring, social change, and political action. At its core, it involves building shared values and communities of interpretation, reducing disparities in wealth and income, and generally enabling people to have a sense of belonging, inclusion, participation, recognition, and legitimacy. A family, as a major social institution, is central to the functioning of any society and is therefore potentially the bedrock of creating and maintaining social cohesion. This article draws inextricable links between the role of the family and the creation of social cohesion by evaluating South Africa’s White Paper on Families. First, it defines and unpacks social cohesion and contextualises the family environment. This is done through an evaluation of the available literature on social cohesion in the family. Second, an evaluation of legislation and the White Paper on family is presented. Third, the aid of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory is used to examine the various environments concerning social cohesion in the family. The White Paper on family recognises the family in aspects other than the concept of the family cycle, a key component of the developing individual who should be nurtured from infancy to adulthood. In addition, gaps in the policy are highlighted by looking at implementation challenges of the constitutional provisions and examining the way in which these gaps lead to social and economic exclusion and attendant poverty as the cardinal result.

The potential of social media to disseminate, aggregate, channel and democratize social accountability processes has encouraged a variety of organizations to actively promote and champion such initiatives. These initiatives typically envision a three step social accountability process where, for example, the publication of previously-private financial information about the inappropriate wealth accumulation activities of politicians and their business allies (step #1), combined with social media dissemination and discussion of these activities (step #2), can result in an accountability conversation that spills out of the medium and that sometimes results in positive social change (step #3). The current study examines Twitter reactions to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalist’s (ICIJ) publication of the Panama Papers. The analysis illustrates that there was a Twitter reaction: furthermore, that there were different styles of response and that certain styles were more likely to elicit an audience reaction, especially if the tweeter was a journalist or organization. While the provided analysis focuses on step #2 within the social accountability process, the results imply that publicly-interested accounting academics qua activists can facilitate social accountability by helping to make previously-private financial information public and by cultivating sympathetic individuals within the traditional media as well as within organizations that are active on social media.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to argue for a strengthening of the relational aspect of social work and for initiatives that involve local people and local communities. Design/methodology/approach A think piece based on observations of the current situation and supporting evidence. Findings Social work has become distanced from those whom it seeks to help. Case management and risk assessment need to be complemented by a more human approach based on positive relationships between professionals and service users. Originality/value An informed discussion on the future of social work.

In 1946 the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong explained his party’s stance on nuclear weapons to the American journalist Anne Louise Strong: “The atom bomb is a paper tiger with which the American reactionaries try to terrify the people. It looks terrible, but in fact is not. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass annihilation: the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new weapons.” The emphasis on the people as the ultimate determinant of victory or defeat was the foundation of Maoist doctrine. It emerged out of a series of successful wars against armies that enjoyed better equipment but lacked mass support, and from a leadership imbued with a revolutionary ideology that identified the aroused masses as the source of social change.

We attempt to make two arguments in this essay. First, through a case study of a mobile phone based voice-media service we have been running in rural central India for more than six years, we describe several implementation complexities we had to navigate towards realizing our intended vision of bringing social development through technology. Most of these complexities arose in the interface of our technology with society, and we argue that even other technology providers can create similar processes to manage this socio-technological interface and ensure intended outcomes from their technology use. We then build our second argument about how to ensure that the organizations behind both market driven technologies and those technologies that are adopted by the state, pay due attention towards responsibly managing the socio-technological interface of their innovations. We advocate for the technology engineers and researchers who work within these organizations, to take up the responsibility and ensure that their labour leads to making the world a better place especially for the poor and marginalized. We outline possible governance structures that can give more voice to the technology developers to push their organizations towards ensuring that responsible outcomes emerge from their technology. We note that the examples we use to build our arguments are limited to contemporary information and communication technology (ICT) platforms used directly by end-users to share content with one another, and hence our argument may not generalize to other ICTs in a straightforward manner.

This chapter analyses how British punk music prompted the music press to reconsider youth, in light of discourse on class and deviance, which again altered narratives of permissive social change. It considers how a punk scene emerged to present journalists with exciting stories full of aggression, attitude and sometimes even violence. The idea of working-class youth acting in a way that transgressed social norms, and encouraged others to get involved in both their music and lifestyle, prompted attempts to mediate punk within a mass market. Music papers did so by reimagining and revitalising the music press’s anti-racist politics and by adopting a more caring approach to readers by admitting that readers emulated musicians by taking drugs and should, therefore, publish strategies to safeguard them.

This article explores how rural community leaders perceived changes to community and family relationships as a result of a pulp and paper mill closure in a rural community in Central Canada. Through the application of a social ecological model, this study explores how intrapersonal and interpersonal factors influence rural community life in the context of a pulp and paper mill closure. The findings from interviews with 10 community leaders showed the mill's closure created long-distance commuting scenarios that diminished various community social relationships and family unit interactions and relationships. This article makes a novel contribution to the literature by demonstrating the changes to rural community and family life faced as a result of a pulp and paper mill closure, emphasizing the challenges to these communities in the context of community change.

The current study examines the micro-linguistic details of Twitter responses to the whistleblower-initiated publication of the Panama Papers. The leaked documents contained the micro-details of tax avoidance, tax evasion, and wealth accumulation schemes used by business elites, politicians, and government bureaucrats. The public release of the documents on April 4, 2016 resulted in a groundswell of Twitter and other social media activity throughout the world, including 161,036 Spanish-language tweets in the subsequent 5-month period. The findings illustrate that the responses were polyvocal, consisting a collection of overlapping speech genres with varied thematic topics and linguistic styles, as well as differing degrees of calls for action and varying amounts of illocutionary force. The analysis also illustrates that, while the illocutionary force of tweets is somewhat associated with the adoption of a prosaic and vernacular ethical stance as well as with demands for action, these types of voicing behaviors were not present in the majority of the tweets. These results suggest that, while social media platforms are a popular site for collective forms of voicing activities, it is less certain that these collective stakeholder voices necessarily result in forceful accountability demands that spill out of the communication medium and thus serve as an impulse for positive social change.

This article responds to the 2014 American Political Science Association Annual Conference’s theme of “Politics After the Digital Revolution.” It first gives a brief assessment of how the discipline of political science has reacted to the digital revolution. It then seeks to couch the putative revolution in Thorstein Veblen’s theory of a “machine process” in order to recast it less as a discrete phenomenon to be dealt with by the discipline, but instead as part of an evolutionary process of social change that instils habits of mind of those who are subject to it, and who in turn, influence the machine process itself in a co-determinant manner. This article offers the synthesis of Veblen and the Frankfurt School to theorize how the digital revolution might be critically assessed in its evolutionary framework, and speaks towards an evolutionary critical theory for analysing political society beyond discrete events.

It’s been 70 years since Kurt Lewin began examining the social dynamics underlying discrimination and 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the United States. Fifty years ago also marks the inception of National Training Laboratories (NTL) and The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (JABS). NTL’s mission is “to advance Applied Behavioral Science in the service of social justice, oppression-free societies, and healthy individuals, groups and organizations in the world” (www.ntl. org) and JABS supports NTL’s mission through serving as a publication outlet for the exploration of group dynamics, organization development, and social change (www. jab.sagepub.com). Thus, it is fitting for JABS to house a special issue on Social Equality as it furthers NTL’s, and by extension, JABS’s, commitment to civil rights and continuing the work of Lewin on creating a more socially just society. While much has changed in terms of workplace equality in the past 50 years, with increases in numbers of women and people of color gaining access to places of power where they had formerly been excluded, much remains the same. Despite the election of Barack Obama as the first African American President of the United States, there are still very few women and minorities in senior leadership positions in organizations that hold power (political, government, corporations). For example, in 2014 men held 94.8% of Fortune 500 CEO positions, whereas women held only 5.2% (Catalyst, 2014). In addition, in 2014 Whites held 95% of Fortune 500 CEO positions, whereas people of color (Black, Asian, and Latino) held only 5% (Diversity Inc., 2014). Moreover, when women and people of color are in positions of authority, racial and gender dynamics often undermine leadership and derail organizational initiatives. There has been a great deal of research on understanding the causes of this persistent social inequality in organizational settings. Some of these studies focus on examining individual differences among various social identity groups (e.g., gender differences in 566493 JABXXX10.1177/0021886314566493The Journal of Applied Behavioral ScienceBlock and Noumair research-article2014

The young people who Andreana Clay detailed in the important contribution to the study of contemporary social movements and protest politics live and work in Oakland, California, a place its Poet Laureate, Ishmael Reed calls, “an American wonder.” Clay argues that youth of color activists organize in light of the “burden” of the sixties, and “keeping it real” thus becomes an essential part of their activist toolkit. Clay concludes that “By performing the acts of resistance and identifying as activists, the youth challenge the dominant understanding of activism by taking action to change their communities, however they define them”. She further suggests that the insights are critical to scholarly understanding of contemporary activism and social change. The work of social transformation, particularly one that may foment a feminist, socialist, and multicultural democracy as hip-hop-influenced Oakland youth activists intimately understand, would seem to include the work of inventing souls, not just inventing leadership.

Both ethnographic investigation and the results of a questionnaire survey on violence among the general female population show that, today, a majority of Kanak women no longer legitimise rape or physical violence, even if the perpetrator is their partner. The now-widespread challenging of such violence from an ideological standpoint by the youngest Kanak women, and by urban Kanak women, indicates that new openings are emerging for women at the individual level and that there is a renegotiation of gender relations in New Caledonia. In the present paper, we examine these changes in the context of the country's recent political and social history. The engagement of Kanak women with the pro-Independence movement, the economic rebalancing program launched in the 1990s in New Caledonia in favour of the Kanaks and recently achieved political parity have led to a profound change not only in women's everyday lives, but also in their representations of gender.

As the epidemic of HIV disease continues to grow among drug users and their sexual partners, new ways must be adopted to de prevention work, outreach, and service delivery to this population. The Harm Reduction Model offers methods of working with drug users, which are in contrast to traditional methods based on confrontation and that require abstinence before change can occur. This position paper examines the Harm Reduction Model and outlines areas in which the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care can play a role in the expansion of harm-reduction-based intervention and policies.

Despite evidence from previous studies that support using Social Stories™ for problem behaviors, research conducted with more rigorous controls is needed to examine whether or not Social Stories constitute an evidence-based practice.This study employed an ABABCBC single-subject design comparing a Social Story presented in two formats across three elementary-age students with autism. Interpretation of the results documents a decrease in the frequency of problem behavior for each participant. Outcomes were slightly better for the PowerPoint™ format than for the paper format. Results were maintained in the training setting and were generalized to another setting with a single verbal prompt. Teachers reported that the PowerPoint format was easily implemented, and students indicated that they liked the computer-assisted format.

Aim In light of debates arising from recent developments in Irish nursing education, this paper analyses tensions in the positioning of nursing in academia in terms of notions of the sacred and profane, and the symbolic boundaries between them, and discusses the implications of this analysis for nurse academics' identities. Background The entry of nursing education to the higher education sector has occurred against a discursive backcloth of opposition which constructs nursing work as either sacred, and under threat from the academy, or profane, and unworthy of a place in it. Method Conceptual resources derived from the work of Basil Bernstein are deployed to analyse the forces driving the loom weaving this discursive backcloth. These forces are conceptualised as deriving from deep-seated fears and anxieties sparked by changes in the strength of symbolically important boundaries between constructions of the sacred and profane in the fields of nursing and higher education. These constructions are explicated. Findings Bernstein regards secure academic identities as inhering in strong boundaries between disciplines and between the fields of education and work. The transfer of nursing education from health to the higher education sector and nurse academics' attempts to articulate a nursing-discipline specific knowledge base can be understood in these terms. This analysis challenges nurse academics who promote disciplinary eclecticism and those who legitimate academic nursing principally in terms of the acquisition of generic and transferable lifelong learning skills. Conclusions To counter a discourse that constructs them as a profane presence in higher education, some nurse academics have articulated a discourse of legitimation that constructs (academic) nursing as a sacred endeavour. Whether this can provide the grounds of their legitimacy and the basis of their careers as distinctively nursing academics is unclear at this stage of nursing's development as an academic discipline.

The contributors to this discussion were invited to submit comments, each from a different standpoint, on the paper by John Caldwell and Thomas Schindlmayr that appeared in the preceding issue of the journal. The invitation was issued with the approval of these authors, and the journal is grateful to them for allowing their paper to be used to generate debate on the issues they had raised. The discussion is followed by the authors' response to it.

The book reviewed here makes an interesting and timely contribution to the continuously growing field of studies about memory. Memory is conceptualized variously within the volume. At times it is seen as a private state, existing within the individualized body as the recollection or trauma associated with past events; at others, as the historical event itself, able to be collectively remembered, interpreted and contested. The 13 chapters thus present studies that range across personal memories, re-examination of classical theorizing and some innovative approaches to aspects of memory, including nostalgia and forgetting. The work of Marx, Mead, Cooley, Halbwachs and Durkheim is examined, but importantly, also the pioneering work on memory by Jane Addams. As authors Lengermann and Niebrugge note in their chapter (‘Memory and social change – Jane Addams’ The Long Road of Woman’s Memory’), it predated Halbwachs’ work on collective memory, and they are able to demonstrate its continuing value as a framework for understanding current social issues.

ELIZABETH COLSON: AN APPRECIATION Chet Lancaster and Kenneth P. Vickery, eds. The Tonga-Speaking Peoples of Zambia and Zimbabwe: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Colson. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2007. viii + 392 pp. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. References. Index. $45.00, Paper. In March 1955, after more than a decade of economic and engineering feasibility studies, the international bidding was opened for the construction of a dam at Kariba Gorge on the Zambezi River. At 384 feet high and 1737 feet long, the Kariba project remains one of the most massive hydroelectric dams ever built, creating the largest artificial lake in the world at the time of its construction. This unique engineering feat was a bold expression of postwar European confidence in science and the human capacity to tame and transform nature in the name of modernization: in fact, to command nature's acquiescence in grandiose colonial dreams of limitless industrial expansion. The Kariba project was also a surprising expression of confidence in the stability of the colonial order of things. Through the hindsight of history, we know that the British Empire in West Africa was already crumbling at that time. Indeed, the former Gold Coast had already achieved some measure of internal self-rule and would receive full independence in less than two years. Much of British Central Africa would follow suit in less than a decade. Yet Kariba Dam was conceived not as a parting gift, a farewell gesture of thanks to colonial peoples for decades of human and material contributions to European development. Instead, Kariba moved forward as if the African clamor for independence were inconsequential-as if African people themselves were irrelevant. The project would flood 20,000 square miles of potentially productive African farmland, and it forced the removal of 57,000 African people to higher ground. No input was sought from those who would be most affected, and no resistance was tolerated. The immensity of Kariba Dam's impact on the landscape was perhaps exceeded only by the immensity of its impact on the human imagination. Industrialists worldwide intensified plans for utilizing the heretofore inconceivable amount of electrical energy that would be up for grabs in both Northern and Southern Rhodesia. International environmental organizations vied to be the first to study the dramatically changed downstream ecology that would result from the containment of roughly 40 percent of the total runoff of the Zambezi River. Conservationists from all over the globe flocked to the Zambezi Valley to participate in "Operation Noah," a multiyear effort to rescue animals, large and small, from the rising floodwaters. Members of the hospitality industry jostled one another to acquire the best sites for new hotels, game lodges, sport fishing resorts, and boating marinas along the shoreline of the newly forming lake. One small group of scholars, however, recognized the potential the Kariba project held for studying social change. A group of people with a richly varied riverine-focused subsistence system was about to be forced to begin life anew on the bleak, wind-swept, wild-animal infested plateaus that hovered over 3000 feet above their old village sites. How would these people adapt? What would be the impact of the move on their social, political, and economic systems? How might notions of land tenure, reciprocal rights and duties, traditional leveling mechanisms, and gender dynamics fare in the new dispensation? Might the change affect such basic parameters as morbidity and mortality rates? And what of the ancestors and spirits of the forest and river below? Would they move up to the new location as well? This satchel of weighty questions was foisted on the shoulders of a young anthropologist named Elizabeth Colson. And the rest is history. Colson was raised in a small farming community in Central Minnesota, conscious from a young age of the continuing presence of Ojibwas who had been dispossessed of their land by Euro-American settlers. …

The extent to which participatory processes are deliberative social inquiry by animated citizens organized in communities of inquiry and engaged in civic science is a measure of the degree to which social institutions reveal a public philosophy of democracy. This paper examines the argument that public participation creates the conditions for social inquiry when a polity defines itself, organizes itself,creates the necessary information for social choices, and exercises its responsibility to make public judgments and exercise public accountability.

This paper investigates the translation of medical information into clinical practice and the role of thoughtful dissent by exploring the influence of sociological factors on change, the impact of evidence-based medicine (EBM), and the role of industry. Changing practice related to hormone therapy for menopausal and post-menopausal women provides context for this discussion. Medical change involves diffusion of ideas to potential users and ongoing reconciliation of new information with old ideas; this process is influenced by sociological factors including values and experiences, interpersonal relationships and local context. While EBM has alerted doctors to the importance of high quality research and theoretically provides a tool for translating research into practice, there are important problems with its application: (1) it has resulted in a reductionist approach to research and illness; (2) there is a considerable gap between research findings and the complex environment of clinical practice; and (3) EBM has been appropriated by experts, thus corporately developed 'standard-of-care' documents have become instruments of external regulation, and EBM has ceased to be a tool in the hand of individual clinicians. In addition, industry impacts the translation of knowledge by significantly influencing academia, researchers, medical publications, consensus conferences, and practising doctors. While questioning doctrinaire practices or directives is a daunting prospect for individual clinicians, the translation of knowledge into practice and evolution of medical thought is dependent on the progressive role of thoughtful dissent.

This paper contends that psychoanalytic theory, a neglected component of social work education, has much to offer in explaining social policy, cultural diversity, and human behavior. It serves to introduce four papers presented at the Presidential Symposium of the December 2001 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association and provides a framework supporting the integration of psychoanalytic theory as essential curriculum content for successful social work practice in the 21st century. This position is supported by evidence illustrating how other professions have incorporated psychoanalytic theory in explaining dynamics of social change and human behavior, such as violence. The authors challenge social work educators to expand their vision of psychoanalytic theory and to institute curriculum modifications supporting its relevance and inclusion.

This piece comprises short presentations given by contributors to a symposium organized by the journal Ethics & Social Welfare on the theme of global ethics for social work. The contributors offer their reflections on the extent to which universally accepted international statements of ethical principles in social work are possible or useful, engaging with debates about cultural diversity, relativism and the relevance of human rights in non-Western countries.

This chapter presents a framework for understanding gender and organizational change. We consider three traditional treatments of gender and discuss the limitations of each as a basis for organizational analysis and change. We then propose a fourth approach, which treats gender as a complex set of social relations enacted across a range of social practices in organizations. Having been created largely by and for men, these social practices tend to reflect and support men’s experiences and life situations and, therefore, maintain a gendered social order in which men and particular forms of masculinity dominate ( Acker, 1990 ). We provide numerous examples of how social practices, ranging from formal policies and procedures to informal patterns of everyday social interaction, produce inequities while appearing to be gender-neutral. Drawing on previous research and our own three-year action research project, we develop an intervention strategy for changing gender relations in organizations accordingly.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Af rica after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 200 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibiography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $20.00. Paper. Charles Piot's landmark 1999 ethnography, Remotely Global, showed that societies of the savanna region of northern Togo, far from being static, insular polities on the margins of the nation-state, lying outside history and isolated from global forces, have always been influenced and preoccupied by the "outside world." In this new book, Piot argues that the ending of the Cold War brought about a decrease in the power of both the state and local chieftaincy in Togo, the emergence of a radically new political economy centered on NGOs and Pentecostal churches, and new, future-oriented social imaginaries, modes of subjectivity, sovereignty, and storytelling. Piot's tide "indexes Togolese longing for a future that replaces untoward pasts, both political and cultural. Such longing is represented not only in Christian End Times narratives and die universal quest for exit visas but also in the embrace of a thousand development initiatives that hail youth and leave elders behind" (20). Utopian yearnings find expression in a passion for playing the green card lottery, fantasies of fictitious marriages with foreigners, membership in churches that promise supernatural abundance, Internet searches for exit strategies, and a turn to the transient pleasures of sex, drugs, and music for an instantaneous sense of affective power and presence. This emphasis on inwardness and self-fulfillment stands in dramatic contrast to the prevailing ethos of a traditional culture, where duty, forebearance, and respect for elders imply a stoic acceptance of life as one finds it and the suppression of thoughts and feelings that challenge the status quo. Traditionally, lip service was paid to the idea that one must sacrifice personal gratification and spontaneous self-expression to make sociality viable (the implication being that what is good for the many will prove good for die individual). Collective rituals and everyday practices of commensality, neighborliness, and mutuality reinforced the common weal. Modernity reverses these assumptions. Personal development through education, travel, and purchasing power becomes the royal road to social development, a precondition for the wider social good. This revolutionary change in worldview does not occur adventitiously. It follows radical disruptions to the social fabric - civil war, famine, epidemic illness, mass migration or displacement, and urbanization. Piot paints a grim picture of the anomic background against which the new social imaginarles emerged in the 1990s. These changes "burst onto this socio-cosmological stage like a comet from the sky. Disconcerted by the violence against Kabre in the cities of the south, puzzled by those strange new keywords democratie and droits de l'homme, attacked by the Pentecostal churches, stung by currency devaluation and state withdrawal, and increasingly neglected by cash-strapped diasporics, this authority system was shaken to its roots" (99). …

The experience of retirement and old age of two cohorts of the residents of Paris, born successively around 1907 and 1921, have been studied through prospective longitudinal studies, each of which comprised several waves of interviews. The two cohorts were first interviewed as they approached retirement and old age, in respectively 1972 and 1984. Moulded by the strong contemporaneous social change, the principal life experiences of the two cohorts have been quite different – from the social and geographic settings of their birth, their childhood and education, through their occupations and career advancement, parenting and family lives, housing conditions and residential mobility, earned incomes and pensions, longevity, and utilisation of medical care. Above all, their long lives have been strongly conditioned by rapid and radical socio-economic changes, particularly in the occupational structure, the rising standard of living, and improvements in urban housing standards, social protection, personal services and average life span. In contrast to their rising material standards, the cohorts have faced the gradual spread of less sympathetic attitudes towards older people, particularly those who lose their autonomy. As the number of people in advanced old age has relentlessly increased, they have in several respects become more distant from the rest of society. Maintaining the continued ‘inclusion’ and full citizenship of frail older people is not only a growing moral and practical problem, but also a major political problem in a democracy.

In the Fourth Quarter 2003 issue I asked readers to send contributions for the international nurses list of grand challenges in improving global health. Although responses were few the list below is informative and revealing both in its content and in comparison to the list of grand challenges identified in an extensive effort sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Cancer Institute (available at http://www.grandchallengesgh.org/). Differences in these lists do not constitute contradictions nor do they imply that any items are wrong. Instead the two sets of grand challenges indicate the vast and complex needs in improving global health and the necessity of focusing efforts on a multitude of conditions underlying health and illness. This list is focused only on health and health care needs not on challenges pertaining to nurses other personnel or resources. Global challenges for nursing were identified in an extensive effort sponsored by Sigma Theta Tau International (Dickenson-Hazard 2004). The list below includes additional information that can be used in conjunction with other reports to focus energies toward improving health. (excerpt)

When I wrote ‘Demography in the archives’, it was my hope to open up a methodological discussion of geographical, social, and demographic aspects of legal sources that I believed had not received sufficient attention in the past. The matter was urgent, I felt, because I had found that there was a distinctive pattern to the reception of my work on either side of the Atlantic. When I presented papers in North America, my basic premise – that it was difficult, if not impossible, to use legal sources like the York cause papers as the basis of an analysis of social change in the century after the Black Death – was accepted with little or no comment. However, when I presented the same papers in Britain there seemed to be unease about this conclusion and one of the most frequent questions I was asked was why I did not analyse temporal variations in the material. From this I perceived the need to explain how I arrived at such a position, and after a long period of gestation the eventual outcome was ‘Demography in the archives’. I am delighted that Dr Goldberg has taken the time to go over my arguments in this meticulous fashion (see ‘Fiction in the archives: the York cause papers is a source for later medieval social history’, above in this number). He has found many errors that escaped me during the article's proofreading, and for this work I thank him. In what follows I shall concentrate on what I see as the main points of his article.It is clear that we differ profoundly in our estimation of the value of these sources to the social historian. However, there is some common ground between us. We agree that an investigation of the categories suggested in ‘Demography in the archives’ will yield important insights into the nature of the medieval litigation material. We are, in other words, agreed that factors such as litigants' social status, their geographical distance to the courts, and the age-composition of witnesses must be examined before we can conclude anything about the usefulness of these sources. Where we differ is in our interpretation of the evidence and in the tools that we suggest are most suited for this analysis.

In sub-Saharan Africa HIV/AIDS has proven to be the most challenging health and development issue of modern times. At the end of 2001 28.1 million people were infected with the virus almost exclusively through heterosexual sex (UNAIDS 2002). Many millions more have been left to cope with orphaned children sick or dying relatives worsened economic circumstances and severely reduced opportunities in life. There is no cure there is a long period between catching HIV and developing AIDS and the drug regimes required to manage it are costly and difficult to manage. Africas health systems designed with a bias towards primary care are finding it difficult to cope with the cost and complexity of treating AIDS especially in rural communities. And yet HIV/AIDS is more than a health problem. Its spread is related to poverty power relationships between men and women the availability and accessibility of basic services sexual customs and the evolution of traditional practices in modern society to name just a few of the factors that contribute to the pandemics magnitude in Africa. The socio-economic and political dimensions of HIV/AIDS determine how and where it is spread--and also how communities and individuals cope with it and adjust to its impact. However the response of governments and development agencies to the virus focuses on treatment from health-care facilities and prevention through the design and delivery of health education messages. (excerpt)