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Managed care, a regime with multiple facets, integrates the delivery of care, whatever fields it concerns (services, hospitalisations, drugs), and the financing to supply medical services of high quality while containing expenses. Its success reached its climax in the 1990s. This paper discusses the history of managed care, analyses the mechanisms of cost reduction that appeared in the aftermath of managed care, notes criticisms from practitioners and insurers and, finally, describes some European experiences inspired by US managed care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines what smartness does on the ground by examining how its anticipatory media visions have been interpreted and acted on in policy decisions and local implementations since the early 2000s. Using a comparative-historical analysis that draws on fieldwork in aspiring smart cities in the United States and Europe, we argue that the visions of smartness are neither singular nor fixed across time and space. Instead, the role of smartness in diffusing new technologies is recruited and reshaped in the present to lend legitimacy to future public and private interventions. We first demonstrate that the narrative of crisis, often associated with smartness, shifted from a pre-2008 emphasis on sustainability and climate change to a post-financial crisis engagement with entrepreneurship and platformization. We then discuss how the development of smart city initiatives has followed divergent paths in the United States and Europe, with big tech companies dominating in the former and the 'living lab' model prevailing in the latter. Our analysis highlights the importance of investigating the complex relationships between anticipatory media visions of smartness and their varying, down-to-earth implementations in the built environment rather than solely focusing on the discursive appeal of techno-idealism. It also explains the enduring appeal of smartness as an urban vision, despite its various shortcomings, by revealing its adaptability to the changing social and political–economic shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this special issue is on the energy transformations taking place in several European countries (Austria, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland) and at the federal and subnational (state) levels in the United States with special attention given to California. The cases examined all have federalist structures, and with the exception of the federal level of the United States, all have relatively ambitious climate and renewable energy targets. We compare these states out of an interest in better understanding how federalism interacts with energy transitions. The comparison is also intriguing as at the federal level the United States presents a stark contrast with the federalist European countries considered in this special issue but at the subnational level many similarities can be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clinical symptoms of dementia include difficulty with speech, poor short-term memory, and changes in behavior. These symptoms can affect how the person with dementia understands and performs in social interactions. This qualitative review investigated how people with mild to moderate dementia managed social connections. A systematic search of social science databases retrieved 13 articles; data were synthesized using thematic analysis. Results established the work undertaken by people with dementia to maintain and present a social persona seen as socially acceptable. Interpretations are contextualized within Goffman and Sabat's theories on "self." People with dementia were agentic in impression management: undertaking work to maintain recognized social roles, while being aware of when their illness led to others discrediting them. Wider recognition of strategies used to maintain a social self could inform interventions designed to increase capability and confidence in co-managing social connections following dementia diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating housing tenure in Instrumental Motivation Theory predicts a tenure gap in electoral participation, as homeowners would be more motivated to vote compared with tenants. The empirical question is whether this effect is causal or rather due to selection into different housing tenures. This question is tackled using coarsened exact matching (CEM) on data for 19 countries, allowing us to better control for endogeneity. Even then, homeowners are found to vote more often than tenants. This association is stronger in countries characterized by a strong pro-homeownership ideology and/or where the financialization of housing markets turned houses into assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent debates about inequality, many have pointed to the predominant position of the finance. This article highlights that structural power, not lobbying resources, are key to explaining variations across countries. It examines finance-government negotiations over national bank rescue schemes during the recent financial crisis. Given the structural power of finance, the variation in bank bailouts across countries cannot be explained by lobbying differences. Instead of observing organized interest intermediation, we can see that disorganization was crucial for the financial industry to get off the hook and let the government carry the burden of stabilizing the economy. Put differently, structural power is strongest when finance remains collectively inactive. In contrast to traditional accounts of the lobbying influence of finance, the comparison highlights that the lack of organization can have crucial redistributive consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the discourses of forced prostitution that circulated in the US and European media and government publications in the context of the soccer World Cup in 2006. This analysis of the public discourse around prostitution reveals two themes: concerns about immigration and border security, and representations of gender binaries that serve to relegate migrant women to the status of victim. The fears of increased sex trafficking and the condemnation of so-called ‘sex shacks’ and ‘mega-brothels’ for the World Cup 2006 served as foils for other perceived crises produced by globalisation. The debates struggle with a marked ‘other’ that reveals new forms of racialised ‘othering’: dangerously white, understood as both of Europe and a threat to it. The 2006 World Cup historical moment has implications for how international sports, consumer culture and feminist activism inform and conceal human agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the ways Islamic leaders have adapted to conditions in Britain, France, and the United States by taking one problem—how a Muslim woman can obtain a religious divorce—and identifying contrasts across those three countries. It emphasizes two contrasts among the three countries: the degree of residential concentration of Muslims and the social effects such concentration may have, and the legal legitimacy of religion in civil courts. Muslim leaders have crafted institutions accordingly: in Britain, shariah councils emerging from tight-knit communities and regarded by jurists as relatively benign; in France, Islamic leaders constrained to emphasize the Islamic legitimacy of civil institutions; and in the United States, leaders developing contractual instruments in response to relatively favorable judicial reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes the characteristics of a distinctively Australian paradigm of metropolitan planning which reflect circumstances of governance, infrastructure provision and concentration on suburban expansion into surrounding countryside. The resultant plans are detailed in their arrangement of land use and communications, comprehensive and long term. There are indications this paradigm may be changing as these dominating influences alter in character. Contemporary metropolitan strategic planning in Europe and America is overviewed to establish the distinctiveness of the Australian paradigm. Changes in plan-shaping forces are leading the emergence of a new European strategic spatial planning paradigm very different to Australia's. Strategic spatial planning in the United States, while heterogeneous, has examples that reinforce the idea of an Australian paradigm in terms of the influence of governance structure and infrastructure agency on the level of spatial plan detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comparative study of romantic anti- Americanism focusing on Britain, Germany and France. On the basis of the hypothesis that romanticism invented what might be called the basic vocabulary of anti-American discourse, the article presents a taxonomy of this vocabulary and points to the determining factors underlying the romantic disaffection for America and Americans. Five motifs are singled out as fundamental to romantic anti-Americanism: the lack of history and culture in the US, the crass materialism of its inhabitants, their vulgarity, their religious excesses, and the flaws of the American political system. The article closes with an interpretation of romantic anti-Americanism as a strongly self-affirming, Eurocentric discourse, which accustomed Europeans to think of Europe and America as antithetical entities, thereby paving the way for cultural constructions not only of the American 'other', but also of a common European identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on city planning-related topics, including visions of waterfront development in postindustrial Philadelphia, the construction of a town planning perception of Colombo, and city planning and the U.S. census.

According to the unified theory, higher unemployment in Europe as compared to the United States is caused by higher wage rigidity, which, in turn, results from more "inflexible" labor market institutions. Focusing on wage coordination, the empirical analysis shows that the variety of bargaining patterns across European countries and during the period 1971 to 1998 contradicts a simple U.S. -Europe juxtaposition. Although some countries have to cope with excessive wage growth, many others do not trigger higher average wage growth and some coordination forms even show better performance than the United States. Secondly, contrary to the contention of rigidity, the labor market actors in most European countries are responsive to the performance of their bargaining system; they tend to adapt their system if wages seem to overshoot Hence, the rigidity of Europe thesis does not hold in a more detailed cross-national and long-term analysis of institutional changes in wage bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]