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Introduction: Acker's description of the ideal worker as “unencumbered with caring responsibilities and ready to devote his life to his job” (Acker, 2006a, p. 69) becomes haunting when considered in the context of a global health crisis. When, on a global scale, human life became more vulnerable, care needs increased exponentially, and organizations demanded intense effort in their clamor for survival. Acker's (1990, 1998) ideal worker concept has captured the intellectual imagination of contributors to Gender, Work and Organization (GWO) for decades (Adkins, 2019; Pocock, 2005; Pullen et al., 2019). In this Special Issue of GWO we apply the ideal worker concept to the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to expose how implicit ideals about who workers are and what workers do interact with unprecedented organizational crisis management and other large-scale changes in practices and processes
This paper explores whether constitutional litigation contributes to sustaining the equity element of the right to health. Equity entails a fair distribution of the burden of healthcare financing across the different socio-economic groups of the population. A shift towards uncontrolled private healthcare provision and financing raises equity challenges by disproportionately benefitting those who are able to afford such services. The extent to which equity is enforced is an indicator of the strength of the right to health. However, do domestic constitutional courts second-guess, based on equity, policy decisions that impact on healthcare financing? Is it the task of constitutional courts to scrutinize such policy decisions? Under what conditions are courts more likely to do so? The paper addresses these questions by focusing on the case of Hungary, where the right to health has been present in the Fundamental Law adopted in 2010 and the Constitutions preceding it. While the Hungarian Constitutional Court has been traditionally cautious to review policy decisions pertaining to healthcare financing, the system has been struggling with equity issues and successive government coalitions have had limited success in tackling these. The paper discusses the role of constitutional litigation in addressing such equity concerns. In doing so, it contributes to the discussion on the role of domestic constitutional courts in the protection of social and economic rights.
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The Convention on Biodiversity has developed the concept of ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural resources’ in order to describe ways in which humans benefit from healthy ecosystems. Biodiversity, conceived through the economic approach, was recognized to be of great social and economic value to both present and future populations. According to its critics, the economic capture approach might be inadequate in addressing rapid biodiversity loss, since many non-human species do not have an economic value and there may thus be limited grounds for prohibiting or even restricting their destruction. This article aims to examine the concept of biodiversity through competing discourses of sustainability and to discuss the implications for education for sustainable development (ESD). https://doi.org/10.1177/0973408213495606 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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