Defining global themes such as Urban Policy, Urban Sustainability, and even the Right to the City (RTTC) is fundamental to stimulating and establishing a continuous dialogue with the scientific community, mainly in the social sciences. Thus, understanding the dynamics around the scope of urban sustainability requires an analysis that is focused on multiple global realities. Taking a holistic view of Brazilian Urban Policy, this entry looks at the historical contexts that make urban sustainability the driving force behind this policy. In addition, an interdisciplinary consideration of urban sustainability is proposed using an analysis that is based on the connection between urban policies and social functions that reflect the idea of a sustainable city. The results of this analysis also point to the need for a continuous debate on the subject that primarily promotes new discoveries; this is so that the driving force of urban policy can gain new meanings and new guidelines can be implemented.

In the 21st century, prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous transformations were already underway in the field of employment. However, this unprecedented global health crisis has had a profound influence on employment worldwide, yielding both positive and negative outcomes across various labor aspects. Consequently, while certain effects are anticipated to be temporary, others are likely to instigate enduring changes in employment practices.

This entry discusses the importance of cultural competence in the healthcare of humans and animals, its challenges, its mixed research results, and the need for widely applicable competencies. Although there is research evidence showing that cultural competence is linked with patient satisfaction, better doctor–patient relationships, adherence to therapy, and to some extent, better health outcomes, there is a huge variety of models and competencies in the literature, which has sometimes resulted in inclusive outcomes, confusion as to what constitutes the necessary competencies, and patchy implementation. In spite of the development of cultural competence in human healthcare, its implementation in veterinary medicine remains poor. On this note, the aims of this entry are to provide a brief overview of the cultural competence in healthcare and veterinary medicine and education, to outline the important facts, and to highlight the need for more standardisation in implementing and testing widely applicable cultural competencies for both human and veterinary healthcare.

Financial interdependence refers to the practice of sharing money as an expression of mutuality. Forms of financial interdependence are often rooted in cultural norms and values and may be carried out as a commitment to the well-being of the family through financial transfers, practiced as informal savings groups, or even established as legally constructed agreements. Financial interdependence can result in either beneficial or harmful outcomes, depending upon the nature of the relationships and the available resources. As a social and cultural concept, it has been generally neglected in the discourse on financial independence, yet it has important implications for society as a basis for collective prosperity.

Viewed as the glue that binds societies, social cohesion is considered an essential ingredient to address common societal challenges. Definitions and associated conceptual frameworks usually summarise social cohesion as collective attributes and behaviours characterised by positive social relations, a sense of identification or belonging, and an orientation towards the common good. However, there are a large variety of definitions, and disagreement exists about what constitutes the core components, causes and consequences of social cohesion.

Positive psychology is a rapidly expanding and recent empirical. interdisciplinary research topic (i.e., within the last 25 years). Early evidence supported that targeting positive variables (i.e., empathy or kindness) has numerous benefits, including improving health outcomes, vocational success, psychological well-being, and interpersonal connectedness. Positive Psychological Interventions (PPIs) are activities and behavioral interventions that target positive variables to promote adaptive functioning (e.g., reducing depression or promoting psychological well-being). PPIs may make excellent contributions to treating substance use, substance use disorders (SUDs), and substance use problems because the interventions can partially shift the notable negative treatment focus (e.g., avoiding the consequences of using) onto positive aspects (e.g., pursuing an ideal future). Current substance use treatment outcomes demonstrate a need for improvements (e.g., low abstinence rates and lifetime symptom remission of SUDs), and positive psychology may provide a framework for improving existing treatments. In the current paper, the author reviewed research supporting the use of PPIs in substance use treatments, provide suggestions for PPI applications, examine advantages and practical issues, outline the current limitations, and provide future directions for continuing this line of work. The author aimed to encourage researchers to advance substance use treatment improvements with positive psychology because the growing consequences from substance use (e.g., the growing frequency of accidental fatal overdose) and the variable, limited treatment outcomes, placing those who use substances in a uniquely vulnerable position.

This review proposes a concise literature review aimed at identifying the current body of knowledge on the adoption of Social Networks in crisis management. The major input is a structured research question based on the initial reading about the topic. Before the recent pandemic, most literature focused on local crises, with relatively few exceptions. Additionally, self-organising systems are spontaneously established between people who are affected by a crisis. The fundamental assumption underlying this study is the huge potential of Social Networks in the field of crisis management. That is supported, directly or indirectly, by a number of previous studies, which emphasise how effective adoption leads to better decision-making for crisis managers and local communities. Among the identified challenges is the need to integrate official communication by emergency agencies with citizen-generated content in a contest for credibility and trustworthiness. In certain cases, it has been reported that there is a lack of specific competence, knowledge, and expertise, as well as a lack of sufficient policies and guidelines for the use of Social Networks. Those challenges need to be framed by considering the classic difficulties of providing timely and accurate information to deal with fake news, unverified or misleading information, and information overload. Bridging major gaps through advanced analytics and AI-based technology is expected to provide a key contribution to establishing and safely enabling the practice of effective and efficient communication. This technology can help contrast dissonant mental models, which are often fostered by Social Networks, and enable shared situational awareness. Future research may take a closer look at AI technology and its impact on the role of Social Networks in managing crises.

This entry delves into the parenting literature and reveals the complexities, perspectives, and multiple expressions of parenting challenging childhood behavior that distress or negatively impact the parent-child relationship so that we can better understand how to support families who are struggling to cope. The entry specifically focuses on the period of transition to school for children aged five to eight years. This transition can illuminate vulnerabilities previously hidden as children attempt to navigate the demands of their unfamiliar environment, meaning that parents can experience distress and emotional challenges. The entry explores the various expressions of relationally challenging behavior and comments on the intersectionality and reciprocity of explicit and implicit expressions of affect such as frustration and anxiety. To gain context, the entry examines common antecedents associated with relationally challenging behavior, such as academic comparison, forming friendships, hidden neurodiverse development, neglect, attachment dysfunction, and family conflict. Qualitative literature enriches understanding and identifies problems such as parental distress related to social stigma and minority stress and reveals specific struggles, including stress, related to homeschooling children with special educational needs, homeschooling during the recent pandemic, single parenting, grandparenting, parenting neurodiverse children, and the triangulated tensions that exist between the parent, the child, and the school. Holding in mind these diverse and context-orientated perspectives, this entry examines research that evaluates helpfulness and illuminates deficiencies of popular structured parent programs. Lastly, the entry identifies and illuminates the need to know more about the ways in which parent programs work, and it is anticipated that this new knowledge will help practitioners to better respond to the complexities of need and expectations of families who struggle to cope with relationally challenging behavior.

Charter schools are educational institutions in the United States funded through taxation but operated privately under a charter or contract with a public entity, providing alternative public education options to families. Charter schools are subject to fewer rules and regulations and have greater autonomy than traditional public schools over operations, curriculum, and instruction, although have greater stakes in school accountability.

Positioning theory is a social theorization that aims to capture the dynamic analysis of conversations and discourses taking place in a social setting. Conversations as part of language assume interlocutors. As one engages in the interactive speech acts in the social setting, there comes the importance of interlocutors involved in these speech acts in creating a social reality, as language forms the knowledge of reality. Certain types of rights and duties can be observed in interactions between speakers and hearers in a social communicative context of interlocutors. The cluster of rights and duties, recognized in a certain social setting, can be termed as a position. One of the critical aspects is that positions are not always intentional or even conscious. Therefore, positioning theory has been redefined as a method of analysis with a focus on storylines. Storylines reveal implicit ascriptions and resistances of rights and duties through the performance of a variety of actions in a social setting where appropriateness of social acts are established and recognized by the participants engaged within the social situation. The education setting presents a dynamic situation where a variety of moral orders come into actions that set possibilities for different actors to engage in shifting positioning to accomplish certain educational actions. This entry presents the use of positioning theory in an educational setting.

The affective economy is a concept that emerged within the field of social sciences, focusing on the interplay between emotions, affects, and economic processes. It explores how emotions and affective experiences shape economic practices, consumption patterns, and the production of goods and services. In the affective economy framework, emotions are seen as not merely individual but deeply embedded in social and political contexts, shaping and being shaped by social structures and power dynamics. The affective economy emphasizes how emotions circulate and contribute to the construction and maintenance of social orders, impacting economic actions. It acknowledges the profound impact of emotions and affects on economic behavior. Thus, this concept sheds light on the intricate relationship between emotions and economic processes, demonstrating how affective experiences influence consumption, production, labor, financial decisions, and the overall dynamics of the market economy. It emphasizes the need for a more nuanced understanding of human behavior in economic contexts, recognizing the significance of emotions and affective responses as integral components of economic activities. This concept is connected to notions of dwelling, topophilia, and affective atmospheres, providing insights into the complexities of economic transactions in diverse cultural contexts.

The term churning is defined by a multifaceted approach and is quite a complex concept that has been gaining relevance in the field of human resources, due to the problematic loss of investment, originating from the voluntary exits of worker-associated costs. This phenomenon is a direct result of the rising competitive job market, causing employees to leave organizations and carry with them all the knowledge and experience acquired in the starting organization, an organization which invested in the development of its workers. Even though churning is aligned with human resource practices, it is considered a multifaceted concept because of the different contexts in which it interferes, such as economic context, per activity sector, clients, the type of organization, geographic location, etc. Although, despite its own complexity, churning is related to turnover; however, there are differences between these two concepts. While turnover is linked to the workers’ rotation within an organization, churning is mainly focused on the costs associated with voluntary exits from workers. It is simply linked to investment losses inside an organization, which has the main goal of creating mechanisms that allow the creation of awareness in organizations about the relevancy of action using strategic measurements of holding in order to minimize the churning rate, and in this way, reducing the unexpected costs, creating revenue, increasing proficiency, standing out in business activity, bettering nimbleness and expanding profits. This initial manuscript introduces the churning concept in human resources, the main causes of churning, as well as approaching how organizations take action in order to appease this event using literature, which lacks major advertising and given relevance to its pertinence in human resources. Through the analysis of the existing, this entry was guided with the objective of demystifying the subject of human resource churning.

Neurodiversity is a concept and a social movement that addresses and normalizes human neurocognitive heterogeneity to promote acceptance and inclusion of neuro-minorities (e.g., learning disabilities, attention disorders, psychiatric disorders, and more) in contemporary society. Neurodiversity is attributed to nature and nurture factors, and about a fifth of the human population is considered neurodivergent. What does neurodiversity mean neuroscientifically? This question forms the foundation of the present entry, which focuses on existing scientific evidence on neurodiversity including neurodiversity between and within individuals, and the evolutional perspective of neurodiversity. Furthermore, the neuroscientific view will be synergistically integrated with social approaches, particularly in the context of the normalization of neurodiversity and its association with the medical and social models of disability. This multidimensional analysis offers a cohesive and comprehensive understanding of neurodiversity, drawing insights from various vantage points, such as social, psychological, clinical, and neuroscientific viewpoints. This integrated approach fosters a nuanced and holistic discussion on the topic of human diversity.

Individual well-being is influenced by a number of economic and social factors that include income, mental health, physical health, education, social relationships, employment, discrimination, government policies, and neighborhood conditions. Well-being involves both physical and mental health as part of a holistic approach to health promotion and disease prevention. The well-being of a society’s people has the potential to impact the well-being and productivity of the society as a whole. Though it may be assessed at the individual level, well-being becomes an important population outcome at the macro level and therefore represents a public health issue. 

Organizational Justice is an individual’s perception that events, actions, or decisions within an organization adhere to a standard of fairness. Justice researchers have categorized justice into four types, differentiated by how fairness is evaluated by employees: distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice. Organizational justice perceptions have consequences for the employee and the organization: increasing job satisfaction, commitment, and trust; and decreasing turnover, counterproductive work behaviors, and even workplace violence. Contemporary organizational justice research seeks to understand how to restore justice after an injustice has occurred. 

Neuromarketing is the union of cognitive psychology, which studies mental processes, neurology and neurophysiology, which study the functioning and responses of the brain and body physiology to external stimuli, and marketing, which studies valuable exchanges, to explain marketing effects on customers’ and consumers’ behaviours and on buying and decision processes. It includes a set of research techniques that, by observing and evaluating how the brain and other body parts respond, avoids possible biases and provides truthful and objective information on consumer subconscious. The term “consumer neuroscience” covers academic approaches using techniques such as fMRI, Eye Tracking, or EED. The objectives of this entry are to show what neuromarketing is and what added value it brings to the study of consumer behaviour and purchase decision processes. The conclusions show a favourable future and positive attitudes towards neuromarketing.

Non-patent literature is defined as scientific publications, technical standards, conference proceedings, clinical trials, books, manuals, technical or research reports, or any other technical scientific material which is cited in patents to show what has already been published and disseminated about the invention to be patented, in order to justify its novelty. These documents are considered technically relevant to the patent granting procedure and are cited along with other patents related to the same subject matter. 

The Barnett critique states that there is an internal inconsistency between the theory that is implied by simple sum monetary aggregation (perfect substitutability among components) and the economic theory that produces the models within which those aggregates are used. That inconsistency causes the appearance of unstable demand and supply for money. The incorrect inference of unstable money demand has caused serious harm to the field of monetary economics.

The new sociology of religion differs from the classical and mainstream sociology, which was in force until the end of the last century, in that it no longer considers religion only as an independent variable, but places it together with other dependent variables, so that it becomes possible to investigate new themes, especially those that do not consider religious involvement—from atheism to the phenomenon of ‘nones’ (non-believers and non-practicing), from spirituality to forms of para-religions and quasi-religions and the varied set of multiple religions. 

Deep meaningful learning is the higher-order thinking and development through manifold active intellectual engagement aiming at meaning construction through pattern recognition and concept association. It includes inquiry, critical thinking, creative thinking, problem-solving, and metacognitive skills. It is a theory with a long academic record that can accommodate the demand for excellence in teaching and learning at all levels of education. Its achievement is verified through knowledge application in authentic contexts. 

Buddhism was established by Guatama Buddha as a practice to liberate sentient beings from suffering. Mindfulness-Based interventions (MBIs) are Western psychologists’ adaptation of mindfulness/Vipassana to treat mental illnesses. In addition to mindfulness, Buddhist recovery peer-support programs also adopt the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and the Five Precepts, which are the Buddha’s prescription to cease suffering and to discipline one’s ethical conduct.

Happiness, or life satisfaction, has become an important factor when considering what should be the objective of a society. Understanding the nature of happiness is thus important. The text offers a biological—specifically evolutionary—framework, which suggests that happiness can be described as the net impact of positive and negative feelings. It follows that a key issue is to explain what these feelings are about. The present situation and options for improving the score of happiness are discussed.

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is an approach and movement in innovative educational practices from the primary level internationally. This would provide a platform for an inquiry approach, creativity, and innovation in young children and formulate a path for changes in existing practices. The STEM approach is widely accepted as a key educational practice; however, it is dealt with as a combination of disciplines in actual teaching and learning practice. Coherence in this interdisciplinarity and integration has yet to be evolved as a practice in synthesising and designing instruction and could be harbinger for an effective design for future practice. Integrated and interdisciplinary STEM can only generate powerful knowledge to deal with issues that are affecting the planet and bring abiotic and biotic equilibrium. Interdisciplinary and integrated powerful knowledge (IIPK) can act as a roadmap for innovation that can bring changes in existing practices, produce informed citizens, build capacity for informed decisions, and generate sustainable living practices. Interdisciplinary and integrated STEM could lay foundations for IIPK and generate a mindset, approach, and practice. IIPK could lead to the formation of new paths for energy generation, transport, agricultural practices, medical treatment, and clean environment. Interdisciplinary and integrated STEM is not seen in actual practice anywhere nowadays. For coherence in curriculum, implications in instructions need reform and development by the governments across the world. That could lead to a new policy for interdisciplinary and integrated STEM.

The simplest net working capital can be defined as the difference between the value of current assets and short-term liabilities together with other short-term accruals. It is equivalent to the part of the current assets financed with equity, provisions for liabilities, long-term liabilities, and the remaining part of accruals. Therefore, it is the capital that finances only that part of the current assets that are not financed with short-term liabilities. This amount is financed with fixed capital. Summing up, net working capital is the fixed capital that finances the company’s current assets. 

Foreign direct investment can be defined as an investment made by an entity (usually a company) incorporated in a home country in the business interests of a host country, in the form of either establishing new business operations or acquiring controlling interest in existing business assets. Foreign direct investment is expected to meet the following characteristics: (1) the capital movement is typically accompanied by further technological, material, information, financial or personnel flows; (2) the foreign direct investor effectively controls facilities abroad; and (3) the investor has a long-term interest in the host country.

Digital literacy is a term that traditionally describes the extent to which a person is able to use interactive digital devices for living and working, such as computers and smartphones, as well as services delivered through these devices. The advent of the digital society at large and electronic business, specifically in the past decades, has broadened the use of digital devices beyond the isolated uses of working and simple communication; this advent has created digital ecosystems in which workers and consumers are embedded to various degrees, such as social media platforms or integrated shopping and media platforms. This embedding implies that a traditional, narrow notion of digital literacy needs to be extended and made more precise. For this purpose, we use the related notions of digital dexterity, digital proficiency and digital awareness. The term digital dexterity describes the extent to which an individual can handle or operate digital devices or services from a physical perspective. The term digital proficiency describes the extent to which an individual can use digital means to effectively and efficiently facilitate their living and working. The term digital awareness describes the extent to which individuals can understand what their position in digital ecosystems is, including the opportunities and threats of participating in these ecosystems. Digital literacy in the modern, broad interpretation is then the combination of digital dexterity, digital proficiency and digital awareness.