While empirical evidence continues to show that low socio-economic position is associated with less likely chances of being in good health, our understanding of why this is so remains less than clear. In this paper we examine the theoretical foundations for a structure-agency approach to the reduction of social inequalities in health. We use Max Weber's work on lifestyles to provide the explana...

This contribution links psychological models of emotion regulation to sociological accounts of emotion work to demonstrate the extent to which emotion regulation is systematically shaped by culture and society. I first discuss a well-established two-factor process model of emotion regulation and argue that a substantial proportion of emotion regulatory goals are derived from emotion norms. In c...

BACKGROUND The inequality of health human resource is a worldwide problem, and solving it also is one of the major goals of China's recent health system reform. Yet there is a huge disparity among cities in mainland China. The aim of this study is to analyze the distribution inequality of the health human resource in 322 prefecture-level cities of mainland China in 2014, and to reveal the facet...

Over the past decade, urban residents have experienced a consumer revolution at multiple levels. In terms of material standard of living, sustained economic growth has dramatically increased spending on discretionary consumer purchases and urbanites have enthusiastically consumed globally branded foodstuffs, pop-music videos and fashion. At the same time, however, income distribution has become...

As early as 1993 an analysis of 34 studies of violent crime concluded that there was a robust tendency for rates of violence to be higher in more unequal societies [1]. In 1997, Messner and Rosenfeld [3] said “A finding that has emerged with remarkable consistency is that high rates of homicide tend to accompany high levels of inequality in the distribution of income.” Two years later in a stud...

Food security is a global challenge embedding complexities including social, economic and environmental fronts. Food security has to be achieved on the quantitative and qualitative level reflected by food availability, food access, food use and their stability. As a result, food security is overlapped to agricultural systems including food production, processing, distribution, retails, delivery...

Land reform usually refers to redistribution of land from the rich to the poor. More broadly, it includes regulation of ownership, operation, leasing, sales, and inheritance of land (indeed, the redistribution of land itself requires legal changes). In an agrarian economy like India with great scarcity, and an unequal distribution, of land, coupled with a large mass of the rural population belo...