Primary Healthcare in the Post-COVID era: what can we expect?

COVID-19 has negatively impacted primary health care (PHC) activities globally. Some argue that now is the time, more than ever, to strengthen PHC in a post-COVID world. It could be argued that COVID-19 revealed the failures of PHC. Global aid agencies, starting with the World Bank, are already calling for the same technical solutions that, by themselves, have not addressed PHC failures in the past. A deeper understanding of the complexity of PHC failures might provide greater clarity to forge a path forward for PHC. Bourdieu’s theory of fields might be a useful framework for that understanding.

Innovation and the theory of fields

Innovation does not just involve the creation of new products, but also includes the need for new kinds of processes and organizations. Field theory can help us understand why some innovations are more piecemeal and others more revolutionary. It explicitly links innovation to the process of the emergence, adjustment, and transformation of markets (conceived of as fields). To illustrate this perspective, the case of the transition in the U.S. from a mortgage market dominated by savings and loan banks to the emergence of mortgage securitization dominated by the government sponsored enterprises and the largest private banks, is explicated. Field theory helps us understand the logic of this transition and the myriad players and innovations that helped produce a large part of what we consider to be modern finance. The case also shows the limits of economic theories of financial innovation and the sociology of finance. I end with a discussion of how field theory can inform subsequent research on innovation.

The European Investment Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

This chapter attempts to complement existing scholarly work by taking a holistic and contextual view of the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). It addresses the following questions: How are the business fundamentals of the EIB and AIIB organized so as to fulfil their broader objectives? How are they ‘equipped’ to meet the requested increased objectives and face the current and future challenges? What role do these two institutions play in the regional development bank (RDB) field? And what are their future prospects in this field? In attempting to answer these questions this chapter follows a synthetic approach by initially investigating each RDB individually as an organizational entity and subsequently as an actor in the field of RDB. In order to analyse the EIB and AIIB as organizations, this chapter employs a novel mechanism developed by the author with recourse to Business Models and the Theory of Fields.

Covariant Physics

This book is an introduction to the modern methods of the general theory of relativity, tensor calculus, space time geometry, the classical theory of fields, and a variety of theoretical physics oriented topics rarely discussed at the level of the intended reader (mid-college physics major). It does so from the point of view of the so-called principle of covariance; a symmetry that underlies most of physics, including such familiar branches as Newtonian mechanics and electricity and magnetism. The book is written from a minimalist perspective, providing the reader with only the most basic of notions; just enough to be able to read, and hopefully comprehend, modern research papers on these subjects. In addition, it provides a (hopefully short) preparation for the student to be able to conduct research in a variety of topics in theoretical physics; with particular emphasis on physics in curved spacetime backgrounds. The hope is that students with a minimal mathematical background in calculus and only some introductory courses in physics may be able to study this book and benefit from it.

Duality and Social Position: Role expectations of people who combine outsider-ness and insider-ness in organizational change

A person’s social position shapes whether and how they can influence organizational change. While prior research establishes people whose social position combines outsider-ness and insider-ness as important change agents, we know little about how they influence change. We analyse a peer coaching initiative in Canadian hospitals to explain how outsider-insiders – in this case, organizational outsiders with professional proximity – advance change. Peer coaches were able to influence change by establishing and enacting a dual outsider-insider role and associated role expectations. We advance theory by showing that role expectations emphasizing duality that are rooted in social position, but created through social interaction, are a key mechanism by which the potential of outsider-insider social positions can be activated and mobilized to influence change. We advance theory on social position generally by highlighting the potential for integrating a symbolic interactionist perspective – focused on role expectations – into Bourdieu’s theory of fields.

Cohomological Invariants in Positive Characteristic

We determine the mod $p$ cohomological invariants for several affine group schemes $G$ in characteristic $p$. These are invariants of $G$-torsors with values in étale motivic cohomology, or equivalently in Kato’s version of Galois cohomology based on differential forms. In particular, we find the mod 2 cohomological invariants for the symmetric groups and the orthogonal groups in characteristic 2, which Serre computed in characteristic not 2. We also determine all operations on the mod $p$ étale motivic cohomology of fields, extending Vial’s computation of the operations on the mod $p$ Milnor K-theory of fields.

First-order Theory of Fields with Arbitrary Spin

By exploiting the previously exposed results in 2-spinor geometry, a general description of fields of arbitrary spin is exposed and shown to admit a first-order Lagrangian which extends the theory of Dirac spinors. The needed bundle is the fibered direct product of a symmetric ‘main sector’—carrying an irreducible representation of the angular-momentum algebra—and an induced sequence of ‘ghost sectors’. Several special cases are considered; in particular, one recovers the Bargmann-Wigner and Joos-Weinberg equations.