Immunity and Genetics at the Revolving Doors of Diagnostics in Primary Immunodeficiencies

Primary immunodeficiencies (PIDs) are a large and growing group of disorders commonly associated with recurrent infections. However, nowadays, we know that PIDs often carry with them consequences related to organ or hematologic autoimmunity, autoinflammation, and lymphoproliferation in addition to simple susceptibility to pathogens. Alongside this conceptual development, there has been technical advancement, given by the new but already established diagnostic possibilities offered by new genetic testing (e.g., next-generation sequencing). Nevertheless, there is also the need to understand the large number of gene variants detected with these powerful methods. That means advancing beyond genetic results and resorting to the clinical phenotype and to immunological or alternative molecular tests that allow us to prove the causative role of a genetic variant of uncertain significance and/or better define the underlying pathophysiological mechanism. Furthermore, because of the rapid availability of results, laboratory immunoassays are still critical to diagnosing many PIDs, even in screening settings. Fundamental is the integration between different specialties and the development of multidisciplinary and flexible diagnostic workflows. This paper aims to tell these evolving aspects of immunodeficiencies, which are summarized in five key messages, through introducing and exemplifying five clinical cases, focusing on diseases that could benefit targeted therapy.

Revolving Doors or Sliding Doors in Brussels? Lobbying Strategies and Capabilities

In this chapter, we explore the micro-level and concentrates on business and its government affairs offices in Brussels. We assess business strategic choices in hiring different types of staff, and its variation across national and corporate lines. While business has overall similar tools to lobby the EU, it employs distinctly different approaches. We look at the educational and professional background of its staff, and the role it plays in its lobbying strategies. In doing so, we reveal substantial variation across firms’ strategic approaches and the central driving factors motivating the observed variance. Moreover, we underscore common approaches as a reaction to the EU’s evolution. Theoretically, the chapter builds on the firm’s micro-capabilities.

“The Struggle is Real”: Punitive assessment in community services

Assessment tools are pivotal for the work of frontline community services providers, shaping client relationships, access to supports and producing evidence for agencies that need to allocate resources, demonstrate outcomes and secure funding. These tools are combined and used cumulatively, as marginalized individuals are cared for – but also controlled and punished - within these systems (e.g. in shelters, street outreach, mental health or re entry supports). Punishment literature has clarified that risk tools are impactful but also contested and resisted. Still, we know little about how the process is experienced and negotiated by frontline by practitioners working with people pushed through the ‘revolving doors'. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 105 interviews with community practitioners, I examine tools and practices used to ‘assess’ criminalized and marginalized individuals. I show that practitioners are producing evidence about problems occurring outside legal institutions while relying on criminal justice logics and engaging with criminal justice spaces and paces. I highlight the challenges service providers face and negotiate, focusing on three themes: the composition of tools, the process of using them, and the service context in which they are used. I argue that despite discretionary efforts and adaptations, community practitioners remain frustrated by assessment tools and practices, and particularly by their inability to meet the needs they are assessing.

The Public-Private Foundations of the Neoliberal State

This chapter maps out the rapidly growing field of public–private brokerage by assessing the scope and breadth of French revolving doors. The media discussion stirred up by the so-called pantouflages — a slang word for the practice of civil servants and politicians joining the private sector — focused almost entirely on politicians and the rising risks of conflict of interests. It therefore failed to adequately reflect the breadth and diversity of the movement that started in the 1990s between the politico-administrative elite and major business law firms in Paris. By drawing a collective sociological portrait of these pantoufleurs, the chapter reveals a structural view of the new pattern of relationships that have been consolidated at the interface between the state and markets: the type of public positions and resources that are prized by the business bar, and also the type of companies and law firms that hire from the public sector, and the sectoral pathways followed by recruits. As we are able to map out the total social space in which these crossovers move, on either side of the public–private border, it is possible to sketch the field of intermediation and influence that has developed over the course of two decades of the French state's neoliberalization.

Are businessmen a benefit to public policy? And if so, what specifically can they offer?

Research background: The closer interaction between business and government has, on a global basis, drawn attention to the “revolving doors” issue, i.e. the movement of persons between high posts in the public and private sectors. Purpose of the article: The main research question of this study covers the issue whether successful businessmen do or do not have better prospects for more effective political governance and economic policy making than career politicians or political professionals, and/or if politics and business require, for achieving their goals, similar or substantially different personal requirements. Methods: The survey was based on multidisciplinary qualitative comparative approach and literature research, covering historical, economics, management, and psychological views. This method corresponds the complex nature of the topics surveyed. Findings & Value added: The findings arrived to the conclusion that even a person successful in business may not necessarily have the expertise for effective public administration as well as sound public policy decisions. It showed that the opposite idea, coming often from businessmen circles themselves, fails to take into consideration that government, due to several reasons, cannot be operated like a business and many characteristics of successful businessmen do not fit well to high political posts, due both to their management style and “professional blindness” in terms of their approach to economic policy, e.g. international trade. Even though many management methods of successful companies can and should be taken over by the state/public administration, this goal can be achieved without the direct personal involvement of professional businessmen.