AFTER CONSUMERISM: UTOPIANISM FOR A DYING PLANET

Realism and Utopianism Revisited

Consumerism: a threat to health?

Tara Latimer et al. recently stirred up the debate on health consumerism, so far seen as the promotion of patients’ autonomy, and aimed at improving patients’ choices about their own health. These authors explain that health consumerism was turned into an instrument that, although wearing the clothes of patient-centred care, ‘reflects a philosophy of libertarianism rather than a philosophy of p...

ERA-PLANET, a European Network for Observing Our Changing Planet

ERA-PLANET is a wide European network comprised of 118 researchers from 35 partner institutions located in 18 countries, aiming to strengthen the European Research Area in the domain of Earth Observation (EO) in coherence with the European participation to the Group on Earth Observation (GEO) and the program for the establishment of a European capacity for Earth Observation, COPERNICUS. It will...

Coercive Utopianism: Endogenous Models of Cultural Dynamics

Coercive utopianism is one of the more disruptive and destructive processes of the last two centuries. It has not spread in a fixed form, but rather is uniquely generated in each socio-historical context. The focus of the present paper is to identify cultural processes by which coercive utopianism is constituted, and the design and implementation requirements of the computational mechanisms req...

Mr Kennedy and consumerism.

The issues raised by Ian Kennedy in the course of his 1980 Reith Lectures on medical ethics are also of concern to Great Britain's Patients Association. Ackroyd, as Chairman of the Association, does not however share Kennedy's view that the consumerism model for regulating abuses is appropriate to medical care. She would prefer to have the Health Service Commissioner authorized to investigate...