International Journal of Social Quality

In Memoriam: Bas van der Horst (1951–2022)

On Discourses Inside the United Nations, Urban–Rural Relationships, and the Impacts on Inequality of Ageism and Digitalization

The Current State of Socioenvironmental and Ecological Challenges in 2022 from an Academic Perspective

Three recent reports from the United Nations Development Programme reconsider human development thinking and revive UN human security thinking: the 2020 Human Development Report (HDR 2020); the 2022 Special Report (SR 2022) on human security; and the 2021/2022 Human Development Report (HDR 2022). The trilogy marks an overdue return to human security thinking. HDR 2020 builds a sense of common human fate, employing the notion of the Anthropocene. SR 2022 adds a diagnostic stress on growing subjective insecurities and a prescriptive stress on solidarity. HDR 2022 explores the escalating felt insecurities, their drivers, and possible responses. It attempts to integrate and extend the other two reports; most of HDR 2020's components and themes recur, but in more mature forms and enriched by perspectives and tools from SR 2022. The present article lays a basis for reconsideration of similarities, differences, and possible complementarities between human development and human security approaches and the social quality approach.

This article updates and further develops the reflections of “Urbanization and Sustainability after the COVID-19 Pandemic” (Motta 2020). It is now even more urgent to focus on the urban–rural relationships that are being modified by the pandemic, climate change, and the impacts of conflicts, causing serious human insecurities and increasing precarious circumstances worldwide. The fast-changing situation and recurrent emergencies confirm the need for a new urban development approach, related to the specificities of the surrounding environment and based on the revival of towns and settlements spread over territories. This should function as a complementary tool to mitigate urbanization flows and urban–rural gaps, identifying new relationships. This requires the review of current urban paradigms, which are no longer able to respond to modified conditions and demands with an innovative vision. This is actualized on the basis of the principles of the social quality theory (SQT) and approach (SQA) and their emphasis on processes in and between the four relevant dimensions of societal life. In the past decade, these principles have been developed tentatively in working papers about sustainability and urban issues from a social quality perspective.

One important response to COVID-19 was the intensification of the use of digital media to deliver education. However, the results are paradoxical, since the digital revolution did not lead to improvement of the social quality of teachers’ working circumstances. We analyze “internal” or subjective oriented constitutional and “external” or objective orientated conditional factors related to teachers that determine the adaptation of digitalization, taking a social quality perspective. Through a case study in the most advanced educational hub of India—Delhi—we find that the digital revolution helped India to address the first-order problems in digital transformation, namely concerning objective infrastructural facilities. The second-order problems, particularly changing the subjective belief structures of teachers related to the integration of technologies, appear to remain a challenge. As India has recently adopted a new education policy (2020), the findings of our study have significant relevance to improving the accessibility and utilization of digital technology in educational spaces.

The digital transformation of contemporary societies may already have been seen by older people as an obstacle; during the pandemic, however, great emphasis was given to technology. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the phenomenon of social exclusion of older people, linked to their vulnerability and the “COVID circumstances” and shaped by the various measures imposed by different countries to limit physical contact, which led to technological inequality. The findings emphasize the isolation of the elderly and their non-use or insufficient use of health services and long-term care services. Further implications relate to socioeconomic costs arising from the inefficient treatment of their needs regarding their physical and “technological” vulnerability. The article concludes with considerations of the importance of distinct—both individually and collectively oriented—approaches to create better social conditions that will enhance technological equality for the elderly.

Age, due among other causes to demographic transitions, has become a common and widespread content of discrimination. It concerns all age groups in all countries. Numerous analyses of regional and international institutions, including departments of the United Nations, demonstrate various determinants of age discrimination (“ageism”) implicit in contemporary societies. This article explores issues of discrimination, in particular age discrimination. These topics are conceived as complex multidimensional societal problematiques that require comprehensive approaches to understand, prevent, and combat them. In our article, the available literature concerning age discrimination is explored. Albania, Great Britain, Norway, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania are deployed as cases of “rules of law” related to ageism. Some practical legal cases are analyzed to explore the impacts of practices of legal politics on discriminatory situations concerning individuals. Finally, recent studies carried out in the context of the social quality approach are used to broaden our scope.