1. The Decent Society, Pamela Abbott, Claire Wallace and Roger Sapsford
2. Mapping Social Quality, Ka Lin and Hua Li
The Decent Society, Planning for social quality
A book by Pamela Abbott, Claire Wallace and Roger Sapsford
This book comes out of twenty-five years of research and analysis using social indicators to explore how nations function and how governments can improve life for their citizens. The book’s title, The Decent Society, reflects the authors’ firm belief that no society is perfect and that there are many routes towards ‘good enough’ governance.
The authors have constructed what they call the Decent Society Index. This is a method which shows potential and combines the merits of indices and dashboards. This approach is chosen to increase our understanding of what is going on in the world in general while permitting detailed discussion and scrutiny of individual countries’ histories, problems and political goals. Central is their analysis of societal processes from the perspective of a social quality approach. Their research has looked particularly at the countries of the former Soviet Union and at Rwanda in central East Africa – all examples of countries recreating themselves after a disastrous past.
Published by Routledge, 2016, available in print and as eBook.
Mapping Social Quality Clusters and its Implications
An article by Ka Lin and Hua Li, Zhejiang University, China
During the past ten years a manifold of extensive empirical research is done in Asia and Australia for determining the state of affairs and changes of the nature of the conditional factors of social quality. This happened with the application of social quality indicators. Also the Zhejiang University in China played a strong role in this empirical research.
In this article, the authors are looking to make a new step. They utilise the existing World Value Surveys database in order to develop a more effective methodology of analysis. With this article, the authors open the discussion about the application of social quality indicators as happened thus far in the European Union, Asia and Australia.
The article is available as a download from Springer publishers.