Issue 10.1 of the International Journal of Social Quality has been published by Berghahn Journals of New York. As a first step in the direction of open access for the journal, two of the articles are accessible for free. Both articles are outcomes of long collaborations within multidisciplinary project groups.
The first of these two articles is Pathways to Empowerment: The Social Quality Approach as a Foundation for Person-Centered Interventions. This article (the first investigating Social Quality’s constitutional factors) describes how the Social Quality Approach has been used as the theoretical framework to structure and ground a person-centred intervention. This intervention (Pathways to Empowerment, PTE) aims to improve the quality of the daily lives of persons who experience losing control of their lives. PTE focuses on their strengths, and stimulates personal agency, participation in society, and self-direction. So far, this intervention has been implemented in 75 care organizations in the Netherlands.
The second project and related article, Evolutionary Thermodynamics and Theory of Social Quality as Links between Physics, Biology, and the Human Sciences, includes a philosophical journey into the natural sciences, focusing on the concept of time irreversibility as developed in the field of Evolutionary Thermodynamics (ET).
This paper opens the potential to bridge the theoretical divide between physics and other natural sciences on the one hand, and social quality and other human sciences on the other. For the human sciences, social quality provides the tools to make this possible, because in ontological sense it incorporates ET and its related dialectics. This may open pathways for meaningful interdisciplinary approaches within and between natural sciences and human sciences – an essential condition for addressing challenges like the overall sustainability in a comprehensive way.
There are two more articles in this issue. The first explores the situation in ever growing megacities all over the world and the impact of the COVID pandemic there. This concerns a new view of the contemporary urban problematique, seen from a Social Quality perspective. The second article evaluates the practicing of corporate sustainability within large corporate organizations.
You can access Volume 10.1 of the International Journal of Social Quality here.