cannyben

Although we all talk about stress, it often isn't clear what stress is really about. Many people consider stress to be something that happens to them, an event such as an injury or a promotion. Others think that stress is what happens to our body, mind and behaviour in response to an event (e.g. heart pounding, anxiety, or nail biting.) While stress does involve events and our response to them, these are not the most important factors. Our thoughts about the situations in which we find ourselves are the critical factor.When something happens to us, we automatically evaluate the situation mentally. We decide if it is threatening to us, how we need to deal with the situation and what skills we can use. If we decide that the demands of the situation outweigh the skills we have, then we label the situation as "stressful" and react with the classic "stress response." If we decide that our coping skills outweigh the demands of the situation, then we don't see it a

Probably the most important step in healthy organizational change is to make a serious and sustained commitment to it. In non-unionized workplaces, this commitment should be made by top management. In unionized workplaces, both top management and union representatives need to be involved.Healthy organizational change takes time. Lots of time. No serious change effort should be initiated with a time frame limited to weeks or a few months.Healthy organizational change includes employee health and satisfaction as an explicit and independent outcome measure. These outcomes should be the key goals of the change effort.Broad Organizational GoalsHealthy organizational change can include:· Changes that will increase employees' autonomy or control.· Changes that will increase the skill levels of employees.· Changes that will increase levels of social support (both supervisory support and coworker support).· Changes that will improve physical working conditions.· Changes that will make a hea

Development refers to improvements in the conditions of people's lives, such as health, education, and income. It occurs at different rates in different countries. The U.S. underwent its own version of development when it became an independent nation in 1776: The average American earned about $1,000 a year in today's dollars, compared with $30,000 today. One in five children died before their first birthday, compared with about one in 143 today. Less than 50% of white children, and almost no black children, went to school; today almost all American children finish primary school. On average, Americans were about four times richer than the people of the world's poorest countries; they are 100 times richer today. Poor countries have experienced improvement as well. Over the past 50 years, there has been more progress in reducing poverty and improving health and education than at any other time in history. Over this period: Diseases such as smallpox and river blindness that fo

Globalization and the attendant concerns about poverty and inequality have become a focus of discussion in a way that few other topics, except for international terrorism or global warming, have. Most people have a strong opinion on globalization, and all of them express an interest in the well-being of the world's poor. The financial press and influential international officials confidently assert that global free markets expand the horizons for the poor, whereas activist-protesters hold the opposite belief with equal intensity. Yet the strength of people's conviction is often in inverse proportion to the amount of robust factual evidence they have.As is common in contentious public debates, different people mean different things by the same word. Some interpret "globalization" to mean the global reach of communications technology and capital movements, some think of the outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries, and others see globalization as a byword for