As we discussed with regard to leadership in Part 1, the context in which the public health tools are used has a bearing on the choice of tool and how it is implemented. In the second part of Essential Public Health: Theory and Practice, we consider a range of contemporary contexts in which public health is practised and illustrate how the tools we have described are applied.

This chapter focuses on the everyday. It considers how responsibility for the everyday, quotidian care of cultural heritage is assumed or allocated and the form that this takes. It analyses how care is translated into access, preservation and care of collections and places and how risk is managed when access has the potential to harm the long-term future of cultural heritage. This chapter analyses the ways in which access and preservation are supported, through financial support as well as in statutory provisions; it analyses the duties of care placed on custodians of cultural heritage and the role played by standard-setting.

The technical and market knowledge a business possesses -- its Information, in the language of the 4Is -- can be an important asset in advocating with regulators. Information can be leveraged in two ways. First, the business can share Information that is mission-relevant for the regulator. Doing so helps regulators avoid crises and, therefore, helps regulators cultivate their reputation for technical competence. Second, alternatively, the business can threaten to attack the regulators reputation for competence. Both strategies leverage the regulators desire to preserve and increase their reputation for technical competence.

Sensemaking is widely seen as one of the most crucial processes in crisis response operations. Frontline responders need an adequate understanding of a crisis situation to implement the appropriate actions. Gaining a better grasp of the situation requires acquiring more cues and avoiding premature commitment to a particular frame of reference. Ideally, operational members need to engage in adaptive sensemaking to achieve a perfect understanding of the crisis. Yet, crises are defined by uncertainty, which hinders a full understanding of the situation. The pursuit of a perfect understanding may also impede a rich awareness of the context and create blind spots. Thus, responders need to embrace some degree of uncertainty in their sensemaking as well, even though this is counterintuitive and demanding. The dilemma for responders is that they need to balance gaining a better understanding with embracing uncertainty. Frontline responders may deal with this sensemaking dilemma by pursuing a plausible understanding. A plausible understanding matches the demands of the situation and helps responders take bold action, but is also treated with an attitude of ambivalence, doubt, and modesty.

In this chapter Innes explores how Soviet economics, and the neoclassical economics behind British neoliberalism, came to conceive of the political economy as a closed system, governed by predetermined economic laws and dependable behaviours. Both orthodoxies are shown to depend on arguments about the universal truths of the political economy that are not just utopian, but tautological - circular - in their reasoning. Their axiomatic assumptions and actions are valid, as distinct from true, by virtue only of their logical formulation, and their end goals are consequently as impossible to realise as they are to refute. By exploring the evolution of both Soviet and neoclassical economic thought, Innes outlines the affinities between the ‘social physics’ of neoclassical economics and the deterministic assumptions of Stalinist central planning, and explains why it is that even the relatively critical, ‘second best world’ neoclassical economics that became associated with New Labour policy is freighted with no less determinism than the ‘first best world’ assumptions adopted by the New, neoliberal right.

Chapter 2 reads John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy in the context of cybernetics theorists Norbert Wiener’s and Claude Shannon’s contradictory definitions of information (Wiener’s theories align the concept with pattern, while Shannon instead describes it as a measure of randomness). Love argues that Dos Passos’s trilogy integrates both sides of this opposition in ways that are important to our understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of early twentieth-century cybernetic thinking. Focusing on the novels’ “Newsreel” sections, she illustrates how this technology – in both form and content, as well as broader industry practices – epitomizes the logic of cybernetic information. By incorporating a literary version of this media form into his novels, Dos Passos demonstrates how predictable patterns jostle with random chance as catalysts for change and progress in the United States. This interdisciplinary pairing shows (a) how cybernetics theories can help us understand the ideological work that texts like Dos Passos’s novels and newsreel productions undertake, and (b) how modernist literature encouraged readers to develop strategies for cybernetic thinking.

Chapter 4 is an examination of workers’ blame attribution, looking at when workers direct their grievances to the central government vis-`a-vis other actors. It demonstrates that migrant workers’ social grievances about limited upward mobility, income inequality, and unfairness grow as they gain experience as migrants. While atomized protests focus on economic grievances pertaining to a specific job, the empirical analyses of survey data show that social grievances pose a bigger threat to the regime, since they change the direction of blame attribution. Protest participants are less likely to blame the central government than nonparticipants, which could imply that those that blame the central government might not be interested in atomized protests.

This chapter presents the bargaining model of war. The basic approach of the bargaining model is to frame the onset, prosecution, and termination of war as a bargaining process: war represents a failure of two sides to reach a peaceful bargain settling a dispute over an issue such as a territorial border, and during war states continue to bargain, searching for a peace settlement both sides prefer over continuing to fight. Using very little math, the chapter introduces a number of key concepts, such as ideal points, reservation points, reversion outcomes, and bargaining space. It also lays out three possible bargaining model explanations as to why wars break out: when the sides disagree about the likely outcome of a war; when at least one side doubts the credibility of the other side to abide by commitments to peace; and when the issue under dispute is perceived to be indivisible. The chapter also develops information and commitment credibility perspectives on bargaining during wartime, and how wars eventually end. It applies these ideas to a summary of a quantitative study of the effects of peacekeeping on civil war outcomes, and to a case study of World War II in the Pacific.

The Conclusion summarises the sum of the individual parts of the knowledge contained across the ten chapters of this book. This is done by answering the three research questions that were posed in the Introduction of the book.

Chapter three concerns the role and influence of politics and other intangible elements in modern warfare. This is taken from a historical perspective with the philosophy of great military strategy thinkers such as Sun Tzu, Niccolo Macchiavelli and Carl von Clausewitz, and the influence of their ideas on the contemporary information war battlefield that runs parallel to physical wars.

Chapter 6 explores theme and information systems and structures. It concentrates on the need to argue from discourse semantics as far as the interpretation of information flow is concerned. This chapter brings some phonological analysis into the picture, since information systems are realised through prosodic phonology (i.e. rhythm and intonation). This work draws on Halliday’s analysis of English intonation, as presented in Halliday (1967, 1970) and Halliday & Greaves (2008).

From the first hours of the US colonial conquest in August 1898, the Philippines served as the site of a social experiment in the use of police surveillance as an instrument of state power. During the decade of pacification that followed, the US army plunged into a crucible of counterinsurgency, forming its first field intelligence unit, the Division of Military Information, which combined voracious data gathering with rapid dissemination of tactical intelligence. At this periphery of empire, freed from the constraints of courts, constitution, and civil society, the US imperial regime fused new technologies from America’s first information revolution to fashion what was arguably the world’s first full “surveillance state.”

This chapter takes stock of the current situation confronting political theory. I introduce the concept of “digital lifeworlds” and explain its relevance in the narrative of humanity. I use Max Tegmark’s distinctions between Life 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, respectively, for guidance in locating digital lifeworlds in history. We do not know if Life 3.0 (the kind of life that designs both its culture and physical shape, the physical shape of individuals) will ever arise. But if it does, it will be from within digital lifeworlds – lifeworlds that already fundamentally change our lives and thus require intense scrutiny even if there will never be a Life 3.0. To understand these lifeworlds, we need appropriate notions of “data,” “information,” and “knowledge” and characterize the connections among them. To that end, we enlist Fred Dretske’s understanding of knowledge in terms of flow of information. Such a notion of knowledge allows for a broader range of knowers than humans (to whom classical analyses were limited): It includes both animals and artificially intelligent beings as knowers. I also draw on Luciano Floridi’s work on the philosophy of information for a related look at digital lifeworlds from a more detached standpoint (“infospheres populated by inforgs”).