Health and Social Organization: Towards a Health Policy for the Twenty-first Century

There is a growing recognition that the most powerful determinants of health in modern populations are to be found in social, economic and cultural circumstances. These include: economic growth, income distribution, consumption, work organization , unemployment and job insecurity, social and family structure, education and deprivation, and they are all aspects of 'social organization'. In Health and Social Organization these issues are examined by leading British and North American researchers. They bring together an array of evidence from the social sciences, epidemiology and biology. Medical services and health-damaging behaviour have been the main concerns of public health policy and interventions in recent decades. Health and Social Organization starts by briefly examining the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches to improving the population's health. Most of the contributions, however, focus on a particular aspect of social organization and its relationship to health.