Happiness is a complex concept that has been intensively researched from many perspectives, but the linguistic aspects of this phenomenon are still under-researched. Using corpus-based analysis of semantically similar words (word embedding), the author studies lexical units denoting happiness and joy in three West Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak) and compares them with the corresponding lexical units in English. The results show that despite the mutual linguistic and non-linguistic ties, the Polish, Czech and Slovak understanding of happiness exhibits not only similarities (e.g. the relationship between happiness and joy and the outward orientation of joy) but also significant differences (e.g. the different value of the component ‘luck’ in happiness, a different relationship between joy, sadness and fear, and cross-cultural differences related to religion). The results also highlight similarities and differences between West Slavic languages and English. In addition to this, the study tests the advantages and limitations of the word-embedding analysis for the analysis of concepts and their culturally specific features. The author believes that the method is useful because it offers new insights into the analysed data, but it also requires human oversight and careful interpretation.

Paul Guyer has shown us how misguided some early criticisms of Kant were, as well as how influential Kant’s views have been on contemporary moral philosophy. Here, I focus on Guyer’s summary judgements of what is of enduring value in Kantian moral philosophy. At issue are the claims that Kantian morality is affirmative of, rather than restrictive on human energy; that the conjunction of universal happiness and universal virtue, the summum bonum, was an important goal for Kant, able to guide individual and collective action; and that the enhancement of freedom, as Kant conceived it, is related to the forms of liberation that characterize contemporary conceptions of social justice and social progress. Such interpretations appear to take Kant in directions he would not himself have wanted to go.

Eudaimonism is a richly complex ethical tradition. To distinguish eudaimonism from other ethical approaches and to demonstrate the diversity of eudaimonistic accounts, I outline five key distinctions: (i) form vs. content, (ii) weak vs. strong eudaimonism, (iii) perfectionism vs. non-perfectionism, (iv) intellectualism vs. materialism, and (v) dogmatism vs. non-dogmatism. This analysis escapes the traditional focus on eudaimonism through a predominantly Aristotelian lens. It also offers a rich conceptual framework for understanding the historical development of eudaimonism and the dialogue between ancient, early modern, and modern eudaimonists.

The increasing participation of women in the labour market has highlighted significant advancements but also inequalities that negatively impact women’s happiness and job satisfaction. This study aims to analyse the existing literature on women’s workplace happiness through a bibliometric review, identifying trends, leading authors, research areas, and critical gaps. Employing a systematic bibliometric review methodology, 307 scientific articles published between 2010 and 2024 in the Web of Science Core Collection database were examined. Findings underscore a growing focus on factors external to the work environment, such as gender roles, double shifts, stress, and mental health. Furthermore, the results reveal considerable fragmentation in scientific production and a lack of established academic benchmarks. Conclusions stress the urgent need for organizational approaches that comprehensively address these inequalities, promoting policies of reconciliation, intersectional inclusion, and emotional well-being programmes. The study offers directions for future research and practical applications for fostering more equitable organizational management.

In The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life, Benjamin Radcliff considers a wide variety of data from North America and Europe and argues that, on balance, welfare state policies make people happier. In short, there is a positive correlation and a causal relationship between happiness and welfare state provisions. This is an important conclusion for anyone interested in public policy and debates about the size of government. In their reviews, Larry M. Bartels and William A. Galston take issue with Radcliff’s thesis. They challenge the relationships that Radcliff suggests exist between specific policies and happiness. Bartels challenges the way Radcliff uses his statistics to support his thesis about the relationship between happiness and specific policies as well as our ability to make generalisations from the data. Galson’s objections to Radcliff’s analysis and argument is more conceptual, and, among other things, he challenges the connection Radcliff seeks to establish between happiness and the satisfaction of human needs.

It is well known that measuring the noneconomic outcomes produced by social economy organizations is fairly difficult and complex. Usually, social economy organizations feature participatory and democratic decision-making processes that help create social capital and relational goods, and they are interested in social integration; accordingly, they tend to create an organizational culture that encourages their workers to contribute to local communities. Therefore, the hypothesis that the increased activities of social economy organizations have a causal effect on the subjective well-being of the people living near those organizations is highly plausible. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect and attempt to test the hypothesis statistically by using a dataset called the “Seoul Survey,” which provides observations on the subjective well-being of 45,496 citizens living in Seoul and the size of social economy organizations. Controlling for variables at the district level and the appropriate socioeconomic characteristics of each individual in the dataset, we find that the size of social organizations is highly significant.

Although happy New Left radical may seem like an oxymoron, many veterans of the protest cycle of the late 1960s-early 1970s in Japan seem to find happiness through political participation in an alternative invisible civil society. Guided by actor-network theory and utilizing long-term participant observation data, the study finds that participants bring distinctive cultural capital to their political activism and use their specialized skills to organize events and produce material objects that explain and promote their ideas. They derive personal enjoyment and a sense of purpose from the creative activities of “making and doing” that characterize their autonomous participation in the invisible civil society, and simultaneously build networks rich in social capital. Their activities meet the criteria for experiencing well-being or happiness both through strong network relations (social capital theory), and engaging in activities with autonomous motivation (self-determination theory).

Engagement is a positive psychological state that is linked with a range of beneficial individual and organizational outcomes. However, the factors associated with volunteer engagement have rarely been examined. Data from 1064 volunteers of a wildlife charity in the United Kingdom revealed that both task- and emotion-oriented organizational support were positively related to volunteer engagement, and volunteer engagement was positively related to volunteer happiness and perceived social worth and negatively related to intent to leave the voluntary organization. Consistent with theory, engagement acted as a mediator between these factors. The implications for future research and the relevance of the findings for voluntary organizations are discussed.

It is argued in this article that citizens in democracies use their subjective well‐being (SWB) as an evaluative criterion when deciding how willing they are to support and comply with government dictates (political system support). When life is satisfactory, government authorities are rewarded with support, when it is not, citizens punish authorities by withholding their support. To make sense of the relationship, it is suggested that citizens act as if they have signed a happiness contract with ‘those in power’. In support of this argument, comparative survey data shows that SWB predicts attitudes on political system support across country contexts and under strong control conditions. Establishing that the relationship is causal, panel data documents that attitudes on political system support can be undermined following the termination of a close personal relationship, and that the causal effect is mediated via changes in SWB. Finally, as predicted, the happiness‐support relationship is weaker among individuals who are high on spirituality/religiousness and attribute blame for external events to both worldly and non‐worldly powers.

Identifying the causes of happiness presents a challenge for researchers interested in this fundamental outcome variable. After reviewing previous literature looking at the causal effect of political participation on life satisfaction, we discuss the merits of using panel data, where there are repeated measurements over time for each individual, and discuss two common statistical models used in the analysis of panel data, the autoregressive distributed lag model, and the fixed effects model. We use both techniques to analyze the British Household Panel Survey and find evidence that social participation strongly predicts life satisfaction but not that voting participation predicts life satisfaction. We argue that the panel data models help reduce the risk of time-invariant omitted variable bias but are still subject to the problems of time-varying omitted variables and reverse causality. The article aims to provide guidance to researchers seeking to analyze the determinants of life satisfaction using large survey data sets.

A growing literature suggests social democratic policies, as exemplified by the welfare state and active labour market policies, promote higher levels of life satisfaction compared to the neoliberal agenda of austerity, smaller government and more ‘flexible’ labour markets. In this article, this inquiry is extended to low‐income countries. A theoretical argument is developed for why labour market regulation (LMR) (rather than social welfare spending or the general size of government) is a more appropriate locus of attention outside of the industrial democracies. The relationship between LMR and several measures of well‐being is then empirically evaluated, finding robust evidence that people live more satisfying lives in countries that more stringently regulate their labour market. Moreover, it is found that positive benefits of LMR on well‐being are the largest among individuals with lower incomes. The implications for public policy and the study of human well‐being are discussed.

This paper investigates the effect of volunteering on quality of life (QoL) in 50+ populations across European countries and Israel. We analyzed data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Using the Kendall tau-b correlation coefficients, we show that the extent of effect volunteering has on quality of life is nonlinearly related to the prevalence of volunteering in a given country. The relationship follows an inverted-U-shaped curve. In countries where volunteering is the most popular (Denmark, Switzerland, and Belgium) and in countries with the lowest rates (Poland, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Spain), the correlation between volunteering and one’s quality of life is low. The correlation is high in countries with medium levels of volunteering (Austria, Italy, and Israel). Moreover, volunteering affects more internal than external domains of QoL. These new insights extend the discussion started by Haski-Leventhal (Voluntas Int J Volunt Nonprofit Organ 20:388–404, 2009). Our study is correlational, and we do not claim causality.