Economics is the study of decisions made when allocating scarce resources to satisfy needs and unlimited wants and business is the enterprise engaged in the production of goods and services, usually for profit. Australia needs innovative individuals with a knowledge and understanding of economics and business who question, process and analyse information, make informed decisions and then reflect upon outcomes. With the end of the mining boom, decreases in manufacturing due to offshoring of labour and the depletion of Tier-1 mines, innovation and entrepreneurship are necessary for a prosperous Australian economy in the future. This chapter will: outline where Economics and Business appears in the Australian Curriculum; provide information on delivery and assessment of Economics and Business knowledge and understanding with illustrations of integration with other learning areas; integrate Economics and Business with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and perspectives and Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia; and then explain how Economics and Business inquiry and skills are delivered through the creation and implementation of a business plan.

Talent Management: Selecting and Preparing Leaders for Global Assignments examines how organizations select and prepare global leaders for effective assignments. An effective mobility program allows development of global leaders. The chapter identifies the personal characteristics for an international assignee and conditions necessary for an effective international assignment. Family responsibilities as well as a spouse’s/partner’s career and employment issues continue to be reasons candidates turn down assignments. To increase flexibility, multinationals have increased the use of “flexpatriates” in nonstandard international assignments. Effectiveness is the ability to live and work effectively in the cultural setting of an assignment. Effectiveness is a function of Professional expertise, Adaptation, Intercultural interaction, and Situational readiness and is reflected in a formula: E = f (PAIS). The international assignment of female executives has become an important consideration as more women have graduated from business schools and are in line for senior management and international careers. Training should be a function of the degree of cultural exposure that will be experienced. Culture shock, acculturative stress, can be a reason for failure to adapt to the host country. Duty of Care and an organization’s responsibilities to employees are discussed.

In order to situate the women who worked in royal and aristocratic households in their proper context, the first chapter explores household composition, demonstrating similarities of servant arrangements at all levels of elite society even though household size varied at different status gradations. Over time, households of every status level grew, offering further career opportunities, especially since elite households became more welcoming to women in the late fourteenth century, even though throughout the Middle Ages they remained almost exclusively male domains. This chapter argues that female servants gained their positions through kinship and patronage opportunities that favored their placement and promotion. In investigating the qualities that employers desired in their servants, I contend that they chose attendants who demonstrated useful skills, good character, and pleasing appearance. This chapter reveals that turnover occurred due to death, retirement, marriage (which did not necessitate retirement), dismissal, or transition to different households, and seems to have been a frequent aspect of life for a lady-in-waiting, yet I also assert that a minority of attendants served their ladies for long durations, at least a decade or more.

The fourteen years of Tory rule constitute a stunning missed opportunity to seize on one of Britain’s few internationally renowned assets – its creativity. The government did step in to save organisations from disaster during the pandemic; it did, early on, extend its successful system of tax credits from film and TV to other cultural forms. It did the beat drum for extending demographic opportunities, even if in its actions it did not follow through. What mattered at least as much as specific decisions in this latest Tory era, particularly the latter part under May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, was the manner of government engagement. Many in the sector are demoralised, having to raise private funds while being disparaged by ministers.

Four core communication skills are “Ask-tell-ask”, recognize and respond to emotion, ask permission to move forward, and “Tell me more…” “Ask-tell-ask” is asking what the patient or surrogate knows about the medical situation, telling them the headline (information and meaning), and asking what they are taking away from your conversation. Recognizing and responding to emotion, both verbal and nonverbal, can allow patients to discuss additional medical information, builds connection between clinician and patient, and can clarify what is important to the patient. Responding to emotion may be nonverbal or verbal (e.g., NURSE statements), and may include simple or complex reflections or “wish statements”. Asking permission to move the conversation forward signposts that there is a transition, allows patients control, and helps you judge if they are ready. Finally, “Tell me more…” helps clarify informational needs or allow a deeper view into a patient’s reasoning or emotional space, giving the clinician guidance on where to direct the conversation. In telemedicine, communication skills need to be adapted as some of the in-person nonverbal skills are less effective or impossible.

This chapter turns to the conception of ‘legitimate’ knowledge, first examining constructions of ‘legitimacy’, drawing on political, sociological, and philosophical conceptions. The construction of legitimate knowledge in relation to the conceptions of belief, truth, and justification are considered. In addition, debates pertaining to the recent discourses of the democratisation of knowledge, linked to the notion of ‘expertise’ and ‘stakeholders’, indigenous knowledge and decolonising knowledge are discussed; this entails a critical exploration of various types of factors complicit in the formulation of knowledge, including positionality, with respect to class, political interest, gender, race, and so on; university diversity initiatives; disciplinary quality; methodology and the ‘Canon’; skills, employment, and research assessment initiatives; funding and international partnerships; and global legitimating systems such as global university rankings, publication systems, and citation practices. Furthermore, it is argued that the production of research does not sit outside these positionalities and the politics of knowledge production.

Effective public health practice requires a combination of expertise and influence. Yet gaining expertise in the subject matter is only one element of practice: the ability to influence outcomes, policy, services and the people who make decisions is crucial. To deploy your expertise to have an impact, you must hone leadership and management skills to persuade, encourage and empower others. This chapter, therefore, aims to:

• offer a brief overview of different schools of thought in leadership;

• propose a simple framework of eight core domains for identifying skills and areas for professional development;

• introduce some popular theories for understanding others, which can enable you to work more effectively with individuals and influence within teams and organizations; and

• signpost to some key models of conceptualizing change and how to lead or manage change.

Public health cannot be understood or fully appreciated without some knowledge of its history, which this Introduction provides. Conventionally, this begins with the large body of work associated with Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BC). In these writings, health was viewed as resulting from a sound balance of the humours. Therapy included diet, exercise and other interventions tailored to the individual – akin to today’s emphasis on healthy living and lifestyle. The Hippocratics were, in addition, early exponents of environmentalism. In Airs, Waters, Places, the occurrence of disease was linked to such factors as climate, soil and water quality. Proposals for disease prevention were related to specific social and economic circumstances.

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.

Despite the rapid advance of technology which has been felt throughout society, the impact on healthcare delivery has taken much longer to be felt. The role of psychiatrists and clinical staff more widely in the design, delivery and development of clinical systems has similarly taken a long time to develop although there has been a significant shift in recent times. The development can be traced through a series of important events including several at national level. There are significant challenges to the current approach to training at all levels, and there remains an urgent need for a well-developed career pathway to make the most of the talent and experience which currently exists whilst providing opportunity for development and support of new staff interested in this work.

This chapter locates the Sophists within the context of earlier Greek wisdom traditions and efforts by a variety of individuals (from Hesiod to Parmenides and Pindar) to establish and communicate their own poetic and/or intellectual authority. The Sophists participated in long-standing debates over the relationship between sophia and technê, and over tensions surrounding physical versus intellectual skills, learning, and teaching. They also looked back to the practice of wisdom and maxim collection. There was no dominant tradition under which one could unify the manifestations of sophia in Archaic and early Classical Greece; this complexity was an important aspect of the sophistic inheritance, and is the background against which we must measure individual efforts to claim distinctive achievement. The analysis traces the importance of Hesiodic and quasi-Hesiodic wisdom collections, the emergence of the inquiry into nature and of intellectual and cultural experts known as “sages” (sophoi), and the representation of sophia in sympotic and epinician poetry.

Contemporary educational reformers strive to balance education for some (elite knowledge workers) with education for all. British and Danish policymakers resolve this conflict in different ways that resonate with long-term cultural frames. British politicians applaud vocational education but devote few resources to it. Efforts to equalize schooling focus on rewarding winners from the working class, but these interventions do little to develop skills for nonacademic learners. Denmark devotes more resources to vocational education, yet reformers have problems meeting the contradictory needs of high and low-skill workers, and immigrants are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the poorly educated. Cultural legacies echo in young people’s views of education in an internet survey of 2100 British and Danish young people. British respondents support national quality standards and uniform curricula more than Danish ones, who prefer individualized learning experiences. Danish students are happier with their educational experiences, support educational investments to strengthen society, and appreciate practical, real-life skills. Upper-secondary vocational education students are more likely to report obtaining useful skills than their British colleagues. Yet Danish NEETs feel shut out of the core economy and their exclusion may be more agonizing because it goes against the historical commitment to a strong society.