This chapter offers an overview of the arguments and key contributions of the book. The book has shown that while clientelism and resource constraints have rationed the provision of public goods and social benefits, across the past century, Indians have engaged in deliberate debates about what an Indian ‘welfare state’ should look like. The ideas and principles on which earlier policies were conceived have remained influential. India’s welfare regime today is shaped by decisions taken and resources allocated in the past. Even moments of expected rupture such as the onset of economic reforms in 1991 - or, as this chapter goes on to show, the 2014 Lok Sabha elections which brought the Narendra Modi-led BJP to power on a platform promising an end to a culture of ‘entitlements’ - have seen underlying stability in the context of India’s welfare regime. This said, there have been substantial areas of divergence over time in both the approach to social policy implementation and the philosophy of citizenship that underpins welfare commitments. The chapter ends by looking ahead to the future of welfare, underlining the continued significance of state-level policy innovation.

This chapter documents our experiences of pivoting research on sexual and gender minority youth towards an online protocol using digital methods. Digital diaries presented an opportunity to conduct virtual longitudinal qualitative research on how youth describe their experiences of living through the COVID-19 pandemic in Vancouver, Canada. Our digital diary process, supplemented with remote interviews, allowed us to capture shifting health-related patterns and trends, establish capacity to identify and explore unanticipated areas of inquiry, and evaluate participants’ impressions of the method itself. While going digital allowed us to overcome some immediate constraints to participation, it also introduced new uncertainties, including equity concerns and issues around consistent, secure and safe digital access for research participants. We describe how features of young people’s lives remain important factors associated with their ability to participate in digital and remote research. We offer solutions to the challenges and conclude that to counteract the inequities arising from the shift to digital methods, we need flexible, adaptive and population-tailored digital and remote approaches to data collection.

This chapter draws on a mixed-method project that explored retail market encounters in Edinburgh during the pandemic. It borrows from Walter Benjamin’s methodological and conceptual approach in the arcades project to explore how online settings, notably Instagram, function as market spaces. Arcades, for Benjamin, work by using their architecture to create atmospheres conducive to specific actions – lingering, browsing and purchasing. Arcades and Instagram share material and technical features that are orchestrated to shape action and in this both parallel the functions of ‘market devices’. The significance of space, as an element in ‘the equipment and devices’ which give market ‘action a shape’ has long been acknowledged in market studies (Callon 1998: 22) but how retail space works to devise action has had little attention. In describing how Instagram provided ‘digital-affective premises’ during the pandemic we advance three broader propositions. First, that market spaces are necessarily market devices because they are designed to produce action. Second, that while scholarship has exposed the material and technical elements of market devices, it had said much less about their sentimental or affective elements. Finally, that market spaces showcase how technical-sentimental, digital-affective elements interact in giving action its shape.

In this chapter, I show how the urge to monumentalize the book-bound novel in the face of cultural and technological transformations inspires a range of strategies to make literature anew. Starting from contested notions of the “end of the book” and then examining several “renaissances,” I explore the resilience of paper-based literature in the era of its foretold death. First, I examine how comparative literary studies has responded to the shift from analog to digital by developing new frameworks and critical tools. Then, I zoom in on recent innovations in, and reinventions of, analogue literary practices, in book art and book design as well as literary fiction. I end with a reflection on a specific form of bookishness that emphasizes the novel’s size and scale, and thus reinvents it as monumental. On all these levels, we will see, the digital has brought the book, and the novel as the literary art form bound by the book, into sharper focus.

This chapter treats the design considerations for dictionaries as printed books, the transition from print to digital formats in the thirty years around the turn of the twenty-first century, and the considerations for digital and online formats. Section 1: Customer-focused decisions about format, size, and extent of physical dictionaries; the mapping of book and page components of printed dictionaries; the mutual influence of editorial and design choices; and the advent of digital composition and production for printed formats. Section 2: Factors driving the choice of digital versus print formats for changing customer needs; functional challenges of converting printed dictionaries to digital; design considerations for online interfaces, including both technical performance and user experience.

Through textually grounded "reverse engineering" of Sun Tzu’s ideas, this study challenges widely held assumptions. Sun Tzu is more straightforward, less "crafty," than often imagined. The concepts are more structural, less aphoristic. The fourteen themes approach provides a way of addressing Sun Tzu’s tendency to speak to multiple, often shifting, audiences at once ("multivocality"). It also sheds light on Sun Tzu’s limitations, including a pervasive zero-sum mentality; focus mostly on conventional warfare; a narrow view of human nature. Sun Tzu’s enduring value is best sought in the text’s extensive attention to warfare’s information aspects, where Sun Tzu made timeless contributions having implications for modern information warfare and especially its human aspects (e.g., algorithm sabotage by subverted insiders). The text points opportunities for small, agile twenty-first-century strategic actors to exploit cover provided by modern equivalents to Sun Tzu’s "complex terrain" (digital systems, social networks, complex organizations, and complex statutes) to run circles around large, sluggish, established institutional actors, reaping great profit from applying Sun Tzu’s insights.

At the heart of the versatility of Sun Tzu’s thinking – and a basic reason it is so extraordinarily conducive to digital age applications – stands its unswerving emphasis on the pivotal importance of information as a resource for strategic actors.

Through textually grounded "reverse engineering" of Sun Tzu’s ideas, this study challenges widely held assumptions. Sun Tzu is more straightforward, less "crafty," than often imagined. The concepts are more structural, less aphoristic. The fourteen themes approach provides a way of addressing Sun Tzu’s tendency to speak to multiple, often shifting, audiences at once ("multivocality"). It also sheds light on Sun Tzu’s limitations, including a pervasive zero-sum mentality; focus mostly on conventional warfare; a narrow view of human nature. Sun Tzu’s enduring value is best sought in the text’s extensive attention to warfare’s information aspects, where Sun Tzu made timeless contributions having implications for modern information warfare and especially its human aspects (e.g., algorithm sabotage by subverted insiders). The text points opportunities for small, agile twenty-first-century strategic actors to exploit cover provided by modern equivalents to Sun Tzu’s "complex terrain" (digital systems, social networks, complex organizations, and complex statutes) to run circles around large, sluggish, established institutional actors, reaping great profit from applying Sun Tzu’s insights.

The causes of ill health and death are changing and, as we live longer, new health-preventable problems emerge, bringing new challenges. Improving health (physical, mental or both) and promoting general well-being remain major priorities.

Just as important, the difference in health status between rich and poor continues to grow. At a global level, the picture is even more complex. Although there is some evidence that life expectancy is beginning to plateau in developed countries such as the UK, the biggest potential to improve health still lies in addressing inequality between or within countries.

Therefore, this chapter:

• summarizes the models of health improvement that are prevalent today;

• introduces a combined conceptual model to describe the factors affecting health in modern times; and

• presents some case studies of interventions designed to improve health which offer important insight and learning.

Digital processes need to have wellbeing at their core. Rather than focusing on burnout and distress, digital can be considered as an enabler of wellness. Using key concepts such as user-centred design, reimagining processes and education, digital can enhance the lives of staff and patients. Many solutions to digital distress involve taking a break from technology. These solutions are temporary and do not address the root cause of the issue. As technology embeds itself into every facet of our lives, we have an opportunity to take control of how we engage with digital. Instead of translating paper processes into digital equivalents there is an opportunity to leverage the power digital brings to reduce the burden rather than add to it. Clinician and patient engagement are key to digital wellbeing and the success of digital in our healthcare systems. Increasing autonomy and providing flexible support can reduce burnout with digital systems. Involvement must be meaningful and not acceptability testing at the end of system design. Critically, we must remember that people are the most important determinant of the success of any digital project.