In this chapter we look at the ways in which we calculate, use and interpret ‘measures of association’, so-called because they describe the association between an exposure and a health outcome. An understanding of these measures will help you to interpret reports on the causes of ill health and the effects of particular exposures or interventions on the burden of illness in a community. Note that, while we discuss the measures in the context of an ‘exposure’ and ‘disease’, they can be used to assess the association between any measure of health status and any potential ‘cause’.

Chapter 2 redraws the genealogies and characteristics of the different players involved in long-distance Tunisian activism. These various constellations of actors were pro-regime, Islamist, leftist and trans-ideological, and they created political parties, associations or other movements within which to conduct their politics in the trans-state space of mobilisation. This space represented a political and relational battleground on which the position of each actor played a role. The chapter shows how Tunisian activists were able to politically survive despite distance from the homeland, and the extent to which they were able to adapt to new configurations to continue their activism. The organisation of long-distance Tunisian politics assumed a specific and complex configuration in the French environment, so it cannot be considered as a simple replication of Tunisian politics.

One of the ways for immigrants to speed up the process of integration was by expanding their social and business networks. The fact that they arrived as a large group with similar backgrounds (e.g. textile workers, exiles with families) provided them with the basis to form a network of family and friends that would reduce the economic and psychological risk of migration. The evidence confirms this pattern, as the immigrants from the Low Countries maintained closer relationships with their compatriots. They inevitably mixed with the native population; however, as we will see later, their relationships with the English were largely based on business . But what were the strategies the new arrivals used to strengthen their position in the new environment? How did the Flemings create and expand their social and business networks? The present chapter is concerned with exploring the integration process of the immigrant community, and how it reflected on both their daily life and the organization of their trade. It will examine the social and business networks of the Flemish immigrants as evidenced in the surviving testamentary records and through the judicial documents.

Chapter 1 begins with the distinction between reasoning from associations and reasoning from rules – a distinction that will resurface in subsequent chapters on creativity and innovation. The associative system is reproductive, automatic, and emphasizes similarity. The rule-based system is productive, deliberative, and emphasizes verification. Daniel Kahneman’s (2011) best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow introduced readers to how associative and rule-based reasoning influence the speed of responses. The third section on biases in reasoning describes Kahneman’s classic research with Amos Tversky on how the use of heuristics such as availability and representativeness influence frequency estimates. The final section discusses monitoring reasoning in which people use knowledge to improve their thinking skills. Monitoring reasoning is a metacognitive skill that controls the selection, evaluation, revision, and abandonment of cognitive tasks, goals, and strategies.

The ecumenical synods of the Roman imperial period cannot be understood without understanding their forerunners, the Hellenistic artists’ associations. These were not organised on a pan-Mediterranean scale as the ecumenical synods were. Rather, they were regionally organised, reflecting the fragmented political world of the Hellenistic period. There were four major associations: the Athenian synod, the Isthmian-Nemean synod, mainly active on the Peloponnese and in Boeotia, the Ionian-Hellespontine synod in Asia Minor and the Egyptian synod connected to the Ptolemaic royal court. This chapter discusses their emergence in the third century bc and their involvement in festivals, politics and religion. In many respects their activities were a model for what would come later, for example their preoccupation with securing financial and honorific privileges for their members, their contribution to the organisation of festivals and their relations with political rulers such as Hellenistic kings and Roman generals.

This chapter bridges the gap between the disappearance of the Hellenistic artists’ associations in the first century bc and the emergence of the ecumenical synods at the end of that century. It begins with a discussion of the first attestations of the ecumenical synods. The ecumenical athletes’ association is first attested in a letter by Mark Antony from the 40s or 30s bc. The first clear evidence of the ecumenical synod of artists dates only from the reign of Claudius (AD 41-54), but there are indications that the artists were already banding together on a transregional scale in the 30s bc. Next, this chapter seeks to explain the emergence of the synods by looking at the broader context of Mediterranean integration. It argues that the synods’ emergence was connected to the development of an 'international' festival network, which was in turn made possible by the Roman unification of the Mediterranean. Moreover, it appears that the Roman takeover in the east created the right conditions for the establishment of associations that transcended the polis framework. Especially the province of Asia seems to have provided fertile soil for experimenting with new organisational forms.

This book opens with some introductory notes on the two ecumenical synods, marking the discrepancy between their importance in the festival world of the Principate and the obscurity they have fallen into in present-day scholarship. This is mainly due to the extremely fragmentary source material on their history and organisation. The ecumenical synods are mainly known from inscriptions, often heavily damaged, and papyri from Egypt. These diverse sources present us with a complex and often contradictory view. The most important documents for this study are decrees drawn up by the synods, their correspondence with emperors and membership certificates. A great variety in names and titles further complicates our understanding of the synods. Nevertheless, there are a number of basic elements that recur in the documents promulgated by the synods themselves, which are discussed briefly. The final part of the introduction sets out the structure of the book as well as the basic principles that form the core of the argumentation.

The conclusion comes back to the main findings of the different chapters. Taken as a whole, this book rehabilitates the ecumenical synods of competitors as prominent actors in the Graeco-Roman society. They shaped its socio-cultural life, reconciled Greek traditions with Roman rule and contributed to the remarkable cultural unification of the Mediterranean in that period.

This chapter addresses those social ties beyond the kin-group which seem – to judge from commemorative practices – to have been of most importance for the inhabitants of Roman Hieradoumia. Fellow members of small-scale local cult-associations (phratrai, symbiōseis, speirai, doumoi) are very prominent in funerary commemoration, as are religious officials, neighbours, friends, and (for unfree persons) groups of fellow slaves. At Saittai, men are often commemorated by trade guilds and professional associations, probably reflecting the existence of guild-based burial-clubs; there is some reason to think that these trade guilds were unusually prominent in the civic organization of the polis of Saittai. Finally, civic communities fairly often participate in the commemoration of deceased members of the civic elite; such men and women’s tombstones can include lengthy extracts from post mortem honorific decrees which systematically conflate the deceased’s public and private virtues.

This chapter argues that an adequate account of group rights requires an embedded understanding of moral duties and rights within the context of common action for a common good. Drawing from Alasdair MacIntyre, I explain why group agency for a common good, through various social practices, grounds a framework of natural justice with correlative duties and rights, including various group moral rights. This account of natural justice is completed by an appeal to the common agency of an institutionalised political community for a political common good. I argue that human rights are a subset of moral rights, which ‘cry out’ as a matter of justice for political enforcement or realisation, whether against violations of fundamental natural law precepts or dereliction of core political responsibilities. These include group rights where the protected aspects of personal human flourishing are pursued through the common action of groups, such as families, trade unions, religious communities, and political communities. Moreover, group rights are essential to human rights – human rights presuppose the group moral right of political authority to administer justice for the common good.

I outline Merleau-Ponty’s critique of first-generation empiricism with its causal account of sensations of determinate qualities, which is rejected in favour of a figure background account that factors in our interests and our biological imperatives. I then show how he rejects a classical account of re-identification through associations based on the projection of memories. We do not associate past and present bundles of sensations, rather past and present configurations. I then run through his positive view of intersensory or intermodal perception, in which our senses work together from the outset because they are structured to do so. Finally I suggest how he would criticise the second-generation objective thought found in the contemporary physicalism that no longer posits unstructured sensations or externally related variables. He would show that our lifeworld, our responses to significant situations and our beliefs in proximate and distant action possibilities for ourselves and others are utterly ineliminable.

Chapter 4 explores the relationship of Cuban law and government to domestic service from the late 1930s through the first year of the 1959 revolution. A law guaranteeing paid vacation days to Cuban domestics was met with such opposition that the government reversed course almost immediately. The opposition to Decree 1754 insisted that domestic workers were like “one of the family,” a notion with a long history in Cuba and in the history of domestic service globally. Transcripts of Cuban law, the 1940 Constitution, the papers of corporate personnel in Cuba, personal speeches and papers of radical feminists, and labor publications all demonstrate, first, that domestic workers did collectively organize and, second, that the depiction of domestic service as familial and feminine quasi-labor was deliberately used as a weapon to bludgeon the collective organizing of domestic servants. The chapter traces the evolution of domestic service activism in the late 1940s, looking both at radical action by Communist Party members and more moderate reform efforts by mutual aid organizations that organized across the country.

Studies of trade are predicated on the antithesis between ‘personalised exchange’ (the Network) and ‘arms-length exchange’ (the anonymous Market). As regards ancient trade, the putative incongruity between the two has informed the view of the supremacy of personalised exchange, and the concomitant absence of market exchange. In historical analyses, furthermore, trade networks are appraised solely for their role in the distribution of raw materials and commodities. This chapter challenges these views. Focusing on a formalised kind of network, the association, it first charts the diffusion of traders’ associations to, and their integration in the economic life of, eastern Mediterranean commercial centres. Then, it investigates the mechanisms that enabled associational networks to act as fighters of trade constraints, distance-shortening entities, bridge builders between state/fiscal concerns and private profit, co-determinants of routes and prices, and as producers of knowledge and trust. Formalised networks, it is concluded, helped trade to break out of its lone-peddler mode and to amalgamate with a wider organisational world, whose newly fashioned business behaviour approximated that of the firm. In all this, this chapter is in alignment with the more recent trend among social scientists to consider networks as integral parts of market models of the economy.