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In this paper, we examine discourse in public deliberations in pre-development locales in the UK and US about advantages and disadvantages of future shale development ('fracking'). We aimed to understand how people anticipate potential health effects, broadly construed, of environmental toxicity and disturbance in the context of planned, but not yet implemented, energy development. In day-long deliberations with small, diverse groups in two cities in each country (London, Cardiff in the UK; Los Angeles, Santa Barbara in the US), participants discussed impacts on health and well-being using three main rubrics: 'It's money or health', 'Why take chances?' and 'Beyond the tipping point'. Throughout, participants framed health as an intrinsically moral issue, with collective responsibility as a dominant normative frame. We identify the concept of compound risk to underscore effects of multiple risks and hazards on people's sensibilities about anticipated future health and environmental harm. The findings demonstrate how and why diverse publics in pre-impact sites in both countries saw shale extraction as high stakes development that poses significant, often unacceptable, risks to human and environmental health and well-being. Risks extended beyond toxicity to broad threats to health, including, for some, the end of life as we know it on the planet. Overall, participants' discussions of health were more connected to social categories and their underlying moral principles than to technological details. This work contributes evidence of blurred boundaries between environment and health as well as the importance people place on social risks in the context of proposed energy system change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a preliminary study of the behavior of U.S. male blue-collar workers on four-day workweeks. Effect on the way free time is used; Patterns of time allocation.

Two questions concerning enjoyment of work asked on a 1955 American Gallup Poll were asked on a 1980 United States national survey to gauge the net change during a quarter of a century. Only the responses of persons employed full-time were used for this study. Indicated enjoyment of work was substantially lower in 1980 than in 1955. The difference was especially great for manual workers, Protestants, and older persons. A tentative conclusion drawn from examining trend data for one birth cohort is that the change resulted from cohort succession and from orientations and attitudes members of younger cohorts brought to their work rather than from changes in work conditions which affected workers of all ages and in all birth cohorts. Some implications of the findings are disscussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]