Work-life balance research has employed both qualitative and quantitative methods. Self-reported surveys dominate the field, with interviews and document analysis used to a lesser extent. Whether stated or not, workers in these studies are generally assumed to have two separate lives or roles and are, therefore, implicitly two different people. We adapted a qualimetric socio-economic intervention research approach to study individualized meanings and impacts of work-life balance in a complete academic/administrative unit of a business college, thereby offering the potential for applicability and scalability to an entire college or university. Treating each worker as a single person immersed in extended social networks revealed that while symptoms or superficial effects may differ at home and at work, the root causes of challenges both at work and at home were the same. The qualimetric approach produced findings that differed from previous research in the broader field of work-life balance research, and offered insight into the power relations that reduce work-life balance to a work-only monologue.

This paper uses business model perspective to understand how different organisations can through their corporate sustainability policies contribute to the social innovation/entrepreneurship processes. Since the current literature on social innovation concentrates on an individual level and the topic of social entrepreneurs, we propose a wider view of the scene. We analyse how social innovation can be a part of a business model (design) on one hand; and how the social innovation can be sustainable as a result of the integration with the business models on the other hand.

In our analysis, we identify four levels of business involvement in which organisations can both contribute and benefit from innovative social goods or support social innovation. An organisation may address social needs as a part of its marketing strategy, offsets, R&D model, or as a core-business idea. We argue that in any of these situations a company can benefit from supporting social innovation, for instance by good brand recognition, positive associations, innovative products and services, new markets, etc. Fulfilling social needs may be either a by-product of business-oriented activities, such as investigation of existing demand, addressing specific groups of potential customers, inventing a new market segments; or because of the external pressures such as legal regulations or public protests.

In the following essay I intend to draw attention to two phenomena, which have become subjects of interest in political science following the occurrence of Brexit and Trump. One of them is “post-truth politics”1, in a way, an explanation for the aforementioned occurrences. According to it, the voters, especially the ones critical of the establishment, disregard certain “self-evident” facts while making their decision. I am arguing that this explanation ignores the fact that in politics so-called “facts” do not exist. A prerequisite of pluralism is to have different arrangements and interpretations of the facts. The other area of my investigation, which is closely connected to the first one, has to be taken into consideration when we are trying to interpret either the Brexit or the Trump phenomenon. Through the social media, the digitalization of politics has dramatically changed political communication and marketing, political content and how fast news or fake news can spread. Therefore the changes in the way voters perceive politics and political matters is also an influential factor. If we perceive certain matters as politics or not, what we do or do not consider as a political matter. Correspondingly, contemporary populist reintroduce topics into politics which were considered concluded and they question certain consensuses of the previous years. As an illustration, we may think of Donald Trump’s concept of public “Post-truth politics” as the normal state of politics policy, which includes not only the wall to the Mexican border but the denial of climate change, as well as his rejection of political correctness or the ban on federal money spent on abortions outside the US. The varying facts, contents, and interpretations reach the voters through a fragmented publicity, through various channels and platforms. A certain part of the voters only encounters the fragments of facts or an interpretation and it may as well be an aim on their side.