Stepping back from the immediate demands of policy-making, Mainstreaming Complementary and Alternative Medicine allows a complex and informative picture to emerge of the different social forces at play in the integration of CAM with orthodox medicine. Complementing books that focus solely on practice, it will be relevant reading for all students following health studies or healthcare courses, for medical students and medical and healthcare professionals.

Through a detailed analysis of a Guild Day ceremony in early modern England we demonstrate that. liminal points in this ritual are interrelated to form a "pattern" or "dance" of liminal pulsations. We argue it is the felt necessity, on the part of participants, to complete that pattern that provides a dynamic to any ritual event. It impels participants to continue the ritual to its conclusion and leads them to resist any interference with the "flow" of the ritual. "Flow", we assert, is thus both an interior state of participants and an exterior social characteristic of a ritual. It is created by the structuring of liminal points in a ritual, the liminal pulsations, but it achieves its dynamic by affecting the interior states of participants so that they feel impelled to "close off" the ritual and complete it.

Orthodox medicine is the dominant form of medicine because, historically, its practitioners organised themselves to lobby governments for a special status. However, alternative forms of medical therapies and medicines are becoming increasingly popular, especially among those with higher education and higher incomes. The reasons for this popularity are related to people’s search for meaning, a distrust of science, the preponderance of chronic rather than acute illness, a ‘personal’ relationship between healers and their clients, and the search for control over one’s life. Users of alternative therapies and medicines do not reject orthodox medicine but use both modalities. Alternative therapies and medicines can ‘work’ by changing the relationship of a person to his or her illness, or by producing a change in a set of symptoms. There have been few scientific demonstrations of the efficacy of alternative practices or medicines, but this is also true of most orthodox medical practices. Some alternative practices are being incorporated into orthodox medicine, and such alternative medical practices are being reclassified as complementary to, rather than alternative to, orthodox medicine.

The impact of economic rationalism on teachers’ working lives has been documented extensively, particularly in the UK. This article provides a case study of its impact in the early 1990s in a small Australian state, Tasmania, to illustrate that although the particular institutional forms through which it is expressed may differ its impact is similar. We do this by focusing on teachers' stories of change that have stress as a major theme. Stress is partially explained by increased workloads, teachers teaching outside their specialist areas and a changing student population. However, the ideology of economic rationalism has heightened stress because of the perceived lack of administrative care. A major stressor is trying to maintain a professional ideology of caring while, concurrently, accommodating to economic rationality. The clash of ideologies leads teachers to reduce commitment by leaving teaching, moving to part-time employment, withdrawing into classroom teaching and/or rationalising their workload with, they perceive, a decrease in the quality of teaching.