Antonovsky discussed humanity and values in terms of respect toward other people, or to use his own words, “ The key lies in a society and in people who care about each other” (Antonovsky, 1993c, p. Civility is about respect toward other people and about the humanity we communicate. Of salutogenesis, a value that informs how we relate to other people, how we look at them as either people with different strengths and abilities or people with flaws and shortcomings. 11.1 remain to be explained: civility and coercion.

Sense of coherence is the term he introduced as an opportunity to manage and adapt to a life of chaos As opposed to this chaos, Antonovsky raised another way to go, to coherence. Go from a societal level to the group level, to families torn apart, and where children, women, and the elderly are particularly vulnerable. ChaosĬan be exemplified as violence and war, and the image of young men and women equipped with weapons trying to solve conflicts with even more violence, senseless and unpredictable violence (Antonovsky, 1993a, p. , how a community deals with this tension and avoids stress is crucial. 970)Īlso offers opportunities for different and flexible choices, possibilities for adapting to change, and possibilities for systems (communities) to reorganize themselves. He stressed that the salutogenic theory and its key concept, sense of coherence, can be applied at a collective level, and not only with a focus on the individual level.Ĭonflict refers to internal tensions of the human being, to tensions between persons, to tensions between the individual and the suprasystems of which she or he is a part, and to tensions between or among such suprasystems. He saw the individual in interaction with theĮnvironment and context. As a medical sociologist, he distinctly expressed systems theory thinking. Here, he expressed how he looked at society and the human being in that context (Antonovsky, 1993a). As a medical sociologist, this wasĪ natural way for Antonovsky to perceive the world: seeing humans as part of a larger context.Īt the beginning of the 1990s, Aaron Antonovsky published an article about the six C’s: complexity, conflict, chaos, coherence, coercion, and civility (Fig. For the individual, the challenge is to manage the chaos and find strategies and resources available for coping with the changes in everyday life. By the latter, he perceived daily life as constantly changing a heterostatic as opposed to a homeostatic state. The former calls for system theory thinking where the focus is on the individual in a context (Antonovsky, 1985). Two important things stand: (1) he saw man in interaction with his environment and (2) chaos and change is a normal state of life. ( 1987), Antonovsky described how he perceived the world. What do we know about the ontological background of salutogenesis? In his second book,

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