Dans le « carré de l’activité » : perspectives internationales sur le travail et l’activité

How to define a “space” of research on labor and work for describing the development, at the international level, of case studies of work-related situations? This space is described as a square bounded by four perspectives: distributed cognition, activity theory, ethnomethodology as well as related currents of thought and the sociology of science and techniques. After an explanation of their underlying principles, these perspectives are compared so as to highlight their tensions and differences with regard to several critical points in analyzing work-related situations: data collection during fieldwork, the roles of persons and things and their position on the dialectics of continuity and change. The current development of information and communication technology provides a starting point for (re)inquiring into these four perspectives and suggesting overlapping areas and possible reconfigurations.     

Estimates of trade-related adjustment costs in Syria

The scope and complexity of international trading arrangements in the Middle East, as well as their spotty historical record of success, underscore the urgent need for an adequate understanding of the relative costs and benefits of participation in preferential trading arrangements and, more generally, of changes in the domestic import regimes. This paper seeks to address this problem by providing estimates of the adjustment costs associated with two broad classes of hypothetical trade policy scenarios for Syria: participation in the proposed EU-Syria Association Agreement, and border tax-related changes affecting the domestic import regime. We find that the revenue consequences of the first scenario are likely to be low if an appropriate stepwise implementation of the agreement can be ensured; our analysis of the second scenario suggests that all border taxes can be eliminated, and the number of tariff bands reduced, while ensuring revenue neutrality, if a VAT of a reasonable size is introduced.     

Ownership Identity and Concentration: A Study of their Joint Impact on Corporate Diversification

This paper examines the impact of ownership on product and international diversification. While ownership concentration has received considerable attention from agency theorists we argue that a more nuanced analysis is necessary. We consider how the identity of owners moderates the impact of ownership concentration on diversification strategies. We develop a framework that explains how the combination of different motivations, resources and capabilities associated with different types of owners results in significantly variable relationships between ownership concentration and both product and international diversification. From a theoretical perspective this suggests a social contextualization and extension of the agency theoretic approach that characterizes the field. Based on a study of 222 European firms between 1994 and 2007 we show that family ownership concentration has a positive impact on product and a negative impact on international diversification while the impact of institutional and state ownership concentration is negative on product diversification and positive on international diversification compared with family ownership. This is the first study to provide a comprehensive framework explaining how ownership concentration and identity interact and affect both international and product diversification.     

The Volatility of Realized Volatility

In recent years, with the availability of high-frequency financial market data modeling realized volatility has become a new and innovative research direction. The construction of “observable” or realized volatility series from intra-day transaction data and the use of standard time-series techniques has lead to promising strategies for modeling and predicting (daily) volatility. In this article, we show that the residuals of commonly used time-series models for realized volatility and logarithmic realized variance exhibit non-Gaussianity and volatility clustering. We propose extensions to explicitly account for these properties and assess their relevance for modeling and forecasting realized volatility. In an empirical application for S&P 500 index futures we show that allowing for time-varying volatility of realized volatility and logarithmic realized variance substantially improves the fit as well as predictive performance. Furthermore, the distributional assumption for residuals plays a crucial role in density forecasting.     

Reviews

M. I. Finley, The Use and Abuse of History (1975), 254 (Chatto &; Windus, £4.50).

John H. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance. England, Germany, France (1974), ix+321 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, £7.50).

Hans‐Ulrich Wehler (ed.), Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg, 1524–1526 (1975), 356 (Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Sonderheft 1, Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, Göttingen, DM 39).

Mervyn James, Family, Lineage and Civil Society. A Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region 1500–1640 (1974), x+233 (Oxford University Press, £5.00).

C. W. Chalklin and M. A. Havinden (eds.), Rural Change and Urban Growth 1500–1800. Essays in English Regional History in Honour of W. G. Hoskins (1974), xxvi+360 (Longman, £8.50).

Peggy K. Liss, Mexico under Spain, 1521–1556. Society and the Origins of Nationality (1975), xvi+229 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, £7.50).

J. I. Israel, Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610–1670 (1975), xiii+305 (Oxford University Press, £8.00).

Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth‐Century France, 1750–1789 (1974), xiii+414 (Oxford University Press, £9.00).

B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics 1750–1970 (1975), xx+827 (Macmillan, £24).

Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels (1974), viii+357 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, £6.00).

Verena Martinez‐Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth‐Century Cuba. A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (1974), x+202 (Cambridge University Press, £4.40).

John Burnett (ed.), Useful Toil. Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (1974), 364 (Allen Lane, £5, paperback £2.50).

A. Allan MacLaren, Religion and Social Class: The Disruption Years in Aberdeen (1974), xii+268 (Routledge, £4.95).

David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (1975), 229 (Allen Lane, £6.00, paperback £3.00).

Robert Gellately, The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics 1890–1914 (1974), xvi+317 (Sage Publications, £6.00).

Alan A. Jackson, Semi‐Detached London: Suburban Development, Life and Transport 1900–39 (1973), 381 (George Allen and Unwin, £6.50).     

Measuring serial dependence in categorical time series

The analysis of time-indexed categorical data is important in many fields, e.g., in telecommunication network monitoring, manufacturing process control, ecology, etc. Primary interest is in detecting and measuring serial associations and dependencies in such data. For cardinal time series analysis, autocorrelation is a convenient and informative measure of serial association. Yet, for categorical time series analysis an analogous convenient measure and corresponding concepts of weak stationarity have not been provided. For two categorical variables, several ways of measuring association have been suggested. This paper reviews such measures and investigates their properties in a serial context. We discuss concepts of weak stationarity of a categorical time series, in particular of stationarity in association measures. Serial association and weak stationarity are studied in the class of discrete ARMA processes introduced by Jacobs and Lewis (J. Time Ser. Anal. 4(1):19–36, 1983). An intrinsic feature of a time series is that, typically, adjacent observations are dependent. The nature of this dependence among observations of a time series is of considerable practical interest. Time series analysis is concerned with techniques for the analysis of this dependence. (Box et al. 1994p. 1)     

Eliciting risk preferences: When is simple better?

We study the estimation of risk preferences with experimental data and focus on the trade-offs when choosing between two different elicitation methods that have different degrees of difficulty for subjects. We analyze how and when a simpler, but coarser, elicitation method may be preferred to the more complex, but finer, one. Results indicate that the more complex measure has overall superior predictive accuracy, but its downside is that subjects exhibit noisier behavior. Our main result is that subjects’ numerical skills can help better assess this tradeoff: the simpler task may be preferred for subjects who exhibit low numeracy, as it generates less noisy behavior but similar predictive accuracy. For subjects with higher numerical skills, the greater predictive accuracy of the more complex task more than outweighs the larger noise. We also explore preference heterogeneity and provide methodological suggestions for future work.     

Configuring Action in Objects: From Mutual Space to Media Space

It has long been recognized that the material environment is an essential feature of the organization of social action and interaction. It is only recently, however, that we have witnessed a burgeoning body of empirical studies, from within both the social and cognitive sciences, that has begun to delineate the ways in which objects are socially constructed and feature in social relations and activities. Despite this growing interest in the object in social life, there remains a paucity of research concerned with how objects are reflexively constituted in and through social interaction. In this article, we consider how aspects of the material environment are rendered momentarily intelligible in and through interaction and the ways in which objects provide a resource for the recognition of the actions and activities of others. We examine interaction in both conventional working environments and new experimental spaces created through advanced telecommunication and communication technologies to reveal the ways in which the sense and significance of social actions and activities are embedded in, and inseparable from, the local ecology.