From barbarian other to chosen people: the etymology,ideology and evolution of ‘nation’ at the shifting edge of medieval Western Christendom

Medieval scholars have demonstrated that the term gens (plural gentes), largely identical in usage to the modern term nation, was in use by the end of the first millennium. This article seeks to explain how and when nation came to replace gens in medieval Europe. The emergence of the concept of nationhood in Central and Eastern Europe must also be understood as a process of othering and resistance to othering, whereby emerging states seek to affirm their status as civilized Christian states, the political, social and cultural equals of the older states that had risen out of the Roman Empire.     

SOVEREIGN DEBT SUSTAINABILITY IN ADVANCED ECONOMIES

We develop a measure of maximum sustainable government debt for advanced economies. How much investors are willing to lend to a country's government depends on the country's expected primary surplus, the level and volatility of its rate of growth, and how much debt the government expects to be able to raise in the future for the purpose of servicing the debt it seeks to raise today. We provide a simple formula that computes a country's maximum sustainable debt (MSD) as a function of four easy‐to‐estimate parameters. We further compute a country's theoretical probability of default (PD) as a function of its debt‐to‐GDP ratio. We finally calibrate our measures for 23 OECD countries and test the relation between sovereign yield spreads and our theoretical PD at prevailing debt levels. We find it to be strongly statistically significant.     

A Study of the Determinants and of the Impact of Flexibility on Employee Benefit Satisfaction

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of individual characteristics and organizational justice on employee benefit satisfaction, and to explore the role of flexible benefit plans. Employees from three Canadian organizations were surveyed. A total of 285 usuable questionnaires were returned, for a response rate of 42%. The variables in the model accounted for more than 40% of the variance in benefit satisfaction. The findings showed that while distributive and procedural justice were useful in predicting benefit satisfaction, the concept of process justice had the greatest effect on satisfaction. Among the variables, communication had the greatest impact. The effect of flexibility, although significant, was ambiguous. Sociodemographic factors had a very limited effect when perceptual variables were introduced into the equation. The paper also sets out the limitations of the study and its practical implications, and makes some suggestions for future research.     

On the (Sample) Condorcet Efficiency of Majority Rule: An alternative view of majority cycles and social homogeneity

The Condorcet efficiency of a social choice procedure is usually defined as the probability that this procedure coincides with the majority winner (or majority ordering) in random samples, given a majority winner exists (or given the majority ordering is transitive). Consequently, it is in effect a conditional probability that two sample statistics coincide, given certain side conditions. We raise a different issue of Condorcet efficiencies: What is the probability that a social choice procedure applied to a sample matches with the majority preferences of the population from which the sample was drawn? We investigate the canonical case where the sample statistic is itself also majority rule and the samples are drawn from real world distributions gathered from national election surveys in Germany, France, and the United States. We relate the results to the existing literature on majority cycles and social homogeneity. We find that these samples rarely display majority cycles, whereas the probability that a sample misrepresents the majority preferences of the underlying population varies dramatically and always exceeds the probability that the sample displays cyclic majority preferences. Social homogeneity plays a fundamental role in the type of Condorcet efficiency investigated here.

     

Au-delà du conflit et de la négociation ?

Since the creation of Sociologie du travail, the importance and forms of conflicts and of negotiations have changed. Nor are the stakes still necessarily the same. Given the emergence of new players in public movements and of new strategies in social protest, it is worthwhile reviewing the ideas of “conflict” and “negotiation” in the light of the forms of circulation between different universes (government, labor unions, employer organizations, associations). Though a topic of debate, the law's place in labor relations has special importance with regard to these two ideas.