Who is right about the modern economy: Polanyi,Zelizer, or both?

Zelizer’s work may be read as an attack on the central Polanyian thesis: that the market system threatens social life by the undue prominence it lends the economy in the organization of modern society. The recent publication of Viviana Zelizer’s The Purchase of Intimacy (2005a) is therefore an excellent opportunity to review the general trend of her work Zelizer 1979, 1985, 1994, and contrast her leading ideas to the central thesis that gives Polanyi’s work its particular flavor: the danger encapsulated in the use of modern money and the functioning of the market system. A draft of this essay was presented in March 2007 at a workshop held at the University of London, and a preliminary French version has appeared in a special issue of the Revue du Mauss devoted to Polanyi’s thought (Vol. 29, June 2007). The present version is directed to Zelizer’s views on the relation between market and society. I thank Franck Cochoy, Keith Hart, José Ossandon, and Viviana Zelizer for their helpful comments and advices.

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Work,Refuge, Transit: An Emerging Pattern of Irregular Immigration South and East of the Mediterranean

Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (SEM) countries have recently turned into receivers of migrants, but they have neither the institutions nor the policies that would allow them to integrate migrants. Therefore, most migrants in SEM countries found themselves in irregular situation. Using a variety of statistical sources, official and non‐official, the article establishes that out of 5.6 million immigrants living in SEM countries in the mid‐2000s, a minimum of 3.6 would be in irregular situation. They belong to three categories: approximately 2 million migrant workers attracted by SEM labour markets where they are employed in the informal sector with no work permit, 1.5 million de facto refugees who cannot obtain the status of refugee and are waiting for resettlement in a third country or return to their homes, and less than 200,000 transit migrants initially bound for Europe, which they are unable to reach for lack of visa. While their reasons to be stranded in the SEM differ, these three categories share the same vulnerable conditions, with no legal access to work, services, or protection.     

Intra-rater reliability of hip abductor isometric strength testing in a standing position in older fallers and non-fallers

Background

Reduced hip muscle strength has been shown to be a major factor related to falls in older persons. However, comprehensive assessment of hip abduction strength in the clinical setting is challenging. The aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility and intra-rater reliability of a quick and simple hip abductor strength test in a functional standing position.

Methods

Individuals over 65 years of age were recruited from the geriatric department of a university hospital and an outpatient clinic. Thirty-two older subjects, including 16 fallers (≥1 fall during the last 12 months) and 16 non-fallers were included. Maximum voluntary isometric strength (MVIS) and rate of force generation (RFG) of the hip abductors of the right leg were evaluated in a standing position using a hand-held dynamometer. Two test-sessions were carried out. All hip strength values were normalized to participants’ weight. Reliability was determined using the intra-class correlation coefficient agreement (ICC_agreement), the standard error of measurement (SEM) and a Bland and Altman analysis (BA).

Results

All participants completed the strength tests, which took a mean 2.47?±?0.49 min (one limb). Intra-rater reliability was higher for MVIS (0.98_{[0.95–0.99]}) than RFG (ICC?=?0.93_{[0.87–0.97]}) for the entire sample. In the non-fallers, ICC was 0.98_{[0.95–1.00]} (SEM?=?0.08 N.kg^??1) for MVIS and 0.88_{[0.75–0.96]} for RFG (SEM?=?1.34 N.kg^-1.s^-1). In the fallers, ICC was 0.94_{[0.89–0.98]} (SEM?=?0.11 N.kg^??1) for MVIS and 0.93_{[0.84–0.98]} (SEM?=?1.12 N.kg^??1.s^??1) for RFG. The BA plot showed that the MVIS and RFG values did not differ across test-sessions, showing that no learning effect occurred (no systematic effect). The mean differences between test-sessions were larger and the LOA smaller in the fallers than in the non-fallers.

Conclusion

Assessment of hip strength in a standing position is feasible, rapid and reliable. We therefore recommend this position for clinical practice. Future studies should investigate the diagnostic value of hip abductor strength in standing to discriminate between fallers and non-fallers, and to determine if change in strength following a falls prevention program reduces the risk of falls.

     

From armed group to movement: armed struggle and movement formation in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country

In recent decades, social movement scholars have expanded our understanding of ‘terrorism’ by analyzing a particular trajectory, movement to armed group, whereby movement demobilization spurs armed struggle. This article analyzes an alternative trajectory: armed group to movement. Once armed struggle’s limitations become apparent, armed groups often adopt an attritional military strategy suited to their capacities. To securely wage an attritional campaign, groups disembed through the adoption of insular structures, removing them from their milieux and from recruits and resources needed for organizational reproduction. To offset this, armed groups reembed through the development of politico-military movement structures: forming allied aboveground movement organizations; coordinating armed and unarmed activism; and creating a ‘movement’ identity. This offsets disembedding in three ways. First, collective action augments armed groups’ violence by expanding the struggle into new domains. Second, mobilized support provides armed groups political legitimacy, countering the ‘terrorist’ label. Third, aboveground movement organizations assist in recruitment, alliance-formation, public communication, and mobilization, facilitating armed groups’ organizational reproduction. This paper investigates the strategic decision to adopt movement structures by analyzing documents produced by militants linked to the IRA and to rival ETAs, ETA Politico-Military and ETA Military, allowing for the exploration of different aspects of the decision to adopt movement structures. From Irish republican texts, insights into the basic benefits of movement development are gleaned. Basque separatist documents, on the other hand, provide perspectives on the nature of interorganizational centralization and coordination within politico-military movements.     

The dynamics of capital accumulation in the US: simulations after piketty

We develop a dynamic model where a competitive firm uses labor and capital, with market clearing rates of return. Individuals are heterogeneous in skills, with an endowment in capital/wealth increasing in skill. Individuals aspire to a socially determined consumption level, with a constant marginal propensity to consume out of income above this level. We also study three variants of the model: one with a higher rate of return for large capitals than for smaller ones, one with a capital levy financing a lump sum transfer, and one with social mobility. We calibrate the model to the US economy and obtain that a steady state exists in all variants, and we obtain convergence to the steady state from the 2012 US wealth distribution. The reduction in the level of the aspirational consumption level is the only way to create wealth for the bottom half of the distribution.     

Axiomatization and implementation of a class of solidarity values for TU-games

A new class of values combining marginalistic and egalitarian principles is introduced for cooperative TU-games. It includes some modes of solidarity among the players by taking the collective contribution of some coalitions to the grand coalition into account. Relationships with other class of values such as the Egalitarian Shapley values and the Procedural values are discussed. We propose a strategic implementation of our class of values in subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. Two axiomatic characterizations are provided: one of the whole class of values, and one of each of its extreme points.     

Pharmacokinetic parameters estimation using adaptive Bayesian P-splines models

In preclinical and clinical experiments, pharmacokinetic (PK) studies are designed to analyse the evolution of drug concentration in plasma over time i.e. the PK profile. Some PK parameters are estimated in order to summarize the complete drug's kinetic profile: area under the curve (AUC), maximal concentration (C(max)), time at which the maximal concentration occurs (t(max)) and half-life time (t(1/2)).Several methods have been proposed to estimate these PK parameters. A first method relies on interpolating between observed concentrations. The interpolation method is often chosen linear. This method is simple and fast. Another method relies on compartmental modelling. In this case, nonlinear methods are used to estimate parameters of a chosen compartmental model. This method provides generally good results. However, if the data are sparse and noisy, two difficulties can arise with this method. The first one is related to the choice of the suitable compartmental model given the small number of data available in preclinical experiment for instance. Second, nonlinear methods can fail to converge. Much work has been done recently to circumvent these problems (J. Pharmacokinet. Pharmacodyn. 2007; 34:229-249, Stat. Comput., to appear, Biometrical J., to appear, ESAIM P&S 2004; 8:115-131).In this paper, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric model based on P-splines. This method provides good PK parameters estimation, whatever be the number of available observations and the level of noise in the data. Simulations show that the proposed method provides better PK parameters estimations than the interpolation method, both in terms of bias and precision. The Bayesian nonparametric method provides also better AUC and t(1/2) estimations than a correctly specified compartmental model, whereas this last method performs better in t(max) and C(max) estimations.We extend the basic model to a hierarchical one that treats the case where we have concentrations from different subjects. We are then able to get individual PK parameter estimations. Finally, with Bayesian methods, we can get easily some uncertainty measures by obtaining credibility sets for each PK parameter.     

METRIC VS. NONMETRIC PROCEDURES FOR MULTIATTRIBUTE MODELING: SOME SIMULATION RESULTS *

Nonmetric procedures such a MONANOVA have been developed to estimate attribute utilities with ranked observations. It is argued that the goodness of the estimation procedure is another criterion which favors a metric procedure like Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Regression. MONANOVA and OLS Regression are compared in their ability to recover attribute utilities with both ranked and scaled observations.     

ON THE USE OF VERBAL PROTOCOLS IN CONJOINT ANALYSIS STUDIES

A recent study by Olshavsky and Acito helped gain insight into (a) the decision process used by respondents when asked to do a conjoint task, (b) the predictive validity of conjoint models compared to models derived from verbal protocols, and (c) the reasons for prediction errors. In this article, the author argues that the Olshavsky and Acito results do not lead one to believe that the compensatory conjoint models can be potentially more misleading than models that try to represent more accurately the underlying evaluation process with noncompensatory and compensatory rules. Hence, it does not seem necessary to try to identify noncompensatory rules in a conjoint study.     

Automatic and location-adaptive estimation in functional single-index regression

This paper develops a new automatic and location-adaptive procedure for estimating regression in a Functional Single-Index Model (FSIM). This procedure is based on k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN) ideas. The asymptotic study includes results for automatically data-driven selected number of neighbours, making the procedure directly usable in practice. The local feature of the kNN approach insures higher predictive power compared with usual kernel estimates, as illustrated in some finite sample analysis. As by-product, we state as preliminary tools some new uniform asymptotic results for kernel estimates in the FSIM model.