‘Je suis socialiste et quinziste’: rugby,wine and socialism in the Aude since 1976

In the Languedoc, the intersections between rugby, wine and socialism give telling insights into the value and significance of regional identity. At the end of the 1970s, the Languedoc's wine industry and rugby were facing up to the challenges of modernisation; the responses which emerged drew upon the principles of regional identity drawn from the ‘banal nationalism’ of wine-drinking, left-voting rugby players in local administrations and at the head of powerful trade unions. The cross-over between board-room and locker-room helped to accent regional responses to change and modernization, ensuring that regional heritage remained potent and ready to be communicated.     

The role,power and influence of company chairs

This paper develops an analytical framework to depict the heterogeneity that characterises the role of board chair and demonstrate the potential variability in how chairs operate boards and exercise power and influence on strategy, control and resource related tasks at board level. Theories of power and influence, as applied to top management teams and boards of directors, are explicated within the context of contemporary governance practices that are establishing the role of the board chair as distinct to that of the chief executive officer. Specifically, the paper maps sources of power and varying contemporary chair practices, including chair nomenclature (i.e. executive vs. non-executive chairs), chair origin (insider vs. outsider) and chair time (full-time vs. part-time). A number of theoretical chair-power models emerge from this analysis and are subject to empirical analysis using data collected from 160 chairs of 500 FTSE-listed companies. Theoretically and empirically, the paper complements structural approaches to studying boards with attention to behaviour on boards. By linking board structure, board process and the exercise of influence, the study reveals both differences amongst chairs in how they run the board, but also that chairs’ differ in the influence they exert on board-related tasks. Full-time executive chairs exert their greatest influence in strategy and resource dependence tasks whereas part-time, non-executive chairs seem to exert more influence over monitoring and control tasks.     

城市大气中污染物扩散的施密特数研究

借助反问题方法对风洞实验工况选取不同施密特数进行数值模拟试验,分析比较了不同施密特数时街道峡谷内各个观测点的数值模拟数据和风洞实验数据.研究结果表明,城市街道内大气污染物扩散的施密特数为0.7～0.8.     

Sequence Comparison Via Alignment and Gibbs Sampling: A Formal Analysis of the Emergence of the Modern Sociological Article

Various substantive literatures in sociology seek small regularities in sequences: turning points in the life course, catalytic moments in organizational change, sharp turns in occupational trajectories, and the like. Commonly these are turning points, but they may also be simple local patterns. This paper reports a method for discovering such regularities even when they are quite faint, applying that method to rhetorical regularities in sociological articles. The paper begins by analyzing the overall sequence structure of such articles and then gives a basic introduction to Gibbs sampling, one member of the broader class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. It then reports an algorithm employing Gibbs sampling to find local sequence regularities and applies that algorithm to demonstrate the subsequence regularities present in sociological articles. Substantively, the paper shows that the rhetorical structure of sociological articles changed from one pattern to another in the period 1895–1965 and that certain faint but standard rhetorical subsequences became characteristic of articles in the later period. Methodologically, it introduces a broad class of methods that provide effective approaches to a number of previously intractable statistical questions.     

The spatial structure of epidemic emergence: geographical aspects of poliomyelitis in north-eastern USA, July-October 1916

Summary.  The great epidemic of poliomyelitis which swept New York City and surrounding territory in the summer of 1916 eclipsed all previous global experience of the disease. We draw on epidemiological information that is included in the seminal US Public Health Bulletin 91, 'Epidemiologic studies of poliomyelitis in New York City and the northeastern United States during the year 1916' (Washington DC, 1918), to re-examine the spatial structure of the epidemic. For the main phase of transmission of the epidemic, July–October 1916, it is shown that the maximum concentration of activity of poliomyelitis occurred within a 128-km radius of New York City. Although the integrity of the poliomyelitis cluster was maintained up to approximately 500 km from the metropolitan focus, the level and rate of propagation of disease declined with distance from the origin of the epidemic. Finally, it is shown that the geographical transmission of the epidemic in north-eastern USA probably followed a process of mixed contagious–hierarchical diffusion.     

Archival Work as Qualitative Sociology

Qualitative Sociology -     

ESTIMATION OF THE CONCENTRATION PARAMETERS OF THE FISHER MATRIX DISTRIBUTION ON 50(3) AND THE BINGHAM DISTRIBUTION ON Sq, q≥ 2

Two procedures are considered for estimating the concentration parameters of the Fisher matrix distribution for rotations or orientations in three dimensions. The first is maximum likelihood. The use of a convenient 1-dimensional integral representation of the normalising constant, which greatly simplifies the computation, is suggested. The second approach exploits the equivalence of the Fisher distribution for rotations in three dimensions, and the Bingham distribution for axes in four dimensions. We describe a pseudo likelihood procedure which works for the Bingham distribution in any dimension. This alternative approach does not require numerical integration. Results on the asymptotic efficiency of the pseudo likelihood estimator relative to the maximum likelihood estimator are given, and the two estimators are compared in the analysis of a well-known vectorcardiography dataset.     

How human resource outsourcing affects organizational learning in the knowledge economy

Adaptability and knowledge management, key elements of organizational learn-ing, are critical to organizational success as a result of a fundamental shift towards a knowledge economy. HR outsourcing and the growth in contingent work can result in a significant loss in learning capital through a breakdown in the psychological contract. We explore how to preserve HR's strategic role in facilitating organizational learning in the new outsourcing and offshoring con-text. The problem is compounded if outsourcing is introduced for cost control rather than strategic refocusing reasons. We suggest that managers can posi-tively influence the relationship between outsourcing and organizational learn-ing through internal marketing tactics and enriched psychological contracts. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada (ASAC) Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada, June 2005.