Les normes comptables comme institution du capitalisme. Une analyse du passage aux normes IFRS en Europe à partir de 2005

In 2002, the European Union changed direction from its past efforts to harmonise European accounting systems and turned instead to a subcontractor, requiring listed European companies to adopt accounting standards drawn up by a private London-based organisation, the IASB (International Accounting Standards Board), which had until then had no public mandate. This decision was all the more significant because the EU has no institutional means of control over the IASB, although it was the first geographical group to decide to impose these standards on its businesses. IASB standards are rooted in the “anglo-saxon” tradition of standardisation for the financial markets, and the view of the enterprise they promote diverges from the accounting traditions of continental European capitalism. This article shows how the new standards are transforming the concept of enterprise, and examines the span of factors that brought about what is a major institutional change for European capitalism. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

Multilevel community health promotion: How can we make it work?

The need for multilevel, comprehensive health promotion programmeshas become widely accepted, as has the importance of communityapproaches. However, many health promotion programmes focuson change at the individual level, no doubt partly due to thedifficulty of implementing all-inclusive health promotion. Thispaper discusses two strategies for guiding multilevel projects:multiple methods for community assessment and charting projectactivities by level of change (a possibility framework). Thesestrategies help ensure a multilevel focus and provide valuableinformation that can assist with the implementation of multilevelhealth promotion research projects in specific community contexts.Our primary purpose, therefore, is not to focus on theory orresearch findings. Rather, our goal is to make visible two strategiesthat have been helpful in one health promotion research projectin Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.     

Labor relations and technological change at Canadian Pacific Railway

There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun Long before the white man and long before the wheel When the green dark forest was too silent to be real For they looked into the future and what did they see They saw an iron road running from the sea to the sea Bringing the goods to a young growing land All up through the seaports and into their hands From “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” by Gordon Lightfoot The authors thank CPR managers and union officials representing CPR employees for their cooperation and patience in explaining the intricacies of the railroad industry. Special appreciation is extended to Jason Copping, Labour Relations Manager, for his facilitating our initial access to the company.     

The Texaco racial discrimination case and shareholder wealth

We analyze the wealth ejfects of the Texaco racial discrimination lawsuit both on the shareholders of Texaco and its major U.S. competitors. Employing a comprehensive data set which included every case docket entry and every Wall Street Journal article on the case as an experimental stimulus, our findings suggest that the overall cost of the case to Texaco shareholders exceeded $500 million, that Texaco's tribulations had little, if any, impact on the share prices of its major competitors, and that Wall Street Journal coverage of the case was highly correlated with significant changes in Texaco stock prices. This last finding provides significant support for Hite 's suppostion that newspaper editors “key ” on ex post stock price changes in selecting the events to be covered in the next day's edition. The authors are grateful to Kee Chung for helpful comments on earlier drafts and also acknowlege the help-ful assistance of the staff of the law library at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law at The University of Memphis.     

IDENTIFICATION AND SEPARATISM: Religious Involvement and Racial Orientations Among Black Americans

Using data from the 1979–1980 National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA), this study investigates the relationships between religious involvement and two sets of racial orientations: identification , or feelings of closeness and commonality of interests among blacks, and separatism , or support for cultural and institutional distance from whites. Both public religious participation and private religious devotion are strong positive predictors of racial identification, net of the effects of sociodemographic factors. However, the positive effects of devotion on identification are diminished sharply among blacks over 60 years of age. In addition, members of tradition black denominations (i.e., Baptists and Methodists) express substantially stronger black identity than do their unaffiliated counterparts. In contrast to models of racial identification, religious involvement bears little consistent relationship to separatism. Relatively strong separatist sentiment is found among (1) frequent churchgoers ages 30–59 and (2) adherents of nontraditional religions (e.g., Muslims). In general, these results cast doubt on the arguments of some critics of the black church, who claim that religion undermines collective identification. Mainstream black religious culture appears to encourage inclusive, but not exclusive, racial solidarity.     

Sources of drug information among adolescent students

A sample of 1023 eighth and tenth grade students in small to medium-sized central Texas school districts was assessed to determine the amount of information they receive from ten sources about six categories of drugs. The amount of information males reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what females reported, and the amount of information that eighth graders reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what tenth graders reported. Television was the primary source of drug information for all categories of drugs except inhalants, for which friends and television were equally important sources. Parents and printed media (magazines or newspapers) were of secondary importance, followed by friends and teachers. Adolescents were less likely to receive drug-related information from experience, siblings, church, doctors, and police. The reliance on the mass media for drug information in smaller school districts is a pattern which has been previously observed in larger urban districts. This consistency suggests that mass media approaches to drug education are likely to be as effective in rural areas and smaller towns as they are among urban adolescents. Implications for television programming are discussed.