La crise du recrutement des lads-jockeys : l’essoufflement d’un système d’emploi corporatiste

How is the French labor market for lads organized (recruitment, careers, personnel management, retraining)? What changes are under way? A recent phenomenon - the vanishing of young lads with diplomas - helps answer these questions. Can this be explained other than by the discrepancy between dreams about this job and on-the-job reality? The latter can be understood only in relation to the economic and social changes in this working environment that have, in particular, threatened trainers’ positions. This happened during a period when the schooling of youth lasts longer and ends with a diploma even though this sector cannot absorb these young people. This difficult situation has several explanations. Working conditions have worsened (increasing precariousness, more stress, career obstructions) while young people have become more demanding, more critical and more qualified. Meanwhile, the old paternalistic system for managing personnel is falling apart.     

Becoming an Ally: Breaking the Cycle of Oppression (2nd edn)

Abstract

In the present context of “get tough on crime” and “back to criminal justice” campaigns that continue to dominate political agendas throughout Australia, critics point to the inadequacy of “welfarist” or reformist criminological and sociological theories that have informed interventions in the past and reinforce the need for “retributive justice” models of penal policy. The present paper examines historical evidence on the role of the human sciences in juvenile justice administration during the 1940s, a formative time when psychiatric, psychological, and social work expertise came together in the form of the Children's Court Clinic in Victoria. It suggests that contemporary critiques about the failure of the welfare model of juvenile justice inadequately capture the historical functioning of expertise in justice administration and the real extent to which the welfare model as “actual rehabilitative intervention” was ever implemented.     

Strategic Management and the Performance of Public Organizations: Testing Venerable Ideas against Recent Theories

Miles and Snow, among others, argue that strategy content isan important influence on organizational performance. Theirtypology, applied recently to public organizations in the UnitedKingdom, divides strategic actors into four general types: prospectors,defenders, analyzers, and reactors. This article begins by integratingwork on strategy content or strategic management into the O'Toole-Meierformal theory of public management. This study shows that strategycontent is a subset of generally accepted management functionsin public organizations. The article then proceeds to test thestrategic management concepts in a large, multiyear sample ofpublic organizations. The results show that strategy can beseparated out from other elements of management for a distinguishableassessment of its impact on organizational performance. Unlikethe predictions of Miles and Snow and the empirical findingsof Boyne and Walker, however, we find that the defender strategyis the most effective for the primary mission of the organizationand that the prospector and reactor strategies work best inregard to the goals of the more politically powerful elementsof the organization's environment.     

Estimating multivariate random effects without replication

This paper considers the estimation of multivariate random effects that are measured with error, but for which there are no replications. Using structural simplification of the correlation of the data, separate estimates are generated for the covariance of the random effects and the covariance of the error. An estimator of the random effects based on a truncated eigen structure is defined, and matrix mean squared error and its trace (risk) are analyzed, with comparison to the maximum likelihood estimator (m.l.e) and also to the Stein-like estimator of Efron and Morris (1972). It is shown that the estimator has risk which is smaller than the risk of the maximum likelihood estimator and the Efron-Morris estimator in most cases.     

Naming Your Child in a Same‐Sex Parenting Situation: Identity of the Child,Parental Status,and Kinship Ties

In Quebec, since the adoption in 2002 of the Act instituting civil unions and establishing new rules of filiation, same sex partners can be officially recognized as the parents of a child. They are invested with all the rights and obligations related to parentage and parental authority, including naming. From a qualitative analysis of interviews realized in 2014 in Quebec with 18 mothers and fathers in lesbian and gay couple relationships, this article examines the nomination processes of children born from gay or lesbian couples in terms of the modalities of entry into parenthood (biological, social, adoptive). Beyond innovations and specificities related to means of family formation where filiation is only partially or not at all rooted in biology and their categorization as same‐sex families, the name passed to the child is often considered by those parents as a means to consolidate “social” parental statuses and fraternal links.     

The etiology of low back pain in military helicopter aviators: prevention and treatment

Low back pain (LPB) is a major health problem among military rotary-wing aircrews worldwide. In order to define the etiology and propose remedies to LBP in helicopter aviators a review and critique of the literature was conducted. In-flight sitting posture and vibration generated by the aircraft were identified as high risk factors for LBP. Consequently, researchers recommended ergonomic modifications to the crew stations. The efficacy of these technical interventions has not been proven. As well, these design changes are not financially practical. Following an in depth kinesiological analysis of the physical demands of this type of flying, and preliminary experimentation, an alternative aeromedical approach focusing on the aircrew rather than the craft is presented. The authors propose a set of flight-specific exercises that might effectively deal with this problem. A thorough testing of this approach is envisioned.     

The measurement of opportunity inequality: a cardinality-based approach

We consider the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets on the basis of equality. First, conditional on a given ranking of individual opportunity sets, we define the notion of an equalizing transformation. Then, assuming that the opportunity sets are ranked according to the cardinality ordering, we formulate the analogues of the notions of the Lorenz partial ordering, equalizing (Dalton) transfers, and inequality averse social welfare functions – concepts which play a central role in the literature on income inequality. Our main result is a cardinality-based analogue of the fundamental theorem of inequality measurement: one distribution Lorenz dominates another if and only if the former can be obtained from the latter by a finite sequence of rank preserving equalizations, and if and only if the former is ranked higher than the latter by all inequality averse social welfare functions. In addition, we characterize the smallest monotonic and transitive extension of our cardinality-based Lorenz inequality ordering. Received: 2 May 1995 / Accepted: 11 October 1996