How Therapeutic Intervention Does Create the Prerequisites of Change in Human Relations

The purpose of this paper is to stress our belief that therapeutic intervention does not have the power to create durable, predetermined changes in human systems. Still, a number of therapists seem to feel that certain adjustments are necessary if improvement is to occur and try to convince families to adopt them. Such partial moves ignore the question of what has prevented the family from discovering such beneficial adaptations on its own.
We suggest that the basic rules of the family prohibit it from changing. Tb stimulate the inherent healing capacities of human systems, a preferable goal might be to validate the present functioning of the family through an understanding of the different levels of its self perception (phenomenological model, mythical model). If this is done effectively, a possible reformulation of the relationship is truly facilitated. Relations between the participants will continue, but will no longer be what they were before. The effectiveness of the intervention is confirmed by the appearance of new beliefs, new perceptions. Any behavioral modifications shown by family members are logical consequences of their new conception of the relationship, not the causes of it.     

Making freedom work: the long transition from slavery to freedom during the Haitian Revolution

The 1791 slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the first French abolition of slavery in 1793–1794 are generally seen as epochal events that redefined labor relations in the French Caribbean. But a close analysis of the labor codes promulgated during and after the Haitian Revolution indicates that elites were eager to reconcile the ideal of universal freedom with the needs of plantation agriculture, resulting in a succession of oppressive labor systems that subsisted until the 1820s.     

The UK National Health Service's migration infrastructure in times of Brexit and COVID-19: Disjunctures,continuities and innovations

The COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit were separate yet inter-related developments which affected the British National Health Service (NHS). The UK's state-funded health sector had historically relied on migrant labour and depended on a migration infrastructure designed to solve its nursing labour shortages. The analysis of primary qualitative and secondary quantitative data shows that the NHS migration infrastructure increased its orientation towards Asia to compensate for the effects of Brexit. The paper reveals how the persistent use of temporary visas along with conditional contractual arrangements has led to various exclusions for migrant nurses and midwives. These data also demonstrate how international travel restrictions associated with COVID-19 created temporary obstacles for nurses' inflows. Alongside Brexit, this has also resulted in an increase in outflows amongst EU health workers. The article identifies the development of migrant support infrastructure amongst Filipino and Indian nurses as a major COVID-19 linked innovation.     

Réinterroger la relation entre école et mobilité sociale. Le cas des enfants d’agriculteurs et d’ouvriers dans l’Ouest

Till now, the relation between schooling and social mobility, a classical question in the sociology of education, has been approached through analyses of a structural sort, either by focusing on the functions that schools are supposed to fill or by adopting the timeless model of neoclassical economics. This approach does not examine all possible relations between schools and social mobility; nor does it see these relations in terms of a process. A study of the scholastic biographies of the children of farmers and workers in western France renews our conception of this relation. It shows that this relation mainly stems from a combination of quite heterogeneous elements, which we glimpse in these biographies.     

Repeated electoral competition over nonlinear income tax schedules

We consider a repeated electoral competition game between two parties, each representing a constituent with a given income level. Parties are unable to commit to a policy before the election; they choose a nonlinear income tax schedule once elected. In each period, citizens cast a vote either for the incumbent or for the challenger. We first show that there exist (pure strategy) subgame perfect equilibria where both parties choose the most-preferred tax schedule of their constituent, subject to the constraint that they are reelected. We characterize a specific class of these BPR (Best Policy with Reelection) equilibria in which one of the parties plays its constituent’s unconstrained optimal tax function. Equilibrium tax schedules are always piecewise linear. Depending on the income levels of the two parties’ constituents, we obtain either classical left-vs-right equilibria (where the poor vote for one party and the rich for the other one) or ends-against-the-middle equilibria (where both poor and rich vote for one party while the middle class votes for the other party). In both types of equilibria, both parties propose the same tax schedule to a subset of the population.     

Works Councils and Firm Productivity in France

This paper utilizes establishment-level data to explore the impact of works councils on firm productivity in France. A variety of empirical techniques is employed, including fixed effects and regression discontinuity designs, to identify this impact. We estimate the works council effect on productivity in union and nonunion settings, and investigate the extent to which alternative forms of worker voice and information sharing might substitute for the works council’s impact in production. We find no evidence of a positive impact of works councils on firm productivity in any of our results, and some limited evidence of a negative effect in some of the findings. There is no indication that estimated impacts on productivity vary with union status. However, a notable finding is that worker voice and information-sharing human resource practices are prevalent in French firms regardless of works council status, and are found to have positive and statistically significant effects on firm productivity.     

Automatic estimation procedure in partial linear model with functional data

Partial linear modelling ideas have recently been adapted to situations when functional data are observed. This paper aims to complete the study of such model by proposing a fully automatic estimation procedure. This is achieved by constructing a data-driven method to choose the smoothing parameters entered in the nonparametric components of the model. The asymptotic optimality of the method is stated and its practical interest is illustrated on finite size Monte Carlo simulated samples.