Ethics and Choosing Appropriate Means to an End: Problems with Coal Mine and Nuclear Workplace Safety

A common problem in ethics is that people often desire an end but fail to take the means necessary to achieve it. Employers and employees may desire the safety end mandated by performance standards for pollution control, but they may fail to employ the means, specification standards, necessary to achieve this end. This article argues that current (de jure) performance standards, for lowering employee exposures to ionizing radiation, fail to promote de facto worker welfare, in part because employers and employees do not follow the necessary means (practices known as specification standards) to achieve the end (performance standards) of workplace safety. To support this conclusion, the article argues that (1) safety requires attention to specification, as well as performance, standards; (2) coal-mine specification standards may fail to promote performance standards; (3) nuclear workplace standards may do the same; (4) choosing appropriate means to the end of safety requires attention to the ways uncertainties and variations in exposure may mask violations of standards; and (5) correcting regulatory inattention to differences between de jure and de facto is necessary for achievement of ethical goals for safety.     

虚开增值税专用发票犯罪若干问题研究

虚开增值税专用发票犯罪给国家经济造成的损失极为巨大 ,且愈演愈烈 ,如何控制、减少本罪成为刑法学的重要课题。由于该罪较强的专业性 ,我国刑法理论对该罪的研究尚不充分。本文对该罪的几个重要疑难问题进行了初步探讨。自然人为实施虚开增值税专用发票而设立单位或单位设立后以虚开增值税专用发票为业或为其主要活动的 ,不能认定为单位犯罪 ,应当以自然人犯罪论处。如实代开行为仅属于一般违法行为 ,应当将小规模纳税人在经济活动中请人如实代开的行为非犯罪化。第二百零五条第一款的规定和第二款并不矛盾 ,适用第二款的条件是行为人虚开行为是否给国家利益造成特别重大损失。单纯进行了虚开行为的犯罪分子只要导致国家巨额税款被骗 ,情节特别严重 ,同样可以判处死刑     

Le télétravail des cadres : entre suractivité et apprentissage de nouvelles temporalités

Telework is often considered to be a means for making life at work and at home more compatible. Why do some wage-earners, in particular white-collar employees, choose it? Do they actually make a choice or simply adopt a solution “for want of anything better” in an organizational context with its limitations? In this case, what factors do they weigh against each other? Once they have opted for telework, how do these white collars manage to adjust their occupational and family lives? Is their aspiration to improve the balance between the two satisfied? Or do they run up against unexpected difficulties? Answers to these questions come out of two studies conducted among white-collar employees in different sorts of telework. Given the absence of institutional regulations governing the relation between life at home and at work, telework, far from leading to a more balanced life, jeopardizes the organization’s collective efficiency.     

阶乘幂多项式及其基本恒等式

考虑两类阶乘幂多项式，由向前或向后差分公式，得到两个同类阶乘幂多项式等价的充分必要条件．给出并证明了阶乘幂代数系统的两类基本恒等式，一类是阶乘幂的二项式定理；另一类是同阶阶乘幂之差的因式分解定理(乘方差定理)．     

L’adaptation des modèles de production dans les pays émergents L’exemple de l’industrie automobile en Argentine

How to test for the existence of a new model of production based on the firm lending an ear to customer demands and valuing the individual and collective intelligence of its work force? The facts for putting this model to the test of reality come from an analysis of two Argentinean automobile-makers, subsidiaries of Toyota and Volkswagen. Various aspects of their organization policy provide evidence of their capacity for making adaptations by “hybridizing” the parent firm’s model with the rationales inherent in the network of local actors (suppliers and labor unions, in particular). These firms are open systems with a narrow margin of maneuver. — Special issue: Latin America.     

广义导数及其应用

文章提出了一种广义导数的概念,得到了广义导数的运算法则,以及连续函数的中值定理。     

Carrières et contradictions en sciences de la vie : réponses du corps académique aux transformations de la connaissance et de ses utilisations

Drawing on interviews with more than 80 scientists on two university campuses, we create a typology that offers insights into how transformations in the nature and locus of life science innovation influence academic careers and work practices. Our analyses suggest that a strong outcome of increased academic concern with research commercialization is the appearance of new fault lines among faculty, between faculty and students, and even between scientists' interests and those of their institutions. We argue that life science commercialization is driven by a mix of new funding opportunities, changing institutional mandates for universities, and novel research technologies that bring basic research and product development into much closer contact. The rise of patenting and commercially motivated technology transfer on U.S. campuses is altering faculty work practices and relationships, while transforming the criteria by which success is determined and rewards are allocated. Through close analysis of interviews with four researchers who typify a range of academic responses to commercialism, we demonstrate emerging patterns of conflict and agreement in faculty responses to commercial opportunities in the life sciences.     

Les rejetés de la modernisation

In Brazil unlike France two very split labour markets co-exist, the formal and the informal. On the formal labor market in Brazil, union rights prevail, and wage-earners are protected unlike in the informal labor market where none of this exists. Raising industry to an international level pushed many wage-earners out of the formal sector during the 1980s. Did they find jobs elsewhere? If so, in which branches of the economy? To provide answers, two files are crossed, their data having been made longitudinal. Dismissed workers’ trajectories from 1989 till 1995 in two branches and two regions are analyzed: the automobile industry in the São Paulo area and the petrochemical industry in the São Salvador (Bahia) area. These career trajectories shed light on how modernization has affected quite different labor markets; it also brings to the foreground the concept of a systemic restructuring of the labor market. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Les figures de la gestion du changement sociotechnique

Computers and software occupy an ever bigger place in an organization’s activities. Studying the social dynamics of their uses has thus become a major preoccupation for the social sciences. An overview of recent studies, in particular “structurationist” research, on this subject is presented; and a federative model, suggested. This archetypical model corresponds to three stylized situations of sociotechnical change (a neutral, regenerated and disturbed archetype) that, in some cases, can be aligned to reconstitute “appropriative trajectories”. This theoretical framework is applied to various sorts of information technology, in particular: enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, intranets and electronic messaging systems. Beyond merely understanding the social dynamics, the effort is made to link appropriative trajectories with the “logics of control” specific to them. The latter correspond to figures of management (the channel, facilitator and catalyst), which are described.     

Le travail des experts : analyse d'un dispositif d'évaluation des risques alimentaires

Following several crises, the French Food Safety Agency was set up in 1999 to solicit scientific opinions as part of assessments of health-related risks. The principle was retained to avoid a conflict of professional and economic interests in making assessments. Observations of how a committee of experts on prions operated has shown that its judgement is the outcome of a variety of resources and procedures (involvement in quite contextualized technical studies, a sharing of tasks with the agency's personnel, etc.). The actual work of the experts involved taking into account both the requirement of legitimation and a concern for examining the case presented and answering the questions that were set.