Comment se font les administrations : analyser des activités administratives constituantes

Between studies in historical sociology on changes in public administrations and microsociological analyses of the ordinary work done by civil servants, an intermediate perspective is advocated, one centered on “constituent administrative activities”. Following a panorama of the varied researches on public administrations, the proposal is made to focus on the arrangements that shape administrations and form their essential operations. Recruitment, personnel evaluation, the division of labor, the restructuring of hierarchies and the activities of keeping written records and statistics (writing and counting) should be the subjects of study. When placed in their historical and social contexts, they help us better understand how public administrations last and change. Discussing the scale of analysis and making comparisons over time and in space, this article presents the other contributions to this special issue. Less linear approaches are suggested for analyzing the historical processes of the “bureaucratization” and “managerialization” of administrative systems.     

Estimation in a model for a semi-Markov process with covariates under right-censoring

A semi-Markov model with covariates is proposed for a multi-state process with a finite number of states such that the transition probabilities between the states and the distribution functions of the duration times between the occurrence of two states depend on a discrete covariate. The hazard rates for the time elapsed between two successive states depend on the covariate through a proportional hazards model involving a set of regression parameters, while the transition probabilities depend on the covariate in an unspecified way. We propose estimators for these parameters and for the cumulative hazard functions of the sojourn times. A difficulty comes from the fact that when a sojourn time in a state is right-censored, the next state is unknown. We prove that our estimators are consistent and asymptotically Gaussian under the model constraints.     

Treatment For Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior: A Review of Family‐Based Interventions

The purpose of this article is to review the scientific evidence on the effects of family based interventions for suicidal ideation and behavior. We conducted an extensive search of electronic databases using a comprehensive search strategy. This search resulted in 16 studies that tested 13 interventions for treating suicidal ideation and behavior using family based interventions. Of the interventions identified, three yielded an overall improvement in suicidal ideation and behavior while an additional three interventions produced partial improvement in mental health symptoms. These studies targeted suicidal ideation and behavior in youth or adolescents while no studies examined family interventions for adults with suicidal ideation and behavior. The limitations of these studies and the need for additional research are examined.     

Au-delà du conflit et de la négociation ?

Since the creation of Sociologie du travail, the importance and forms of conflicts and of negotiations have changed. Nor are the stakes still necessarily the same. Given the emergence of new players in public movements and of new strategies in social protest, it is worthwhile reviewing the ideas of “conflict” and “negotiation” in the light of the forms of circulation between different universes (government, labor unions, employer organizations, associations). Though a topic of debate, the law's place in labor relations has special importance with regard to these two ideas.     

Estimation for semi-Markov models with partial observations via self-consistency equations

Nonparametric estimators of the survival function S(t) = P(T ≥ t) for a partially observed time variable T have been defined by several methods, in particular, by integral self-consistency equations. The author establishes explicit expressions of the estimators in an additive form and extend this approach to several cases: a left-truncated and right-censored variable and the left-censored or left-truncated sojourn times of a right-censored semi-Markov process. These estimators are always identical to the product-limit estimators if hazard functions may be defined.     

Bounding the total domination subdivision number of a graph in terms of its order

The total domination subdivision number \(\mathrm{sd}_{\gamma _{t}}(G)\) of a graph G is the minimum number of edges that must be subdivided (each edge in G can be subdivided at most once) in order to increase the total domination number. In this paper we prove that \(\mathrm{sd}_{\gamma_{t}}(G)\leq \lfloor\frac{2n}{3}\rfloor\) for any simple connected graph G of order n≥3 other than K ₄. We also determine all simple connected graphs G with \(\mathrm{sd}_{\gamma_{t}}(G)=\lfloor\frac{2n}{3}\rfloor\).     

Constructing merit in the civil service: The French Ministry of Culture (1880–1980)

Merit-based procedures for evaluation and grading in the French Civil Service have often been studied with the idea that concepts and practices circulate between public and private sectors, domestic and foreign organizations. Less attention has been afforded the in-house origins of procedures for assessing the work of civil servants. This article focuses on the procedures gradually built up to evaluate government employees in the French Ministry of Culture. Light is shed on the difficulties of making good the Republic's promise to base merit on differences in talent alone. How is a civil servant's work to be measured? Are qualifications evaluated while seeing to it that as many employees as possible can be promoted? Focusing on procedures – imagined or actually implemented – for grading, evaluating and promoting museum personnel shows that the process follows a timing and modality that vary depending on one's position in the hierarchy. The evaluation process nevertheless creates ties between socio-occupational groups that all else separates. Ways to measure civil servants’ activity existed before the neomanagerial objection to bureaucratic rules and regulations of the 1960s; the French system for evaluating merit is, thus, not simply an importation of anglo-saxon managerial methods.     

Prisoner’s Dilemma payoffs and the evolution of co-operative preferences

We analyse the evolutionary stability of a preference for reciprocity in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. A distingushing and, as we argue, plausible, feature of the analysis is that reciprocal players are not assumed to be able to coordinate on mutual cooperation with probability one. We show how two payoff conditions, one well-known and another new, then become crucial for the evolutionary stability of co-operation. Somewhat paradoxically perhaps, an altruistic preference poses a greater threat to stable cooperation than a self-interested preference.