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Version d'auteur ; International audience ; Between the mid. 5th/11th and the mid. 6th/X12th century, the domination of the Saljuq sultans over the ʿAbbāsid caliphate caused important social changes in Baghdad. Based mainly on Arabic chronicles and biographical dictionaries and making use of prosopography, this paper focuses on these social changes and on the consequences they had on the development of the city. In the first part it examines the impact of the madrasa-endowment policy, often considered as a characteristic of the period, on the three main madhāhib present in Baghdad, as well as the impact of the numerous ribāt foundations on Baghdadi Sufis. During the Saljūq period, the main judicial, administrative and political positions in Baghdad were held by a limited number of families. The study presents the most influential of them: newcomers such as the Dāmaghānī or families of local origin such as the Zaynabī. Both the Saljūq and ʿAbbāsid ruling elites were great patrons of building activity in Baghdad. They founded madrasa and ribāṭ endowments, but also private constructions, religious and public works. The second part of the paper focuses on the vigor of urban construction in Baghdad at that time, when different groups of patrons (Saljūq orʿAbbāsid officials and Baghdadi civilian elites, including women sponsors) were responsible for the urban development of different parts of the city. In fact, far from being in the ruined state sometimes described by historians on travelers' accounts, mainly based on the view of Ibn Jubayr, Baghdad appears as a dynamic city, still an important cosmopolite metropolis in the region. ; Entre le milieu du Ve/XIe et le milieu du VIe/XIIe siècle, la domination des sultans seldjoukides sur le califat abbasside engendra d'importantes mutations sociales à Bagdad. Le présent article, fondé essentiellement sur les chroniques arabes et les dictionnaires biographiques et ayant recours à la méthode prosopographique, s'intéresse à ces changements sociaux et à leurs conséquences sur ...

Version d'auteur ; International audience ; Between the mid. 5th/11th and the mid. 6th/X12th century, the domination of the Saljuq sultans over the ʿAbbāsid caliphate caused important social changes in Baghdad. Based mainly on Arabic chronicles and biographical dictionaries and making use of prosopography, this paper focuses on these social changes and on the consequences they had on the development of the city. In the first part it examines the impact of the madrasa-endowment policy, often considered as a characteristic of the period, on the three main madhāhib present in Baghdad, as well as the impact of the numerous ribāt foundations on Baghdadi Sufis. During the Saljūq period, the main judicial, administrative and political positions in Baghdad were held by a limited number of families. The study presents the most influential of them: newcomers such as the Dāmaghānī or families of local origin such as the Zaynabī. Both the Saljūq and ʿAbbāsid ruling elites were great patrons of building activity in Baghdad. They founded madrasa and ribāṭ endowments, but also private constructions, religious and public works. The second part of the paper focuses on the vigor of urban construction in Baghdad at that time, when different groups of patrons (Saljūq orʿAbbāsid officials and Baghdadi civilian elites, including women sponsors) were responsible for the urban development of different parts of the city. In fact, far from being in the ruined state sometimes described by historians on travelers' accounts, mainly based on the view of Ibn Jubayr, Baghdad appears as a dynamic city, still an important cosmopolite metropolis in the region. ; Entre le milieu du Ve/XIe et le milieu du VIe/XIIe siècle, la domination des sultans seldjoukides sur le califat abbasside engendra d'importantes mutations sociales à Bagdad. Le présent article, fondé essentiellement sur les chroniques arabes et les dictionnaires biographiques et ayant recours à la méthode prosopographique, s'intéresse à ces changements sociaux et à leurs conséquences sur ...

Purpose: This paper investigates the stalled adoption of a supplier park at Bridgend Engine Plant in the UK. It starts from the position that not all firms can or should implement the same set of practices. Design/methodology/approach: Critical incident technique and semi-structured interviews over five years were used to understand the influence of institutional and strategic choices during the implementation of a supplier park. A conceptual framework was developed to incorporate practices broadly associated with parks, i.e. improving supply stability, supply coordination, redefining the OEM/supplier boundary and enhancing interaction between co-located firms. Findings: The findings demonstrate a limited implementation of supply practices at Bridgend with only one component supplier brought onto the site. The original plan was to create a supplier park that would "grow" to an industrial park, creating an automotive sector in the area. However, a combination of operational, processual, and contextual factors have conspired against the plan. Research limitations/implications: The combination of a broad range of theoretical and practical elements means there are associated discussions that could be more fully explored. Condensing the interview notes has resulted in the researchers' own interpretation of events becoming a significant reality filter. Whilst single case studies raise inevitable concerns over comparability, our focus is on theoretical generalizability through richness of empirical data. Originality/value: As firms continue to use best practice as a core ingredient of strategy, researchers must respond with robust theoretical concepts explaining adoption and implementation. This paper integrates disparate perspectives across multiple levels in order to build a richer and more believable picture of a stalled initiative. Three key conclusions can be drawn: the contingent nature of "bundles of practice" implications of political ambiguity over the efficiency argument and the effect of isomorphic or bandwagon responses by firms. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

In the global warming negotiations, all parts agree to look for just and fair solutions. But each one develops a specific understanding of what equity implies. In fact, the political conditions for the development of an order based on the concept of justice are not met within the international community. The impossibility to conclude about fairness and equity echoes the need of lacking well-shaped tests that would allow arbitration among conflicting claims. Within such a context, issues of justice tend to be reinterpreted in terms of acceptability. In fact the various conceptions about fair and equitable solutions to support depend on empirical situations and justification orders that shape them. Specifically, a Kyoto-type regime, designed to give birth to trades of obligations and rights, does affect the nature of problems of justice to solve and the key relevant concepts of justice to use. Market reveals both as a critical means to make it possible to consider equity criteria at all when comes the distribution of emission rights and abatement obligations, and a lever to transform a problem of topic justice into one of global justice. This leads to open up the issue of allocating GES emission rights in a broader context. ; Dans la négociation internationale sur l'effet de serre, toutes les parties s'accordent pour rechercher des solutions justes et équitables. Mais chacune a une vision particulière de ce que représente l'équité. C'est que les conditions politiques nécessaires à un raisonnement en termes de justice ne sont pas réunies à l'échelle internationale. La suspension du jugement sur le juste reflète l'absence d'épreuves bien constituées permettant d'arbitrer entre des prétentions contradictoires, ce qu'on appelle une justice. C'est dans ce contexte qu'une problématique de la justice se rabat sur une problématique de l'acceptabilité. En fait les différentes conceptions de solutions justes à promouvoir dépendent tout à la fois des situations empiriques et des ordres de justification qui les ordonnent. En ...

Contents: Mircea BRIE: Ethnicity, Religion and Intercultural Dialogue in the European Border Space; Ioan HORGA: Ethnicity, Religion and Intercultural Education in the Curricula of European Studies; Victoria BEVZIUC: Electoral Systems and Minorities Representations in the Eastern European Area; Sergiu CORNEA, Valentina CORNEA: Administrative Tools in the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Ethnic Minorities; Florica STEFĂNESCU: Demographic Determinants of the Economic-Financial Crisis; Yurjy YURIYCHUK: Ukrainian Minority in Romania: Problems of National Identity Preserving; Sonia CATRINA: Identity Perceptions and Buildings of the Hungarian Minority in Relationship with the Romanian Majority Identifications; Gheorghe SISESTEAN: Marital Strategies and Identity Changes of Romanians in Hungary
(Hajdu-Bihar); Constantin-Vasile łOCA: Ethnical Analysis within Bihor-Hajdú Bihar Euroregion; Anna GORBAN: Ethnic and Socio-Cultural Aspects of Political Culture in Moldova; Mircea BRIE, István POLGÁR: Dual Citizenship Granted to Hungarian Ethnics. Context and Arguments in the Romanian and Hungarian Mass Media; Natalia PUTINĂ: The Socio-Political Dilemas of Integration of Gagauz in Republic of Moldova; Aurelian LAVRIC: Romanian Ethnic Minority in Ukraine: Current Issues and Prospects of Survival; Stelian NISTOR, Sorin SIPOS: Historical and Geographical Considerations about the Slovak Communities in the Villages of Upper Bistra Valley, Bihor County; Judit MOLNÁR: The integration Process of Immigrants in Scotland, UK and in Washington State, USA. Immigrants from Countries of the Former Soviet Union; Valeriu MOSNEAGA, Rodica RUSU: Diaspora as an Element of Cultural-Ethnic Cohesion; Valentina-Tania DUNA, Dacian DUNA: War, Migration and Societal Security: The Case of the Iraqi Kurdish Diasporas
in Europe; Adrian-Claudiu POPOVICIU: Labour Migration Reflected in the Council of Europe Law; Alexandra CSEKE: Integration of Immigrants in the European Union; Kobasheni Moopen PARUMAUL: Migration in Europe Against the Backdrop of the Global Revolution - An African Perspective; Anatoliy KRUGLASOV: Interethnic Relations Stability on the Ukraine-Romania Border: A Case of Chernivtsi Region; Dorin I. DOLGHI: The Culture of Security: Perceptions and Preference Formation in the European Union; Srimayee DAM: Re-interpreting the Civic-Ethnic Divide on the European Identity; Pavlo MOLOCHKO: Peculiarities of Ethnonational Policy of Ukraine (Illustrated by the Example of the Chernivtsi Region); Dragos DĂRĂBĂNEANU: Ethnicity and Multicultural Communication in Shaping the European Social Space; Grigore SILASI, Monica BOLDEA: The Romanian Banat Region - An Example of Peaceful Interethnic Cohabitation at the Eastern Border of the European Union; Floare CHIPEA, Raluca MICLEA: The Social Frameworks of the Neighbourhood Relationships' Construction in the Cross-Border Area Bihor-Hajdú-Bihár; Sergiu BĂLłĂTESCU: Subjective Well-Being and Satisfaction with Places of Residence in the Counties at the Cross-Border Between Hungary and Romania; Aurora BENCIC, Teodor Ioan HODOR: Transdniestria. Ethnic Conflict or Geopolitical Interests?; Ecaterina CEBAN: The Role of Political Parties in Harmonization of Interethnic Relations (Case of the Republic of Moldova); Nataliya NECHAYEVA-YURIYCHUK: National Development Beyond the Nation-State: Problems and Prospects; Elisabetta NADALUTTI: Old and New Identities in the Upper Adriatic: is a Cross-Border Kind of Citizenship Emerging in Cross-Border Regions?; Dragos Lucian IVAN: Differentiated Containment: Compass and Horizon in Untying Ethhnicity and Interest within EU; Claudia Anamaria IOV: The Roma Minority - the Prospects and Limits of EU's Social Policy, what Could or Should the EU be Doing?; George ANGLIłOIU: The Belgian Dilemma of Partition. A Pattern Study for the East.

When studying individual attempts to foster citizen engagement, scholars have pointed to the coexistence of competing rationales. Thus far, however, current literature barely elaborates on the socio-political processes through which employees of professional organizations deal with such disparate considerations. To address this gap, this article builds on an ethnographic study, conducted in the Netherlands between 2013 and 2016, of a professional care organization's attempts to engage local citizens in one of its elderly care homes. To investigate how citizen engagement is 'done' in the context of daily organizing, we followed employees as they gradually created and demarcated the scope for such engagement by approaching citizens as either strategic partners (pursuing 'democratic' rationales) or as operational volunteers (pursuing 'instrumental' rationales). In order to deal with such potentially incongruent orientations, we found that employees used discursive strategies to influence the balance that was struck between competing rationales; either through depoliticization—i.e., the downplaying of incongruities and the framing of disparate considerations as being complementary within the pursuit of a shared, overarching goal—or through politicization, i.e., the active challenging of how their colleagues prioritized one consideration over another. By showing how the successful conveyance of such (de)politicized accounts helped employees either defend or redraw the boundaries of what citizen engagement was (not) about, we contribute to extant theorization by (1) developing a processual approach to studying citizen engagement that (2) is sensitive to organizational politics.

Nowadays state and its citizens are exposed to a wide range of threats that are not necessarily of a military character, which requires a systemic and strategic response. The main hypothesis of the paper is that the very change in the perception of security, as well as the increasingly diverse manners of endangering it, which are also reflected in the theories of modern wars, impose on state the obligation to expand the concept of strategic deterrence to other spheres of social activities, in addition to the military, which still remains crucially important. In order to better understand the concept of strategic deterrence, the authors try to provide answers to the questions: who should be deterred and what from? In addition to armed aggression, which strategic deterrence is primarily aimed at, the paper indicates that the focus has to also be on all other phenomena and activities that lead to the destabilisation of society, the collapse of institutions, some form of intrastate conflict and, ultimately, the collapse of state and/or violent regime change. Having in mind that deterrence is, in essence, a matter of perception, a special part of the paper is devoted to the analysis of the situation in Serbia, that is, the perception of its internal weaknesses that affect the ability of strategic deterrence. For the purpose of this analysis, in the paper the authors use some databases and reports by international organizations, which make it possible to do a comparative analysis with other countries and monitor its trends. Theoretical assumptions and analysed data are used as a basis for answering the question: how to deter? For strategic deterrence to be effective, first of all it must not be partial and has to encompass all domains of national power. In this sense, it is pointed out that military power is important, but not sufficient. Moreover, in the context of strategic deterrence, the importance of strengthening the international position of state through cooperation with others, as well as attracting foreign investment, is emphasized. Finally, as a key condition for the credibility of strategic deterrence, the authors emphasize political stability and the functioning of institutions. Bearing in mind the expansion of the context of strategic deterrence, important institutions in this regard are, in addition to the military, police, intelligence and security services, certainly also the judiciary, financial institutions, educational and health system, cultural and information institutions, etc. For a country that has not managed to ensure the minimum of unity within its society for strategic decisions, or at least the absence of extreme polarisation, as well as the proper functioning of the state apparatus and other segments of society, there are not armed forces that could defend it. Such a state will not be externally attacked by potential enemies, but internally. Precisely due to this, the authors conclude that without a comprehensive and systemic approach, without strong and efficient institutions, without establishing a functional and democratic society, there is no successful deterrence.

Italy was the first European country to experience the impact of COVID-19. In order to deal with the health emergency, in early March 2020, the Italian government enforced strict lockdown measures. The different Italian police forces, the Polizia di Stato, Carabinieri and city police forces (Polizia Municipale), patrolled the streets, ensuring that people stayed at home and non-essential shops remained closed. These police forces received unprecedented support from the public in enforcing lockdown. People were active in their neighbourhoods, taking pictures of alleged violators and reporting them to the police, as well as posting pictures of those violating the rules on social networks. Local administrators encouraged citizens to report lockdown violations and in the case of Rome, introduced an online reporting system. This article focuses on the policing of lockdown in Italy. The article develops the argument that public attitudes, defined as policing from below, combined with policing from above by local administrators, produced a populist policing of the lockdown. Qualitative methodology is used to discuss interviews with police officers and analyse newspaper articles. Populist political forces are hegemonising in Italy, relying on the feelings of insecurity that the virus has embittered. Populist hegemony strongly influenced the policing of problems related to COVID. The lack of community policing or plural policing models within the organisation of Italian police forces, which remain a combination of continental and colonial models, has been decisive in the development of populist policing. The consequence of this is a type of 'policing on demand', with the public providing the police with intelligence and demanding enforcement.

Through an analysis of the FDA's approval of the controversial anti-influenza drug Relenza (zanamivir), we interrogate distinct social scientific theories of pharmaceutical regulation. We investigate why, despite internal negative opinions and an Advisory Committee's non-approval recommendation, the FDA approved Relenza in the late 1990s. Based on a close reading of FDA documents, we show how agency officials guided the manufacturer's analyses and participated in constructing a tenuous argument for approval. We show how regulators may strategically design drug labels that can justify their permissive regulation. We consider the explanatory power of official accounts and alternative, partially overlapping, theories of pharmaceutical regulation in the Relenza case, and develop new insights into the institutional dynamics of regulator-industry relations. We find little or no evidence that the FDA was primarily driven by public health concerns, pressure from disease-based patient activism, or a consumerist and neoliberal regulatory logic, although some of these explanations provided managers with convenient rhetoric to rationalize their actions. Rather, we argue that the Relenza case highlights contradictions between a scientific culture at FDA, conducive to rigorous product evaluations, and the agency's attempts to accommodate higher-level political (i.e. Congress) and industry demands conducive of permissive regulation – consistent with some aspects of reputational and capture theories, as well as with corporate bias theory.

Assortative mixing in networks is the tendency for nodes with the same attributes, or metadata, to link to each other. It is a property often found in social networks, manifesting as a higher tendency of links occurring between people of the same age, race, or political belief. Quantifying the level of assortativity or disassortativity (the preference of linking to nodes with different attributes) can shed light on the organization of complex networks. It is common practice to measure the level of assortativity according to the assortativity coefficient, or modularity in the case of categorical metadata. This global value is the average level of assortativity across the network and may not be a representative statistic when mixing patterns are heterogeneous. For example, a social network spanning the globe may exhibit local differences in mixing patterns as a consequence of differences in cultural norms. Here, we introduce an approach to localize this global measure so that we can describe the assortativity, across multiple scales, at the node level. Consequently, we are able to capture and qualitatively evaluate the distribution of mixing patterns in the network. We find that, for many real-world networks, the distribution of assortativity is skewed, overdispersed, and multimodal. Our method provides a clearer lens through which we can more closely examine mixing patterns in networks.

Willem Boshoff's work articulates around a pivotal date, April 1994, the first democratic elections in South Africa. He may choose to work gigantic rocks of granite or establish vast installations of accumulated material. The artist claims that his work is based on language, often taking the form of Dictionaries. While reviewing the main questions by artists of the twentieth century, texts or artworks from Europe are systematically tested against their South African counterpart. Boshoff's attitude is determined by a melancholic questioning of his role as a creator linked to a political situation and cultural milieu. He discovers more dynamic ways of presenting gestures when his artistic activity is related to the way of life of a druid. As a conscientious objector he learnt that it is often better to hide the true signification of a sign or to disqualify a text. Boshoff's "Notes towards a blind Aesthetic", where the essential is not visible, invent a dictionary to be read with the hands. Questioning perception theories provides the artist with a way of capsizing the occidental world towards patterns of thinking that he can claim for himself. The multiplicity of languages in South Africa opens up to questions of memory, ecology, disappearance, mental space as a site of creation, experiments with the limits of the fictional. The druid is one exceptional character amongst others in the contemporary art world. Boshoff obliges his visitor to participate in an act of translation which is given provisional but tangible form in such works as "Writing in the Sand" and the "Gardens of Words". The druid becomes the guardian of words and plants in danger of being forgotten also safeguarding them against being petrified or fossilized into a set theory or dogma. Kindred spirits working on all continents are: Sarkis, Mofokeng, Baumgarten, Mudzunga, Ulrichs, Kosuth, Wafer, Bochner, Gette, Filliou, Darboven, Alÿs, Acconci, Langa, Marshall McLuhan and Ivan Vladislavić. ; Le travail de Willem Boshoff s'articule autour de la date charnière d'avril 1994, les premières élections démocratiques en Afrique du Sud. Il fait des sculptures en granite et des installations de matériaux accumulés. L'artiste revendique son attachement à un art basé sur le langage, il est écrivain de dictionnaires. En revisitant les questions posées par les artistes du XXème siècle, textes et œuvres produits en Europe sont systématiquement vérifiés au regard de leur contrepartie sud-africaine. L'attitude de Boshoff, une mélancolique interrogation de son rôle de créateur, s'explique par les conditions politiques et son milieu culturel. L'artiste découvre des façons plus dynamiques de faire geste quand il adopte ce persona du druide. Lors de son objection de conscience au service militaire il avait appris qu'il est mieux de cacher la véritable signification d'un signe ou d'inventer des façons de disqualifier les textes. Les "Notes pour une esthétique aveugle" où l'essentiel n'est pas visible, inventent un dictionnaire à être lu avec les mains. Boshoff interroge ici les théories de perception qui munissent l'artiste sud-africain d'une façon de faire basculer le monde occidental vers une pensée qu'il peut réclamer sienne. La multiplicité des langues en Afrique du Sud s'ouvre à des questions de mémoire, d'écologie, de disparition, d'espace mental, des limites de la ficticité. Boshoff incite son spectateur à une opération de traduction qui peut être envisagée de façon tangible dans des œuvres tels que "Writing in the Sand" et les "Jardins de mots". Le druide est le berger des mots et des plantes en danger d'oubli. Par le même geste il les protège contre la possibilité d'être pétrifiés ou fossilisés dans une théorie ou dans un dogme. Un champ d'intelligibilité du travail de Boshoff est créé à l'aide d'esprits apparentés: Sarkis, Mofokeng, Baumgarten, Gette, Mudzunga, Ulrichs, Zulu, Kosuth, Wafer, Bochner, Filliou, Darboven, Alÿs, Acconci, Langa, Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Vladislavić.

International audience Military dictatorships and armed conflicts delineate the history of Latin America over the last four decades. Dead bodies were produced en masse before being confiscated , concealed or destroyed by those who carried out the crimes. Today, some of these corpses are being exhumed and identified. This special issue aims to specify and understand the challenges this process of exhumation represents for Latin American states, namely, the social and political life of these exhumed corpses in democratic post-conflict societies, the possible performance of sovereignty that these dead bodies can activate and, in a broader context, the impact that the presence of corpses may have on the community of the living.Exhumations in Latin America gathers five different contributions, each enlightening particular aspects of the exhumation process in Guatemala, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay and Colombia, respectively. In the case of Guatemala, Clara Duterme explores this process as an element of 'transitional justice' in which tensions between different social actors arise. If community associations, governmental actors and victims all share the pursuit of justice as a common goal, their understanding of what compensation and reparation mean is not uniform. Departing from the discourse of local actors, Duterme focuses on concrete forms of compensation , showing how 'local justice' is sometimes more effective than legal justice. Exploring a distinct form of tensions occurring in Argentina, Laura Panizo analyses the impact of the exhumed corpses of the disappeared on the living bodies of the families and of the scientific investigators. The article analyses different conflicts that emerge when people cohabit with the 'reappeared' corpses. Moreover, digging into her personal experience, Panizo reflects on the extent to which her own body was, and is, affected by cohabitation with the exhumed corpses of the victims.

International audience Rachel Cusk's first novels were published in the second part of the 1990s, at a time when British women's fiction was considered "parochial", "insular" and "piddling," prompting some intellectuals such as Elaine Showalter and David Lodge to react. However, at first reading, her texts may be unlikely to contradict the long-lasting view that women writers tend to write about women and for women. Her debut novel Saving Agnes (1993) is an introspective novel on Agnes Day, "sub-editor, suburbanite, failure extraordinaire." (12) It is exemplary of Rachel Cusk's fiction, in that it interweaves a seemingly uneventful plot with a realistic depiction of the characters' inner thoughts, by using a style chiselled with precision and dark humour. This can easily be seen as the epitome of what is often rejected as feminine, all the more so as Cusk's attempts at entering the male psyche can fairly be said to have proven less successful, or at least less frequent, Contradicting E. Showalter's assertion that British female authors tend to shun away from theory and feminist thinkers from fiction, Cusk has gradually sought to have a sociopolitical voice of her own, which is why we may wonder why she has not been given prominence in contemporary research works so far. In addition to her contributions to The Guardian, her fiction is peppered with political, feminist views that use humour as a way of debunking the feminine ideal which is constructed in the text, a straightjacket of convention in which the female characters are stuck. Cusk's characters are trying to build a sense of self that is not completely based on the stereotypical characteristics of womanhood, which are taken for granted.

For epistemological reasons specific to discipline (Gadet 2006, Moïse 2007), sociolinguologists in French or France are little 'applied' or even 'involved'. Or, in other words, the involvement of sociolinguists in civil society is rather marginal, although some well-known and circumscribed fields of our vast area of investigation, linguistic arrangements (and more so even in French-speaking than in France) and language teaching, or more restricted fields such as the working environment (Boutet, Gardin and Lacoste 1995) or justice (Lagorgette 2006), can be mentioned. Nevertheless, because the language, historically and in a positivist spirit (of Robillard 2007) was not, a priori, social, because interfering with language productions affects political ideology and the design of the nation (Moïse 2006), sociolinguist is far from having the status of social geograph, spatial planning specialist, communicator, specialist in advertising Semiotic, or even sociologist or psychologist, social and individual experts and advisers and contributors of widely distributed journals or books. The sociolinguist lives in this paradoxical injunction: remain descriptive, variationist or interactionist sociolinguistic, for example (although it is known that in the United States, in particular, W.Labov or J. Gumperz were given major orders for linguistic expertise), in order to be heard in his own world and to derogate from his intimate social commitment, or to live genuinely in the sociolinguistic process involved (Blanchet 2000), to choose the perilous adventure of clearing, 'lost' time, initial exploration, financial apories, and still without always real institutional recognition (number of posts, representation in the CNU, few laboratories). But I am not of the kind to play lamentations or victimisation. I prefer to see the need to intervene in the field of language practices, because we have a public responsibility for transfers of knowledge, exchanges and skills in our complex, changing and linguistic world, because, behind the ...

This report served as a basis for publishing the book: Hiroatsu Nohara, Marc Maurice (Eds) (1999), Les Mutations du Modèle Japonais de l'Entreprise (Political and Social Problems No 820), La Documentation Française, Paris, 74 pages, ISBN 3303332108206 ; Ce rapport vise à décrire les changements observables ou prévisibles à moyen terme, en tracent déjà quelques traits. Ils concernent dans l'entreprise la composition et la structuration des emplois : un « portefeuille d'emplois » selon la formule de l'organisme patronal, action critiquée par les syndicats. Il s'agit donc d'une flexibilité de l'emploi associée à de nouvelles pratiques de gestion : recrutement à mi-carrière, salaires incitatifs, évaluation plus transparente, incitation à la créativité individuelle, etc. La question se pose, dès lors, selon certains experts japonais : ne va-t-on pas remettre en cause ce qui fondait jusqu'ici l'efficacité du système productif, en particulier l'apprentissage collectif du travail, l'accumulation des compétences et savoir-faire, la capacité d'innovation incrémentale, etc. ?Sans nul doute, il ne s'agit pas d'une rupture radicale, mais d'une « hybridation » entre des éléments de continuité et de discontinuité, qui constitue le socle des changements ou des innovations « à la japonaise ». D'autres changements s'imposent déjà – le système de sous-traitance – celui du Keiretsu, – du « corporate governance », – des relations banque-industrie ; de même l'importance accrue accordée au « venture business » et au « venture capital », allant de pair avec une conception renouvelée des relations entre les entreprises et les services. Tout cela ne constitue, toutefois, que l'une des faces des changements qui s'amorcent. L'autre face – plus politique – s'appelle : dérégulation, déréglementation internationale des alliances, fort investissement public dans la recherche associé à des coopérations privée/publiques, investissements dans les technologies de l'information (multimédia en particulier), réformes dans l'Université et le système ...