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Employment Services are an important topic in the agenda of local governments and in the EU due to their social implications, such as sustainability, workforce mobility, workers' re-qualification paths, training for fresh graduates and students. Many administrations started their own E-Government projects whose imitations emerge as the demand of workers mobility increases. The SEEMP system presented in this paper overcomes this issue in different ways: starting bilateral communications with near-border similar offices, building a federation of the local employment services, and merging isolate trials. The SEEMP approach relies on a distributed semantic service oriented infrastructure able to federate local projects, in order to create geographically aggregated services for employment by leveraging existing local ones. The social and technical aspects of the SEEMP project are presented, showing how the SEEMP system is integrated with National level systems.

The worldwide demand by gays and lesbians that they be allowed to openly participate in military service and the ways in which this demand have been handled reveal discrepancies between political culture and actual recruitment practices. This article offers a model drawn from a multiple-case study for explaining recruitment policies toward homosexuals. Arguably, to the extent that the military is used to perform civilian-social roles that determine the social hierarchy beyond the purely professional aspects of the military repertoire, the military command is compelled to modify its professional code— a code that is originally and normatively exclusionist in regard to homosexuals. Owing to those societally prescribed modifications, the resulting inclusionist-exclusionist recruitment policies might be at odds with prominent pillars of the host political culture.

In this paper, decision-making by Australian commercial fishers is explored with reference to aspects of risk or uncertainty that characterize their experience of the physical and biological environment, the socioeconomic environment and the environment of management. In these environments decisions are grounded in, respectively and particularly, skill, strategy and (often) recklessness. In a broader frame it is argued that ways in which fishers 'place' themselves in these distinct environments with respect to certainty, social identity, personhood, agency and temporal orientation have parallels with conventional anthropological and sociological representations of 'premodern', 'modern' and 'late modern' societies respectively. Our argument directs attention to the multidimensional life-worlds of fishers and serves as an ethnographically-based critique of the universalizing and essentializing themes of some recent approaches in social theory.Key Words: risk, uncertainty, decision-making, commercial fishing, management, late modernity, Australia.

La experiencia china de reforma política y apertura económica puede ser dividida en tres ciclos: 1898, 1919 y 1978. El último ciclo ha sido, hasta ahora, el más exitoso en sus consecuencias económicas y sociales. Este documento describe estos tres ciclos y, sobre todo, las difíciles opciones que la sociedad china enfrenta en este inicio del nuevo siglo en algunos aspectos críticos: la política, la agricultura y la corrupción. ; The Chinese experience of political reform and economic openeness can be divided in three cycles: 1898, 1919 and 1978. The last one has been, until now, the most successful in its social and economic consequences. This paper describes these three cycles and, most of all, the difficult choices that Chinese society confronts at the beginning of the new century in some critical aspects: politics, agriculture and corruption.

Some aspects of the history of social science research in Ireland, such as the work of Arensberg and Kimball, have been repeatedly revisited and reappraised. Others have been largely ignored and neglected. This paper revisits one such victim of neglect: a research project on the morale of Dublin busmen carried out by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the early 1960s within the twin contexts of turbulent industrial relations and fledgling Irish social science research capacity building. This working paper does not focus principally on the theoretical framework, fieldwork methods or empirical findings of the Tavistock study as published in 1967. Instead it examines the abortion of the project as originally conceived at what should have been its half-way stage together with the party political rows and media spinning that took place over its dead body.

This article considers the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu's conceptions of the body to the development of disability theory. We begin by discussing the limitations of reductive conceptions of disability. In so doing, we consider how far Bourdieu's (1990) concept of habitus offers a way of bringing an analysis of the body to bear upon an understanding of the social inequalities which are core to the lives of disabled people. Through focus groups with disabled people, the article explores aspects of disabled people's corporeal identities, feelings and (embodied) encounters in a range of social settings. The research shows that disabled people's lives are connected to different `valuations' attributed to corporeal forms, and to systems of signification and representation, which underpin them. We conclude by reaffirming the need to consider Bourdieu's ideas in helping in the development of disability theory.

AbstractThe transition from high school to college is an important phase for adolescents in social as well as academic aspects. This study examined the changes that occur in high school best friendships during the first year of college. Results revealed that during the first year in college high school best friendships declined in satisfaction, commitment, rewards, and investments. During this period there was also an increase in costs and alternatives to best friend relationships. Proximity did not influence the friendships; however, level of communication did moderate friendship deterioration. Furthermore, individuals who continued their best friendship reported engaging in more maintenance behaviors of positivity, supportiveness, self‐disclosure, and interaction than individuals who reported a change in the relationship to close or casual friendship. Maintaining the best friendship also appeared to buffer adolescents from social loneliness. The results are discussed in terms of the implications of transitions on adolescent friendships.

A debate begun in a previous issue of the Swiss Political Science Review is continued in the current edition through two supplementary contributions. The idea behind the debate is to establish a forum through which various authors can clarify certain aspects of Pierre Bourdieu's work & raise questions about what he has brought to contemporary political analysis. The current article by Bernard Lacroix (2002) is dedicated to an analysis of the reception Bourdieu's work met in hexagonal political science, & is less an examination of his theoretical contribution than an empirical analysis of the social history of a scientific discipline. Jacques Lagroye's (2002) contribution looks at the classic object of political science, the institution, & shows how Bourdieu's work sidesteps the objectivist error that tends to reify the institution, showing instead that the institution is the product of social practices. D. Weibel

In the past few years, environmental activists and some academic studies of environmental political issues have portrayed environmental protection as a new social consensus. This view has some, though limited, capacity for explaining the controversial character of many environmental protection issues and the frequent losses that environmental activists experience in political struggles. In an effort to clarify this seeming conundrum, the author delineates the core of the societal consensus thesis' best explanation for the controversial character of many environmental policy decisions. This explanation is contrasted with explanation that draws on conflict among three coherent rival environmental perspectives in contemporary political life. These environmental views are integral, if frequently unrecognized, aspects of familiar general social perspectives distinguished by contrasting principles, values, and practical objectives. A strategy is designed to facilitate responsible environmental protection legislation in light of these three rival perspectives.

The Musical Nature of Non-verbal Interaction
Musical qualities and the improvisatory approach seem to be important in sustaining mutual attention and reciprocal responsiveness in non-verbal interaction with congenitally deafblinds. Studies of mother-infant interaction within modern developmental psychology indicates that musical paramètres are essential features at the micro-level of interaction. Thus, musical terms do not only reflect audible musical elements as such, but rather the temporal organisation of patterns of dynamic togetherness. The improvisatory approach in social interaction gives us the chance to incorporate the idiosyncratic expression of the child into a dyadic and social interplay, independent of topography, function or intention. Functional aspects of interaction rhythms should be relevant in the search for a clinical entry to meaningfull togetherness with the congenitally deafblind child, that is, regardless of sensory modality.

The influence of Robert Malthus's population theory on Karl Marx's thought is explored. Ted Benton's (1989) assertion that Malthusian thinking prompted Marx to adopt a social constructionist approach to the relationship between nature & materialism is questioned. It is contended that Benton's attribution of a material/social dichotomy to Marx's thought is erroneous; rather, it is maintained that this bifurcation is the product of Benton's Marxist approach, one heavily influenced by Malthusian thought. In addition, Benton is charged with introducing the fallacious dichotomy into other aspects of Marx's thinking, eg, in relation to Marx's treatment of empiricism & methodology. Moreover, it is argued that Benton has wrongly "Malthusianized" Marx's thought in order to facilitate interaction between red & green parties. The consequences of Benton's de-materialization of class within Marx's thought are considered. 40 References. J. W. Parker

The quantitative approaches to the phenomena of political socialization have nourished research in this area for a long time, without however leading to a reflection on their sociological relevance. This work analyzes on one hand the prevalent US behaviorist approaches to the processes of transmission of values and political beliefs from parents to children and on the other hand the research strategies which deal with the effect of the "context", of the immersion of the individual in social "networks" or of particular historical conjunctures on attitude changes. To conclude an analysis which enphasizes the sociological aspect of this research, the article surveys the criticisms to these still dominant approaches levelled by certain authors as well as the research agendas proposed by them, inspired by various currents in American social psychology. (Revue francaise de science politique / FUB)

The article presents a model of the formation process of new cooperatives, primarily based on studies of the Swedish organizational population. The predominance of pragmatically oriented cooperatives provides an opportunity to study the process's organizational aspects, in relative isolation from ideological factors and the impact of movements. Cooperative formation is seen as an act of collective entrepreneurship, and a key event in the process is the emergence and crystallization of a social bearer for the cooperative project. A review of concrete cases of cooperative formation points to the importance of a prior history, and suggests four bases for the definition of a social bearer: community, need, idea and enterprise. The article closes with a review of the implications of the model for waves of cooperative formation, and for the cooperative's continued life path.