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Rising concerns about climate change and the growing realization that humanity has become a geological agent shaping planetary systems have led to the adoption of the term Anthropocene as an overarching term for the current period of planetary history. The growing disjunction between traditional geopolitical specifications of territorial and spatial categories of politics and the new geological circumstances require a reconsideration of the material context for politics. Having taken our fate into our own hands, governance mechanisms have to grapple with novel matters of production and energy challenging modern assumptions about an autonomous humanity playing out its political drama against a stable natural background. While governing climate is generating new spatial categories of politics, it is far from clear that these devices can reassemble the human and natural systems into a sustainable configuration for the next period of the Anthropocene. One of the key dichotomies that structures modern thinking, the division between human and nature, is no longer tenable. We are literally making our own future, and the consequences of these reconsiderations are profound for politics in general and security in particular.

Malgré son apparente évidence, l'engagement de l'anarchisme français en faveur de l'écologie politique est un phénomène très récent. On sait toutefois que, dès le début du XX e siècle, une partie des militants libertaires se sont montrés sensibles aux thèses élaborées par les médecins naturistes et qu'ils ont présenté le retour à la nature comme une étape nécessaire à la régénération des individus et de la société. On peut alors se demander si les positions de ces anarchistes naturistes ne constituent pas l'une des sources de l'écologisme libertaire contemporain, et si leurs réalisations ont permis ou non de jeter les bases d'un projet d'organisation sociale fondé sur le respect du milieu naturel et le refus de sa domination. L'article tente d'éclairer cette question en étudiant le cas particulier de Louis Rimbault et de ses diverses expériences de vie dans des communautés libertaires, jusqu'à son décès en 1949. La Cité végétalienne Terre libérée, qu'il fonda près de Tours en 1923, et les positions qu'il a défendues dans ses écrits permettent de voir en lui, sinon un précurseur, du moins un homme à l'avant-garde de l'écologisme anarchiste.

Total quality management (TQM), its components, techniques and principles are extensively accepted by scholars as a comprehensive philosophy for improving organizational performance (OP). Moreover, findings suggest that a prerequisite for successfully implementing TQM is exchanging knowledge in the organization. However, the number of studies addressing the mentioned issue is limited. Also, the nature of knowledge and its interactions with TQM are not properly investigated. Current study investigates the role of employees' different forms of knowledge sharing appreciation in their tendency to use TQM critical success factors (CSFs). In order to do so, knowledge sharing was divided into two categories of explicit and tacit, and the employees of the IT department of one of the largest companies in Middle East were selected and grouped based on their knowledge sharing characteristics. Further, ten categories were identified for TQM CSFs, and the employees' appreciation of CSFs were measured. The data were gathered through two questionnaires. Finally, the subjects were plotted and grouped using Tacit–Explicit Analysis. The results indicated that while both Tacit and Explicit knowledge sharing positively correlates with CSF appreciation, a simultaneous increase in both types can bear much fruitful positive results.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to offer an exploratory assessment of the employment of assurance in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)/Sustainability reports published by the UK's top ten food retailers.



Design/methodology/approach
– The paper begins with an outline of the characteristics of assurance and the empirical information for the paper is drawn from the assurance material in the CSR/Sustainability reports posted on the internet by five of the selected retailers.



Findings
– The findings reveal considerable variation in the nature and the scope of the assurance processes undertaken, at best the accent is on limited assurance and some concerns are expressed about the independence of the assessment process. The paper concludes that these concerns can be seen to reduce the reliability and credibility of the assurance process.



Originality/value
– The paper provides an accessible review of how the UK's top ten food retailers are employing external assurance statements as part of their CSR reporting and as such it will interest academics, managers within the retail industry and those professionals and consultants who work with the industry.

The emergence of political neuroscience—an interdisciplinary venture involving political science, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience—has piqued the interests of scholars as well as the mass public. In this chapter, we review evidence pertaining to four areas of inquiry that have generated most of the research in political neuroscience to date: (1) racial prejudice and intergroup relations; (2) the existence of partisan bias and motivated political cognition; (3) the nature of left‐right differences in political orientation; and (4) the dimensional structure of political attitudes. Although these topics are well‐known to political psychologists, the application of models and methods from neuroscience has renewed interest in each of them and yielded novel insights. There is reason to believe that many other areas of political psychology await similarly promising renewals and that innovative methods will continue to advance our understanding of the physiological processes involved in political cognition, evaluation, judgment, and behavior. We address limitations, criticisms, and potential pitfalls of existing work—including the "chicken‐and‐egg problem"—and propose an ambitious agenda for the next generation of research in political neuroscience.

AbstractDoes the increasing politicisation ofEurope signify a step towards the legitimation of theUnion? This could be the case if the increased public intensity of debate and polarisation of opinion brought about by politicisation do not fragment the audience and if arguments presented in public are sufficiently clear about the desired nature of the polity. To answer this question, the focus of this article is on dynamic contestation in the public sphere using original data of news platforms and political blogs in 12EU MemberStates and transnational websites during theEuropeanParliament election campaign of 2009. The results are, first, that diffuse eurosceptic evaluations dominate public debates despite large variation in the intensity of debate acrossMemberStates. Second, a majority of evaluations made, particularly those by citizens leaving comments online, are negative in all countries included in this study. A gap between elites and citizens persists, but it appears less pronounced than often proclaimed in the literature. And third, democracy is a primary concern inEUpolity contestation, especially for those evaluating theEUnegatively. Although little evidence is found of a fragmentation of audiences, the prominence of diffuse euroscepticism poses a major challenge to legitimation of theUnion.

The paper deals with the topic of security bodies and their transformation during the transition to democracy. Theoretical framework for studying the security area lies in the transition and consolidation theory. Applying the theory to the security area is based on the hypothesis that theoretical assumptions with regard to the nature of the prior regime and the way the change of regime takes place can be applied to the area of security policy. At the same time, other significant factors may exist affecting the transformation process in the given area. The source of data consists in case studies of intelligence agency reforms following the transition to democracy. Conclusions conceived based on the example of intelligence services are consequently applied to the state security bodies as a whole. Selected cases have shown that assumptions of the transition and consolidation theory are applicable also in the area of security policy. Beside the original regime and the transition changes, the transformation of security bodies is also significantly influenced by the security situation and personal capacities of the new government.

Purpose– The aim of this study is to investigate how male managers make meaning the role of their female spouses along with their careers.Design/methodology/approach– The topic was investigated within a Finnish context by analyzing the narratives of 29 male managers. Common to the men were their managerial position and extensive work experience. All the men had or had had one or more spouses during their careers, and all of them were fathers.Findings– A typology distinguishing four types of female spouses was constructed: supporting, balance-seeking, care-providing, and success-expecting types. These types describe the various roles that are constructed in relation to the female partner during a male manager ' s career, pointing out the ambiguous nature of the phenomenon.Originality/value– The study highlights that to understand more about male managers ' experience in their careers, the author needs to acknowledge how a male manager ' s career unfolds in tandem with their family life, as well as the norms and gender roles related to the family. Research approaches that enable examination from that perspective should be developed.

This article presents the findings from two studies that investigated the concept of whānau ora (family wellbeing): One examined the nature of resilience for Māori whānau and how resilience relates to whānau ora; while the second investigated the impact of the Working for Families policy on Māori families' perceptions of whānau ora. In each study, Māori were asked to define whānau ora for their family. The responses to the "whānau ora" definition question in each of the studies were separated out to derive a unique dataset of 46 whānau definitions of whānau ora. A secondary analysis of responses was undertaken specifically for this article and these were compared to the whānau ora outcome definition outlined in the Report of the Taskforce on Whānau-Centred Initiatives (Taskforce on Whānau-Centred Initiatives, 2010). The degree of concordance between the definitions of whānau ora expressed by Māori families and those espoused by the government's Taskforce is outlined. The article discusses the variability in understandings around whānau ora and the implications of our analysis for social service delivery and social policy development.

The aim of this paper is to show the possibility of crafting a new theoretical model of international migration that would enable researchers to take into account the political settings of the early 21st century. In order to do so, the author firstly critically examines the mainstream theories of migration that dominate today's academic literature. As a result of this analysis, it is concluded that, despite of the fact that many of the proposed theoretical approaches are quite useful for understanding certain aspects of the migration process, when it comes to the task of analyzing international migration as a whole, no conceptual model exists. The paper demonstrates that apart from the theories that are focusing on only one of migration's dimensions, albeit the most significant from a particular disciplinary perspective, the introduction of a general model is a necessary step to reach a better understanding of the nature of contemporary migration processes. The author argues that such a model can be constructed using the theory of structural violence proposed by Johan Galtung and the concepts of human development and human security.

Human resource (HR) management has been proposed as being one of the core drivers of the modernization of the public sector, in particular with reference to the changing nature of people management and 'HR-public service partnerships' as an antecedent capacity of modernizing public service organizations. Notwithstanding the ongoing interest in the transformation of HR systems, this study explores how and why such relationships between HR management (HRM) and organizational change emerge. Considering a resource and capability-based approach, the analysis reveals strategic HRM practices as a useful concept to distinguish HR activities and the processes that are occurring when a HR strategy is performed. Moreover, using a multiple case study design, the study exhibits the antecedents and effects of HR strategy formation during accounting change in six German local governments. The results provide evidence that forces of either strategic or administrative patterns of alignment refer to different layers and the sequencing of HRM activities within a process of HR system change, thereby revealing the possibility of contradictory effects induced by HR change agency on either the 'HR' or the 'public service' side of the strategic coin.

International audience ; Die sich daraus ergebende Anzahl von Zuschreibungen an das Verfassungsgericht, das Ergebnis des Willens der Väter der Republik, als Reaktion auf den Faschismus einen tadellosen Rechtsstaat zu errichten, rechtfertigte eine anhaltende Aufmerksamkeit für die Qualität der Rekrutierung der Mitglieder, aus denen es besteht. Zwischen den Forderungen der Rechten, die darauf bedacht war, den juristischen Charakter der Consulta festzulegen, und denen der Linken, die im Gegenteil ihren ausschließlich politischen Charakter behaupten wollte, wurde eine Lösung gewählt, die, allesamt kompromisslos, eine gemischte Einstellung der fünfzehn Richter des Gerichtshofs sowohl in technischer als auch in politischer Hinsicht vorsah. Das Eingreifen der Obersten Gerichte, die fünf seiner Mitglieder aus ihrer Mitte wählen, ist eine der technischen Bezeichnungen, da der Wahlkampf im Allgemeinen immun gegen ideologische Positionierung ist. Die fünf vom Staatspräsidenten ernannten Richter sind schwieriger zu klassifizieren und teilen die Doktrin auf, die zwischen der Schiedsrichterrolle (die diese Bezeichnungen in die technische Kategorie einordnen würde) und der politischen Rolle des Staatsoberhauptes aufgeteilt ist. Zweifelsohne werden die von den Parlamentariern gewählten Richter nach politischen Erwägungen gewählt. Aber die erforderliche verstärkte Mehrheit, drei Fünftel der nationalen Volksvertreter, hat Mehrheit und Opposition zu einem Kompromiss zwischen ihnen gezwungen. Dieses System könnte jedoch zu einer institutionellen Lähmung geführt haben, die den Wunsch nach Reformen rechtfertigt, der in letzter Zeit von der Doktrin begrüßt wurde. ; The consequent number of attributions devolved to the Constitutional Court, the fruit of the will of the Fathers of the Republic to establish, in reaction to fascism, an irreproachable rule of law, justified sustained attention to the quality of the recruitment of the members constituting it. Between the demands of the right, anxious to establish the jurisdictional nature ...

This article presents the findings from two studies that investigated the concept of whānau ora (family wellbeing): One examined the nature of resilience for Māori whānau and how resilience relates to whānau ora; while the second investigated the impact of the Working for Families policy on Māori families' perceptions of whānau ora. In each study, Māori were asked to define whānau ora for their family. The responses to the "whānau ora" definition question in each of the studies were separated out to derive a unique dataset of 46 whānau definitions of whānau ora. A secondary analysis of responses was undertaken specifically for this article and these were compared to the whānau ora outcome definition outlined in the Report of the Taskforce on Whānau-Centred Initiatives (Taskforce on Whānau-Centred Initiatives, 2010). The degree of concordance between the definitions of whānau ora expressed by Māori families and those espoused by the government's Taskforce is outlined. The article discusses the variability in understandings around whānau ora and the implications of our analysis for social service delivery and social policy development.

Publication disponible en ligne: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297700616_Diversity_in_family_farming_Theoretical_and_empirical_approaches_to_its_many_forms?channel=doi&linkId=56e0570708ae979addf0eee5&showFulltext=true ; Rapports ; The transformations occurring in family-based agricultural structures are raising questions in the academic and political worlds. The questions being asked span the history of agricultural representations over the last century. The ways of perceiving and representing the different forms of agriculture relate to these transformations. Family farming has acquired an international legitimacy but is presently being questioned by agricultural evolutions in developed countries, as well as in developing or emerging countries. The Sustainable Rural Livelihoods (SRL) approach enables a global comprehension to be formed of the agricultural entity as a constituent of an activity system that has become multi-sectorial and multi-site, relating to market and non-market regulations. The relative significance and the nature of the mobilized capitals led us to schematically present six organizational forms of family agriculture in New Caledonia, Vietnam, Mali, South Africa, France and Brazil. Lastly, a more generic characterization, which our proposed agriculture representation framework outlines, is presented and raises further methodological challenges. (Résumé d'auteur)

This book explores different applications of disciplinary and governing techniques of microfinance institutions (MFIs) for their clients. While microcredits are repeatedly hailed as an effective measure of development policy, empirical research arrives at different results. The present study argues that MFIs require a high level of disciplinary measures for an absolute level of financial success in terms of repayment. The study employs a comparative case study design covering two MFIs, BRAC and the Bangladesh Rural Development Board. This research has found that relationships of authority and obedience constitute through different instruments, tactics, techniques and vocabulary of the MFI staff. The study results argue that MFIs target women as their principal subjects as a matter of convenience. The principal function of applying the strength of women's social capital, giving special attention to the customers and staff-client relations, is obtaining sensitive information about clients. Their detectable presence ensures regular repayment of the credit. The study has also revealed the nature of surveillance, which covers not only the customer behavior but also the state of enterprises and investing plans.