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This study aims to contribute new insights into the way 'political labour' is divided in the household. I use data from a large-scale panel study, the Parent–Child Socialization Study 2012–2013, conducted among adolescents and both their parents in Belgium, to analyse the different ways in which family members engage in politics and influence each other's political preferences. First, I analyse differences in political engagement between fathers, mothers and adolescents. Second, I present a full triadic structural equation model to measure the political influence that fathers, mothers and adolescent children exert on one another. The findings suggest that fathers are (still) more engaged in politics, but when it comes to preferences for political parties, both parents influence their partners and their adolescent children in equal measure.

In the United States, a person's credit standing is determined by private enterprise through a numerical assessment of risk called a FICO® score. The basic technology behind this scoring system is a device called a `scorecard' which was designed by the operations research firm Fair Isaac & Company Incorporated (Fair Isaac) in the late-1950s. The scorecard is a prime illustration of how military-inspired practices were adapted to manage civilian enterprise in the post-war period. Drawing upon insights from social studies of science, technology and finance as well as from business history, this dissertation chronicles Fair Isaac's efforts to introduce computer-assisted statistical techniques for screening credit applications to department stores and finance companies. Instead of treating risk assessment as a set of universal technical standards, the research examines how Fair Isaac labored to build a commercially viable technology that would work in everyday business conditions. The research finds that Fair Isaac has repeatedly shifted its development criteria to respect socially, commercially, and politically imposed mandates. The empirical chapters cross-reference the recollections of former Fair Isaac employees with documentary evidence, and recapture four moments in a long-term process of problem solving and reengineering. In its first twenty years, Fair Isaac set up a process for manufacturing scorecards from paper records (Chapter 1); redesigned the technology so buyers did not bear the costs of implementation (Chapter 2); prepared customized products that reflected the unique policy structures of financial institutions (Chapter 3); and battled regulators over political definitions of discrimination (Chapter 4). Together, these stories demonstrate that risk assessment is not a simple substitute for assessing individual creditworthiness. The original scorecard was a piece of office equipment whose purpose was to mechanically reproduce a previous pattern of performance outcomes. The tool provided creditors with customized `operating information' that projected rates of default given the way each firm processed its credit cases. The dissertation concludes by discussing the relationship between privately -engineered systems of control, internal operating consistency, and the rise of financial predictability. It challenges the claim that FICO® scores evaluate the quality of individual consumers and offers an organizational understanding of consumer credit risk

International peacebuilding has reached an impasse. Its lofty ambitions have resulted in at best middling success, punctuated by moments of outright failure. The discrediting of the term 'liberal peacebuilding' has seen it evolve to respond to the numerous critiques. Notions such as 'inclusive peace' merge the liberal paradigm with critical notions of context, and the need to refine practices to take account of 'the local' or 'complexity'. However, how this would translate into clear guidance for the practice of peacebuilding is unclear. Paradoxically, contemporary peacebuilding policy has reached an unprecedented level of vagueness. Peace in political unsettlement provides an alternative response rooted in a new discourse, which aims to speak both to the experience of working in peace process settings. It maps a new understanding of peace processes as institutionalising formalised political unsettlement and points out new ways of engaging with it. The book points to the ways in which peace processes institutionalise forms of disagreement, creating ongoing processes to manage it, rather than resolve it. It suggests a modest approach of providing 'hooks' to future processes, maximising the use of creative non-solutions, and practices of disrelation, are discussed as pathways for pragmatic post-war transitions. It is only by understanding the nature and techniques of formalised political unsettlement that new constructive ways of engaging with it can be found.

Food production plays a crucial role for challenging the escalating environmental breakdown. It is also a fertile ground for analysing environmental (in)justice and its components of recognition and participation in environmental decision-making. Scholars of environmental justice have paid limited attention to the post-political and its implications for the ability to challenge the ecologically destructive status quo. This article innovatively combines environmental justice perspective with the literature on the post-political condition, using the case study of pig farming intensification in rural Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has been driving policy to encourage growth and intensify its meat production, resulting in a sharp rise of intensive farms. The resulting pollution have and continue generating environmental justice concerns. Using qualitative data from a 2-month fieldwork in November-December 2018, the article shows that local community's ideas around how farming should be organised were not recognised. Their participation in environmental decision-making was also reduced to an empty ritual; formal inclusion did not translate into a genuine impact on the decision-making outcome. In the post-political landscape, environmental justice concerns become harder to address; environmental decision-making becomes a means of serving the operations of capitalism, stifling disputes around the neoliberal growth agenda, and precluding possibilities for a meaningful change of the ecologically destructive status quo.

Je m'appuie sur l'économie politique féministe pour argumenter qu'il nous faut changer notre approche. Au lieu de nous concentrer sur les structures du travail axées sur la déqualification et le contrôle de la maind'œuvre ou sur les individus et leur apprentissage formel, nous devons nous interroger sur les conditions qui empêchent les individus d'acquérir et d'utiliser les compétences voulues et réfléchir aux différents moyens de tenir compte du facteur temps dans la façon d'évaluer les compétences. Notre article se veut d'abord une intervention théorique dans le débat sur les compétences, mais qui prend racine dans une préoccupation très concrète : les compétences requises dans le domaine des soins de santé.Using a feminist political economy lens, I argue that there is a need to change how we approach skills in political economy. Instead of focusing solely on labor processes that deskill and limit control (as much of the rich political economy literature does, in this journal and elsewhere), or on individualized formal learning (as much of the management literature does), we need to ask what prevents people from developing and using the skills they need for their work, and how time can be factored into skill assessment. The argument is theoretical, but grows out of a practical concern with skills in health care.

The world continues to grow wealthier, but not necessarily better governed. The rapid economic growth of the last several decades has resulted in a majority of the world's most impoverished citizens now living in middle-income countries. The inequality this implies is perhaps the clearest indication of stagnation in government: the systems required to manage and deploy newly created wealth to support broader development goals have not kept pace with wealth creation itself. Direct evidence of this fact is most visible in the widespread and severe shortcomings in everyday public services that even citizens in relatively prosperous middle-income countries continue to expect from their governments. To name a few examples, recent studies in India have found a 23.6% rate of workplace absence among teachers in rural schools, climbing to up to 30% for primary health providers—and when the latter do show up, more than half the time they lack formal training. Service delivery-related protests in South Africa in 2018 were at their highest levels since 2004. Despite 2018 being marked as the "Year of Anti-Corruption", half of surveyed citizens in Sub-Saharan African nations believed their country was becoming more corrupt, with one in four acknowledged having to pay a bribe to access health care or education.6 In much of the world, driver's licenses are commonly bought rather than earned. At the same time, there are limitations in public service delivery despite considerable investments in and focus on the "modernization" of systems, technology and human capacity in government in recent years. The World Bank's International Development Assistance program has committed more than $14 billion from 2015-2019 to public administration reform—its largest sectoral commitment to date—not counting an additional $1 billion for technology upgrades.8 Other multilateral and bilateral agencies routinely make commitments in the billions of dollars for similar goals.

G.P.O. sales statement incorrect in publication. ; Originally published: Washington, D.C. : Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army, 1966. ; "Third and final volume of the Chemical Warfare Service subseries of the Technical Services in the series United States Army in World War II"--P. vii. ; Shipping list no.: 2003-0034-S. ; Includes bibliographical references and index. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Variante(s) de titre : L'Observateur européen ; Variante(s) de titre : L'Observateur européen : politique, diplomatie, arts, littérature, sciences ; Périodicité : Hebdomadaire ; Etat de collection : 1927 N°1-36 ; Appartient à l'ensemble documentaire : MAEDI007 ; Appartient à l'ensemble documentaire : MAEDIGen0