Suchergebnisse

Third party material in this work are included in the work's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line. The front cover image is (c) Bibliothèque Nationale de France. ; This study of the gentilshommes campagnards of Burgundy reconsiders the supposed decline of the population of old rural noble families during the last century of the ancien régime. Historical debate has focused on various contributing factors in this 'decline', such as government centralisation of the seigneurial system, venal ennoblement, noble poverty, and the social and cultural divide between aristocratic elites and minor nobility, old rural military landowning families and newer professional robe nobility. Re-visiting these themes, integrating them with an analysis of official records and surveys of the Burgundian noble population of the period, and looking afresh at notions of noble identity allows this volume to challenge the established view of a noble population and culture in decline. Contemporary sources not only reveal the existence of a sizeable community of gentilshommes, diverse in origins, identities and cultures, but also show that far from fading into provincial obscurity, this community had adapted and evolved, and continued to thrive right up to the eve of the Revolution. ; Publisher PDF

This article reflects on the use of a scenario workshop as a way of improving the link between policy-related research and policy practice, in the light of current interest in evidence-based policy. It describes a scenario workshop that was used to engage senior policy actors in our research project on the precautionary principle in relation to genetically modified crops. The workshop highlighted some of the difficulties faced by qualitative researchers in attempts to provide evidence for senior policy makers. Nevertheless, we conclude that engaging policy makers within the research process in this way allows researchers scope to explain more about the nature of the evidence being produced and how it may be useful. The dialogue encouraged by more active engagement of potential end-users increases the likelihood of producing grounded `evidence' that they will find relevant.

Since various crises concerning food safety in the European Union (EU), institutional reforms have been designed to regain public confidence in regulatory decisions and their expert basis. By Europeanising advisory expertise, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was also intended to help harmonise 'science-based regulation' and thus facilitate EU decisions. In evaluating agri-biotech products during 2003 – 05, however, the EFSA procedure extended previous expert disagreements rather than overcome them. The EFSA was designed to demonstrate that expert advice would be 'independent, objective, and transparent'; yet tensions arose between expert experience versus independence, between transparency versus objectivity, and between harmonisation versus precaution. These conflicts have been shaped by the dominant problem diagnosis, which favours a narrow expert consensus within a specific policy view. Alternative problem diagnoses suggest that expertise should instead be pluralised, so that norms and uncertainties become more explicit. Pressure for EU reform manifests tensions between the dominant and alternative problem diagnoses.