Documents found
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141.More information
AbstractThe organisations representing retired people in France and the United States have different strategies for intervening in public policy debate, and this despite significant similarities in the two types of organisations. In the United States the emphasis is on professionalism, while in France the same kind of associations organise around their “amateur knowledge”, despite the rise of professional expertise within them. While the two cases display a reliance on professional expertise, there is also an “advocacy logic” present in the two cases. For the moment, the development of any social opposition to public policies is more developed in the USA than in France.
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142.More information
In France as in the majority of European countries, a double-digit unemployment rate and its persistent growth have been dominating the economic and social scene since the 1980s. Thus, these facts almost naturally characterize all the approaches aimed at creating the conditions that will lead society out of its current state of anomie. Although the ideologies on which they are based and the economic rationalities they propose are diverse, they nevertheless all claim that this situation, described as a new phase in the transformation of industrial societies, can be overcome successfully. Therefore, the introduction of massive flexibility of labour power combined with an intensive and permanent effort to increase the level of training of the labour force are set out as necessary conditions for the success of this process.In this context, the successive government mechanisms and social accords are presented as contributing to the creation of the conditions for managing the employaient crisis. Thus emerge the elements of a belief in the ability of political, economic and social actors to arrive at a positive outeome to the drama of economic redundancies as long as workers agree to commit themselves to cooperating in the processes of redeployment offered. Rejecting the period of social struggles and bitter confrontations that characterized industrial restructuring during the last twenty years, the discourse on this new belief declare the beginning of a more constructive period of management of occupational redeployment, a period in which the individual will be entitled to full recognition within the collective. Thus, the essential and constituent elements of a new myth of modem times that expresses the ability of the elites to manage the modernization of our industrial societies are brought together. Although the myth is defined as a symbolic representation influencing social life, the author hypothesizes that in France, since 1973 and especially since 1981, the elements of a powerful belief have emerged through a series of laws and public and private strategies. It serves to drive a process that attempts to convince people of the possibility of negotiating restructuring and redeployment calmly without social struggles, and of planning economic and social change through an equitable exchange for all actors. In practice, although the policies and measures proposed during the last twenty years have produced results, it must be observed that on the whole they have done nothing to stop the almost continuous increase in unemployment. Today, despite these successive fallures, many institutional and social actors still believe in and boast about these approaches in the hope that economic recovery can demonstrate their pertinence and effectiveness. Underlying the strength of such a myth are two components: one suggests a representation of society in which the very forms of social confrontation and collective action can be dissolved and reified in a series of rational mechanisms; the other suggests convincing everyone that social adherence to the measures offered would be enough to see the declared fight against continuing unemployment to a successful conclusion.The myth set forth and its underlying beliefs thus assert that a new specifie era in the life of industrial society is emerging. Therefore, to proceed to a critical analysis of the myth, our approach here is to consider it as part of a process of putting a major social issue into perspective: the planned, or negotiated, control of the volume of work and employment. The issue is studied in reference to the more general context of the sociology of social time.To define the study of this issue, three social periods are analyzed. The first involves interpreting the determining role of the state. The second carries out a contrasting interpretation in terms of the social confrontation of the historical period covered. The third provides a process-based interpretation of the emergence of the myth and its constituent elements. Finally, the initial hypothesis is validated. The myth of the management of modernization has in fact well and truly established itself. It has involved union actors in a process in which they appear partly responsible for choices made with regard to redeployment, even when they fight against these decisions. In France this myth has functioned until now as a complement to diversified practices opposed to the emergence of the union movement as an economic factor with possible alternatives.
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143.More information
This paper examines the recent changes in collective bargaining in France and the characteristics and conditions of the emergence of a post-Fordist bargaining system.For the last two years, die system of collective bargaining in France has been through an accelerated phase of change. The "Aubry laws" on 35 hours have revitalized the collective bargaining on working time and work organization by expanding the decentralization movement observed since the early 1980s: the number of enterprise agreements increased from 6,400 in 1987 to 13,300 in 1998 and 31,000 in 1999. The revival of collective bargaining through the government's political agenda has also rekindled the controversy over the respective roles of die agreement and the law in the production of standards governing labour relations. Due to the social partners' reticence about contractual commitment as well as the state's influence, industry-wide collective bargaining has for a long time been confïned to a secondary role in relation to die legal provisions on which it could only improve or complement. From the early 1980s onwards, this hierarchy of standards based on me principle of favour was gradually weakened as enterprise agreements that allowed for working time beyond statutory standards were legalized.This radically changed the function of bargaining. As a law- improvement tool, it became an instrument of change and decentralized adaptation to work rules, especially in the firm. Since less than 10 per cent of French employees were unionized, this change gave rise to numerous questions about me unequal distribution of capacities of action between employers and employees' representatives. The greater autonomy of enterprise regulation vis-à-vis die legal standards and industry-wide agreements cardes the risk of a return to employer self-regulation. This risk is all the greater as collective bargaining has become more complex and tends to be more oriented towards job regulation than distributive management of the capital-labour relationship. The "Fordist" social compromise of the "Gloden Age" was based on a scheme of "statutory" bargaining that entalled a trade-off between wages and contribution to production, the organization of which was left to management by die union actor. With a focus on a compromise between employment and competitiveness — through reduction of working time in the case of France — post-Fordist collective bargaining deals simultaneously with all the parameters of me employment relation: working time, qualifications, quantitative job evolution, reorganization of production, wage policy, and investment strategies.Such an extension of the field of bargaining inevitably leads to a rethinking of the actors' doctrines and strategies, inasmuch as they had strongly incorporated the division between economie and social matters inherent in the Fordist compromise. For employers, this implies sharing, if not only a part of their managerial power, then at least information on the firm's economie strategies. For trade unions, these new contractual dynamics imply greater expertise and a renewal of modes of legitimation, which were previously based mainly on conventional wage demands.The new paradigm of collective bargaining, which is more autonomous, more complex and more demanding for industrial relations actors, undoubtedly calls for a greater consideration of local or regional dynamics. Previously, the decentraHzation of industrial relations was not accompanied by a regional framework sensitive to the negotiated regulation of labour relations. Yet, the growing importance of local forms of coordination in the performance of social Systems of production, as well as in managerial practices, tends to erase the firm's "physical" borders. The forms of outsourcing of activities that often come with a "triangulation" of labour relations (dissociation between the worker, the user of the workforce and the person responsible for the employment relationship) make the regulation typical of the Fordist era quite ineffectual. Neither the firm nor the industry is up to the emerging challenges of employment regulation in these new production organizations. Although the legal resources necessary for regionalizing collective bargaining do exist, the hegemony of industry federations and the structural weakness of local inter-industry authorities, both workers' and employers', still constitute a formidable obstacle.
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144.More information
SummaryThe goal of this article is to analyse the influence of the socially responsible instrumentation of key firms on the modes of employment management of their partner businesses. Through examples of International Framework Agreements (IFA) and of Codes of Conduct (CC), we will simply try to show to what extent the problematic of the management of inter-business relations cannot be exclusively conceptualized, as the economy of transaction costs suggests, in an institutional comparative approach where economic calculation plays a predominant role. First, we will present a critical analysis of the notion of social responsibility for the firm. Without being exhaustive on this question, we will discuss five difficulties.First of all, in keeping with its normative beginnings, it presents all the characteristics of a natural normative “anthropologized” order within a logic where equity, ethics and morality almost take the place of legal rules of behaviour. Considered from this perspective, it can lead to demanding of a private operator that he become an active subject for the maintenance of public order in his sub-contracting network, that is to say, that he replaces the states in the handling of social and environmental risks. It can also lead businesses to unduly adjust their practices to the fluctuating normative demands of involved parties whose institutional legitimacy can be inversely proportional to their capacity to damage their brand image and their reputation.A second difficulty comes from the absence of a normative and substantive definition of SRE which leaves its meaning extremely vague and ill-defined. It seems less constructed around the moral personality of the business except in reference to its relations, its commitments and/or its contracts. This shift is not neutral in character. It reflects on the personalization of responsibility which distances itself from a legally inspired retrospective vision to give a prospective responsibility marked by an ethic of solicitude and a positive commitment on the part of businesses. As well, academic definitions may reduce SRE to a question of management of stakeholders without considering the implications brought about by the usage of the term “responsible.” This reductionism, which finds a legitimation in the politicized theory of governing, risks reducing it to aggregation or to the equilibrium of the interests of the involved parties, while supposing that these reflect the general interest.A third difficulty arises from the breaking up of forms of intelligibility linked to SRE. Pulled between doctrinal and scientific aspects, it is part of an academic field which is particularly prolix and vague. It is saturated with meanings which do not make it possible to identify what makes up the theoretical unity of the field, even formal and uncertain, of which it is a part.A fourth difficulty arises from the supposed voluntary nature of socially responsible involvement. In general, this chosen responsibility appears as an echo to the legal deregulation movement which translates into a shift from the production of heteronomy standards to autonomy. This perspective is ambiguous for at least two reasons. First of all, it leads to a neglect of the structuring influence of institutional frameworks and the pressure of involved parties on the behaviours of organizations. Next of all, in maintaining a confusion between a voluntary standard, and a standard of private origin, it sometimes hides the fact that a rule which is adopted voluntarily in the framework of the exercise of a private power is not, and far from it, without inevitable effects when put into practise.A fifth and final difficulty comes from the numerous reasons for involvement in socially responsible actions. Do these derive from ethics or from morality? From a rational strategic instrumentalization? From a search for legitimacy with reference to institutional pressures which are as varied as they are many? The positions of authors on this question appear very heterogeneous and not very integrated into a federal theoretical space and create confusion on the justification systems of businesses as concerns what is socially responsible.With regards to socially responsible instrumentation, we will show that the CCs and the IFAs, beyond their structural differences (type of standards produced, conditions of their control, etc.), have points of convergence relative, notably, to the choice of principles or of referentials adopted by businesses so as to materialize their socially responsible commitments (ILO declarations and conventions, etc.). These instituted international suprastate standards necessarily provide a certain degree of homogeneity, universality and stability to managers according to which issuing transnational businesses regulate their contractual cooperation relations. They also confer a strong legitimacy while simplifying the arbitration of businesses in their choice of normative referentials. Situated between public and private standards, these tools prove to be instruments of regulation whose institutionalization guarantees the domination of the strongest of the private powers so as to impose the respect of the fundamental rights of workers in the different links of the value chain. As concerns the capacity of transnational business to go above and beyond national social legislation in certain countries, these tools may signify true progress for salaried employees further down the chain, placed in a position of functional subordination (notably those implanted in emerging countries.) Faced with incomplete national state rights, these may make it possible to improve the social conditions surrounding the relation. Since the law continues to consider businesses in an economic network as legally autonomous entities, these regulation tools make it possible to avoid a too definite break of the link between the economic power of a key company and the responsibility associated with the social consequences of its activity within its partner network.
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145.More information
ABSTRACTThe tendency towards early retreat from the workforce observed in Europe over the past years can be attributed to social security measures other than old age security, and is not simply due to an advancing retirement age. Two programmes have been especially favoured for protecting ageing workers: disability insurance and unemployment insurance. Preretirement compensation packages have also facilitated the early departure of these workers from the labour force, whether employed or not. Such emerging models in the transition from work activity to retirement are revealing, both in terms of the social restructuring of the life cycle, and the overhaul of the social safety net. These transformations are analyzed in conclusion, in relation with their potential role in new stakes for social security.
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146.More information
SummaryIn a context marked by urban crisis, the end of full-time employment and the challenging of institutions responsible for socialization, a renewal of interest over the last few years in France for the question of the relationship between the young and the city has developed. The object of this paper is to propose a preliminary assessment of these studies and to identify the main themes and transformations they present, as well as their limits and the obstacles they have encountered. An hypothesis can be formulated that these studies attest to a differentiation in forms of social integration of the young into urban spaces.
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147.More information
The advantage of our analysis of the territorial image projected by the citizens of Rennes is that it focuses on a territory pursuing unusual objectives. While Rennes is both dynamic, in good health demographically, and deemed to be a pleasant place to live, it projects an official image as extensively as a city in crisis. The primary focus of its extra-territorial image is local; from a European perspective, this image is confronted with performativity. In the search for a global image, bolstered by the interplay of solely public actors, the metropolization of Rennes is sustained by recourse to public initiatives. But is metropolitan governance concerning questions of image really making headway? Is it not detrimental to cooperation with other territories? Symbolically, even though Rennes appears to be following the trend of the urban market through the construction of ideologies fuelled by the spirit of the times, it still strives to assume a trailblazing role in the extension of its image as an innovative city.
Keywords: Image de la ville, Rennes, métropolisation, promotion territoriale, jeux d'acteurs, City image, Rennes, metropolitization, territorial promotion, actor interplay, Imagen de la ciudad, Rennes, metropolización, promoción territorial, juego de protagonistas
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148.More information
For many, the fragmentation of identity and belonging is a menace to the establishment of a common and shared citizenship and to the equivalent protection of individual rights within a given territory. This article argues, referring particularly to the Canadian case, that this fear is fed by a Jacobin vision of the state which is problematic in multinational states, where it may even lead to the state's disintegration. Two elements retain our attention. First, the presence of particularist identity référants is not necessarily contradictory with the establishment of a citizenship which subsumes differences, as long as this citizenship accepts and recognizes that many levels of belonging exist. That is why in plurinational states, particularly when inspired by the principles of federalism, citizenship can be functional rather than founded on a dynamic that homogenizes differences. This functional citizenship, in a political space that aims to be democratic and inclusive, must be based on a number of fundamental rights which should be considered in light of preserving the community of primary belonging.
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149.More information
While the integration of newcomers is a key issue for small businesses, socialization practices they implement remain poorly understood. This research examines the diversity of organizational socialization practices of small French companies in mobilizing the framework of organizational configurations theory, and more precisely the SMEs' configurations theory (Bentabet, Michun et Trouvé, 1999). A multiple case study identifies socialization practices unique in each of these configurations. These practices appear consistent with each other and with the system of variables characteristic of a given SME's configuration. Thus, the socialization practices of « entrepreneurial » SMEs reflect a desire to enjoy the presence of a newcomer to innovate. Those of « independent traditional » SMEs are guided by an ideology of tradition and take the form of normative inculcations. Socialization practices of « managerial » SMEs refer a high level of formalization, of organization and rationalization of the integration of new recruits.
Keywords: Socialisation, Petite entreprise, Configuration organisationnelle, Étude de cas, Socialization, Small firms, Organizational configuration, Multiple case study, Socializacion, Pequenas empresas, Configuraciones organizacionales, Estudio de caso multiple
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150.More information
AFNOR published, in May 2003, the SD 21000, guide for the taking into account of the stakes of sustainable development in business management and strategies. The translation of its recommendations in a diagnosis tool, and its experimentation within 78 French SME, will enable us to validate our assumption according to which, considering of stakeholders and their expectations is a condition that is necessary but not sufficient to take into account sustainable development principles. This paper endeavours to contribute to clarify the debates in the view of the future ISO 26000.
Keywords: Responsabilité sociétale des entreprises, Développement durable, Parties intéressées, Parties prenantes, Référentiel, SD 21000, PME