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ABSTRACTLarge gravel bedforms, gravel dunes, are described from a site between drumiins in the Trenton drumlin field, Ontario. The forms are up to about 10 m high, occur in groups, are asymmetrical and contain large-scale cross-bedding. Gravel dunes occur elsewhere in the drumlin field where they are found in subglacial tunnel channels and are commonly associated with eskers. The internal structures of the dunes show reactivation surfaces like those described from large-scale eolian, marine and fluvial bedforms. Distinctive graded foreset beds in the dunes show a fining of the clasts and either coarsening or reduced volume of matrix upwards. These relationships are explained in terms of longitudinal sorting of bedload and deposition of suspended load in a return flow beneath a separation eddy to the lee of the dune. Finer sediment, mainly sand, is found downstream from the dunes. Both bedload deposits and suspension deposits are found in the produne beds, depending on the location relative to the attachment point. The dunes are interpreted to have formed subglacially in tunnel channels with flow depths of several tens of metres.

This article is based on the analysis of different reactions observed among workers of a semi-autonomous work group, operating for eight years, particularly regarding key aspects of this organizational change. At the time of the empirical research, social relations among workers were conflictual and tense. In this paper, the authors develop an analytical framework for the study of this problem of internal social differentiation, which has generally not been investigated in the literature on semi-autonomous groups. According to this framework, it is hypothesized that this kind of social differentiation and conflict among workers members of the work group depends on factors related to the organizational context, the work organization and Personal characteristics of the workers. The empirical evidence shows that in the first years of the project, the autonomous work group had been creative and rather cohesive regarding key aspects of the experience, such as: job rotation, the decision-making process, the payment system and supervision. However, at the time of the empirical research (eight years after the beginning of this organizational change), the work group appeared divided and lacking in cohesiveness. In fact, three subgroups were identified within the work group, having very different attitudes towards such aspects as productivity, discipline and job rotation.In this article, the authors describe these attitudes and try to explain why members of the work group evolved so differently. The three subgroups are a minority of leaders, another minority of restricters and, between them, the majority of the workers who had silently followed the leaders at the beginning but now hold a different view of the work groups future. While the leaders are pushing to attain higher group productivity and self-discipline, it appears that the restricters overtly opposed the leaders, criticizing almost every aspect of the new work organization, and trying to do the least possible work. The majority of the workers nevertheless, are satisfied with the present state of affairs and trying to stabilize and institutionalize the work group formula.Within the analytical framework proposed, the authors explain the differences observed among workers by a set of factors. First of all, there are significant differences between subgroups concerning personal characteristics of their members, such as seniority and career expectations. Secondly, it appears that subgroups are influenced by some characteristics of the organizational context such as: the company's initial plan to extend the work group formula to other departments, the presence of a union, the rules of the collective contract and the established pattern for labour relations.The authors conclude that the evolution of this autonomous work group is largely opposed to what could have been anticipated from a socio-technical point of view. Based on socio-technical approach, autonomous work groups are supposed to evolve towards more and more internal integration, unless external factors keep them from doing so. The present research shows that that has not been the case here.The work group has evolved towards more and more internal differentiation and a reduced cohesiveness. Moreover, the empirical evidence shows the prominent influence of personal characteristics of the work group's members as the determinant factor in the explanation of such an evolution. In fact, this case study calls for a more strategic approach to the autonomous work group's dynamics.

Flexibility between trades, job rotation, semi-autonomous work groups, quality circles, total quality management, just-in-time: all of these are new forms of work organization (NFWO) which have been part of labour-management discussion, particularly since the beginning of the 1990's. The policies of the labour central organizations on these are pretty well known. But what about local union offîcers' positions? What are the factors motivating these? Is it correct to claim that the latter have changed?In November 1991, questionnaire was sent to a sample of 266 offîcers from various local unions in the Quebec's manufacturing sector. These offîcers belong to local unions with more than 50 members and affiliated to the QFL, the CNTU or the CDU. A total of 114 questionnaires were returned including 63 from the QFL, 39 from the CNTU and 20 from the CDU.Key findings from the data and from statistical analysis include the following. The NFWO most often introduced were: total quality (54 %), job enrichment and enlargement (50 %), job rotation (49 %), quality circles (44 %) and flexibility between trades (44 %). After their introduction, initiatives were maintained in the majority of cases (85 %), with the exception of the quality circles (50 % of cases). NFWO are normally introduced outside the collective bargaining process. Offîcers expressed favourable positions concerning quality of working life, favourable but critical position concerning job rotation and total quality management, critical (ambivalent) positions vis-à-vis job enrichment/jobs enlargement and flexibility between trades, and defensive positions regarding quality circles. Factor analysis resulted in two groupings of officer's positions, the first including initiatives related to the allocation of work and the second to quality. The results of linear regression analysis suggest that policies related to the first group were positively influenced by the officer's willingness to adapt to his/her environment and by the position of his/her labour confederation.For the second group, the position of the labour confederation exerted a negative influence and the officer's experience with NFWO a positive influence. A trend toward more favourable policies was noticed among the offîcers of the three labour confederations, especially within the CNTU.

This analysis follows, and I hope completes, Dion's (1) paper published previously in this review. It is based on information drawn from the files of both the Quebec Labor Relations Board and the Canadian Council on Labor Relations. For the time span under study, we observed 230 disputes of which 77 were cases of rivalry and 153 were cases of raiding. The distinction of these two forms of conflicts must be stressed : when a rivalry occurs, the actor, in this case the prospective union member, has a simple choice to make between two alien organizations ; when raiding occurs, people are faced with a much different choice, that of maintaining or severing an allegiance.RIVALRYRivalries occured mainly between the CNTU and the international unions affiliated to the Canadian Labour Congress (17 cases) and between these and the unaffiliated locals (16 cases). Cross-tabulations (fig. II to VI) show higher frequencies in transport and communications, in greater Montreal, for 1965-1966, for small negotiations units accounting from 10 to 49 members in similarly small establishments.RAIDINGRaiding is the most severe form of conflict whether we consider the number of cases or the number of implied workers. Figure VII gives information on who attacks, who is attacked, and who wins. Figures VIII to XII show cross-tabulations on each of the five used variables : industrial branch, region, date, importance of negotiating units and importance of establishments. The main conclusions are that the CNTU is the most agressive and the most resistent organization. In addition to this, let us note that the worst years were the last three : they account for 92 cases of raiding out of a total of 153.A BALANCED-SHEET FOR RAIDINGNo previous paper, to my knowledge, has tried to give an accurate figure of the number of people affected by raidings nor to provide an estimate of the consequent gains and losses in membership. Balanced-sheet were drawn against a detailled list labour organizations for each year (fig. XIII to XXII) and then aggregated into one single figure (fig. XXIII). Used symbols should be translated : Ti represents the number of implied workers ; P, the number of those lost, G, those won, * those for which no information was available ; GN, the net gain for the organizations listed in the column. Finally the letter C states the number of workers who changed allegiance.The reader should remember that, for the ten years studied, 35,400 workers were implied in such disputes and that 23,568 did change their allegiance. The number of people affected by raidings grew steadily from 1957-59 to 1964-65 when it jumped to a peak of 4.287 : the bulk of raiding took place between 1964 and1967 ; most of the workers implied, 74.2% were implied in raiding that occured during that period ; for 1964-65 alone the figure is 31.8%.Yearly, the CNTU and the international unions affiliated to the QFL show a net gain. The reverse is true for all the other groups. Figure XXIII shows that, for the ten years, the CNTU has a net gain, by raidings alone, of 11,710. The QFL's international unions are far behind with 3,297. The most severe blow is received by the Canadian unions affiliated to the QFL : they showed a net loss of 4,190 members.But who wins who from whom ? The CNTU takes 11,208 members to the CLC against the 183 that is loses to the Canadian wide movement ; the CLC however takes 6,563 members to the unaffiliated locals. The preceeding figures are consistent with the most general pattern of agression revealed by a detailed examination of the behavior of each group of unions. On the whole, the CNTU is more agressive towards the CLC — and within the CLC proportionnally more agressive towards Canadian than international unions — than towards the unaffiliated locals. The converse is true for the CLC, while unaffiliated locals behave much like sitting ducks.AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONThe comparison of two peak periods of union feuds, those that did prevail in the United States in 1951-1952 and in Canada (1964-1967), shows striking dissimilarities. While the importance of the phenomenon is roughly the same — annually about 0.70% of all unionized workers are implied in such conflicts — the percentage of workers implied who finally change their allegiance is much lower in the US than in Quebec, 17.0% as against 86.7%. More, while the net gain of the mutual raiding between the AFL and the CIO was ridiculously low — 8000 members in favor of the AFL out of a total of 366,470 implied worked — the CNTU, out of the 10,700 workers implied in its raiding with the CLC affiliates, has a net gain of 9,356 new members.CONCLUSIONCrispo recently pointed out the poor services furnished by some international unions in Quebec (2). In my opinion, however, a more general explanation must be seeked to account for the two following facts : first, the average CLC members in Quebec is probably better off than his counterpart in the CNTU, merely because the CLC membership is more heavily concentrated in greater Montreal and in the more prosperous, more paying, branches of the economy ; second, the Canadian unions suffer as badly as, and even more badly than when one takes a proportional perspective, the international unions.Shortcomings in the daily operations of these unions and recent changes in the political climate in Quebec have an explanatory potency, but the former is also true of the CNTU while many people in the QFL are as nationalists as the next man. This explanation should be seeked in such a few structural characteristics as the distribution of powers, the relative importance of regional and central bodies as compared with industrial unions, and functional characteristics as the importance attributed, and content diffused by, education services. On each one of these counts a careful comparative analysis would show some important differences between the CNTU and the CLC.(1) DION,Gérard, « La concurrence syndicale au Quebec ».Relations industrielles, vol. 22, no 1, 1967 pp. 74-84.(2) CRISPO, John,International Unionism : A Study in Canadian American Relations, Toronto, McGraw-Hill, 1967.

The authors' study fits within the recent current of studies of «industrial districts», aligned with Alfred Marshall, a current that has had little impact in Quebec. However, they demonstrate that there is a mode of industrial development here that is centred on local entrepreneurship, in diversified sectors of production, where the collective identity is linked with territorial proximity over a long period. Two main observations are made in their article: in the transition from farming to industrialization, markets have to a large extent been deregionalized; on the other hand, regionalization has been renewed by rules for cooperation that are more clearly defined than before, in order to protect and develop local production.

SummaryThe field of social mobility studies has long been under the hegemony of one and only one technique of empirical observation, i.e. the survey research. This technique having its own blind spots, as any technique does, its total domination has resulted in the disappearance, not only from collected data but soon from sociological thinking as well, of a huge number of relevant phenomena. It thus became necessary to develop other techniques giving access to these phenomena. One is proposed here, namely the method of Social Genealogies Commented and Compared. It aims at combining on one hand the flexibility of the observation grid, thus making it possible to register the particularities of such phenomena as the varying processes through which life trajectories are shaped, the differing modalities of passing on from one generation to the next some elements of social status, the local rules of the games of generalized social competition ; and on the other hand, it aims to keep on recording factual data which can be coded and thus computer processed. Coming back to the issue of statistical respresentativity, it is demonstrated that it actually rests upon a hidden assumption, which is that national societies are homogeneous as a result of modernization. If this assumption was taken for granted during the Cold War, it is now being questioned by the emerging crisis of nation states. Hence geopolitical forces, which had previously aided in the hegemony of the survey research over the field of social mobility, are now moving in the other direction and add their specific strength to the inner dynamics of sociology : both work in their own way towards the opening of new methodological alternatives to the construction and study of the object " social mobility ".

The sociology of imaginary contributes to understand better the innovation process in organizations and companies. This approach consists to examine how the imaginary is managed by individuals and groups to become an element of productivity or an obstacle to innovation. It is for example demonstrated that the imaginary can constitute a cognitive outlet particularly useful in technoscientific structures to avoid problems in the management of the logic delirium emanating from them. The imaginary is found in all the phases of the innovation process, among scientists who invent new objects, but also in the considerations of experts in marketing, who commercialize innovations. Sociology is used to understand better innovation and the imaginary processes that participate to it.

Keywords: sociologie, imaginaire, innovation, exutoire cognitif, organisations, Sociology, imaginary, innovation, cognitive outlet, organizations, Sociologia, imaginario, innovación, exutorio cognitivo, organizaciones

SummaryWhile analyses of the State have told us much about the trends of the crisis it is undergoing, they have been silent on the reasons why certain states manage to survive these trends while others appear to be headed for decomposition. The goal of this article is to provide some elements of an answer to this question through an analysis of the reorganization processes and forms of European states over the last few decades. The comparative analysis proposed here attempts to tease out common lines of force while bearing in mind the diversity of research trajectories aimed at better articulating the approach of political regulations and social regulations.

Keywords: État, crise, État-providence, réorganisation, Europe, régulation politique, régulation sociale, néolibéralisme, transformation, State, crisis, Welfare, reorganization, Europe, political regulation, social regulation, neoliberalism, transformation, Estado, crisis, benefactor, reorganización, Europa, regulación política, regulación sociale, neoliberalismo, transformación