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Keywords: Recherche, résultat, transfert des connaisances, autochtone, Arctique

The knowledge of how our taste preferences in food are shaped by our social lives has largely developed without attention to the roles played by relationships with other people. While the well-known sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu highlights the relationship of economic, cultural, and social capital with food consumption, very little scholarship concerned with food has given explicit empirical attention to social network connectivity as a form of social capital. To bridge this gap, this investigation utilizes data from a prospective cohort study of health in which both the food choices of several thousand individuals and their social ties with peers are examined. Comparing the relative social connectedness of individuals and their common food choices provides a new perspective on taste formation and maintenance and provides new evidence of how interpersonal mechanisms play a role in food choice and taste preferences.

Keywords: goût, choix de nourriture, réseaux sociaux, pairs, Pierre Bourdieu, taste, food choice, social networks, peers, Pierre Bourdieu, gusto, opciones alimentarias, redes sociales, pares, Pierre Bourdieu

AbstractThe goal of this study is to investigate whether social support may constitute a protective factor for attempted suicide among men and, if so, to identify the most important sources and forms of support. The study compares two groups of men who experienced comparable stressful events during the last 12 months : 40 men admitted to hospital emergency following suicide attempts, and 40 men with no history of suicide attempts. Results indicate that the men who attempted suicide perceive less support available and are less satisfied with the support they received following the most difficult stressful event that occurred in the last year. Concrete help and reassurance of worth are the forms of support that appear to be of most importance. This study highlights the importance of social support in the prevention of suicidal behaviours among men.

AbstractWhereas the immediate consequences of institutionalized placements on children have been documented, no study has investigated adults who were raised in orphanages or institutions. In Quebec, les enfants de Duplessis offer a unique testimony of the long term consequences of an institutionalized childhood. Stories collected from 40 men and 41 women who grew up in institution in Duplessis'era indicate a high number of abuse and aversive experiences, including physical, psychological and sexual aggressions. In addition, the environment was poor in stimulation and opportunities to develop positive attachment relationships with adults. When matched and compared to adults from the Santé-Québec survey, les enfants de Duplessis report a higher number of health problems associated with stress and more psychological distress. Moreover, our results indicate that those who had fewer strengths and aptitudes in childhood are the most affected by unfavourable experiences.

In the field of urban planning and housing, particularly, the fourties and the fifties constituted a specific period: a period of transition, of passage to the contemporary era. In the light of concrete events, issues and debates surrounding major developments in housing and urban planning, this paper examines the political and social "arrangements" brought in view by three sets of issues related to the transformation of the urban space in the Montreal area. The first part of the paper deals with the willingness of the federal government to intervene in the housing field and the local resistances to that intervention. The second part, to be published in the next issue, will focus on the linkages between housing types and models of living conditions with a case-study of the cooperative housing movement, on one hand, and on the orientations of urban development and more precisely the spatial redistribution of urban activities and social classes, on the other hand.

SummaryIn this article, the term front-line safety practitioners refers to the various company members who regularly and directly intervene in the workplace with respect to health and safety within organizations. This definition covers both employer and worker representatives, whether or not they have undergone training recognized by an occupational health and safety agency. (Work inspectors, specialized consultants and physicians are here excluded from the category of front-line safety practitioners.)Today's front-line safety practitioners working within companies must be adaptable because they face a constantly evolving work environment and increased complexity in their occupational health and safety work. We observe two concomitant phenomena within companies : an increase in the number of occupational health and safety interveners (foremen, engineers, managers, employees) and increased expertise in prevention. Although the safety practitioner presumably plays an essential role in this tension between generalization and specialization, little is known about its inherent functions and responsibilities.Based on the literature addressing safety practitioners' work, their activities and the work sites where they operate, we have identified three major spheres where the activities identified in prevention can be linked. Preventive initiatives can be directed toward the human, technical and organizational dimensions of work. Moreover, the scope of safety practitioners' activities spans different levels. Sometimes safety practitioners are directly involved in operational activities (e.g., risk inspection, correction of technical failures) whereas at other times they intervene on a much more strategic level (e.g., company policies, occupational health and safety management system).This article presents the results of a survey conducted among safety practitioners representing employers (n = 111) and safety practitioners representing employees (n = 134), with the objective of developing a better understanding of their respective roles and functions within the companies concerned. The analysis of these results provides a means by which to examine the work context of safety practitioners and highlight its main characteristics.The most significant conclusion that may be drawn from our study is that there is no one right way to conduct preventive interventions. On the contrary, a wide range of intervention strategies results from organizational conditions, interpersonal relations and the characteristic traits of safety practitioners themselves. Implementation of prevention measures is thus a complex issue that becomes incorporated into safety practitioners' relations with the various company members.Based on the responses of employer and worker safety practitioners, we are also able to conclude that intervention priorities are not perceived in the same way. Employer-appointed safety practitioners give priority to the individual and his or her work behaviour and methods. Worker-appointed safety practitioners, however, adopt a more union-oriented view, assigning top priority to having management take action and to administering operational policies in occupational health and safety.The findings also show that work is to an extent divided up between the employers' representatives, whose initiatives are primarily oriented toward the organizational level, and the employees' representatives, whose actions are focused on the technical level. Upon closer analysis, we note that nearly one out of two employer-appointed safety practitioners (48.6%) regularly intervenes at the organizational level. A trend can be observed whereby the safety practitioner emerges as a member whose role as coach, rather than solely as an agent of prevention, becomes increasingly significant. Among safety practitioners named by workers, the intervention profile that stands out (44.8% of cases) is the one termed “technical/operational.” As safety practitioners who operate in the field, they clearly possess and apply an expertise of their own, which most certainly enables them to conduct prevention interventions at the source of risks.Very few studies address what the work of safety practitioners actually entails. Our research provides a detailed portrait of the intervention practices and the roles of safety practitioners representing the employer and those representing workers.

SummaryThe goal of this research is to study the impacts of technological changes on the professional identity of a specific category of workers: technicians. This research is based on a case study of a major high-tech organization working in the telecommunications sector. This group of “technical workers” establishes itself both as a key social actor and also as a professional category weakened by a deep identity malaise.This malaise itself can be attributed to its own specific social history and to the recent technological changes that have had a major impact on the production structures of its “natural” activity space. The study, carried out in a factory in a suburb west of Montreal, started just after the beginning of a complex process of technological and organizational change. The study has a dual goal. The first goal is to understand the dynamics of change brought about by these transformations, which have led to a new distribution of qualification spaces and a redefinition of negotiation powers for the members of the community. A second goal is to analyse the mechanisms which were in place for the remaking of the technician position and which make up the basis for the reconstruction of her social and professional identity. It is the deconstruction of this process which lies at the basis of this research which also set out to question the explanatory impact of the controversial notion of technological determinism as related to the recent transformations which have affected industrial work. The analysis model calls on three notions. The first notion is that the dynamics of the social work space within the enterprise set up a transformation process that leads to a structuring of new disqualification and requalification spaces. The second is that these dynamics are not the result of technological change alone; other factors much be taken into consideration in the redefinition of the technician's identify and function. The third notion establishes a structural relation, of cause and effect, between the transformation process of the qualification spaces, their respective zones of uncertainty, and the technician identity through its technical, professional, and social components.The case study of this work sets up a constructivist and inductive approach, which takes the form of a long-term study, based on direct observation, personal conversations, and use of the organization's documentary sources.The research results bring out two major phenomena. The first is the homogenization of the production space. The research is presented in two parts: first the bringing together of manufacturing operations into a single ad hoc space linked to the function rather than the product but in line with the same methods of task distribution; and thereafter, the definition of identical tasks, with the constraint of operation automation and equipment computerization. The second phenomenon is that of the fragmentation of the technician community. This is based on a transversal fracture of the technical population as a socioprofessional community and on the division of the technician's function. The result of this phenomenon has been the disappearance of the largest of the sub-groups which previously made up the technician collective and which defined professional and collective identities; and the reconstitution of the community around two differentiated components: production technicians, and “specialized” technicians. The first group is by far the largest and includes, from this point in time on, operator technicians who have been greatly disqualified. Our results associate the second group with a redefined identify as a technician, a new collective group characterized by the appropriation of power spaces and technical means of authority, all of this to the detriment of both technical support (engineering) and hierarchical support (management).Each group draws its resources from the same formerly homogenous population for which the enterprise's social space allowed a “long maturation period”—from the 1960's—and an identity affirmation based on professional function and on a technical mastery which were institutionally recognized in the industrial space. This global transformation dynamic also led to the restructuration of the organization's professional and social system.The results show that technological changes did not play an exclusive or overly developed role. The determinism attributed to the changes is, all things considered, relative when these are part of a complex dynamic with which other factors are associated, among which the enterprise's strategy as an actor plays a decisive role. This is not because this role is more or less decisive than the dynamic stemming from technological changes, but rather because the former acts as a catalyst creating the conditions favourable to such an action. The technological changes appear, in the final analysis, as a strategic issue around which the power relations between different actors crystallized, particularly between technicians and leadership. Parallel to the irrefutable impacts of the “technical logic”, other strategic issues contributed to creating the social conditions for the institutional and collective action. The conduct and strategy of the leaders within the business are evident in a decisive manner at the very source of the main social transformations brought into focus by this study.This transformation dynamic cannot be seen as the sole result of some technological determinism, or of an unavoidable logic over which actors have no control. Research shows that technological changes are the focus of an instrumentalization as a contextual platform which leaders use as a basis to legitimize their strategic choices in the field of work organization.

This paper discusses a new form of political protest, Britain's Peace Camp movement. This novel experiment is part of Britain's Nuclear Disarmament Movement, which also includes the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Initially, women camped out indefinitely at Greenham Common Air Force Base in protest against installation there of American cruise missiles. This dramatic action prompted the formation of Peace Camps at about fourteen other American military bases in Britain. We hope to show the basic characteristics of Peace Camps, how they go about protesting nuclear weapons, and what they have accomplished.

The pandemic context is reconfiguring the boundaries of the act of teaching and learning, leading teachers and learners to build adapted forms. The notion of device (in the sense of “dispositif”), as it is usually mobilized, no longer seems to reflect the reality of practices. It must be reinterrogated to go beyond what is prescribed by the educational institution, considering the hybridization of social spaces-time and digital devices, which favors the emergence of the learner's personal environment of proximity learning (EPAP). This EPAP mobilizes formal and non-formal dimensions through which the learner organizes his or her activities taking into account his or her capacities and constraints.

Keywords: Formation en ligne, environnement, proximité, apprenant, EPAP (environnement personnel d'apprentissage de proximité), E-training, environment, proximity, learner, EPAP (personal proximity learning environment)

The elaboration of a world anthology of African literatures represents, in my opinion, an opportune moment to revisit African literary history in order to refocus and rethink it in its relations with the framework in which it was constituted on the African continent. Roland Lebel's anthology Le Livre du pays noir (1927), subsequently republished in Roger Little's collection (L'Harmattan, Autrement mêmes) represents, in this respect, a milestone. For, beyond its colonial bias, it points to the complexity of the African canon formed at the intersection of extra-national, even transnational, literary practices. The essay proceeds in a three-step study. It opens with a cross-reading of colonization and globalization, crucial turning points in literary denationalization; then, based on a reading of a series of colonial and postcolonial anthologies, it identifies the changes and transformations in the idea of African literature; and finally, it closes with an investigation of what literary critics say about the relationship between these two literary poles. The importance of taking into account the historical process of the elaboration of world literature when conceiving a world anthologization of African literatures will thus be understood.

Keywords: anthologie de littérature mondiale, world literature anthology, colonial literature, littérature coloniale, littérature-monde, littérature-monde, African literature history, histoire littéraire africaine, littérature africaine, African literature