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Social acceptability of mining projects is a major issue for the extractive industry. The literature considering social acceptability in connection with the mining world discusses a concept called the social licence to operate, as a way to avoid disturbance that could compromise extractive activities. This reductive vision is a transposition in the social world of mining projects establishment dynamics. Moreover, there are definitional and measurement difficulties associated with the notion of social acceptability itself. With the view of being useful to actors involved in real-life situations, we created an index that determines the risk for conflict development between a company and a local community during the first stages of mineral resources development, at the beginning of advanced exploration. It is applicable to the Province of Quebec. The model is based on an analytical description of the main determinants of conflicts, articulated around three structuring poles : affected community-ies, the company promoting the project, and the project itself in its natural environment. A questionnaire is used to qualify the communicational dynamics, and completes the evaluation of a given situation while giving space to perceptions. The identified variables are weighted and combined to get the social risk index. The index can be used by investors, mining companies, communities and governments. It facilitates the identification of aspects that can generate more social risk and the development of a stakeholder's dialogue. This article reflects the interdisciplinary approach adopted for this project.

Keywords: acceptabilité sociale, ressources minérales, modélisation, risque, interdisciplinarité, Québec, social acceptability, mineral resources, model, risk, interdisciplinarity, Québec

Second of a trilogy dedicated to human resource management (HRM) in small businesses (SMEs), this paper summarizes a study that describes and comments the major HRM maintenance activities in small and medium-sized firms. Much of the available international literature has been reviewed and analyzed, based on empirical data obtained from several European and North- American surveys. A first global trend shows that, overall, compensation and fringe benefits are the most formalized HRM activities. Between 45 and 80 % of SMEs formalize these practices through policies and procedures, these figures increasing with organizational size and unionization level. In fact, SME owners and managers pay particular attention to these HRM activities as they constantly face losing their highly qualified resources to larger competitors, and are more likely to offer attractive compensation packages. These competitive constraints, along with other contingency factors, partly explain the increasing use of more sophisticated incitative and involvement packages, even if these methods remain optional in France (for SMEs smaller than 100 employees) and in most other western countries.On the other hand, the situation totally differs for performance appraisal, which is substantially less formalized in SMEs. With HR planning and job analysis, this appraisal is the least structured and the most misapplied by owners and managers, who often personally evaluate their employees' performance in a paternalist manner. As for compensation, the formalization level of performance appraisal varies with organizational size and unionization. In fact, evaluation policies are three times less frequent in firms with less than 150 employees, compared to small firms having less than 25 persons. Evaluation criteria usually refer to the individual employee and to his results, rather than to his professional behaviors, and are thus harder to define and to observe on a continuous basis. Finally, HR maintenance activities, whilst generally less formalized, occur in SMEs at various levels, again emphasizing the strong heterogeneous character of small and medium-sized firms, thus limiting any kind of generalization related to their HRM practices.

AbstractThe ecological thesis in urban sociology has long treated suicides as a symptom of urban pathology. Historians who have studied the problem in Paris in the nineteenth century have accepted that official statistics mirrored reality and have explained higher rates in the capital than elsewhere in France by the failure of immigrants, marginal groups and working classes to adapt to the urban milieu. The purpose of this article is to determine the validity of these conclusions. The method adopted to do so consists, first of all, in creating a reliable data base using three different sources: the Morgue registers, statistics published annually by the Ministry of Justice and compilations made from individual suicide dossiers in the 1850s. It consists, secondly, of an analysis of crude data and global rates, and a more detailed examination of the incidence of suicide by gender, civil status, age group and profession and across Parisian space. The argument that is presented denies the validity of the ecological thesis. It is argued that rates do not increase across the period and that immigrants, the marginal, the working class are not overrepresented among suicides. It is further argued that the methods used to end one's life were more passive than brutal and that suicides were less important among causes of death than they would be in the twentieth century when Parisian rates had become the lowest in France.

In Quebec, the creation of a unified family court (UFC) has long been proposed as a solution to several issues relating to access to justice for families. Although UFCs were piloted in the 1970s and maintained in many Canadian provinces, the idea failed to take root in La Belle Province. This article sets out the documented advantages of UFCs for litigants and identifies the reasons why it has not been introduced in Québec.The barriers that litigants face in the current family justice system will be laid out, before making the case for a UFC in light of the experience of other Canadian provinces. An examination of the work undertaken by l'Assemblée nationale regarding the creation of a UFC allows us to identify the obstacles to its realization. The views of the various actors in the field are also analyzed to establish the importance of access to justice. This analysis will show that the debate is focused around federalism and how political barriers continue to hinder reforms relating to access to justice for families.

The Amish arrived in Southern Ontario in 1822. This religious minority adopts specific socioreligious practices, such as the use of horses to farm and as a means of transportation, and intergenerational and communal familial cohabitation. Have the Courts in Ontario contributed to the acknowledgement of these socioreligious practices? If so, in what manner? It is postulated in this study that the Courts positively influenced the acknowledgment of the Amish socioreligious practices at the local level. Two cases are examined to explore this hypothesis, both concerning municipal law: Mornington (Township) v.Kuepfer and Stoll v. Kawartha Lakes (City) Committee of Adjustment. In the first case, the Amish community was granted the right to keep horses in a municipality where a by-law formally forbade such keeping. In the second case, the Amish community was granted the right to build a second house on farmland where such construction was forbidden. In both situations, the Courts, acting as a source of State authority, took into account the religious freedom afforded to this religious community, thus contributing to the acknowledgement of these specific socioreligious aspects of the Amish community.

School actors mandated to monitor homeschooling are at the crossroads of normative, political and educational conflicts. They solve them by various practices: mutual understanding, agreement on disagreement, search for the child's interest and creativity, but also, negligence, abuse of power, protection of their professionality, incontestability and distrust. The reflexive governance theory offers a genetic training approach in order to support local actors' participation ininstitutional reflexivity rather than to a form of resistance. Homeschooling supervisors from four Quebec school boards participated in a research-training process aimed, on the one hand, at experimenting an accompanied self-training framework; on the other hand, at modeling the learning process of participation in institutional reflexivity. At the end of the process, participants realized pragmatic learning and genetic learning, having shifted from a mandated executant posture to that of change agent. The learning process components and their conditions of success are described.

Keywords: instruction en famille, gouvernance, gestion du changement, recherche-formation, réflexivité, homeschooling, governance, change management, research training, reflexivity, Instrucción en familia, gobernanza, gestión de cambio, investigación-formación, reflexividad

In the early days soon after the release of the landmark policy paper Indian Control of Indian Education (1972), postsecondary studies among Indigenous people in Quebec were still new and relatively unknown. Against a backdrop of Indigenous communities starting to take ownership of their own services, the demand for postsecondary Indigenous graduates began to increase significantly, resulting in the development of tailored programs and services: the Amerindianization program led by UQAC in 1971 and the founding of Manitou College in 1973, for example, stand out as two major milestones. The distinctive linguistic reality of Quebec moreover soon became apparent, adding to the initial bilingual dimension (moving from an  Indigenous language to an non-Indigenous one) the duality of a francophone and anglophone education system rooted in colonial history. Drawing on a review of literature on postsecondary Indigenous education in Quebec from 1972 to 2021, our analysis in the present article is framed around the changes that took place over these past five decades in programs and services provided by postsecondary institutions. Also discussed are issues involving Indigenous student paths marked by identity, systemic racism and discrimination. We note that in spite of sustained efforts by an increasing number of institutions, Indigenouspeople still face enduring barriers. We conclude with some thoughts on the university and the CEGEP as postsecondary institutions, their development model and their role in decolonizing and democratizing education.

Keywords: autochtone, enseignement supérieur, services aux étudiants, programmes d'études, Québec, Indigenous, higher education, student services, study programs, Quebec