International Organizations

Weniger Koordination, mehr Markt? Kollektive Arbeitsbeziehungen und Neokorporatismus in der Schweiz seit 1990

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Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die These, wonach sich die industriellen Beziehungen in der Schweiz weg vom koordinierten rheinischen hin zum marktorientierten angelsächsischen Modell bewegten. Die Koordination zwischen Arbeitgeberverbänden und Gewerkschaften wird erstens im Bereich der kollektiven Arbeitsbeziehungen sowie zweitens in der Politikgestaltung untersucht. In einem dritten Schritt wird die Entwicklung der Repräsentationsmacht der Verbände seit Anfang der 1990er Jahre diskutiert. Nur wenig spricht dafür, dass sich die Schweiz vom Koordinationsmodell bewegt: Dezentralisierung und Individualisierung der Lohnpolitik haben zwar zu weniger Koordination geführt. Im Rahmen der Personenfreizügigkeit haben Gesamtarbeitsverträge jedoch stark an Bedeutung gewonnen. Die Verbände sind zudem weiterhin in den meisten ausserparlamentarischen Regulierungsinstanzen vertreten und spielen in der Wirtschaftspolitik die Rolle des Vetoplayer.

Coming to Grips with a Changing Class Structure: An Analysis of Employment Stratification in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland

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Over the last 30 years, trends such as service sector growth, welfare state expansion and rising female participation rates have promoted increasing heterogeneity within the occupational system. Accordingly, this article argues that the class map has to be redrawn in order to grasp these changes in the employment structure. For that purpose, it develops the bases of a new class schema that partly shifts its focus from hierarchical divisions to horizontal cleavages. The middle class is not conceptualized as a unitary grouping and the manual/non-manual divide is not used as a decisive class boundary. Instead, emphasis is put on differences in marketable skills and the work logic. The schema is expected to more accurately reflect the class location of unskilled service employees and to make visible the political divide within the salaried middle class. This expectation is empirically examined with survey data from Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Findings for earnings and promotion prospects indicate that the schema successfully captures the hierarchical dimension in the class structure. Moreover, results for party support and union membership suggest that the schema grasps a salient horizontal cleavage between managers and sociocultural professionals.

Labour market trends and the Goldthorpe class schema: a conceptual reassessment

L'inégalité, frein à la croissance? L'effet de l'inégalité des revenus sur les taux de croissance de dix pays de l'Europe de l'Ouest

Guerre et sociologie du risque

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La sociologie du risque apparaît être un domaine scientifique pertinent pour conduire l'étude des guerres et l'analyse des conditions de l'action d'urgence en situation extrême. La guerre ne peut plus être seulement étudiée comme la seule relation entre des objectifs et des moyens, elle doit intégrer les conditions de "sortie" de guerre qui relèvent de conditions de sortie de crise.

De la menace atomique aux conflits de "faible intensité", L'emprise croissante de la guerre sur la ville

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Guerre et ville vont de pair. La chute du Mur de Berlin et l'effondrement du Bloc soviétique ont signifié la fin d'un ordre mondial bipolaire établi sur la dissuasion nucléaire. Guerres de pays riches et guerres de pays pauvres se juxtaposent aujourd'hui sur la planète. Le XXIème siècle présente de "nouveaux risques urbains" au titre desquels la destruction des villes par les guerres et les menaces terroristes rendent compte d'une évolution particulièrement préoccupante

Privacy, Democracy and Surveillance

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How should we think about our claims to privacy and their relationship to security? Must we suppose that privacy should give way before the demands of security whenever the two cannot both be fully protected? This is the position presented by Sir David Omand on numerous occasions and, most recently, in his response to the revelations of Edward Snowden. However, this article shows, Omand's reasoning and conclusions are both problematic, as the protection of privacy is necessary to a democratic conception of people's claims to security.

Which European Public Sphere? Normative Standards and Empirical Insights From Multilingual Switzerland

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Since the beginning of the 1990s, the EU has increasingly been criticized for its democratic deficit, which is intrinsically linked to the absence of a public sphere at the European level. Whereas scholars consider the emergence of such a public sphere a necessary requirement for democratizing the EU, they disagree on the conceptualization and normative requirements for a meaningful public sphere at the European level. This article takes an empirical perspective and draws on the nation-state context of multilingual Switzerland to get insights into what a European public sphere might realistically look like. Based on a content analysis of the leading quality papers from German- and French-speaking Switzerland using political claims analysis, this article shows that three of the most often cited criteria for a European public sphere—horizontal openness and interconnectedness, shared meaning structures, and inclusiveness—are hardly met in the Swiss context. On this basis, the article concludes that the normative barrier for finding a European public sphere might be unrealistically high and should be reconsidered.

Die Bedeutung von Gesamtarbeitsverträgen für die Arbeitsmarktregulierung in der Schweiz"

Comparative analysis of the institutional regimes of urban water networks in tourist resorts, the case-studies of Crans-Montana (Switzerland) and Morzine-Avoriaz (France)

Description: 

Tourism resort represents an urban area mainly dedicated to tourism while including at the same time a permanent residential population. From the point of view of urban water networks, this characteristic induces a strong seasonal fluctuation of residential population and involves special water uses such as golf irrigation, production of artificial snow or functioning of thermal baths. Therefore, water supply planning can be tricky and difficult to predict. These difficulties are reinforced by the fact that temporary concentrations of water demand coincide generally with periods of water stress. In the case of seaside resorts, frequenting peaks arise in general during summer when water resource is less available. The problem is similar in mountainous tourist resorts where water is generally unavailable as it is stored as snow during months of highest frequenting. Furthermore, these difficulties are often reinforced by resorts' geographical localisations, which are often situated in sensitive areas in terms of temporary or structural water shortages. These problematic issues often lead to strong rivalries between tourists' water uses on the one hand, and between locals and tourists uses on the other hand. Thus, features of tourism tend to reinforce rivalries between different sectors of activity (supply of drinking water, tourism, hydroelectricity, artificial snow, irrigation, etc.). These different and competing water uses need the implementation of rules structured through public policies and property rights and through national, regional and local legal components; We propose to call this framework as an Institutional Resource Regime (IRR) (Knoepfel et al. 2001, 2007, 2009). Through this PhD thesis, we answer different research questions. We firstly aim to understand how those different IRR are implemented within tourism spaces? How do actors materialize them and what are their effects in term of technical, environmental, social and economical sustainability of urban water networks? We then, investigate effects of tourism on water networks infrastructures' management at the scale of the tourist resort and its river basin. We focus our attention on two tourist resorts situated within two different institutional contexts (Crans-Montana, Switzerland and Morzine-Avoriaz, France) and study three types of institutional regime in particular: public, delegated and private management of infrastructures. Results of this PhD thesis indicate firstly how tourism modifies in a significant way the perception and management modalities of water resource and infrastructures. Results also show that functional space of infrastructures management rarely matches with the limits of the natural river basin and indicates what it means in terms of sustainability. Finally, the comparison of different institutional regimes reveals the strengths and weakness of each management model in the specific case of tourist resorts and shows the different solutions in locally implementing an institutional arrangement for a more or less sustainable management of network infrastructures and natural water system.

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