infonet-economy

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Does the rejection of pure proceduralism show that we should adopt Brettschneider's value theory of democracy? The answer, this paper suggests, is ‘no'. There are a potentially infinite number of incompatible ways to understand democracy, of which the value theory is, at best, only one. The paper illustrates and substantiates its claims by looking at what the secret ballot shows us about the importance of privacy and democracy. Drawing on the reasons to reject Mill's arguments for open voting, in a previous paper by A. Lever, it argues that people's claims to privacy have a constitutive, as well as an instrumental, importance to democratic government, which is best seen by attending to democracy as a practice, and not merely as a distinctive set of values.

Cet article analyse dans le contexte suisse la stratification sociale des goûts musicaux à partir des données issues de l'Enquête sur les pratiques culturelles réalisée en 2008. Il montre, d'une part, que le modèle élaboré par Bourdieu conserve une valeur heuristique et, d'autre part, que la grille d'analyse que nécessite le test de la thèse de l'omnivorisme permet de complexifier et d'actualiser l'analyse des processus de domination culturelle et symbolique. Enfin, il suggère que la structuration et la transformation des goûts musicaux sont également tributaires d'effets d'âge et de cohorte.

By switching the level of analysis and aggregating data from the micro-level of individual cases to the macro-level, quantitative data can be analysed within a more case-based approach. This paper presents such an approach in two steps: In a first step, it discusses the combination of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) in a sequential mixed-methods research design. In such a design, quantitative social network data on individual cases and their relations at the micro-level are used to describe the structure of the network that these cases constitute at the macro-level. Different network structures can then be compared by QCA. This strategy allows adding an element of potential causal explanation to SNA, while SNA-indicators allow for a systematic description of the cases to be compared by QCA. Because mixing methods can be a promising, but also a risky endeavour, the methodological part also discusses the possibility that underlying assumptions of both methods could clash. In a second step, the research design presented beforehand is applied to an empirical study of policy network structures in Swiss politics. Through a comparison of 11 policy networks, causal paths that lead to a conflictual or consensual policy network structure are identified and discussed. The analysis reveals that different theoretical factors matter and that multiple conjunctural causation is at work. Based on both the methodological discussion and the empirical application, it appears that a combination of SNA and QCA can represent a helpful methodological design for social science research and a possibility of using quantitative data with a more case-based approach.