Journal articles on the topic 'Travail en ©♭quipe'

This paper concerns the main results of an empirical study addressing 129 practitioners involved in Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) in Quebec. The author defines this type of program on the basis of the linkage between work structure and mental health issues. The linkage between health and work can be appraised through four different traditions: the struggle against alcoholism, work counselling, health and safety at work, and the quality of working life. The present EAP orientations, their organizational setting, and their dominant type of intervention can be related to a work counselling model. A union alternative approach, based on “union counselling” practice indicates a more community-based type of intervention. The conclusion is that both types of interventions are still quite far from a more organizational perspective, in which work structure would represent a salient factor influencing workers' mental health.

Perimortem cesarean is rare and one of the worst possible scenarios in obstetrics. Multidisciplinary approach and speed are extremely important. Pelvic packing in massive postpartum hemorrhages is a method which obstetricians do not commonly use. The patient who had cardiac arrest during travail was successfully managed with a peripartum hysterectomy and two different types of pelvic packing after perimortem cesarean. The mother and baby were healthily discharged. Fetal and maternal survival after perimortem cesarean is quite low. The most important factor determining survival is speed. Pelvic packing is effective in postpartum unstoppable bleeding.

AbstractThis paper uses the case of West China Union University's Sociology Department as an example to study the mutually beneficial relationships that generally prevailed between Protestant colleges in China and local governments during the Republican era (1912-1949). In most cases, Protestant colleges and local administrations shared a vision of modern urban society that led quite naturally to collaboration. Drawing from modernist theologizing about the city, West China's Sociology Department played an important role both in research on and social work in Chengdu. To theorize this cooperative relationship, this paper takes West China's sociological work as an instrument of globalizing modernity, which was changing the West in many of the same ways as the East. Cet article se penche sur le département de sociologie de la West China Union University afin d'étudier les relations mutuellement bénéfique qui se tissèrent entre les instituts de formation supérieure protestants et les gouvernements locaux en Chine durant la période républicaine (1912-1949). Dans la majorité des cas, les instituts protestants et les administrations locales avaient des vues convergentes sur la société moderne, ce qui entraina une collaboration naturelle entre les deux. S'inspirant de la pensée théologique moderniste sur les villes, le département de sociologie de l'université de la West China Union joua un rôle crucial aussi bien en termes de recherche que de travail social à Chengdu. Afin de théoriser cette relation de coopération, l'article considère le travail sociologique de l'université de la West China Union comme un instrument d'une modernité globalisante qui était en train de transformer le monde occidental de manière similaire à l'Asie.

Résumé Dans un ouvrage récent, le philosophe Bruno Karsenti propose une réinterprétation de l’étude que Sigmund Freud, au soir de sa vie, consacra à la figure de Moïse et à la questiondes origines du monothéisme. Cette relecture le conduit à esquisser, au sujet d’une idée cardinale de la politique moderne, celle de peuple, une généalogie alternative à celles quise centrent sur la notion grecque de demos. Elle l’amène également à discuter la théorie que développe Freud à propos des mécanismes psychosociaux (la répétition et le refoulement, notamment) assurant la transmission des traditions. De ces différentes analyses, on propose une lecture sociologiquement intéressée, et par conséquent volontairement décalée. Il s’agitde se demander quelles conséquences pour le travail d’enquête du sociologue peuvent avoir trois éclairages centraux offerts par l’ouvrage : le premier concerne le rôle joué par la transcendance dans l’organisation des rapports politiques au sein des sociétés modernes; le second touche à la fonction de la codification juridique dans les processus de légitimation en vigueur dans ces mêmes sociétés ; le dernier est relatif aux limites de l’approche psychanalytique s’agissant d’expliquer la genèse des idées religieuses.

La revendication d’un domaine de la « communication publique » constitue une forme d’aboutissement d’un long processus de valorisation d’un domaine de compétence et d’exercice distinct d’autres professions proches et de reconnaissance d’une spécificité et d’un savoir-faire qui justifierait la revendication d’une labellisation en tant que profession. C’est en effet sous les termes de « communication publique » et de « communicants publics » que l’on désigne aujourd’hui en France un secteur d’activités pour l’essentiel constitué de professionnels rattachés aux institutions politiques et administratives. En combinant démarche compréhensive et objectivation, nous reviendrons, dans ce travail, sur les conditions sociopolitiques qui ont permis de poser progressivement, en France, les bases de reconnaissance de l’existence d’une « nouvelle » profession, pour nous intéresser ensuite aux enjeux de l’institutionnalisation des métiers de la communication publique à travers la contribution de la principale association de « professionnels de la communication publique » (Cap’Com), en mettant l’accent sur la portée et les limites de cette action ainsi que les modèles dont elle s’est inspirée pour son travail de légitimation professionnelle. The identification of a specific field of “Public Communication” marks the end of a long process in which the existence of a set of skills quite distinct from those of other related and/or competing professions has finally been recognised. It also acknowledges the specific area of expertise that justifies its claim to be classed as a “profession”. Indeed, in France today the terms “public communication” and “public communicator” are used to denote a sector of the economy that is composed mainly of professional people working for political and administrative institutions. Approaching the subject comprehensively and objectively, this study examines the socio-political conditions that laid the foundations in France for the gradual recognition of a “new” profession. We then consider the issues surrounding the institutionalisation of public communication professions by looking at the contribution made by the principal association of “public communications professionals” (Cap’Com), while emphasising the extent and limits of its activities and the models that provided the inspiration for its work in placing the profession on a legitimate footing.

It is now six weeks since I stepped between the train and the platform at Frankfurt am Hain, rushing to catch the slightly delayed 17:34 train to Darmstadt Hauptbahnhof. I'm not sure why I was rushing – the first concert was not until 20:00, so I had plenty of time. My right foot fell through, and the front of my leg hit the step of the train quite hard. I thought it would bleed, but it didn't. It just turned to a very hard bruise (haematoma I was later told). You couldn't really see the raised bump with the eye, it wasn't sore, but if you ran your hand over my leg you could feel it. I had booked my train from Liverpool specifically so I could see Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Vortex Temporum once more. I had seen it at Sadler's Wells and had been pleased, but was lucky enough to see Rosas performing Work/Travail/Arbeid as an installation at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. There, it was a revelation. Whether it was the space, the extra forces, or just the freedom to walk away, I was entranced. Best of all it was free. She was there herself, making comments, keeping an eye on things.

The pre-history of a nineteenth-century composer's first opera often required labours more arduous and frustrating, more time-consuming by far, than the work of composition itself: the search for a suitable libretto or the source from which a libretto could be fashioned. The chronicle of Beethoven's travails before work on hisSchmerzenskindcould begin, his rejection of plays and poets both before and after the Bouilly-Sonnleithner text ofFidelio, is not the only instance of its kind. Later composers with operatic ambitions and without a court-sponsored coterie oflibrettistihad an even harder time. The difficulty of locating a good text was not the only or even the principal reason for Brahms's famous quip, ‘Better to marry than to write opera’, but it was certainly a contributing factor and a stumbling block for others. For those who, unlike Wagner, did not trust their own poetic skills, the doleful refrain, ‘A good poet is hard to find’, was a leitmotif more insistent than anything in theRing.

[L]es travaux considérés partagent, entre autre choses, ce que faute de mieux j'appellerai un ‘rapport’ à la ‘chose grecque’, qu‘à cet égard certains d'entre ‘nous’ puissent dire ‘nous’, ‘nous et les Grecs’ […] Il doit bien y avoir des raisons, je veux dires descausesde toute sorte (et non seulement dans l'ordre du discours philosophique, aussi dans ce qu'on appelle – et je me sers à dessein de ces mots conventionnels – la société, l'histoire, la politique, la macro- et la micro- économie des passions et des désirs), pour rendre compte de ce fait: à tel moment, dans un pays donné, un certain nombre de philosophes qui appartiennent à peu près à la même génération, à des institutions très voisines, en gros à la même, et qui publient à peu près en même temps, disent des choses quise ressemblent.(Jacques Derrida ‘Nous Autres Grecs’)

In several iterations of the Gnostic ontogenetic myth, we find variations on an intriguing notion: namely, that the first rupture in the otherwise eternal and continuous procession of ‘aeons’ in the divine ‘pleroma’ is caused by a cognitive overreach and failure (the “fall of Sophia”). As much as it might contain a distant echo of certain myths concerning hubris in the classical tradition or in biblical literature, this general schema of cognitive overreach—cognitive failure—fall has no obvious parallel in Greek philosophy prior to Plotinus, in some of whose more pessimistic accounts of hypostatic procession we find a similar schema, in which the generation of each ontological stratum occurs as the result of a cognitive failure on the superjacent level. If Plotinus borrowed this schema from the Gnostics, one might ask how the latter came up with it in the first place. In response, this paper makes the following three points. [1] Gnostic thinkers ultimately derived this schema from a particular juxtaposition of two profoundly aporetic Platonic passages referring to the travails of the individual soul, one certainly genuine (the description of the unexplained but catastrophic fall of the soul that fails to follow the heavenly train of the gods through the intelligible realm at Phaedrus 248c2-d3), the other quite possibly spurious (the claim that the cause of all evils is the desire, and the failure, of the soul to understand the nature of the notoriously enigmatic ‘King,’ ‘Second,’ and ‘Third,’ at 2nd Letter 312e1-313a6). [2] The Platonizing Sethian Gnostics closest to Plotinus also employed this latter source text to justify their conception of the individual soul, whose vicissitudes were understood to parallel those of Sophia. [3] This hypothesis is confirmed by evidence of tacit anti-Gnostic argumentation alluding to the 2nd Letter throughout Plotinus’ oeuvre.

AbstractAgricultural programme planners have commonly assumed that, to adopt new crops and inputs, small-scale farmers need financial loans, and that private land titles help them to borrow by providing a form of collateral for mortgages. The experience of the over 2 million Luo people and others in Kenya shows how inappropriate this theory can be in a tropical African context.With a land-holding system based on patriliny, the hosting of in-laws, and other principles, Luo tend to live among kin. They continue to justify land claims largely by labour, by the presence of ancestral graves, and by the group membership these represent. These patterns persist despite individual titling by the government since the 1950s. Financial institutions trying to foreclose on defaulters, and buyers trying then to move on to those lands, face stiff social a~hd political resistance, sometimes violent. The government land register obsolesces, and double-dealing proliferates. The mortgage system breaks down.Other problems in exogenous finance are legion. Credit means debt. It also means patronage, at international, national, or local levels. Neither public nor private financial institutions have overcome the great cultural, political, or pragmatic difficulties of lending to small farmers for staple food cropping or most other farm activities. These people have important debts and obligations of their own already, some quite subtle and some long-term. The promise of more loans, the most commonly cited justification for freehold tenure, proves largely illusory in western Kenya, as in many other rural parts of tropical Africa. Aid strategies based on saving and investment, and on non-financial intervention, hold more promise.RésuméCeux qui ont établi la planification agricole ont assumé de facon générate que, pour adopter les nouvelles cultures et ressources, les fermiers à petite échelle ont besoin de prêts financiers, et que le titre de propriétaire leur permet d'emprunter en constituant une sorte d'engagement pour une hypothéque. L'exemple du peuple Luo de plus de deux millions et des autres au Kenya, montre que cette théorie n'est pas due tout appropriee dans le contexte d'une Afrique tropicale.En raison d'un systeme foncier basé sue l'héritage père-fils, le recueillement des belles-families, et d'autres principes, les Luo ont tendance à vivre en communaute familiale. Us continuent à justifier leurs demandes de terres essentiellement par leur travail effectué, par la présence des tombes ancestrales, et par l'appartenance au groupe que celles-ci représentent. Ces modèles persistent, même depuis que le gouvemement a attribué des titres de propriété individuels à partir des années 1950. Les institutions financières qui tentent de saisir les débiteurs, et les acheteurs qui essaient de prendre possession de ces terres, se heurtent à une résistance ferme à la fois sociale et politique, et parfois même violente. Le registre des terres du gouvemement tombe en désuetude, et le procédé du double-jeu prolifère. Le système de l'emprunt s'effondre.Les autres problèmes en finance exogène sont multiples. Le credit est un signe de dette. II signifie aussi le patronage, aux niveaux international, national, ou local. Aucunes institutions financières publiques ou privées n'ont pu surmonter les grandes difficultés culturelles, politiques ou pragmatiques pour prêter à de petits fermiers pour la production alimentaire de base ou la plupart des autres activités de la ferme. Ces gens ont déjà leurs propres dettes de reconnaissance, à plus ou moins long terme. La promesse d'emprunts supplémentaires, ce qui est le plus regulièrement utilisé pour justifier la propriété fonciére libre, se revèle être fortement illusoire dans le Kenya de l'ouest, comme dans beaucoup d'autres régions de l'Afrique tropicale. Les stratégies d'aides basées sur l'épargne et l'investissement, ainsi que sur des interventions non financieres donnent plus d'espérances.

SUMMARY Prosodic Morphology and Phonology have extended the prosodic hierarchy to solve recalcitrant problems in a number of areas and, more recently, work on phonological acquisition has determined that a prosodic template is a basic organizing unit for the acquisition of features and generalizations across the lexicon. While synchronic phonological theory in general has long exploited such higher prosodic entities, little has been done along these lines in historical phonology. This paper extends that template to another kind of change across states in time, namely to the analysis of a set of superficially quite diverse sound changes in Mixtec Highlands or Alta Mixtec dialects have a broad tendency to reduce historically more complex roots to a CV(C)V, disyllabic foot, with an onset of minimal sonority and fullest possible phonetic implementation, plus many shared specifications for both vowels. The template allows a coherent and unified account of these various changes. Incorporating a prosodic template into the analysis of sound change suggests new approaches to other longstanding problems in historical phonology as well as substantially broadens and strengthens prosodically-oriented theories of sound change. Ultimately, this diachronic study provides striking and independent support for the general role of a prosodic template in phonology, as well as further underpinning the acquisitional work for which the template was first posited. RÉSUMÉ La morphologie et la phonologie prosodiques ont etendu la hierarchie pro-sodique dans le but de resoudre des problemes durables dans plusieurs do-maines. Plus recemment, le fait de travailler sur 1'acquisition phonologique a determine qu'un gabarit prosodique est une unite fondamentale d'organisation pour l' acquisition des traits et des generalisations a travers le lexique. Tandis que la theorie phonologique synchronique a en general exploite depuis long-temps les entites prosodiques au dela de la syllabe, ces lignes de recherche ont ete assez peu exploitees en phonologie historique. Cet article etend ce gabarit a un autre type de changement a travers des etats de temps, c'est-a-dire a l'ana-lyse d'un groupe de changements phonetiques a premiere vue differents en Mixtec. Les dialectes du Mixtec des Hautes-Terres ou de 1'Alta ont une disposition prononcee a reduire des racines historiquement plus complexes a une structure CV(C)V, i.e., un pied disyllabique, avec un commencement de so-norite minimale et 1'implementation phonetique la plus complete possible, plus la specification partagee par deux voyelles. Le gabarit permet d'expliquer de fagon coherente et unifiee ces changements varies. Ce genre d'incorporation d'un gabarit prosodique a l'analyse d'un changement sonore ouvre la porte a des approches nouvelles a d'autres problemes de longue date en phonologie historique, elargit substantiellement et renforce les theories prosodiques orien-tees vers le changement phonetique. Enfin, cette etude diachronique fournit un soutien remarquable et independant au role general d'un gabarit prosodique en phonologie, ainsi que l'etaiement plus pousse du travail sur l'acquisition du langage qui a mene a la theorie du gabarit. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Die prosodische Morphologie und Phonologie haben die prosodische Hie-rarchie erweitert und eine Reihe von Losungen seit langem bestehender Pro-bleme herbeigeführt. AuBerdem ist jüngster Zeit auf dem Gebiet des Erstspra-chenerwerbs der Nachweis erbracht worden, daB eine 'prosodische Schablone' ('prosodic template') als eine dem Erwerb phonologischer Merkmale wie auch lexikalischer Verallgemeinerungen zugrunde liegende organisierende Einheit dient. Wahrend synchron-orientierte Forscher schon seit langerer Zeit mit sol-chen hoheren prosodischen Einheiten Fortschritte erzielt haben, hat man in der diachronen Phonologie bisher nur wenig mit diesen Einsichten unternommen. Der vorliegende Aufsatz baut diese Schablone aus, um diachrone Entwicklun-gen zu erfassen, hier am Beispiel einer diversen Gruppe von Lautentwicklun-gen im Mixtekischen. Die sogenannten 'Highlands' bzw. 'Alta' Dialekte zeigen namlich starke Tendenzen zur Reduktion von historisch komplexeren Wurzeln zu einem einfachen metrischen FuB vom Typ CV(C)V, wo der anlautende Konsonant minimale Sonoritat und eine stark ausgepragte phonetische Reali-sierung besitzt, mit weiteren Tendenzen zur Harmonie zwischen den beiden Vokalen. Der Begriff der 'prosodischen Schablone' ermoglicht auf diese Weise eine einheitliche, zusammenhangende Analyse dieser vielfaltigen Veranderun-gen, bahnt neuen Losungen alter historischer Probleme den Weg und unter-mauert prosodisch-orientierte Theorien des Lautwandels. Dariiber hinaus bietet diese historische Studie auch unabhangige und auffallende Unterstützung der generellen Rolle einer prosodischen Schablone in der Phonologie und im Spracherwerb.

International audience In this paper, we present a quite simple recursive method for the construction of classical tensor product Hermite spline interpolant of a function defined on a rectangular domain. We show that this function can be written under a recursive form and a sum of particular splines that have interesting properties. As application of this method, we give an algorithm which allows to compress Hermite data. In order to illustrate our results, some numerical examples are presented. Dans ce travail, nous présentons une méthode simple permettant de construire le produit tensoriel des interpolants splines d'Hermite d'une fonction définie sur un domaine rectangulaire. Nous montrons que cette fonction peut être décrite de manière récursive sous la forme d'une somme de fonctions splines qui vérifiant des propriétés intéressantes. Comme application de cette décomposition, nous décrivons un algorithme qui permet de compresser des données d'Hermite. Pour illustrer nos résultats théoriques, nous donnons quelques exemples numériques.

Un aspect de la vie et de l’œuvre romanesque d’Hervé Guibert, moins connu, tient à son amitié et à sa fréquentation, sociale autant que littéraire, d’Eugène Savitzkaya, alors encore jeune auteur de Minuit, mais dont le travail scriptural et poétique tout à fait inédit faisait déjà l’objet d’une reconnaissance parisienne et catalysait bien des espoirs critiques en Belgique. Cet article se propose de relire cette phase de l’esthétique et de l’imaginaire savitzkayens à travers l’amitié, voire la passion amoureuse de Guibert pour cet écrivain hétérosexuel, exprimée dans sa « Lettre à un frère d’écriture ». Il vise à éclairer cette phase féconde à maints égards pour les deux écrivains, que le souci autofictionnel rejoint par des stratégies romanesques diverses.AbstractOne of Hervé Guibert’s life as well as work aspect, less known, is related to his social and literary friendship and frequentation of Eugène Savitzkaya, who was still by then a young Minuit writer, with crossed Slav origins, but whose writing and poetic work, quite unprecedented, was already recognized by Paris and Belgium. As a matter of fact, we will suggest a refreshed reading of this Savitzkaya’s literary phase through his friendship, or even passion to that heterosexual writer, expressed in Guibert’ famous « Lettre à un frère d’écriture ». We propose a new approach of these two writers’ self-fictional work and novelistic strategies.

The Great Recession has left in its wake an expected “age of austerity” where deficits accumulated to stave off economic collapse, are being addressed through steep cuts to government spending, with profound implications for social services and public sector employment. In an earlier era of austerity, eleven mass strikes and enormous demonstrations swept through the major cities of Ontario. This Days of Action movement – which has real relevance for the current period – began in the fall of 1995, continued through all of 1996 and 1997, and came to an end in 1998. This article, part of a larger research project, focuses on the movement’s origins. Two themes shape the overall project: the relation between social movements “outside” the workplace and union struggles themselves; and the relationship between the energetic inexperience of newly-active union members, and the pessimistic institutional experience embodied in a quite developed layer of full-time union officials. It is the former – the dialectic between social movements and trade unions in the Days of Action, that will be the focus of this article. La Grande récession a donné naissance, comme on pouvait s’y attendre, à une « ère de l’austérité » où les déficits accumulés pour contrer l’effondrement économique sont pris en charge via des coupes brutales dans les dépenses des États, avec des répercussions majeures pour les services sociaux et l’emploi dans le secteur public. Durant une période d’austérité précédente, onze grèves de masse et des manifestations monstres se sont succédées dans les principales villes de l’Ontario. Ce mouvement des Journées d’action – qui est tout à fait pertinent dans la période actuel – a débuté à l’automne 1995, s’est poursuivi durant les années 1996 et 1997, pour se terminer en 1998. Cet article, une composante d’un projet de recherche plus vaste, met l’accent sur les origines du mouvement. Deux thèmes traversent l’ensemble du projet: les rapports entre les mouvements sociaux situés hors des lieux de travail et les luttes syndicales, et les liens entre l’inexpérience énergique des syndiqués à l’implication récente et l’expérience institutionnelle et pessimiste incarnée dans une couche bien développée de responsables syndicaux à temps plein. C’est la première des deux relations, la dialectique entre les mouvements sociaux et les syndicats dans les Journées d’action, qui sera l’objet du présent article.

International audience In this work we analyze the resort to high order exponential solvers for stiff ODEs in the context of cardiac electrophysiology modeling. The exponential Adams-Bashforth and the Rush-Larsen schemes will be considered up to order 4. These methods are explicit multistep schemes.The accuracy and the cost of these methods are numerically analyzed in this paper and benchmarked with several classical explicit and implicit schemes at various orders. This analysis has been led considering data of high particular interest in cardiac electrophysiology : the activation time ($t_a$ ), the recovery time ($t_r $) and the action potential duration ($APD$). The Beeler Reuter ionic model, especially designed for cardiac ventricular cells, has been used for this study. It is shown that, in spite of the stiffness of the considered model, exponential solvers allow computation at large time steps, as large as for implicit methods. Moreover, in terms of cost for a given accuracy, a significant gain is achieved with exponential solvers. We conclude that accurate computations at large time step are possible with explicit high order methods. This is a quite important feature when considering stiff non linear ODEs. Dans ce travail, nous analysons le recours aux solveurs exponentiels d’ordre élevé pourdes EDO raides dans le contexte de la modélisation en électrophysiologie cardiaque. Nous nousintéressons en particulier aux schémas exponentiels Adams Bashforth et Rush Larsen de l’ordre 2à 4. Ces schémas sont explicites et multi-pas. La précision et le coût de ces méthodes sont analysésnumériquement et comparés avec plusieurs schémas explicites et implicites classiques à diversordres. Cette analyse nous permet de calculer des valeurs informatives qui ont un interêt particulieren électrophysiologie cardiaque: Le temps d’activation (ta), le temps de restitution (tr) et la durée dupotentiel d’action (APD). L’étude est faite à travers le modèle ionique Beeler Reuter, spécialementconçu pour les cellules ventriculaires cardiaques. Nous montrons que malgré la raideur des équations,les schémas exponentiels permettent de faire des calculs à des pas de temps aussi grand quepour des schémas implicites. De plus pour une précision donnée, un gain significatif en terme de coûtest obtenu avec des solveurs exponentiels. Nous concluons qu’il est possible de faire des calculsprécis à des grands échelles de temps avec des schémas explicites d’ordre élevé. Ce qui est unecaractéristique très importante quand il s’agit des EDO raides et non linéaires.

Globalization affords an excellent opportunity to develop a genuinely universal, scientific sociology. In recent decades, the politicization of the discipline has undermined the central mission of sociology: scientific discovery and explanation. The paper identifies several intellectual shifts that will facilitate expansion and communication in an emerging global village of sociological analysts: 1) breaking with classical sociology to build upon innovative theoretical ideas; 2) eliminating the ideological and normative focus that plagues much contemporary sociology; 3) moving beyond teleological approaches to scientific explanation; 4) embracing a distinctively “social” conceptualization of sociology’s subject matter; and 5) eliminating nationalistic disciplinary boundaries and the attendant parochialism that obscures the search for universal principles of social behaviour. The final section of the paper emphasizes the internationalization of sociology, reorganized along epistemological lines. Those scholars whose research focuses on observable variations in social behaviour occupy an intellectual location quite distinct from those who place their politics at the centre of their social analyses, focus on the meanings that individuals attach to their experiences, or reject science altogether as a valid form of knowledge building. Rather than continue fruitless dialogues with those who have different objectives with their work, sociological analysts are invited to join a global village of scientists who examine the full range of cases that reflect purely social behaviour, drawing upon the dimensions of social space or networks of resource flows that are most relevant to their general explanations. Conceptualized this way, sociology becomes a global science no longer handicapped by individualistic theories or nationalistic political fervour. The net result is the development of a genuine “sociology without borders” aimed at realizing the discipline’s fullest scientific potential. Résumé. La mondialisation fournit un excellent prétexte au développement d’une sociologie véritablement universelle et scientifique. Durant les dernières décennies, la politisation de la sociologie a conduit au déclin de la mission centrale propre à cette discipline, celle de découverte scientifique et de recherche d’explications. Cet article identifie plusieurs changements intellectuels qui visent à faciliter l’expansion et la communication d’une telle science dans un village planétaire d’analystes sociologiques en émergence: 1) Rompre avec la sociologie classique afin de construire des théories sociologiques innovantes; 2) Éliminer la concentration idéologique et normative qui caractérise en grande partie les recherches sociologiques actuelles; 3) Dépasser les approches téléologiques et les remplacer par des explications scientifiques; 4) Conceptualiser la matière de la sociologie en termes clairement «sociaux» 5) Enfin, éliminer les frontières disciplinaires nationalistes et l’esprit de clocher qui leur est corollaire, car ils nuisent à la recherche de principes universels gouvernant le comportement social. La dernière section de l’article met l’emphase sur l’internationalisation d’une sociologie réorganisée selon des schèmes épistémologiques. Les spécialistes dont les recherches se concentrent sur des variations observables dans le comportement social ont une position intellectuelle bien distincte de ceux qui placent leurs opinions politiques au centre de leurs analyses sociales, se concentrent sur les significations que les individus attachent à leurs expériences ou encore nient à la science toute validité à fonder un savoir. Plutôt que de continuer un dialogue stérile avec ceux qui ont des objectifs différents pour leur travail, les sociologues sont invités à se joindre au village planétaire des scientifiques qui examinent l’ensemble des cas renvoyant à un comportement purement social. Il s’agit d’établir les dimensions de l’espace social ou les mécanismes des flux de ressources les plus pertinents pour fournir des explications générales. Ainsi conceptualisée, la sociologie n’est plus entravée par des théories individuelles ou des ferveurs politiques nationalistes et elle a le potentiel de devenir une science mondiale. Le résultat en sera le développement d’une véritable «sociologie sans frontières» apte à réaliser le potentiel scientifique maximum de la discipline.

Being a celebrity sure ain’t what it used to be. Or, perhaps more accurately, the process of maintaining a stable star persona isn’t what it used to be. With the rise of new media technologies—including digital photography and video production, gossip blogging, social networking sites, and streaming video—there has been a rapid proliferation of voices which serve to articulate stars’ personae. This panoply of sanctioned and unsanctioned discourses has brought the coherence and stability of the star’s image into crisis, with an evermore-heightened loop forming recursively between celebrity gossip and scandals, on the one hand, and, on the other, new media-enabled speculation and commentary about these scandals and gossip-pieces. Of course, while no subject has a single meaning, Hollywood has historically expended great energy and resources to perpetuate the myth that the star’s image is univocal. In the present moment, however, studios’s traditional methods for discursive control have faltered, such that celebrities have found it necessary to take matters into their own hands, using new media technologies, particularly Twitter, in an attempt to stabilise that most vital currency of their trade, their professional/public persona. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this new mode of publicity management, and its larger implications for contemporary subjectivity writ large, we must first come to understand the history of Hollywood’s approach to celebrity publicity and image management.A Brief History of Hollywood PublicityThe origins of this effort are nearly as old as Hollywood itself, for, as Richard DeCordova explains, the celebrity scandals of the 1920s threatened to disrupt the economic vitality of the incipient industry such that strict, centralised image control appeared as a necessary imperative to maintain a consistently reliable product. The Fatty Arbuckle murder trial was scandalous not only for its subject matter (a murder suffused with illicit and shadowy sexual innuendo) but also because the event revealed that stars, despite their mediated larger-than-life images, were not only as human as the rest of us, but that, in fact, they were capable of profoundly inhuman acts. The scandal, then, was not so much Arbuckle’s crime, but the negative pall it cast over the Hollywood mythos of glamour and grace. The studios quickly organised an industry-wide regulatory agency (the MPPDA) to counter potentially damaging rhetoric and ward off government intervention. Censorship codes and morality clauses were combined with well-funded publicity departments in an effort that successfully shifted the locus of the star’s extra-filmic discursive construction from private acts—which could betray their screen image—to information which served to extend and enhance the star’s pre-existing persona. In this way, the sanctioned celebrity knowledge sphere became co-extensive with that of commercial culture itself; the star became meaningful only by knowing how she spent her leisure time and the type of make-up she used. The star’s identity was not found via unsanctioned intrusion, but through studio-sanctioned disclosure, made available in the form of gossip columns, newsreels, and fan magazines. This period of relative stability for the star's star image was ultimately quite brief, however, as the collapse of the studio system in the late 1940s and the introduction of television brought about a radical, but gradual, reordering of the star's signifying potential. The studios no longer had the resources or incentive to tightly police star images—the classic age of stardom was over. During this period of change, an influx of alternative voices and publications filled the discursive void left by the demise of the studios’s regimented publicity efforts, with many of these new outlets reengaging older methods of intrusion to generate a regular rhythm of vendible information about the stars.The first to exploit and capitalize on star image instability was Robert Harrison, whose Confidential Magazine became the leading gossip publication of the 1950s. Unlike its fan magazine rivals, which persisted in portraying the stars as morally upright and wholesome, Confidential pledged on the cover of each issue to “tell the facts and name the names,” revealing what had been theretofore “confidential.” In essence, through intrusion, Confidential reasserted scandal as the true core of the star, simultaneously instituting incursion and surveillance as the most direct avenue to the “kernel” of the celebrity subject, obtaining stories through associations with call girls, out-of-work starlettes, and private eyes. As extra-textual discourses proliferated and fragmented, the contexts in which the public encountered the star changed as well. Theatre attendance dropped dramatically, and as the studios sold their film libraries to television, the stars, formerly available only on the big screen and in glamour shots, were now intercut with commercials, broadcast on grainy sets in the domestic space. The integrity—or at least the illusion of integrity—of the star image was forever compromised. As the parameters of renown continued to expand, film stars, formally distinguished from all other performers, migrated to television. The landscape of stardom was re-contoured into the “celebrity sphere,” a space that includes television hosts, musicians, royals, and charismatic politicians. The revamped celebrity “game” was complex, but still playabout: with a powerful agent, a talented publicist, and a check on drinking, drug use, and extra-marital affairs, a star and his or her management team could negotiate a coherent image. Confidential was gone, The National Inquirer was muzzled by libel laws, and People and E.T.—both sheltered within larger media companies—towed the publicists’s line. There were few widely circulated outlets through which unauthorised voices could gain traction. Old-School Stars and New Media Technologies: The Case of Tom CruiseYet with the relentless arrival of various news media technologies beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the present, maintaining tight celebrity image control began to require the services of a phalanx of publicists and handlers. Here, the example of Tom Cruise is instructive: for nearly twenty years, Cruise’s publicity was managed by Pat Kingsley, who exercised exacting control over the star’s image. With the help of seemingly diverse yet essentially similar starring roles, Cruise solidified his image as the cocky, charismatic boy-next-door.The unified Cruise image was made possible by shutting down competing discourses through the relentless, comprehensive efforts of his management company; Kingsley's staff fine-tuned Cruise’s acts of disclosure while simultaneously eliminating the potential for unplanned intrusions, neutralising any potential scandal at its source. Kingsley and her aides performed for Cruise all the functions of a studio publicity department from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Most importantly, Cruise was kept silent on the topic of his controversial religion, Scientology, lest it incite domestic and international backlash. In interviews and off-the-cuff soundbites, Cruise was ostensibly disclosing his true self, and that self remained the dominant reading of what, and who, Cruise “was.” Yet in 2004, Cruise fired Kingsley, replaced her with his own sister (and fellow Scientologist), who had no prior experience in public relations. In essence, he exchanged a handler who understood how to shape star disclosure for one who did not. The events that followed have been widely rehearsed: Cruise avidly pursued Katie Holmes; Cruise jumped for joy on Oprah’s couch; Cruise denounced psychology during a heated debate with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. His attempt at disclosing this new, un-publicist-mediated self became scandalous in and of itself. Cruise’s dismissal of Kingsley, his unpopular (but not necessarily unwelcome) disclosures, and his own massively unchecked ego all played crucial roles in the fall of the Cruise image. While these stumbles might have caused some minor career turmoil in the past, the hyper-echoic, spastically recombinatory logic of the technoculture brought the speed and stakes of these missteps to a new level; one of the hallmarks of the postmodern condition has been not merely an increasing textual self-reflexivity, but a qualitative new leap forward in inter-textual reflexivity, as well (Lyotard; Baudrillard). Indeed, the swift dismantling of Cruise’s long-established image is directly linked to the immediacy and speed of the Internet, digital photography, and the gossip blog, as the reflexivity of new media rendered the safe division between disclosure and intrusion untenable. His couchjumping was turned into a dance remix and circulated on YouTube; Mission Impossible 3 boycotts were organised through a number of different Web forums; gossip bloggers speculated that Cruise had impregnated Holmes using the frozen sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. In the past, Cruise simply filed defamation suits against print publications that would deign to sully his image. Yet the sheer number of sites and voices reproducing this new set of rumors made such a strategy untenable. Ultimately, intrusions into Cruise’s personal life, including the leak of videos intended solely for Scientology recruitment use, had far more traction than any sanctioned Cruise soundbite. Cruise’s image emerged as a hollowed husk of its former self; the sheer amount of material circulating rendered all attempts at P.R., including a Vanity Fair cover story and “reveal” of daughter Suri, ridiculous. His image was fragmented and re-collected into an altered, almost uncanny new iteration. Following the lackluster performance of Mission Impossible 3 and public condemnation by Paramount head Sumner Redstone, Cruise seemed almost pitiable. The New Logic of Celebrity Image ManagementCruise’s travails are expressive of a deeper development which has occurred over the course of the last decade, as the massively proliferating new forms of celebrity discourse (e.g., paparazzi photos, mug shots, cell phone video have further decentered any shiny, polished version of a star. With older forms of media increasingly reorganising themselves according to the aesthetics and logic of new media forms (e.g., CNN featuring regular segments in which it focuses its network cameras upon a computer screen displaying the CNN website), we are only more prone to appreciate “low media” forms of star discourse—reports from fans on discussion boards, photos taken on cell phones—as valid components of the celebrity image. People and E.T. still attract millions, but they are rapidly ceding control of the celebrity industry to their ugly, offensive stepbrothers: TMZ, Us Weekly, and dozens of gossip blogs. Importantly, a publicist may be able to induce a blogger to cover their client, but they cannot convince him to drop a story: if TMZ doesn’t post it, then Perez Hilton certainly will. With TMZ unabashedly offering pay-outs to informants—including those in law enforcement and health care, despite recently passed legislation—a star is never safe. If he or she misbehaves, someone, professional or amateur, will provide coverage. Scandal becomes normalised, and, in so doing, can no longer really function as scandal as such; in an age of around-the-clock news cycles and celebrity-fixated journalism, the only truly scandalising event would be the complete absence of any scandalous reports. Or, as aesthetic theorist Jacques Ranciere puts it; “The complaint is then no longer that images conceal secrets which are no longer such to anyone, but, on the contrary, that they no longer hide anything” (22).These seemingly paradoxical involutions of post-modern celebrity epistemologies are at the core of the current crisis of celebrity, and, subsequently, of celebrities’s attempts to “take back their own paparazzi.” As one might expect, contemporary celebrities have attempted to counter these new logics and strategies of intrusion through a heightened commitment to disclosure, principally through the social networking capabilities of Twitter. Yet, as we will see, not only have the epistemological reorderings of postmodernist technoculture affected the logic of scandal/intrusion, but so too have they radically altered the workings of intrusion’s dialectical counterpart, disclosure.In the 1930s, when written letters were still the primary medium for intimate communication, stars would send lengthy “hand-written” letters to members of their fan club. Of course, such letters were generally not written by the stars themselves, but handwriting—and a star’s signature—signified authenticity. This ritualised process conferred an “aura” of authenticity upon the object of exchange precisely because of its static, recurring nature—exchange of fan mail was conventionally understood to be the primary medium for personal encounters with a celebrity. Within the overall political economy of the studio system, the medium of the hand-written letter functioned to unleash the productive power of authenticity, offering an illusion of communion which, in fact, served to underscore the gulf between the celebrity’s extraordinary nature and the ordinary lives of those who wrote to them. Yet the criterion and conventions through which celebrity personae were maintained were subject to change over time, as new communications technologies, new modes of Hollywood's industrial organization, and the changing realities of commercial media structures all combined to create a constantly moving ground upon which the celebrity tried to affix. The celebrity’s changing conditions are not unique to them alone; rather, they are a highly visible bellwether of changes which are more fundamentally occurring at all levels of culture and subjectivity. Indeed, more than seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin observed that when hand-made expressions of individuality were superseded by mechanical methods of production, aesthetic criteria (among other things) also underwent change, rendering notions of authenticity increasingly indeterminate.Such is the case that in today’s world, hand-written letters seem more contrived or disingenuous than Danny DeVito’s inaugural post to his Twitter account: “I just joined Twitter! I don't really get this site or how it works. My nuts are on fire.” The performative gesture in DeVito’s tweet is eminently clear, just as the semantic value is patently false: clearly DeVito understands “this site,” as he has successfully used it to extend his irreverent funny-little-man persona to the new medium. While the truth claims of his Tweet may be false, its functional purpose—both effacing and reifying the extraordinary/ordinary distinction of celebrity and maintaining DeVito’s celebrity personality as one with which people might identify—is nevertheless seemingly intact, and thus mirrors the instrumental value of celebrity disclosure as performed in older media forms. Twitter and Contemporary TechnocultureFor these reasons and more, considered within the larger context of contemporary popular culture, celebrity tweeting has been equated with the assertion of the authentic celebrity voice; celebrity tweets are regularly cited in newspaper articles and blogs as “official” statements from the celebrity him/herself. With so many mediated voices attempting to “speak” the meaning of the star, the Twitter account emerges as the privileged channel to the star him/herself. Yet the seemingly easy discursive associations of Twitter and authenticity are in fact ideological acts par excellence, as fixations on the indexical truth-value of Twitter are not merely missing the point, but actively distracting from the real issues surrounding the unsteady discursive construction of contemporary celebrity and the “celebretification” of contemporary subjectivity writ large. In other words, while it is taken as axiomatic that the “message” of celebrity Twittering is, as Henry Jenkins suggests, “Here I Am,” this outward epistemological certainty veils the deeply unstable nature of celebrity—and by extension, subjectivity itself—in our networked society.If we understand the relationship between publicity and technoculture to work as Zizek-inspired cultural theorist Jodi Dean suggests, then technologies “believe for us, accessing information even if we cannot” (40), such that technology itself is enlisted to serve the function of ideology, the process by which a culture naturalises itself and attempts to render the notion of totality coherent. For Dean, the psycho-ideological reality of contemporary culture is predicated upon the notion of an ever-elusive “secret,” which promises to reveal us all as part of a unitary public. The reality—that there is no such cohesive collective body—is obscured in the secret’s mystifying function which renders as “a contingent gap what is really the fact of the fundamental split, antagonism, and rupture of politics” (40). Under the ascendancy of the technoculture—Dean's term for the technologically mediated landscape of contemporary communicative capitalism—subjectivity becomes interpellated along an axis blind to the secret of this fundamental rupture. The two interwoven poles of this axis are not unlike structuralist film critics' dialectically intertwined accounts of the scopophilia and scopophobia of viewing relations, simply enlarged from the limited realm of the gaze to encompass the entire range of subjectivity. As such, the conspiratorial mindset is that mode of desire, of lack, which attempts to attain the “secret,” while the celebrity subject is that element of excess without which desire is unthinkable. As one might expect, the paparazzi and gossip sites’s strategies of intrusion have historically operated primarily through the conspiratorial mindset, with endless conjecture about what is “really happening” behind the scenes. Under the intrusive/conspiratorial paradigm, the authentic celebrity subject is always just out of reach—a chance sighting only serves to reinscribe the need for the next encounter where, it is believed, all will become known. Under such conditions, the conspiratorial mindset of the paparazzi is put into overdrive: because the star can never be “fully” known, there can never be enough information about a star, therefore, more information is always needed. Against this relentless intrusion, the celebrity—whose discursive stability, given the constant imperative for newness in commercial culture, is always in danger—risks a semiotic liquidation that will totally displace his celebrity status as such. Disclosure, e.g. Tweeting, emerges as a possible corrective to the endlessly associative logic of the paparazzi’s conspiratorial indset. In other words, through Twitter, the celebrity seeks to arrest meaning—fixing it in place around their own seemingly coherent narrativisation. The publicist’s new task, then, is to convincingly counter such unsanctioned, intrusive, surveillance-based discourse. Stars continue to give interviews, of course, and many regularly pose as “authors” of their own homepages and blogs. Yet as posited above, Twitter has emerged as the most salient means of generating “authentic” celebrity disclosure, simultaneously countering the efforts of the papparazzi, fan mags, and gossip blogs to complicate or rewrite the meaning of the star. The star uses the account—verified, by Twitter, as the “real” star—both as a means to disclose their true interior state of being and to counter erastz narratives circulating about them. Twitter’s appeal for both celebrities and their followers comes from the ostensible spontaneity of the tweets, as the seemingly unrehearsed quality of the communiqués lends the form an immediacy and casualness unmatched by blogs or official websites; the semantic informality typically employed in the medium obscures their larger professional significance for celebrity tweeters. While Twitter’s air of extemporary intimacy is also offered by other social networking platforms, such as MySpace or Facebook, the latter’s opportunities for public feedback (via wall-posts and the like) works counter to the tight image control offered by Twitter’s broadcast-esque model. Additionally, because of the uncertain nature of the tweet release cycle—has Ashton Kutcher sent a new tweet yet?—the voyeuristic nature of the tweet disclosure (with its real-time nature offering a level of synchronic intimacy that letters never could have matched), and the semantically displaced nature of the medium, it is a form of disclosure perfectly attuned to the conspiratorial mindset of the technoculture. As mentioned above, however, the conspiratorial mindset is an unstable subjectivity, insofar as it only exists through a constant oscillation with its twin, the celebrity subjectivity. While we can understand that, for the celebrities, Twitter functions by allowing them a mode for disclosive/celebrity subjectivisation, we have not yet seen how the celebrity itself is rendered conspiratorial through Twitter. Similarly, only the conspiratorial mode of the follower’s subjectivity has thus far been enumerated; the moment of the follower's celebrtification has so far gone unmentioned. Since we have seen that the celebrity function of Twitter is not really about discourse per se, we should instead understand that the ideological value of Twitter comes from the act of tweeting itself, of finding pleasure in being engaged in a techno-social system in which one's participation is recognised. Recognition and participation should be qualified, though, as it is not the fully active type of participation one might expect in say, the electoral politics of a representative democracy. Instead, it is a participation in a sort of epistemological viewing relations, or, as Jodi Dean describes it, “that we understand ourselves as known is what makes us think there is that there is a public that knows us” (122). The fans’ recognition by the celebrity—the way in which they understood themselves as known by the star was once the receipt of a hand-signed letter (and a latent expectation that the celebrity had read the fan’s initial letter); such an exchange conferred to the fan a momentary sense of participation in the celebrity's extraordinary aura. Under Twitter, however, such an exchange does not occur, as that feeling of one-to-one interaction is absent; simply by looking elsewhere on the screen, one can confirm that a celebrity's tweet was received by two million other individuals. The closest a fan can come to that older modality of recognition is by sending a message to the celebrity that the celebrity then “re-tweets” to his broader following. Beyond the obvious levels of technological estrangement involved in such recognition is the fact that the identity of the re-tweeted fan will not be known by the celebrity’s other two million followers. That sense of sharing in the celebrity’s extraordinary aura is altered by an awareness that the very act of recognition largely entails performing one’s relative anonymity in front of the other wholly anonymous followers. As the associative, conspiratorial mindset of the star endlessly searches for fodder through which to maintain its image, fans allow what was previously a personal moment of recognition to be transformed into a public one. That is, the conditions through which one realises one’s personal subjectivity are, in fact, themselves becoming remade according to the logic of celebrity, in which priority is given to the simple fact of visibility over that of the actual object made visible. Against such an opaque cultural transformation, the recent rise of reactionary libertarianism and anti-collectivist sentiment is hardly surprising. ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1994.Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Jenkins, Henry. “The Message of Twitter: ‘Here It Is’ and ‘Here I Am.’” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 23 Aug. 2009. 15 Sep. 2009 < http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/the_message_of_twitter.html >.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984.Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. New York: Verso, 2007.