pt. I. Autori noti. V. 1* [Academici-Cyrenaici] V. 1*** in 2 vols. (v. 2(?): Nicolaus Damascenus-PLatonis Fragmenta; pt. 1. 2. Cultura e filosofia (Galenus-Isocrates) (2 v.); v. 3(?) : Platonis Testimonia-Zeno Tarsensis) -- pt. 3. Commentari -- pt. 4.1. Indici -- pt. 4.2. Tavole (I.1 e III). Tavole (I.2 Galenus-Isocrates).

This handbook provides information on the business case for biodiversity, as well as current biodiversity issues for business, and guidance on corporate biodiversity strategies. The current status of the debate is illustrated by specific case stories, thus providing an opportunity for companies to highlight their renewed commitment to an issue of high importance. The accompanying CD-ROM provides additional biodiversity resources, including extended case studies and lists of the key institutions and sources of information that can help build a company’s capacity (...) for integrating biodiversity into business practice. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 18-20.

"Canada, like other industrial nations, is undergoing widespread social change at a faster pace than ever before. Many features of our basic institutions are being transformed and some of the values on which they were based are being weakened or swept away to be replaced by others. As this Royal Commission indicated in its first report, Challenges and Choices, the scope and implications of these changes call "into question basic assumptions, values, and institutions at every level of society, from the (...) shop floor to the cabinet room, to the international economic system," but while many values change, others endure."--. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article provides a normative justification for unions. It discusses three arguments. The argument from consent justifies unions in some circumstances, but if the employer prefers to not bargain with unions, it may provide very little justification. The argument from contestability takes as its starting point the fact that employment contracts are incomplete contracts, where authority takes the place of complete contractual terms. This theory of contracts implies that consent to authority has been given under ignorance, and, (...) therefore, that authority cannot be justified by consent. Contestability is a mechanism that can handle this problem for consent theory. It demands transparency, channels for voice, and a forum where contestations can be evaluated. This idea can be implemented in firms in different ways, but the argument from the separation of powers implies that unions are uniquely suited to implement contestability, since they are organized outside of the employer’s domain of authority. (shrink)

This paper examines the endogenous structure—centralised or decentralised—of labour unions, where leadership is delegated to set wages and holds distinct preferences over wages and employment. To address this issue, the article analyses a duopolistic, quantity-setting industry in which homogeneous firms, producing with a linear cost technology, compete simultaneously (Cournot). The study investigates whether the wage-aggressiveness of union leadership influences the choice of unionisation structure and the welfare of both workers and society. This is done by considering that wages are (...) fixed by the union’s leadership with exogenous preferences, which are more or less oriented towards the salary. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the paper demonstrates that a wide range of wage-aggressiveness levels leads to a Pareto-efficient outcome in the game, yielding a Pareto-superior allocation for society. This arises because wage-aggressiveness renders the decentralised regime more desirable for workers than the centralised one. The analysis is then extended to separately consider heterogeneous firms (different labour productivities) and heterogeneous consumers (different product quality), confirming the results of the baseline model. Additionally, robustness check for convex costs confirms the results found under linear costs. This underscores that technology does not matter in determining the optimal union structure, which is a robust feature of a strategic setting. (shrink)

There is a growing movement of workers joining together in unions that don’t follow a typical formal recognition with collective bargaining model, yet who are still making meaningful workplace changes. Despite this, the labor literature seems to largely focus on the more recognizable collective bargaining style unions, to its detriment and the detriment of those involved in the labor movement. In this paper, I offer a framework for better recognizing and understanding the diverse union landscape, arguing that we (...) should understand unions as democratically controlled associations of workers that aim to improve their workplace conditions through collective action. Collective bargaining can be a great tool for unions, but it isn’t a necessary feature. (shrink)

As Social Economy financial institutions, credit unions have traditionally been considered less efficient than traditional banking entities. However, like banks and savings banks, they have to be as efficient and competitive as possible to survive in today’s business environment, especially at times of crisis. To date, there have been very few studies on their efficiency and practically none for the crisis period. Moreover, almost all the existing studies assess only financial efficiency, without considering their social function. This study examines (...) the levels of both financial and social efficiency in Spanish credit unions as well as their main determinants during the recent crisis. We apply the two-stage double bootstrap data envelopment analysis methodology based on panel data corresponding to all the credit unions active in Spain between 2008 and 2013. The empirical results indicate that financial and social efficiency achieved an acceptable level, although on average the former was slightly greater than the latter. We also find that both age and merger and acquisition activity were positively influential on the financial efficiency of credit unions but had a significant negative effect on their social efficiency. Moreover, the regional location of such entities and the financial crisis were also crucial determinants of both types of efficiency. Our findings are therefore useful for all the stakeholders of credit unions to know if these entities have been efficient according to a double bottom line accounting in the crisis period and hence to maintain successful social management that is compatible with satisfactory financial efficiency. (shrink)

Trade unions have been the object of sustained critique coming from across the political spectrum for several decades now. Based on a discourse theoretical analysis of articles in three Dutch-speaking Belgian newspapers, published in two periods of social protest in 2014 and 2016, this article identifies six strands of critique: (1) critiques that label unions as conservative anachronisms that are out of sync with the realities of our times; (2) critiques that psychologize unions as egoistic, irresponsible and (...) child-like actors; (3) critiques that criminalize unions as vandals, hostage takers or terrorists; (4) critiques that oppose unions to a homogenized general interest; (5) metadiscursive critiques of unions’ discursive practices; and (6) metapolitical critiques that problematize unions as polarizing and ‘political’ actors. These six strands of critique get articulated through discursive logics that operate within and across texts, newspapers and voices. Together they constitute a heterogenous but relatively consonant polyphonic discourse that challenges trade unions and their right to strike. This discourse has metapolitical implications for the debate on the mode(s) of politics that can legitimately be practiced by civil society actors. (shrink)

The paper argues that an ethical firm has cause to realize and to respect, in good faith, the decision of workers regarding labor unions, and proceeds along the following lines. First, the employer is due appropriate deference the bounds of which should be determined in conjunction with employees, as they are the most closely affected party. Second, employee preferences for defining the employment relation and appropriate deference are best reflected through autonomous voice. Third, autonomous voice is assured by the (...) right to free association and generally achieved through labor unions. Fourth, because employment is so important to a dignified existence, an economically just system of employment requires respect for workers’ choice regarding labor unions. And fifth, there are concerns and contradictions that arise from labor union operations, but they do not justify impeding a morally valid prerogative. (shrink)

Il s'agit certes d'un dossier de passion et de combat destiné à soutenir la cause de la reconnaissance officielle des « unions du même sexe » dans les sociétés d'aujourd'hui, mais d'un dossier constitué par un historien de grande notoriété et très érudit : 293 p. de thèse, 77 p. de documents à l'appui et 128 p. de notes! D'une écriture pressée et émue, parfois douloureuse et toujours vibrante, le plaidoyer est volontairement provocant : considérée comme inhérente au judéo-christianism...

The corporate social responsibility and industrial relations studies have evolved mostly in parallel. In this paper, we integrate the IR with the CSR perspective, highlighting their similarities and differences. In particular, the study adopts a framework which includes a wide set of CSR-related issues to explore what unions and companies negotiate under the umbrella of CSR. It analyses and compares the national sectoral agreements of two key industries in the Italian economy, i.e. Metal and Chemical. We find that these (...) two sectors exhibit differences because the CSR-related issues covered by the two contracts are formally labelled as CSR in the Chemical contract, and not labelled as CSR in the Metal contract. We also find similarities regarding the CSR-related issues covered and not covered by the national contracts, and the binding processes centrally negotiated for their implementation. We interpret the similarities in light of the specificities of the Italian IR system, and the differences in light of the negotiation traditions of the two sectors under study, which induce the actors in the Metal sector to focus more on what differentiates the CSR and IR perspectives, and the actors in the Chemical sector to focus more on what the CSR and IR perspectives share. (shrink)

This article challenges dominant explanations in the comparative political economy literature on the origins and purposes of social protection. Far from being a tool of working-class mobilization, social protection in southern Spain was strategically employed by a left party to politically demobilize its supposedly “natural” constituencies. This peculiar outcome is the result of a setting that is common in welfare states outside of northern Europe: the context of a divided left, in which parties and unions are seeking to mobilize (...) different constituencies and in which left parties are themselves divided between moderate and far-left groups. The result in Spain was that social policy became a weapon in parties' efforts to undermine their political competition. This suggests the need to rethink the received wisdom about what the welfare state does to build working-class power in the context of a divided left. (shrink)

As Social Economy financial institutions, credit unions have traditionally been considered less efficient than traditional banking entities. However, like banks and savings banks, they have to be as efficient and competitive as possible to survive in today’s business environment, especially at times of crisis. To date, there have been very few studies on their efficiency and practically none for the crisis period. Moreover, almost all the existing studies assess only financial efficiency, without considering their social function. This study examines (...) the levels of both financial and social efficiency in Spanish credit unions as well as their main determinants during the recent crisis. We apply the two-stage double bootstrap data envelopment analysis methodology based on panel data corresponding to all the credit unions active in Spain between 2008 and 2013. The empirical results indicate that financial and social efficiency achieved an acceptable level, although on average the former was slightly greater than the latter. We also find that both age and merger and acquisition activity were positively influential on the financial efficiency of credit unions but had a significant negative effect on their social efficiency. Moreover, the regional location of such entities and the financial crisis were also crucial determinants of both types of efficiency. Our findings are therefore useful for all the stakeholders of credit unions to know if these entities have been efficient according to a double bottom line accounting in the crisis period and hence to maintain successful social management that is compatible with satisfactory financial efficiency. (shrink)

(2012). Modal logics for reasoning about infinite unions and intersections of binary relations. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 275-294. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.705960.

Power indices are commonly required to assign at least as much power to a player endowed with some given voting weight as to any player of the same game with smaller weight. This local monotonicity and a related global property however are frequently and for good reasons violated when indices take account of a priori unions amongst subsets of players (reflecting, e.g., ideological proximity). This paper introduces adaptations of the conventional monotonicity notions that are suitable for voting games with (...) an exogenous coalition structure. A taxonomy of old and new monotonicity concepts is provided, and different coalitional versions of the Banzhaf and Shapley–Shubik power indices are compared accordingly. (shrink)

Young people are seriously under-represented in both political parties and trade unions. I argue that a dependent conception of democracy interested in substantive equality, not merely formal equality, would support addressing this problem through descriptive representation. The essay begins by considering the requirements of democracy, and whether these can support a case for descriptive representation. Although descriptive representation entails democratic costs, there is a contingent case for group representation that is consistent with the aims of democracy. Young people, moreover, (...) satisfy this case in terms of membership of political parties – but less so in the case of trade unions. Finally, the essay considers practical methods for improving young people’s representation in these. (shrink)

In this highly original and accessible book, one of our leading philosophers of religion seeks to answer this question by analyzing the several states of mystic union as they are described and explained in the classical primary literature ...

In this paper, we consider a notion of nonmeasurablity with respect to Marczewski and Marczewski-like tree ideals $s_0$, $m_0$, $l_0$, $cl_0$, $h_0,$ and $ch_0$. We show that there exists a subset of the Baire space $\omega ^\omega,$ which is s-, l-, and m-nonmeasurable that forms a dominating m.e.d. family. We investigate a notion of ${\mathbb {T}}$ -Bernstein sets—sets which intersect but do not contain any body of any tree from a given family of trees ${\mathbb {T}}$. We also obtain a (...) result on ${\mathcal {I}}$ -Luzin sets, namely, we prove that if ${\mathfrak {c}}$ is a regular cardinal, then the algebraic sum of a generalized Luzin set and a generalized Sierpiński set belongs to $s_0, m_0$, $l_0,$ and $cl_0$. (shrink)

Pepper Culpepper’s seminal Quiet Politics and Business Power has revitalized the study of when business elites can shape policies away from public scrutiny. This article takes the concept of quiet politics to a new, and surprising, set of actors: trade union leaders. Focusing on the case of Denmark, it argues that quiet politics functions through political elite networks and that this way of doing politics favors a particular kind of corporatist coordination between the state, capital, and labor. Rather than showing (...) macrocorporatist coordination between the two classes and governments, it identifies representatives of business and labor that hold privileged positions in political elite networks. Representatives of segments are found in industries important for the Danish economy, specifically, the exporting manufacturing sector. Being at the core of the network requires not only a key position in the Danish economy but also an understanding that politics is often done best without politicians and voters. The analysis shows that trade union and business association representatives work closely on a wide number of issues through quiet politics, using their extensive network to broker and foster agreement between different stakeholders. (shrink)

According to the reports in the past decade, some Asian subcontractors, mainly Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea transnational corporations, tend to be labor abusive in their overseas investment destinations like China or Southeast Asia. Taking Vietnam as an example, this paper raises questions as to why Taiwanese transnational companies can control workplace unions in a trade-union-supportive regime. Given the government s constraint of political rights, and the individualized workplace unions, the function of trade unions in Vietnam is (...) destined to be limited. The trade unions turn out be an arm of management, rather than representing workers interests in these transnational companies. This article also explores the influence of the newly developed codes of conducts from Western buyers. In the survey of three companies which are required to follow the codes of conduct by buyers, trade unions had no more freedom than those in companies without codes of conduct. The paper discusses the implications of this research, offering strategies for labor rights improvements. (shrink)

Marriage promotion is a government strategy aimed at ensuring that children are raised in married, heterosexual families, preferably by their biological parents. This article places critical heterosexuality studies in dialogue with feminist state theory to examine marriage promotion as a reaction of the gendered and sexualized state to crisis tendencies of institutionalized heterosexuality. Drawing on the first in-depth study of marriage promotion politics, the author examines polycentric state practices that seek to stabilize the norm of the white, middle-class, heterosexual family. (...) While explicit policy concerns focus on race and class, state-sponsored marriage workshops teach about gender hierarchy to rehearse an implicit ideology of marital heterosexuality. In contrast to feminist state theories that present a monolithic, top-down model of state control, the author offers a more nuanced examination of the relationship between macro and micro levels of power and their uneven consequences for social change. (shrink)

Goldstern showed in [7] that the union of a real-parametrized, monotone family of Lebesgue measure zero sets has also Lebesgue measure zero, provided that the sets are uniformly $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }^1_1$. Our aim is to study to what extent we can drop the $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }^1_1$ assumption. We show that Goldstern’s principle for the pointclass $\boldsymbol {\Pi }^1_1$ holds. We show that Goldstern’s principle for the pointclass of all subsets is consistent with $\mathsf {ZFC}$ and show its negation follows from (...) $\mathsf {CH}$. Also we prove that Goldstern’s principle for the pointclass of all subsets holds both under $\mathsf {ZF} + \mathsf {AD}$ and in Solovay models. (shrink)

This article sets out to research and resolve the conceptual lag between the family as defined and recognised in law and the multiplicity of queer constellations of ‘intimate citizenship’ in which families are actually done. The focus is on adult unions outside of conjugal coupledom. The family law practices, and awareness and expectations of adults in such unions were analysed through 21 interviews and the content analysis of 40 documents and were projected against the applicable legal mould. The (...) article then proposes to resolve the existing conceptual lag by advancing a conception of the family as a malleable, open-ended assemblage, in lieu of the current rigid status approach in family law, which is both under- and overinclusive. The proposed conception does justice to the increasing fluidity of family formations, which are not always already domestic, dyadic and sexual. (shrink)

Seen from a national business system perspective, the notion of corporate social responsibility emerges as a specifically US‐American response to challenges regarding the corporate place in society. With the spread of American capitalism, however, CSR is bound to come into contact – and conflict – with other approaches to the role of business in society that have been shaped by different national cultures. Within Europe, one such area of potential conflict concerns the role of organised labour in representing employee interests. (...) Studying the perceptions held by European trade unions on stakeholding, as one of the important concepts in the CSR discourse, does indeed reveal a considerable degree of union scepticism of CSR and its terminology. There is, however, also embryonic evidence of at least some unions attempting to link the CSR discourse to traditional union goals. Furthermore, national differences in union responses to CSR are beginning to emerge, which may, in turn, further shape the evolution of national business systems in Europe. (shrink)

La romancière ne sait pas de quoi relèvent les apparitions d’OVNI, mais elle aime le « point de bascule entre le présent et le possible » qu’offrent les rendez-vous mensuels des ufologues parisiens. Un dispositif poreux, proche de celui qu’elle met en place dans l’écriture pour imaginer ses histoires.

Globally, labor unions have been criticized for being highly gendered, patriarchal organizations that struggle to engage with, and represent, women. In Cambodia, the disparity between women’s activism and organizational power is particularly acute. Women workers are the face of the labor movement, yet they remain excluded from union leadership despite some movement toward more progressive gender policies within unions. Using data from semi-structured interviews with workers and union leaders in the construction and garment sectors, I illustrate how gendered (...) narratives and practices of control are mobilized through gender regimes that operate in the household, the workplace, and unions. I propose an analytical framework that incorporates these three interlocking gender regimes to draw attention to the contradictory role of unions in advocating for worker rights while depoliticizing women’s activism and sustaining gender inequity. I argue that it is the contradictory relationship between these regimes that entrenches women’s subordination within unions despite their numerical strength. (shrink)