Research focusing on the relationship between measures of Corporate Social Responsibility and company financial performance has led to mixed results in the North American context. In addition, the ethical attitudes and approaches toward CSR investments of both companies and rating agencies are not necessarily the same in Europe and the United States. In this study, we use CSR ratings issued by a major European CSR ratings agency to examine in a bi-directional manner the relationships between CSR ratings and financial performance (...) in the European context. By bi-directional, we mean an examination of the relationship between prior CSR ratings and subsequent accounting and financial performance and reciprocally, the impact of accounting and financial performance of year N − 1 on CSR ratings of year N. Our principal findings are: the greater the market capitalization of a company, the higher the Vigeo rating, the higher the risk of the company, the lower the Vigeo rating, and the greater the stock market return of a company, the lower the Vigeo rating. Based on these findings, we propose a concept of “political visibility” pursuant to which enterprises of a greater size are exposed to greater pressure to conform to norms of socially acceptable behavior, a concept of “priorities” in which enterprises that have resolved their most urgent financial needs have a greater ability to invest in CSR, a concept of “rating downgrading” which reveals the sanctioning role of the rating agency from an ethical standpoint. (shrink)

This paper is an essay about Harold Garfinkel's heritage. It outlines a response to Eric Livingston's proposal to say goodbye to ethnomethodology as pertaining to the sociological tradition; and it rejects part of Melvin Pollner's diagnosis about the changes occurred in ethnomethodological working. If it agrees with Pollner about the idea that something of the initial ethnomethodology's program has been left aside after the "work studies" turn, it asserts that such a turn has nonetheless made possible authentic discoveries. So the (...) paper speaks for a better integration of the two versions of ethnomethodology separated by Pollner. (shrink)

Cet article présente et discute la philosophie de la religion de John Dewey, en la rapportant aux débats actuels sur le « post-séculier ». La perspective de Dewey est complètement séculariste tout en plaidant pour le développement de l’attitude religieuse dans l’expérience. Il s’agit d’une attitude religieuse libérée du surnaturalisme et du dogmatisme des religions instituées. Ce sécularisme religieux paradoxal est fondé sur une conception naturaliste de l’expérience humaine et de la vie sociale. Après avoir reconstitué les arguments de Dewey, (...) l’article examine deux objections qui leur ont été adressées. (shrink)

This paper outlines an adverbial approach of value, which it proposes as an alternative to a “nominalistic” one. It starts from a review of a recent book of a French economist, André Orléan, who develops, from the instance of money, a theory of value which he thinks valid for all social values. The paper criticizes the main presuppositions of Orléan’s model of value and tries to elaborate a more praxeological and a more social one.

In general, in our ordinary life, we manage to make the difference between “strange” behavior and error or extravagant beliefs. The question is here to know how we do so, and against what background. There are also specialized contexts for evaluating whether certain types of behavior or discourse are normal or abnormal: courts of law and psychiatric hospitals are two examples. In these contexts, judgments are formed against a background of technical or scientific knowledge, but they also result from epistemic (...) means of evaluation that are similar to habitual ones. The paper seeks to highlight this similarity with respect to recognizing mental disturbance. Starting from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, it attempts at extending it by drawing on notions of reciprocal perspectives and of judgments of incongruity. It documents its investigation by analyzing sequences from Malek Bensmail’s documentary, Aliénations, which examines the treatment of mental suffering in contemporary Algeria. (shrink)

This paper leads to apply some recent developments in the economic literature dealing with the concept of innovation systems to the problem of economic cohesion in Europe. Starting from a definition of innovation systems, it allows to consider firms and sets of intstitutions as two main but different types of innovation systems. This distinction is the source of a discussion about the nature of the coordination problems which appear when considering the European diversity of innovation systems. The different combinations between (...) innovation systems developed in the paper are a useful means of discussing European policy intervention and its ability to favour (or not) economic cohesion. (shrink)

Cet article étudie les temporalités de l’action publique à travers le cas de la production des plannings dans les administrations publiques françaises. Les plannings sont considérés comme des instruments constituants des organisations au sein desquelles ils sont élaborés. En s’appuyant sur l’analyse de deux terrains complémentaires – une enquête sur la formation des attachés d’administration dans les Instituts régionaux d’administration et une enquête sur la prise en charge des chômeurs par le Pôle emploi – l’étude rappelle que les plannings produits (...) par l’encadrement intermédiaire sont l’occasion de la mise en adéquation des hommes et des choses dans le temps. Le planning apparaît en cela comme un dispositif de microplanification d’État, révélateur des injonctions réformatrices descendantes et notamment de leur composante gestionnaire. Les concepteurs de plannings sont mis en position de mettre en forme, par leurs arbitrages, les orientations de l’action publique. En retour, ces outils sont l’objet de pressions ascendantes, de la part des agents, qui conduisent à donner à l’outil un caractère diplomatique, ou tout au moins négocié. (shrink)

1. Introduction Ce livre offre une plongée saisissante dans le bouillonnement intellectuel qui a généré le mouvement pragmatiste à la fin du xixe siècle. Mathias Girel considère que “le continent pragmatiste reste encore en grande partie à explorer” (2021: 16). Parfaitement documenté, son ouvrage est une contribution importante à cette exploration. C’est sans doute le meilleur ouvrage en langue française sur les controverses à travers lesquelles ce courant philosophique inédit a pris forme....

Gynaecological self-help, a well-known and historical feminist practice from the Second Wave movements which aims at embodying a radical alternative to traditional reproductive politics, is resurging today in France, Switzerland and Belgium. Drawing on empirical observations and interviews, this article questions the links between feminist memory of self-help, the shaping of nostalgia and the production of a political feminist ‘we’. Born at the end of the 1960s in the United States, feminist self-help travelled internationally and was appropriated differently depending on (...) national contexts. This ‘glorious’ history of self-help and, more importantly, its narrated memory, is central to contemporary European self-help activism, as observed in the three national contexts. Drawing on this insight, this article reveals the active memory-oriented emotional work of self-help activists. It examines the ways in which nostalgia for an imagined and lost past is actively and practically produced and encouraged in social movement practices, and highlights the specificity of the kind of collective feminist identity that it shapes and promotes in contemporary self-help politics. (shrink)

Pour George Herbert Mead, penser c’est entretenir « une conversation de gestes intériorisée». Cette conception ne paraît pas à première vue d’une originalité absolue. Ce qui la rend vraiment originale est l’approche « sociale-behavioriste » dont elle fait partie, et notamment la double idée que la conversation dont il s’agit est une conversation de gestes ou d’attitudes, et que la pensée ainsi quel ‘intelligence réflexive naissent de l’internalisation d’un processus d’organisation de la conduite étayé sur le mécanisme social de la (...) communication. Encore faut-il saisir en quoi cette conception diffère de celle du fondateur de la psychologie behavioriste, John B. Watson, pour qui penser n’est rien d’autre que se tenir un discours interne. (shrink)