Books on the topic 'Raison d’être des entreprises'

This chapter argues that poverty is created, maintained, and regulated. Global poverty occupies a unique position as both the ‘blind spot’ and raison d’être of an international legal system that has long attempted to secure a veneer of cooperation, justice, and legitimacy over a reality of competition, conquest, and exploitation. As such, it vividly illustrates the radical indeterminacy and ‘schizophrenia ‘ that ‘ tear[s]‌ apart the fragile structure’ of international law. That this contradiction appears to be little analysed, that there is so little conversation to detail, is testament to the strategies deployed to naturalize, excuse, and obscure the ‘fact’ of poverty.

This chapter examines the significance to advertising of the Temporary National Economic Committee’s (TNEC) investigations, and discusses the ongoing government investigations into advertising’s economic role. It considers the shift from a consumer to a defense economy and how the changes affected the advertising industry’s raison d’être. A series of bills were proposed in Congress that would have effectively halted advertising during World War II, leaving advertisers to fear that the public might not be eager to return to an advertising-laden society once the fighting was over. Increasing demands for advertising restrictions, combined with renewed government interest in consumer conditions, propelled industry leaders into a state of high defense.

There is a great diversity among welfare states in Europe. This diversity is reflected in the scale of expenditures for social protection systems, their evolution over time and the division of expenditures among programs. This chapter analyses the level and structure of expenditures for the last year for which data is available. Then, it turns to the evolution of social expenditure over time. Even though one observes some convergence, social spending is increasing in almost all countries. One of the reasons for this is the development of entitlements that makes it difficult to dismantle programs that have lost most of their raison d’être. Another issue concerns the international comparison of programs that are public in some countries and private, but heavily subsidized, in others.

Since French Anglicisms readily conjure up the Académie française, the introductory chapter presents purist views on Anglicisms, which tend to be implicitly political (Anglicisms as an allegory for the decline of French as an international language) and explicitly lexical (substitution of French words with English words). The raison d’être of this book was to provide an objective linguistic analysis that would test the myth, discussed here, that Anglicisms are lexical polluters, a myth magnified by the advent of the World Wide Web and the use of English as its lingua franca. The linguistic behavior of the resulting lexical items in the lexicon and morphology of French is the topic of this book, as, mainly because of this purism, linguistic research on these words has not been intensively pursued in France.

This chapter provides a social analysis of the governance of an orchestral board in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand. The discussion interprets the ways context, community and social capital are interconnected concepts for understanding aspects of orchestral governance in a postcolonial state. The first part of the chapter provides a background to the orchestra under study, the Southern Sinfonia, in its cultural context, and it offers an historical and contextual framework for understanding this particular group’s raison d’être and its organizational practices. The second part discusses the contribution the orchestra’s board has made to the community it represents, especially with regard to its social and cultural links to key stakeholders. The last part focuses on the idea of social capital as a way of interpreting how the orchestra is connected with its local community.

Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face of the undecidable. The essays collected here tackle this problem against the background of an Enlightenment that has made the overcoming of contingency its raison d’être. However, contingency’s hardnosed existence subverts this success story. And it seems that Hegel’s dialectics—whose main goal it is to eliminate it—forms something like a last line of defence against it. Ranging from topics like community, environmental ethics, and agency to the goals of critical philosophy, the renowned scholars assembled in this volume show that it might be time to leave Hegel’s cosmological concept of reason behind.

The raison d’être of international environmental law, the avoidance of the occurrence of environmental harm, dictates an anticipatory approach. At its heart is the principle of prevention which imposes an obligation on states to exercise due care in the face of risks of environmental damage. This chapter presents prevention as a multifaceted norm that operates at multiple levels in order to best anticipate different types of risks. It analyses prevention from three different perspectives. First, it identifies its material scope by detailing the different categories of risks which are covered by prevention. Second, it looks at the temporal scope of prevention and highlights the multiple conceptions of the future found in the principle. Finally, it presents the potential beneficiaries of the preventive rationale to explain how it aims to shape the future of different audiences. The chapter concludes on the challenges brought about by the multifaceted nature of prevention.

The epilogue is devoted to the long-term legacy of the post-World War I conflict in Lithuania. The war greatly contributed to the emergence and dissemination of a national and civic identity among Lithuanians. The national movement of patriotic intelligentsia that emerged in the late nineteenth century managed to transform itself into a mass movement during the turbulent period of 1914–23. Yet, in Lithuania, coming to peace after the long-term violence was a complex process that continued through the whole interwar period. The country remained militarized, as its key institutions and major societal groups stayed prepared for the production of violence. The threat of war or a coup d’état remained a constant feature of interwar Lithuanian politics and the raison d’être of a large group of people who believed that their identity was defined by their military service for the nation.

This volume addresses the means and ends of sacrificial speculation by inviting a selected group of specialist in the fields of philosophy, history of religions, and indology to examine philosophical modes of sacrificial speculation — especially in Ancient India and Greece — and consider the commonalities of their historical raison d’être. Scholars have long observed, yet without presenting any transcultural grand theory on the matter, that sacrifice seems to end with (or even continue as) philosophy in both Ancient India and Greece. How are we to understand this important transformation that so profoundly changed the way we think of religion (and philosophy as opposed to religion) today? Some of the complex topics inviting closer examination in this regard are the interiorisation of ritual, ascetism and self-sacrifice, sacrifice and cosmogony, the figure of the philosopher-sage, transformations and technologies of the self, analogical reasoning, the philosophy of ritual, vegetarianism, and metempsychosis.

Chapter abstract This chapter argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s research program is less compatible with ethnography than it first appears. Bourdieu was critical of structuralism, that perspective on the social world that prioritizes general patterns over lived experience, whereas ethnography claims as its raison d’être the elucidation of lived experience. A close reading of Bourdieu’s entire body of writings, however, reveals multiple reservations about the ethnographic method. At various points Bourdieu argues that ethnography is partial knowledge, impotent knowledge, and dangerous knowledge. This chapter elaborates each of these critiques, and gives ethnography a chance to respond. Ultimately, it concludes that it is possible to do ethnography from within the Bourdieusian research program. But ethnographers must take care to contextualize their field data in its extra-local context; they should deploy systematic research designs; and they must exercise reflexivity as to how one’s position as a scholar shapes one’s experience of others’ social worlds.

Women’s Neurology details how to best care for women with neurological disorders. It can be challenging for physicians to stay on top of the latest research about how sex and gender affect the course of specific diseases, medication effects, and best neurological care. The book’s raison d’être is therefore to heighten caregivers’ awareness about the gender differences in neurological care. It spans the neurological issues that occur at different portions of women’s lives, including reproductive health, pregnancy, and issues around healthy aging. The book addresses a range of topics about women’s health and gender-specific neurological care. Topics include issues that are unique to women, as well as those that may affect both men and women, but have a different risk, prevalence, presentation or treatment considerations for women. The book’s format is based on the “What Do I Do Now?” texts, using case examples of common problems and questions that involve women with neurological disease and discussing how to best address the key issues. The aim is to give practical advice for everyday problems clinicians face in caring for women.

This handbook is aimed at helping users of PMTs who are faced with the challenge of designing sensitive light detectors for scientific and industrial purposes. The raison d’être for photomultipliers (PMTs) stems from four intrinsic attributes: large detection area, high, and noiseless gain, and wide bandwidth. Detection involves a conversion process from photons to photoelectrons at the photocathode. Photoelectrons are subsequently collected and increased in number by the action of an incorporated electron multiplier. Photon detection, charge multiplication, and many PMT applications are statistical in nature. For this reason appropriate statistical treatments are provided and derived from first principles. PMTs are characterized by a range of photocathodes offering detection over UV to infra-red wavelengths, the sensitivities of which can be calibrated by National Laboratories. The optical interface between light sources and PMTs, particularly for diffuse or uncollimated light, is sparsely covered in the scientific literature. The theory of light guides, Winston cones, and other light concentrators points to means for optimizing light collection subject to the constraints of Liouville’s theorem (étandue). Certain PMTs can detect single photons but are restricted by the limitations of unwanted background ranging in magnitude from a fraction of a photoelectron equivalent to hundreds of photoelectrons. These sources, together with their correlated nature, are examined in detail. Photomultiplier biasing requires a voltage divider comprising a series of resistors or active components, such as FETs. Correct biasing provides the key to linear operation and so considerable attention is given to the treatment of this topic. Electronic circuits and modules that perform the functions of charge to voltage conversion, pulse shaping, and impedance matching are analysed in detail.

The nineteenth century was a very good century for Congregationalism in England and Wales. This chapter documents the significant numerical growth it achieved during this period, and its energetic efforts in the area of missions, both foreign and domestic. Congregationalists provided the lifeblood of the large, well-funded London Missionary Society, and the most celebrated missionary of the age, David Livingstone, was a Scottish Congregationalist. Throughout this chapter the question of whether generalizations about Congregationalism in England were also true of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland is kept in view. This chapter explores the denomination’s raison d’être in its distinctive view of church polity as local and the way that it was increasingly in tension with the strong trend towards greater union among the churches. Founded in 1831, the Congregational Union of England and Wales waxed stronger and stronger as the century progressed, and Congregational activities became progressively more centralized. Although women were excluded from almost all official positions in the churches and the Congregational Unions and generally were erased from denominational histories, they were nevertheless often members with full voting rights at a time when this was not true in civic elections. Women were also the force behind the social life of the congregations, including the popular institutions of the church bazaar and tea meeting. They were the main energizing power behind works of service and innumerable charitable and outreach efforts and organizations, as well as playing a significant part in fundraising. The self-image of Victorian Congregationalism as representing the middle classes is explored, including the move towards Gothic architecture and the ideal of the learned ministry. A mark of their social aspirations, the Congregational Mansfield College, founded in 1886, was the first Protestant Dissenting Oxbridge college. Congregationalists also gave leadership to the movement towards a more liberal theological vision, to an emphasis on ‘Life’ over dogma. English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish Congregationalists all participated in a move away from the Calvinist verities of their forebears. Increasingly, many Congregational theologians and ministers were unwilling to defend traditional doctrines in regards to substitutionary atonement; biblical inspiration, historicity, authorship, dating, and composition; and eternal punishment. A particularly important theme is Congregationalism’s prominent place of leadership in Dissenting politics. The Liberation Society, which led the campaign for the disestablishment of the Church of England, was founded by the Congregational minister Edward Miall in 1844, and Dissenting Members of Parliament were disproportionately Congregationalists. Many Christians emphatically and passionately knew themselves to be Dissenters who were relatively indifferent about which Nonconformist denomination they made their spiritual home. In such an environment, Congregationalism reaped considerable, tangible benefits for being widely recognized as the quintessential Dissenting denomination.