Realizing the Right to Access in France: Between Implementation and Activation

This article explores the realization of the right to access in France, based on biographical interviews with people with mobility or visual impairments. I lay out an original theoretical framework for studying rights realization at the individual level. Although rights activation is the horizon of most rights consciousness research, I argue that rights do not necessarily need to be activated in order to be made real. This realization may also derive from effective policy implementation. In France, however, disabled individuals are very active in realizing their right to access, in a context of insufficient implementation. Moreover, although there is limited collective mobilization, several types of policy feedbacks fuel rights activation and the emergence of grievances regarding the lack of accessibility. Studying the realization of the right to access thus opens up promising perspectives for sociolegal research.     

Self-Objectification,System Justifying Beliefs,and the Rise of Labiaplasty

Social Justice Research - Labiaplasty, an invasive surgical procedure that reduces the size of the labia minora, has dramatically increased in popularity, particularly among adolescent and young...     

Participation, Fragmentation and Union Response: The 1998–2000 ACT Public Sector Bargaining Round and the Workplace Relations Act

The current Australian Capital Territory (ACT) public sector workplace bargaining round lasted more than two years with most agreements involving a trade-off between low wage outcomes and protection of job security within performance improvement measures. The main focus of this paper is on government and agency experiments with bargaining structures and processes. The first was a limited and largely unsuccessful attempt in 1998 and 1999 at participative agreement making without the involvement of the key unions. The second, a selective decentralisation of bargaining to parts of a single business, was more successful: of 50 agreements, over 40 have been achieved. The procedural success of the decentralisation strategy is a significant outcome. However, the fragmentation strategy contained internal contradictions and required strong centralised policy control of bargaining agendas and outcomes, leading to delays and breeding distrust. Unions conducted effective defensive campaigns against non-union agreements and involuntary redundancies, but face their own dilemmas in finalising this round and preparing for the next.     

Further Evidence on the Anatomical Placement of the Human Eyeball for Facial Approximation and Craniofacial Superimposition*

Abstract: Recently a small sampled cadaver study (n = 4) suggested that the human eyeballs are placed closer to the orbital roof and lateral orbital wall as first reported in the anatomical literature many years previously. This contrasts with central positioning of the eyeball within the orbit as advocated by the facial approximation literature. Given the limits of such small samples, this study re-examined globe position in nine new cadavers to help clarify which relationship is accurate. The results essentially confirm prior empirical findings except that the mean lateral divergences from the orbit center were found to be larger—the eyeball was found to be “displaced” 1.4 mm superiorly and 2.4 mm laterally. Medians calculated across all 13 cadavers from this study and the above-mentioned recent report refine these measurements to 1.4 and 2.3 mm respectively. Globe projection values were identical to those observed for living individuals (c. 16 mm).     

Book reviews

M.B. Hayne, The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) £35. ISBN 019-820270-9.

Keith Hamilton, Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador (Woodbridge/Suffolk: Boydell Press 1990 (= Royal Historical Society Studies in History, No. 60)), ix + 436 pp. ISBN 0-86193-217X. £35.

Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1947-56 (Pinter, 1993) pp. 309. £45.

Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) $37.50. ISBN 0-8262-0790-1.

Robert Pearce (ed.), Patrick Gordon Walker: Political Diaries 1932-1971 (London: The Historians Press, 1991) £20. ISBN 1-872273-05 X.

Richard J. Aldrich (ed.), British Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London: Routledge, 1992) £40. ISBN 0-415-07851-2.

Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe's Name. Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) £25. ISBN 0-224-02054-4.