Horizontalité et gouvernance décentralisée: les conditions de collaboration dans le contexte de l'action communautaire

Sommaire: Cet article s'interroge sur les formes de gouvernance qui caractérisent le secteur communautaire en s'appuyant sur l'étude de deux cas de partenariats locaux initiés par l'organisme Québec en forme (QEF) dans les régions de l'Outaouais et de la Mauricie. La participation croissante des organismes communautaires à la prestation des services publics met en relief l'importance de la collaboration et du partenariat interorganisationnels dans le cadre d'une gouvernance plus horizontale. L'article présente certaines difficultés posées par la construction d'une telle gouvernance dans le secteur communautaire. Le poids des structures de pouvoir traditionnelles, de même que les innovations proposées dans la littérature sur la gouvernance et l'horizontalité (élargissement des partenariats, développement de nouveaux objectifs partagés, etc.), ont beaucoup de difficultéà prendre assise dans la pratique communautaire. Abstract: This article examines the forms of governance that characterize the community sector, referring to two case studies of local partnerships initiated by the group “Québec en forme” (QEF) in the Outaouais and Mauricie regions. The increasing participation of community organizations in the delivery of public services highlights the importance of cross‐jurisdictional cooperation and partnerships within the framework of a more horizontal governance. The article presents some of the challenges surrounding governance construction in the community sector. The weight of traditional power structures, as well as the innovations proposed in the literature on governance and the implementation of a horizontal approach (securing broader partnerships, developing new shared objectives, etc.), are not easily adopted in community practice.     

ECONOMIC MOTIVES FOR "SOCIAL" PROGRAMS: THE NEW FEDERAL DIRECTION

The Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), passed by Congress in 1982, is significant federal employment and training legislation for a number of reasons. Most noticeably, it substantially enhanced private sector and state government roles in the administration of such programs. In order to understand both the programmatic impact of JTPA and its likely consequences on subsequent federal employment and training initiatives, it is necessary to look at the politics of the legislation-especially those interests that are strongly represented through its implementation and those that are not. By doing this, one obtains a better sense of the dimensions of conflict around future employment and training legislation. General guidelines within which Congress should act in subsequent legislative activity are laid out.     

WINE WARS—DIRECT SHIPMENT OF WINE: THE TWENTY-FIRST AMENDMENT, THE COMMERCE CLAUSE, AND CONSUMERS'RIGHTS

The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited. ¹     

Opening the Mexican political system: Public opinion and the elections of 1994 and 1997

Over the past decade, the proliferation of election surveys has worked to undergird the electoral system in Mexico and to make electoral fraud more difficult. In the presidential elections of 1994, significant controversies arose as to survey methodologies, but by the congressional elections of 1997 the fierce debates over methodologies had subsided. Substantively, the surveys confirm the accuracy of the vote count in 1998, allow profiles of voters to be constructed for the three most important parties and mark declines in the support of the once dominant Partido Revolucionario Institucional.     

Quantitative cross-national studies of economic development: A comparison of the economics and sociology literatures

For more than two decades, economists and sociologists have pursued parallel cross-national quantitative investigations of the determinants of economic development. These investigations have proceeded in mutual ignorance despite the often large overlap in statistical methods and data employed. Apparently contradictory findings have resulted, especially regarding the impacts of international trade and foreign direct investment. We find that there are two factors that account for these inconsistent results. One key factor is the use of different variables to measure international trade and investment, the choice of which is in turn driven by underlying differences in theoretical motivations. A second important difference involves sociologists’ greater preoccupation with more complex multivariate models versus economists’ greater willingness to focus on individual variables in multivariate regressions while viewing others as “controls.” A major finding of our survey is that when thesame variables are used, the results of economists and sociologists tend to be consistent, rather than contradictory (as might have occurred, for example, because of the use of different samples of countries or time periods, or the use of other variables included in the regression equations). We also consider some studies whose purviews go beyond economic growth to consider factors such as income inequality, physical quality of life, demographic change, and basic needs provisioning. Angela Martin Crowly is at the Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92717. James Rauch is at the department of Economics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093. Susanna Seagrave is at the U.S. General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C. 20548. David A. Smith is at the Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92717.     

Genotyping the future: scientists' expectations about race/ ethnicity after BiDil

The ongoing debate about the FDA approval of BiDil in 2005 demonstrates how the first racially/ethnically licensed drug is entangled in both Utopian and dystopian future visions about the continued saliency of race/ethnicity in science and medicine. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, this paper analyzes how scientists in the field of pharmacogenetics are constructing certain visions of the future with respect to the use of social categories of race/ethnicity and the impact of high-throughput genotyping technologies that promise to transform scientific practices.