Governance in democratic member-based organisations

This paper considers issues of governance in democratic memberbased organisations (DMOs), such as cooperatives and mutual societies. It examines the processes whereby members' interests are mediated through the democratic process, and the board; and it explores some of the factors influencing the power of managers. It goes on to argue that the system of governance in DMOs in their institutional context runs the risks of managers becoming powerful and entrenched in poorly performing social economy organisations, unless countervailing measures are adopted

Analysis of PBPK models for risk characterization

International audienceAdoption of a Bayesian framework for risk characterization permits the seamless integration of different kinds of information available in order to choose and parameterize risk models. It also becomes easy to disentangle uncertainty from variability, through hierarchical statistical modeling. Appropriate numerical techniques can be found, for example, in the recently developed arsenal of Markov chain, Monte Carlo simulations. The developments in this area can actually be viewed as extensions of the traditional or standard Monte Carlo methods for uncertainty analysis. Following a brief review of the techniques, examples of Bayesian analyses of physiologically-based pharmacokinetic models are presented for tetrachloroethylene and dichloromethane. The discussion touches on some open problems and perspectives for the proposed methods