The Quest for Certainties

The lecture series in the autum and winter of 1994/95 at the Centre Marc Bloch brought to Berlin social researchers from Eastern and Western Europe who were questioning precisely these opposites. They had all done longterm qualitative research in factories and among entrepreneurs and managers in Eastern and Western Europe. Their research challenges the view en vogue since 1989 of market economy as a coherent attainable aim that followes clearly defined predictable laws. They criticize existing theories that failed to study the changes in Eastern Europe as a political process with an economic dimension that had its own sui generis dynamics. The papers show that labour relations in the market economies of East and West undergo similar developments. The papers on labour relations in the West analyse in a historical perspective the profound changes by which these relations were affected in the last thirty years. These are shown to have been inextricably linked to politics. The papers giving a detailed account of relations on the shopfloor in Eastern Europe point to the continuities in mechanisms of social interaction in the face of a radical change in the economic framework and to the growth of existential uncertainties.work; anthropology

Mechanism design for decentralized online machine scheduling

Traditional optimization models assume a central decision maker who optimizes a global system performance measure. However, problem data is often distributed among several agents, and agents take autonomous decisions. This gives incentives for strategic behavior of agents, possibly leading to sub-optimal system performance. Furthermore, in dynamic environments, machines are locally dispersed and administratively independent. Examples are found both in business and engineering applications. We investigate such issues for a parallel machine scheduling model where jobs arrive online over time. Instead of centrally assigning jobs to machines, each machine implements a local sequencing rule and jobs decide for machines themselves. In this context, we introduce the concept of a myopic best response equilibrium, a concept weaker than the classical dominant strategy equilibrium, but appropriate for online problems. Our main result is a polynomial time, online mechanism that |assuming rational behavior of jobs| results in an equilibrium schedule that is 3.281-competitive with respect to the maximal social welfare. This is only lightly worse than state-of-the-art algorithms with central coordination

NWAOBIALA : DER AUFSTAND DER TANZENDEN FRAUEN

Source : document auteur. Numérisation : financement fonds propres IIAC UMR8177 CNRS/EHESS. Eliane Daphy, responsable des archives ouvertes du IIAC, tient à remercier Jean-François Gossiaux, directeur du IIAC, pour son soutien à l'opération "AO-IIAC".Unpublished document ; precisions forcomingIn dieser Arbeit habe ich es mir zur Aufgabe gemacht, ein Stück Kolonialgeschichlezu schreiben, wobei ich versuche, die Kolonisation aus der Sicht der Betroffenen heraus zu verstehen und zu analysieren. Die Frauenrevolten von 1925 und 1929, die in extremer Form Unzufriedenheiten mit dem kolonialen System zum Ausdruck brachten, habe ich hier zum Ausgangspunkt genommen, um Verânderungen aufzuzeigen, die seit dem Eindringen der britischen Kolonisatoren mit der Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsstruktur der Igbo des südbstlichen Nigeria vorgegangen sind. Spezielles Augenmerk habe ich dabei auf die Rolle der Frau geworfen. Die zwanziger Jahre dieses Jahrhunderts sehe ich als Wendepunkt an, von dem aus sich die Position der Frau als unabhângige Produzentin und Händlerin entscheidend umstrukturierte. Dieser Prozess, der hier für Igboland beschrieben wird, kann in anderen Teilen Westafrikas ebenfalls nachvollzogen werden und mag bis zu einem gewissen Grad ais beispielhaft gelten

Fools Gold on the Prairies: Ontologies, Farmers and their Seeds

The "ontological turn" in anthropology is linked to the insight that environmental thinking requires reflecting on conflicting ways of "being and becoming in the world". This article explores how large-scale industrial farmers engage with the world, their ontic relationship with seeds, their direct reconnection to reality and sensorial perception of the non-human. However, seeds not only become what they are in multifarious networks of natural, cultural and political agencies, but their emergence and co-evolution with humans is ruptured through deregistration, persecution, confiscation and destruction. Proprietary industrial seed varieties carry instrumental rationality and control into the fields of Canadian farmers that are hard to resist.The "ontological turn" in anthropology is linked to the insight that environmental thinking requires reflecting on conflicting ways of "being and becoming in the world". This article explores how large-scale industrial farmers engage with the world, their ontic relationship with seeds, their direct reconnection to reality and sensorial perception of the non-human. However, seeds not only become what they are in multifarious networks of natural, cultural and political agencies, but their emergence and co-evolution with humans is ruptured through deregistration, persecution, confiscation and destruction. Proprietary industrial seed varieties carry instrumental rationality and control into the fields of Canadian farmers that are hard to resist.The "ontological turn" in anthropology is linked to the insight that environmental thinking requires reflecting on conflicting ways of "being and becoming in the world". This article explores how large-scale industrial farmers engage with the world, their ontic relationship with seeds, their direct reconnection to reality and sensorial perception of the non-human. However, seeds not only become what they are in multifarious networks of natural, cultural and political agencies, but their emergence and co-evolution with humans is ruptured through deregistration, persecution, confiscation and destruction. Proprietary industrial seed varieties carry instrumental rationality and control into the fields of Canadian farmers that are hard to resist

Games and Mechanism Design in Machine Scheduling – An Introduction

In this paper, we survey different models, techniques, and some recent results to tackle machine scheduling problems within a distributed setting. In traditional optimization, a central authority is asked to solve a (computationally hard) optimization problem. In contrast, in distributed settings there are several agents, possibly equipped with private information that is not publicly known, and these agents need to interact in order to derive a solution to the problem. Usually the agents have their individual preferences, which induces them to behave strategically in order to manipulate the resulting solution. Nevertheless, one is often interested in the global performance of such systems. The analysis of such distributed settings requires techniques from classical Optimization, Game Theory, and Economic Theory. The paper therefore briefly introduces the most important of the underlying concepts, and gives a selection of typical research questions and recent results, focussing on applications to machine scheduling problems. This includes the study of the so-called price of anarchy for settings where the agents do not possess private information, as well as the design and analysis of (truthful) mechanisms in settings where the agents do possess private information.computer science applications;

Decentralization and Mechanism Design for Online Machine Scheduling

We study the online version of the classical parallel machine scheduling problem to minimize the total weighted completion time from a new perspective: We assume a strategic setting, where the data of each job j, namely its release date r(j) , its processing time p(j) and its weight w(j) is only known to the job itself, but not to the system. Furthermore, we assume a decentralized setting, where jobs choose the machine on which they want to be processed themselves. We study this setting from the perspective of algorithmic mechanism design and present a polynomial time decentralized online scheduling mechanism that induces rational jobs to select their machine in such a way that the resulting schedule is 3.281-competitive. The mechanism deploys an online payment scheme that induces rational jobs to truthfully report about their private data: with respect to release dates and processing times, truthfully reporting is a dominant strategy equilibrium, whereas truthfully reporting the weights is a myopic best response equilibrium. We also show that the local scheduling policy used in the mechanism cannot be extended to a mechanism where truthful reports with respect to weights constitute a dominant strategy equilibrium.operations research and management science;

Characterization of revenue equivalence

The property of an allocation rule to be implementable in dominant strategies by a unique payment scheme is called \emph{revenue equivalence}. In this paper we give a characterization of revenue equivalence based on a graph theoretic interpretation of the incentive compatibility constraints. The characterization holds for any (possibly infinite) outcome space and many of the known results are immediate consequences. Moreover, revenue equivalence can be identified in cases where existing theorems are silent

Toward an alternative culture of work : political idealism and economic practices in West Berlin collective enterprises

ln recent years, and especially in the wake of the upheavals of 1989, there has been a growing perception that the "socialist experiment" has failed and that the "free market" has finally been vindicated as the only successful, realistic model for economic activity. What has become of the idealists, the utopians, and the dreamers of a more humane mode of production within this freshly affirmed dominant system of pragmatic capitalism? In the alternative economic sector of West Berlin, Dr. Müller explores the confrontation between an ideologically motivated philosophy of work and the constraints of survival in the heart of the competitive capitalist market. Through detailed ethnographic analysis of relatively successful cooperative enterprises, the author not only discusses the rationale and viability of the collectivist model of production but also charts a complex of social and psychological factors affecting the participants. Dr. Müller 's unusual, thorough, and readable study will be of interest to anyone concerned with the culture of work and to scholars of countercultural social movements.Anthropology ; work; enterprises; West Berlin

A la recherche des certitudes perdues ... Anthropologie du travail et des affaires dans une Europe en mutation

Actes des séminaires, automne et hiver 1994/95 ayant réuni, au Centre Marc Bloch à berlin, des chercheurs en sciences sociales de l'Europe de l'Ouest et de l'Est, sur la question des changements sociaux et économiques dans les usines et les entreprises.Anthropologie ; entreprise ; travail ; mutations ; pays de l'Est

Pitfalls and potential of institutional change: Rain-index insurance and the sustainability of rangeland management

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the sustainability of rangeland management. We show that a rain-index insurance with frequent payos, i.e. a high strike level, leads to the choice of less sustainable grazing management than without insurance available. However, a rain-index insurance with a low to medium strike level enhances the farmer's well-being while not impairing the sustainability of rangeland management.ecological-economic modeling, weather-index insurance, Namibia, grazing management, risk, sustainability, weather-based derivatives