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Framing has previously been studied in the field of pandemic preparedness and global health governance and influenza pandemics have usually been framed in terms of security and evidence-based medicine on a global scale. This paper is based on the pandemic preparedness plans, published after 2009, from eight European countries. We study how pandemic preparedness is framed and how pandemic influenza in general is narrated in the plans. All plans contain references to ‘uncertainty’, ‘pandemic phases’, ‘risk management’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘surveillance’. These themes were all framed differently in the studied plans. The preparedness plans in the member states diverge in ways that will challenge the ambition of the European Union to make the pandemic preparedness plans interoperable and to co-ordinate the member states during future pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I am applying a rights-based approach to childhood social exclusion that, following Sen's capability approach as one formulation of such a rights-based approach, sees social exclusion as the failure of people to have access to critical capabilities relating to their integration into society. The implications of this approach will then be applied to the relation between education and social exclusion, where it is shown that education has a critical impact on mitigating or reinforcing social exclusion. Taking such a capabilities-based approach implies a shift away from a concentration on average achievement generated by an education system to the low end of the achievement distribution and the ability of the education system to raise the performance and integrate the most disadvantaged students. The paper investigates how education systems in Europe and other industrialized countries are achieving this goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article notes international serials and electronic resource management news for July 1, 2012. The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services' Continuing Resources Section presented the Ulrich’s Serials Librarianship Award to Valerie Bross. The North American Serials Interest Group's newly elected officers include Joyce Tenney, Shana McDonald, and Chris Brady. The Library of Congress' Bibliographic Framework Initiative General Plan is on its website at http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/pdf/bibframework-10312011.pdf.

Objective. European countries practice a wide range of car driving license renewal procedures. These range from issuing lifelong licenses without subsequent medical checks, to issuing a license to age 70 and for 3- or 5-year periods thereafter based on self-declarations of medical fitness, to requiring medical examinations for renewal, to renewal every 5 years from the age of 45. This paper presents a case study of the different older driver licensing procedures in seven European countries and addresses the association between these procedures and older driver safety. Method. The seven countries studied consist of France, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The first-mentioned three countries have the most relaxed license renewal procedures and least demanding medical examination requirements. Results. There is no evidence that any license renewal procedure or requirement for a medical examination has an effect on the overall road safety of drivers aged 65+, though undoubtedly there are individual drivers who should no longer be driving who might be detected by stringent renewal procedures. Considering the three countries with the most relaxed licensing procedures, The Netherlands and United Kingdom have the lowest fatality rate for car drivers aged 65+, and the rate for France is falling rapidly. Conclusions. There is also evidence that stringent renewal procedures and demanding medical examinations at renewal reduce the level of car driving licenses among older people. France, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have the highest level of driving license holding by people aged 65+, which has direct implications for the independent mobility of older people. Reduced mobility also has safety implications: in about half the European countries for which road accident fatality data have been analyzed, people aged 65+ are at greater risk of death as a pedestrian than as a car driver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With more than 10 million Muslims living in Western Europe, states are struggling to accommodate the religious needs of Muslims in state-supported institutions. Such issues include whether to fund separate Islamic schools and how or whether to teach Islam in state-supported schools. Despite these common concerns, national governments vary widely in their response to the religious needs and practices of Muslim citizens and permanent residents. This paper looks at how Britain, France and Germany have resolved these issues. We explore how pre-existing Church-State practices and institutional arrangements structured the politics of state accommodation of Muslims' religious needs in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilising archival materials relating to an Italian pottery manufacturer, Manifattura Ginori, this paper examines the development of the company's accounting system during the 19th century. By the early 1800s, Manifattura Ginori is shown to have developed a double-entry bookkeeping system and to have carried out cost calculations. Deficiencies in the archive unfortunately do not enable us to determine precisely the nature of the links between the cost calculations and the financial accounting system during the early decades of the 19th century. However, as the century wore on, and the business moved from being an artisanal based manufacturer of high quality porcelain to a large-scale, industrial producer of utilitarian wares, Manifattura Ginori developed its system of accounting to reflect organisational changes and managerial needs. The Ginori archives therefore not only provide us with a rare glimpse of accounting in an early industrial context in Italy, but also of the use of accounting as a mechanism for business management and control in a non-Anglo-Saxon context. In particular it allows us to examine the role of accountants, to throw light on factors causing accounting change, and the relevance of alternative theoretical paradigms in interpreting such changes. By placing the experiences of Manifattura Ginori in a context of developments elsewhere in Europe, especially Britain and France, some implications can be drawn regarding the possibility of multiple origins of accounting ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationships between the migratory policies of the EU countries with more experience of immigration and their national political cultures. It focuses on France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It then looks at Italy, a relatively new country of immigration, which, with 3,000,000 legal immigrants, has become the fourth country of immigration in Europe and the first in the Mediterranean basin. In its final part it highlights the incipient process of 'communitarisation' of the immigration policies of EU countries in the last decade. This process, which has already entailed a significant convergence of their migratory policies, is expected to continue after the recent enlargement of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The involvement of urban and regional governments in transnational cooperative arrangements and policy networks has led to considerable debate regarding the political and theoretical implications. This paper examines networking and cooperation between urban areas and regions in the UK and France with a shared sea border. Such cross-border cooperation involving local authorities in Europe is a growing phenomenon and has certain implications for the analysis of local and urban politics. Three study areas are examined in detail: the Transmanche region involving Kent County Council and the French region Nord-Pas-de-Calais; the Transmanche Metropole which includes Southampton, Portsmouth, Bournemouth and Poole in Britain and Caen, Rouen and Le Havre in France; the cooperative initiative between the English county of East Sussex and the French de partements of Somme and Seine-Maritime. In all three case studies, the development of cooperation has been influenced by the availability of funds from the European Union Interreg programme which supports transfrontier networking. A number of political consequences of cross-border cooperation are identified. The implications of these policy initiatives for theories of urban politics are considered, including a discussion of the political and economic construction of competition and cooperation between cities and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the prospects for trilateral concord among Britain, France and Germany in terms of defence policies? Would more institutionalised links among them lead to more convergence of their defence policies? To answer these interrogations, this article investigates the relation between policy convergence and institutionalised cooperation, in particular by studying whether and when one is a prerequisite to the other. First, this article examines the extent to which these countries' defence policies have converged since the end of the cold war based on several indicators: their attitudes towards international forums, their defence budgets, the structure of their armed forces and their willingness to use force. Second, we study each of the bilateral relations between the three states to qualitatively analyse their degree of institutionalisation and the convergence of their defence policies. This article concludes that contrary to the arguments of many discussions, think-tank reports and political actors, there is no evidence that institutionalised cooperation leads to policy convergence as far as defence is concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports on a study which estimate prevalence of gambling among European professional athletes and explore factors that are associated with gambling practice and gambling problems in professional athletes. It states that self-completion questionnaire was designed for this study and socio-demographic variables, variables linked to gambling and impulsive behavior data were gathered. It mentions that instruments used for screening problem gambling were all validated.

Copyright of Modern & Contemporary France is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article comments on key issues concerning the editorial board and policies of the "Comparative Education" periodical in Great Britain in 1985. Guy Neave, the professor-elect of the magazine in the University of London, is added to the magazine's editorial board. The periodical also decided to focus on comparative studies of education in higher-income contexts and particularly Europe. The provision of technical, vocational and technological education in France is also surveyed by the magazine.

Although parliamentary questions (PQs) are a feature of most legislatures, no two legislatures share exactly identical questioning forms. This research provides an overview of forms of questioning in European parliaments, covering variation in the main institutional features, the processing of questions and the impact of political parties on questioning. Cross-national and temporal variation in the behavioural trends in questioning is identified using more in-depth analysis of patterns of questioning in the national parliaments of the United Kingdom, France and Spain. The accountability game is found to have a general structure based on the principal-agent relationship and the fact that government must answer questions posed by MPs. PQs are conceived as formal mechanisms to combat information asymmetries and moral hazard, especially when there is hidden information, and by means of them MPs can give orientation or indirizzo (direction) to the executive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information from various aspects of the field of international serials and electronic resource management. Abstracts for several research articles are included on topics such as scholarly electronic books (e-books) and open source data in academic publishing. Additionally, awards and grants presented by the American Library Association (ALA) in 2011 are highlighted along with notes on the reorganization of the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG). Brief information regarding the 2012 conference for the UKSG and a list of online resources related to serials librarians are also included.

This article uses original and secondary archival sources to examine the value of the distinction between creditor and debtor states in explaining the behaviour of domestic elites in international and European macroeconomic and monetary cooperation, compared to variables like size and trade. It highlights the paradox and tension between changes in institutional forms and stronger incentives to cooperate (Montagu Norman's 'new Europe') and persisting patterns in strategic behaviour across space and over time. Central to this continuity is a fundamental asymmetry of power between creditor and debtor states. The imbalances that underpin creditor-debtor state relations also reveal the structural underpinnings of arguments from economic principle, 'who argues what' and receptiveness to economic ideas and thinkers. Not least, the case studies and arguments in the article offer fresh and different insights into British and French attitudes to European coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores UK and German positions in the debates on European defence in the Convention on the Future of Europe and in the Intergovernmental Conference that followed. It also has a subsidiary interest in France, and develops a framework for exploring why UK, German and French positions on defence cooperation diverge, but also for plotting how those positions moved significantly towards convergence during the constitutional debate. The move towards more convergent positions is traced through a discussion of Common Foreign and Security Policy, the Petersberg Tasks, the solidarity clause, structured cooperation and the European armaments and strategic research agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic thought has often regarded business cycles as asymmetric. This study examines the existence of asymmetries over the business cycle in seven European countries: France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. To analyse this issue, industrial production in these countries from 1957 to 1998 is examined, and quarterly contractions and expansions in this variable are compared. The results obtained with both parametric and non- parametric methods allow the existence of asymmetries in these countries to be questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent investigations concerning the productivity of the UK construction industry and its performance compared with other European and world-wide nations have reported conflicting findings. These investigations have utilized various methodologies in attempting to measure and compare productivity levels. The present investigation uses a customized method to gauge the productivity at site level of three European national construction industries, namely Germany, France and the UK. Analysis of variance is employed to compare the productivity rates used by contractors' planning engineers for a specific concreting operation. The performance of UK contractors is found to be more disparate than those of contractors in either France or Germany. Although leading UK contractors can compete with the best on the continent, there are a number of companies whose performance is far worse than any in France and Germany, due mainly to the construction methods used by UK contractors. It is concluded therefore, that a best practice recommendation for UK contractors would be for them to avoid using traditional timber formwork methods to beams, and instead adopt more productive approaches afforded using either proprietary or prefabricated systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article surveys basic secondary education in France, which bears resemblances with arrangements in other advanced countries of Continental Europe, and from which England may derive some lessons. In the French system only one public examination is taken at intermediate level by average and above average pupils, namely the Brevet d'études du premier cycle (BEPC). In other European countries too there is a corresponding measure of the 16+ attainment. The United Kingdom is unique in considering public examination at 16+ to be of high importance and in mounting an elaborate examination procedure conducted by external examining boards. France retains an external examination for this intermediate stage but only in diminished form.

The article assesses the impact of three distinct types of pressure for regulatory change on the two contrasting sectors of legal and medical service provision. These have been driven by both regional and global integration processes. The article focuses on the distinctive forms of regulatory competition which have developed at the European level, within the framework of a highly managed system of mutual recognition, and on the very different strategies for managing regulatory reform at the national level which have developed in two of the larger member states of the European Union (EU): France and Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]