Reshuffling Paperworkers: Technological Change and Experiences of Reorganization at a Québec Newsprint Mill

This article offers an historical-geographical account of how an aging newsprint mill located in Gatineau, in the Outaouais region of western Québec, with serious obstacles to cost-effective production, came to be chosen for a complete in situ technological reorganization project in the early 1990s. This apparent paradox is explained by locating the mill with respect to the production system and corporate strategy of its parent company, with respect to changing production and demand requirements, and with respect to its particular labour relations history. We focus on the process through which this drastic reorganization was implemented at the mill, showing how logistical considerations particular to this type of continuous-process industry, as well as procedures laid out in the labour contract, influenced the company's timetable and labour deployment strategies during this period. We show how the process of technological reorganization helped create the conditions for the subsequent implementation of functional flexibility. We also refer to the unpredictable contingencies that necessitated building flexibility into the timetable for downsizing the workforce by some 450 jobs. As well as considering the constraints faced by local management, we explore how the reorganization process was experienced by workers, especially those facing prolonged uncertainty as to their future at the mill. We examine the seeming paradox of the prevalence of overtime at the mill even as workers were being laid off. In conclusion, we critically discuss the appropriateness of concepts such as management strategy and numerical flexibility and point to the need for further concept development to facilitate analyses of labour deployment strategies adopted during periods of production reorganization.     

The history of head injuries: an overview

The history of cerebral trauma is a large subject and this overview is an attempt to summarise the main trends of understanding and management over the millenia. Although beginning with anthropological evidence, papyrology and Homeric times, the main impetus for its scientific study began with Hippocrates, but little progress was made until the Salernitan period. Because the ancients believed it was the fractured bone and not the underlying neurological status that mattered, and determined whether an operation was to be performed, the classification of head injuries was based on the types of skull fracture and not the underlying neurological damage. Only in recent centuries was it realised that it was not skull fractures that were important but the brain lesion. Further improvement in management occurred during warring periods but the lessons learned were not passed on, although mortality from military wounds has steadily declined. Since only a small percentage of head injuries require surgery, consideration should be given to reserve the time and skills of the neurosurgeon to those cases requiring his expertise; this would require that the preliminary care should be undertaken by physicians with a specific interest in this field.     

Language as apparatus: entanglements of language,culture and territory and the invention of nation and ethnicity

Postcolonial linguistics has shown that African languages emerged from a complex figuration of missionary, scientific and colonial practices. The article interprets this emergence as the result of an existential onto-epistemological dislocation stabilised through the hegemonic project of colonialism. It rests on an apparatus of modernity that separated nature and culture/society and stabilised this new order with a particular notion of language as an autonomous object. In the nineteenth century, language enters a conjunction of territory and culture, which played out in Europe in the terms of a nationalist, hegemonic trajectory and in Africa as the fractionation of ethnic/linguistic groups and the pervasive linguo-ethnification of contemporary societies. Thus, language can be understood to be an apparatus productive of nationalism as well as ethnicity. In an attempt to demonstrate the plausibility of this conceptualisation, I show how today these trajectories have effects in that Afrikaans in South Africa as ethnified language loses and Swahili in Tanzania as national language gains ground at the respective universities. Both languages compete with global academic English, which despite its colonial heritage appears as a deterritorialised, culturally neutral language.     

ON THE PLAUSIBILITY OF THE SUPPLY-DRIVEN INPUT-OUTPUT MODEL: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON JOINT STABILITY*

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses the issue of the plausibility of the supply-driven input-output model from an empirical standpoint. We suggest that requiring production coefficients to remain perfectly fixed during an application of the supply-driven input-output model is unnecessarily restrictive given the extensive use of approximation methods in mathematics, economics and regional science. Simulations with the supply-driven version of an input-output table for a representative region are shown to result in changes in the corresponding production coefficients well within conventional tolerance levels.     

Evidence of butchery and hominid activities at Torralba and Ambrona; an evaluation using microscopic techniques

Torralba and Ambrona have been interpreted as butchery sites for many years, a contention recently challenged; natural death or carnivore activities are invoked as an alternative explanation. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of bone surface replicas distinguishes among hominid-produced cutmarks, carnivore tooth scratches, and other types of bone damage. A sample of 102 replicas, comprising the most likely cutmarks on a combined sample of roughly 3000 fossils from Torralba and Ambrona, were scanned to determine the major agent of damage. Microscopically verified cutmarks are present, but rare, occurring in less than 1% of the bones in the combined sample. Carnivore tooth scratches are comparably rare. In contrast, evidence of sedimentary abrasion, which obliterates the diagnostic features of cutmarks, is present on nearly every bone from Torralba and Ambrona. It remains unresolved whether cutmarks were initially more common on these bones and were subsequently obliterated by abrasion, or whether the incidence of cutmarks was always low. These data demonstrate clearly that hominids and carnivores each damaged some bones at Torralba and Ambrona, but the frequency of each type of mark is too low to confirm strongly the interpretation of these sites as either butchery or carnivore remains.     

Historiography: An Introduction

This introduction precedes the four papers given in October 2000 in Copenhagen on analysing problems in the history of the neurosciences. The term historiography can be defined in different ways but means the study, and not simply the writing, of history. Although it goes back two millenia, it is a rapidly developing field as illustrated by the subsequent contributions.