Books in the Population, Famille et Societe - Population, Family, and Society series

Over the past few years, the cross-disciplinary field of research devoted to family and kinship history in Europe has seen the emergence of an important stream of studies developing wide-ranging comparative perspectives on great spaces and long periods.

Cet ouvrage, reunissant une trentaine de contributions, propose une approche historique des fratries dans la longue duree et pour une aire geographique etendue, du Canada a l'Europe. Le volume s'attache a definir et mesurer les fratries, a les analyser comme ressource pour leurs membres et aborde enfin la fraternite, du lien vecu au lien reve.

The book offers new insights on the impact of wars (namely, but not exclusively, World War I), by underlining its social and psychological consequences, particularly in public health, demography, and mentalities in different countries.

This volume discusses family and migration in the Middle East, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America, and in the context of the 2015 global refugee crisis. Topics include: protections for refugees and internally displaced people, migration governance, child mobility, disability and immigration, human trafficking, media and refugees.

In recent labour market history, one of the most striking features has been the increase in part-time employment. In Switzerland, one person out of three works part-time. 57% of women work part-time compared to only 13% of men. This disparity between women and men is one of the highest worldwide. At the same time, differences in the level of education between genders are disappearing. Given the magnitude of this phenomenon, new questions and challenges need to be addressed. By presenting several econometrical models and taking into account historical and social gender focused behaviors, the author analyzes the impact of part-time employment on earning disparities, labour market segmentation and the probability of being promoted to a higher level of responsibility. While introducing ways to improve the situation for part-timers, the author examines innovative models of work organization such as job-sharing, top-sharing, functional flexibility and project team rotations. Beyond demonstrating the need for changes within public and private companies, the book also reveals concrete instruments on policy which could facilitate the implementation of such innovative models.

Labouring Lives unravels the huge changes which have so fundamentally altered the life courses of ordinary women over the past one hundred and fifty years, namely the changes in marriage and fertility patterns. Using dynamic data from Dutch population registers and analytical techniques from the life course approach, the book offers new evidence on women's changing position in the labour market, their role in pre-nuptial sexuality, and their contribution to marriage and fertility change in the Netherlands between 1880 and 1960. The author reconstructs the socio-economic and demographic worlds of different groups of working and non-working women, and by doing so she is able to locate the various groups driving the changes. Advanced statistical tools enable the author to analyse differences in fertility strategies, stopping versus spacing, employed by various social and cultural groups in the Netherlands. This book leads to conclusions which challenge a number of orthodoxies in the field.

The study presents the oldest detailed mortality tables worldwide, for the year 1635, including model life tables. Mortality tables are also provided for the times of plague epidemics, something never done before. Gaps are also filled with population structures and age pyramids, with premarital sex and with the importance of remarriages.

Only in France is demography essentially the population science: it is taught at school, newspapers feature the evolution of fertility rates in their headlines and the subject sparks ideological debates in the media. How did demography become a national identity issue?The French exception is attributable to a political history that reached fulcrums during the Second World War under the racist Vichy regime and then after the Liberation, with the development of population policies and the creation of the French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). The book is the first to retrace its controversial genesis and analyze its ramifications for the following decades. It shows how theories, institutions and demographic policies developed simultaneously in France. Its reflection on the links between ideologies, science and the state offers a model that could be applied to the history of many other scientific disciplines.Paul-André Rosental¿s indispensable study examines the emergence of demography as an autonomous discipline and its association with the state in mid-twentieth-century France. Demography¿s success in the immediate post-war years came in part from its dual concern with both "science" and "action," which allowed policy makers to claim both knowledge and expertise in addressing social problems. Rosental¿s measured tone hides a provocative argument that should serve as both a model and a foil for others working in the history of the human sciences.Joshua Cole, University of Michigan.

Qu'y a-t-il de commun entre l'alcoolisme, les maladies veneriennes, la tuberculose? A priori peu de choses, en dehors de leur etiquette commune de fleau social Mais, si chacun presente des specificites propres, force est de contacter la convergence des dangers qu'ils presentent. Ces fleaux sociaux menacent la population. Ils sont la cause d'un surcroit de mortalite dans une France qui se singularise deja par de hauts niveaux comparativement a ses voisins. Mais ils compromettent aussi la qualite de la population en vertu de l'idee selon laquelle ils se transmettent de generation en generation. Aussi, face a un tel danger, les fleaux sociaux font-ils l'objet d'une intense mobilisation qui conduira a la mise en place d'une veritable politique de population que l'expression hygiene sociale subsume. Un ensemble de mesures est portee par des associations reunies au sein d'institutions qui lui sont dediees et ce, en depit de concurrences fortes entre elles. Leur objectif : proteger voire encourager le renouvellement demographique. Le livre s'interesse a l'intense mobilisation qu'ont suscite ces fleaux sociaux et aux actions - le plus souvent convergentes qu'ils ont menes sous le label d' hygiene sociale La lutte contre les fleaux est passee en particulier par l'education des populations. L'analyse de ses contenus, si elle temoigne des balbutiements de l'education a la sante devoile aussi les representations de ce que doit etre la demographie francaise et de ce qui la menace.