Damien Rousselière

Constructing the legitimacy of a financial cooperative in the cultural sector: a case study using textual analysis

This article investigates the foundations of cooperative identity and how it is constructed by the organization. More specifically, our research focuses on a financial cooperative in the simultaneously emerging and consolidating cultural sector. The originality of this article lies in the methodology used – textual analysis. We use the Economies of Worth model developed by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), which accounts for a plurality of legitimate forms of evaluation used in the processes of critique and justification.

Decomposing the effects of time on the social acceptability of biotechnology using age-period-cohort-country models.

The study of European attitudes toward biotechnologies underlines a situation that is relatively contrasting in Europe. However, as different effects of time can influence the social attitudes (a life-cycle effect, a generational effect, and an exogenous temporal effect potentially affecting the entire population), an appropriate methodology should be used. To this end, age-period-cohort-country models have thus been estimated based on Eurobarometer data from 1991 onward. Applied to different data subsets, these models give similar results underlining the importance of the life-cycle effects as well as the heterogeneity of the link between political affiliation and biotechnologies attitudes across the European countries.

Is biotechnology (more) acceptable when it enables a reduction in phytosanitary treatments? A European comparison of the acceptability of transgenesis and cisgenesis.

Reduced pesticide use is one of the reasons given by Europeans for accepting new genetic engineering techniques. According to the advocates of these techniques, consumers are likely to embrace the application of cisgenesis to apple trees. In order to verify the acceptability of these techniques, we estimate a Bayesian multilevel structural equation model, which takes into account the multidimensional nature of acceptability and individual, national, and European effects, using data from the Eurobarometer 2010 73.1 on science. The results underline the persistence of clear differences between European countries and whilst showing considerable defiance, a relatively wider acceptability of vertical gene transfer as a means of reducing phytosanitary treatments, compared to horizontal transfer.