Population, Famille et Societe - Population, Family, and Society – serie

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.

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. Their hypotheses and interpretative models differ somewhat with regard of the factors taken into account, and of the underlying logic identified for these processes. The first part of this volume presents a broad discussion of these recent developments. The chapters in the second part have an alpine focus and are dealing more or less directly with the theoretical framework proposed by Dionigi Albera’s book, Au fil des generations. The contributions to the third part of the book are further opening up the field. They leave the alpine terrain and are dedicated to some European contexts, with approaches that are generally influenced by the experience of Albera’s analysis of Alpine Europe.

The study deals predominantly with basic questions of Historical Demography that have so far not yet been tackled, as no adequate sources seemed to exist, or the effort for digging into these problems seemed outrageous. Many major gaps are filled in this study, based on two types of sources: 14 census-like nominal population listings for 126 parishes of the Zurich countryside, complemented by 52 parishes of adjacent areas, and four reconstituted communities with very early parish books. This allowed coming up with detailed population structures by year of age, sex and marital status for the year 1634, with regional variations. Full, detailed mortality tables by sex and for all ages could be calculated for the period 1634–37, by far the earliest mortality tables worldwide. Mortality during plague epidemics was analysed in detail, too, resulting in the first and only plague mortality table. Model life tables are presented as well, showing a pattern that differs strongly from what has been assumed so far. New insights could also be gained about premarital sex and the importance of remarriages.

Families are actors and drivers in migration and refugee crises. However, the current protection frameworks privilege the individual over the family unit. Consequently, the stories of families in migration have remained under-researched and their challenges under-addressed. This volume explores the interplay between family, separation, and migration in the Middle East, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and in the context of the 2015 global refugee crisis. Guiding it are two questions: How do family, migration, and separation play out across geographical, political, and historical contexts? And what are the gaps in the protection of migrants and their families? Thirteen authors – academics and practitioners – discuss the international protection for refugees, migration governance, child mobility, disability and immigration, human trafficking, and dilemmas in refugee reporting.The book proposes a paradigm shift in the way we cater to the needs and aspirations of families on the move. Its authors offer evidence-based solutions that cut across polarized discussions on migration and refugees. As such, the volume is aimed at researchers, students, policymakers, and experts working in international relations, migration, human rights, and refugee protection.

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.

War Hecatomb. International Effects on Public Health, Demography and Mentalities in the 20th Century, 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. Therefore, it is not just another book on World Wars, since it does not focus primarily on political, diplomatic, military or economic aspects. Instead, the work offers a brand new approach on these wars’ consequences, and especially on the civilizational significance of the Great War of 1914-1918. This original view over societies coping with the aftermath of the two world wars reveals how states and different agents were compelled to act and to face the new post-war reality, bringing to light an innovative social agenda while simultaneously trying to cope with the overwhelming phenomenon of physically and mentally scarred multitudes of veterans and their families. The book focuses on the consequences of conflicts in different perspectives and geographic locations. In twelve chapters, several aspects and effects of wars are analysed through different lens.

This book reconstructs fundamental aspects of family organization across historical Poland-Lithuania, one of the largest political entities in early modern Europe. Using a plethora of quantitative measurements and demographic microsimulation, the author captures and elucidates the complex patterns of leaving home and life-cycle service, marriage and household formation, along with domestic group structures and living arrangements among different subpopulations of Poland-Lithuania, highlighting a variety of ways in which these patterns were nested in their respective local and regional contexts. By showing that at the end of the 18th century at least three distinct family systems existed in the Polish-Lithuanian territories, Szoltysek challenges a number of orthodoxies in the ‘master narratives’ on the European geography of family forms of F. Le Play, J. Hajnal, P. Laslett, and their followers. Volume two of the book contains an extensive bibliography along with a thorough archival documentation of the census-like microdata used in the book, and provides detailed information on their quality and further technicalities pertaining to data analysis.

This book reconstructs fundamental aspects of family organization across historical Poland-Lithuania, one of the largest political entities in early modern Europe. Using a plethora of quantitative measurements and demographic microsimulation, the author captures and elucidates the complex patterns of leaving home and life-cycle service, marriage and household formation, along with domestic group structures and living arrangements among different subpopulations of Poland-Lithuania, highlighting a variety of ways in which these patterns were nested in their respective local and regional contexts. By showing that at the end of the 18th century at least three distinct family systems existed in the Polish-Lithuanian territories, Szoltysek challenges a number of orthodoxies in the ‘master narratives’ on the European geography of family forms of F. Le Play, J. Hajnal, P. Laslett, and their followers. Volume two of the book contains an extensive bibliography along with a thorough archival documentation of the census-like microdata used in the book, and provides detailed information on their quality and further technicalities pertaining to data analysis.

The importance of significant family contexts that are not easily circumscribed with reference to a household or a limited set of family roles has been underlined throughout the last two decades by researchers. A strong interest for family relationships beyond the nuclear family has emerged in the social sciences. The various contributions to this book develop a configurational approach to families, which emphasizes interdependencies existing among large numbers of family members, and reconsiders some of the central issues of family life in this light: fertility projects, childcare and socialization, monetary transfers across generations and support for the elderly, relationships with grandparents, uncles, aunts and in-laws, gender inequalities, divorce and other family disruptions, and the importance of friends and acquaintances for families. Beyond very real changes affecting the structures of family life since the sixties, the book reveals that basic forms of togetherness still underlie much of what is going on in family configurations.

Is the Asian stem family different from its European counterpart? This question is a central issue in this collection of essays assembled by two historians of the family in Eurasian perspective. The stem family is characterized by the residential rule that only one married child remains with the parents. This rule has a direct effect upon household structure. In short, the stem family is a domestic unit of production and reproduction that persists over generations, handing down the patrimony through non-egalitarian inheritance. In spite of its ambiguous status in current family typology as something lurking in the valley between the nuclear family and the joint family, the stem family was an important family form in pre-industrial Western Europe and has been a focus of the European family history since Frédéric Le Play and more recently Peter Laslett. However, the encounter with Asian family history has revealed that many areas in Asia also had and still have a considerable proportion of households with a stem-family structure. The stem family debate has entered a new stage. In this book, some studies that benefited from recently created large databases present micro-level analyses of dynamic aspects of family systems, while others discuss more broadly the rise and fall of family systems, past and present. A main concern of this book is whether the family type in a society is ethno-culturally determined and resistant to changes or created by socio-economic conditions. Such a comparison that includes Asian countries activates a new phase of the discussion on the stem family and family systems in a global perspective.