The trade unions membership dynamics and union members’ trajectories

This text presents an analysis of aggregated membership’s dynamics for Spanish trade unions, using ECVT data, as well as union memberships’ trajectories, or members’ decisions about joining the organization, permanency and responsibilities, and subsequent attrition. For the analysis of trajectories we make use of information of the records of actual memberships and the record of quitting of CCOO, and of a survey-questionnaire to a sample of leavers of the same union. This study allows us to confirm a linkage between the decision and motivations to become union member, to participate in union activities, the time of permanency, and the motives to quit the organization. We also identify five types of union members’ trajectories, indicating that, far from views that assert a monolithic structure, unions are complex organizations.

Hybrid philosophy and rational vitalism in Canguilhem and Ortega y Gasset

This paper explores the problem of the synthesis between vitalism and rationalism, in contemporary philosophy. With this aim, we compare the intellectual careers of Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) and José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). We contrast their conceptions of philosophy as “hybrid” knowledge, closely related to science, as well as their points of view on Vitalism, anthropology, the technique and the perspectivism. To avoid that comparison is purely abstract and ahistorical, we use the method of the sociology of philosophy. This forces us to locate both paths in their respective philosophical fields and generational units, also according to his social background and professional career.