Crónicas, reliquias, piedras legendarias y coronaciones en la Edad Media

Este artículo es un estudio histórico de la leyenda de la «Piedra del Destino», que fue parte del asiento del trono de coronación de los reyes de Escocia y que fue trasladada a la abadía de Westminster por el rey Eduardo de Inglaterra, que la situó bajo el trono de la coronación de los reyes de Inglaterra. La «Piedra del Destino», como muchas reliquias y antigüedades de la Edad Media, tuvo una larga historia, escrita por cronistas e historiadores. Una historia muy semejante a otras translationes de reliquias. La historia de la «Piedra del Destino» contiene ricos aspectos jurídicos, políticos y sacrales. Para comprenderlos es necesario analizar las crónicas, entendidas como textos históricos, que dan sentido a los rituales jurídicos y políticos de la Edad Media.

Discovering keys to explain social policies within the social and democratic rule-of-law sate

There is a collective worldview on social policies that is expressed and understood by university professionals. However, it takes students time to construct this knowledge. Here, we provide fundamental ideas and a dynamic to facilitate learning of social policies. The preparation of a brief dictionary of significant terms is to be constructed as a group, alongside the maieutic work to be carried out by the teacher. The goal is to discover keys to understand the meaning of social policies and the underlying values that sustain a social and democratic rule-of-law state such as the one proposed in the Spanish Constitution of 1978. Attention is focused on the structure of the mixed welfare state. This is an integral proposal and comprises three dimensions. First, it considers the state and its possible welfare agents: business, market, the Church and civil society. The attitudes with which universal and inclusive social action is promoted, breaking radically with the aid-based meaning contained in other systems, are then addressed. Finally, we examine human dignity as a principle and aim of intervention, a basis for understanding other concepts such as human, social, labour and political rights. It is to be hoped that these pages prove useful for both teaching staff and students.

Discourses on Modernization in the Employment Public Services: Towards a New Form of Governance?

The “crisis of the social issue” in the EU has led to a certain consensus in the need to renew the organizational and institutional model of public administration. The core of the reform implies important administrative changes in most of the European welfare states. Those changes are inspired on theories such as the new public management, management by objectives or partnership. Such changes involve both semantic (“sharing responsibilities”, “effective costs”, or the substitution of “citizen under an administration” by “consumer”) and political (predominance of scattered forms of power and the individualization of responsibilities) transformations which operate in the framework of individuals and State relations. The paradigms of activation and flexicurity have been central in this public administration modernization project. This commitment with new forms of governance of social issues has important consequences for the political and moral foundations of social cohesion, and the Spanish case is not an exception. This paper aims at looking at those representations of “modernization” (as they appear in debates about the employment services restructuring policies) in detail as well as providing references to the trajectory of such reforms of public services since the early eighties to the beginning of the crisis.

The duty of loyalty in the cooperative law. A comparative study

Among the duties of the government bodies’ members of the different entities, which are connected to the good government, the duty of loyalty must be underlined. This duty, derived from the good-faith duty, obliges to act in the interest of the entity in case of conflict of interest, and to subordinate one’s own interests, except when there is an authorisation. Loyalty duty is applicable both to managers, who must manage the entity’s interest, and to partners, according to the common purpose derived from the company contract. This duty, at the same time, includes some particular rules, referred to transparency, remuneration, prohibition of competition, self-contracting... This essay compares the regulation of the duty of loyalty and its realizations in the different Cooperative Laws in Spain, both referring to the managers and to the partners, comparing this, at the same time, with the regulation of these aspects in companies’ general legislation, an in the Spanish Corporate Enterprises Act in particular, in order to obtain a general view of the issue, a necessary basis to go more deeply into it, and suggesting some preliminary conclusions or assessments.