Moment of stasis: the successful failure of a constitution for Europe

The 2005 French and Dutch negative votes on the Constitution open up a space of conceptualisation, not only of Europe's relation to its demos, but significantly to its failures. Through a critical analysis of mainly Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, the article proposes taking a distance from traditional constitutional dogmatics that are no longer capable of dealing with the paradox of contemporary society, and more specifically with the eventual resurgence of the European project as one of absence and stasis: the two terms are used to explain the need, on the one hand, to maintain the 'absent community' of Europe, and, on the other, to start realising that any conceptualisation of the European project will now have to take place in that space of instability and contingency revealed by the constitutional failure. The relation between law and politics, the location of a constitution, the distinction between social and normative legitimacy, the connection between European identity and demos, and the concept of continuity between constitutional text and context are revisited in an attempt to trace the constitutional failure as the constitutional moment par excellence.

Telaprevir or boceprevir based therapy for chronic hepatitis C infection: Development of resistance-associated variants in treatment failure

The use of triple-therapy, pegylated-interferon, ribavirin and either of the first generation hepatitis C virus (HCV) protease inhibitors telaprevir or boceprevir, is the new standard of care for treating genotype 1 chronic HCV. Clinical trials have shown response rates of around 70–80%, but there is limited data from the use of this combination outside this setting. Through an expanded access programme, we treated 59 patients, treatment naïve and experienced, with triple therapy. Baseline factors predicting treatment response or failure during triple therapy phase were identified in 58 patients. Thirty seven (63.8%) of 58 patients had undetectable HCV RNA 12 weeks after the end of treatment. Genotype 1a (p = 0.053), null-response to previous treatment (p = 0.034), the rate of viral load decline after 12 weeks of previous interferon-based treatment (p = 0.033) were all associated with triple-therapy failure. The most common cause of on-treatment failure for telaprevir-based regimens was the development of resistance-associated variants (RAVs) at amino acids 36 and/or 155 of HCV protease (p = 0.027) whereas in boceprevir-based regimens mutations at amino acid 54 were significant (p = 0.015). SVR12 rates approaching 64% were achieved using triple therapy outside the clinical trial setting, in a patient cohort that included cirrhotics.

Success or failure in knowledge management systems: a universal issue

This paper takes a sociotechnical viewpoint of knowledge management system (KMS) implementation in organizations considering issues such as stakeholder disenfranchisement, lack of communication, and the low involvement of key personnel in system design asking whether KMS designers could learn from applying sociotechnical principles to their systems. The paper discusses design elements drawn from the sociotechnical principles essential for the success of IS and makes recommendations to increase the success of KMS in organizations. It also provides guidelines derived from Clegg’s Principles (2000) for KMS designers to enhance their designs. Our data comes from the application of a plurality of analysis methods on a large comprehensive global survey conducted from 2007 to 2011 of 1034 participants from 76 countries. The survey covers a variety of organizations of all types and sizes from a comprehensive selection of economic sectors and industries. Our results showed that users were not satisfied with the information and knowledge systems that they were being offered. In addition to multiple technology and usability issues, there were human and organisational barriers that prevented the systems from being used to their full potential. We recommend that users of KMS are integrated into the design team so that these usability and other barriers can be addressed during the feasibility stage as well as the actual design and implementation phases.

The troubling concept of class: reflecting on our ‘failure’ to encourage sociology students to re-cognise their classed locations using autobiographical methods

The troubling concept of class: reflecting on our ‘failure’ to encourage sociology students to re-cognise their classed locations using autobiographical methods Abstract This paper provides a narrative of the four authors‟ commitment to auto/biographical methods as teachers and researchers in „new‟ universities. As they went about their work, they observed that, whereas students engage with the gendered, sexualised and racialised processes when negotiating their identities, they are reluctant or unable to conceptualise „class-ifying‟ processes as key determinants of their life chances. This general inability puzzled the authors, given the students‟ predominantly working-class backgrounds. Through application of their own stories, the authors explore the sociological significance of this pedagogical „failure‟ to account for the troubling concept of class not only in the classroom but also in contemporary society.