Society

What is the nature of our current societies? Do we see a clash of civilizations, or the end of history? The advent of globalization, or the birth of the network society? Are we witnessing the emergence of a risk society, or the advent of the knowledge society? More fundamentally, is ‘society’ an ideological construct that should be abandoned? Coming into English from the Latin term ‘societas’ via Old French ‘société’, the etymology of ‘society,’ in the sense of a system adopted by a group of co-existing individuals for mutually beneficial purposes, can be traced back at least to the mid-sixteenth century. By the Age of Enlightenment, ‘society’ was increasingly used in intellectual discourse to characterize human relations, often in contrast to notions of ‘the state’. During the nineteenth century, the concept was subject to highly elaborate treatment in various intellectual fields, such as political economy, philosophy, and legal thought; and ‘society’ continues to be a central conceptual tool, not only for sociology, but also for many other social-science disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, political sciences, and law. The notion resonates beyond the social sciences into the humanities; it is a fundamental concept, like nature, the universe, or the economy. Moreover, ‘society’ remains a highly contested concept, as was demonstrated, for example, by the controversy surrounding the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s pithy assertion of the neoliberal economic wisdom that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987); and by the term’s rehabilitation at the turn of the twenty-first century, not least with the ascendancy of the notion of ‘civil society’. This four-volume collection, a new title in the Routledge Critical Concepts in Sociology series, brings together both canonical and the best cutting-edge research to document the intellectual origins and development of what remains a key framework within which contemporary work in the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, proceeds. Edited by Reiner Grundmann and Nico Stehr, two leading scholars in the field, this Routledge Major Work makes available the most useful, important and representative treatments of the subject matter, and helps to make sense of the great variety of perspectives and approaches in which social scientists and other thinkers have understood, and continue to understand, society. Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction newly written by the editors, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Society is an essential reference work, destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource.

Back from the future:the second chance in the past of aller + infinitive

Typological studies (Bybee et al. 1994, Dahl 2000, Bourdin 2008 among many others) have shown a tendency for spatial elements (such as movement verbs) to grammaticalise into temporal expressions. The periphrasis made of aller + infinitive has been very productive in Romance languages. If in French, Spanish or Portuguese, it refers to future, it refers to a simple past in Catalan. fr.: je vais aller au cinéma esp.: voy a ir al cine pt. Vou ira o cine cat.: vaig anar al cine Barceló & Bres (2005:168) indicate that, In French, «vers le XVIème siècle, […] la périphrase a brièvement fonctionné comme un temps du passé (alors même que l’emploi comme temps du futur émergeait)»: (1) Sur ces propos, firent leur accord et, en regardant le lieu le plus propre pour faire cette belle œuvre, elle va dire qu’elle n’en savait point de meilleure ni plus loin de tout soupçon, qu’une petite maison qui était dedans le parc, où il y avait chambre et lit tout à propos. (Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron) The future value took over so much so that Damourette & Pichon (1911-1936 :117) claimed the past value had disappeared»: Un second tour, encore plus aberrant, n’a plus, que nous sachions, aucune position en pays d’Oui. Nous voulons parler de l’expression d’un passé au moyen de l’auxiliaire aller, suivi de l’infinitif. Ce tour a eu une grande fortune dans le provençal ancien et le catalan […] En français, on n’en trouve que des traces, notamment du XIVe au XVIe siècles . Ex.:[…] Adoncques s’arrêtèrent le conte et Raimondin soubz un grand arbre ; lors va dire le conte à Raimondin: […]. Et Raimondin va lui dire : Sire, ce qu’il vous plaira. That allegedly extinct use is nonetheless alive and kicking in Contemporary French. Larreya (2005:349)notes that it is « très courant dans les récits – en particulier dans les récits oraux» and it is also found in newspaper language as shown by this except from an obituary for Loulou Gasté (Le Monde 1995): (2) Celle-ci se déroule aux Editions Micro, où il a un bureau. Séduit par la jeune interprète, il commence à lui écrire des chansons sur mesure et leur complicité va mettre cinq ans à se transformer en amour. Au début de leur rencontre, Loulou est neurasthénique parce qu’il vient de divorcer et la future Line, exclusivement préoccupée par son métier, ne songe à rien d’autre. Line et Loulou vont rattraper le temps perdu et créer ensemble un millier de petites chansons dont la plupart sont devenues immortelles. Jusqu’à ces derniers mois, il ne va pas se passer une journée sans que Loulou s’empare de sa guitare pour créer un refrain. Would we be witnessing a linguistic resurrection? The same structure seems therefore to have grammaticalised in diverging and even diametrically opposite ways in different Romance languages. In this talk, we shall try to explain how the phrase aller + infinitive is able to function both as a future and a past. We will especially concentrate on the case of contemporary French where, while the future interpretation has obtained the status of tense as futur proche or périphrastique, a past interpretation is now commonplace. Our reflection will be supported by a personal corpus of authentic examples.

A new three phase method (SDP method) for the multi-objective vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delvery and pickup (VRPSDP)

Transportation service operators are witnessing a growing demand for bi-directional movement of goods. Given this, the following thesis considers an extension to the vehicle routing problem (VRP) known as the delivery and pickup transportation problem (DPP), where delivery and pickup demands may occupy the same route. The problem is formulated here as the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pickup (VRPSDP), which requires the concurrent service of the demands at the customer location. This formulation provides the greatest opportunity for cost savings for both the service provider and recipient. The aims of this research are to propose a new theoretical design to solve the multi-objective VRPSDP, provide software support for the suggested design and validate the method through a set of experiments. A new real-life based multi-objective VRPSDP is studied here, which requires the minimisation of the often conflicting objectives: operated vehicle fleet size, total routing distance and the maximum variation between route distances (workload variation). The former two objectives are commonly encountered in the domain and the latter is introduced here because it is essential for real-life routing problems. The VRPSDP is defined as a hard combinatorial optimisation problem, therefore an approximation method, Simultaneous Delivery and Pickup method (SDPmethod) is proposed to solve it. The SDPmethod consists of three phases. The first phase constructs a set of diverse partial solutions, where one is expected to form part of the near-optimal solution. The second phase determines assignment possibilities for each sub-problem. The third phase solves the sub-problems using a parallel genetic algorithm. The suggested genetic algorithm is improved by the introduction of a set of tools: genetic operator switching mechanism via diversity thresholds, accuracy analysis tool and a new fitness evaluation mechanism. This three phase method is proposed to address the shortcoming that exists in the domain, where an initial solution is built only then to be completely dismantled and redesigned in the optimisation phase. In addition, a new routing heuristic, RouteAlg, is proposed to solve the VRPSDP sub-problem, the travelling salesman problem with simultaneous delivery and pickup (TSPSDP). The experimental studies are conducted using the well known benchmark Salhi and Nagy (1999) test problems, where the SDPmethod and RouteAlg solutions are compared with the prominent works in the VRPSDP domain. The SDPmethod has demonstrated to be an effective method for solving the multi-objective VRPSDP and the RouteAlg for the TSPSDP.