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The Second World Congress of Sociology will be organized by the International Sociological Association (ISA) under the auspices of UNESCO from August 24 to September 1, 1953 in the city of Liege, Belgium. Sociologists of all countries of the world, professors, research workers and students, are cordially invited to take part in this Congress and are asked to contact the ISA Secretariat for registration and detailed information. The Congress will be centered on the presentation and discussion of papers in two major fields including social stratification and social mobility and intergroup conflicts and their mediation. It will also include important discussions of recent development in sociological research and of the problems relating to the professional activities and responsibilities of sociologists. All papers and reports to be prepared for the Congress will be duplicated and distributed in advance and will be presented by general reporters to be followed by prepared discussants for each section or sub-section.

The article focuses on the negotiations of the Franco-Belgium military accord of 1920. The military relations of France and Belgium were of utmost importance because their joint power could be used as a defense against Germany. When the Franco-Belgium military accord was signed on October 27, 1920, it brought with it a storm of protests from anti-militarist Socialists like Flemings and others. With the increasing intensity of the protests, the accord was cancelled and it was decided that a policy which is solely and exclusively Belgian was required to govern the military affairs in Belgium.

This paper presents some empirical evidence, for Belgium, the Netherlands and France, on the so-called 'administrative inflation' hypothesis. The hypothesis might be defined as saying that price increases are higher in more concentrated industries, given positive changes in demand and costs. Empirically speaking, it implies that, for a cross-section of industries, wholesale-price changes are a positive function of concentration ratios, for given increases in demand and unit costs. Although any relevant evidence would be an interesting contribution to the present discussion about the Common Market's antitrust policy, the hypothesis has never been confronted-to my knowledge-with data from European Economic Community (E.E.C.) countries. The evidence presented in this paper is limited to the 1958-65 period, because of the difficulty in collecting comparable data form earlier years. As we were more familiar with Belgian data, Belgium was selected as a test case to detetmine the most appropriate empirical specification of the hypothesis. A few changes in Weiss's approach proved to be beneficial and are discussed in section it together with the data and results obtained for Belgium. In section III, results for the Netherlands are compared with the Belgian evidence on the basis of an analysis of covariance. Section IV introduces France while the last section draws some conclusions as to the validity of the hypothesis in a European framework.

This paper attempts to test whether some propositions, explaining the number of children desired by women of urban American settings, are equally valid in explaining those of women of an urban European setting (Louvain urban area, Belgium). Attention focuses on the ‘institutional socialization theory’ which states that differences among Catholic women are to be explained by a difference of degree of exposure to the value system of the Catholic church in their formative years including college education, more specifically to the amount and extent of Catholic education. This theory, however, fails to explain the empirical data. In order to do so, the author elaborates the ‘avoiding status incongruency theory,’ or, positively formulated, the ‘status congruency theory.’ This miniature theory states that if one has a high social status and one is a highly integrated church member, one is seeking also to have a high status in the church by practicing the total church ideology and having, among other things, a large family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hill's typology of comparative family research is a challenging attempt to classify international, e.g., cross-cultural, research. This paper intends to criticize some details of this classification, particularly concerning methodological issues. The main point stressed here is the problem of the reconceptualization of the research problem for each different country in which the research has to be carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigators seeking to determine public opinion during the last half of the nineteenth century have too often overlooked the foreign office archives, particularly those of Belgium and Switzerland. The Belgian envoys reported official and other opinions gathered in the usual fashion, but they were expected to be more thorough and discerning than members of other foreign services in reporting opinions of the press. At times, the envoys summarized the opinion of the press and translated excerpts from leading papers, in most cases, however, they enclosed the clippings, being careful to give the name of the journal and the date. As often as they felt it necessary, a note on the political complexion of the journal was added. In addition to the clippings forwarded officially, Baron Lambermont, the most active and distinguished Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had some of the consuls report press and other opinion to him privately. Realizing the growing influence of the press in the nineteenth century, the Belgian authorities made a special collection of articles. It contains both clippings and copies taken from the periodicals of many countries between 1860 and 1922.

This study shows that environmental factors do at times influence human relations in industry, but that satisfactory relations as such can contribute, nevertheless, to industrial peace. Data for the study were acquired in Belgium during the first quarter of 1956. In an effort to create structures which would help to reduce industrial conflict the Belgian government passed the Economic Reorganization Law of 1948 which required the setting up of enterprise councils in every plant employing 50 or more workers. The only significant relationships are those between strikes in 1953 with production and employment levels in 1954 and production in 1954 with strikes in 1956, the correlation being .733 and the chance probability .028. For example, the coal industry is consistently high in strikes and low in production and employment. The human relations approach stresses the patterns of interaction in explaining action or sentiments. It is felt that the major influence which shapes sentiments, and hence industrial peace or conflict, is the nature of the human relations which prevail between labor and management in an industry. Among other things, satisfaction with these councils is in effect satisfaction with a stable structure of labor-management relationships. In other words, satisfactory human relations as such do contribute to industrial peace.

The article discusses biographic data of several local subsidiary managers. Biographic data was gathered from 130 non-American executives in 27 subsidiaries of 12 U.S. companies in Belgium, France, and Great Britain. The biographic data resulted in some discrepancies with conclusions that are usually gathered from material related to this topic. Among the better educated managers, the expatriates advance faster than the non-American. According to the author, the three most plausible reasons are that the people sent abroad are individuals who have showed rapid upward mobility by virtue of past performance or qualifications, Americans are able to advance faster, or innovations within the firms originate in the U.S. so that U.S. personnel have the experience to transfer the innovations.

Influence exerted by husbands and wives at different stages in the decision process was examined for 25 economic decisions in a convenience sample of Belgian households in which both spouses were questioned. The analysis considers changes in marital roles throughout decision-making and extent of role consensus within families. Implications are discussed in relation to communication strategies as well as for research on household economic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on the implications of the chlorine attack in Ypres, Ieper, Belgium the first true measure of the chemical escalation that preceded the massive gas attacks of World War I. In April 1915, The French and British Commands were taken by complete surprise with the Germans in a chlorine attack. However, this gas attack did not occur without prior warning. The preceding months had seen the slow steps of escalation which began with the combat use of tear gas by both sides as early as October 1914. Upon the attack at Ypres, the poisonous gas became one of the greatest casualty- producing agents used in combat.

This article deals with a strike ordered by the National Federation of Physicians' Unions in Belgium in 1964. The strike started because of the failure of the government and the medical corps to agree on reforms in the Belgian sickness insurance program requested by the union. The causes of the financial difficulties involved in the program include an increase in the number of beneficiaries and additional allowances for drugs and hospital care. Two events in 1961 have increased the tension between the medical corps and its adversaries. Then a number of Belgian doctors cooperated with the Federation to conduct the strike.

Several abstracts are presented for articles pertaining to international marketing. They include "Statistical Abstract of Latin America," by C. Paul Roberts, "French and EEC Grain Policies and Their Price Effects, 1920-1970, by Helen C. Farnsworth and Karen J. Friedmann, and "Spirits and Liqueurs in Belgium."

The article explores the individual characteristics of top managers in Belgium and their career path in their firms. Studying only the practices of managers is not sufficient to grasp in depth the functioning of applied management systems in firms. Management is the result of a compromise between a value system and the internal and external constraints which weigh on the firm. Basically the socio-cultural background of managers is usually studied with respect to two variables: the father's profession and education. As far as the father's profession is concerned, it appears that two out of five managers are sons of top manager. And when the education is concerned, it appears that 75 percent of the top managers went to college, 12 percent received advanced training somewhere other than at college, and 13 percent did not go any farther than high school. When talking exclusively industrial character of top managers, 87% of the members had never worked anywhere else than in industry, while 13 percent came to it from public administration. If one examines the education, professional qualities, and social origin of individuals, the top managers' professional success can always be mainly attributed to one of these factors.

The article presents information about an international conference, Transportation Research Forum and the College of Europe, to be held at the College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium, from June 18-22, 1973. The theme of the conference will be "Current Issues in Multi-Modal Transportation," and will focus primarily on matters of inter-modal and international significance. The issues to be discussed will span all modes of transportation and their inter-modal relationships, and will concern both passenger and freight movements. The issues will reflect the perspectives of the public and of the private sectors, and will concern research, policy and planning, as well as operations. Descriptive outlines of proposed papers, in English (300-400 words), should be submitted before December 1, 1972 to: Professor Marvin L. Manheim, Room 1-138, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, United States; or Dr. H. Brugmans, Rector, College of Europe, 8000-Bruges, Belgium.

Three miniature theories constructed to account for patterns of task allocation in marriage are compared for their explanatory power on data collected from similarly designed samples of American and Belgian families. Cultural prescriptions theory fails to explain either American or Belgian findings. Availability theory, namely, that the more available a spouse is to perform family tasks, the more tasks he is likely to perform, best explains American task allocation but does less well in explaining the Belgian findings. Family development theory which puts availability theory into time perspective over the family's life cycle explains best both American and Belgian variations in task allocation. Task performance, task specialization, and adherence to gender definitions of task assignments are shown to vary in both settings with changes in the size and composition of the family over its life cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Points out that the population record of Belgium displays areas of marked deterioration which show strikingly against the general background of growth. Population growth categories; Language frontiers, which compares cultural differences within the country; Peak dates in population growth; Areas of decline; Areas of growth.

Delves into the geography of some countries. Discussion of the conditions of countries such as France, Great Britain, Germany and Belgium; Analysis of local causes of factors such as low prestige of geography in some countries; Importance of improving the conditions for geographic research.

The article presents a speech by Murray A. Geisler that was given at the 8th Annual International Meeting of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) in Brussels, Belgium on August 24, 1961. The speech discussed the role of TIMS in the field of management science, the international role of the organization and in particular the role of the European section of the organization. Geisler also discussed his research into logistics while working for the RAND Corporation in collaboration with the U.S. Air Force.

The article discusses the political parties of Belgium after its liberation. It states that the Belgian Catholic Party has always been a conglomerate constituting different economic strata and differing political opinions. After the liberation, the Belgium's Liberal Party had the support of high finance groups although most of its followers have come from the middle class, small business men, civil servants and liberal profession members.

This article discusses modern studies in the sociology of religion in France and Belgium. Modern studies in France and Belgium are predominantly conducted by Catholics who have had no formal sociological training. Their interest dates from the publication of a popular three volume work by a Jesuit priest, Pierre Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieu which cited facts to prove the diminution of religious influence among the working classes in the Paris suburbs, and was followed by the publication of a book on the scarcity of priests in France by Paul Doncoeur, La crise du sacerdoce, and by later similar publications. The facts revealed by Lhande did more than influence public opinion, for they led a professor of the history of canon law at the Sorbonne University, Gabriel Le Bras, to begin his career in the sociology of religion by writing his first article of a series in the Revue d'histoire de I'Eglise de France. In Belgium, as in France, Catholics are in the forefront of studies in the sociology of religion. Canon Jacques Laclercq, has had two courses in the subject within his department at the University of Louvain, another Catholic, a research assistant at the university, Mlle Claire Leplae, was one of the first to do modern-type research in the field: Pratique religieuse et milieu, Bulletin de I'Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales, XIII.

The article reports on industrial democracy in Belgium. In order to appreciate the significance of revolutionary law, it is essential to see it as a response to a widespread and growing demand throughout the whole of the industrial capitalistic world, a demand that has become extraordinarily loud and insistent in Western Europe since the war. This is the demand of the working classes to be considered no longer as a mere extrinsic element or part of the production costs in the plant to which they contribute the best part of their time and energy, but rather to be admitted to a more organic role of participation with capital in the rights, responsibilities, and fruits of the enterprise in which they play such a key part. Thus alone, they maintain, will inherent dignity and value of their labor receive just recognition, and their personality and initiative, crushed out in the modern impersonal factory system, be given a chance once more to express themselves in work. In the United States also the same tendency is unmistakably present, but general opinion seems to look on such pretensions of labor as either too radical or too premature to have any chance of success for a long time to come. Witness the opposition on the part of capital to Philip Murray's proposal some years ago of a national system of labor-management industrial councils.

This article presents information about a survey of recent Belgian population policy. Belgium is one of the most thickly populated areas in the world, with an average density of rather more than 279 inhabitants per square kilometer. Belgium, like other industrial nations of the western world, has for fifty years been experiencing a rapidly declining birth rate with a consequent ageing of her population. The total population of a country is affected by three major factors-births, deaths and migrations. The government's policy is concerned with all three but, since purely demographic considerations cannot be isolated from the general national approach to social welfare and public health and the political and economic tensions and strains peculiar to the nation, its intentions, successes and failures must be viewed in their proper setting. Any population programme in Belgium, as indeed any national programme in whatever sphere of activity, is faced with deep racial-linguistic conflicts, and particular attention must be given to regional needs and desires.

The article presents findings from one part of a major research project, carried out in Belgium, on computer use in business firms. The project's objective has been to explain the kind and degree of computer use in terms of the firm's task. The research design was based on the considerations that the existing literature contains too many speculations and even contradictions' to suggest a coherent and consistent set of research hypotheses and too much of the research is in the form of case studies covering one or a few firms. This raises doubts about the generality of the conclusions of these studies. Moreover, possible differences as to the use of computers in the Anglo-Saxon business world and in the Belgian business environment have never been investigated and no systematic study has previously been made of characteristics of the firm's task to explain the use of computers. The research project has two parts. Part 1 studies the impact of the task environment on computer use and part 2 is a study of the organizational consequences of computer use.

This article focuses on Great Britain's dependence on the Antwerp, Belgium money market for loans or credits during the sixteenth century period. The reasons for this dependence are largely explicable in terms of the size and frequency of royal demands for credit, the inability of the English money market to satisfy such demands, and the contemporary dominance of Antwerp both as an international capital market and as a center for English trade. There can be no doubt that intermittently throughout these thirty years Britain's demands for credit were extraordinarily heavy. A few random illustrations reveal the enormous scale on which credit was periodically demanded. The localization of financial transactions in the famous bourse and an advanced system of brokerage facilitated the rapid satisfaction of borrower and lender. Also, to Antwerp there migrated, and at Antwerp were developed, some of the greatest fortunes of the sixteenth century.

The article reports on issues and topics related to the global nuclear energy development. Belgium and Great Britain has signed an agreement providing for the sale to Britain of uranium from the Belgian Congo. In relation to this agreement, an atomic power plant will be built within a few miles of the center of Brussels to provide electricity for the World's Fair of 1958. Seven British scientists, headed by Dr. B. F. J. Schonland, left London for a six-day visit to the Soviet Union. The First International Training Course for Health Physicists opened in Stockholm, Sweden on November 11, 1956.