La chiropraxie est une thérapie manuelle fondée à la fin de XIXème siècle aux Etats-Unis. Au cours du XXème siècle, cette profession a su, dans certains pays, s’insérer progressivement au sein du système de santé et académique. Aujourd’hui, en France, la chiropraxie est définie comme une profession de la santé visant à la prévention et au traitement des troubles neuro-musculo-squelettiques.En marge de cette évolution, certains chiropracteurs adoptent une approche thérapeutique conservatrice, en accord avec les principes fondateurs de la chiropraxie. C’est particulièrement le cas dans le domaine de la prévention, où les soins de wellness sont parfois utilisés en chiropraxie. Les soins de wellness peuvent notamment être composés d’ajustements chiropratiques, visant à prévenir primairement les troubles neuro-musculo-squelettiques, mais aussi les troubles non neuro-musculo-squelettiques.Les travaux constitutifs de cette thèse ont pour but d’étudier la prévention en chiropraxie, principalement chez des patients asymptomatiques. La première revue systématique de la littérature a mis en évidence le fait que les chiropracteurs souhaitent effectuer des actes de prévention primaire auprès de leurs patients, y compris des soins de wellness. Cependant, les patients chiropratiques ne souhaitent pas consulter pour ces motifs. La deuxième revue systématique a montré que la prévention primaire/secondaire précoce des troubles non neuro-musculo-squelettiques n’est pas soutenue par l’évidence scientifique. Enfin, l’enquête effectuée auprès des étudiants en chiropraxie a montré que ces derniers ont des difficultés à identifier les cas de non-indications au traitement chiropratique préventif chez les patients asymptomatiques. Il a également été montré que ces difficultés sont associées à leurs opinions conservatrices envers la chiropraxie. / Chiropractic is a manual therapy founded in United States at the end of the XIXth century. During the XXth century, progressively in some countries, this profession succeeded to be integrated in the health care and academic systems. Today, in France, the chiropractic profession is defined as a health profession allowed to prevent and treat neuro-musculoskeletal disorders. However, some chiropractors have a conservative therapeutic approach, following the original principles of chiropractic. This approach is used in a form of chiropractic prevention, called wellness care. This type of care can especially include chiropractic ‘adjustments’ of the spine to primary prevent both neuro-musculoskeletal and non neuro-musculoskeletal disorders.The main goal of this theses is to study chiropractic prevention, mainly on asymptomatic patients. The first systematic review showed that chiropractors are willing to offer primary prevention care to their patients, wellness care included. However, chiropractic patients are not willing to consult a chiropractor for this motive. The second systematic review showed that primary/early secondary prevention of non neuro-musculoskeletal disorders is not supported by the scientific literature. Finally, a survey carried out on chiropractic students, showed that they have some difficulties to correctly identify chiropractic non-indicated cases on asymptomatic patients. These difficulties were found to be associated with their conservative approach to chiropractic care.

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In chapter one, by exploiting the staggered interstate banking deregulation as exogenous shocks to bank geographic expansion, we examine the causal effect of geographic diversification on systemic risk using the gravity-deregulation approach developed in Goetz, Laeven, and Levine (2013, 2016). We find that bank geographic diversification leads to higher systemic risk measured by the change in conditional value at risk (ΔCoVaR) and financial integration (Logistic(R2)). Furthermore, we document asset similarity and bank inter-connectedness as two channels to explain the documented results. The impact of geographic diversification on systemic risk is more pronounced in BHCs located in states comoving less with the U.S. aggregate economy. In chapter two, by integrating the staggered interstate bank deregulation into a gravity model, we construct a time-varying bank-specific instrument for geographic diversification, and investigate how geographic expansion affects borrowing firms’ innovation. Our approach disentangles the effects of bank deregulation on geographic expansion from competition and isolates its direct impact on innovation via the lending channel. Bank geographic diversification boosts borrowing firms’ innovation input and output, enables firms to expand innovation scope beyond core business, and enhances the economic value of innovation. We find that relaxing debt covenants and alleviating borrowers’ financial constraints are two channels through which bank geographic diversification spurs innovation. In chapter three, we construct a novel bank-specific and time-varying measure of deregulation-induced bank competition following Jiang, Levine, and Lin (2016) and Goetz (2017), and investigate the causal effect of bank competition on borrowing firm’s accounting conservatism. We find that bank competition leads to an increase in firm accounting conservatism. Moreover, we find that bank competition intensifies lenders’ monitoring in that banks impose more strict and intensive covenants on bank loans, and bank monitoring reduces the probability of default of borrowing firms, and thereby result in more conservative reporting of borrowing firms. Our findings are robust to alternative accounting conservatism measure C-Score and potential multicollinearity issue.

The issue of work-life balance and work-life conflict has become increasingly important as the relationship between employer and employee becomes more flexible. This situation has blurred the line between what was once clearly the place of work and the place of life. Various studies have found evidence linking poor work-life balance to increased rates of adverse health outcomes, increasing the need for organisational cultures, policies, and interventions to better address the phenomenon’s underlying antecedents, mediators, and aggravators. However, knowledge of these mechanisms has often remained limited, and many have called for greater expansion of the individual characteristics that get accounted for in research and intervention design. Using a mixed-methods approach in a Swedish context, it was explored whether conservatism (social + economic) was one of these characteristics, testing for a significant relationship with work-life conflict. The quantitative findings (linear regression) showed a significant and positive relationship between social conservatism and work-life conflict. In contrast, economic conservatism had a significant and negative relationship with work-life conflict. These relationships held while controlling for demographics (age, sex, living status), psycho-social characteristics (class identity, emotional stability, work-life satisfaction), and occupational characteristics (working hours, education, job demands and control). The qualitative aspect explored different causes and strategies of work-life conflict across low, medium, and high self-rated conservatives, using content analysis to find any latent differences. The qualitative findings suggest that individuals higher in conservatism prefer strategies to cope with work-life conflict that focus more on order and stability compared to those lower. The overall findings have implications for research and policy that address work-life balance issues. It also suggests there is room to expand our traditional conceptualisation of conservatism as a general tendency beyond any political system of thought.

This study tests the relationship of the 6 ideological variables and 7 contextual variables to shifts in ideological alignment through a latent class regression analysis for three periods of years (1972-1978, 1980-1992, 1993-2006). The latent class regression models determine the number of identifiable classes for each model. Using ideological realignment theory (Abramowitz and Saunders 1998) this study finds there has been a moderate polarization of opinions that has occurred, as well as, a moderate hardening of ideological beliefs with moral issues during the third time period becoming the driving force in ideological makeup. With regard to the culture wars hypothesis (Hunter 1991) there seems to be so much randomness in peoples overall ideological makeup that it hardly suggests a salient culture war is taking place. It also seems to matter very little what opinions individuals express on domain specific issues with regard to political ideology.

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The emphasis of this work ls on the common theme found in the three recent works of Stuart Hampshire (Morality and Conflict), Alasdair Macintyre (After Virtue) and Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice). I call this theme "moral conservatism". While I believe that the "moral conservatives" are correct in their attempt to establish morality within society rather than in abstraction, their method of generating moral rules through social discourse seems to conflict with their own belief in certain vague notions of justice and equality. on close examination the method of the moral conservatives appears to be hermeneutic in that it involves the re-establishment of appeals to tradition and authority within the context of discourse. Given this hermeneutic element I have found that Habermas 's critique of hermeneutics can also be applied to their methodology. The result is a solution to the initial conflict. Habermas's analysis of universal pragmatics and the ideal speech situation provide a means of introducing constraints on the outcome of social discourse about norms. These constraints, because they are inherent in all social discourse, are universal. Nevertheless, they are not abstract in that they do not derive from an appeal to pure reason; rather, they are inherent in social discourse itself. This modification of the moral conservatives' approach indicates the possibility of combining the concreteness of historical relativism with a universal element usually found in a historical and indeed antihistorical ethical theories. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Tracing the construction of gender neoliberalism in the United Kingdom with the context of austerity measures and increased social divisions stemming from the European Union referendum, this research analyses the way political discourses act to legitimize gender neoliberalism as the hegemonic rationality in the Conservative Party. Undertaking a comparative case study approach, this study aims to examine the evolution of neoliberal rationality in political discourses between the two female Prime Ministers of the country, namely, Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. It seeks to add to the body of literature on right-wing politics and gender, through the theoretical framework of intersectionality to consider the implications of the rhetoric on intersecting forms of oppression, specifically, of gender and socioeconomic status. This aim will be achieved through the research question of: How is (implicitly and explicitly) gendered and classist neoliberal rationality promoted and legitimized in the political discourses of Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May? Additional sub-research questions will guide the research in terms of its comparative approach and consider the prominence of neoliberal feminism in the discourses as well. This analysis will be conducted through a corpus of speeches, articles, and interviews by the two politicians in their first year and a half in office. The research employs a feminist critical discourse analysis to understand the way ideology and power in discourses maintain gendered social hierarchies. The analysis found a relatively stagnant evolution of gender neoliberalism between the leaders, where deeply gendered and classist discourses continued to be legitimised but through a different neoliberal focus.

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Understanding the mechanisms that generate shared morphologies across closely related taxa is important when identifying distinct evolutionary lineages using morphological characters. Desmognathus salamanders are an ideal group for testing hypotheses concerning the correlation between morphological similarity and genetic exchange within and among nominal species due to a pattern of high discordance between the two. Phylogeographic hypotheses are tested for populations of the D. quadramaculatus species complex throughout southern Appalachia by combining phylogenetic and population genetic methods with geographical information. Phylogenetic and phylogeographic inferences are then assessed in conjunction with morphological characteristics that have traditionally diagnosed taxonomic entities to understand the genetic basis of shared morphology in this complex, and to assess species boundaries. A history of fragmentation followed by range expansion is suggested as a recurrent pattern that has shaped the current population structure within this complex. The current taxonomy is found to unite populations that share similar morphologies due to parallel evolution rather than ancestry. We suggest revisions in taxonomy that will better reflect the evolutionary history of these lineages. Appreciation of the hidden genetic variation and homoplasious morphological variation often present in and among salamander species can foster the implementation of more appropriate methods for detecting and recognizing the complex history of these organisms.