This article analyzes the role of law in the surveillance and prevention of occupational risks within a large public bureaucracy in France, based on a comparison of three services: a listening unit, an occupational health service, and an inspection mission. Each of these services offers legal intermediation activities that frame forms of legality, ranging from the most spontaneous to the most formal normative references. These references to the law make it possible to differentiate situations in order to create an occupational risk prevention policy that favors actions within the organization rather than external recourse. Deprived of any judicial horizon to use effectively to transform working conditions, the legal intermediaries in charge of occupational health and safety are nevertheless relying, even if in a differentiated way, on the law to work towards better risk prevention.

This article explores the impact of public sector employment on attitudes to retrenchment of social spending from a household perspective. The idea the employees of the public sector will stand together to preserve public spending exists throughout the literature on support for and persistence of the welfare states. The empirical evidence for this link, however, has been poor. In this article, I show that this link can be established when studying it from a household perspective. Using a nationally representative survey from Denmark I show that people living in a household where one or both are employed in the public sector are more willing to spend more on the public sector. This effect is, however, only for some policies – unemployment benefit, social assistance, education grant, and integration services – which were generally the least popular policies in the eyes of the public.

Is China's public bureaucracy overstaffed? To answer this basic question objectively, one needs to define public employment in the contemporary Chinese context; survey data sources available to measure public employment; and finally, compare China's public employment size with that of other countries. Using a variety of new sources, this article performs all three tasks. It also goes further to clarify the variance between bianzhi (formally established posts) and actual staffing size, as well as other permutations of the bianzhi system, especially chaobian (exceeding the bianzhi). A key finding is that China's net public employment per capita is not as large as often perceived; quite the contrary, it is one-third below the international mean. However, it is clear that the actual number of employees in the party-state bureaucracy has grown – and is still growing – steadily since reforms, despite repeated downsizing campaigns. Such expansion has been heavily concentrated at the sub-provincial levels and among shiye danwei (extra-bureaucracies).