Le marché comme rencontre d’activités de régulation : initiatives et innovations dans l’approvisionnement bio et local de la restauration collective

How to apply Jean-Daniel Reynaud's theory of social regulation to market relations? When applied to the results drawn from fieldwork on the supplying of organic and local produce to catering businesses serving public institutions in France, this grid of analysis shows that organizing this supply chain involves many activities of regulation. An explanation is provided about how hard existing regulations make it to search for local produce. Two contrasting cases show the degree to which the parties involved can skirt around existing regulations and also, use certain regulations to construct new ones. The innovative regulations that enter into application are qualified as being “joint”, since they stem from the efforts of the parties in catering and in agriculture to agree about how to organize transactions, which had previously been done through the work of market middlemen. In that case, instead of reasoning in terms of a pre-existing supply and demand, we have to understand how supply and demand gradually take shape through the process of working out regulations.     

De la vigne à la rue : la difficile mobilisation des petits viticulteurs dans le département de l’Aude

The European Commission's specialized services are trying to tighten their grip over viticulture by invoking the legitimating figure of a “new consumer”. Accordingly, growers who work small vineyards are unable to make a wine adapted to market trends. They should, therefore, withdraw from wine-growing and enjoy the subsidies granted by the EU for uprooting vineyards. In Aude Department, southern France, small wine-growers take issue with this analysis, which, in their opinion, caves in to the pressure exerted by traders and hypermarket chain stores. However, there have been no protest actions against the Commission's decisions. This can be explained by the way the EU's policy is embedded in national and local conflicts. Although we cannot point to any joint plan, administrations, trade associations and political parties are developing practices that prevent organized protests.     

Entre « passion » et incertitude : la socialisation au métier de footballeur professionnel

On the basis of a socioethnographic survey conducted in a professional soccer training center in France, the means of occupational socialization are analyzed in this demanding, captivating institution. Light is shed on how trainees appropriate this professional world and its requirements. As they enter this social universe, they encounter a key tension. On the one hand, training calls for a heavy investment that trainers and trainees experience as a “passion” and understand as being separate from the world of “ordinary” work. On the other hand, it is also a major source of uncertainty as to trainees’ prospects, given its intense selectivity and the few outlets in the labor market. It requires of trainees a strong commitment in time, body and spirit with prospects so uncertain that the course of training is seldom free from periods of soul-searching.     

Le métier de pornographe : rhétorique, contrôle et savoirs d’un groupe professionnel discrédité

This article deals with the professionalization of heterosexual pornography in France since 1975. Although pornography is discredited by public authorities and lacks any institutionalized training programs, pornographers have developed an occupational rhetoric whereby they present themselves as the entrepreneurs of fantasy, claim sexual expertise and control a masculine, heterosexual business. They present the boundaries of sexual and gender identities as natural, and the professionalization of pornography relies on a differential distribution of the know-how underlying a sex-based division of labor. This professionalization of sexuality involves not only a work of legitimation for turning sex into a subject matter for pornography but also an appropriation by men of sexual know-how and knowledge. What defines the job of pornographers is not only the turning of consumers’ fantasies into images but also male control over female sexuality.     

Crise de la rationalité industrielle et transformations de la prescription. Une étude de cas

Studies of industrial rationality should be reconsidered given the thoroughgoing changes under way. We have switched from a Taylorist rationality based on Scientific Management, which claimed to fit production into a single viewpoint, to a dissemination of the sources of the directions to be followed and an overall destabilization of any attempt at rationalization, and as a consequence, to a looser sense of rationality even among engineers. But this does not at all benefit wage-earners. Often without bearings, they have to cope with instructions; but have a harder time doing so whenever their organization provides them with few tools for coping and whenever the instructions, or part of them, are contradictory.     

Le temps de l'activité de la caissière : entre logique productive et logique de service

At first sight, the worktime put in by cashiers at checkout counters seems homogeneous, continuous and repetitive. An empirical study of hypermarket cashiers in France shows, on the contrary, that the time spent working is relatively discontinuous and diversified. It is similar to the time on the job put in by semiskilled workers in industry. What characterizes cashiers' work is their having to manage flows of both products and customers. Their worktime can, therefore, be understood as a compromise that comes out of balancing productivity with human relations, a compromise that sometimes causes conflict. By acquiring an “incorporated know-how”, cashiers manage to fill their assignment.     

Pour une approche sociologique de la comptabilité Réflexions à partir de la réforme comptable chinoise

Based on research on state-run companies in China, the reform of Chinese accountancy is examined so as to show the advantages of a sociological approach to accounting. How can bookkeeping interest sociologists? First of all, it has come out of struggles between various parties and addresses social issues. Secondly, it conveys models of reality, in particular of what is and is not a firm. Thirdly, it produces history in that it shapes economic practices and expectations. Finally, there is a high degree of coherence between the bookkeeping system, the form of a firm, the operation of the economy and the management of social questions. These various points turn accountancy into a legitimate subject of study for sociology and provide an interesting approach to analyzing broader phenomena and processes.     

Les apories de la solidarité familiale Contribution à la sociologie des configurations de justice entre les familles et l’État, dans le cas français

Despite its many meanings, “solidarity” has once again become current in French to describe macro as well as microsocial relations. Social relations in and outside the family have not always been understood as instances of solidarity. But is this solidarity the same as the one established by the welfare state? Forms of family solidarity that have risen in esteem over the past two decades are “deconstructed”. The conditions for family solidarity are examined; and conceptual paradoxes, described. This approach suggests that family solidarity, as this concept is normally used, mixes together several systems of justice that should be clearly distinguished, especially if we want to put this phrase to a judicious social use.     

Les ajustements de la technique médicale face aux règles de droit

During the 1990s, partly as a result of accusations of medical malpractice, doctors’ obligations were reinforced; and patients’ rights, recognized. In a lawsuit brought on the grounds of liability, the doctor and his/her qualifications are accused; and the doctor's identity and sense of professional honor, affected. This has serious risks for medical practices and, more broadly, medicine. This research based on interviews with doctors shows that the specialty, type of practice and nature of the establishment expose doctors to more or fewer risks and thus partly determine how they adjust techniques to cope with the risks of a lawsuit. The professional identity (including the values and practices to which interviewees referred) and the consciousness of their symbolic status (related to the place and type of practice) are keys for understanding practitioners’ behaviors. Assuming that a doctor's sense of professional identity is shaped by his/her sense of responsibility, relations with patients and concern for achievement, it is hypothesized that these three dimensions and their possible combinations explain the adjustments, or lack thereof, made by doctors.     

Un atelier d’écriture internationale : l’OCDE au travail. Éléments de sociologie de la forme « rapport »

The writing of a “transversal” report on employment at the OECD is examined by focusing not on the finished product but, instead, on the drafting of the report. This approach allows for exploring the dynamics of power at work inside the OECD. It opens toward broader considerations about how this type of international organization produces knowledge in economics and weaves relations, throughout the long process of drafting the report, with those who requested it. This article analyzes how economic issues are assembled through a succession of intermediate studies and reshaped through an asymmetrical competition between services. By making visible the process of constructing the position of “institutional author”, this analysis repositions on new grounds the problem of “influence”, which usually arises in organizations of this sort.     

Syndicalisme et délitement du salariat artistique : la CGT et les groupes mobilisés autour du régime de l’intermittence

In a context of strong growth and intense social struggles related to the employment conditions of media industry worker on short-term contracts in France, attention is drawn to the difficulties that the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) has had organizing performers and stage hands in show business (cinema, theater, etc.). This labor union must deal with a large number of young professionals who pay no mind to the rules and norms related to wage-earning and no longer consider them to be a common good. Working in small groups that produce shows, these professionals regard their occupation as a vocation, value the hyperflexibility of their working conditions, pay scant attention to the distinction between employer and employees, and tend to deny the specific characteristics of their jobs and skills while referring, instead, to a blurry set of qualifications.     

La transition théâtrale dans l'ex-RDA : vers la recherche de nouvelles formes de régulation organisationnelle

Organized around a very dense set of public institutions, the theater world in the former German Democratic Republic has undergone major changes since reunification. New organizational models have come into being, often imported from West Germany, that jeopardize the foundations of theater practices in the East. In East Germany, people working in theater were strongly protected: homogeneous training, lifetime employment, the stability of forms of artistic cooperation, etc. Since reunification, a new division of labor and a new human resource management have been imposed in public theaters. The profession’s rules are changing as the itineraries of theater people are being individualized. The diversification of the theater world makes public institutions fragile. On the basis of field work in Saxony, questions are raised about how public theaters are being recomposed in the East. Attention is paid to individual and collective movements and to the movements of organizations.     

Le temps du remue-ménage. Conditions d'emploi et de travail de femmes de chambre

It is now admitted that part-time work is a signal of inequality between the sexes, in both work and family. By focusing on cleavages among women, an analysis is made of how worktime and the company’s position as a subcontractor combine so as to produce inequality among wage-earners by assigning them heterogeneous statuses and thus forcing some of them to cope with precarious working, employment and living conditions. This study of the working and employment conditions of chamber maids in France focuses on those who work part or full-time in cleaning companies under contract with other firms. Inside this rather unskilled group of women, part-time work stresses the differences produced by subcontracting and worsens the inequality between stable, full-time employees and the women subcontracted at part-time who do the same job. These cleavages set off a strike among these part-time workers. Analyzing this labor dispute has shed light on the social relations running through the firm and on invisible issues in work and employment for these women with jobs in the shadows.     

« Adieu les artistes, here are the managers » : les réformes managériales au sein de la DG Développement de la Commission européenne

The managerial reform of the European Commission's DG Development-formerly DG8-started in the 1990s. Placed in a historical perspective, this reform is seen as the temporary outcome of a long process for bureaucratizing an institution marked, since its origins, by the pervasiveness of patronage. The sociology of the principal parties involved in the DG8 and their changing coalitions are linked to the powers and instruments successively used to establish this institution's authority and legitimacy and to professionalize its procedures for allocating aid to countries in Africa, the Caribbean Basin and the Pacific. Light is shed on this incomplete bureaucratization, punctuated by successive expansions of the EU, as new member-states have sought to rationalize the DG's operations in order to better control it.     

Les infortunes de la vertu. Sociologie d’un répertoire d’action patronal

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the sociology of employer organisations, by combining input from work recently conducted in France, with research — notably in the field of Science and Technology Studies — on lobbying and public relations activities pursued by companies to repudiate or downplay the dangers to health or the environment posed by their activities or products. Drawing on a study focused on the Comité des salines de France, an organisation that represents French industrial salt producers, we explore the strategies that industrial firms employ to defend their reputation and that of their products when doubts are cast on their safety. This enables us to demonstrate the existence of a common repertoire of strategies — both trans-sectorial and transnational — employed by these actors.     

Que faire de la compassion au travail ? La réflexivité stratégique des avocats à l’audience

The article explores the way in which professionals who are exposed to people's testimonies of suffering manage to integrate compassion into their work. Research has shown how compassion is a problematic emotion for such professionals, and has identified the forms of reflexivity that they employ to handle the tensions that such feelings arouse. By examining legal work — in particular the practices of lawyers in a criminal trial where a large number of victims are present — the article makes a new contribution to the study of compassion in the workplace. It identifies the normative repertoire which lawyers use to construct an appropriate attitude towards victims and analyses how, within the framework of strategic reflexivity, lawyers mobilise this repertoire to suit the particular interests they are representing at the trial.     

Les émeutes urbaines de l’automne 2005 : cadres d’analyse et points aveugles de la sociologie française

Sociological interpretations of the suburban riots in France during the autumn of 2005 have been the subject of many a comment. This critique places the more original interpretations in the context of the unstated paradigms adopted by “understanding” authors, who have sought to provide a meaning to persons whose actions were supposedly deprived of it. There is a flagrant need for studies of how the crisis was globally managed with respect to local events - as if the persons involved in regulating the riots were not as worthy of study by sociology. Case studies are emerging to fill this need that have more awareness of the interactions between parties during these events.     

L’adaptation des modèles de production dans les pays émergents L’exemple de l’industrie automobile en Argentine

How to test for the existence of a new model of production based on the firm lending an ear to customer demands and valuing the individual and collective intelligence of its work force? The facts for putting this model to the test of reality come from an analysis of two Argentinean automobile-makers, subsidiaries of Toyota and Volkswagen. Various aspects of their organization policy provide evidence of their capacity for making adaptations by “hybridizing” the parent firm’s model with the rationales inherent in the network of local actors (suppliers and labor unions, in particular). These firms are open systems with a narrow margin of maneuver. — Special issue: Latin America.