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.     

Un plafond à caissons : les femmes à l’EHESS

The feminization of employment at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris has fallen off after an early start and it remains low. This is not to be set down so much to the formally discriminating nature of the recruitment examination (concours) as to competition, the accumulation of social capital and the methods for producing job applications. The initial feminization owed much to long inhouse careers, as women were recruited without sitting for an examination but into subordinate positions from which they could move upwards. This trend came to a halt as this channel of recruitment was shut down and a more elitist, relational and competitive one was opened that leads fewer women to enter job applications. The situation is not a stalemate however. A group of women professors has managed to place the gender question on the agenda and this seems to have given a (weak) boost to feminization.     

Pour une sociologie des professionnels engagés : « Mondes de l’art » et militantisme contre la guerre en Irak aux États-Unis

This analysis of the mobilization of American artists against the war in Iraq emphasizes how their work situations have shaped their involvement. Regardless of political organizations and networks, or of the ideological dimensions of the anti-war cause, relations having to do with the work and occupational identities of these persons determined, in the first place, their actions and the positions they have adopted publicly. This article contrasts various “artistic subfields” and “patterns of activity” in order to understand the factors that have made it more or less tenable for these social actors to articulate the identities of artist and activist and, in some cases, to produce “political art”. The second part focuses on the “professional structuring” of this activism by showing how the current operation of artistic spheres — which have become more self-regulated, specialized and professionalized —tend to curb the confusion of issues that mixes aesthetic up with politics.     

Le SAT et l’accès aux études supérieures : le recrutement des élites américaines en question

James Conant developed the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in the 1930s in line with thought about the mobility of elites, a subject that many American as well as European intellectuals were discussing. This test, now used for the admission of high school graduates to universities, was to be a means for detecting talented youngsters and, in fine, producing a model of society. Nowadays, the SAT has a value as a means of effectively comparing students nationwide; but in practice, it serves to reproduce a certain social elite. Far from measuring pure intelligence disconnected from culture, it has turned into a commodity advantageous to certain social groups and ethnic communities.     

Recruteurs sous tensions. Discrimination et diversité au prisme de registres argumentaires enchevêtrés

While most studies on discriminatory practices in recruitment identify them with a single set of motives, this article, based on 57 interviews with recruiters from different sectors, seeks to provide an alternative analytical framework. The requirements for fairness in the recruitment process are taken seriously and used to describe an experience of recruitment that entails grappling with contradictory demands, some related to economic efficiency, others to social justice. Recruiters have to balance these requirements. And whether or not recruitment is discriminatory depends on how the balance is struck and the social and organisational constraints that affect it.     

Confiance et qualité des produits alimentaires : une approche par la sociologie des relations marchandes

Given the current crises, what means do actors implement in order to redefine the conditions for both a social contract and an economic adjustment between the producers and consumers of foodstuffs? These means can be interpreted as ways to cope with the risk of a mismatch between consumer expectations and the quality of produce in the marketplace - as new ways of assembling actors around interests that are not always stable. This quite high degree of indeterminacy, which comes into play throughout the market game, makes it necessary to better understand forms of association among actors and the arrangements that emerge as the market evolves as a function of new forms of adjustment. The actions undertaken by a group of mussel producers in France are reported. Under pressure to standardize produce, they have, nonetheless, imagined solutions for identifying produce and sorts of production so as to force the marketplace to deal with differences in quality. - Special issue on Agriculture and food.     

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.     

Le travail vu par les assistés : éléments pour une sociologie des politiques d’insertion

The relations between “assistance” and “work” are seen from the viewpoint of the beneficiaries of welfare services for integrating them in the world of work. Material was collected during 70 semi-directive interviews with recipients of the minimal welfare payment program (RMI) who had valid “contracts of integration” in three local authorities in the Île-de-France region between 2005 and 2007. The relations of these persons to work differ as a function of their attachment to the norm of autonomy, their resistance to stigmatization and their guilt feelings. They very much depend on beneficiaries’ sociodemographic characteristics and quite diverse backgrounds and itineraries. Three types of relations to the world of work have been detected that enable us to empirically verify the postulate that the most disadvantaged categories have difficulty appropriating the currently widespread norm of individual autonomy.     

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.     

Compter : l’invention de la statistique des fonctionnaires en France (1890-1930)

Civil servant statistics in France were invented on the margins of the state during the period from 1890 to 1930. This invention came out of activist and/or professional rationales that were desynchronized with the drafting or application of polices for reducing the number of government employees. There were three successive phases. At the dawn of the xx^th century, civil servants were counted in order to inveigh against “functionarism” and “depopulation”. During the decade before World War I, counting them was a matter of improving the expertise of statisticians. Between the two World Wars, sharp cuts were made in personnel, while civil service statistics were held in abeyance. By focusing on how civil servant statistics have been produced and used, the approach proposed herein sheds new light on a persistent but paradoxical discourse in France that ignores how many civil servants there are while claiming that there are too many.     

L’après-communisme et le déclin du syndicalisme à l’Est : leçons de Pologne et d’ailleurs

Trade unions in Eastern Europe have declined in almost all aspects since 1989, due not just to economic restructuring but to subjective factors such as reactions to communist-era legacies and skilled workers’ animosities towards the unskilled, which made union officials themselves skeptical of the value of unions. Starting around the turn of the new century, however, five factors now favor revival: survival imperatives of the union bureaucracy, incorporation into the European Union, emerging cross-border labor solidarity, a new generation of workers, and the end of postcommunism in the firm, or the dismissal of unessential workers, which means union officials no longer need to defend the unskilled. Three obstacles, however, continue to work against union revival: ideological (continued distrust of unions), organizational (plethora of small firms), and structural (location in the global economy). Organized labor is likely to remain weak, with a few stronger unions emerging in the manufacturing sector that are more elitist, male, and less class oriented than those in the past, while unions chiefly in the public sector would flounder. Such an arrangement is not conducive to stable liberal democracy.     

L’économie de l’attention : entre protection des ressources cognitives et extraction de la valeur

This general survey of the economics of attention presents the major theoretical models for exploring the mechanisms for “allocating” attention in an economy where it is a scarce resource. Writers have emphasized various means for attracting attention: the recognition, relevance, style and power of the emitter of information. The economics of attention subjects parties on the Internet and in the electronic media to two apparently opposite rationales. The first seeks to protect the attention of users from an information overload and improve its allocation. The second seeks to capture, for firms, the attention of customers or audiences in order to make money from it. Reconciling these two approaches is a challenge for innovation and an asset for competing in the digital economy.     

Matière à spéculer : les produits laitiers saisis par l’écrit

This article seeks to describe the work of dairy products speculators. It reveals the effort, cognitive and material, that enables these actors to handle the widening of their range of action, but also the contraction in the timescale of that action, two dynamics characteristic of the financialization process currently underway in certain international agricultural markets. In contrast with certain works critical of finance, which report a decoupling of the “financial sphere” from the “real economy”, it reveals – through close attention to the graphic media employed – agents who are aware of the materiality of the products they manipulate, despite their growing distanciation, both cognitive and geographical, from the target of their activity.     

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.     

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 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.     

La sociologie du travail en Amérique latine : un essai de périodisation

Even though some areas in Latin America were already industrialized in the 1930s, labor sociology did not appear there till after WW II. Although this discipline followed in the tracks of its North American or European predecessors, the region’s history has affected its development. Three historical phases over the past half century draw attention: industrialization by replacing imported merchandise with goods produced by national firms; the authoritarian governments or military dictatorships that put a halt to the developing homeland economy; and the competitive restructuring that is programming the abandonment of public firms and advocating an export-driven economic model. During each phase, new questions have arisen but without making ideas from the preceding phase obsolete. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Écrire l’incertitude. Le travail à bord des navires de commerce entre stabilisations,prises de risques et responsabilisations

Because of the many sources of uncertainty and opportunities for separation between sailors and the ship, work on board a merchant ship requires a panoply of tools that contribute to the continuity of activity and the identification of active agents. Writing is one of these instruments. Observation of the ship's different written media reveals the difficulty and, at the same time, the need for this organization to be maintained. They reveal the existence of a particular connection between land and sea, while raising issues of responsibility.     

Les politiques d'emploi et la transformation des normes : une comparaison européenne

Given the central orientation of the European employment strategy — adapt unemployment compensation systems so as to broaden access to jobs — the effects of policies in this field are examined by focusing on three axes: the impact on unemployment; the action on employment standards, and trends in the social regulation underlying these policies. A comparative view reveals how much national systems have been able to interpret EU objectives in their own way. This does not invalidate the pertinence of a European level of regulation,but it does expose the conditions for clarifying standards for public actions and leading actors to become involved in EU institutions, a source of legitimacy still to be constructed. This comparison of six national cases (Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom) sheds light on the importance of the social compromises that set the framework for job polices. The quality of occupational transitions is related to the ability of actors to jointly regulate employment policy and labor market standards. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

Quand la formation ne suffit pas : la préparation des étudiants à l’emploi en Angleterre,en France et en Suède

The proliferation of internships and the rise of professionalisation in higher education are, in France, frequently condemned as evidence of a quest for greater employability, driven by a skills-based approach. A comparative analysis of the methods used to prepare students for employment shows the degree to which the social mechanisms are homogeneous in England (employability) and in Sweden (bildning). In France, the transition from higher education to employment entails a process of pre-professionalisation. This is characterised by the dominant role of professional skills and their incorporation into the structure of initial education itself. Rather than the outcome of a process of commodification, this mechanism of pre-professionalisation is explained by the persistence of an idealized conception of “matching” that still profoundly marks the relations between education and employment in France.