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.     

L’intergouvernementalité en reconstruction : le cas du Mexique

Since the 1930s, Mexico has had a dominant party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional; and, despite the country’s federal constitution, decision-making has been so centralized that few powers have been left to the states. Recent attempts to break with this tradition and decentralize educational, health and welfare policy from the federal level to the states and big cities are examined. Three trends might unfold in the future: the establishment of an effective, multicentered decentralization; a surface decentralization without any real impact; or the fragmentation of policies and their impact. The foreseeable consequences of these three possibilities come under discussion. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Privatisation des télécommunications et relations de travail en Amérique latine

This article deals with the privatization of telecommunications in the three largest Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Labor unions have strongly affected the way telecommunications have been privatized in Latin America and its timing, but they have not been able to keep their traditional influence from waning. Comparing Argentina and Mexico brings to light opposite models of labor relations based, for the one, on the denationalization of management and loss of guaranteed jobs for wage-earners and, for the other, on the maintenance of control over telecommunications by local entrepreneurs and the preservation of guaranteed employment. The more recent privatization implemented in Brazil has fueled debate about the consequences on collective action in an era of open-market telecommunications. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Les réseaux de PME en Argentine : une voie alternative ?

Do small businesses in Argentina really form “local networks of production” similar to those in Italy? Institutional, regional (public or private) networks of support for small businesses are identified along with the strategies of various parties and the sorts of agreements worked out between them. A survey of small business networks in four areas chosen for the variety of their output and for their positions in the market and in the chain of production shows that regional networks lack consolidation, except in the Mendoza area, where small businesses, big firms, universities and private as well as public institutions function in an “integrated” network. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Repas ambulants Informalité urbaine et modernité industrielle à la frontière nord du Mexique

The relation between urban informality and industrial modernity is analyzed by examining very small businesses specialized in selling prepared food to workers in the transnational manufacturing plants (maquiladoras) along Mexico’s northern border. In the urban setting along this border, the model of an export-driven industrialization is compatible with premodern aspects of the subsistence economy. In fact, it depends on subsistence activities for its very existence. As a consequence, informal services have emerged that help stabilize the work force needed by these plants. A survey of the owners of these microbusinesses has provided data for analyzing the organization and operation of this commerce and its relation with the family as a social unit. — Special issue: Latin America.     

La restructuration des PMI à Saint-Étienne après la crise : traces du passé et limites de l'intégration horizontale

On the basis of a survey conducted in Saint-Étienne, France, as part of a comparative European project on “modes of governance” in local economies (which, thus, takes into account the level of small and medium-sized industry and the middle level of the territory), questions are raised about the goods and services that enable these industries to be competitive with big firms or holdings. For these industries, solutions developed two decades ago for the machine tool industry, mechanics and metal-working are still significant resources. The momentum detected in a small number of fields can lead to an increasing specialization and horizontal integration that favor a more competitive growth. How to know whether this momentum results from still (temporarily) active remnants of the past or whether it is evidence of a collective impetus that can stimulate new economic growth?     

Externaliser la défense : la politique américaine

This analysis of the thoroughgoing change effected in the US defense industry shows that the Pentagon’s traditional partners are taking a back seat behind private, for-profit service providers. These firms, which provide military services and the “information technology” necessary for modern warfare, now play a key role in the American national security system. Among the factors accounting for this unprecedented sharing of a classical government prerogative with private firms are the redefinition of the government’s role, the technological revolution and the strategic environment related to the global war against terrorism. This role-sharing brings new forces into play. The Defense Department is externalizing strategic activities without all the legislative and institutional means for regulating them, whence the risk of a crisis in the military establishment. The mixed systems coming out of this change are a driving force in altering the civilian and military capability to project power and intervene in the world.     

Dispositifs d’intermédiation marchande et politique des marchés. La modernisation du marché des fruits et légumes en France, 1950-1980

As this study of experiments with organizing the fruit and vegetable market from the 1950s till the end of the 1970s shows, there were alternatives to the principle of distribution, for instance: the modernization of traditional wholesale marketplaces (carreau) or the establishment of veilings (marchés au cadran) controlled by producers. After exposing the rationale underlying each of these arrangements, the empirical conditions are examined for actually modernizing markets. Attention is drawn to the factors that weigh on players in the market, in particular the tensions, on the one hand, between homogenization and concentration and, on the other hand, the singularity of products and transactions.     

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.     

L’Europe et les États-providence

This analysis of the EU's influence on the future of national welfare states points out three distinct phases in the interactions between the building of Europe and of welfare states. During a phase of expansion (1950s-1970s), European authorities were building a common market while allowing member states that were lagging behind in welfare to catch up. During a second phase of conflict (1980s-1990s), advances in the economic construction of Europe caused tensions to flare up with social policies inherited from the past. During a third phase (starting in the late 1990s), EU authorities have been trying to reconcile economic policies with new social policies. To analyze each phase, we must take into account both the EU initiatives capable of having a direct or indirect impact on national welfare systems and the national welfare institutions and strategies that were adopted.     

Introduction. Ce que les écrits font au travail

As is known, large numbers of writings circulate within every kind of professional environment. As a result, there is extensive research on the formats, uses and roles of writings in work. However, the approach taken here is not to describe what is done with writings in work. The central hypothesis rests on a performative vision of writings, one that gives them the power to act, agency. It can be summed up as follows: what do writings “do” to work? Studying work through its writings is a way to connect two dimensions that are too often kept separate: situated activities on the one hand, organizational functions on the other. Indeed, writings are material and robust — though not always lasting — traces of concrete activities, and they provide a handhold for the rigorous analysis of work as close as possible to its conditions of realization. However, writings travel and circulate. They form links between workers, groups, workshops, services, firms, without which production could not take place. They stretch work beyond its source. To track them is therefore to shift the field of enquiry to moments other than the present of the observed situation, and also to other nearby, surrounding workspaces. This brings out the procedural and interactive dimensions of organizations, their integrating capacity. Exploring what writings do to work is therefore not only to place oneself at an intermediate level between situated action and organized action. For the sociologist, it is a way of connecting these two perspectives “on paper”, by embedding the analysis of the actual work in spatially and temporally broader collective actions, and by documenting organizational analysis on the basis of observed work situations. It is a way of contributing to a more extensive ecology of activity, more clearly anchored within its organizational envelope.     

Le modèle de « l'État-stratège » : genèse d'une forme organisationnelle dans l'administration française

Since the 1990s, a new organisational form of the administrative system in France has been steadily redefining relations between central administrations and local state units. Labelled “the steering state” or the “managerial state”, this new paradigm hinges on separating the strategic functions of steering and controlling the state from the operational functions of execution and policy implementation. The making of this new form of state organization involves two parallel processes: political and cognitive. For one thing, the adoption of concrete measures for “government at distance” results from power struggles between three major ministries (Home Office, Budget and Civil Service). For another, a new legitimate “categorization of the state” is being formed in the major committees involved in the reform process of the 1990s; it is borne by top civil servants and inspired by the ideas of New Public Management. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

Le marché a dit. Intermédiaires financiers et managers dans le secteur électrique

The role played in the electricity industry by finance analysts, consultants and rating agencies has received too little attention in research on the liberalization of technical networks. Three arguments are brought forward. First of all, despite any rational argumentation, these intermediaries must be seen as ordinary actors with their interests, drawbacks and cognitive limits. Secondly, they have played an important part in transforming what used to be a tightly regulated industry. Their power mainly derives from their ability to influence the definition of the “right” policies and the production of information prior to decision-making. It takes the concrete form of an oligopoly power over two basic links in the information flow: big operations in the capital market and the ability to make comparisons between firms, sectors and countries and thus recommend the “right” allocation of resources. Thirdly, this quite real power does not have mechanical effects since it reflects a state of equilibrium within the firm, as the case of Suez proves. The relation between markets and firms is more interactive that it seems at first glance.     

Les rejetés de la modernisation

In Brazil unlike France two very split labour markets co-exist, the formal and the informal. On the formal labor market in Brazil, union rights prevail, and wage-earners are protected unlike in the informal labor market where none of this exists. Raising industry to an international level pushed many wage-earners out of the formal sector during the 1980s. Did they find jobs elsewhere? If so, in which branches of the economy? To provide answers, two files are crossed, their data having been made longitudinal. Dismissed workers’ trajectories from 1989 till 1995 in two branches and two regions are analyzed: the automobile industry in the São Paulo area and the petrochemical industry in the São Salvador (Bahia) area. These career trajectories shed light on how modernization has affected quite different labor markets; it also brings to the foreground the concept of a systemic restructuring of the labor market. — Special issue: Latin America.     

« Le Premier Cercle » : le Kruzhok de Heidelberg et la nationalisation de la chimie russe

In the 1860s and 1870s, Russian chemistry was rocked by a series of charged nationalist polemics, alleging that German chemists had been engaged in jingoism, bias, and poaching the discoveries of Russian chemists. These salvos from leading members of the Russian Chemical Society (established 1868) formed the core of the Russian contribution to some of the earliest and clearest claims that natural knowledge revealed a national character. This paper traces the origins of these disputes to a specific location: Heidelberg in the late 1850s and early 1860s. After the humiliating defeat of Russian forces by a Western European coalition in the Crimean War (1854-1856), the Russian government resolved to “modernize” its major institutions to enable it to compete more effectively against its former opponents. Alexander II and his ministers decided to export Russian postdocs to leading Western universities (mostly in the German states) hoping that these graduates would be able to erect modern scientific institutions within Russia upon their return. This paper focuses on the chemists among them, most of whom ended up at Heidelberg University (including their most famous representative, D. I. Mendeleev, later renowned for his 1869 formulation of the periodic system of chemical elements). While there, they experienced profound alienation from their German peers, and retreated to their own environments — particularly the Russian urban institution of the kruzhok or “circle.” This kruzhok, formed as a reaction to perceived German xenophobia, was the major social institution upon which the Russians — once back in St. Petersburg — could construct a Russian Chemical Society and the basic institutions of Western scholarship. The supposed venture into Western Europe resulted not in a hegemonic submission to the institutions of German academia, but rather to a revitalization of a Russian cultural form that proved both adaptable to the demands of technical professionalization and became a kernel for a Germanophobic nationalism that would permeate the sciences in the ensuing decades. The paper concludes with an analysis of three different styles of scientific nationalism in chemistry: the representative, concerning the preferential employment of Russians over Germans in state institutions; the linguistic, about the proper national language(s) for science; and the internationalist, whereby Russians defended the cosmopolitan in science to attack perceived German jingoism.     

Brèves réflexions sur la reconnaissance d'un « droit à la différence alimentaire » dans le commerce international

We repeatedly hear that the World Trade Organization's rules (modified in 1994 to reinforce the principle of worldwide free trade) tend to inevitably uniformize culture in food, among other things. Whether in the case of bovine growth hormones or genetically modified organisms, WTO rules will ultimately impose a single food model as a universal reference mark. In France, these ideas crop up in talk about malbouffe (bad eating) and calls for a return to democratic choices or for instituting a fundamental “right” to freely choose food habits. Even though such talk has sometimes confused the issues, it has shed light on how the food question is presented in international trade. Increasingly, the issue is to defend national or regional values, or even choices about the type of society. What place do WTO rules reserve for these values ? Under what conditions can such values justify exemptions from free-trade rules and, ultimately, the maintenance of a “right to food differences”? As the European Union is thoroughly changing food legislation in line with its own concepts - the precautionary principle, the plurality and independence of procedures for evaluating foodstuffs, the well-being of animals, etc. - the answers provided to the foregoing questions will be decisive. - Special issue on Agriculture and food.     

La responsabilité sociale des entreprises, un projet européen en panne

The European Union (EU) has developed a special approach to corporate social responsibility by incorporating it into its strategies of employment and social cohesion and of sustainable development. This should make it possible to diffuse the European social model inside and outside the EU. Through an unprecedented dialog between institutions and “civil society”, the EU planned to explore the possibility of a consensus on a framework for corporate social responsibility. This article seeks to shed light on the perilous disconnection between European institutions, companies and society at a time when the corporate social responsibility practiced by European firms has turned into a vector of innovation in labor relations by becoming a subject of transnational negotiations. It has also become a litmus test of the limits of a self-regulation, worldwide, of labor questions.     

Le travail enseignant en lycée professionnel et ses paradoxes

The paradoxes in the work of teaching in French vocational education stem from the “symbolic closure” of these secondary schools. The latter, given the mass enrollment in general secondary schools, receive students marked by their failure in middle school. This has created a distance with the students' social and family environment and with firms, even though the latter are supposed to be the destination where these students are bound. The work of these teachers is strongly marked by “subjective ordeals” related to their subordinate position in the school system, to a concern for keeping peace in the schools and to doubts about integrating students in the world of work. Might the work of these teachers not lead paradoxically to reasserting the “weight of the educational form” by including therein actions that are supposed to help students “mature” and develop an “appropriate school identity”? In this case, the purpose of this work is the academic socialization and rehabilitation of young people as much as their vocational training as such.     

Généalogie et évolution de la catégorie de « cadre » en Italie

Conceptions of the social world in industrialized countries use categories worked out in the course of a nation's history. In this respect, the notion of cadre for referring to both a concrete social group and a statistical, cognitive category turns out to be a French invention. From a societal perspective, why are there no cadres in Italy? Why is this sort of catchall category for referring to persons in the middle range of employees missing there? Although the notion crystallized through the French experience does not fit the Italian situation, we can inquire into it by examining the history of two close but distinct socioeconomic categories: quadri and dirigenti. A constructivist approach is taken to examining several aspects of the emergence of these categories in Italian society: the place of the institutions that defend and objectify them as a socioeconomic category; the expectations and aspirations that motivate them; the impact of historical and symbolical events in making these categories; and the role of sociologists who persist in analyzing Italian cadres by using quite different theoretical and ideological presuppositions.