Politique et expertise scientifique. La régulation européenne des médicaments

A study of the EU system for regulating medicinal products is used to show the usefulness of distinguishing between policy-making and scientific expertise when analyzing political decision-making. This approach presupposes identifying the characteristics of scientific expertise. The experts responsible for assessing drugs have to combine knowledge and action. Questions are raised about how work is shared between decision-makers and experts. In the case of medicinal products, the work of experts has absorbed decision-making. Lest we waver between explanations in terms either of science or else of politics, it is necessary to substantively identify expertise’s political dimensions. Two conceptions — the “healthy man’s” and the “sick man’s” — of the purpose of assessing medicinal products stand out in debates; but political authorities pay no heed to them.     

Appropriation et régulation des innovations biotechnologiques : pour une comparaison transatlantique

This article analyzes two biotechnological innovations — the tests of tracking the genetic risks of diseases and the transgenic organisms — and explores the controversies concerning the status of these new knowledges and the ways there are applied. It shows how these innovations were received in a different way in the United States and in France. The market regulation, which is strong in the USA is problematic in France. It is marginalized by the professional regulation in the case of the genetic tests. And in the other case it is limited by the control of the state, which constitutes some resources for the mobilization of the civil society against transgenic organisms. Finally the comparison consolidates the hypothesis of the emergence of a new regime of production of the knowledge, specified by the tension between a “market” regulation and a “consumerist-civic” regulation.     

Écrire l'événement : le travail agricole mis en mémoire

Pieces of writing about work can be taken to be a cognitive resource for action, especially when the way to act cannot be fully stated beforehand. To prove this, a pragmatic interpretation is proposed of the interactions between writing and cognition in agriculture, a sector where keeping an agenda is a widespread but seldom studied practice. After describing the diversity of the information (mainly technical or economic) that farmers noted from day to day, the functions of remembering on-the-job events are described in relation to farming activities: how this memory serves to follow up on activities, to think about what should be done and when. This detailed study of how agendas are actually used sheds light on the means available to farmers for managing their activities. Sometimes, writing serves to codify operations; sometimes, to make plans and assessments; and sometimes, to routinize an activity. In general, it helps stabilize the farmer’s work environment, splintered as it is among various places and schedules.     

« 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.     

Carrying American Ideas to the Unconverted : la tentative manquée du MIT d'exporter la recherche opérationnelle au sein de l'OTAN

Recent scholarship on the 'Americanization' of economic and cultural practices emphasize that the Europeans were not passive victims of this 'colonizing' project but selectively appropriated or even completely rejected aspects of it. This paper extends these insights to a scientific field. It describes the failed attempt to export to NATO a theory-based, computer-dependent model of operations research which embedded civilian scientists deeply in the military decision-making process. This conception of operations research and its related social practices was blocked by the British, who rejected a model of operations research which called for a training in advanced mathematics and computing, and who insisted that NATO maintain a strict civil/military divide. 'Americanization' was a negotiated and contested project which, while stimulating an awareness for change in Europe, did not necessarily determine its trajectory.     

Conflit de générations ou conflit d'organisation ? Un train peut en cacher un autre…

In a railway marshaling yard, relations between the two principal age-groups (employees in their fifties and young, recent hires) are very tense. Various persons set this down to an obvious generation clash. By observing on-the-job situations, we come to see how these tensions tie in with a reorganization of work that occurred when the yong people were hired. Members of these two groups interpret differently the organization of work and the rationale for cooperation between job stations. The explanation in terms of a “generation clash” overlooks the actual issues in an organizational conflict having to do with changes during the recent reorganization. It thus keeps us from noticing the threats against the personnel's statuses and the social and symbolic hierarchies underlying them.     

Le sacre des présidents d'université. Une analyse de l'application des plans Université 2000 et Université du troisième millénaire en Rhône-Alpes

Policies of higher education provide evidence of recent trends in the actions undertaken by public authorities. Local authorities are ever more implicated, since the places for defining objectives are being decentralized and contracts are more often being used to formalize relations between partners. Despite the increasingly “polycentric” patterns of the parties involved, civil servants in the Ministry of Education still maintain control over setting objectives. The greater investment made by local authorities, who allege that universities depend financially on the central government, reinforces the presidents of universities.     

Des « employeurs multiples » au « noyau dur » d'employeurs : relations d'emploi et concurrence sur le marché des comédiens intermittents

Managerial literature sometimes uses an ideal-type of contingent labor to describe what it imagines to be future changes in organizing work and labor. These changes would entail a shortening and, therefore, multiplication of labor contracts. Statistics on the intermittents du spectacle (an administrative category in France referring to performers as well as stagehands who work for the duration of a project in show business, television and the performing arts) are analyzed to show that the conception of work in the media industry, as reflected in the aforementioned writings, cannot account for the actual plurality of relations between these part-time employees and their employers. In the media industry labor market, two types of labor relations can be distinguished. The one is close to the ideal-type of an intermittent employee who has occasional relations with his employer, whereas the other is based on a “hard core” of employers with whom an employee has recurrent relations. This core significantly affects the number of engagements of these performing artists and contributes decisively to the stability of their careers.     

Les transformations de l'intégration par l'emploi: Regards croisés : France métropolitaine - île de La Réunion

Against a background of mass unemployment and the increasing precariousness of employment, the current changes in the labour market demand that we examine the previously central role of paid employment in social integration. If the individual now deprived of employment or having a temporary contract is by dint of this fact less included in society or is less secure by not having a permanent salary, is it to say that he embodies the face of the de-affiliated, of those who miss out on social benefits? Taking the example of the Reunion Island which has the highest level of unemployment and population covered by the minimum income (RMI: Revenu Minimum d'Insertion) in the country, this article endeavours to explain and understand how, in the context of a protective society and increasingly flexible employment market, new methods of social integration without and resulting from paid employment are being formed.     

Land-use planning and participation: The case of inuit public housing (Nunavik, Canada)

This article examines the role of participation in land-use planning. It discusses a concrete example of planning, related to the construction of social housing in Nunavik, the most northerly region of Québec, Canada, inhabited mainly by Inuit. It looks at how the responsibilities of the various parties involved in the planning process have changed over the past 30 years and strives to understand the exact nature of their responsibilities at the present time. In so doing, it focuses on the role of citizens. This study shows that citizen participation plays a relatively limited role in planning, even though existing legislation makes it an integral part of the process. It helps to fulfil basic land-use planning functions, namely, an economic rationalization function and a political legitimization function. From this perspective, discourse on the democratic virtues of participatory planning is misleading.