Formation et calcul des prix : le travail de tarification dans la grande distribution

Sociologists have recently been rasing questions about how prices are set in various markets. Although their seminal studies have explained the many processes and variables that come into play, they do not enable us to describe the concrete procedures whereby prices are actually calculated. This empirical case study explores the sophisticated methods of calculating the prices of products distributed in a French retail hypermarket chain. Three major conclusions are drawn. First of all, the law enters into the delimitation of the “space” for calculating the prices that distributors set for selling to consumers. Secondly, the choice of a procedure for performing the calculation affects the balance of power between marketing professionals in the struggle to control their shares in the value. Thirdly, the “consumer sale price” does not result directly either from the relation between supply and demand or from micronegotiations between suppliers and distributors. Instead, it tends to ensue from the linkage between several, heterogenous “spaces” of calculation. This study describes the actors, tools and know-how involved in defining these spaces.     

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.     

Le syndicat des travailleurs domestiques de Rio de Janeiro : un observatoire des transformations de l'emploi domestique au Brésil

This study of the major dimensions of actions undertaken by the labor union for household employees in Rio de Janeiro shows how the new “social rights” extended to these personal service workers has led to a new sense of what is “fair” and to an increase in lawsuits with employers. Given its place in labor relations courts, the union's position is ambivalent. Light is shed on the tensions between various categories of persons who visit the union's offices — tensions that tell us much about social relations. Attention is then turned to this small organization's role in labor courts: after cases have been heard, household employees often have a feeling that their rights have been upheld.     

Catégorisation des usagers et rhétorique professionnelle: Le cas des policiers sur la voie publique

Placing “users” or even “customers” at the center of concern has been the keystone in reforms in several French public services. As the example of police officers shows however, the idea of a user takes on quite specific meanings depending on the values and objectives defended by the occupational group in question. Placing those who commit offenses, their victims or mere citizens into categories is part of the process of constructing what the police officer's “real work” should be by disqualifying and stigmatizing those who “don't fit in”.     

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.     

La division sexuelle du travail chez les musiciens français

Data from a survey of French musicians conducted for the Ministry of Culture are used to analyze the processes producing inequality between men and women in music. Two models of a sexual division of labor coexist along with a differentiation depending on the style (learned vs. popular music). These two models closely link together working conditions, careers and the organization of home life for male and female musicians; and they underlie the construction of musicians', identities. In the world of popular music, bodily stereotypes of femininity (youth, seduction) and masculinity (the aestheticization of deviance, the bohemian life) dominate. In the world of learned music, a hierarchical model of masculine authority prevails with the figure of the conductor at the summit.     

Faire œuvre commune. Dynamiques d'attribution et de valorisation des coproductions en art numérique

By bringing together various parties and multidisciplinary contributions, digitalized art parcelizes the act of creation with, as a consequence, various ways for referring to the “work” of art. The outcome of this joint, polyphonic production process might be a piece of software, separate from the work itself, or an artwork, which might or might not incorporate the computer program. What arrangements ultimately redistribute these multicentric externalities between the cooperating parties? How are the results of this coordination exploited depending on the market (academic or industrial) of destination? By emphasizing the arrangements necessary for finishing a co-production whose social career is described, this article draws attention to the changes introduced through digitalized innovations and explains the new arrangements for giving credits and promoting partnerships between art, science and technology.     

Nez à nez avec des nuisances odorantes. L'apprentissage de la cohabitation spatiale

By setting up “nose networks”, inhabitants were able to do more than merely criticize the nuisance of odors coming from a nearby paper mill. This case study conducted in France seeks to understand the process that, through a negotiated limitation of nuisances, ended up making industrial development compatible with life in the local area. This is radically different from the NIMBYist attitude, since inhabitants, instead of saying “no” to the installation of a new annoyance in their backyard, were trying to live with a problem “already there”. Neighbors of the mill thus became “nose experts” who had the right to bring evidence not in a lawsuit but through a shared know-how that made each party's rights and obligations compatible in the effort to live (at least temporarily) together in the same place.     

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 l'indocilité au travail d'une fraction des jeunesses populaires.: Les apprentis et la culture ouvrière

Research on apprentices in two big public enterprises leads us to put in perspective the prevailing theses based on arguments about the rejection of the working-class heritage and the disappearance of forms of resistance among young people with working-class origins. Focusing on contexts of apprenticeship it sheds light on how apprentices cope with requirements related to situations at the workplace. Apprenticeship — an uncertain, contingent, unsteady position in the world of work — does not motivate these young people to identify collectively with other wage-earners; nor does it facilitate the acquisition of class consciousness. In this sense, it relates to a process of social rather than occupational integration. However apprentices reinvent traditional and/or new practices of resistance (opposition, evasion or pretending) that enable them to skirt around or even modify work-related requirements. Entry into the world of work, as well as the resulting pleasure or disenchantment, can be marked by feelings other than “disaffection” with labor, a sense of submission or individualism, or a fascination or identification with the middle classes.     

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.     

La clôture comme seule protection ? Syndicats du spectacle et marché du travail dans l’entre-deux-guerres (1919-1937)

The case of performers in the entertainment industry during the period between the two World wars serves to test the hypothesis of a monopolistic closure, as workers try to improve their lot by restricting access to the labor market. In line with the predictions of this hypothesis in the sociology of professions, actors and singers did try to close the labor market by instituting a “professional card”. Contrary to expectations however, labor organizations of musicians sought to control pay scales and jobs by opening the market so widely that anyone entering it joined the organization. These two different strategies affected these groups’ identities by drawing legitimate boundaries and influencing the nature and degree of solidarity. Beyond these strategies, two prospects for emancipation contrast with each other: the professional one of an exclusive group among performing artists on stage and in song, and the wage-earning one of an inclusive group among musicians.     

Le travail entrepreneurial, ou l'entrepreneur schumpetérien performé

Creating a firm requires the completion of specific tasks of gathering, and combining of the resources needed for production and sales. The head of the project does not do all this alone; he receives help from advisers, experts and managerial tools. This study of the collective entrepreneurial work accomplished by jobless persons who set up a business casts doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption of a visionary entrepreneur, who, all alone, creatively designs a “new combination” of resources. Although a new firm does not spontaneously spring out of an individual's intuition, the framework wherein it gradually takes shape tends to make it a novel combination that is coherent in terms of production, sales and accounting. In this framework, full responsibility can be attributed to the project head. The entrepreneur is not, therefore, Schumpeterian; he becomes so.     

La « perruque » en usine : approche d’une pratique marginale, illégale et fuyante

A “homer” is an artifact that a worker produces using company tools and materials outside normal production plans but at the workplace and during workhours. Despite legal, artistic and ethnographic evidence of their existence, silence surrounds homers. Along with this evidence, interviews conducted mostly with retirees from a French aeronautics plant are used to show that this silence is not linked just to the marginal and illegal quality of these artifacts. Homers shed light on a high degree of “complicity” between employees regardless of their position in the hierarchy. Since the factory’s institutional framework has little room for this complicity, the silence surrounding homers is a sign probably of an inability to talk about them rather than of their marginality or illegality.     

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.     

La construction des inégalités hommes-femmes dans l'entreprise. Une analyse de cas dans la métallurgie

Under the 1983 and 2001 laws on equality at the workplace, firms in France must submit to the works council a report “comparing the situations of men and women”. This report lays the groundwork for collective bargaining and remedial actions. Since this comparison is a snapshot at a year's interval from the previous report, it does not shed light on differences in occupational trajectories and opportunities; and it even risks masking the inequality between men and women. In contrast with the legally required report, a longitudinal analysis of data collected during a case study in a large metal-working firm shows that inequality has a long life and might be thriving. The company abides by the law but in an effort, it is hypothesized, not so much to reduce inequality between the sexes as to avoid lawsuits and prosecution.     

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?     

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.     

Entreprises et gouvernance en France : perspectives historiques et évolutions récentes

Does France have a society that is blocked by nature and essence? A historical perspective yields a completely different view of the country's social and economic landscape. In particular, attention is drawn to the deep transformations of French firms and of their governance. The history of this change partly fits into a broader trend that, reaching well beyond borders, can be easily summed up through a single word — “globalization”. Changes in French firms and in their “logics of governance” can partly be seen as a reaction to powerful outside pressures that are pushing the economies of France and many other countries in a particular direction. Still, as we probe further, we realize that these changes are, in fact, adaptations, translations and hybridizations that involve ongoing negotiations with already existing institutional frames and logics. The advance of globalization and neoliberalism is quite real; but it interplays with and is embedded in local settings and logics that limit its scope and impact. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

Le télétravail des cadres : entre suractivité et apprentissage de nouvelles temporalités

Telework is often considered to be a means for making life at work and at home more compatible. Why do some wage-earners, in particular white-collar employees, choose it? Do they actually make a choice or simply adopt a solution “for want of anything better” in an organizational context with its limitations? In this case, what factors do they weigh against each other? Once they have opted for telework, how do these white collars manage to adjust their occupational and family lives? Is their aspiration to improve the balance between the two satisfied? Or do they run up against unexpected difficulties? Answers to these questions come out of two studies conducted among white-collar employees in different sorts of telework. Given the absence of institutional regulations governing the relation between life at home and at work, telework, far from leading to a more balanced life, jeopardizes the organization’s collective efficiency.