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.     

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.     

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 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.     

Logiques professionnelles et logiques familiales : une articulation contrainte par la délocalisation de l'emploi

A survey of French wage-earners faced with the delocalization of their factory, which moved 200 kilometers away from their homes, sheds light on the contingencies of integrating life at work and at home. A typology is presented of how wage-earners balanced geographical and occupational factors so as to make choices. Certain decisions resulted from tensions between family and occupational interests whereas occupational and economic purposes prevailed in other cases without contradicting family attachments. Four types are discussed; for instance, job instability and mobility tend to reinforce affiliations having to do with housing, the family and the private sphere. Requirements for residential mobility thus increase social inequality between wage-earners, who are not all equipped alike for coping with occupational and family-related risks.     

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.     

Régulation et compétition entre établissements scolaires dans six espaces locaux en Europe

According to this analysis of the dynamics of competition in six school zones in Europe (Charleroi, Budapest, Lisbon, London, Lille and the Paris area), secondary schools pursue “logics of action” that are shaped by an interdependence between local establishments. Parents’ strategies for choosing a school rank establishments and lead to a competitive interdependence with a pattern and intensity that vary depending on the place — the major issue being the capacity to attract and retain pupils. A typology of these “logics” is proposed: establishments pursue a logic of conquest, profit from the status quo, diversification or adaptation depending on their local position and the intensity of competition. Questions are raised about the potentials and limits of public interventions for regulating this competitive interdependence. Competition, along with its deviant effects (segregation and inequality), arises out of the shortcomings and limitations of public interventions and out of the fragmentation of local regulations. A lack of coordination between the authorities in charge, between districts and between the public and private supply of education affects the development of opportunistic tactics by certain establishments. The conclusion draws attention to the need for coordinating regulations.     

Les usages nationaux d'une science « globale » : La diffusion de nouveaux paradigmes économiques comme stratégie hégémonique et enjeu domestique dans les champs nationaux de reproduction des élites d'État

This paper analyses the production and international diffusion of different forms of State expertise, such as economics, from a threefold perspective: hegemonic strategies structured around the Cold War, professional rivalries between lawyers and economists within the field of state power and the internationalisation of the academic circuits for the reproduction of national elites. In order to understand the relatively low (or delayed) introduction of neo-liberal paradigm in Asia, it starts by highlighting the authoritarian genesis of these new fields of economic expertise, as an instrument for the developmental policies launched by the Cold War dictatures, such as Suharto in Indonesia or Marcos in the Philippinnes. Then, by focusing on the cases of India and South Corea, it analyses how the processes of institutionnalisation and consolidation of these new professional fields was structured around an international division of scientific labour, in which the elite US campuses control both the production of theoretical innovation and the academic networks for the reproduction of the elites of the periphery.     

Les promesses des cellules souches. Scientifiques, familles et santé publique dans la controverse autour des stem cells aux USA

This article describes the impact of the contested properties of stem cells in the United States. Starting from the limitations on stem cell research that the current Bush administration imposed, it is possible to follow the mobilizations of various levels of us politics, each of them being articulated around exclusive properties of the stem cell. Ranging from the role of the family in the biomedical research decisions to the threat of a disintegration of the Union, stem cells question the American body politic.     

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 apprentissages du changement dans l'entreprise polonaise. Entre continuité et rupture

Two major currents of theory have striven to explain the driving force behind the post-Communist transformation in central Europe since 1989. Based on the absolute rationality of actors, the so-called standard approach implies radical public policies that mark a break with the legacy from the preceding period. However it has turned out to be unable to account for the permanence of certain elements from the past. The “path-dependence” approach tries to understand institutional continuities as a reworking of accumulated experiences. However it has not managed to explain phenomena signaling a radical break in behavior patterns. This analysis of a technological change in a Polish firm combines the two dimensions of rupture and continuity by distinguishing between the introduction of change and forms of adaptation and learning by various categories of actors.     

Man Up,Man Down: Race–Ethnicity and the Hierarchy of Men in Female‐Dominated Work

Scholars have largely overlooked the significance of race and socioeconomic status in determining which men traverse gender boundaries into female‐dominated, typically devalued, work. Examining the gender composition of the jobs that racial minority men occupy provides critical insights into mechanisms of broader racial disparities in the labor market—in addition to stalled occupational desegregation trends between men and women. Using nationally representative data from the three‐year American Community Survey (2010–2012), we examine racial/ethnic and educational differences in which men occupy gender‐typed jobs. We find that racial minority men are more likely than white men to occupy female‐dominated jobs at all levels of education—except highly educated Asian/Pacific Islander men—and that these patterns are more pronounced at lower levels of education. These findings have implications for broader occupational inequality patterns among men as well as between men and women.     

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.     

Illustrating the Implications of How Inequality is Measured: Decomposing Earnings Inequality by Race and Gender

This paper makes three distinct contributions: it presents a novel modification to an established methodology for assessing inequality using the CPS ASEC data, it illustrates how valuable a multi-metric inequality analysis is by reconciling some open questions regarding the trend in inequality and the role of the composition of income along the distribution, and it provides a baseline assessment of the trend in earnings inequality for four distinct groups of income earners. The evolution of earnings inequality from 1995 to 2010 is compared to increasing inequality in total income as documented by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez to show that earnings inequality has followed a qualitatively similar, though less extreme trend. In the process, the disconnect between the trend in the Gini coefficient and inequality assessed via the share of income going to the top 1 % of income earners is reconciled through the use of several alternative inequality indices. Finally, the evolution of the earnings distribution for black women, black men, white women, and white men are considered separately, which shows that there are important differences in the experience of inequality. The main findings are that only white men have experienced changes in within-group earnings inequality that parallel the changes in inequality seen in the overall distribution. By contrast, black income earners have seen no notable increase in within-group inequality by any measure, suggesting that they may rightly perceive growing inequality as primarily a between-group phenomena.     

L’Europe sociale : créativité institutionnelle communautaire et réalités nationales

“Social Europe” has been constructed following 50 years of EEC and EU policy-making, which has gradually extricated social questions from a pure rationale of economic integration in order to turn it into a lever for European political integration. The theoretical and disciplinary viewpoints are presented that, together, help us better understand the processes at work. Attention is drawn to three of them. First of all, the evolutionary process of building the EU accounts both for the differences between social Europe and national welfare systems, and for an ongoing process of institutional creation through an accumulation of EU legal achievements (acquis). Secondly, the expansion of the EU to twelve new member states lacking robust labor relation systems, along with globalization, represents a challenge for the future of the “European social model”. Finally, social Europe has not yet undergone an assessment. Problems arise owing to the short shrift given by treaties to questions of social legislation or redistribution, but the “Europeanization of national policies” apparently opens a way toward overcoming these obstacles.     

Trend Analysis of Anticipated Lifetime Income Inequality among Post‐war Japanese Youth

This study aims to measure the inequality of anticipated lifetime income and the inequality of annual income among the younger generation (24–29‐year‐old men), and to examine any trends that can be found in terms of inequality between 1955 and 2005 in Japan. Anticipated lifetime income is defined in this study as the present value of the total anticipated annual income that one is likely to earn each year between the ages of 24 and 59 years, assuming that there is no intragenerational class mobility. The anticipated lifetime income for each young male is estimated using the Social Stratification and Social Mobility Survey dataset, which is a Japanese national cross‐sectional survey of social stratification and social mobility. An inequality in the anticipated lifetime income can be regarded as an “inequality of outlook” among the younger generation. As a result of this analysis, it was found that the Gini coefficient, the most general measurement of income inequality, had significantly increased for anticipated lifetime income between 1995 and 2005. At the same time, the gap between the Gini coefficient of anticipated lifetime income and that of annual income had narrowed. It is suggested that “inequality of outlook,” which cannot be easily identified using a superficial index, has increased significantly.     

Changes in the gender structure: Inequality at the individual,interactional, and macro dimensions

As a society, we've made tremendous progress toward gender equality over the past several decades. Yet there remains significant inequality between women and men. Furthermore, when we look closely at some of the progress made toward gender equality, we find it considerably less impressive than surface appearances. In this article, we review the updated framework of Risman's (2017) gender structure theory and argue that it can help us make sense of the progress we've made as well as analyzing inequality as it persists between women and men. Using gender structure theory, we then show how gender is simultaneously reproduced and contested across the individual, interactional, and macro levels of society within 3 major social domains: work, family, and gender identity.     

Men's and Women's Beliefs About Gender Inequality: Family Ties,Dependence, and Agreement

This paper addresses an often stated but rarefy tested assumption in feminist theory: that women's dependence on men and the high degree of intimate contact between women and men shape women's consciousness of gender stratification, encouraging them to develop interpretations of gender inequality similar to men's. I explore this issue by examining whether women's dependence on men and family ties to men are associated with the degree of similarity in men's and women's gender-related attitudes, using data from a national probability sample of adults in the United States. The analyses presented are not conclusive, but they do suggest that further inquiry into the role of dependence and family ties in drawing women's interpretations of gender inequality toward men's is merited.     

Les « intermittents » de l'Église. Modalités d'emploi des personnels laïcs dans le catholicisme français

Given the shortage of priests, bishops have assigned permanent religious duties to several thousand laypersons, a majority of them women. Many of these persons have employment contracts. The employment conditions of this new type of permanent personnel tend to be unfavorable: assignments for a few years despite contracts of unlimited duration, part-time work and a nearly minimum wage. Various factors account for this fragility: the dire financial straits of French dioceses; ecclesiastical authorities, determination to present the clergy as the only fully legitimate, permanent personnel in the Church; and the attitude of laypersons who seem to be satisfied with their lot. The efforts to institutionalize this work have encountered difficulties with respect to both the labor code and the unexpected effects produced internally by the advocacy of a “culture of limited duration commitment”.