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 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.     

Bien-être et souffrance en élevage : conditions de vie au travail des personnes et des animaux

Starting in the 1980s in France, the scientific problems related to the well-being of animals reduced a complicated social critique of industrial systems for raising livestock to a matter of adapting animals to the living conditions imposed by these systems. This swept out of view questions about the working conditions for farmers and wage-earners. However people and animals tend to share living conditions in these systems, conditions that cause suffering. Given the intensified pace of work, as people tend an ever larger number of animals, and the mounting pressure on both people and livestock, affects are repressed, and communication breaks down. Relations to one's self and to others are altered, and the relation to death is “pathologized” at the workplace - thus providing further evidence of a failed relation to life and to others in animal husbandry. - Special issue on Agriculture and food.     

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.     

Quand les associations font office de street-level bureaucracy. Le travail quotidien en faveur de l’accès au droit au logement opposable

This article looks at the contribution of non-profit organisations to public action. It employs a conceptual arsenal usually applied to the analysis of street-level bureaucracy to depict day-to-day work in the field of access to justice for disadvantaged individuals. A case study on the implementation of a legal right to housing shows how non-profit actors play a policy-making role through their participation in the process of selecting the beneficiaries of public action. This entails the exercise of discretionary power in the legal characterisation of individual situations and the selection of cases to support or reasons to adduce in dealings with the administration, with the result that the outcomes for clients who receive social and legal support appear strongly improved.     

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.     

La barrière et le plafond de vitrail. Analyser les carrières féminines dans les organisations religieuses

Research conducted mainly in the United States and France on how ordination works like a barrier to the feminization of religious staffs in various Christian and Jewish organizations has brought to light factors for distinguishing several cases: women either gain formal access to religious offices, or informally exercise religious duties, or are barred from religious offices. The second part of this article examines the level in these organizations where this barrier has been lifted, in particular the dissymmetries between men's and women's careers. Emphasis is laid on comparisons with other professions, since similar processes operate underneath the religious sphere's apparent differences, as reflected by the phrase “stained-glass ceiling”.     

La dynamique de la vocation : les évolutions de la rationalisation de l’engagement au travail des danseurs de ballet

The commitment to one's work, with body and soul involvement is a key issue in the study of vocation-driven occupations. In such callings, the aspirations that are socially constructed and experienced as vocations have been shown to provide meaning and direction to one's commitment. However, this study of Paris Opera ballet dancers shows that realizing one's aspirations are impossible to achieve does not necessarily result in quitting, nor retraining. Changes in the way dancers relate to their work are studied using sequential analysis, to examine which social factors may explain how this involvement's meaning is maintained. The analysis identifies some processes of vocation recomposition. Thus revealing, behind the professional careers, the “moral careers” of the vocation.     

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.     

Une communauté indienne face au travail : les nisads du Gange

This article explores a working community in the northern India, specifically fishermen, boatmen and boatbuilders of the middle course of the river Ganges. It seeks to show that, on the one hand, conceptions of work and, on the other hand, the realities of different tasks, constitute a complex nexus, marked by nuances and change. Community factors (work in general but also caste and religion) strongly influence perceptions of the working world. While the universe of the Ganges fishermen is strongly marked by poverty and a heavy burden of toil, it is also noteworthy for its aesthetic, playful and rebellious elements. And finally, the conceptions and realities of work are highly gendered, leading to the existence of two paradigms of the task.     

La carrière des artistes et les transformations de la production musicale. Relations de travail et relation au travail dans le monde des musiques rap et électroniques

The interaction between the artistic and managerial poles of the world formed by the persons specialized in rap and electronic music in France is described as well as musicians' occupational culture. The aesthetic and organizational characteristics of these musical genres are shown to influence the division of labour in recording and production. Owing to the combination of artistic and managerial activities typical of these musicians, occupational networks are fluid. This blurring of roles is especially visible in the recording labels used from home studios. Technical changes in the “tools” for this work have led these artists to become professionally involved in management and advertising. Cultural motivations also explain this involvement: the critical stance adopted by the “cultures” of rap, electro, techno, etc., tends to make obsolete the image of the artist as a creator who avoids the engineering aspects of the commercial distribution of his recordings. In contrast, rap and electronic musicians' careers develop through participation in many and various projects, which nurtures their artistic production, improves the quality of their groups and enhances their reputations. Accepting more short-term professional engagements supposedly increases their control over their career profiles. However these musicians voice concerns, in particular, about bonds between the individual and the groups whom they cross (and who cross them) — concerns that can be extended to other types de workers caught up in an occupational world organized “by project”.     

Le nom et le corps. Personnalisation et collectivisation du travail chez les ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées autour de 1800

A tension between strong individualization and a holistic conception of activities characterizes most of the French state's major administrative corps. By concentrating on the civil engineering corps (Ponts et Chaussées) during the early 19th century, we can see how this tension was resolved. When the Ourcq Canal was to be built, a conflict during the Ponts et Chaussées Assembly, which was responsible for examining plans for public works and making decisions about them, brought to light two contradictory rationales: incarnation and delegation, two ways of relating the individual and collective aspects of civil engineering during the drawing up of plans and their examination. These two rationales, which come into conflict in controversial situations, are normally combined in a “moral economy” — the civilities that enable this corps to relate the individualistic aspirations of the engineer in charge of a project with the collective dimensions of supervision and integration in a whole. In conclusion, the relations between design and execution, between activity and passivity, are examined in order to show how similar the administrative corps’ tense relation with the state is to the individual engineer's relation with his corps.     

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.     

Crise de la rationalité industrielle et transformations de la prescription. Une étude de cas

Studies of industrial rationality should be reconsidered given the thoroughgoing changes under way. We have switched from a Taylorist rationality based on Scientific Management, which claimed to fit production into a single viewpoint, to a dissemination of the sources of the directions to be followed and an overall destabilization of any attempt at rationalization, and as a consequence, to a looser sense of rationality even among engineers. But this does not at all benefit wage-earners. Often without bearings, they have to cope with instructions; but have a harder time doing so whenever their organization provides them with few tools for coping and whenever the instructions, or part of them, are contradictory.     

Structuration d’un champ d’action publique : l’intervention publique sur les copropriétés dégradées

This article focuses on the social construction of the problem, which emerged in France during the 1980s, of dilapidated condominium apartment buildings and on the public policy instruments that have been used. A sociology of organized action serves to analyze this twofold process, which has resulted from the formation of networks of persons unfamiliar with the legal aspects of condominium ownership. Linking the periphery to the center, these networks have crystallized around norms ensuing from housing policy. The concept of “field” in the Weberian sense explains this crystallization, and also applies to the symmetrical process of conserving civil law on joint ownership. Parties attached to this normative system denied the problem of dilapidated condominiums, when it was presented to them. By pursuing a social activity based on applying and producing rules, individuals in the networks related to housing policy and persons concerned by condominium ownership contributed to maintaining and, too, revitalizing rules and norms.     

La transition théâtrale dans l'ex-RDA : vers la recherche de nouvelles formes de régulation organisationnelle

Organized around a very dense set of public institutions, the theater world in the former German Democratic Republic has undergone major changes since reunification. New organizational models have come into being, often imported from West Germany, that jeopardize the foundations of theater practices in the East. In East Germany, people working in theater were strongly protected: homogeneous training, lifetime employment, the stability of forms of artistic cooperation, etc. Since reunification, a new division of labor and a new human resource management have been imposed in public theaters. The profession’s rules are changing as the itineraries of theater people are being individualized. The diversification of the theater world makes public institutions fragile. On the basis of field work in Saxony, questions are raised about how public theaters are being recomposed in the East. Attention is paid to individual and collective movements and to the movements of organizations.     

L’origine sociale de la vigilance entrepreneuriale. Quand les artisans d’art se font entrepreneurs

Drawing on the concept of “entrepreneurial alertness” forged by Israël Kirzner, the article provides a sociological interpretation of the way in which entrepreneurs earn financial profits. By studying the productive diversification practised by craftsmen to make a living from their skills, he casts light on the social origin of entrepreneurial alertness. This arises from the intersection of the productive and commercial spheres: the dual role of creative craftsmen as both producers and sellers enables them to identify price differences between inputs and outputs from which they can profit. Because of their embeddedness in a professional community, however, there are limits on how much profit they can make. Entrepreneurial alertness is shaped by professional ethics.     

Le diable et les prolétaires. Le travail dans les mines de Potosi, Bolivie

For miners in Potosi, Bolivia, mining is more than a victory for acquiring underground wealth thanks to hard work and human know-how. This intrusion into an underworld understood to be the dwelling-place of ancestors, devils and wild forces is a ritualized activity, both a pilgrimage and an initiation. Learning the job and doing the work are conditioned by the diabolic divinity of the mineral world indwelling the miners' bodies. Mine work is examined from the angle of workers, bodily experiences so as to explore both the quite intimate grounds of the occupational identity of miners and the imagery that, in the Andes, emerged with miners as a social category distinct from the peasantry.