Les ambiguïtés de la sélection par concours dans la fonction publique territoriale : une institutionnalisation inachevée

The process of constructing a civil service in France at the local and regional levels (function publique territoriale) is examined by focusing on selective examinations for recruiting and promoting personnel. The political and administrative rationales are described that have, since the 1970s, institutionalized these examinations, which do not challenge the prerogatives of the elected officials to fill the employer's role. The incomplete process of bureaucratization in local and regional administrations affects how these examinations take place. The duty of civil servants to avoid expressing opinions in public is evaluated but by the elected officials who serve on the panels that select applicants. Although the “bureaucratic personality” is prized, expectations stemming from the current reference to managerial criteria moderate this emphasis. Though similar to examinations conducted in the central government's civil service, the selective examinations for local and regional government employees illustrate a determination to stand apart. These ambiguities show how weak the procedures related to these examinations are at a time when they have come under wide-ranging criticisms. The latter are amplified in local and regional administrations which, historically, differ significantly from the French Republic's merit-based model.     

Contextualizing the Education Effect on Women's Employment: A Cross‐National Comparative Analysis

The authors examine how and why the effect of education on women's employment varies cross‐nationally. First, they present a theoretical model that (a) outlines the micro‐level mechanisms underlying education effects on women's employment in the couple context and (b) proposes contextual moderators at the country level. Second, they test the theoretical model against survey data from the United Nations' Generations and Gender Programme for 5 European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, and Norway). The data comprise 10,048 educationally homogamous heterosexual couples involving a woman age 20–45. The results indicate that more highly educated couples are more likely to have dual‐earner arrangements in each country, yet the strength of education effects varied substantially between countries and across the family life cycle. In contrast to prior work, the authors find that education effects are not generally smaller in countries that are supportive of women's employment. This relation holds only for later child‐rearing phases.     

Des carrières aux parcours… en passant par la compétence

Do the social uses of the notion of competence affect operatives’ careers? A linkage between competency-based-management and careers is not to be taken for granted when competence is seen in relation to changes in work. In France, “policies of competence” entail modifying the specifications for managing the future of wage-earners, since a rationale grounded on the idea of a career yields to one based on the notion of an itinerary. Firms have supported the latter as a way to make mobility more fluid and to ensure the recognition of qualifications. However, this rationale based on occupational itineraries runs afoul of the segmented in-house labor market, which unfailingly turns an itinerary into an obstacle course. As a result, careers are “deinstitutionalized”, a trend to be related to the gradual institutionalization of “secure itineraries” with incentives coming from public employment and training policies. Invoking competence in order to make itineraries secure is part of an argument about the “destabilization of employment” that justifies delegating to individuals the management of their future and legitimates the idea that employability is to be the major counterpart for motivating wage-earners. For lack of new regulations for work throughout the life course, the rationale of an itinerary risks making the marketplace the major source of (dis)order in personal destinies.     

Syndicalisme et délitement du salariat artistique : la CGT et les groupes mobilisés autour du régime de l’intermittence

In a context of strong growth and intense social struggles related to the employment conditions of media industry worker on short-term contracts in France, attention is drawn to the difficulties that the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) has had organizing performers and stage hands in show business (cinema, theater, etc.). This labor union must deal with a large number of young professionals who pay no mind to the rules and norms related to wage-earning and no longer consider them to be a common good. Working in small groups that produce shows, these professionals regard their occupation as a vocation, value the hyperflexibility of their working conditions, pay scant attention to the distinction between employer and employees, and tend to deny the specific characteristics of their jobs and skills while referring, instead, to a blurry set of qualifications.     

Les politiques d'emploi et la transformation des normes : une comparaison européenne

Given the central orientation of the European employment strategy — adapt unemployment compensation systems so as to broaden access to jobs — the effects of policies in this field are examined by focusing on three axes: the impact on unemployment; the action on employment standards, and trends in the social regulation underlying these policies. A comparative view reveals how much national systems have been able to interpret EU objectives in their own way. This does not invalidate the pertinence of a European level of regulation,but it does expose the conditions for clarifying standards for public actions and leading actors to become involved in EU institutions, a source of legitimacy still to be constructed. This comparison of six national cases (Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom) sheds light on the importance of the social compromises that set the framework for job polices. The quality of occupational transitions is related to the ability of actors to jointly regulate employment policy and labor market standards. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

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.     

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.     

Compter : l’invention de la statistique des fonctionnaires en France (1890-1930)

Civil servant statistics in France were invented on the margins of the state during the period from 1890 to 1930. This invention came out of activist and/or professional rationales that were desynchronized with the drafting or application of polices for reducing the number of government employees. There were three successive phases. At the dawn of the xx^th century, civil servants were counted in order to inveigh against “functionarism” and “depopulation”. During the decade before World War I, counting them was a matter of improving the expertise of statisticians. Between the two World Wars, sharp cuts were made in personnel, while civil service statistics were held in abeyance. By focusing on how civil servant statistics have been produced and used, the approach proposed herein sheds new light on a persistent but paradoxical discourse in France that ignores how many civil servants there are while claiming that there are too many.     

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.     

Les ouvriers en Europe centrale : la dissolution d’une catégorie sociale dans les statistiques

In central Europe, the economic and symbolic status of blue-collar workers has considerably declined since the end of Communism. How visible were workers in official statistics and in sociological research under Communism and afterwards? Do workers as a social category gain visibility in scientific research when they have specific conditions of existence and a strong collective identity? For different reasons in Poland and Czechoslovakia, it is hard to talk about a working class under Communism even though authorities grounded their legitimacy on this class. After 1989, workers became invisible in both official statistics and sociology. Owing to the adoption of the International standard classification of occupations (ISCO) in central Europe and the use that national institutes of statistics have made of it in their publications, the boundary of the worker category has blurred. Since 1989, sociologists have shown little interest in workers for reasons that are discussed. A few case studies (mostly by Western academics) are mentioned to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding this social category in sociology. A comparison between the ISCO and the french scheme Professions et Catégories socioprofessionnelles (PCS) shows the interest (and difficulty) that sociologists have in constructing nomenclatures that satisfy both them and statistical offices.     

Maternal Employment,Community Contexts,and the Child‐Care Arrangements of Diverse Groups

Integrating family and child data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort with contextual data from the census, this study examined associations among maternal employment, aspects of communities related to child‐care supply and demand, and the early care and education arrangements of 4 year olds in Mexican‐origin, Black, and White families. Children with employed mothers were more likely to be in informal care arrangements than in early childhood education, regardless of racial/ethnic background. For children in Mexican‐origin families, selection into informal care over early childhood education was more likely in zip codes with greater demand for care as measured by higher female employment. Utilization of parent care versus early childhood education was also more likely for children in Mexican‐origin and Black families in zip codes with higher female employment. Constraints associated with maternal employment thus hindered children from enrolling in early childhood education, and community contexts posed challenges for some groups.     

Ordres socio-économiques et polarisation de la recherche dans l'agriculture : pour une critique des rapports science/société

What if farming were the exemplar of a knowledge-based society? Due to their many, ambivalent effects, research and innovation in agronomy lie at the center of trends now shaping the world of agriculture. To present this history, the types of pairing are examined between, on the one hand, processes for producing scientific knowledge and techniques and, on the other, contingent forms for organizing collective action. For this purpose, the notion of a “socioeconomic order” is introduced to account for the multiplication of collective spaces of action based on specific systems of norms and cooperation. Studying these pairings brings to light three “models of polarization of research” in France (the Colbertist model, academic polarization, and fragmented polarization), which have changed over the past fifty years. Accordingly, agriculture's recent history is interpreted as the joint transformation of socioeconomic orders and these modes of polarization. - Special issue on Agriculture and food.     

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 agriculteurs dans la fabrique d'une nouvelle agriculture

The model of development that has governed the modernization of farming in France is increasingly coming under attack. Given this, analysing the “work” that farming performs to “translate” the criticisms with which it must cope in formulating new definitions of roles is important in order to understand changes under way in this sector. The changes undergone by farming over the past eighty years are briefly presented and then the procedures and results of a survey, conducted during the mad cow disease among beef-farmers in Burgundy, are described. Light is thus shed on the diversity of the positions that farmers have adopted with regard to the future of their occupation. An interpretation is proposed of how the distribution (and interplay between) these positions might affect agriculture. - Special issue on Agriculture and food.     

Les professions sociales en France: Du modèle de la qualification au modèle de la compétence?

In the social professions, is the qualifications model going to be driven out by a second model, that of the management of skills, as seen in many other sectors of activity? The social professions used to be accepted in their employment sectors in line with the statutory logic of qualifications. However, the recent introduction of a skills management logic privileging individual aptitudes, advantages gained from a variety of professional experiences, and the capacity to conform to the objectives of an employing organization could lead to less regard for original qualifications, and to a decline in any correspondence between a diploma or degree and the individual's position within the repertory of salaried jobs and classifications. One can in fact note an increased disjunction between titles, functions, and status, especially in the newer activity areas (insertion, city/town, policies, mediation, etc.). In contrast, one can still observe a very firmly maintained linkage between the qualification and the job in the traditional sectors (social services, work with the disabled, specialized education, etc.). However, the widening of social interventions beyond the frames of classical action areas, and their extension to areas such as accommodation and home help, along with the progressive modification of organizational models, leads one to wonder whether the social professions will retain their special character, or whether, to the contrary, they will experience a process of differentiation into sub-sectors with reference to alternative operational logics. Will the future of the social professions oscillate between assignation to employment sectors where the qualifications logic reigns (and which could become residual), and entry into new intervention areas where the 'battle of the skills' will be fought? Whatever the outcome, the debate about the professionalism of social workers should surely rise above any such presumed antagonisms.     

Réinterroger la relation entre école et mobilité sociale. Le cas des enfants d’agriculteurs et d’ouvriers dans l’Ouest

Till now, the relation between schooling and social mobility, a classical question in the sociology of education, has been approached through analyses of a structural sort, either by focusing on the functions that schools are supposed to fill or by adopting the timeless model of neoclassical economics. This approach does not examine all possible relations between schools and social mobility; nor does it see these relations in terms of a process. A study of the scholastic biographies of the children of farmers and workers in western France renews our conception of this relation. It shows that this relation mainly stems from a combination of quite heterogeneous elements, which we glimpse in these biographies.     

Comment transformer un produit en marchandise et lui attribuer un prix : le traitement de la viande dans la grande distribution

Several social science studies have described the conditions under which goods and services become merchandise. In 2002, Sociologie du travail [Sociologie du travail 44 (2002) 255-287] presented contrasting approaches to “quality” by focusing on the processes of identifying and evaluating goods. Approaching this question from the angle of meat-packing provides us with means for accurately describing the relevant operations in this commodification as well as the way that mass marketing has shaped the two aforementioned processes. By leaving aside operations specifically intended for customers and concentrating on those used in mass marketing, we see how meat is “objectified” as it circulates, and how its value and price depend on processing the data ensuing from this objectification.     

Confiance et qualité des produits alimentaires : une approche par la sociologie des relations marchandes

Given the current crises, what means do actors implement in order to redefine the conditions for both a social contract and an economic adjustment between the producers and consumers of foodstuffs? These means can be interpreted as ways to cope with the risk of a mismatch between consumer expectations and the quality of produce in the marketplace - as new ways of assembling actors around interests that are not always stable. This quite high degree of indeterminacy, which comes into play throughout the market game, makes it necessary to better understand forms of association among actors and the arrangements that emerge as the market evolves as a function of new forms of adjustment. The actions undertaken by a group of mussel producers in France are reported. Under pressure to standardize produce, they have, nonetheless, imagined solutions for identifying produce and sorts of production so as to force the marketplace to deal with differences in quality. - Special issue on Agriculture and food.     

Parenthood,Gender and Work‐Family Time in the United States,Australia, Italy,France, and Denmark

Research has associated parenthood with greater daily time commitments for fathers and mothers than for childless men and women, and with deeper gendered division of labor in households. How do these outcomes vary across countries with different average employment hours, family and social policies, and cultural attitudes to family care provision? Using nationally representative time‐use data from the United States, Australia, Italy, France, and Denmark (N = 5,337), we compare the paid and unpaid work of childless partnered adults and parents of young children in each country. Couples were matched (except for the United States). We found parents have higher, less gender‐equal workloads than nonparents in all five countries, but overall time commitments and the difference by parenthood status were most pronounced in the United States and Australia.