Qualité des produits alimentaires et marques de filières

Brands have recently cropped up in the distribution of fresh produce - a phenomenon closely linked to food and health crises in the past few years. Public authorities have been creating new control and monitoring procedures, tightening regulations on production and modifying regulations about official labels of quality. Meanwhile, retailers have been adopting new strategies for segmenting supply. How does this affect the supply of produce to consumers? How does it modify relations between producers and distributors? Under what conditions do these parties have an interest in complying? How do these segmentation strategies interact with the policies advocated by public officials and affect the raising of standards for a “minimum quality”? - Special issue on Agriculture and food.     

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.     

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.     

Gérer la qualité de l’eau : singularisation, évaluation et régime de gouvernement

The April-June 2002 issue of Sociologie du Travail opened its pages for a discussion of the question of quality. Authors highlighted two mechanisms: “identification/singularization” (a sociotechnical process of co-constructing the quality of goods and services) and evaluation (a process of building up confidence so as to do away with uncertainty about the quality of goods and services). Can these two processes be analyzed together? If so, how to understand their interactions? As the example of managing the water supply and wastewater shows, jointly analyzing these two processes helps us understand the work of “qualification/requalification”. The relation between singularization and evaluation is clarified by introducing the notion of a “regime of government”.     

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 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.     

La maladie des coûts est-elle contagieuse ? Le cas des ensembles de musique ancienne

To complete traditional explanations of why the performing arts tend to run a deficit, the case of Early Music orchestras is examined. The usual mechanisms do not suffice to explain why these institutions suffer from the “illness of costs”. Two hypotheses are combined to complete Baumol’s model. For one thing the deepening deficit of Early Music orchestras is related to their professionalization; and for another, it is explained by their being simultaneously in two markets: the concert market and the musicians’ labor market, where they have to compete with subsidized orchestras.     

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.     

Les apories de la solidarité familiale Contribution à la sociologie des configurations de justice entre les familles et l’État, dans le cas français

Despite its many meanings, “solidarity” has once again become current in French to describe macro as well as microsocial relations. Social relations in and outside the family have not always been understood as instances of solidarity. But is this solidarity the same as the one established by the welfare state? Forms of family solidarity that have risen in esteem over the past two decades are “deconstructed”. The conditions for family solidarity are examined; and conceptual paradoxes, described. This approach suggests that family solidarity, as this concept is normally used, mixes together several systems of justice that should be clearly distinguished, especially if we want to put this phrase to a judicious social use.     

Dénoncer en justice les discriminations syndicales : contribution à une sociologie des appuis conventionnels de l’action judiciaire

This article examines the rise in court cases relating to discrimination against trade union workers in France since the late 1990s. It seeks to identify sources of support for victims of discrimination to help them file complaints before the Courts. The judicialization of union-related discrimination cases was made possible by a new discourse that links the recognition of individual merit and the common cause of re-unionization. The development of a special method of proof and the specialization of certain union actors and lawyers have helped make legal action against discrimination routine. But the historical roots of this strategy raise the question of how it can be applied to workers in secondary labor markets, particularly precarious workers.     

Dispositifs d’intermédiation marchande et politique des marchés. La modernisation du marché des fruits et légumes en France, 1950-1980

As this study of experiments with organizing the fruit and vegetable market from the 1950s till the end of the 1970s shows, there were alternatives to the principle of distribution, for instance: the modernization of traditional wholesale marketplaces (carreau) or the establishment of veilings (marchés au cadran) controlled by producers. After exposing the rationale underlying each of these arrangements, the empirical conditions are examined for actually modernizing markets. Attention is drawn to the factors that weigh on players in the market, in particular the tensions, on the one hand, between homogenization and concentration and, on the other hand, the singularity of products and transactions.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Le marché comme rencontre d’activités de régulation : initiatives et innovations dans l’approvisionnement bio et local de la restauration collective

How to apply Jean-Daniel Reynaud's theory of social regulation to market relations? When applied to the results drawn from fieldwork on the supplying of organic and local produce to catering businesses serving public institutions in France, this grid of analysis shows that organizing this supply chain involves many activities of regulation. An explanation is provided about how hard existing regulations make it to search for local produce. Two contrasting cases show the degree to which the parties involved can skirt around existing regulations and also, use certain regulations to construct new ones. The innovative regulations that enter into application are qualified as being “joint”, since they stem from the efforts of the parties in catering and in agriculture to agree about how to organize transactions, which had previously been done through the work of market middlemen. In that case, instead of reasoning in terms of a pre-existing supply and demand, we have to understand how supply and demand gradually take shape through the process of working out regulations.     

Territoires professionnels en question. L’exemple des comptables et réviseurs au Proche-Orient, une comparaison Liban-Jordanie

In Lebanon as in Jordan, the accountancy profession is faced with major regulatory and institutional reforms owing to policies of economic liberalization, which open markets and try to attract foreign investments. Light is shed on both the issues underlying resistance to these reforms and the conflicts that have flared up. By pointing out similarities and variations in the definition of this profession and of its boundaries, we notice: the weight of history and of institutional and political factors; the convergence owing to the globalization of markets; and national responses to changes determined by factors and pressures that are mostly supranational. This can help us better understand conditions under which a profession is constructed in quite different contexts.     

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.     

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.