Un plafond à caissons : les femmes à l’EHESS

The feminization of employment at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris has fallen off after an early start and it remains low. This is not to be set down so much to the formally discriminating nature of the recruitment examination (concours) as to competition, the accumulation of social capital and the methods for producing job applications. The initial feminization owed much to long inhouse careers, as women were recruited without sitting for an examination but into subordinate positions from which they could move upwards. This trend came to a halt as this channel of recruitment was shut down and a more elitist, relational and competitive one was opened that leads fewer women to enter job applications. The situation is not a stalemate however. A group of women professors has managed to place the gender question on the agenda and this seems to have given a (weak) boost to feminization.     

From Potent Dead to Potent Places? Reflections on Muslim Saint Shrines in South Asia

This paper analyses the issue of the thaumaturgy of the Muslim saints in South Asia by focusing on the notion of potent place rather than on the exemplary lives of these figures and on their exceptional relations to God. Nevertheless, there is an important contradiction between the ubiquity of the saint, his residence with God and his strict localisation in space. To establish a firm relation with him and obtain his intercession, devotees must visit him precisely where his corpse was buried. Generally, this place was already potent or extra-ordinary before the inhumation of the saint. Does the process of the saint’s institutionalisation through the rites performed on his body transfer the potency of the place onto the saint and the power of the saint to the place? The analysis will draw on fieldwork enquiries conducted at the shrine of the martyr Ghāzī Miyāñ, the oldest (eleventh century) and most popular Muslim heroic figure in Northern India and Nepalese Terai, and at the shrines of two popular Sufi saints of Sindh (Pakistan), Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar and Bodlo Bahār.     

Les rouages du genre. La différenciation des pratiques de travail chez les juges des enfants

When women and men occupy apparently identical positions, do they develop exactly the same working practices? Based on a survey of youth court judges, the article directly tackles this tricky question, one rarely raised in relation to the highest professions. After showing that gender contributes to differences in judicial practices, but not in the sense of gender stereotypes, it identifies the mechanisms through which it operates. Far from acting in isolation, uniformly and independently of the contexts of practice, it works through complex and sometimes contradictory processes, always closely linked with the other dimensions of professional and social pathways. In this case, gender produces its effects through two primary mediations: one, the attitudes of each judge to psycho-educational norms, and two, their attitudes to gender stereotypes.     

Risk factors for dating violence among teenage girls under child protective services

The aim of the present study was to explore potential risk factors for severe physical victimisation in dating relationships of adolescent girls in the child protective system (CPS). A total of 196 adolescent Canadian girls within the care of the CPS completed questionnaires containing measures relating to dating and family violence, sexual history and socio-demographic variables. Results showed that the majority of participants had experienced some types of victimisation in their dating relationships, with 53.1 per cent reporting at least one severe physical victimisation experience. Results from bivariate analyses revealed that a history of child sexual abuse and school failure or dropout were not associated with dating victimisation. History of parental physical abuse, living outside the family environment before placement, age of first sexual relationship, number of sexual partners and having been pregnant were related to sustained severe physical dating victimisation. Logistic regression analysis indicates that all factors, save for number of partners and living outside family environment, contributed to the prediction of dating victimisation in multivariate analysis. Having been pregnant increased the odds of sustaining severe physical abuse more than threefold (by 3.60). Implications for intervention and further research are discussed.     

La tournée des facteurs Normes gestionnaires, régulation collective et stratégies d’activité

The work of mailmen is mainly defined by the delivery routes to which they are assigned. Since this special organization of work grants them broad autonomy, the processes for delimiting, defining, and conducting routes must be analyzed by taking into account observations from three levels. The first one focuses on the French Post Office’s managerial standards, which, though increasingly determined by objectives for making a profit, have little impact on mail deliverers’ activities. The second centers around this occupational group’s own regulations, which stem from a hierarchy based on seniority and control over mail delivery and routes. The third level of observation takes into view the strategies for delivering mail that postmen adopt on their routes. These strategies reflect different relations to managerial objectives and to customers; and they reveal contrasting conceptions of the job of delivering mail. Emphasis is laid on the fact that the situations for working at lower levels in the service sector cannot be separated from the factors defining and organizing these situations.