Quand la formation ne suffit pas : la préparation des étudiants à l’emploi en Angleterre,en France et en Suède

The proliferation of internships and the rise of professionalisation in higher education are, in France, frequently condemned as evidence of a quest for greater employability, driven by a skills-based approach. A comparative analysis of the methods used to prepare students for employment shows the degree to which the social mechanisms are homogeneous in England (employability) and in Sweden (bildning). In France, the transition from higher education to employment entails a process of pre-professionalisation. This is characterised by the dominant role of professional skills and their incorporation into the structure of initial education itself. Rather than the outcome of a process of commodification, this mechanism of pre-professionalisation is explained by the persistence of an idealized conception of “matching” that still profoundly marks the relations between education and employment in France.     

« Le Premier Cercle » : le Kruzhok de Heidelberg et la nationalisation de la chimie russe

In the 1860s and 1870s, Russian chemistry was rocked by a series of charged nationalist polemics, alleging that German chemists had been engaged in jingoism, bias, and poaching the discoveries of Russian chemists. These salvos from leading members of the Russian Chemical Society (established 1868) formed the core of the Russian contribution to some of the earliest and clearest claims that natural knowledge revealed a national character. This paper traces the origins of these disputes to a specific location: Heidelberg in the late 1850s and early 1860s. After the humiliating defeat of Russian forces by a Western European coalition in the Crimean War (1854-1856), the Russian government resolved to “modernize” its major institutions to enable it to compete more effectively against its former opponents. Alexander II and his ministers decided to export Russian postdocs to leading Western universities (mostly in the German states) hoping that these graduates would be able to erect modern scientific institutions within Russia upon their return. This paper focuses on the chemists among them, most of whom ended up at Heidelberg University (including their most famous representative, D. I. Mendeleev, later renowned for his 1869 formulation of the periodic system of chemical elements). While there, they experienced profound alienation from their German peers, and retreated to their own environments — particularly the Russian urban institution of the kruzhok or “circle.” This kruzhok, formed as a reaction to perceived German xenophobia, was the major social institution upon which the Russians — once back in St. Petersburg — could construct a Russian Chemical Society and the basic institutions of Western scholarship. The supposed venture into Western Europe resulted not in a hegemonic submission to the institutions of German academia, but rather to a revitalization of a Russian cultural form that proved both adaptable to the demands of technical professionalization and became a kernel for a Germanophobic nationalism that would permeate the sciences in the ensuing decades. The paper concludes with an analysis of three different styles of scientific nationalism in chemistry: the representative, concerning the preferential employment of Russians over Germans in state institutions; the linguistic, about the proper national language(s) for science; and the internationalist, whereby Russians defended the cosmopolitan in science to attack perceived German jingoism.     

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.     

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.     

Décloisonner la sociologie de l’engagement militant. Note critique sur quelques tendances récentes des travaux français

This critique reviews an especially active field of research during the last 20 years in France: the sociology of activism. In this current of sociology, a new interactionist paradigm has emerged that takes into account activists’ careers and the process of becoming an activist. This critique focuses on how the idea of the “rewards” of activism has been reworked. After reviewing theoretical debates about whether or not new forms of activism and new activists are arising, this article points out two issues for current research, both related to the social division of labor, namely: improving our understanding of, on the one hand, the linkage between macrosocial changes and activism and, on the other hand, of the way that organizations shape activism.