Contenu du sommaire : Management

Politics – so near and yet so far. The professional universe of employees of the French Socialist Party and the managerialization of politics To what extent can a political party be managed like a commercial business? This article addresses this question by means of a sociological study of the low-ranking staff of a political party, dwelling on recent challenges that have been faced by both the leaders of the Socialist Party and its full-time employees. For almost fifteen years, business has served as the model for different modernization programs undertaken by the Socialist Party, deeply transforming not only working conditions but also the recruitment of staff. Confronted with the effects of this managerialization movement, the staff has in turn adopted the tone and tools of traditional labor movement. Informed by nostalgia for the militant political solidarity that characterized the highpoints of the Socialist Party's history, their struggle reveals the staff's incapacity to slow down the process of depoliticization (through the division of labor in both productive work and services, or the outsourcing of political missions) of the full-time staff of these politically oriented enterprises.

The partisan institution confronted to management. Managerial rhetoric and practices in the recruitment of “new members” into the “Union pour un Mouvement Populaire” (UMP) The matter of this article is to study the spreading of a modernizing rhetoric and managerial practices (introduction of “contracts of objective”, ranking of the federations according to their results, promotion of the “responsabilization”, use of the webmarketing) regarding the recruitment of “new members” by the UMP leaders. Rather than taking for granted the existence of a universal process of partisan “managerialization”, this paper analyzes the social conditions of the introduction of these techniques. It reveals that their use has been an essential resource for elites struggling for the succession at the head of the party and eager to display their managerial competences and their ability to innovate and modernize the party. The recurrent exhibition of the UMP modernization should be understood as a double strategy of recognition and disqualification of the “old” partisan practices and by extension the “old” leaders of the party, which notably brings about local tensions.

Sectorial reforms and monstration of modernity. The uses of managerial knowledge in the employment and food policies This article sketches a comparative analysis of the mobilisation and importation of the managerial knowledge in the employment and food policies in the middle of the 1980s and in the end of the 1990s. The commonalities between both reformative sequences rest on the fact that the recourse to managerial tools and discourses cannot be interpreted as an inflicted alignment to international policy norms imposed from the outside. Rather, thank to critical conjunctures, the managerial knowledge is constructed as a resource used by reformative groups to enhance their position, as well as the position of the policy sector they belong to, in the administrative space. As such, the article focuses on the different registers of legitimation of policy action (its conformity to international “good practices”, the invocation of its “scientificity”, its proximity to the business world) that arise from the twinning between reformative projects and managerial knowledge. The mobilisation of its references enables to guarantee the claims of modernity in the administrative activities at stake. It is consequently partaking of the (always precarious) symbolic positive discounting of relatively dominated sectors and public policies.

Training french senior civil engineers as managers. Elite circulation, professional reputation and the image of “the manager” After having achieved a major status reform, the grand corps of the Ponts et Chaussées was led to conceive a new training to management intended for his new recruits. The “managerial identity” they aim to perform created a serious conflict within the grand corps. Indeed, some of these high civil servants value and promote public management to reinforce the public sector whilst others use it as a means to encourage their peers to transfer from the public to the private sector. The apparent consensus and the current trend towards hightened managerial control conceals a series of issues concerning the Ponts et Chaussées'identity and control. Analyzing management through its training enables us to deconstruct its imagery by trying to grasp to which extent the relationships between high civil servants and French administration are here at stake.

Trade-Unionism seized by the management. The conditions of the production and of the differentiated appropriations of a managerial expertise on union action This article aims at analysing the dynamics of construction of management consulting companies specialized in the management of the relations with trade-unions. In the 1970's, these consultancies emerge in a context of an increase in industrial disputes, and are invested by some practitioners of industrial relations, strongly linked with social scientists, and by some activists converted. Thanks to the examination of their trajectories and of their practices, we hope to show the interest to understand the development of management expertise beyond from the expectations of employers. At first, taking into account the professional and the political socialization of these consultants is a way to highlight their own interests to pretend to contribute to the civilization of the conflicts between employers and trade-unions. From this point of view, it is also possible to determine how they try to translate their own knowledge and competences in a legitimate managerial expertise.

Dirty work and good causes: institutionalizing and justifying direct marketing in NGOs This article deals with the changes from the beginning of the 1980s which allowed NGOs to use fundraising techniques directly taken from mail order selling strategies. In this article what is particularly highlighted are the professional itineraries of the brokers who implemented direct marketing in a sector which is thought to be reluctant to those strategies. Indeed, legitimizing direct marketing in NGOs is a way to build a new and critized profession which could be called "non-profit fundraiser".

False alarm? The peculiar destiny of the glycol ethers in the field of occupational health in France This article recounts the career of the health alert about the dangers of the glycol ethers in France. This career began in the field of occupational health, in the middle of the 1990's, vanished for a few years and then reappeared after the asbestos scandal. This contribution shows how the glycol ethers became publicized through the confinement by workers organizations of many uncertainties concerning the efficiency of the occupational chemical risk management policy. As a consequence, this alert does not share one of the major characteristics of most alerts, which publicization depends on the capacity of some political actors to make uncertainties proliferate around them. It is thus expected that this article will underline how the field of occupational health resists the changes visible in other fields of public health.

From enumeration to survey for the Census: the French model of democracy In 2002, French Parliament adopted a reform of the national Census which partly replace the traditional enumeration by sampling technique. This decision, prepared by the state statisticians, was not subject to any political debate. This is a great difference with, by example, the American situation. In United States, a similar project for introducing sampling technique in the census has been leading to a national controversy for more than twenty years. This gap offers an interesting sociological perspective on democratic institutions.