Contenu du sommaire : Calculs économiques

A History of the Contingent Assessment Method
The contingent assessment method is a scientific instrument developed by economists in the 1950s for the valuation of what are ordinarily viewed as non-market resources. While the method has generated considerable scientific controversy, it came into being in a favourable social and political climate, and it is now widely used in public environmental policy in most industrialised countries.

The War of Indices. Inflation in Brazil (1964-1994)From 1964 to 1994, Brazilians grew accustomed to living with indices that measured past price variations and indexations that determined future prices. This article studies how public figures are socially generated and the social meanings they carry, the relationships between professionals and the research centres that calculated and disseminated public figures, and the transformation of those figures into genuine cultural devices that serve as key categories for improvement and action in collective life.

Lending to SMEs: Calculation, Guarantees and Information Gathering in Russia in the 2000s
In Russia, the decade of the 2000s was marked by an explosion in the number of bank loans granted to private individuals. At the same time, the risk management tools of scoring and prudential ratios were imported from Western banking models and disseminated. This article argues that the rapid dissemination of these loans was due more to the bank's ability to control their organisations than to the efficiency of the tools in calculating credit risk. Thus, commercial banks succeeded in consolidating the hierarchical authority of their head offices over their expanding territorial networks.

Keeping Accounts: Accounting Standards, Social Standards
The categories that enable make it inventory household budgets are «translated» by various institutional agents (customer service advisors at banks, social workers, etc.) when they are applied to the household budgets of low-income families. This process underscores the normative content of these categories: they are based on socially situated representations of the domestic unit (the household) and of time (the month) that are likely to impose a «double economic penalty» on the budgets of low-income families.

Measuring Immigrant Inclusion. The Genesis and History of the Girard-Stoetzel Surveys, 1945-1953 The surveys conducted by Alain Girard and Jean Stoetzel in the early 1950s constitute one of the few available sources for the study of immigrant issues at the time. The archives of the National Institute of Demographic Studies allow us to understand the rationale and the principles that guided the implementation of these surveys. But the decisive new element that helped structure the project and give it its final shape was the particular situation of increasing migration of colonial subjects to metropolitan France.

The Heuristic Value of Empathy in the Study of «Disgusting» Commitments
The article is concerned with the benefits of an empathetic position in the ethnographic approach. Starting from a case in which the researcher found the object of study « abhorrent », the article attempts to show that in situations in which the logic of indigenous behaviours seems opaque, empathy enables a private understanding of the emotions at work in the field. To be tenable, however, such a position requires a rare combination of proximity and distance in relation to the object; this can be turned to the researcher's advantage more easily in exotic fields than in fields close to home.

Activist Academics and New Trade Union Leaders in the United States: an Alliance to Cope with the Decline of Trade Unions? Since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of articles on « trade union revitalisation » in the United States. This article presents this literature by emphasising the relationship between the development of new research topics and the dynamics of exchange between the academic and militant spheres. In particular, it looks at how a break was constructed between two supposedly homogeneous types of trade unionism : « management-oriented trade unionism » and « new trade unionism ».

«On the Utility of Research in Descriptive Sociology Research in French Indochina»: an Unpublished Manuscript by Marcel Mauss (1902)Marcel Mauss drew up a questionnaire for the first international research conference on the Far East entitled «On the utility of research in descriptive sociology in French Indochina». The text is of major interest in three respects: the importance given by Mauss very early on to «descriptive sociology»; the explicitly pedagogical relationship between the «laboratory scientist» and ethnographers; finally, the fact that this guide is addressed to missionaries, civil servants in the colonial administration, officers and doctors as well as « indigenous» scholars.