Contenu du sommaire : Déni de travail. L'invisibilisation du travail aujourd'hui

The Formalization of Employment as a Test of Invisible Work : Two Cases of Women Service Workers in Brazil. Based on field studies about domestic workers in Rio de Janeiro and two recently created categories of social workers (health community agents and social protection agents) in São Paulo, this article aims to analyze the effects of formalization on female employment in the service sector in Brazil. The first part deals with the ongoing process of juridical visibilization within these forms of employment. Next, the analysis of work insists on the maintenance of invisible work, which still characterizes these activities, in spite of the juridical visibilization of the professional categories of these female workers. Finally, we will show how these processes of juridical visibilization are flexible and keep part of the work invisible. In the end, we will ask about the impact of the formalization of the employment status on the content of work, trying to find out whether juridical visibilization contributes to a better recognition of the preexisting work content or if it contributes to its transformation.

Servitude and the Volunteer : Political Uses of Invisible Work in New York City's Parks. Based on research on the transformation of the workforce responsible for the maintenance of municipal parks in New York, this article proposes to show how the work of volunteers on the one hand, and that of the workfare workers (welfare recipients forced to “work off” their welfare checks) on the other, have enabled the city's Parks Department to function – and even survive – since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. From the standpoint of social class, these two categories of atypical workers are often diametrically opposed. These differences inscribe themselves in the workplace as they carry out maintenance tasks : they are subject to different forms of supervision and types of motivation. Nevertheless, volunteer workers and workfare workers are similar in the use to which they are put by the city government. Their work is not always recognized as such, they are not understood to be workers, and their work is unpaid : it is rendered invisible as work in the name of the citizenship volunteers enact or the citizenship workfare workers must try to regain.

Not-Quite-Workers and Paradoxical Unionization : What Can be Learned from Volunteer Firefighters. French fire departments are staffed by professional civil servants and volunteers, but in fact, 80% of French firefighters are volunteers. For years, it has been clear that the volunteers did the job without wages. This changed when they began to be paid for their commitment – a few euros per shift. Even though the pay is ridiculously low, some firefighters – especially the youngest ones who are jobless – live with this “pay”. In this article, I try to understand to what extent this situation has created new relations between coworkers, new conceptions of the work, and new perceptions for the volunteers who see themselves as real workers without the professional status. Moreover, some recent political reforms reinforce this process by developing many different statuses for French firefighters : you can be professional, volunteer, or hired with a private contract for a short time (e.g., a few months, a summer job). This article analyses this evolution of public services in France, the multiplicity of statuses among the workers, and specifically a new phenomenon, namely, the creation of Volunteer Firefighters' Unions, which are similar to the professionals' unions. This mobilization of volunteers is a crucial way to observe what John Krinsky called “constructing workers”.

Challenge and Suffer : Forms and Foundations of Inmate-Workers' Social Criticism. Based on fieldwork in seven French prisons, the article deals with social criticism expressed by inmates (women and men) about their employment conditions and wages. The gaps among their conditions and the common law (absence of employment contracts and social protection, piece wages), their experience of work (in prison and before) and their knowledge of social issues give rise to repertoires of contention focused on low wages and production rates. Despite the prohibition of the right to strike, social criticism can turn into collective action. Inmates are aware that they suffer the denial of rights. Their speech and practices show that they consider themselves as employees and act as such.

The State According to Bourdieu. Though he forced himself not to use the word State in his work until the second half of the 1980s, Bourdieu devoted his lectures at the Collège de France to it for three years (1989-1992). Why ? A recent volume helps answer this question. He explains himself by tracing the sociogenesis of the state in Europe since the twelfth century in connection with what he called “the field of power” in his work since the early 1970s. This interest in the State owes much to his studies on the modes of domination and his investigations into the different fractions of the ruling class (the “state nobility”), which contributed significantly to the development of the notion of symbolic capital. The primitive accumulation of symbolic capital is, according to Bourdieu, at the basis for the emergence of the state, the main agent and primary instrument of the social construction of reality.

Science of the Science of the State. The Perturbation from the Embedded Researcher : an Epistemological Dilemma. The article further develops the reflections on the renewal of inquiry methods in line with the contemporary transformations of research policies. Comparing three contrasting research experiences, it details the heuristic value of our reflexive engagement in the State reform. Observant participation and ethnopraxy grants direct access to the reform machinery, and depart from scholastic approaches of public policies. Above all, they inquire about the disturbances that we create on the ground as embedded researchers. As the researcher can never become a genuine native, he necessarily makes blunders, gaffes, perturbations whose analysis can prove fertile for a science of the science of the State.