Contenu du sommaire : Approches croisées de l'Etat, du gouvernement et de l'action publique (deuxième partie)

This article seeks to enrich the analysis of public action, or policy, by blending it with an ethnographic method. To this end, it defines four levels of public action: 1) the targets of policy; 2) “street-level” practitioners and 3) their immediate supervisors; and finally 4) those at the origin of the policies in question. In a first section, it demonstrates that the analysis of public policy has gradually evolved toward a position of greater realism through a (limited) reduction of its initial ethnocentrism, by an (incomplete) critique of the model of “economic man”, and finally through a (relative) methodological shift. It further demonstrates that, although it is as yet little applied, ethnography is a type of knowledge that is useful for the study of public policy: it allows us to overcome the problem of positional ethnocentrism and to mobilize all of the tools of social science without ignoring certain essential dimensions of actors such as their age, gender, and social trajectory. Ultimately, this article illustrates this hybrid approach through examples of methods and results obtained in the study of French public policy in the hospital sector in the 2000s.

It is frequently heard in both France and the United States that policy analysis is “running out of steam” or perhaps even in crisis. This article suggests that an important reason for this is the excessive intellectual and academic dynamic of specialization and division of scientific labour in political science, which has led to a parting of ways among the studies of public policies, public administration, and the state as each of these has become a largely autonomous sub-field. Taking stock of the changes that have occurred in the North American academic field since the early 20th century, the article identifies through both analytic and genealogical approaches how these processes have led to a fragmentation of the objects under examination in the social and political sciences. It then suggests that, among various contributions, historical institutionalism has offered, since the eighties, a flow of innovative solutions aimed at rearticulating the study of states, public policies, and bureaucracies. This American trip helps define and compare the specificities of the French academic trajectory in the field of study of the state, public administration and public policies. It also raises the issue of the conditions under which American theories have been imported into the French context.

The question: “Who governs public policies?” is central to the analysis of those power elites who can be characterized by their capacity to bring about change in public policy. Analysis of these transformative elites, which we label “programmatic,” requires us to articulate the sociology of elites with the analysis of public policy. On an empirical level, a combination of methods derived from the sociology of elites (positional, reputational, relational, and decisional approaches) as well as those developed by analysts of public policy (cognitive approaches) allows us to identify programmatic groups, to analyze their degree of cohesion, and to assess their power. Analysis of these programmatic actors leads us to propose an endogenous explanatory framework for policy change centered on the interactions among actors. More broadly, it allows us to explore the dynamic of the increasingly autonomous state based on the characteristics of the actors within it and of the policies these put forward.

This paper analyzes the implementation of a prison policy aiming at guiding the culture of detention towards a culture of restorative justice in Belgium. Following the musical metaphor of Lascoumes and Le Gales (2007), the performers and the audience are the main focus of the analysis, not the score or the composer. This analytical orientation is justified especially since the partition is, as we will show a "graphical score”, that is to say an abstract schema ­ a diagram ­ rather than a governmental agenda. After the presentation of the analytical framework, we will account for the interpretation of this singular policy.

On the basis of a field study conducted in the Romanian vine and wine sector, the paper highlights the role played by the European Union in the process of shaping new economic “interests”. It takes issue with the analysis which consists in rating the “access” to supranational institutions. The emphasis is rather laid on labelling dynamics and on the circulation between national and European fields of representation. The biggest players in the Romanian wine market get control over competing representative organisations. Each of them receives support from Brussels, within the Common market organisation, and makes the most of it in Bucharest. As a result, there are several definitions of the product to be defended. The national administration is expected to decide between them. But no definitive solution is found, as variable-geometry coalitions are formed.