Contenu du sommaire : Varia

How to forge a link between the economic and social spheres?
Vichy is a key moment in the institutionalization of the economy, society and population as categories of public policy. If some expert forums of the regime are well known, the overall institutional configuration has never been systematically studied. The proliferation of new institutions, counterbalanced by many interconnections, was an expression of a search for a more rational organization. The Vichy regime methodically sought to link local and national levels, economic and social spheres, private and public sectors, politics and the family. These connections reveal the networks involved in collective processes of maturation and dissemination of ideas. To understand their overall logic, it is essential to focus on multipositionnal individuals who built bridges between the different parts of the whole structure. Most of them escaped the Épuration. The analysis thus leads to reconsider the extent of the rupture of structures and people which occurred between Vichy and the Liberation. It highlights a continuity in the functional architecture governing the flow of economic and social information.

Building up the Cognitive State
Focused on training and curricula at the École nationale d'administration from 1945 to 1982, this article explores the cognitive underpinnings of State power. Drawing on the archives of the school, it shows that changes in curriculum and teaching at the ENA are structured by different strategies of legitimization and distinction driven by the professional groups that recruit graduates into the field of power, as well as the positioning of the grandes écoles in the field of higher education. These transformations help to historicize the changing figures of the senior civil servant, moving from the “humanist” civil servant in the 1950s, to the “scientific” civil servant in the 1960s, and then the “operational” civil servant in the 1970s. These successive models have a decisive impact on the mode of legitimization of different groups of top State officials, and on the symbolic categories that public policies articulate.

The emerging leadership of the regional state
The French territorial State is in flux. After a decade of reforms, it is now organized around a new administrative governance pattern, structured in a “Y” shape. This pattern is, by its very nature, indeterminate and has given rise to varying institutional configurations over time, space and depending on the policy field. By taking as a case study a small-sized region, this article deals with the emergence of new forms of administrative regulation around the Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development. First, it stresses the increasing role played by the regional level, whose place has been strengthened in the local administrative order by the recent round of reforms. Secondly, it shows that the rise of a regional State is a negotiated process, which depends on three main variables, whose combination generates distinct ways of steering public policies, ranging from a strong regional control to a softer action based on animation and coordination.

Is law ever useful for disadvantaged people?
This article analyzes the implementation gap of social rights for disadvantaged people by focusing on the processing of priority applicants for the enforceable right to housing (DALO) in France. Behind the homogenizing legal label of DALO, distinctions must be made between different types of applicants, whose social characteristics and trajectories determine both the type of accommodation proposed by the local officials and their contrasted expectations in terms of housing. This explains why accommodations proposed to homeless people who manage to assert their rights are predominantly located in the poorest areas, when they are not simply directed to emergency shelters. Depending on their backgrounds and expectations they may be satisfied, resigned or refuse the offer. Lastly, this paper shows the limitations and the unintended effects of the effort to “optimize” social housing policy through the individual recourse to justice, as it increasingly targets policy on the most disadvantaged people and contributes to the concentration of poverty in certain urban areas.

Sorting out household budgets
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a low income urban area in France, this article analyzes the way in which household budgets are organized in practical terms. More precisely, it questions the effects of ambivalent institutional conditions (cognitive, normative and instrumental) on the professional practices of street level bureaucrats whose role it is to implement, at a local level, public action seeking to prevent personal insolvency. Paradoxically, it appears that despite a loose institutional framework, the labeling of economic deviancy is carried out in a relatively homogeneous and univocal way.