Contenu du sommaire : Varia

Fare setting by the French National Railway Company (SNCF), a social history of pricing. From uniform fares to yield management (1938-2012). This article analyses the conditions of production and justification for systems of rail fares in France since the creation of the French National Railway Company (Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français — SNCF) in 1938. Initially based on the principle of a uniform rate per kilometre, the historic uniform fare system was steadily abandoned during the post-war decades in favour of pricing indexed to marginal costs. At the turn of the 1980s-90s, this paradigm was itself replaced by a real-time pricing mechanism — yield management — aimed at obtaining as much surplus per consumer as possible. The transformation of SNCF fare models, which was accompanied by a redefinition of the highly polymorphic notion of “public service” railways, was the result of work by a few leading actors. These “price setters,” who rely on tools from the discipline of economics as well as their own influence, act in specific (political, social, technical and competitive) contexts that make their proposed innovations possible, necessary and legitimate.

Coming to terms with diversity. Recruitment between market and pay bargaining`/titreb Diversification of recruitment is the managerial response to the strengthening of anti-discrimination legislation. It places recruiters in the paradoxical situation of having to both value and ignore “differences.” How can they do this without positive discrimination ? To answer this question, the article shows that recruitment cannot be reduced to a commodity exchange based on “skills agreements” but also fits into the rationales of differential mobilization of social groups. Diversity leads to the promotion of the presence, within the business, of discriminated groups on the basis of “agreements on established practices and customs,” differentiated according to the presumption of competence attached to the source of their disrepute. The example of the catering industry allows us to show the conditions of implementation of these policies in a sector under pressure. Although “diversity” legitimizes the principle of differentiation in wage requirements on the basis of the extra-occupational characteristics of individuals, it leads more to the replenishment of a reserve army of labour than to curbing the practices in use.

Succeeding in a triangular employment game : keeping one's job and making a career as a low-skilled service provider employee. On the basis of a study of hostesses employed by service providers and working for customers, the article analyzes the conditions in which low-skilled employees can successfully advance in a triangular labor relation. This employment arrangement — which scrambles the usual employer-employee relation in that the customer becomes a determinant third-party — is extremely malleable and does not systematically increase employee subordination. In fact, three types of alliances may emerge, shaped in part by customer characteristics and customer's relations with the service provider, but the article emphasizes the degree of maneuvering room employees have when it comes to facilitating or thwarting the development of those alliances. To succeed in these triangular relations — that is, not only to keep one's job but to advance in it, to make a career — does not require uncommon skills so much as the ability to master certain codes : it is crucial to be able to serve customers to their satisfaction while maintaining a certain distance and keeping one's employer content as well, and hostesses are not all equally at ease when it comes to getting their bearings and maneuvering within these configurations. The article explores the personal resources and dispositions behind that faculty.

Producing in urgency. The management of unpredictability in the world of journalism. Journalistic work is structurally confronted with urgent situations. Unlike other sectors using just-in-time methods, here urgency is not only the result of random failures in the production cycle, it also relates to the nature of the commodity itself — current affairs — which must be handled within the context of a collective organization. Based on observations and interviews in the written press, this article examines how urgency impacts on daily journalistic production. It highlights attempts at serialization within this flow of unique products and the slim possibility of negotiating irreversibility — inherent in industrial processes. The solution to the problems posed by urgent situations principally stems from inventory management, emphasizing the central role of forecasting in situations where the content of the work is itself characterized by uncertainty.

The 1999 reform of the Polish education system and its effects on socially based inequalities in scholastic competence. Poland is the only European Union country to have undertaken profound structural reform of its compulsory education system recently. One of the main components of the 1999 reform was to lengthen the shared curriculum component of general education by one year, thereby deferring the first orientation decision to age 16. This examination of the Polish experience, based on PISA evaluations for 2000, 2003, 2006 and 2009, sheds new light on the effects of comprehensive schooling. The analyses suggest that the reform has worked to increase students' scholastic performances and that lengthening the shared curriculum by one year reduces inequalities in socially based scholastic acquisition among students who complete compulsory schooling. The overall fall in such inequalities seems due primarily to the homogenization of learning conditions in comprehensive schools where the shared curriculum has been prolonged to the end of compulsory schooling. The Polish experience thus suggests that the changes in teachers' instruction methods and relations among students induced by the reform have been much more beneficial to socially disadvantaged, scholastically weak students than they have been harmful to more privileged students.