Contenu du sommaire : Varia

Everyday categorizations of French social space. Analysis based on a card game. Although many studies have examined the ability of socio-occupational classification to objectify social class divisions, there are very few that study their correspondence with the everyday categorisations used by French people in their thinking about society. Based on a “card game” inspired by the survey by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in the early 1980s, this article describes everyday class rankings in order to assess their degree of convergence with official classifications, and particularly with socio-economic classification. Conducted with a sample of 547 persons, our survey shows the presence of shared rationales and typical variations within what are assumed to be the highly differentiated rankings used by people. In fact the majority of these categorizations rely on occupational criteria that are ordered according to a hierarchical logic (by distinguishing between employed and self-employed, and then according to an internal classification amongst the employed), or in terms of occupation (by trade and occupational sector), and they confirm a form of internalization of official divisions within the social world.

Changes in educational, social class and social class of origin homogamy in France (1969-2011): Greater openness overall but increased closure of elites. Despite the relevance of homogamy for the study of social structure, the few existing French studies on the evolution of homogamy have significant weaknesses. This article aims to fill this gap by studying the evolution of educational, social class and social class of origin homogamy (following the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero-EGP classification) within cohabiting couples, using 42 Labour Force Surveys conducted by INSEE between 1969 and 2011. Homogamy is shown to have clearly declined in all three of the components studied, both in absolute terms and beyond what would be expected as a result of structural changes to the population. Endogamy has declined for almost all groups and the dimensions of social space for partner choice have become largely unimportant. In particular, the specificity of persons with no qualifications, of the self-employed, and of agricultural occupations has very clearly diminished. Only the endogamy of graduates of grandes écoles has increased. Finally, these results are related to changes in class-consciousness, socio-spatial segregation and economic inequality.

Words for ills: diagnostic theories and health problems. The respondent reporting on health problems collected in 1999 by the French national survey “Handicaps-Incapacités-Dépendance” [Disabilities-infirmity-dependence] provides access to a multitude of ways of presenting health disorders. Textual analysis of this material shows that self-reports vary by social background, illustrating Luc Boltanski's notion of somatic culture. However, it is possible to go beyond this observation and show that ways of presenting health problems are also and indissociably ways of understanding disease—what we call here “diagnostic theories.” Drawing on the examples of mental illness and Alzheimer-type disorders, the article shows the relevance of taking into account other factors, particularly the social and moral construction of pathologies, the treatment configurations specific to each French medical-social sector, but also family configuration, as the issues involved in modes of organizing daily life vary according to those configurations.

The consecration of children: Perspectives on a contemporary passion. The recent, simultaneous publication in French of two books on childhood is an occasion to analyze the two faces—one decidedly grim, the other considered quite attractive—of a phenomenon here called the “consecration of children,” understood to characterize current attitudes toward childhood in western societies. This critical review first presents and discusses Pierre Verdrager's L'Enfant interdit, which studies discourses on pedophilia in France since the 1970s and how the issue has been dealt with in that country. It then turns to Séverine Mathieu's L'Enfant des possibles, which discusses the ethical positions of the actors—patients as well as caregivers—implicated in medically assisted reproduction. The review thereby brings to light a profound shift in attitudes that simultaneously involves attitudes toward childbearing, filiation and social norms. It successively points up a civilization of childbearing, filiation reversal and norm psychologization and naturalization.

Pragmatism and sociology. This article provides an account of a body of sociological studies recently published in France, which claims to use a pragmatist approach (that of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead), or to highlight the similarity between its analytical principles and those of sociology (the primacy of practice, the decisive nature of context, the importance of uncertainty, the temporality of action and the sociality of normativity). An examination of these publications also shows how certain notions belonging to pragmatism (habit, investigation, experimentation, valuation, democracy and truth) have now been assimilated by different sociological approaches in different ways.