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The empirical study of municipal cultural policies shows that the modes of implementation of these policies are drastically different from their conceptual and normative framework. Having described this difference the authors try to understand why this difference is maintained. They see one possible answer to this question in the resources in terms of possibilities of action which this conceptual and normative framework offers both to the municipal actors and to the producers of cultural goods and services. However, it also generates inflationist pressures which can only be contained by financial and political criteria and considerations.

Having learned its lesson from the strikes of 1974, the General Direction of the Post Office, in its program of automating the mail sorting centers, made a major priority of improving the working conditions of its employees. While so far 2.8 billion francs have been spent on automating the sorting centers and while important material improvements have been made, the employees of the automated centers find that their working conditions are still unsatisfactory and even that they have deteriorated as a result of the introduction of the new sorting system. This article attempts to explain the contradiction between the objective improvements in working conditions and the negative perception of those workers most directly concerned.

This paper concerns the evaluation of public policies designed to promote quality control in small firms ; these policies have been implemented by the Ministry of Industry between 1977 and 1982, and mainly consisted in granting subsidies to firms which hire experts for a few days. Such policies are part of a number of incentive schemes recently developed by the french administration. These policies had to face two difficulties : on one hand, the concept of quality had to compete with rival concepts promoted by other departments of the Ministry, and lost a great part of its audience ; on the other hand, it proved extremely difficult to find exemplary cases that could have been useful to regain this audience. The authors link the latter point to the procedures of control of the policies, which emphasized the observance of formal rules rather than real evaluation concerns. This specially contributed to the standardization of the expertises to the prejudice of their relevance. The analysis is then extended to the whole of public policies concerned with the management of small firms, and leads to a new insight into new ways of controlling these policies.

Using a technical and teleological definition of what a cost is and trying to apply it to cost analysis in public organizations raises two issues : technical constraints of cost computation are poorly satisfied and the conventional goals of the analysis are questionable in these organizations. In public administrations cost analysis seems rather to fulfill a socio-organizational role. As for technical difficulties they can be overcomed as some instances are suggesting it. Issues raised by the cost analysis in the public organizations can improve its problematics in any kind of organization.