Contenu du sommaire : Varia

Carbon and crumpled metal. The social space of car models. Using data from the French “National Transport and Travel Survey” conducted in 2007-08, this article develops the analyses of Luc Boltanski about competition on the road in the 1970s. Whilst for the latter competition focused on styles of driving and vehicle characteristics, thirty years later, in a context where the external costs of the automobile are widely highlighted, there is also competition in relation to safety and air pollution. The aim is to show the social structures of road safety and environmental sustainability of car models, in postulating that relatively homogenous lifestyles differentiate between car models that are very unequally dangerous and polluting. The car thus makes it possible to capture the social rationales of a dual relationship with risk, road risk and environmental risk, rationales that deviate from traditional analyses of the literature on the subject; although they contribute little to pollution, the lower social classes are however widely subject to road risk, mainly due to the low protective capability of their vehicles. Conversely, the more affluent social classes contribute greatly to road and environmental risk, even though they have high quality automotive equipment available to them.

A long-term approach to teachers' legitimate cultural practices: stability in a time of change? While the link between legitimate culture and categories of graduates has been redefined in recent years, how much is this also true for schoolteachers? Sharing many of the dynamics experienced by other graduates and facing changes in their sociological characteristics, elementary and secondary schoolteachers may have had new life breathed into their cultural practices. We demonstrate, using Ministry of Culture and Communication surveys, that variations over time in cinema and theatre attendance and regular book reading are not the same for “schoolteachers and comparable occupations,” “teachers in secondary and tertiary education, scientific occupations” and other categories of graduates. In order to investigate further we use a method based on a comparison of two surveys conducted in 1970 and 2008, which enables us to analyse changes in the cultural practices of teachers in secondary education alone. We observe a decline in the consumption of legitimate culture that is only partially explained by changes to the sociological characteristics of secondary school teachers over the period studied.

Family and friends of persons in a situation of residential precarity: the strength and weakness of social ties as they relate to housing deprivation (homelessness). The article focuses on the family, friends—and possibly the social worker—of persons in a situation of residential precarity in France. Drawing on INSEE's 2012 “Sans domicile” survey and an ethnographic study conducted at the subsidized housing application office of the City of Paris housing and habitat bureau [Direction du Logement et de l'Habitat], it shows how lack of family support may lead to residential precarity and how this in turn may further isolate the person in question. It then analyzes how people go about applying for subsidized housing (the main strategy used to escape homelessness) and the role of social and family ties in this undertaking. It appears that getting onto the waiting list for a subsidized housing unit implies being integrated into a network that is both relational (family, friends compatriots) and institutional (social workers). Mothers play a crucial, combative role, their primary concern being to reconstitute the family household. In contrast, individuals without such a network do not claim their right to subsidized housing, despite their need. Being deprived of housing is therefore the result not only of poverty but also of a loss of the protection provided by family and social ties on one hand, institutions on the other.

Dropping in and hanging on in a military-inspired boarding school. The case of school dropouts who sign up to join Epide. The Public Establishment for Social Integration of the Military (Epide) is one of the support schemes for young adults without recognised educational or vocational qualifications. It aims to put them in an educational setting and prepare them for employability with the help of a socio-educational programme based on a military-inspired boarding school. The purpose of this article is to understand, first, the reasons that lead to educational dropouts signing up to this system despite the constraints of the boarding school and its military form, and secondly the reasons why they hang on within it. To do this, we base our explanation on direct observation in two Epide centers, combined with interviews with young people and senior staff. We firstly present the general principles of Epide and then assess the role of time and the decisive event in the process of re-connection. We then identify the impulse behind dropping back in, which cannot be reduced to career plans because it comes from causes that are extrinsic and intrinsic to the scheme. Revealing these causes is done in such a way as to locate the engagement of young unqualified adult people within a sequence that begins before their recourse to the scheme, continues with the act of engagement ( “signing up”) and is extended through their state of engagement ( “hanging on”).

Intimate partner violence, gender and criminalization: a synthesis of American debates. The article reviews American literature on domestic or intimate partner violence (IPV). Several major surveys have been conducted in the US by researchers with different theoretical positions (e.g., family violence versus violence against women); the survey findings have elicited much debate. This review of the literature offers a detailed summary of those debates—on gender symmetry, whether violence is bidirectional, how to define IPV, its etiology, legal responses to it—with the aim of helping to construct the research object called “intimate partner violence.” The disapproval and condemnation elicited by such violence is also an object of analysis.