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Reconfiguring alimentary norms and surveys in France: the nutrition service of the National Institute of Hygiene. This article examines nutrition surveys and the reconfiguration of food standards in France during World War II. Physiologists and doctors came together in several commissions to monitor the food consumption of the French population and the evolution of the state of nutrition, and to solve the problems caused by restrictions. The Institut de Recherche d'Hygiène (Institute for Hygiene Research) was set up in Marseille by the Rockefeller Foundation to implement measures to conduct nutrition surveys. They introduced an innovation in French research into nutrition, comparing the nutritional composition of people's diets with the state of their health in the same way as earlier research had compared food consumption with physical activity. In so doing they introduced a third term into traditional nutritional assessments. The results of these surveys caused controversy about the nature of nutritional standards, especially the assessment of the rations consumed by population groups. The article examines the impact of the techniques imported by the Rockefeller Foundation and their application during the war on the reconfiguration of research into nutrition and nutritional standards.

Taking health into account in public policies: analysis of a regime of governmentality in Quebec
Health is determined by social, economic and environmental factors and cannot be reduced to curative approaches. A broad range of public administrations — well beyond health ministries or agencies — should be involved in promoting health. Horizontal initiatives cutting across government sectors are essential pillars of health-related interventions. We use the perspective of governmentality proposed by Foucault to understand and draw lessons on how the implementation of health in public policies develops. In this article, we use the term governmentality to refer to the governance of complex interventions which integrates evidence in decision-making processes. We examine the way health concerns are integrated in public policies in Quebec, Canada. Our study is based on 61 interviews with managers and professionals and on an analysis of related documentation. The analysis is based on four characteristics of governmentality : object, targets, shapes of governmentality, and visibility regime. As part of our results, sub characteristics could be extracted : accountable actors, type of evidence to be mobilised, direction of evidence sharing, involvement of first, second and third circle of a network, specificities and generalities of the visibility regimen, frequency and formality of interactions. These sub characteristics can guide upcoming studies and analysis of regime of governmentality.

Building up an “experimental” health local contract: negotiations and compromise under stress
Our work investigates the different stages of construction of a local contract between the Health Regional Agency and territorial collectivities in the Midi-Pyrénées Region (France). This ethnographic study of public action in real time analyzes the interplay of the actors, the tensions and the negotiations that have contributed to an eventual agreement and compromise between the partners. This contract constitutes a terrain fertile to tension and resistance, negotiation and compromise on numerous points, from the sanitary diagnostic of the territory, to the selected perimeter for action or to territorial governance.