Contenu du sommaire : Métiers de relation et nouvelle gestion publique

The Effects of New Public Management on the work of professionals: transpositions, variations, ambivalences. How to consider the effects of the New Public Management (NPM) and the reform it inspired on the work of professionals in the public sector? At the core of this file, this issue is explored from field surveys conducted in the field of education, but also of health and social action. The combined works paint a differentiating and subtle picture of the effects of the NPM on the work of the professionals. A few main lines of action emerge. Considered as a doctrinal puzzle, the NPM appears even more varied, if not shattered, when it is examined through its implementation and specific responses within devices and normativities concentrating on management. The diversity of the reforms based on it traditionally express national specificities, but the proposed surveys allow to identify numerous other sources of variation: fields of activity, reactions of the professionals, implications of the intermediate hierarchies, local environments, etc. Therefore, in their specific versions, these reforms face heterogeneous actors and rules configurations, and their effects are neither direct nor mechanic. On the contrary, they testify of a paradoxical or ambivalent dimension of the NPM.

A well-tempered management: the experience of heads of French institutions of secondary education
Heads of French secondary schools have seen their missions expand and their work enrich since the decentralization of the education system after 1980. Since the 1990s, this evolution is ongoing with the assertion of their educational role and the increasing trend of operating by taking into consideration the school performances, thus echoing the themes of a new public management attentive to an efficient use of the resources and advocating a framework ensuring it. An empirical investigation finds that heads adhere to this new professional reality they deem to get things moving in the school. For them, this movement is legitimate in terms of organization, as it helps to overcome bureaucratic modalities of action, which are not reactive enough at the local level; and in terms of goals, because it focuses on defending the most academically and socially fragile students. But according to the scopes of activities; i.e financial resources or teaching methods, the management of teachers, its position in a local environment, this adhesion is more or less achieved in practice, leading the heads to build various managerial positions under the duress from the organization.

External evaluation policy and reorganization of professionalisms in primary education: a case of gentle accountability. In the French speaking part of Belgium, a policy of external evaluation of the achievements of the pupils has been developed over the last fifteen years. It's based on a particular logic of accountability which can be either “gentle” or “reflexive” (Mons & Dupriez & 2011). According to the results provided by these evaluations, it is aimed to make the school stakeholders more responsible and encourage their reflective practice supposed to be source of improvement of their practices. This article, from a qualitative survey by interviews, questions the effects of this policy on the professionalism of teachers and headmasters of/ in primary education. These effects are rather important in particular on the self-conceptions as professionals and on the relations at work, however in a variable way according to the situations and the people. The effective implementation of external evaluations is accompanied by a relative membership of teachers and heads to the logic of accountability (individual and collective) associated with a reflective approach, which changes their relationship to professional autonomy and to others. It goes hand in hand with the development of an ambivalent feeling of reframed autonomy and a more collective vision of the educational work which tend to reconstruct the relationships between peers and between teachers and heads.

School administration, compliance with governmental standards and obligation of results with high stakes: political and educational change in the United States. This article examines how the school staff has received the expected performance standards and accountability for results with high stakes. The methodology is based on interviews, reports of meetings within schools, as well as field notes collected in four primary schools in Chicago between 1999 and 2003. The analysis goes beyond the suggestion that the logic of standardization, transparency and accountability have found their way into school life and influence the work in class. In fact, it highlights how school leaders (re) configure the infrastructure of the formal organization of their institution and how it led to the emergence of logical standardization, transparency and accountability inside schools. Finally, the analysis shows how these school leaders manage their school in an uncertain space, at the intersection of external pressures and the internal political games. Research states that in response to an institutional changing environment, school leaders, administrators or teachers work to re-articulate and to couple the administrative practice of the school with the teaching in class as well as with the new environment of the institution.

The new public management and the particularities of public policy areas: the case of health in France. The implantation of globalized models such as the New public management has practical, material, economic, anthropological and symbolic conditions that the article explores by making some comparisons between a few sectors: education, medicine, mental health, social work. Based on the example of health in France, it explores other processes where the peculiarity of management takes place: the configuration of tools and actors, professionals or laymen, in which public action is built. As a whole, it allows to understand why, in its search of productive efficiency, the NPM succeeds in the health sector in an extreme sophistication of the proceduralization, which is not the case for other public policies and why the status of users is also specific.

The trade union debate facing the new public management in the Quebecois educational system
This article focuses on the nature of the debates of teachers' unions facing the new public management in the Quebecois educational system. It places the union debate in a transverse way by analyzing how it integrates and shapes various common places (cognitive categories, causal theories, privileged topicals) shared by most of the stakeholders expressing themselves on the NGP in education in the media or on the institutional political scene. It offers a content analysis of the debate of these union members as regards the process of political dialogue related to the NPM in education and studies their interventions in parliamentary commission. The article shows that beyond the visible oppositions, their action in this forum has reinforced the neo-statist path printed in the NPM of education in Quebec. The analysis of the debate reveals that the union members have largely distanced themselves from governmental actors and the main educational authorities despite of results-oriented management. Paradoxically, the union debate and dialectical accounts of public action during parliamentary hearings have helped to strengthen the new Quebecois public management neo-statist way, against a more Neo-liberal path.

The new public management in health and social services and the emergence of case management
The article offers an analysis of the constituent principles of the new public management, in the light of those who structure the deployment in the field of health and social services from the perspective of practical guides based on the convincing data of the research (Evidence-based practice). From the case management of older people in loss of functional autonomy, professional emblematic device of this new environment, the authors show the conceptual complexity of the effects of the alliance between these two currents of thought in terms of control of professional practices, but also the consideration from the point of view of users in the organization of the services that affect them. In doing so, the perspective gets more complex on this important issue and broadens on the question of the incarnation by the professionals of these principles in the clinical tools they use.

Learn mathematics by chance: the calculations of poker players
Can we learn mathematics by playing a game of chance? This is the question posed by this article through the example of poker. Notwithstanding the requirements of some psychologists in the field of pathological gambling, the field survey conducted among the poker players shows that the random dynamic of this card game does not exclude some incidental learning. The administration of standardized calculations allowing players to make and justify their decision is indeed a matter of an apprenticeship coming from their experience in gambling. By clarifying these decisions, the players discover what they have learned accidentally. Their stories of practical experiences in fact bear traces of a mathematical learning that sometimes exceeds the framework of the entertaining experience: learning to rely on the uncertain.

School imperative of partnership and its partial ownership in working-class families: a Genevan example. In recent years, the family-school partnership has intensified in Geneva popular areas including the introduction of a social worker, mediator between the school and the families, and the establishment of school projects involving collaboration with families at the center of the concerns of the teachers. This article shows how popular families have adapted to this requirement based on their own cultural resources, their social history, their class ethos and the schooling of their children. In the end it is clear that if these past few have well internalized the need to meet with teachers, which is a sign of the rise of school concern in popular environments; collaboration remains aloof and relationship tinged with divided affects. Shouldn't we therefore talk of habitus cleaved to characterize contemporary popular classes and their relationship to the school?

A relationship to the job of Canadian teachers: the relative weight of the task, the conditions of teaching and the relationships with the pupils and the school-team. The evolution of both the school population and the many responsibilities that arise from the changing role of the teacher encourage researchers to question the status of the teaching profession. This article, based on recent empirical data collected from Canadian teachers (2006), focuses on the relationship of teachers to this complex and evolving profession that is teaching, as well as on factors that explain its variation. The obtained results show that the relationship to the profession of teachers is associated in a significant way with the working conditions and workload, but also with the social relationships which surround the daily practice of the profession. A close examination of the results brings to conclude that the influence of social relationships is more important than that of the working conditions. More specifically, the relationships with pupils have a more significant impact than the other studied factors: the more they are rewarding, at least as perceived by the teachers, the more the latter tend to have a positive relationship to their profession. Conversely, difficult relationships with the pupils have a negative effect on their professional experience. Although to a lesser degree, it is the same with regards to the quality of the relationships with the other members of the school team.