Contenu du sommaire

NATIONAL REGULATOR, TRANSNATIONAL POWER. THE DIFFUSION OF MEDICO-ECONOMIC EVALUATION WITHIN THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRYThis article questions the capacity of national regulatory schemes to influence the behaviors and the representations of “globalized” industries. To this end, we study the effect on the pharmaceutical industry of the deployment of agencies in charge of the cost-effectiveness evaluation of medicines. We observe an alignment of the firms involved on the requirements of one single national agency: “that of England”. Two explanations for this situation are then considered. We first show how the political work of this agency's experts led to the legitimization of their regulatory standards in various international forums. Subsequently, this initiative generated emulation within the industry. More precisely, convinced that these approaches would soon be adopted by other national markets, private firms adopted the principles of the English bureaucracy. This emulation in turn generated several feedback effects, modifying the business development strategies of the manufacturers, and changing their relations with other national regulators.

AN AGENCY AT THE WHIM OF A MINISTER'S STRATEGY : THE MEDIATOR CRISIS AND THE CONCORDANCE OF FIELDSOn the basis of the example of the suspension of anti-diabetic medicines in France, this article addresses the question of regulatory agencies' autonomous capacity of action as regards their respective minister. The article shows that this decision of the Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Produits de Santé (AFSSAPS) was effectively imposed by the minister for Health and his close advisers. In demonstrating how and why this occurred, our analysis challenges an academic orthodoxy which considers agencization to be a foundation of a “strong state”. More precisely, we reveal the structural conditions that enabled different actors to adopt strategies that, ultimately, rendered the ministerial intervention possible. More generally, we propose a means of sociologically studying the moments of contingency which favor concordance between the logics of action adopted by certain factions belonging to separate fields. We show how this convergence creates a dominant set of power relations.

WHAT PARTICIPATION DOES TO PUBLIC POLICY: THE CASE OF THE CHICAGO PLAN FOR TRANSFORMATION AT LATHROPBased on the case study of the urban renewal project of Lathrop Homes' public housing units in the city of Chicago (Illinois), this article analyzes the effects of public beneficiaries' participation on the implementation of public action. The residents of this neighborhood opposed themselves to the project in which they were involved. Their use of participatory governmental devices spawned the rise of a contentious movement that blocked the project for several years. Participatory processes can therefore slip from the grasp of public or private actors that are responsible for it. Indeed, in this case, participation opened a window of opportunity for contention and its tools constituted mobilizing structures through which potential beneficiaries organized and framed their contestation. Nonetheless, the article also highlights the complex adaptation of public programs in response to the inclusion of policy targets. It concludes that the limits of participation are maybe more related to the incapacity of public actors to learn from these processes rather than the manipulation of their tools and the conflicts that emerge from them.

THE CATEGORY OF ENERGY CONSUMERS WITHIN “ENERGY TRANSITION”: BETWEEN EXHORTATIONS OF HOUSEHOLD AUTONOMY AND THE ECONOMIC NORMALIZATION OF THEIR ACTUAL PRACTICESThis article deals with the history and content of the figure of the energy consumer within France's “energy transition”. Building upon the results of other studies, this research first reveals the framing effects caused by the category of individual consumer experience. It then examines how the promoters of this framing achieved these results, especially its transformation into a matrix of market regulation instruments and practices of households.