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The price of prison labour : building a compromise between economics and moral correction
The internal economic organization of prisons is at the heart of a tension between penitentiary rationality in the service of punishment and moral correction, and an economic rationality that aims to rationalize the relationship to wealth. From the analysis of various historical sources on French prisons between the middle of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century (discourse, regulations and statistical data), this article aims to explore this tension in terms of the formation of the price of prison labour. For each dimension of the prison economy—production, the distribution of the labour product and the consumption of prisoners—the article shows how the mechanisms for calculating the price of prison labour make it possible to compromise between these two contradictory moral positions. It then proposes a concept of prices as a means of coordination, not between supply and demand, but between distinct values. The article concludes with a consideration of contemporary developments in prison labour in the light of the tension between economics and moral correction.

The professional space of nursing : an analysis based on the case of French-speaking Switzerland
The nursing profession is experiencing rapid numerical growth in all Western countries. With the proliferation of non-hospital sectors, the academicisation of training and the establishment of distinct hierarchies, this growth is accompanied by a process of horizontal as well as vertical differentiation. In such a context, it is important to reconsider the issues that run throughout this occupation by taking into account all of its sectors of activity at the scale of a specific geographical area. A combination of multiple correspondence analysis and cluster analysis, carried out on a representative sample of nurses from French-speaking Switzerland (n = 2,923) reveals a nursing space in which four segments can be identified : “medically dominant”, “medically dominated”, “nursing elites” and “heterodox”. Each of these segments is characterized by specific representations and practices, whether in the spaces of the practice of care, production of knowledge or relationship with the medical profession.

Public reforms and professional autonomy : how professional segments matter
Based on a socio-historical study of museum curators in France since 1945, this article shows how professional autonomy is not only the result of negotiations between group representatives and the state but also determined by interactions between intra-professional segments. Power struggles between regional and national-level museum curators—respectively local civil servants and a sub-category of a corps of high-ranking state civil servants called conservateurs du patrimoine (heritage curators)—have actually increased the impact of group collective action, and affected the course of public decision-making in this cultural area in the 1990s. What we call the “interplay” between professional segments is a symbolic process. In the case under study, interactions between segments helped unify the statuses of regional and national-level curators and increased their prerogatives. While contributing to recent research on relations between professionals and reforms of public services and administrations, the article leads to a reconsideration of the classic antinomy between professional group unity and diversity.

Should sociology be afraid of methodological individualism ? A critical discussion of Mark Granovetter's Society and Economy : Framework and PrinciplesThis review presents Mark Granovetter's most recent book, which aims to lay out the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the new economic sociology—a field that has been strongly influenced by this eminent sociologist. This provides the opportunity to return to some of his previous work. As part of our critical discussion of the book, we express our perplexity about the sudden introduction of the notion of the “pragmatic actor” in the final two chapters. Never clearly defined, this figure closely resembles the actor of methodological individualism, an analytic position that Granovetter firmly rejects and avoids in the first section. This conceptual inconsistency is all the more perplexing when seen in light of another, which, equally strange, can be observed in the most recent book by Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, A Theory of Fields. Having presented actors whom they describe as competent and strategic, the authors then deny them any real autonomy or ability to evaluate or measure their commitment to and in collective action. The review concludes by questioning the broader significance of such conceptual slippages, and proposes the hypothesis that they are the sign of sociology's problematic position within the broader field of the social sciences.