Contenu du sommaire : Prix du jeune auteur 2017

The sociology of prisons has long documented the central role of informal and interpersonal negotiations between prisoners and prison officers within a highly bureaucratised custodial institution. This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of the role of communication behind bars, as it focuses on the exchanges between prisoners and a professional group — prison middle management — that has received little scholarly attention. Unlike frontline guards, middle-ranking officers hold significant discretionary power in the day-to-day issues of prison life. In particular, this analysis underlines the relational work that takes place during prison hearings, which are formal face-to-face meetings between a prisoner and a middle-ranking prison officer. In addition to one-off transactions, hearings provide an opportunity for the construction of a fragile and asymmetrical cooperation between structurally antagonistic participants. Indeed, hearings may establish reciprocal relational expectations that help to redefine the nature of institutional restraint as well as the repertoires of action available to the actors of the prison system. Through the relational investment of discretionary power in the hearing, penal power becomes hybrid, combining personal dependence and bureaucratic norms, moral obligations and legal formalism. The study of prison hearings thus raises the question of the role of relational work and its reinvestment in formal settings within penal institutions. Often reduced to their role in the enforcement of public policies, middle-managers are instrumental in such back-office relational work.

In France, until 1st October 2017, legal medicine was distinct from both the medical specialty model — in which the monopoly of legal expertise is restricted to those holding a specific title — and the model of expert opinion — in which any medical doctor can make an assessment as an occasional collaborator of the courts. Forensic scientists and medical examiners followed a university medical curriculum that could consist of various medical specialties, with the result that their practice could be rooted in very different disciplinary backgrounds. Between the multiplicity of medical specialties and the different ways of addressing medical expertise in the legal context, the professional socialisation of medical experts suggests the need to study the medical specialty of experts as a force of inertia in the day-to-day practice of legal medicine. Drawing on an ethnographic analysis of several hospital legal medicine departments and on a series of interviews with experts, this paper addresses the different ways in which specialist knowledge and medico-legal expertise combine. The analysis unfolds at three levels: professional models in legal medicine, the circumstances of medical assessment, and the actual organisation of medico-legal work. Beyond this, the paper seeks to analyse how initial training is redirected following the transition to a new professional activity framed by the law.

In places where minerals and hydrocarbons are extracted, the mining and oil industries trigger many social changes. This article analyses one such change: the advent of an entrepreneurial model in villages neighbouring an Amazonian oil drilling site, whose inhabitants are called “indigenous”, in the sense that they are categorised as belonging to ethnic minorities and descending from pre-Columbian populations. The oil company representatives persuade them to create enterprises in order to increase their access to labour on the industrial site. These “community enterprises” have become a key method of conflict prevention for companies in the extractive sector. They have led to the emergence of a new phenomenon in the villages, the indigenous entrepreneur. In contrast with a mechanistic approach, the analysis is based on an ethnographic study of the surroundings of the oil site, with the aim of understanding how some local people adopt the community enterprise institution and embrace a particular entrepreneurial rationality. Exploring the hybrid processes of socialisation whereby indigenous become entrepreneurs, at the interface between the Amazon and the cities, between the village arena and the corporate world, the article highlights the ambivalence of capitalism as it takes shape at the margins of the globalised economy.

This article, based on an investigation in the agro-industrial plains of North-East France, explores the processes whereby farmers become attached to and bound by their cooperative. Inspired by the sociology of commercial relations, it analyses three interwoven aspects of farmer attachment: the institutional level, which relates to the cooperative values and principles that legitimise a call for loyalty to the cooperative project; the organisational level, with the establishment of a diverse range of services; the level of service relations, at which technical sales representatives seek to forge strong ties with producers. The article shows how the issue of attachment influences big changes in the cooperative's offering and in the work of the technical sales agents. It reveals the complexity of the cooperative relationship, the tensions between logics of loyalty and service, and the mechanisms involved in the construction of ties of dependency between farmers and technical sales agents, where it is not always clear who is dependent on whom.