Contenu du sommaire : Saisir l'État par son administration

APPROACHING THE STATE VIA ITS ADMINISTRATION. TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF PUBLIC POLICIES. Revisiting the aims of the program launched in 1964 by the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO) to empirically study the French administration, this issue illustrates the importance of studying the State via its administration, in conjunction with a perspective grounded in the sociology of public policy. By examining the ebb and flow of this approach's popularity in France since the mid-1960s, and by highlighting the contributions and limitations of research carried out within the program entitled « Administrations in the Face of Change », this introductory article argues for a sociology of the nuts and bolts of policymaking. Through a cross-cutting and cross-sectoral approach, both at the central and territorial levels, such an approach sheds light on issues of permanence and change, but also provides an answer to the ultimate question : what holds the State together ?

THE NEW BUREAUCRATIC PHENOMENON PERFORMANCE-BASED MANAGEMENT BETWEEN. BUREAUCRATIZATION, MARKET AND POLITICS. The concept of bureaucratization, originally at the heart of the work conducted by the sociologists of bureaucracy during the 1940s and 1950s, has been revisited since the 1980s to describe the effects produced by the various reforms that came out of the New Public Management movement, and in particular the phenomenon of performancebased management using objectives and indicators. This article demonstrates the heuristic nature of the analyses undertaken by early sociologists of administrations (Alvin Gouldner, Peter Blau, Michel Crozier), which focused on rules and how they were used, to outline the traits of the new « bureaucratic phenomenon » based on numbers, quantification and commensuration. This article also highlights the limits of this outlook, emphasizing the importance of considering the economic and especially political implications of mechanisms of performance-based management.

SENIOR BUREAUCRATS ACROSS ORGANIZATIONS, PROFESSIONS AND POLITICIANS. A COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY OF ADMINISTRATIVE LABOUR MARKETS. This paper reassesses a number of observations made over fifty years ago regarding the corporatist structure of the senior civil service in France, by discussing this French particularity in a comparative perspective. Building on the work of Neil Fligstein, we propose a comparative theoretical framework to analyze senior civil service systems as administrative labour markets. We argue that administrative labor markets, as institutions, are the result of interactions between three collective actors : professional groups, administrative organizations, and politicians. We then elaborate three ideal-types of administrative labour markets and demonstrate how they can be used to compare the trajectories of institutionalization of senior civil service in various countries.

THE VARIABLE TIGHTNESS OF STATE CONTROL FRENCH LOCAL GOVERNMENTS CAUGHT. BETWEEN AUTONOMY AND STATE REGULATIONS. This article explores the transformations of the French model of territorial administration and how authority has changed hands since the middle of the 1970s by examining the mobilization of two main categories of actors : local elected officials, their associations and institutional support in the Senate on the one hand, and senior officials in central administrative positions, particularly in the Ministry of Budget, on the other hand. This article shall identify the contexts and mechanisms which allowed for circumstantial asymmetries in power to be translated into rules, thus modifying reform trajectories. It shall also highlight the loosening of State control, a phenomenon which transpired from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s and reached its zenith with the passing of decentralization laws. On the other hand, however, this article shall also illustrate why the implementation of the euro led to a sharp decline in the budgetary and fiscal autonomy of local authorities, as well to the adoption of policies to merge local governments, and how the sovereign debt crisis magnified the State's control over local and regional affairs.

A HALF-CENTURY AFTER PIERRE GRÉMION. RE-SEIZING CENTRALIZATION FROM THE PERIPHERY. Pierre Grémion's Le pouvoir périphérique (« peripheral power ») is undoubtedly the most influential book on French local politics. However, a half-century after its publication, this reference work is generally only used as a historical yardstick against which to assess the extent of the political and administrative transformations that France has witnessed since the 1970s. This article argues that although the empirical underpinnings of Grémion's work are now obsolete, his bottom-up approach remains relevant to understand contemporary changes in French administration and their impact on central-local relations. It sheds light on new forms of centralization in the context of a now decentralized France, forms which are no longer based on supervisory authority but on competition and emulation mechanisms.