Contenu du sommaire

The French State's internal security system is characterised by an original and centralised architecture, inherited from its history, which now features, alongside the national police and gendarmerie, the contribution of private security, municipal police and citizen vigilance movements. Using the authors' extensive cumulative empirical research, the article discusses the emergence of the security continuum reference framework and analyses the development of the various resources mobilized. It shows how the central government, far from letting itself be deprived of its prerogatives, has striven to take advantage of a movement of pluralization that it has overseen and promoted in a context characterized by both security and budgetary pressure.

By acting on the process through which policemen and women are selected, public authorities can prioritize the resources, social abilities and dispositions that they consider important, thus selecting the applicants who will best comply with the requirements of the security policies they promote. However, the entrance exam is underused for this purpose, and its handling is not very easy. Often presented as a lever for the professionalisation of the institution, major reforms of the recruitment test have in fact been based on a plurality of logics and its specific impact upon changing the direction of police policy has been limited. Moreover, the entrance fee required of candidates is mostly defined by the members of the jury themselves. Hence, recruitment practices tend strongly to result in the reproduction of the institution, rather than in its transformation.

Building on the analysis of a type of local public policy fostering innovation, i.e. cluster policy, this article aims to contribute to the literature on territorial governance. Rarely studied in political science, this type of policy is analysed here using the policy-feedbacks approach in order to ascertain its effects on local politics. The theoretical framework used aims to combine analysis of vertical coordination logics linked to the recomposition of centre-local relations (examined through from the French policy of “pôles de compétitivité”) and by studying the horizontal coordination logics linked to the strengthening of urban governance (studied here in the Parisian context). Specifically, by retracing the history of a Parisian cluster (Cap Digital), from its genesis then over a period of ten years, the article analyses the implementation of the “pôles de compétitivité” policy and the effects it may have had in terms of legitimizing certain social groups and reorientating local public policy. The research results are twofold : firstly, it identifies the material and cognitive mechanisms through which the competitive rules of a national policy have been translated locally ; secondly, it shows these mechanisms have contributed to the politico-economic differentiation of the Parisian territory. Territorial governance of innovation is used as a concept to synthesize these two results.

This paper deals with the structuration of a territorial interest group, made up of employer representatives, mobilized in favor of the creation of a metropolitan institution in Marseille. This mobilization, which began in the mid-2000s, fits alongside the vote of the MAPTAM law in 2014 creating the Aix-Marseille-Provence (AMP) metropolis. At the crossroads of a sociology of interest groups and a sociology of territorial reforms, this article highlights the logic of the structuration of a small business elite, whose wide resources, both expert and relational, did not initially enable them to guide the choices of local political actors, who were mostly reluctant to support an integrated metropolitan institution. It was not until 2012 and the decisive intervention of the state, then in search of local support to overcome the opposition of elected officials, that the role of these employer representatives was legitimized. If this legitimation was more strategic than ideological, it nevertheless has had very concrete effects, leading to the integration of a certain fringe of economic interests within the AMP authorities.