Contenu du sommaire : Travail, espaces et professions.

Boel Berner : Looking for Mister Engineer. Understanding Masculinity and Technology at two Fin de Siècles. In this article, I examine how technical expertise is created as a male domain. The focus is on higher technical education in Sweden around the turn of the century. Three aspects of education seem to have contributed to the formation of a specific type of masculine engineering identity : the contents of studies, the pedagogical methods and the homosocial relations and rituals of everyday life. It is argued that these practices created a sense of distinction in relationship to the world of women, and to men without a higher technical education ; it also created links of solidarity and community among the male students which tended to keep women outside, and helped them on their way to leadership positions.

Clevi Elena Rapkiewicz : Women and computer professions. This article presents a study of the place of women in the computer field. An analysis of the literature shows that, despite the important role played by some women in computer development, women have remained invisible. In addition, two field studies, one in Brazil and the other in France, make it possible to see concretely what is women's participation today in this field.

Rosemary Crompton, Nicky Le Feuvre : Choose a career, have a career : women doctors in France and Britain. This article proposes to analyse the process of the development of gendered segregation in a comparative perspective. A comparative study of the professional and family careers of women doctors in France and Britain makes it possible to show that, although at first sight the distribution of women and men in the medical profession seems rather different, the processes of gendered allocation between the different positions within the profession is generally the same in the two countries. The results of this research lead us to think that the gendered structure of the medical profession has been changed relatively little by the recent increase in the rate of féminisation. These conclusion leads us to situate our work within the framework of the recent sociological discussion of the theoretical analysis of the process of reproduction of the sexual division of labour and the gendered segregation of employment in Europe.

Jacqueline Coutras : On the gendered construction of urban space. Is the construction of the town, as it can be understood through its organization into separate zones - considered to be “complementary” to each other-based on the division between the sexes and in particular the sexual division of labour ? In order to study this “hidden dimension” of space it seems necessary to centre the analysis on the economic and ideological dimensions of urban functioning and at two levels (local and the urban unit). According to the author, only this approach to the town makes it possible to bring out to what extent women's spatial duty, which has never been recognised as such and which is circumscribed to the immediate residential area, is in fact one of the fundamental elements of the coherence and thus of the solidity of the overall urban organization in our modem north-western cities.

Nicolas Dodier : Technical activity, forms of work organization and the question of society. The author examines to what extent a sociological theory of technique changes the way in which the sociology of work has traditionally studied the condition of operators in the workplace. He first of all characterises the “technical solidarity” which results from the common participation of human beings in the functioning of technical objects linked together in the framework of complex units. He then studies the condition of operators in two types of this soldarity, planned organizations and flexible organizations, through comparing in particular the way in which operators can bring a consciousness of the collective to bear in the two cases.

Mary Nash : Redefining Motherhood and Citizenship in Contemporary Spain. This paper explores identity politics, gender culture, female agency and the construction of citizenship in early twentieth Spain. It discusses motherhood as a crucial political feature in gender politics and the modernization of the Spanish state. The role of the medical profession is examined in the redefinition of a modem reading of gender culture based on a biosocial understanding of motherhood and on a political reading of social citizenship. It also contests that motherhood provided a differential perception of political subjectivity and citizenship and raises the issue how women shaped resistence strategies through gender identity and motherhood. Finally, the contingency of women's political apprenticeship through motherhood is seen as a key feature in shaping their strategies and agency as militiawomen or combatant mothers in the fight agains fascism during the Civil War.