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Ditmar Brock and Hans-Rolf Vetter The biographical erosion process as a consequence of technological upheavals. The introduction of a new technology does not only transform, the job, the work conditions and the operating modes but also, more fundamentally, the relation between professional identity and personal identity. The authors set out to analyze the economy/biography relation following the introduction of a new technology in the printing business. In order to do so, they combine two dimensions : the level of participation in the new organization and the level of mobilization in the defense of collective interests, which they relate to the nature of jobs held. They are led to identify three types of workers : those who are professionally active, those who are socially active and professionally resigned and those who detach themselves from their professional universe.

Patrick Pharo Work and Social Positioning. Between the quest for the objective description of social groups and the recording, from biographical analyses, of the capacity of individuals to define their own social positions, a relatively unexplored field is open to analysis. The author identifies three stages in the «positioning» process : professional characterization operations which lead to the subject's capacity to adhere to a social category on the basis of his mastering of cognitive resources, narrative operations which find the definition of the social position through interaction with other partners, and civil operations which describe a series of legitimate representations and practices. According to the author, the advantage of this renewed class analysis is that it does not dissociate objective positions from subjective positions.

Anne-Marie Guillemard Forming and crisis of social policies : the case of old-age policy. Public policy towards the aged follows a dynamic located at the crossing of various forces : entrepreneurial interests, union demands, state policies, confronted with economic crisis and labor market management. Through the analysis of thirty years of old-age policy in France, the author stresses various historical phases during which these forces constitute successive phases resulting both in alternate policies and in redifinitions of the very notion of old-age. At the intersection of social interests and state actors, the article leads to a general reflexion on the mainsprings of social policies as revealing the links between the State and Society.

Dominique Martin Employees expressing their views : a management technique or a new institution ? The Auroux Acts, which organize how employees should express their views, are three years old. The experimental phase is nearing its end and an initial assessment can be attempted with the following question : are these reforms superfluous in relation to hierarchical functioning and union institutions or can they potentially lead to the institutionalized creation of new social regulations ? At the close of an empirical study, in a branch of Thomson, a large electronics company, the author concludes by insisting on the diversity of consultation modes, the ambiguities, the dysfunctions, the deadlocks of expression and on the essential role played by managerial initiative.