Contenu du sommaire

The surgeon 's work : Open heart surgery This contribution to labor sociology and the sociology of the professions results from the direct observation of open heart operations. This description of surgery makes it possible to compare the surgeon's work with other jobs where «manual work» predominates. Working conditions are examined with respect to postures, gestures, physical and nervous stress, manual dexterity and visual attentiveness. Beyond his job as a solist, the surgeon also conducts an orchestra : he coordinates small teams, which differ owing to their training, their place in the hospital and their hierarchy of know-how. He is responsible for harmoniously arranging the work of anaesthetists, nurses and blood specialists. He also assumes the duty of organizing services for the patient in the phases before and after the operation. He plays a key role in drawing up the list of patients to undergo operations and then selecting specific cases from this list. The available quantity of transplant tissues and organs and the cost of available operating rooms limit the number of operations. On the average, three thousand transplants a year are made in France. The hospital system prefers patients with stable means of livelihood, a family united around them, and steady incomes.

A strategy of trust : The industrial partnership as observed from the supplier's view point Long-term interfirm cooperation is a risky undertaking that calls for establishing not only contractual but trustworthy relations. A study was conducted of how trust reduced «polymorphous uncertainty» in an industrial partnership in the car' industry. The opportunistic dimensions in constructing relations of confidence is studied ; and the paradoxical coexistence of trust and opportunism in interfirm relations is brought to light by showing how local contracts of confidence can both be released from the global contract of confidence and lead to breaches of trust based on a full-fledged strategy for disguising the shortcomings and «hidden reductions» of production costs. From this viewpoint, arrangements (such as certification) help reassure the firm that is passing an order as it selects suppliers more than they help it to be sure about the eventual supplier's reliability. Partnership turns out to be a vulnerable and unstable form of organized action.

The training-to-job relationship, an endless quest : Training in plastics This study of the relationship between jobs and training in the plastic industry focuses on all the relations involved between students, teachers, industrialists, union-management committees, professional associations, the national system of education, etc. The construction of diplomas ensues from a complex interplay between national standards and local actors. The way teaching is organized comes out of the interaction between slightly motivated students and teachers with often contradictory profiles and interests. Professional experience is acquired inside firms, whose attitudes swing from the desire for immediately operational, trained employees to the demand for a more adaptable labor force. By shedding light on the plural nature of actors and issues, the fit between jobs and training does not reduce to a simple relationship between the supply of training and the demand for qualifications. The necessarily complex, dynamic and problematic nature of this fit can thus be better understood.

For a sociology of innovation in industry : The factory and the small jar Despite a recent opening in terms of concepts sociology has not yet much formulated innovation as a research topic. During a case of product innovation (the changeover from small jars ) in agribusiness, the internal dynamics of the innovation process was observed for two years. By focussing on the relations formed throughout this period of intense negotiation, innovation is described in terms of a rewriting of social bonds as : norms and cognitive arrangements were challenged ; the work of giving form to the innovation and formulating it in words was highlighted ; and objects, arguments and persons entered into an unprecedented rearrangement. The proposal is made to complete the classical trilogy of actor-rules-cognitive representations with subject-object-project.