Contenu du sommaire : Mobilités professionnelles

Throughout the 20th century, the world of labour and workers' conditions were riddled with numerous, intersecting fault lines, which were deepened by the scale of industrial restructuring and haemorrhaging of the workforce since the 1970s and 80s. This article, which explores the relationships between career inequality, professional mobility and economic recession, investigates the destabilisation of the workers' world through the prism of workers' careers. A prosopographical approach is adopted in order to observe the transformation of miner's careers – primarily French and Moroccan miners – in the Houillères du Bassin du Nord-Pas-de-Calais (nationalised collieries), from their creation in 1946 to their permanent closure in December 1990, throughout the implementation of recession policy in the coal industry.

In comparing the manner in which the careers of permanent CGT and CFDT personnel are constructed, this article examines the institutional work of codifying the professional mobility of union officials. It highlights the extent to which the mobility of these individuals is part of pre-established circuits, which are the subject of tensions and negotiations within militant structures. It also demonstrates the hybrid nature of the range of promotion on offer to union officials, founded on a combination of material and symbolic compensations. The article thus emphasises the importance to be attached to the often invisible symbolic dimensions of professional mobility.

This article looks at the differentiated inner workings of professional mobility among workers in logistical warehouses, a sector of activity that crystalizes the effects of policies advocating the flexibilization of the labour market. On the basis of an ethnographic survey carried out in Seine-et-Marne, it focuses primarily on the study of entry mobility in warehouses, and shows that interim employment is at the root of social diversification in workers' profiles. Repeated mobility between warehouses allows us to observe the constraints and the resources mobilised by interim employees in order to cope with the precarity of their conditions of employment. Finally, the analysis reveals the various types of job retention, between fragile professional advancement and forced stabilization, within the warehouse context.

This article analyses “discreet” professional mobility within stabilised fractions of the popular classes, using a novel and collective means, namely household monographs. The proposed approach reveals a “household” logic that throws light on these professional mobilities. In taking into account the articulation between four dimensions – financial, residential, educational and professional – which are potential constituents of forms of popular respectability, the approach proves to be heuristic for analysing the contrasting effects of this “household” logic.

Focusing on the case of young art school graduates whose aspirations to become visual artists have to confront the rights of entry to the artistic labour market, this article offers an analysis of the development of a lasting mismatch between professional mobility and subjective aspirations. The first part of the article aims to describe the processes that have given rise to these disillusions, at the crossroads between this thwarted professional mobility and a forced return to the space of origin, a declining middle-sized town. The second part looks at the readjustment and abandonment of artistic vocations within two “universes of consolation”, the voluntary sector and the private conjugal world.

While central to all militant experience, “self-actualisation” is not easy to grasp. In demonstrating how the collective struggle actualises forms of relationships to oneself that have been tried and tested by individuals over time, this article provides sociological substance to this individual experience. Focusing on the example of a woman committed to elucidating the “truth” about a State crime, it shows how this political struggle has reconfigured a work of introspection that was initiated in the context of a psychoanalytical treatment, and reveals the extent to which the surrendering of oneself to a cause is inextricably linked to a sense of self-actualisation derived therefrom.

This article shows how statistics may be used to study professional environments that cannot be identified by the French standard occupational classification (PCS : nomenclature of Professions and Socio-professional Categories). The objective is to identify the members of these professional environments through analysis of profession labels, which are the basis of the classification in the nomenclature. Using the case of real estate agents, the article shows how useful this work can be, and describes the different steps for its implementation. Moreover, it shows that this method can allow us to clearly identify social positions and to closely link official statistics data with field survey findings.

In the spirit of the motion voted by the Parlement des revues on November 13th, 2020, and hereby presented, the Editorial Board of Genèses intends to continue the fight against the process of restriction of academic and basic liberties, against the commodification of knowledge and the destruction of the public service in education and research, in part through the modest means offered by this “Resisting” section. This commitment is in no way diminished by the fact that the Research Programming Act for the period 2021-2030, which introduces various provisions relating to research and higher education (LPR), was adopted on December 24th 2020 (Law no. 2020-1674, published in the Official Journal of December 26th, 2020).