Contenu du sommaire

In the continuity of research on street-level bureaucracy and the mechanisms of obedience and disobedience within authoritarian regimes, this article aims to grasp the modalities of the implementation of Vichy policies by the teaching profession. By focusing attention on the social, institutional and historical frameworks within which the teachers evolved, and particularly on their professional ethos, the article reveals the docile behaviour that was largely adopted by this social group during the period 1941-1942 and the forms of collective disobedience that it developed from summer 1942 until the end of the regime.

In a context of politico-administrative reorganisations, “Pôle emploi” was created in 2008 by merging “Assedic” and “ANPE”, which were respectively responsible for compensating the unemployed and placing them in employment. Based on two ethnographic surveys, this article analyses the issues at stake in the implementation of such a reorganisation, beyond the initial reformist watchwords. It shows how the merger reconfigures professional groups, from the dual point of view of work practices and the hierarchical relationships associated with them. The merger makes the work of street-level bureaucrats more complex, as they have to deal with the coercive orientation of the reform. But some groups of managers even see this as a professional opportunity : by promoting their managerial vision of bureaucratic rationalisation, they regain the margins of institutional power.

Based on the French component of a European survey with a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology, this article examines the gendered contours of the care work provided by family caregivers to cancer patients. Informal support is examined from the point of view of its moral, informational and material components, according to the different temporal registers of the illness' trajectory. The most significant gender disparities that operate within the informal personal networks mobilized throughout the trajectory are then identified, as well as the differences in informal support perceived from the point of view of men and women having a cancer.

Based on an enquiry on the construction and the negotiations of racial delimitations within the family unit, this article considers the implications of qualitative research concerning racial issues in today's France. The difficulties facing such an enquiry arise early on during the formulation of its scope, when it comes to assigning words on a particularly sensitive and shifting concept and to defining analytical categories. The enquiry reveals that the utterability of race is complex ; it is subject to conditions and is heterogeneous, depending on whether it is used to refer to minority groups or to the majority group.

Cognitive sociology recently emerged in the United-States in the wake of cultural sociology, and more specifically of the “Culture and Cognition” current. Omar Lizardo, a sociologist at the University of California Los Angeles, revisits these scientific developments to which he directly contributed. It is an opportunity for him to reflect on the rationale behind the construction of objects in the social sciences, the relationship between (neuro-) psychology and sociology, as well as the ways of thinking and assessing the incorporation of cognitive dispositions.

This article revisits in detail the case of the collective input of an administrative source and its conversion into a database. Its aim is to analyze this moment in time in collective historical research by raising the organizational, methodological and epistemological issues that it raises and by looking at the knowledge effects produced. By the same token, it questions the practices of collective enquiry applied to history by exposing the various positionings vis-à-vis the source, the treatment of irregularities, and the potentials opened up by these readings.