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Prior to the 2000s, research studies on adolescent socialization were few and far between; since that time, and in connection with changes in family socialization and the advent of digital practices, the number of such studies has risen considerably. This article apprehends adolescent experiences at school and in leisure activities, analyzing the connections between the two spheres and emphasizing the digital dimension while identifying the major ways in which those experiences differ. The aim is to grasp in statistical terms the main logics that structure adolescent experiences of school and leisure while generating their own socializing effects, which extend beyond social and gender differentiation. Drawing on a questionnaire survey of 3,356 students in their third (penultimate) year of middle school in France, the study distinguishes three profiles of schooling and leisure experiences combining school culture, “cultivated” culture, youth cultures, and digital culture. The analysis brings to light distinct types of cultural integration or marginalization, showing strong continuities between school and leisure experiences and adolescents' representations of the future. The study is particularly concerned to understand the “withdrawn” profile, situated at the margins of the dominant youth and school-centered cultures.

In both Mediterranean European countries and post-communist countries, the wide diffusion of so-called modern contraception does not necessarily mean that planned births have become the ideal. In post-Soviet Russia, young people mainly use condoms, and to a lesser extent the pill and coitus interruptus, to postpone entry into parenthood; seldom do they resort to abortion. Transitions to adulthood are lasting longer, especially among the highly educated, in a context of welfare state decline. This article compares the contraceptive and procreation trajectories of young people of the post-Soviet generation with those of the preceding generation, focusing on women. Drawing primarily on interviews with urban middle-class men and women born between 1957 and 1994, it shows that pregnancies that are unplanned but are in fact predictable and socially expected enable young people to resolve contradictory injunctions related to changing gender and age norms and a familialist model of transition to adulthood.

Drawing on “negative” data (the difficulty, in a prosopographical enquiry on the exponents of the idea of public service in France from 1870 until 1940, to find women), the article asks how the category of gender can be handled as the underside, or blind spot, of a historical study. In relating this absence to the growing enrolment of women in bureaucracy and to their presence in the backstage of a predominantly masculine state apparatus, the author pinpoints an unconscious invisibilisation as well as barriers openly set to prevent women's access to the higher strata where the idea of service public is shaped and discussed. He argues that the “masculinity” of this debate arises both from its publicity and from a legal framing that map out a field actually entirely devoted to men.

This article explores the evolving role of General Practitioners (GPs) in one of the most significant transformations in France's ambulatory healthcare over the past two decades: the rise of multi-professional and contractual practice within healthcare homes. By delving into this change, it aims to enrich the sociological literature on institutional entrepreneurs. It highlights that the success of GPs in driving these transformative endeavors does not rest solely on the resources at their disposal but heavily relies on their ability to negotiate cooperation with key stakeholders. The article sheds light on the strategies used by GPs to secure collaboration and the costs that come with it, challenging the prevailing analyses that tend to individualize and glorify change-makers.

Through an ethnographic study of the shops and businesses of an exurban town, this article explores the functioning of an acquaintanceship-based economy—a specific type of business district in which interdependent merchants earn income through individual and collective use of market relations within one and the same geographic locality. This type of economy operates through the interaction of greater urban area externalities, professional norms, and local institutions in the managing of a common good. The article retraces how the merchants defend and share the “customer” resource; then takes up the specificity of economic exchanges and reputations within a space defined by acquaintanceship. Last, it describes the ambivalence of female [“commerçantes”] merchants' strategies for winning customer loyalty, strategies closely related to the kinds of sociability characteristic of rural centers and small towns in France. By taking the question of space seriously, it brings to light some of the local economic structures that may develop at the intersection of a set of differentiated markets and through interdependency chains that involve sharing whatever customers spend time, or are likely to spend time, in the given geographic area.

This article further develops thinking on consumer capture by applying the analytic tools of sociology of markets to a production factor key to the intensification of productive farming models: agricultural machinery. We describe the organizational-level efforts of machine constructors to transform the economic model of their distributers by turning them into service providers. The “industrialization of renewal” notion (in this case, renewal of farming equipment) highlights the fact that the distributors' work of reproducing market transactions is aligned with the industrial interests of the manufacturers. The latter programme obsolescence not so much in terms of technical machine durability as the objective of constantly adjusting machine renewal cycles to farmers' investment abilities. This focus on the rhythms of farmers' investments leads to relativizing the environmental virtues of turning consumption and production goods into services, since the aim is not so much to rationalize product use as to ensure the accelerated renewal of demand.

Anthropologists and sociologists alike have long observed two generic types of human society— big man and chief—across indigenous tribes around the globe, but they are not in agreement on how and through what mechanisms they adapt to modern economic life. Drawing upon qualitative and statistical analysis, this study examines the establishment of credit unions across indigenous villages in Taiwan, where both of these traditional authority structures are present. The analysis shows that villages characterized by ascribed power and inherited hierarchy (chief villages) provide less structural support for the founding and operation of credit unions and are less likely to adopt credit unions than communities whose leadership is determined by individual merits and achievement (big man villages). This finding suggests that existing authority structures in these traditional societies constrain incentive schemes and trust structures critical to the founding and persistence of new economic organizations.