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Social science researchers often encounter individuals who can articulate a highly developed discourse about their lifestyle, which they frame as being centered around a “line” of political or religious conduct. This volume revisits the process through which these respondents work to achieve coherence in their lives, drawing on the tools of dispositional sociology. The focus is specifically on the socialization processes that shape this work of self-coherence, considering both the institutions that facilitate this process and the dispositions that enable self-reformation – what these dispositions entail and how they are developed. This introduction first highlights the social exceptionalism of these intense commitments to “being coherent”, and examines how the studies in this volume address both the reorganization of individual practices and the rationalizations behind them. Four key dimensions are explored in greater depth: the various forms of institutional “envelopment” experienced by those striving for coherence; the personal work they undertake to achieve it; the social and professional contexts in which they are situated; and the crises and adjustments that punctuate their commitment.

Our article focuses on the evolving way in which individuals produce institutionally framed work to align their dispositions to believe and act in the service of a commitment to the Gülen movement. To accompany the quest for ethical conduct on the part of the faithful, the religious institution takes on different guises over time. Initially, during the youth of the faithful in Turkey, the institution was omnipresent in transmitting self-ethical techniques to students undergoing moral training. Now that they have become professional activists, the faithful are led to put their ethical conduct into practice as missionaries in sub-Saharan Africa under the guidance of a less visible, but no less enveloping, institution.

Based on an immersion field study within the Identitaire movement, this article examines the way in which the organisation leads activists to carry out a biographical reconstruction in order to bring themselves into line with the cause defended by the movement. New activists take part in an Identitaire camp where they learn to identify their regional and racial ‘roots', which they set out to defend in the face of a supposed migratory invasion. This experience continues in the local sections, where they recompose their ordinary practices in contact with their peers to bring them into line with their commitment. However, activists are more likely to stay in the organisation if it reinforces their previous socialisation.

While the “salting” of the Maoists of the '68s has already been the subject of sociological studies in the past, this article aims to revisit this political practice by questioning the practice in progress, based on respondents who have migrated themselves in the working class after the 2000s. At a time when revolutionary belief, the socializing force of May 68 and working-class centrality are disappearing, the article aims to question the coherence of the self in a far-reaching social shift for these intellectuals who became “workers”. In this case, the social construction of self-coherence involves a significant hierarchization of spheres of life and the transfer of their dispositions to intellectuality in the displacement. In contrast to approaches that emphasize the social ordeal of crossing social boundaries, the dispositionalist approach emphasizes the self-coherence found in displacement. Indeed, these militants manage to live as intellectuals in the working-class world, even if this presupposes strong conditions of possibility for maintaining coherence over time. To answer this question, we'll be basing our analysis on a certain fringe of contemporary “embedded militants” corresponding to the best-educated young militants who join the ranks of skilled workers. These are the people who most clearly demonstrate this search for coherence and cohesion.

This article looks at the way in which the environmental cause space institutes an imperative of individual coherence. It stems from militant socialisation, the effects of which are comparable to those of enveloping institutions. However, this socialisation to self-coherence is not dependent on a centralised organisation, as environmental activists regularly move between different places and groups. Its effectiveness can be understood by taking into account the wider ecologist context. To this end, it is necessary to articulate the mechanisms for revising the behaviors of screwing put in place by the collectives studied, the class dispositions of the activists and the networks of sociability internal to the activist sphere.

Using the case of an Italian heterodox marxist review from the 1960s, the article looks at the figure of the “intellectual activist” as the result of a commitment shaped by peers on the model of a vocation. While the sociabilities studied would usually be described as informal, it seeks to identify the mechanisms that encouraged political and intellectual activities, professional choices and leisure activities to follow the same logic of intellectualising revolutionary militancy. The first part describes the different “interaction frameworks” set up by the ritualisation of collective theory-making activities. The second part seeks to explain the dispositional conditions of conformance to these frameworks, by highlighting, at the level of the sub-group that continues to animate the collective despite a split, the decisive role of a certain socialisation preceding commitment to the review.

Based on an in-depth study of two shepherds who entered the profession in the mid-2010s, this article analyzes the relationship between political socialization and social mobility in a context affected by the closing down of biographical and collective opportunities for holders of cultural capital. It shows how protest dispositions shaped outside the family accentuate a disengagement from academia, produced by the deteriorating context, and give meaning to an experience in an objectively downgraded profession. If being a shepherd appears to be a space for political self-fulfillment for respondents who have dropped out of higher education, it's first and foremost because it enables the transfer of anti-establishment dispositions. But maintaining one's activist commitments while being a shepherd contradicts the strategies needed to settle into the activity on a long-term basis.

Since the 1980s, the territorialization of educational policies has led to the emergence of an associative market around the management of educational and youth policies. By combining the sociology of partnership public action and the sociology of associative work, and by adopting “case-based thinking”, the article sheds light on the changes in local educational policies based on associative uses, approached from the double angle of costs and (relative) profits derived from partnership involvement. Firstly, the article identifies the socio-professional and activist profiles of the associative workers involved in partnerships as well as the forms of professionalization “in small steps” and “in tension” reinforced by the rapprochement with the school and educational sphere. Secondly, the article identifies three types of “partnership trials”. It thus sheds light on the structuring recompositions of public partnership action: by discreetly encouraging the processes of subcontracting and gratuity, commodification and flexibilisation of educational work, local educational policies embrace a neo-managerial approach to handling educational problems.

Based on the case of Jordanian MPs who failed to secure re-election in 2020, the article proposes a contribution to the sociology of political defeat, analyzing both the way ex-MPs interpret their defeat and the effects of this event on their biographical and political careers. The study first explores the strategies employed by MPs to ignore their own responsibility in the defeat, and to convert the latter into a resource of political legitimacy. The study of the post-defeat period then shows that remaining in the political field is conditional on the possession of resources that can be reconverted outside Parliament. While most ex-MPs find themselves excluded from the political field and suffer a devaluation of their notability resources accumulated at local level, a more professionalized minority manages to remain in other political arenas, which they invest in the continuity of the parliamentary roles they have hitherto assumed within the institution.