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Classification, De-classification, Re-classification. The strategies of reproduction and in particular the strategies of re-conversion depend on the objective profit-risks offered to investments in a given state of the institutional instruments of reproduction and of the capital they are to reproduce ; it follows that the recent transformations of the relationship between the different classes and the educational System —which have resulted in the massive increase in schooling and all the corresponding changes in the educational System itself, and all the transformations of the social structure which, at least in part, are due to the transformation of the relationships holding between qualifications and job-openings— are the result of an intensification of competition for educational qualifications. Thus, those fractions of the ruling and middle classes which are richest in economc capital have had, in order to ensure their reproduction, to greatly intensify the use they made of the educational System, constraining the fractions whose reproduction was hitherto ensured chiefly by schooling to intensify their investments in schooling. Hence the inflation of qualifications and their devaluation. As a consequence of devaluation, the broadening of the monopoly of the holders of educational qualifications over positions which were until then open to non degree-holders means that the chief victims of this process are those who go onto the job-market without qualifications. Hence a reinforcement of the way in which schooling predetermines professional career opportunities and of the interdependence of qualification and job-opening. The re-conversion of the economic capital into cultural capital permits the middle classes to maintain the position of its heirs and explains the morphological changes within the middle classes and, in particular, the emergeance of a new type of craftsmen and trade with a high cultural investment. The hysteresis of the habitus tends to conceal the devaluation of qualifications from the classes which are furthest from the educational System. The other classes can, in order to escape loss of position, either produce new professions more adapted to their social claims, or else modify in accordance with these claims, by a redefinition implying a re-evaluation, those professions to which their qualifications give access. This creative redefinition effect can be observed in professions of sparse distribution and low degree of professionalisation, such as the new sectors of cultural and artistic production and all those professions which ensure the best return on the cultural capital transmitted by the family; consultative occupations, and those of presentation and representation. One can only understand the emergeance of that new petty-bourgeoisie which harnesses to its function as intermediary between the classes new instruments of manipulation by reference to the transformations in the methods of ruling which, since they are concerned to ensure the symbolic integration of the ruled classes, grant more importance to the prescribing of needs rather than the instilling of norms. The increase in school-attendance underlies a whole group of transformations in the educational System itself; the well-defined boundaries of the old system are supplanted by the vague classifications of a system which sanctions vagueness of aspirations. It is as if the new logic of the educational system and the economic system promoted the maximum postponement of the moment when, by a series of imperceptible degrees, the final balance-sheet of the semi-bourgeois abortive careers is settled at last. Hence the type of structural instability we find in the representation of social identity and aspirations. The outcome of all the opposing effects of re-conversion and re-classification, is a global movement upwards of the structure of the distribution, between classes and segments of classes, of the wealth which is the stake of competitiveness, the maintenance of order, that is to say of relational property, being therefore ensured by the ceaseless changes in substantial properties.

School-failure and the Medical Point of View. In this article, we analyse what part scientific discourse and medico-psychological practice dealing with mentally-deficient children owes to the social conditions of their production. The emergeance, in the latter years of the nineteenth century, of new types of "abnormal children" — the unstable and the retarded — is directly linked to the massive entry, as a result of educational requirements, of children from the lowest segments of the popular classes. The early specialists in child-psychology work out scientific representations of these "abnormal schoolchildren" and press for the establishment of specialized structures, adapted to their care. The success of this project is approved by a law of 1909 creating classes for further training. But this legal victory will have no institutional effects throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It is only with the aftermath of the Second World War, at a time when a system of diversified institutions is being established to care for different groups of malad- justed infants (delinquents, psycho-neurotics, low-grade or middle-grade mental defectives, and so on) that the classes for further training will begin to develop whilst specializing exclusively in the education of the "backward" (now termed, under the new psychological nomenclature, the slightly retarded). The field of maladjusted infancy, grouped around different bodies of specialists (child-psychiatrists, psychiatric hospital doctors, infant psychoanalysts, psychologists, specialized teachers), occasionally clashing over the concepts of maladjustment and therapeutic practices, was dominated up until the end of the sixties by the child-psychiatrists who were to occupy the key positions in the new institutions outside State Education (Safeguard of infancy and adolescence, medical teaching Institutes, Rehabilitation Centres for the psycho-neurotic). It is their word which is law and determines the limits of intervention of the other specialists (psychoanalysts are confined within caring for minor disorders, doctors of mental hospitals are relegated exclusively to the caretaking of the lowest-grade mental deficients). The new concepts relating to maladjustment elaborated by the child-psychiatrists combine with an eclectic discourse elements originating from different disciplines (genetics, experimental psychology, genetic psychology, psychoanalysis), by organising them in such a way as to establish on "scientific" bases a causal relationship between maladjustment and risk of delinquency. Mentally-defective infants are no longer characterized by the level of their intellectual deficiency but as "personalities totally deficient" (intellectual backwardness, psychomotor and affective deficiency, inability to conceive abstractly) whose psychic fragility is the dominant trait. Threatened by the social surroundings, the young mental defectives are deemed to be "in moral danger" by virtue of their being retarded. If child-psychiatrists still exert today a determining influence in certain institutions of the field of enquiry and if the concepts that they have elaborated are still current in a large part of the institutional System (and notably in the teaching profession), their dominant position was called into question, towards the end of the sixties, by a new line of enquiry which was psychoanalytically-oriented. It was by critieizing the notion of mental deficiency and the intractable nature of specialized teaching that the analysts tended to tear themselves a way from the auxiliary situation which had been assigned to them until then. Theoretically displacing mental retardation into the field of psycho-neuroses, they replace at the same stroke backward children within the potential clientele of the psychotherapies they practice within their institutions (medical-teaching centres, day-hospitals, and so on). By so doing, they enter into direct competition with the child-psychiatrists who had until then monopolised the clientele of the mentally retarded, judged moreover unanalysable by the masters of psychoanalysis until then. The confrontation between analysts and child-psychiatrists seems to resolve in favour of the latter, since the state authorities take up in official texts the nosographic categories prevalent in modem analytical discourse , relegating the child-psychiatrists ' categories to tradition. Thus the notion of psychoneurosis as implying a deficit takes over from that of mental deficiency, and here the analysts are merely taking over where the child-psychiatrists left off in the psychological retranslation of a strictly social phenomenon such as failure at school in children from the working classes, a resuit of the distance separating the culture of the family milieu from the arbitrariness of the dominant culture. The analysts are merely replacing the neuropsychiatrists but by their therapeutic practice they broaden the social reference of the institutions of the field of enquiry since, in accordance with their theory, they are led to seek in the symbolic economy of the family nucleus the elements that might determine the infant's failure at school. From failure at school viewed as a symptom of the child's suffering, we move on to the child as a symptom of some malady within the family, and in that case it is in the family that one must intervene directly through those institutional dynamics. A massive psycho-therapeutic caretaking of the most culturally tinderprivileged families tends to establish itself. Psychoanalysis of the poor tends to develop at the same time as the power of the analysts asserts itself within the field of maladjusted childhood, where it still encounters a certain number of obstacles of which one of the lesser is not the shunning by the more working class families of analytical questionning.

Learning to Labour. The domination exerted through the school System is not the inculcation of an ideology that is passively imbibed. Many working class boys put up a cultural resistance especially as expressed through chauvinism, delinquency, joking and specialised «rough», language. The perceived «problem» this resistance poses for the smooth functioning of the English school system is now sufficiently evident to have become a full-scale «moral panic» about indiscipline and violence in British schools, re-echoed and amplified by the discourses of the media, the teachers' unions and the highest levels of Government. An ethnographie study of the language, practices and attitudes of working class lads in the English industrial Midlands, as they move from school to employment, shows, however, that their oppositional responses of refusal, resistance, reinterpretation and subversion may well be the very means by which a key aspect of social reproduction in a capitalist society, the reproduction of the proletariat, is accomplished, without constraint or indoctrination but with the consent and even joyous acceptance of their social destiny by those concerned. Those working-class youths whose cultural heritage leads them to suffer external definition as scholastic «failures» have a choice of response : to play the game of the institution and to seek integration as humbe conformists, «ear'oles» attentive to their teacher ; or to opt for the counter-culture of the «lads», a differentiation into a cultural mode which is a rich, inventive generator of ways of grasping and mastering their experience of schooling, of «penetrating» the contradictions of the ideologies in which the school strives to enmesh them. This «counter-school culture» is continuous with the culture of the factory shop floor, with its techniques for self-defence, moral survival and a kind of celebration in and despite the conditions of factory labour. Thus the response of resistance at school is an apprenticeship and a channelling towards a certain type of work which might otherwise appear unacceptable. The transition of these lads from school to work cannot be understood without reference to the meanings they daily construct and impose, on the basis of resources transmitted within the working-class school and on the factory shop floor. It is only by grasping the processes of this semi-autonomous culture that one can understand the ironic twist whereby, despite the efforts of their educators, despite the lads' capacity for resistance and grasp of their situation, and to some extent «behind the backs» of all concerned, social reproduction takes place.

The Assembly-Line in a Hungarian Factory. It is widely agreed that assembly-line work, what-ever the political regime may be, imposes on workers certain working-rhythms and takes from them all autonomy and all initiative. Ethnographical observation, in Hungary, of the running of a moped assembly-line and in-depth interviews carried out with the workers show that this is not necessarily the case. Broadly speaking, the regularity of production is obstructed by the fact that the workers are never totally interchangeable. In the case of Hungarian industry, the absence of standardised tools and the many defects which mar the spare parts are added factors preventing the establishment of a perfectly normalized assembly-rhythm. To the extent that the management of the factory is less subject to consumer demands than to the production targets set by the political power, it is doubtless less concerned with producing good-quality mopeds than with respecting, frequently in a purely formal manner, the production norms fixed by the Plan. Because the factory cannot deliver, under regulation working conditions, the number of motor-cycles provided for by the norms, a large part of the work is effected in overtime, this latter being as essential to the workers whose salaries are inedaquate as to the managers of the firm who can thus respect the production plan. In consequence to this a certain balance of power results between workers and managers. Higher-skilled workers can regulate their working rhythm to a relatively supreme degree; they can also choose the tools and the work-methods; but, if they do enjoy fairly great autonomy, and master technology, they have no say in matters concerning the quantity and quality of production.