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The Artisan and Patterns of Social Moyement The artisan, in direct touch with work and the instruments of production which characterize his social position, may be differentiated in terms of social position according to the amount of capital at his disposal and the particular qualification he has acquired. Both of these factors determine his relationship to his craft. An analysis of the professional paths open to the artisan reveals two poles of different social composition; the pole of the artisan-employer formed in the main by artisans who have inherited a skill or craft, and the working-class artisan dominated by artisans from the lower classes. Another contrast may be drawn between a form of traditional stable craftsman-ship, the labour-force of which is constantly renewed through the process of apprenticeship, and on the other hand an up-and-coming craftsmanship whose membership is frequently initially trained in technical schools. Insofar as the offspring of the petty managerial classes migrated more readily and in larger numbers to other sections of the middle classes, this phenomenon coinciding with that of the conversion of economic into academic capital as a move to promote wider changes within the economic System, it was easier for working class offspring to enter the artisan class. However, that area of craftsmanship which draws and relies on the working-class is a high-risk area and its internal turnover-rate is as a consequence considerably higher.

The Neo-Rurals. In ever-increasing numbers since 1974-75, city-dwellers began settling in the country and living off agriculture and artecrafts. They settle mainly in areas of Southern France that had suffered a population drain. This so-called «return to nature» movement followed the utopian wave of immigrations triggered off by the aftermath of the events of 1968, and was the sequel to the rise and subsequent fall of the libertarian rural communities. These neo-rurals, originating for the most part from the new petty bourgeoisie, seem to have abandonned the radical anti-institutional outlook of the original community members and be more concerned with securing their integration into the local society and the economic viability of their enterprises. There is nonetheless a kind of conti- nuity between the «unregulated» existence of the libertarian communities and the «way-of-life-according-to-nature» of today's neo-rurals: in both cases, the respective views of nature —as proliferation and as order- are at the root of essentially ethical attempts to face up to the social and moral insecurity created by the contradictions inherent in the development of capitalism of which they are made acutely aware by the insecurity and contradictory nature of their own social situation. The structural ambiguity of the neo-rural utopias may therefore be analysed in terms of the mirror-image of the condition of a particular social stratum placed on the precarious periphery of normal social relations. Inversely, it is this precarious position which dictates the utopian outlook of these elements of the new petty bourgeoisie. This ambiguity is mainly (but not solely) linked to the discrepancy — one aggraveted by the economic recession— between social aspirations considered as a function of the possession of a certain number of educational qualifications at school and university level, and the real, sometimes harsch facts concerning the social and professional openings at their disposal. It is this very ambiguity of the utopian neo-rurals which makes them fair game for being brought back into line by society. Through this process of ideological «rehabilitation», the social System tends to digest its own crisis by absorbing elements from those social categories which have been bred by the crisis. Examination of the connexions between this return to nature, for example, and the recent long-term plans on the use of space by the State, might lead us to think that the «neo-rurals» are merely experimenting with those principles of «gratifying» and «sobre» growth which have been set forth as today's targets of national importance. But these farmers who are not real peasants, these craftsmen who remain intellectuals, these «fringe-elements» who have become notables in their own right, these social experimentors who hail back to traditional rural society, have their own peculiar influence on society; because they are unclassifiable, they throw out of gear the classifiying mechanisms of the localities where they settle; because their motivations and aims are ambiguous, they act as analysts of the contradictions inherent in their social stratum. In this twin respect they may be dealt with and viewed as symbolic destabilizors.

The Career of a Leftist Salaried Employee after 1968. Basing his article on the examination of an extreme case, the author studies the secondary professionalization of young people who turned to careers as lower-salaried staff in industry after having recognized that they would have found it impossible to enter the liberal professions or to obtain university posts, though these would have been more suited to their vocation of «intellectuals». The analysis is centred on the case of a small group of psycholo- gists who were militant members of the far left in 1968 and who subsequently found jobs as animateurs in various training programs of a large private company. The description of their career and the detailed commentary on a conversation held at the factory makes it possible to grasp, simultaneously, the subjective modes involved in their becoming adapted to their profession, the techniques utilized by the human relations executives to integrate the new arrivals, and the contribution that the young «rebels» make - no doubt unwillingly - to the work of modifying the adaptation of the other employees to the company structure, in a way that accords with the political context of the post-May 1968 period. In order to establish some continuity between their past as intellectuals and militants and their professional practice, the animateurs integrate a political vocabulary and political themes into their professional ideology. The perplexity of the other members of the firm, who sometimes label them as «agents of management» and sometimes as «leftists», shows that objectively, they contribute to making the situation more ambiguous. Now, in this period, managements strategy is oriented precisely toward masking the «authoritarian» and «conservative» aspects of the adaptation of employees to the firm and towards the assimilation and gradual reinterpretation of the «ideas of May 1968». In confronting, with passionate conviction, the most traditionally-minded of the people involved the insertion of minor employees, the animateurs are doubtless the most zealous artisans of the policy set by top management. And yet they reason in terms of «the class struggle» and call themselves part of «the avant-garde of the popular forces».

Social Taxonomies and Class Struggles. In the pre-1930's no trace of the 'executive' is to be found in symbolic products such as the novel or cinema. Nor do they appear in statistical censuses until after the War. Even though at the time officials did exist who occupied similar positions in business to those now occupied by executives, it is as if they had not yet achieved a common identity. The aim of this study is to analyse the way in which the executive emerged as a new figure on the social horizon through processes of regrouping and redefinition. The use of the term 'executive' as a unifying concept and the constitution of executives into an explicit group are phenomena that are inseparable from the increasing attempts to restore social order subsequent to the strikes of 1936: a need emerges to restructure the inert 'masses' of the 'Middle Classes' into a class which is capable by its membership and cohesion to check and defeat the working classes. The emergence of the 'executives' as a recognized, named group is inseparable from the ideology aiming to insert the executive element of the Middle Classes in a third position intermediate between the working classes and management. The large amount of literature devoted to the middle classes and the executives that appeared in the period 1930-1940, and particularly after 1936, was inspired essentially by corporatism and social Catholicism (not to mention Italian Fascism, a subject of fascination for a large number of Middle Class ideologists). Vichy went even further in the unifying of the executive class by giving officiai recognition to it. The post-war Parodi agreements establish for good and all the tripartite representation of the social world that had been instituted by Vichy. The Confederation Generale des Cadres, an official body representing the interests of executives, owes its orientation and character to the middle class movements of the 1930's. This officialisation is accompanied by changes on the level of representation; a whole body of literature, invariably written by Catholic engineers, sets out to define the identity, mission and values of the executive. These engineers spur the restructuring of those hitherto known as mere 'colleagues', a term used to designate und underline the special relationship held by these bourgeois wage-earners with management.