Contenu du sommaire : Varia

This article is based on the ethnographic observation of a Prefecture service in charge of immigration control. By emerging himself in this professional environment, the observer develops an understanding of the relations between the social position of the actors, the bureaucratic norms under the constraint of which they operate, and the resulting professional practices. The organized scarcity of resources, the technical codification of procedures, the bracketing of legal rules, and the imposition of quantitative goals in the processing of asylum requests are as many factors that contribute to creating a relation of bureaucratic domination over asylum seekers. In their daily practice, these “low-level policing agents” are led to develop a depoliticized vision of “social problems” and, depending on their social trajectory, their years of service and their own persuasions, they adopt different strategies to cope with their situation. Those who have access to sufficient resources can choose to leave. But for the others, the effect of time is a certain habituation to the established norms. Beyond the changes heralded by new regulations, the length of service appears as the best way to ensure the reproduction of supervisory practices.

A discussion of the “social effects” or “collateral consequences” of the American phenomenon of mass incarceration on social and family life has emerged in recent years. Keenly attuned to the poverty, unemployment, and other socio-economic burdens shouldered by those most affected by the United States' punitive penal policies, researchers often claim that being sentenced to spend time in prison is the disruptive force that results in job loss and family disintegration. However, an analysis of women's romantic relationships with prisoners demonstrates that in the near-total absence of basic social services characterizing the United States today, prisons provide substitute sites for domestic and conjugal life that, paradoxically, may be preferable to or easier to manage than the chaos and stress of the family home. This article draws on ethnographic observation at northern California's San Quentin State Prison and interviews with fifty women whose husband, fiancé, or boyfriend was incarcerated to analyze how impoverished women –lacking mental-health services, substance-abuse treatment, domestic-violence intervention, and other social-welfare assistance for themselves and their partners– engage the criminal justice system as a protective intervention in their relationships with marginalized men. Extending Donald Clemmer's classic theory of “prisonization,” it's possible to argue that women with incarcerated partners undergo “secondary prisonization”, a less absolute but still powerful process of socialization to carceral norms and subjection to penal control that induces women to rely on the correctional facility as the most powerful public institution available to them. Aware that prisons provide only degraded proxies of the services they need, but denied the means of obtaining these services in a more humane manner, women express profound ambivalence about the penitentiary's control over them and their partners.

Using the example of the 2003 pension reform in France, this article explores the political functions of opinion polls. By analyzing all opinion polls conducted between the announcement of the reform and its adoption by the Parliament, the article suggests that opinion polls have sought to shape the preferences of the respondents by making them supportive of the reform. To achieve this, polls have actively selected the questions and acted upon their formulation, overlooking the economic context that emerged in the wake of the 2000 stock market crash. Moreover, polling technologies raises the issue of the representativeness of polled opinions. Upon the publication of the polls in the news-papers that had commissioned them, biased interpretations have been proposed. A more thorough survey realized by the DREES led to very different findings.

This article traces the genesis of an idea: that of the Vespa scooter, officially introduced on the Italian market in 1946 by the Piaggio corporation. The first section follows the process of autonomization of an international field of the scooter between Europe and the United States during the first half of the 20th century. The second part points at the existence of Italian scooters before the introduction of the Vespa and sheds some light on a public and polyphonic discourse advocating the production of a “people's motorbike” at the end of the 1930s. One of the most assertive and influential voices defending the importance of a utility motorbike is that of Renato Tassinari, the director of the Fascist daily Il Littoriale, national deputy of the Corporation of Newspapers and Print Media at the Camera dei Fasci, and an admirer of Nazi Germany. Tassinari, who will be hired by Piaggio at the end of the war as head of its corporate newsletter, can be considered as the missing link between the Vespa and the pre-1946 scooters. The last section of the article focuses on the entrepreneurial properties of the sub-field constituted by the Piaggio corporation as early as the 1930s: the good technological level of its production plants, its international market, and its long-standing commitment to diversification in the transportation sector. These properties eased the shift from aeronautics to motor-scooters after 1945. However, a last building block in the genesis of the Vespa is the social trajectory of engineer Corradino D'Ascanio, who invented the Vespa. In conclusion, the article sums up the internal and external conditions that led to the birth of the most famous scooter in the world.

In the short novel Ferragus, Balzac tells of the rise and fall of the Desmarets couple. Their trajectory within the Parisian commercial bourgeoisie under the Restauration period illustrates three interwoven forms of symbolic capital: professional reputation, matrimonial trust and social honor. This social tale is a true sociological fiction about trust, and it makes it possible to analyze the social and historical emergence of a specific subset of Parisian bourgeois: the traders, i.e. ministerial officers and merchants who enjoyed a monopoly over the trade of stocks officially quoted at the Paris stock exchange.