Contenu du sommaire : Ecole publique/école privée : des frontières poreuses

Social and school differentiation of urban space: Inequalities and local configurations. Distribution of school provision in the greater Paris metropolitan area, including availability of certain courses and study programs, is strongly correlated with the social profiles of the different localities and corresponds to sharp disparities. The highly diversified, attractive school options in localities whose residents are highly privileged in socio-economic and occupational terms stands in contrast to the less diversified educational resources, including fewer course and study program options, and reduced private school presence in more markedly working-class municipalities. Different approaches to school choice are strongly linked to parents' socio-economic status but do not amount merely to practices for avoiding stigmatized middle schools in working-class localities. Those approaches make sense when considered in relation to what may be tightly circumscribed social and school environments and differentiated social positions and demands. The results presented here call into question the effectiveness of school districting rules in France aimed at regulating the social profile of middle schools as long as the space considered doesn't correspond to effective school practices of each social category.

Illusion and reality of the concurrence between high schools in urban context : the example of Lille. This article describes the process and mechanisms by which public school is going on the way of concurrence and segregation by focusing on the role of institutional actors. The analysis of relationships between high schools in the city of Lille during the twenty last years shows a progressive obliteration of traditional frontiers between public schools and private schools, at the benefice of new forms of interdependence leading to the construction of an educational space socially organized into a hierarchy. In that perspective, high school choice or avoidance practises which are increasing in urban areas must be considered as a direct consequence of new public school regulation ant not as its starting point.

Public school and private school in Spain: a creeping segregation. State and private schooling networks have maintained virtually the same proportions for the last ten years (two thirds and one third of enrolment, respectively), but these gross figures should not hide three crucial processes. First, access to non-state education (whether state granted or purely private) is growing in big cities and among families of higher income, occupational and cultural level. Second, among non-state schools there occurs also a displacement from state granted to privately financed schooling. Third, and most important, the stability of stocks has no match in flows: state / non state ratio stagnates because state schools recover at the bottom what they lose at the top. In other words, middle and higher classes fly away from public education, which must support the harder stretch (even if not the only) in order to integrate the most problematic students (and not always with the most ready teachers).

The weakness of private education in Italy: a paradox ? This article examines the peculiarities of private schools within the Italian educational system and their political regulation during the post-war period. It is argued that, at the secondary level, private schools accomplish crucial functions with respect to the intergenerational reproduction of inequality and to the cultural differentiation of the Italian society on a religious basis. Until recent years, however, politicians have paid little attention to private education, at least if one looks at formal regulation. However, in the course of the 90's, several laws have ensured increasing financial support and symbolic legitimization to the private educational sector. It is suggested that the deep transformations of the Italian political system and the financial crisis of private schools explain these recent reforms.

Vocational guidance and school marginality : a professional dilemma in the french upper-secondary school. The French school doesn't work as obviously as it used to. The practices and ethics of the professionals of education are stamped by this uncertainty. We want to show what types of justification these professionals provide, when they have to "reorientate" a pupil in vocational training. Beyond the dilemmas produced by this decision, we'll try to point out the professional and organizational motives which explain the various attitudes we observed.

Failure at school and research of self-worth through Islam. An ethnographic investigation in an average town The central hypothesis of this paper is that youth religious identifications can only be treated through an analysis of their family, scholar and professional curriculum. It is in the trajectories of social positions access of children from working classes that the motivations, forms and constraints of Muslim religiosities put settle and not in the belonging to a reified Muslim community. Boys wish to reach another image of them than the one sent to them by the institutional actors or the parental judgments. Islam in the young people's context is not built according to the interests of the Muslim countries but is settled in a society that is struggling to create space to the youngest generations originating from the North African immigration.

Once upon a time, there was a body... : the biological construction of the body in children's encyclopaedias. Since the second half of twentieth century, Sociology, Ethnology and History have been able to show that the notion of the body is a social construction. Moreover, recent studies deal about the distinction between sex and gender and bring us to read the biological body also as a social construction. Children's encyclopaedias which explain scientifically the anatomical body to children are an obvious example to see how symbolic and social gendered values are naturalized. Through biological discourses told to children, the social discriminations between men and women seem to be “scientifically” proven, and therefore, to be natural. Indeed, we will show that the language used to describe the body, and the difference between organ denomination according to sex tend to build the so-called “nature” and to spread, with scientific justifications, the social rules.

How does the French social world of rap music produce its boundaries? Debates about the status of the French group Manau. In 1999, the French group Manau's first album wins the prize of best Rap & Groove album of the year at the French ceremony of “Victoires de la Musique”. The rap magazines, acting like entrepreneurs of ethic, criticize this judgment, arguing that Manau isn't a rap group. This attempt to assign a status to artists shows the existence of a French “social world” of rap, by working on its boundaries. To well understand this debate, we must study the outsiders of this social world, insofar as they contribute to produce its boundaries.

Working in the shadow. The employment of female correctional officers in men's prisons. Women increasingly enter into occupations which are highly sex-typed male. Taking the example of women correctional officers recently affected in all-male prisons, the author wonders whether a truly social mixing might exist at work. While female recruits learn about their job in detentions, they are also confronted with a string of tests by male colleagues and the hierarchy. This is obviously a serious obstacle to women's adjustment to the job. Dynamics of the gender division of labor and the organizational changes caused by women arrival highlight how difficult it is to promote coexistence between genders. The interactions between female guards and male inmates are also strongly influenced by gender. In particular, in dealing with inmates, women cannot forget their so-called ‘feminine nature'. Despite some evolutions emphasized by this process of ‘feminization', the author concludes that prison remains a gendered organization.