Contenu du sommaire

Georges Davy : In honor of Célestin Bouglé (1870-1940). Speech given at a commemorative session of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, recalling the life and works of the French sociologist.

Haroun Jamous : Political participation and cultural conflicts in the Congo. The article analyses some results of an inquiry made in Kinshasa (ex-Leopoldville) three months before the independance. Its purpose was on the one hand, to reveal the perception and representation of the present and future in connection with the idea of independance, on the other hand, to define its chief determining factors. The dependant variable examined is 'political participation' which the author tries to measure by Guttmanian type techniques. The treatment of the answers reveals two dimensions of political participation, which combined, suggest four types of political reaction to the historical moment represented by pre-independance. Multivaried analysis suggests a typology of 'cultural conflicts' as independant variable or principal determinant of these different political activities. To conclude, the author shows how the explanatory schematisation could help to explain more recent facts and to grasp better the problems of the search for Congolese unity.

William Grossin : The psycho-sociological dimension of working-time. The liberty of an employer to fix the duration of working time within legal limits is in fact quite small, because he is brought to practice that duration best suited for the stability of his personnel, the social climate of his enterprise, that is, for good productive conditions. This duration is situated in the relatively narrow framework of the work-group, which in turn depends mainly on the social composition of the personnel. It was noted for example, that the length of time is shorter when the work group comprises a large proportion of women. In case of commercial fluctuations industrials may recur to several means to insure the production : increase or diminish the number of over-hours, taking-on or laying-off of employees, spreading out of orders etc... The study of tactics used, reveals a concern not to maintain durable a length of time beyond the implicit limits of the group's psycho-social framework.

Jacques Maitre : Total transitivity model between scaled items. A model for cumulative scales (scale analysis) is presented first in a purely formal manner, pre-supposing only the total order between elements ; the divergence between observations and models are characterised for intransitivity statistics. An index of adjustment is figured by balancing this statistic with the maximum it can reach. An example drawn from an inquiry is dealt upon. Some applications of the model are described, starting respectively from paired comparisons, the logical implication, the language of graphs, weighted lattices, distances between partial orders, Boolean calculation. An examination of scalability indexes suggested by Guttman, Green, R. Boudon, and J. Loevinger shows that homogeneity (L. Loevinger) corresponds numerically to the index drawn by the author from the formal model.