Contenu du sommaire

Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Madeleine Lemaire : Spatial proximity and social distance. The population of big housing developments is preconstructed, it owes most of its characteristics to the manner in which the population was formed. Different factors operate when the mechanisms of the housing market alone, are considered. In the housing development, a heterogeneous population is formed and their diversity depends on the means of access to the development. In this way, social groups which are usually separated spatially, coexist; the contrasts are accentuated in these housing developments more than they normally are in the local population. Ignorance of the conditions of population formation explains in part, certain tendencies in the sociology of new housing developments, the Utopian vein and the exclusive insistence on sociability, at the expense of a morphological study of the population.

Luc Boltanski : Popular taxinomies, scientific taxinomies : the objects of consumption and their classification. This study criticizes the methods used by the econometricians to order and classify the different merchandises. By listing according to function, an abstract and arbitrary division is made which is determined by the nature of the techniques used to analyse the merchandise (regression analysis) ; this method claims theoretical neutrality, nevertheless it involves an implicit theory of consumption, of the consumer, and his needs. A list of this kind supposes the existence of natural needs which exist before the production of merchandise. Needs are not independent of merchandise: and it is not false to say that production produces consumption. The ideology of natural needs, expresses itself best in surveys on food consumption, which most often, do not account for dietary categories. The nomenclature used in these surveys, in classifying different types of food use abstract divisions without relation to categories which people use when they buy and consume. The utilization of such a list makes it difficult to discern the differences in consumption among various social groups.

Yvette Delsaut : Political opinions in the system of attitudes : liberal arts students and politics. In 1965 a survey was made of 2300 liberal arts students in the faculty of letters and social sciences in various French universities (Paris and the provinces). This study tries to show the particular position of sociology in the selection of courses and tries to point out the relationship between the social and scholastic characteristics of individuals « devoted to » a given discipline and their attitudes towards work, politics and professional future. These attitudes were expressed and emphasized in the recent crisis in French universities. It is an illusion of spontaneous sociology that the discipline chosen by the students is an explanatory variable of particular political attitudes. The determinants in the choice of a discipline are in the last analysis dependent on the student's social origin, and these social determinants differ themselves according to social classes.

Howard Rosenthal, Naomi E. Kies : Collinearity and the inference of individual properties from aggregate data. The authors resume the work started by L. Goodman and R. Boudon on the inference of individual properties from collective correlations and deal with the practical problems set by the estimation of parameters in these models. There is indeed the risk, in this type of study, of clashing with the delicate question of the effects of multicollinearity. Taking for example, the electoral behavior of Israelis ? the authors offer some models to make collinearity situations more apparent.