Contenu du sommaire

Victor Karady : University Growth and the Evolution of the Differential Opportunity in the Teaching Career at the Beginning of the French IIIrd Republic. This study concerns the morphology of the humanities teaching corps in secondary and higher education from 1870 to 1914. The growth of the teaching staff, resulting from the university reform, altered the composition of the teaching corps by multiplying the positions at the top of the university hierarchy. This evolution does not follow directly the social demand for teaching but rather a political strategy chosen by the Republicans. The career opportunities of the teaching corps are bettered, but differently according to the sub-groups and the conjunctures. In the first period of the regime (around 1890) the graduate students of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, profiting from a quasi- professional training to the teaching career, and from many school benefits, are the first concerned by the new appointments available. Later, their privileged position is weakened on the academic market by their competitors, graduated through different channels. Comparative data are presented of historical opportunity inequalities between Ecole Normale graduates and other university graduates, in relation to age structure, diploma and intrinsic indices of success. The career opportunities of the two populations tends to converge after the reform period.

Alain Degenne and Pierre Verges : Introduction to Similitude Analysis. This article introduces a new method of data analysis: similitude analysis. In the first part, the authors merely present the technique through the use of an example. In the second part, they develop the theoretical frame. Finally, data processing enables them to stress the use of this tool in the analysis of social indicators of rural development in Lebanon. Similitude analysis permits to explore a set of data by means of methods borrowed from the graph theory. The starting point is the calculation of a similitude index between each couple of variables or elements under study. The resulting similitude matrix is treated from two complementary points of view: -the selection within the whole set of relations of a partial graph with features of local « maximality » (maximum tree, ternary analysis) . - the aggregation of objects of analysis as joint sets according to an internal homogeneity threshold of these groups and the organization of these sets through a « straining » graph. The authors develop in the second part of the article the relations between the two approaches.

Jean Padioleau : Cohort Analysis as a Technique in Sample Surveys. The use of the concept of cohort and of cohort analysis makes it possible to determine and measure the separate effects of age and generation. The author presents the basic frame of cohort analysis and discusses the problems raised by its application to survey sample data.

Christian de Montlibert : Adult Education in France: For Whom? Adult education holds a growing position in the French educational system. But, in spite of its growth, it does not succeed to reach the unskilled population. Whether one considers the field of « continuing education » (mostly occupational) or that of « mass culture » (mostly cultural) , the middle class seems to profit mostly from the existing program. In the case of geographical mobility (promotion in the hierarchical scale of the enterprise), job mobility (change of profession following an economic crisis) the best educated, the best qualified, the less constrained by work hours, are the most concerned. The same process occurs in culture and youth centers, social centers and in mass education in general: the better educated are over-represented. The factors which explain this situation are numerous and interactional, among them: the effect of discrepancies in the means offered to the different social strata, the impact of the material means and the influence of ideological variables.