Contenu du sommaire

François Chazel : Power, Causality and Force. This article attempts to specify the major dimensions inherent in the concept of power. In the first section, the author doubts whether this concept should simply go into the same class as the notion of causality. He is thus led to question the relevance of Riker's distinction between two conceptions of power, each of which has a particular form of causality associated with it. In the second section, the author analyzes the relationships between power and force. After critically examining the positions of Bierstedt, Bachrach and Baratz, Parsons, he endeavors to show that power is a function of the mastery of force to the degree that force, outside of its naked manifestations, serves to establish the credibility of menaces and guarantee the application of less brutal sanctions. The article ends with an attempted definition which gives a privileged place to the fact a given social unit can, as the result of negative situational sanctions, reduce the courses of action open to other social units.

Jean Kellerhals : Family Dimensions of Stratification. The author undertook three studies based on probabilist samplings of married women in Switzerland. Using these, he tries to throw light on differences in the perception about a woman's role and on some strategies for attaining family objectives according to the woman's social category. Two hypotheses are confirmed. First, women from the lower categories have a greater identification with the traditional dimensions of a woman's role. Second, greater tension exists within these categories between family aspirations and the means for fulfilling them. A third hypothesis is proposed and partially confirmed, namely that this greater tension goes along, throughout the evolution in the family cycle, with a certain deterioration in conjugal relations. Quite clearly, a woman's professional work has different effects on aspirations and behaviors depending on her social category.

Jean-Pierre Worms and Emmanuèle Reynaud : Urban Renewal of Les Halles in Paris: Social Requests and Requirements and Urban Planning. This article studies decision making processes, from 1959 to 1975, concerning renewal of the Parisian district containing Les Halles. Relating the processes of mobilizing the local population and formulating a social demand to the characteristics of the Parisian politico-administrative system brings out two constants in the decision making processes. First, within the political system, there is a « regressive progression », a kind of decisional spiral for which institutional conflict is a way of making progress. Second, the relationships between the institutional system and the population follow a process with an analogous spiral. In the last case however, the internal therapeutical crisis becomes a serious crisis involving legitimacy. Since the legal proceedings of the Parisian decision making system and relationships with inhabitants proceed almost exclusively through crises, an extreme situation develops: the decision is marked either by internal conflicts (heavy equipment) or by measures ? the please-all solutions ? hurriedly taken in order to appease a popular movement. Subsequently foreseeable management risks stressing these two tendencies even more.

François A. Isambert: Workers and the Catholic Church. Surveys and various statistics of Western European countries show that the, at least relative, departure of workers from the Catholic Church goes well beyond the French setting. Some surveys done in France during these last years make it evident that, from the political point of view, workers are not more anticlerical than other categories of the population. On the other hand, they turn out to be more reserved about the Church's intervention in matters of morals and private life. The phenomenon of class, merging into political cleavages, seems to be strongly enough modified by a phenomenon of milieu, where the opposition between common and cultivated categories comes into play.

Christian Lalive d'Epinay : Protestant Elites, Policy and Processes for Development: The Case of Argentina. In other works, the author has proposed and empirically verified, with a contextual survey, a typology of Protestant groups in South America. On that basis, he proposes the following hypothesis: that the structural typology of Protestant groups corresponds to a typology of their leaders' conceptual systems. In this article, he limits himself to verifying this hypothesis with respect to conceptions about the developmental process and the relationship between church and politics. The survey, conducted by means of an individual questionnaire distributed in Argentina between 1969 and 1970, includes the totality of leaders ? ordained and lay ? in certain representative churches of different kinds. Data analysis does not stop with quantifying opinions but goes on to quantify the structures of opinions which account for general conceptions about development. The article ends by putting into perspective the structures of some Protestant groups and some conceptual systems.

B. A. Campbell and J. G. Padioleau : The Electorate under the Fifth Republic: First Results from a Model. This research note delivers the first results from a study of the Fifth Republic's electorate. The schema of interpretation has essentially borrowed its elements from the American Voter Model, drawn up by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. This analysis brings to light a voter typology according to the characteristics of belief systems. The 1967, 1968 and 1973 elections provide the basis for studying the electoral choices of these types of voters.