Contenu du sommaire

François Bourricaud : Against « Sociology-ism » : A Critique and Some Propositions. This work opens with a discussion of « totalitarian realism » (a term borrowed from Jean Piaget), presented as one of the dominant orientations of sociological analysis. After having indicated the difficulties of this approach, the author emphasizes how a trend, which he calls neo-individualistic, has persisted, particularly in certain studies by economists and political scientists. This neo-individualism is characterized by the importance given to the « actors' strategic capacities », their roles and «distance», at least potential distance.

Erhard Friedberg : Planning: a Difficult to Grasp Concept. Comments upon Several Works Dealing with French Planning. This critical survey presents and discusses three main theoretical approaches used in some of the more recent literature on French Planning: planning as a decision-making process, as a process of learning new modes of collective action and as process of norm production. The note goes on to assess the relevance of these approaches and of planning as an autonomous field of inquiry to the study of the development and general mechanisms of state-interventionism in France.

Lucien Nizard : The Necessity of State Planning Regulations in Contemporary Capitalistic France. The traditional approaches of French planning implicitly admit, as Friedberg correctly stresses, that planning plays a central role among state regulatory processes. The present article emphasizes the necessity of going beyond these approaches by locating planning with respect both to other forms of governmental intervention and to a hierarchical society which is divided into classes and whose capitalistic economic system obeys a certain working logic. By this means, the author criticizes Friedberg's exclusively organizational approach. Relying on the constraints imposed by open frontiers, planners, regardless of their intentions, produce unifying norms for social change which necessarily profit the dominant categories. French planning also appears to be an attempt for reunifying the deeply divided ensemble of state mechanisms.

Yohanan Manor : Administration and Society in Israel. The Israeli society is divided in many autonomous segments and sectors which were generated by the initial matrix of the political parties and are still more or less affiliated to them. The ability of this national set to work and act as a whole results from a mechanism grounded on the control of the various segments by the respective political parties, the ability of their elites to cooperate, and the vested interests of quite every party in this political system and its actual functioning. The predominance of this pattern throws some light on the conservative dynamism, or the conservative anarchism of the Israeli society, as well as on some salient features of its state and administration. In spite of some recent structural changes, the state remains a limited and fractioned reality which main features are hazy and latent. Public administration is by no means a bureaucracy in the sense used by Weber. It remains a set of agencies which main function is to socialize the citizens to the political system, and to condition them to the rule of the political parties. The dominant style of action in public administration seems to amount to the institutionalization of the « débrouillardise », that is an ambivalent approach mixing a deep understanding of the need and role or organizations to a clear consciousness that one has to organize their short-circuiting. The costs attached to and the developments stemming from this system (the dwindling of the political parties, the situation of high dependency in which are the individuals, the failure of the system of decision making on the national level with regard to long term and cross sectoral-segmental issues) are creating the conditions for its modification.

Abdolhossein Nikgohar : Some Observations about Iranian Land Reform. The Incorporated Land Company is an Iranian socioeconomic institution set up during the 1962 land reform. Its most important aspect concerns putting land in common and distributing shares of stock to peasants. As a means for reorganizing rural life, the ILCs aim at multiple objectives: social integration, political control, rational land organization, and the turning of agricultural infrastructures into profitable operations. As in the case of any imposed change, the creation of an ILC meets up with many difficulties whose origins are found not in its objectives but rather in the practical measures which accompany implementation. Taking the form of a participatory process, this reform consists in purely and simply applying measures decided by the central power; in spite of its apparent consultative form, the administration's indifference to the local population's expectations lets a conflict of interest, which partly paralyzes the reform's evolution and limits its scope, reappear during each phase of change.