Contenu du sommaire

Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud : On rereading Herbert Spencer. Spencer is usually read today through his commentators, notably Durkheim. This makes it interesting to point out that he is not given the credit he deserves for a number of notions and ideas he created that are part of the common heritage of sociology. His evolutionism is much subtler than is often admitted, and his ideas probably had a greater influence on Durkheim than the latter suggests.

Catherine Paradeise : A closed work market : the French merchant navy. The study of occupational population variations makes it possible to analyse the regulating ability of closed work markets, governed by a strict relationship between qualification, seniority and type of work, to interpret or foresee individual « desertions » or workers' collective declarations of disagreement, and to calculate the transformations that may affect their organizational rules. Such a study was carried out on the personnel of the French merchant navy from the 70s to the 80s, using the seamen's registration file and school enrollment files. It brings to light a social and demographic deregulation, which is analysed by type of service and level of qualification, and suggests that this closed work market will face a crisis that in the long run should cause it either to open up or be restructured.

Marco Diani and Sebastiano Bagnara : Union tracts as reflecting opinion conflicts. This article is concerned with a methodology for the study of industrial conflicts based on content analysis of leaflets and tracts produced by organized workers' groups in a newly constructed car plant in the italian Mezzogiorno. The plant was constructed there with the intention of moving to a region with a tradition of less organized and militant workers. The authors propose to examine the communications of the organized workers' group as a mean of studying the strategies and behavior of these groups. Different forms of conflicts are considered, i.e. struggles possessing a term of negotiation as well as diffuse or « spontaneous » forms of struggle which are only visible ex post facto.

Jean-Paul Grémy : Comments on the differences between percentages and their interpretation. In the preceding issue of the R.F.S. Jean-Claude Combessie set out the problem of the interpretation of empirical data relating to the evolución of disparities in educational opportunity. The present article points out the limited value of the data used by Combessie to illustrate the problem; it then suggests a relatively simple model for the process of interpreting numerical data. The thesis developed here is that interpretation cannot be univocal, dictated either by the data or by the statistical instruments used to describe them; interpretation always depends on the sociological (or other) hypotheses to which the sociologist presenting this data refers.

Jean-Pierre Terrail : Working-class families, education and social future (1880-1980). Important modifications can be observed in the relationship of working-class families with the educational system when it is studied over a long period, from the founding of the public school to the present day. For a long time school was just one of several socializing institutions; during the period running from 1930 to 1960 a minor trend emerged that began encouraging the promotion of children from the working class to salaried work outside the sphere of labour. In the 1960-1970 period the acquisition of an educational diploma became a decisive event in the social definition of individual identities. For working-class families, most of whom were determined to respond to this evolution, the limiting of the birth-rate appeared to be a vital way to assure success for their children ; in acting massively to achieve this goal, they thus demonstrated an ability that was new for their class to predict and organize their descendants' future.

France Arnault : Frederic Le Play, from metallurgy to social science. Three articles published by Le Play as part of his work as a mining engineer, before writing "Les Ouvriers Européens", are examined to show how this professional experience (and following the indications he provides) counted in training the sociologist he was to become. On the one hand he had a first-hand experience of the economic and social circumstances surrounding industrial operations and influencing technical decisions; on the other hand, the contributions he made to the natural sciences (mines, forests, metallurgical phenomena) which belong to « concrete » sciences, developed in him certain forms of work, categories and techniques which would later influence his social studies.