Contenu du sommaire

Alain GIRARD and Jean STOETZEL : The French and present-day values. The results of an opinion poll on values, conducted simultaneously in nine West European countries, constitute the substance of a work published in 1983 by Jean Stoezel and entitled "Les valeurs du temps présent. Enquête européenne" (Paris, PUF). The present paper analyses in particular that data collected in France. The main areas investigated were morality and religion, family and professional lives, attitudes towards the economic system and towards political ideology. Religious beliefs and political preferences, in a reciprocal relation, make up a veritable system in terms of which attitudes may be differentiated. On a graduated scale, the French may be situated at the moment of the enquiry a bit "left" of the average for the other European countries investigated. However, neither in France nor elsewhere can we find a rupture between two opposed groups : a strong majority of the public decides in favour of central positions.

Guy Michelat and Michel Simon : Socio-economic determination, symbolic organisation and electoral behaviour. On the basis of data collected in 1966 the authors were able to show that vote varies very strongly in terms of the level of affiliation in the Roman Catholic population group, on the one hand, and, on the other, in terms of affiliation to the working class and of intériorisation of their symbolic organisations. These findings continue to hold true in 1978. On a qualitative basis, the authors had also underlined the importance of patrimony and the affective charge projected on it in the core of meanings which are characteristic of professed Catholics. Using recent quantitative data, the authors now point up that the amount of effort devoted to either the conservation or the constitution of a patrimony in fact increases as the level of religious integration; it also depends on the degree of affiliation to the independent classes (positive correlation) and the working class (negative correlation). As for vote itself, it varies to a much greater extent under the effect of the degree of affiliation to Catholic or working class (or independent) groups than under that of those variables such as patrimony or revenue which are more indicative of individuals' economic dispositions. We are thus in a position to evaluate the limits of interpretations based on a univocal model of the rational individual. The orientation towards possession of patrimony, along with the politico-ideological meaning of the latter once acquired, depend strongly on value systems and more generally speaking on the symbolic appointments developed during the course of socialisation in environments (Catholicism, working class, independent classes) characterised by specific sub-cultures.

Guy Groux and Catherine Levy : Collective mobilisation and economic productivity : the case of "quality circles" in metallurgy. Quality circles have multiplied extensively in France since 1981. This social strategy for awaking wage-earners' interest in the firm's productivity cannot be defined simply with respect to the economic crisis and to the problems of product competitiveness. Yesterday, employers' policies constituted so many responses to trade-union demands and initiatives. Today, quality circles arise out of employers' initiatives alone and are based on specific mechanisms of collective mobilisation, independent of the different modes of trade-union action. They imply new work relations and are based on the workers' organic solidarity with respect to the enterprise. Thus, on the very concrete level of work units, quality circles contribute thereby to intensifying the (present-day) trade-unionism crisis and, at least in part, palliate the crisis in traditional modes of employers' organisation and authority. In this sense, quality circles may be inscribed in the three-fold crisis that fundamentally characterises the present period : economic crisis but also and above all crisis of trade-unionism and crisis of the traditional (employers') modes of labour management.

Lise Demailly : Contribution to sociology of pedagogical practices. In order to understand the dynamic of the power relations which underly the question of the French collège (first part of secondary school) and to indicate what may be the possible outcomes of the present tentatives ? both militant and institutional ? to transform this institution, it seems necessary, among other research, to describe the teachers' professional practices. Analysis of both the individual and the social genesis of pedagogical attitudes reveals families of strategies articulated within a space of positions, conflicts and alliances where the chief concern is defining the teaching profession. The present article is an attempt to construct such a space of positions and to study the genesis of professional practices on the basis of an investigation conducted among French-language teachers in the collège. Thus, the successes and the fragility of the "modernist" tendency become evident, a tendency which has tried to set up a "modernised traditional" type of practice and which is marked by changes affecting the teachers' attitudes, those of the school children and the cultural field of action. The question is to know whether in the wake of modernism a new school model can be constituted and compel recognition, one that would be a mobilising and catalysing agent for the teachers' professional consciousness.

Patrick Pharo : Empirical problems of comprehensive sociology. The methodological foundations of Max Weber's comprehensive sociology are very likely to be forgotten when the sociologist, in neglecting that one of the major objects of his investigation is social activity, also neglects accounting for the operations that authorise him to express the meaning of these activities. Yet thanks to the work of Alfred Schiitz and to the extensive resumption of work on the problems of social description which we owe to ethnomethodology and in particular to Harold Garfinkel, Weber's posterity suffices to attest that the methodological difficulties of comprehensive sociology that Weber himself had faced, may find, at least partially, empirical and rigorous solutions. In this line of thought, the present article tries to systemise certain principles of methodical description and to show that by taking into account the three referential, contextual and sapiential levels of meaning of social activity, it is possible to make the latter comprehensible, while opening up interesting perspectives for sociological generalisation.