Contenu du sommaire

Olivier Galland : A new age of life. Does the fact that the period of a person's life situated between living in the family and starting off a new family unit is increasing in time mean that a new age of life is being formed ? The article is concerned precisely with this hypothesis which will be examined critically by referring to concepts of functionalistic sociology on the ages of life. The principal hypothesis being demonstrated is that we are going from one way of entering adult life to another : to one wherein the model of identification is no longer that based on a presumed heritage of social identity associated with the father but becoming more one of experiment whereby this new identity builds up by means of successive approximations taken from the various social experiences following family life. At the same time, this age of life will also be the occasion for an increasing mass of young people to take advantage of a streak of freedom to live a new moral individualism as they are now fully removed from the supervision of their parents and not yet living within a new family unit.

T. Bloss, A. Frickey, F. Godard : Cohabiting, decohabiting, recohabiting. The routes followed by two generations of women. Using the results obtained from a survey carried out on two cohorts of women, this article undertakes to analyze the leaving of the parent's house in terms of a point in one's existence where the decisive events for the passage to the « adult state » can be condensed. There are two social logics behind the entrance into adulthood which govern behavior during decohabitation. There is a form of establishment which dominates, matching that of the original family, whereby social autonomy is attained through conjugal means. However, there also exists an individual means through academic or professional certification which is rarely accompanied by traditional-type alliances but rather by a return home. Recohabitation is a phenomenon related more particularly to middle and upper class young women attempting insertion by trial and error. This tendency illustrates the permanent nature of the links of solidarity to be found between parents and their children indicating a qualitative transformation of decohabitation.

M. Pissart, F. Poncelet, M. Voisin : Life as an unemployed. Helping the young unemployed to enter adulthood. Despite the constant fall in the number of young unemployed, current evolution of unemployment statistics makes it extremely difficult to foresee any significant change in the actual distribution concerning the out-of-work period (since the beginning of the eighties statistics indicate that 25 % of young unemployed remain unemployed for a period of at least two years). A survey based on national sampling procedures addressed to the under twenty-five years old who had been unemployed for more than four years helps to outline the characteristics of this particular category of which a high percentage is female. More particularly, this survey has made it possible to situate this inactivity at a socially dynamic level operating beyond the professional frame, looking into social and family background, school and matrimonial itineraries as well as into the unemployment procedures in Belgium. This survey points out and clarifies the ambiguities to be found in this particular type of long-term unemployment which starts immediately on leaving school : ambiguities due to both an approach to professional inactivity which is still too marked with the idea of rupture, and to the young people's own representation of the situation.

Ruwen Ogien : Diffuse sanctions. Sarcasm, laughter and contempt... The division made between diffuse and organized sanctions can be attributed to Durkheim. However, Durkheim limited the scope of his discovery by presenting diffuse sanctions as attenuated copies of legal sanctions. It is not impossible to show that between these two types of sanctions there exist irreducible differences. It therefore follows that Durkheim's division can be saved from Durkheim, despite the high cost involved, as placing the specific properties of diffuse sanctions in the fore, entails a paradox. It is difficult to explain precisely what diffuse sanctions enable us to identify or to characterize : informal social order (the alleged « order of interaction »).

Guy Michelat : Tha Catholic identity of French people. II. Membership and socialization. The scales used for measuring the different dimensions of the religious universe of French people (cf. previous issue of this journal) inform precisely which factors evolve and which factors remain stable. Generally speaking, women tend to be greater believers and churchgoers than men. But going down the scale of age, religiosity decreases as regards practice, attitude towards the institution, as well as belief. Furthermore, the importance of religious socialization throughout life is clearly apparent. Current religious practice and belief depend firstly on the degree of religious integration within the family, the prime origin of the psychosocial character. After which exists church attendance helping to reinforce religious apprenticeship at both experiential and cognitive levels : the earlier religious practice is abandoned, the greater the decrease in belief and practice. It can therefore be said that the frequency of church attendance is a true indicator of the level of integration in Catholicism.