Contenu du sommaire

Michel Euriat, Claude Thelot : Social recruitment of a school elite in France. Evolution of inequality between 1950 and 1990. The article aims to define the capacity of the "Schools" to have members of the popular and middle layers of the population become part of the school elite, based on the study of social recruitment of students, over a forty-year period, at the four famous French Schools : l'Ecole Polytechnique, l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, I'ENA, HEC. On the one hand, the general evolution of social inequality within the "Schools" is measured for the same period at three specific points in the educational system : college (secondary school), passing the baccalauréat, and higher education, and depending on which point is being studied, there can be seen stability or more often a decrease in inequality. On the other hand, it is shown that the proportion of youngsters of "popular" background (with a farmer, manual worker, office worker, craftsman, shopkeeper father) in the four French Schools listed above has greatly decreased over the last forty years : approximately 29% of the students were of popular origin in the first half of the 1950s, compared to 9% today. The evolution is very different to what it is at university where the proportion is more or less constant (50%) for the same period. This evolution must be viewed in relation to the social structure in France, in which case, it can be said that the four schools in question have not shut their doors to members of the popular layers of the population : rather, there is a slight opening up, but less than in the educational system as a whole, in particular universities.

Martine Barthèlemy : School militants : school parents associations in France. At the meeting point between the controversy over schools and the questions on the crisis in militancy, the results of a survey carried out on the militant elite of the three large school parents' associations clearly indicate the permanence of associative engagement models based on two logics : private education-state education and leftwing-rightwing logic. Representations of parent participation in the education system, of the "educative community" with its "anti-teacher" attitudes, underline the fundamental contradictions of the school parents' movement and contribute to its evolution.

Guillaume Sainteny : Ecologist militancy and their retribution. After a brief presentation of the theories for the retribution of militancy, this article goes on to show that in practice the materiel retribution for ecologism in France is very low, whereas the expectations in terms of immaterial retribution through participation are high. It would thus seem that the particularity of ecology leaders in comparison to the characteristics of the traditional political elite is based on the low retribution of ecologist movements and on the type of retribution being offered.

Nathalie Heinich : Ways of "being" a writer. Professional identity in a singular regime. Declaring an activity can in itself be a problem if that activity does not belong to the occupational regime of employment, career or profession, but to that of a vocation, as is the case for writers. This article is an attempt to explain the reasons why self declaration of a profession can cause so many problems for a writer. The article deals with the parameters which go to form a professional identity as it is seen and developed by the subjects : a personal representation formed by the professional declaration as well as the designation made by other people and how it is perceived by the subject. This research is both part of a sociology on the artistic profession and of a sociology on identity which means that this notion can be given firm signification and may thus be used by social sciences.