Contenu du sommaire : Fluidité et hiérarchie. L'évolution de la stratification sociale en France.

Louis-André Vallet : Forty years of social mobility in France. Temporal trends in social fluidity illuminated by recent models. The aim of this paper is to examine whether a long-term trend can be identified in the mobility regime of French society from the middle of the century. Its begins with a review of the international literature on temporal trends in social fluidity within modern societies. Analysing recent French research which has concluded that inequality of opportunity has remained unchanged in France during the last two decades, the paper argues that such a conclusion can only have resulted from the use of insufficiently powerful statistical techniques. The second part of the paper analyses father-son and father-daughter mobility tables drawn from national representative surveys carried out in 1953, 1970, 1977, 1985 and 1993 (N = 35, 741 for males and 18, 484 for females). The use of log-linear and log-multiplicative models reveals that the statistical association (as measured with the logarithm of the odds ratio) between social origin and destination has declined steadily by 0.5 % a year over a period of forty years. This finding highlights a slow but continuous trend towards a reduction in inequality of opportunity from the middle of the century. Of the twelve million French men and women between the ages of 35 and 59 who were in employment in 1993, nearly half a million would have belonged to different classes without this forty-year increase in social fluidity. The paper concludes that the thesis of temporal invariance in the intergenerational mobility regime cannot be maintained for France, but that the reasons of this change still remain to be ascertained.

Michel Forsé : Status consistency and its evolution in France from 1982 to 1997. Achieved social status is generally defined along three main lines : cultural, professional and economic. The end-of study age, the PCS and the salary are the three indicators used to measure these three aspects. To evaluate their consistency and its evolution in France over the last fifteen years, the results of a 1982 INSEE survey on employment have been compared to those for 1997. A slight increase in the gross connection can be noticed, but log-linear or log-multiplicative models allow us to establish that the net consistency (with changes in structure being neutralised) is perfectly stable. This result applies equally to each age group. In relation to their consistency, hierarchies appear strong and continuous when only achieved status is taken into account. This rigidity contrasts with the relative opening that can otherwise be seen when the elements of ascribed status intervene.

Louis Chauvel : Bread and holidays : is the consumption of occupational groups (still) becoming more homogeneous ? This article assesses the hypothesis that consumption modes of different occupational groups are becoming more and more similar. According to the most radical authors, there is no longer any difference in the structure of expenses for managers and workers. A discriminating analysis based on household budget surveys in 1985 and 1995 indicate that managers and workers keep to distinct budget structures and that there has been no significant alteration in the last ten years. The hierarchy of occupational groups as constructed by this method is stable over time. Furthermore, spouse's activity which could have blurred social boundaries has contradictory empirical effects : heterogamy between spouses brings workers and managers closer together, while homogamy sets them further apart ; the global effect is nil. A long-term study may have given the opportunity to discern more important changes, but it appears that over the last ten years the occupational groups has been both a stable and efficient descriptive tool.

Philippe Besnard, Guy Desplanques : Occupational scaling put to the test of temporal stratification of taste. To test empirically the classical hypothesis of a vertical social diffusion of taste, one of the most privileged materials is parents' choice of names for their newborn babies, since aesthetic preferences are objectivized in the registered certificates. The present study is based on a representative sample (N = 367 000) of first names given to newly-borns between 1930 and 1988. The proportion of innovative choices in the different occupational groups (i. e. choices made at the very beginning of the diffusion process) provides an indicator of a temporal hierarchy in taste. This hierarchy which corresponds well to the nomenclature of occupational categories of the INSEE (French Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) tends to be compressed over the years. To make the meaning of this temporal stratification of taste clear, it is compared to the various dimensions of social stratification.

Olivier Donnat : Social stratification of cultural practices and its evolution from 1973 to 1997. Four successive studies on the cultural practices of French people - 1973, 1981, 1989, 1997 - were conducted on the initiative of the Ministry of Culture. The most recent study shows that despite profound transformation of people's relations with art and culture, cultural practices remain in many cases exclusive and cumulative. The most traditional practices, in particular, are still, socially-speaking, very discriminative : since 1973 no significant reduction in the gap between occupational groups has been observed.