Profession sociologue (French Edition)

In these intermediary and indeterminate social positions, family heritages intersect with educational strategies and aspirations of upward mobility with tactics against downward mobility. Ultimately the study of career choices in cultural management suggests a new take on the analysis of social reproduction.

PROGRAMMES D'ÉTUDES OFFERTS À L'UL

The empirical findings of this research conducted in France are set in a broader comparative perspective, at the European level and with the USA. Few answers truly satisfy. Vincent Dubois poses a set of fresh questions and manages to answer this and far more in his well-researched, highly readable volume. It should be required reading in our field. How cultural occupations became attractive 1. The rise of cultural employment 1.

Professional labels and vocations 1. An attractive sector despite poor employment conditions 1. The attraction of uncertainty 1. Training and the genesis of vocations 1. The development of specialized training programs in cultural management 1. The structured of the specialized training supply 1.

The effects of the specialization of training. A largely feminine vocation 2. Higher social backgrounds 2. The space of applicants. Leaving doors open 3 1. A genuine choice 3. The narratives of vocation 3. Choosing the cultural sector rather than a given occupation 3. A third way between art and teaching 3.

Teaching as a foil 3. The artistic vocation as a reference 3. The social rationales of a career choice 3. The liber amicorum offered to Lode Van Outrive under the rather flat title Politique, police et justice au bord du futur [Policy, the police and justice at the frontier of the future]; Cartuyvels, is entirely different from the preceding programmatic works. A Belgian, Lode Van Outrive pursued a career at the Catholic University of Leuven; he presently enjoys great international renown as a sociologist of the police.

• After Pusan (Faber Finds).
• Doctorat en sociologie (Ph. D.) | Université Laval;
• François de Singly!
• Benoit COQUARD - CESAER.
• Anything You Can Do.
• La sociologie étasunienne à l’heure du trumpisme. Entretien avec Michèle Lamont – AFS.

Like the book dedicated to him, his range of interests greatly exceeds the police; he has worked on the courts and prisons and on numerous aspects of criminal sociology. No more than glancing reference can be made here to the book's twenty or so texts, only a quarter of which are directly concerned with the police; others deal with legal sociology or make advances in the neglected study of "illegality among the powerful delinquency in business, fraud, corruption.

The distinctions between these research domains are actually quite slight in this book and often merely formal: Brodeur begins by observing that a surprising fall in crime rates has been recorded in both the United States and Canada since , one that could even be called a "collapse", as in the now celebrated example of crime in New York City. This overall decrease surprised the specialists, who had to improvise hasty explanations for it.

Brodeur gives a delightful list of such explanations, finding no fewer than sixteen, of all varieties. But this extended research into causes did not suffice to protect the social scientific community from the hegemonic discourse of the main interested party, the police hierarchy itself, for whereas before the s the generally accepted understanding among sociologists of the police was that police repression had only marginal impact on increasing crime rates the determining factors, in their view, were vastly more likely to be demographic, economic, and social , the statistical reversal in the '90s was enough to make researchers doubt their own conclusions, or at least the strength of them.

They were now ready to believe that the new repressive policy known as "zero tolerance" had isolatable effects. The fact is that regardless of whether crime goes up or down, no statistical relation has been established: In the world of the police, the siren's song inevitably leads to the siren's wail. Finally, to assess the relations between "researcher and police officer", which we can only imagine to be complex and variable, there is Dominique Monjardet's synthesis , another contribution to the indispensable sociologists' sociology. As my title suggests, the present critical note is mainly concerned with Dominique Monjardet's Ce que fait la police.

Sociologie de la force publique [What the police does. Sociology of the public force], a critical presentation of 12 years of research and the most important recent book in the field. Monjardet has played a decisive role in getting French sociology of the police started and gaining firm acceptance for the research policy followed at Ihesi in all except moments of political turbulence. Monjardet's book, whose subtitle is more relevant than its title, is an exemplary work that every sociologist and political scientist should read, whatever his or her particular field of interest.

It is not utterly free of weaknesses, which I shall mention now so as not to have to come back to them, as they count for little against its great general value. Discussions of some points are too long and there are occasional repetitions. The author does not seem at ease presenting typologies pp. Certain discussions seem merely juxtaposed, no doubt because it was necessary to include the results of earlier studies -the structure as actually realized in the book is less effective than it appears in the table of contents. Minor criticisms these -one cannot remain perfectly on target through pages.

Monjardet remains close enough that the journey is eminently worth taking and retaking. It is rare to read a book at once so clear and concrete, and that makes social processes so intelligible in such a serene, non-denunciatory tone. These qualities make it all the more regrettable that the present review is being published so long after the book. Monjardet first engages in a discussion of how to define the police, namely by reexploring Weber's oft-misquoted formula of the state's claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.

Navigation de l’article

What truly characterizes public force is not any monopoly on "legitimate violence", which cannot exist, but rather that such force is always sufficient for "public regulation of private violence" p. In practice, public force is constituted in such a way that it will always be able to overcome any and all private force: The discussions that follow pp.

Though there are exceptions namely pp. Within each police unit, police officers in reality choose what they want to work on, and "the mechanisms of the selection process are in fact the major determinants of how police work is defined, organized, and analyzed" p. There are also fascinating pages on hierarchical inversion: And an entire chapter on the police profession -condition, rather- and the different police specializations, since areas of police expertise and police self-representations are so numerous and varied that we cannot really speak of any professional unity.

The much shorter second part, just as rich but much more heterogeneous and sometimes difficult to read, aims to describe both internal "police dynamics" and the relations between the police system and society. Thankfully, what the reader discovers above and beyond this slightly academic distinction are discussions of truly central issues, such as the contradiction between means to be used and ends to be attained; the famous "grey check"; 11 resistance to change within the institution; and the impossibility of mastering petty delinquency.

Monjardet's work could be said to manifest and apply the very model of the sociological approach, which understands every social group, assuming it is a lasting one, as the site of processes either not perceived which is generally the case or overtly denied or interpreted by means of a particular, incomplete type of rationality.

Sociological analysis, then, consists in: Monjardet brilliantly applies this type of approach. With regard, for example, to what he calls "the bureaucratic organization of non-responsibility" -the idea that what is manifested by the systematic police practice of recording all activities and the formal nature of "verification" is a constant concern to prove "non-responsibility" for whatever might happen- he demonstrates forcefully that this is not a pathological trait of police organization but "the logical result of the structural features of police work" p.

The systematic practice of opacity, the persistent dissimulation of faults committed police "blunders" do not, therefore, reflect any trait of professional "culture" to think so, Monjardet insists, would be to entirely misinterpret this practice but are rather an effect of the very situation in which the police find themselves in our societies see his demonstration, pp. Consider a second example: For an institution to "involute goals" means to assign itself its own goals or attribute to its "task [ The author identifies the structural causes of this "involution" -the fact that the police is instrumentalized by both the political and judicial powers as well as by the multiform, all-consuming demand emanating from society at large- and explains their consequences on the actors, which range from "exit", meaning here that while remaining on the force one refuses -inwardly- to put any energy or effort into one's work, to "voice" in the form of politicization or even deviance.

Everything touching the police institution is particularly spectacular because, as Monjardet demonstrates, "the police is the site of the greatest disjunction between formal power and real authority" p. Not only is the police characterized by opacity, as most institutions are, but it is something of an illusionist: This approach gives rise to several questions that the author does not explicitly resolve he is not, of course, writing a sociology treatise.

One such question pertains to the nature of the structuring processes: Another problem is the aggregation of individual practices. The author seems certain that the great number and variety of representations and practices does not likewise lead to a scattering of effects of those representations and practices. Whether "perverse" or not, the effects can be reduced to unity and thus generate another set of social causalities.

La réforme des armées en France, Sociologie de la décision (English)

Monjardet is thus situated at the macrosociological level and I, among others, wholeheartedly approve while using studies, especially participant studies, that might have led him to foreground ethnographic singularities or revel in the play of microsocial interaction and the pleasures of analyzing it. His chosen position enables him to note in passing, for example, that insecurity is "an attribute of the social and not [ These are eminently sensible points, of the sort one would like to read more often.

The author does not refrain, here and there, from stating "sociological laws", either citing their canonical authors -"The extent of harsh discipline is inversely related to the amount of actual close supervision" Manning, quoted p. Such "laws" are sometimes formulated ironically, a delight for the reader: I cannot overemphasize how much it is to be hoped that Monjardet' s book will be read far outside the circle -particularly tight in France- of those who study the police as a central institution of social and political order or even a "representation of society, a model of the social".

Consider a few more of the many salient analyses. The measure granting permission not to wear the uniform was instituted in under police union pressure and is now a standard feature of police practice; it was a response, moreover, to the profound social change in police status at that time. It also had the instantaneous effect of reducing police presence in public transport by four-fifths. Monjardet gives several other examples of "these unintentioned links between policy and results in which a practice motivated by a particular corporate concern recognized as legitimate and reasonable by the national administration produces considerable effects -effects bearing directly on police work- that were in no way foreseen and certainly not consciously aimed at" p.

If "today, all things considered, police officers are the public agents who receive the best pay for the shortest number of hours" p. Neighborhood policing has been consistently recommended by governments in France for the last 25 years. The impossibility of putting such a policy into action, however, has to do with morphological givens whose grip no one has yet been able to loosen. The need to have a patrol vehicle, for example. Car patrolling represents "a radical change in police practice" which makes police officers deaf and virtually blind to what is going on around them p. Then there is the very mode of police recruitment in France: Not to mention the devaluing of foot patrolling and delinquency prevention compared with what is, as noted, still perceived as the core of the police profession, "fighting crime".