Pierre-Paul Zalio

Pierre-Paul ZALIO, a sociologist, is a Professor at the École normale supérieure in Cachan. He specializes in economic sociology and conducts research on the figure of the entrepreneur within the IDHE laboratory (Institutions and historical dynamics of the economy). His work has focused successively on the socio-history of French family employers, the territorialization of economic actors, and, more recently, on sociological theories of entrepreneurial activity. Based on numerous field surveys (in Marseille and Le Havre on port activities, in Shanghai on real estate), he defines the activity of businessmen as a work of identifying heterogeneities in the framing of transactions, work that requires the businessman to build himself at the crossroads of several social worlds. The figure of the businessman is therefore inseparable from the social supports that make it possible to connect heterogeneous social spheres. His study presupposes a sociology of the equipment (material, social and institutional) necessary for the construction of an entrepreneurial identity.
Born in 1966, Zalio is a former student of the ENS de Cachan, an associate professor of social sciences, a doctor of sociology from the EHESS and a holder of the HDR (Sciences-po Paris). He founded the thematic network of economic sociology of the French Sociology Association (AFS) and directs the journal Terrains & Travaux. Bronze medalist of the CNRS in 2003, he is a member of the Institut universitaire de France (2006). He published numerous articles as well as a book on a French family employer (Grandes familles marseillaises au XXe siècles. Enquête sur l’identité économique d’un territoire portuaire, Belin, 1999). Interested in sociological theory and its history, he has also published an annotated anthology of texts by Durkheim and the Durkheimians (Durkheim, Hachette, 2001).