Throughout the nineteenth century, ecological currents in the agricultural world promoted organic farming and the defense of small producers. The story of these “ecological farmers” sheds light on the forward-looking contract forged between agriculture and society.
Contemporary uses of the word “Muslim” in France illustrate the variety of ways in which minorities identify themselves. In a book that straddles semantics and ethnography, Marie-Claire Willems sheds light on the diversity of forms of belonging available to populations exposed to exclusion.
How have French women of Arab and North African descent become the subject of a collective fantasy? If the language of immigration reveals collective imaginaries and social and discursive practices that are worth analyzing, then the word beurette also deserves our attention.
What binds people together and turns them into a society? In an ambitious book, the sociologist Serge Paugam wrestles with this question, while bringing sociology into conversation with psychology.
Is the law doing enough to protect the environment? Through an analysis of the concept of environmental crime, Grégory Salle shows that legal provisions are limited by a social vision that favors the technical and capitalist exploitation of nature.
Since the 1980s, patient accompaniment has been considered a form of care in its own right. Yet, the “ethic of care,” now a key notion in philosophy, is also part of the solidarity pact that governs the welfare state in France.
How can we explain the variations between judicial decisions in criminal matters? Using the method of natural experiment, economist Arnaud Philippe sets out to identify the factors that influence decisions and determine criminal sanctions. At the risk of forgetting sociology?
Employees are the primary inventors, but they are often deprived of their rights by legal strategies that capture their expertise. In response, new forms of resistance are emerging, based on open access.
Is scientific evaluation sufficient to improve educational practices? For many teachers, evidence-based policy constitutes an obstacle to their own practices because it relies on statistical generalizations without taking into account their professional intuitions.
Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing movement, is a paradoxical religion: it denies its status as a church, leaving individuals in a one-to-one relationship with God, yet in a way that allows dominated groups to acquire a degree of social legitimacy.
Based on a study of the social experience of overweight people in three European countries, Solenne Carof’s book explores the logics behind weight-based stigmatization.
By analysing a generalised process of “logistisation”, Mathieu Quet shows that the circulation of people and goods is at the heart of our societies. But has logistics also captured language and the living world?
Carole Gayet-Viaud’s ethnographic study shows that city dwellers are far from always indifferent to their public environment. They sometimes interact with it, either by giving to beggars, getting into disputes, engaging in pure sociability, or perpetuating (but also combating) discrimination.
Educating children by respecting their spontaneous interests: Such is the promise of alternative pedagogies. Subjecting these promises to sociological critique, Ghislain Leroy shows that they are not necessarily emancipatory and may even contribute to the reproduction of social inequalities.
While Chinese immigrants and their descendants have long been portrayed as a “model minority”, Ya-Han Chuang shows how this qualifier papers over the representations that are imposed on members of this minority in France – who are now fighting back against racism.
French sociologist Alexandre Mathieu-Fritz analyzes the rise of telemedicine, which was brought to the fore by the pandemic. He examines changes in the practices of healthcare professionals, the doctor-patient bond, and delegation between professions.
Pierre Bourdieu declared that sociology has the power to reflect on itself, and in particular to reflect on its own scientificity. Four rare or previously unpublished texts serve to illustrate this doctrine, the implications of which are still open to debate.
The renaturation of cities offers several advantages in terms of healthcare, urban planning and economics. But urban gardens can also become a Trojan horse for gentrification. Is cultivating them really all that counter-cultural?
The unconscious, according to Bernard Lahire, is “socially structured.” This principle makes possible an individual sociology of dreams that requires—like all psychoanalytic interpretation—the presence of a third party to grasp the forces bearing down on the dreaming subject.
How do working-class and lower middle-class women experience their youth in rural environments? Based on a study of several rural and exurban spaces, Yaelle Amsellem-Mainguy revisits the question of women’s social trajectories.
Cutting the number of civil servants is a topic that is raised at each election in France. Why this anti-civil service attitude, despite public services themselves being constantly praised? Why this hostility, even though as soon as electoral campaigns are over, it is usually left without any practical consequences?
Is the French police on a downward slope? A vast encyclopaedia takes a historicist approach to the history of polices in France, while analysing it in light of contemporary challenges. It is a daunting task, made possible by adopting a long-term view and a broader geographical perspective.
The Larzac plateau is famous and paradoxical: as the scene of an emblematic struggle against the state, but also because its economy is a model of integration within global capitalism. Philippe Artières retraces its history.
How is it that the car, a symbol of freedom for the American people, leads them into a cycle of debt and imprisonment?
Care, which refers both to a kind of work and a social relationship, covers a wide range of realities and often precarious activities. Helena Hirata subjects this polysemic term to piercing and uncompromising sociological scrutiny.
Hunters are more concerned about nature’s fragility than most people realize. They are the first to witness it, and their relationship with animals is not just one of blind predation.
In her new book, sociologist Scarlett Salman analyzes a figure that embodies the new spirit of capitalism: the corporate coach. She provides a unique insight into the changes that contemporary capitalism has wrought not only within organizations, but also on types of mindsets.
The interpretive framework applied to the transitioning of trans people by sociologist Emmanuel Beaubatie produces a wealth of knowledge. Male domination and heteronormativity are shown in a new light.
The emergence of environmental protection policies in the second half of the twentieth century is the result of compromises between protest movements and economic and urban development—change by bits and pieces, rather than a genuine urban ecological transition.
In France, the law is rather vague regarding the meaning of prostitution. The job of defining it is often left to the police, but they focus on street prostitution, that of the lower classes, paying barely any attention to the often luxurious type of prostitution used by the upper classes.
Can the law be broken to maintain public order? This is the question addressed in a remarkable comparative work on vigilantism and ‘rough justice’ in the security era.
Who owns the big audiovisual media and the press in France? How does this affect the pluralism and independence of information? An economist and a lawyer give a grim diagnosis of the situation and set out the principles that might allow information, a public good, to be better protected.
From the 1980s onwards, the practice of vacationing in the Maghreb homeland became widespread, and gradually replaced any hopes of resettlement. These summer vacations allowed people to return to their roots in a family setting and temporarily escape the subjugation and social labels they endured in France.
Pierre Blavier’s ethnographic study of the roundabouts occupied by the Yellow Vest protestors sheds light on this movement’s emergence and staying power. The sense that their way of life is directly threatened is key to understanding the Yellow Vests.
The voice of businessmen invariably finds itself at the heart of electoral debates. Yet few businessmen remain permanently involved in politics. Between small businessmen and top managers of large firms, world view vary considerably. The only principle that seems to unite them is free enterprise.
Ever more numerous, ever more polluting, superyachts are a ‘Capitalo-scene’: in a space that is at once vast yet highly circumscribed, they embody the hidden face of contemporary capitalism, in all its planet-killing splendor.
Once a closet for homosexuals, now embroiled in pedophilia scandals, the Catholic Church is trying to restore a veneer of masculinity to its religious figures, thus sacrificing itself to gender politics.
Numerical indicators, gauges, kilometre limits, bed occupancy rates… Our public authorities like to take cover behind a barricade of numbers – but is its only purpose to pull the wool over our eyes?
Nicolas Jounin’s undercover immersive fieldwork takes the reader on a postal worker’s route, one week before his office was reorganized—when he had only a week’s seniority.
Hundreds of species have adapted to modern conurbations. What drives animals to go and live in the city? Beyond the accelerated degradation of nature, we need to rethink the very notion of wildness, and invent an “ethics of asymmetrical relations”.
