Centre de Sociologie Européenne

To explain the astounding over-representation of blacks behind bars that has driven mass imprisonment in the United States, one must break out of the `crime-and-punishment' paradigm to reckon the extra-penological function of the criminal justice system as instrument for the management of dispossessed and dishonored groups. This article places the prison in the historical sequence of `peculiar institutions' that have shouldered the task of defining and confining African Americans, alongside slavery, the Jim Crow regime, and the ghetto. The recent upsurge in black incarceration results from the crisis of the ghetto as device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for the containment of lower-class African Americans. In the post-Civil Rights era, the vestiges of the dark ghetto and the expanding prison system have become linked by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion, spawning a carceral continuum that entraps a population of younger black men rejected by the deregulated wage-labor market. This carceral mesh has been solidified by changes that have reshaped the urban `Black Belt' of mid-century so as to make the ghetto more like a prison and undermined the `inmate society' residing in U.S. penitentiaries in ways that make the prison more like a ghetto. The resulting symbiosis between ghetto and prison not only perpetuates the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic taint of the black subproletariat, feeding the runaway growth of the carceral system. It also plays a pivotal role in the remaking of `race', the redefinition of the citizenry via the production of a racialized public culture of vilification of criminals, and the construction of a post-Keynesian state that replaces the social-welfare treatment of poverty by its penal management.

▪ Abstract Artistic labor markets are puzzling ones. Employment as well as unemployment are increasing simultaneously. Uncertainty acts not only as a substantive condition of innovation and self-achievement, but also as a lure. Learning by doing plays such a decisive role that in many artworlds initial training is an imperfect filtering device. The attractiveness of artistic occupations is high but has to be balanced against the risk of failure and of an unsuccessful professionalization that turns ideally non-routine jobs into ordinary or ephemeral undertakings. Earnings distributions are extremely skewed. Risk has to be managed, mainly through flexibility and cost reducing means at the organizational level and through multiple job holding at the individual level. Job rationing and an excess supply of artists seem to be structural traits associated with the emergence and the expansion of a free market organization of the arts. Reviewing research done not only by sociologists, but also by economists, historians and geographers, our chapter focuses on four main issues: the status of employment and career patterns, the rationales of occupational choice, occupational risk diversification, and the oversupply of artists.

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter-century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.

S'il fallait définir le modèle auquel s'apparentent aujourd'hui la sociologie et l'ethnologie du corps, on ne pourrait sans doute trouver meilleur paradigme que celui du « colloque interdisciplinaire », lieu de rencontre fictif et abstrait où se rassemblent pour un temps, autour d'un même domaine du réel ou d'un problème social perçu et désigné comme tel par la conscience commune, des spécialistes venus des disciplines les plus différentes.

This article first takes the reader inside the Los Angeles County Jail, the largest detention facility in the `Free World', to give a ground-level sense of how the entry portal of the US detention system operates by way of prelude to this special issue on the ethnography of the prison. A survey of the recent sociology and anthropology of carceral institutions shows that field studies depicting the everyday world of inmates in America have gone into eclipse just when they were most needed on both scientific and political grounds following the turn toward the penal management of poverty and the correlative return of the prison to the forefront of the societal scene. Accordingly, this issue seeks to reinvigorate and to internationalize the ethnography of the carceral universe understood both as a microcosm endowed with its own material and symbolic tropism and as vector of social forces, political nexi, and cultural processes that traverse its walls. Field researchers need to worry less about `interrupting the terms of the debate' about the prison and more about getting inside and around penal facilities to carry out intensive, close-up observation of the myriad relations they contain and support. This article discusses the obstacles to such research, including questions of access and funding, the professional organization of academe, the lowly social and therefore scientific status of the object of investigation, and the (mis)use of the military metaphor of `collateral damage'. It concludes by suggesting that getting `in and out of the belly of the beast' offers a unique vantage point from which to contribute to the comparative ethnography of the state in the age of triumphant neoliberalism.

Not one but several `peculiar institutions' have operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States: chattel slavery from the colonial era to the Civil War; the Jim Crow system in the agrarian South from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution; the ghetto in the northern industrial metropolis; and, in the post-Keynesian age of desocialized wage labor and welfare retrenchment, the novel institutional complex formed by the remnants of the dark ghetto and the carceral apparatus with which it has become joined by a relationship of structural symbiosis and functional surrogacy. In the 1970s, as the urban `Black Belt' lost its economic role of labor extraction and proved unable to ensure ethnoracial closure, the prison was called upon to shore up caste division and help contain a dishonored and supernumerary population viewed as both deviant and dangerous. Beyond the specifics of the US case, this article suggests that much is to be learned from the comparison between ghetto and prison as kindred institutions of forced confinement entrusted with enclosing a stigmatized category so as to neutralize the material and/or symbolic threat it poses for the surrounding society.

The resurgence of extreme poverty and destitution, ethnoracial divisions (linked to the colonial past) and public violence, and their accumulation in the same distressed urban areas, suggest that the metropolis is the site and fount of novel forms of exclusionary social closure in advanced societies. This paper essays an ideal-typical characterization of this new, rising regime of urban marginality by contrasting it with selected features of urban poverty in the postwar era of Fordist growth. Six distinctive features of advanced marginality are proposed: the growing internal heterogeneity and desocialization of labor, the functional disconnection of neighborhood conditions from macro-economic trends; territorial fixation and stigmatization; spatial alienation and the dissolution of place; the loss of a viable hinterland; and the symbolic fragmentation of marginalized populations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the rise of advanced marginality for social analysis and policy, including the need to break out of the market-and-state paradigm and to sever the link between work and subsistence via the institution of a citizen's wage.

Attending to Bourdieu’s early field studies conducted concurrently in colonial Algeria and in his childhood village of Béarn in southwestern France sets his scientific approach and output into a new light: it reveals the twinned ethnographic roots of his theoretical enterprise; it dissolves the caricatural figure of the ‘reproduction theorist’ oblivious to historical change; and it dispels the academic fiction of the ‘practice theorist’ by displaying how Bourdieu’s conceptual innovations (such as the reintroduction of habitus) were driven by questions of field research centered on social transformation, cultural disjuncture, and the fissuring of consciousness. Using each site as a living laboratory to cross-analyze the other enabled Bourdieu to discover the specificity of the ‘universally prelogical logic of practice’ and led him to break out of the structuralist paradigm. It also stimulated him to translate his existential disquiet with the scholastic posture into a methodical return onto the operations and tools of objectivation that evolved into his trademark stance of epistemic reflexivity. Recoupling his youthful inquiries in Kabylia and Béarn further reveals how, foreshadowing the ‘repatriation’ of anthropology after the close of the imperial age, Bourdieu revoked the dominant conception of ethnography as a heroic exploration of otherness and pioneered multi-sited ethnography as a means for controlling the construction of the object. Bourdieu’s paired field studies of social structure and sentiment in the far-away colony and the mother-country not only efface in practice the disciplinary division between sociology and anthropology. They demonstrate that one can conduct ‘insider ethnography’ and acknowledge the social embeddedness and split subjectivity of the inquirer without reducing ethnography to story-telling and forsaking social theory for poetry. Indeed, the ‘participant objectivation’ that Bourdieu sought to achieve and exemplify in his linked trans-Mediterranean investigations aimed to buttress the scientific underpinnings of fieldwork and points up his conception of social science as an instrument of self-appropriation.

Abstract Historical accounts of the social sciences have too often accepted local or national institu‐tions as a self‐evident framework of analysis, instead of considering them as being embed‐ded in transnational relations of various kinds. Evolving patterns of transnational mobility and exchange cut through the neat distinction between the local, the national, and the inter‐national, and thus represent an essential component in the dynamics of the social sciences, as well as a fruitful perspective for rethinking their historical development. In this pro‐grammatic outline, it is argued that a transnational history of the social sciences may be fruitfully understood on the basis of three general mechanisms, which have structured the transnational flows of people and ideas in decisive ways: (a) the functioning of international scholarly institutions, (b) the transnational mobility of scholars, and (c) the politics of trans‐national exchange of nonacademic institutions. The article subsequently examines and illustrates each of these mechanisms. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Like many countries of the Second World caught in the throes of post-Fordism before they could reap the full benefits of Fordist-style development, Brazil is tempted to import the US-style discourse and policy of ‘zero tolerance’ because, enshrouded in the aura emanating from America as the world’s sole symbolic superpower and global Mecca of crime control, they appear cutting edge, effective and efficient; and because they are the indispensable order-maintenance counterpart to policies of economic deregulation and fiscal austerity adopted by Latin American countries under the press of international financial agencies. But in Brazil, as in neighboring nations, this borrowing promises to produce a social catastrophe of historic proportions because the depth and scale of urban poverty are much greater, violent crime is more prevalent and more entrenched in the history and economy of the country, and because the Brazilian police is not a remedy against violence but a major source of violence in its own right. Moreover, Brazil does not possess a rationalized court system capable of ensuring minimal protection of constitutional rights and its prisons are plagued by fantastic overcrowding, gross lack of access to food, hygiene and health and inordinately high levels of brutality, akin to concentration camps for the disruptive fractions of the (sub)proletariat. Under such conditions, to respond to the disorders generated by the rise of absolute and relative poverty associated with incorporation in the emergent neoliberal global order with the penal apparatus is tantamount to instituting a chaotic dictatorship over the poor, and therefore antithetical to the project of nation building on a pacified and democratic basis.

A sociological approach to translation needs to take into account publishers, whose role in the international circulation of books is crucial. This paper focuses on the contribution of Bourdieu's economy of symbolic goods and field theory to the sociology of translation. The first section introduces Bourdieu's article “A conservative revolution in publishing” and more broadly his analysis of publishing. In the second section, I propose three theoretical and methodological directions for enlarging Bourdieu's model to a global sociological analysis of the circulation of books in translation: firstly a displacement from the national to the global market of translation; secondly a focus on publisher's strategy and booklist; and thirdly reception.

The carceral boom in post-Civil Rights America results not from profit-seeking but from state-crafting. Accordingly, we must slay the chimera of the “Prison Industrial Complex” and forsake its derived tale of the “Prisoner Reentry Industry.” This murky economic metaphor is doubly misleading: first, most released convicts experience not reentry but ongoing circulation between the prison and their dispossessed neighborhoods; second, the institutions entrusted with supervising them are not market operators but elements of the bureaucratic field as characterized by Pierre Bourdieu. Post-custodial supervision is a ceremonial component of “prisonfare,” which complements “workfare” through organizational isomorphism, and partakes of the neoliberal reengineering of the state. Reentry outfits are not an antidote to but an extension of punitive containment as government technique for managing problem categories and territories in the dualizing city. To capture the glaring economic irrationality and bureaucratic absurdities of the oversight of felons behind as well as beyond bars, our theoretical inspiration should come not from the radical critique of capitalism but from the neo-Durkheimian sociology of organization and the neo-Weberian theory of the state as a classifying and stratifying agency.

In the past 20 years, several theories of criminal (and antisocial) behavior have been proposed from an evolutionary perspective, some of which specifically stipulate that people vary in their genetic dispositions toward criminality. It is these theories, herein called gene‐based evolutionary theories, that are the focus of this article. Two categories of gene‐based evolutionary theories are described. One category is crime specific, pertaining to the offenses of rape, spousal assault/murder, and child abuse neglect. The second category consists of two general theories of criminal and antisocial behavior: the cheater (or cad vs. dad) theory, and the r/K theory. In addition to assuming that genes contribute to variation in criminal (and antisocial) behavior, all five of these theories assume that natural selection has acted on human populations to open up reproductive niches for individuals and groups who victimize others. While the theories are still far too new to have been fully tested, we derive some of the most obvious hypotheses from each theory and explore the relevant empirical evidence. We show that while gene‐based evolutionary theories open make predictions similar to strictly environmental theories, they also lead to unique hypotheses, several of which have at least some support.

This chapter contains section titled: Territorial Stigmatization: Roots, Experience and Effects Delinquency, Street Violence and the Shrinking of Public Space Institutional Isolation Versus Organizational Desertification Social Vision and Division in Ghetto and Banlieue Conclusion

One of the most original contributions to the anthropology of immigration of the past century, the work of the late Adelmalek Sayad demonstrates the potency of three principles for the study of peregrination. The first insists that, before becoming an immigrant, the migrant is first an e-migrant and that the sociology of migration must therefore start, not from the receiving society, but from the structure and contradictions of the sending communities. The second takes seriously the fact that migration is the product of a historical relation of inter-national domination, at once material and symbolic, a repressed relation of state to state which every migrant unwittingly recapitulates in her personal strategies and experiences. The third recognizes that, like other processes of group (un)making, migration requires collective dissimulation and social duplicity. A corollary of these principles is that the sociology of migration must be reflexive and include a social history of the lay and scholarly discourses that swirl about it in the societies involved. Sayad elaborated these propositions because he was more than a scholar of migration: he was the phenomenon itself. The ethnographic sensibility and rigor that animate his work were rooted in his active solidarity with Kabyle migrants; they enabled him to dismantle prefabricated representations of immigration and to use the migrant, as social hybrid devoid of legitimate place, in the manner of a flesh-and-blood analyser of the collective unconscious and to pose anew the question of the relationship between citizen, state, and nation.

On the basis of an empirical analysis of the emergence, spread and transformation of No Holds Barred fighting contests during the 1990s, we argue that Norbert Elias's model of sportization represents a fruitful but not sufficiently differentiated framework for understanding the recent development of combat sports and fighting contests. Although the martial arts in the 20th century provide striking examples of processes of sportization and para-sportization, the rise of No Holds Barred events in the 1990s represented an opposing trend, a process of de-sportization . The analysis of No Holds Barred contests demonstrates that both sportization and de-sportization trends depend primarily on the interests of the organizers, and in particular on the degree to which they rely on the perspectives of practitioners, spectators, or viewers. The decisive factor for the predominance of the latter perspective was the formation of a new and poorly regulated market for visual material, which emerged with pay-per-view television. This allowed media entrepreneurs to commercialize non-sanctioned events, which depend primarily on the demands and fantasies of viewers who are less interested in the specifics of particular sports or games than in the antinomian excitement produced by the transgression of the rules and conventions of ordinary life. The case of No Holds Barred fighting thus suggests that new markets for visual material are likely to become an important factor in the development of spectator sports and sport-like forms of entertainment. It also suggests that regulatory regimes are an essential feature for the actual outcome of the changes that these new markets may bring about. Public pressure eventually led to the disappearance of No Holds Barred events from the major US cable television networks and from the full contact fighting scene in most Western European countries. In response, various initiatives worked towards a re-sportization of the matches, a process that has led to the transformation of No Holds Barred tournaments into Mixed Martial Arts matches.

▪ Abstract This review explores the creation and transformation of the field of international human rights in the period after World War II. The narrative proceeds through an examination, based on documentary evidence and interviews, of three generations of human rights nongovernmental organizations: the International Commission of Jurists, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Each was created in part to overcome the limitations of the previous generation, and the process, linked to developments in the U.S. field of state power and U.S. activities abroad—especially in Latin America—gradually produced a field with substantial legal autonomy. At the same time, however, the structure of the field moved increasingly close to U.S. power and the issues and strategies that would gain credibility in the United States. The autonomy is therefore structurally close to U.S. power.

Résumé Cet article traite des formes et des modalités d’intervention politique des intellectuels, à travers le cas français. Celles-ci tendent à se différencier selon trois facteurs qui structurent le champ intellectuel : le capital symbolique ; l’autonomie à l’égard de la demande politique ; le degré de spécialisation. De la combinaison de ces trois facteurs se dégagent huit modèles d’intervention construits de façon idéaltypique, et qui sont analysés dans une perspective socio-historique : l’intellectuel critique universaliste, l’intellectuel critique spécialisé (ou « intellectuel spécifique » selon Foucault), le gardien de l’ordre moralisateur, le spécialiste consulté par les dirigeants (« l’expert »), le groupement intellectuel contestataire universaliste (souvent représenté par « l’avant-garde », mais aussi par des groupements pour la défense d’une cause universelle), le groupement contestataires spécialisé (baptisé par Bourdieu « l’intellectuel collectif »), l’intellectuel d’institution généraliste, l’intellectuel d’institution spécialisé.

BACKGROUND: Prostate cancer is for many men a chronic disease with a long life expectancy after treatment. The impact of prostate cancer therapy on men has been well defined, however, explanation of the consequences of cancer treatment has not been modelled against the wider variables of long-term health-care provision. The aim of this study was to explore the parameters of unmet supportive care needs in men with prostate cancer in relation to the experience of nursing care. METHODS: A survey was conducted among a volunteer sample of 1001 men with prostate cancer living in seven European countries. RESULTS: At the time of the survey, 81% of the men had some unmet supportive care needs including psychological, sexual and health system and information needs. Logistic regression indicated that lack of post-treatment nursing care significantly predicted unmet need. Critically, men's contact with nurses and/or receipt of advice and support from nurses, for several different aspects of nursing care significantly had an impact on men's outcomes. CONCLUSION: Unmet need is related not only to disease and treatment factors but is also associated with the supportive care men received. Imperative to improving men's treatment outcomes is to also consider the access to nursing and the components of supportive care provided, especially after therapy.

Observatoire National des Asthmes Professionnels (ONAP) was created in 1996 by two French professional societies to estimate the incidence of occupational asthma and to promote preventive measures against it. Occupational and chest physicians were asked to report newly diagnosed cases of work-related asthma and reactive airway dysfunction syndrome (RADS), the information collected included age, sex, occupation, suspected causal agents and diagnostic methods. In 1997, 82.3% of 559 cases reported (64% males, mean age 36 +/- 13 yrs) involved occupational asthma, 4.7% RADS and 12.7% atypical asthma syndromes. Incidence rates (expressed as number of cases per million workers) showed a regional variation that ranged from 4 to 73 (national mean: 25.7). The most frequently suspected agents were flour (23.3%), followed by isocyanates (16.6%), latex (7.5%), aldehydes (5.5%), and persulphates (4.1%). Occupations at risk were bakers (23.9%), healthcare workers (12%), painters (9.1%), hairdressers (5.2%), wood industry workers (4.8%) and cleaners (3.5%). These results are compared to those of other systems set up in Europe and North America. Because of the considerable bias inherent in a surveillance system based on voluntary, reporting, the number of occupational asthma cases reported is probably lower than the real incidence. Nevertheless, the French National Observatory for Occupational Asthma encourages physician awareness of occupational asthma and provides an estimate of its incidence and aetiologies in France.