BORRAZ Olivier

This article looks back at the cycle of publications born of the fiftieth anniversary of the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO), which the dossier "naissance de la sociologie administrative" (birth of administrative sociology) brings to a close. Since the colloquium organized for the 50th anniversary of the laboratory in 2014, several dossiers have been published: in Entreprises et histoire (n°86, 2016), in the Revue française de science politique (n°70-1, 2020) and now in this issue of Mouvement social. The aim of the dossier is to present and stimulate new critical reflections on the transformations in the sociology of administration since the founding work of Michel Crozier and his teams. By situating the contributions in the dossier in the recent revival of the history of the social sciences, this article is also a plea for reforms that are a little less oblivious to the history and sociology of the State, the administration and the civil service.

How can regulatory agencies with a technical or scientific mission forge and defend their reputation, when the definition of expertise is subject to countervailing influences and perceptions among a wide array of audiences? In this paper, we tackle this broad question, focusing on a particular episode of the European controversy over the regulatory control of exposure to bisphenol A, during which the European Food Safety Authority altered the method by which it produced an assessment of the risk of BPA, responding to the regulatory controversy surrounding this substance. Building on the literature on organizational reputation and science and technology studies, we shed light on the work that regulatory agencies undertake to gain credibility in particular configurations of audiences. This perspective on the management of audiences and knowledge standards is central for the explanation of the decisions, policies, and strategies of science‐based agencies, and the way in which a technical reputation takes form in controversy‐prone areas of regulation.

Crisis management exercises are nowadays a widespread method of preparation for the occurrence of uncertain events that could potentially destabilize administrations and companies. However, the literature on crisis management exercises has given little attention to the writing of the scenarios that make up the framework. By taking the case of crisis exercise scenarios in the civil nuclear sector in France, this article intends to show that these scenarios, far from placing the participants in a totally new and uncertain universe, tend on the contrary to bring out an ordered vision of the crisis. This is due to the different kinds of constraints and framings that are embodied in the writing of the scenarios, which are the result of tacit agreements and power relations between the organizations of the civil nuclear sector (operators, regulatory authorities, expert organizations, etc.) and civil security.

For a sociology of the workings of public action-Government by performance between bureaucratization, the market, and politics-A comparative sociology of administrative labor markets-French local governments between autonomy and state regulation-Understanding centralization from the periphery Studying the administrative workings of public action to better understand the state: this is the purpose of the thematic dossier in this issue, which reports on a conference organized by the Center for the Sociology of Organizations (CSO) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Far from a simple commemorative aim, its contributions offer a transversal look at the contemporary metamorphoses of the state. A third edition of the bibliographic chronicle on political ethnography enriches this issue.

Taking up the ambition of the program launched in 1964 by the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO) to study the French administration empirically, this issue aims to demonstrate the interest today in studying the State through its administration, in addition to an entry through the sociology of public action. By reviewing the ebb and flow of this approach in France since the mid-1960s, and by pointing out the contributions and limitations of the work carried out within the framework of the "Administration in the Face of Change" program, this introductory article argues for a sociology of the workings of public action. It is through a transversal and cross-sectoral approach, at both the central and territorial levels, that it is possible to grasp the issues of permanence and change, but also to answer the question: what makes the State hold together?

Taking up the ambition of the program launched in 1964 by the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO) to study the French administration empirically, this issue aims to demonstrate the interest of studying the State through its administration, in addition to the sociology of public action. By reviewing the ebb and flow of this approach in France since the mid-1960s, and by pointing out the contributions and limitations of the work carried out within the framework of the "Administration in the Face of Change" program, this introductory article argues for a sociology of the workings of public action. It is through a transversal and cross-sectoral approach, at both the central and territorial levels, that it is possible to grasp the issues of permanence and change, but also to answer the question: what makes the State stand? Revisiting the aims of the program launched in 1964 by the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO) to empirically study the French administration, this issue illustrates the importance of studying the State via its administration, in conjunction with a perspective grounded in the sociology of public policy.

This article reviews the use of scientific expertise in crisis situations, using the example of the scientific council created in March 2020.

This dossier concludes a cycle of publications that, since 2014, have engaged in a critical discussion of the contributions and blind spots of research conducted within a research laboratory: the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO). It thus follows on from an issue of the Revue française de science politique ("Saisir l'État par son administration", 70-1, 2020) that addresses the question of the relationship between the founding work of the CSO and the development of administrative sociology. The perspective is more sociological than historical, with contributions focused on a contemporary and critical re-reading of some of the concepts developed in the program "l'administration face au problème du changement" (administration facing the problem of change) launched by Michel Crozier and his teams in 1964 (bureaucratic phenomenon, peripheral power, and the corporatist system, in particular). The articles gathered here under the heading "birth of administrative sociology" aim to offer a historical perspective to critical reflections, not only on the work of the CSO but, more generally, on the founding period of a certain form of administrative sociology practiced in the 1950s to 1970s.

This issue's thematic dossier proposes to study the administrative workings of public action in order to better understand the State. It continues the reflections begun during a colloquium organized on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO). Far from a simple commemorative aim, its contributions offer a transversal look at the contemporary metamorphoses of the State. Contributions to the dossier: "Seizing the State through its administration. For a sociology of the workings of public action" (Olivier Borraz and Émilien Ruiz). "The new bureaucratic phenomenon. Le gouvernement par la performance entre bureaucratisation, marché et politique" (Philippe Bezes) . "La haute fonction publique entre organisations, professions et patrons. A comparative sociology of administrative labor markets" (Natacha Gally) . "Between loosening and tightening the state lock. French local authorities between autonomy and state regulation" (Patrick Le Lidec) . "Half a century after Pierre Grémion. Re-understanding centralization from the periphery" (Renaud Epstein).

Disasters overwhelm plans and collapse governmental organizations, which sometimes manage to rebuild themselves into something new. Using the cases of Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in northeast Japan, this thesis examines how local and meso-governmental structures reorganize, and what this tells us about the role of the state in disaster response. Crisis management centers (CMCs) may lose control of part of the response entirely, but in most cases they reorganize themselves to become relevant. In doing so, they express and, to some extent, create the idealized image that the state has of itself in response to a crisis. Operational teams gradually build more elaborate structures. As their processes become more routine, these teams often find themselves faced with decisions for which they have no formal basis, and their choices reflect an ad hoc and personal conception of the role of the state. Although the evaluations project professionalism and stability, an examination of the processes shows that in these cases they were divergent and improvised. What we see at all these levels is a struggle to rebuild normal life. Disasters reaffirm government - demonstrating why stability is to be valued - and threaten it existentially. As a result, disaster response is not treated as a public policy area.

It is now a fact that the vote for populist parties or candidates takes place primarily on the margins or outside large urban areas. This chapter intends to show that, although powerful economic processes lead to an increased polarization between cities and peripheral areas in developed countries, this does not automatically lead to voting for populist parties. It is indeed through social networks and forms of sociability that the experience of relegation gradually comes to feed a strong resentment against cities and their inhabitants. In other words, the factors at work in the success of populist parties are deeply rooted in territorialized social structures, which cannot be reduced to simple dimensions of class or ethnicity. (first paragraph).

This thesis focuses on the development of a public health policy on nutrition in France. By means of interviews, observations and archival work, this investigation approaches 1) the elaboration and the uses of prevention instruments as close as possible to the actors who conceive and implement them . 2) the controversies related to the regulation of food marketing . 3) the introduction of behavioral sciences (social marketing, nudge and social neuroscience) in nutrition. At the crossroads of the sociology of public action, the sociology of organizations and the sociology of expertise, this thesis shows that the implementation of a public health prevention program, the National Nutrition and Health Program (PNNS), does not lead to the stabilization of a definition, even if it is contested, of the nutrition problem. The elaboration of prevention instruments reveals several tensions, between the will to promote good nutrition without challenging the market and the will to individualize messages without stigmatizing individual behaviors. The end of the 2000s was marked by the publicity of knowledge presented as effective for "changing nutritional behaviors": social marketing, nudge and neuroscience. However, despite political announcements and enthusiastic expert opinions, this knowledge was not finally translated into public action. Behavioral knowledge is of interest not so much for its content as for the various strategic uses to which it is put. Heterogeneous actors (members of health agencies, private actors, scientists) use it mainly to challenge other forms of knowledge and actors and to legitimize themselves, rather than to transform public action.

This article tests the extent to which the organization and stringency of occupational health and safety regulation complements the dominant mode of coordination in the political economy. While the UK explicitly sanctions risk-cost-benefit trade-offs, other European countries mandate ambitious safety goals. That contrast appears to reflect cleavages identified in the Varieties of Capitalism literature, which suggests worker protection regimes are stronger in coordinated market economies than in liberal market economies. Our analysis of Germany, France, UK and the Netherlands, shows that the varied organization of their regulatory regimes is explained through a three-way complementarity with their welfare systems and modes of coordination. However, despite varied headline goals, we find no systematic differences in the stringency of those countries’ regulatory protections insofar as they all make trade-offs on safety. Instead, the explicitness, rationalizations and logics of trade-offs vary according to each country’s legal system, state tradition and coupling between regulation and welfare system.

Olivier Borraz, Director of Research at the CNRS Centre de sociologie des organisations, has devoted his research to the governance of risks, initially focusing on environmental and health issues, but since then his work has broadened to include public policies for regulating risks. Here he presents an analysis of the risks affecting metropolises and calls for better consideration of the risks generated by public policies themselves.

Crises, emergencies, catastrophes, and disasters have become salient on the agenda of governments across Europe and in the United States over the last few decades. Besides preparing for extreme events such as pandemics, terrorist attacks, and major disasters, public authorities also deal on a recurrent basis with health scandals, floods, urban riots, industrial accidents, technological breakdowns, massive opposition to megaprojects, and the prolonged effects of the financial meltdown. Governing in this instance thus implies being ready to manage a range of events that hold the capacity to destabilize the social, economic, and political fabric. (beginning).

How to regulate chemical substances in spite of old, incomplete, but above all unevenly shared data? Since the adoption of the Toxic Substances Control Act in the United States in 1976, information asymmetries and the multiplication of uses of industrial chemicals seemed to have made their control impossible. To this long unsolvable problem, the European regulation REACH, adopted in 2006, proposes an original answer: the authorization procedure. This thesis examines the way in which the authorization procedure has changed the way in which "prohibition" is carried out, despite the asymmetries of information. This procedure now gives public authorities the possibility of banning "substances" on the basis of their classification, while certain "uses" of these molecules can then be authorized on the basis of individual requests made by companies. In order to continue to use them, these companies then put into circulation toxicological and exposure data and, above all, socio-economic evaluations that had never been produced before. While authorization inherits part of the previous regulatory system, in which regulatory activities involved the production of lists of chemical substances, it above all reconfigures the relationship between public authorities and companies, modifies the objects over which they have control and transforms the ways in which the regulatory knowledge that supports decision making is developed.

No summary available.

Risk regulation covers all the institutions, rules and standards that contribute to the supervision of activities that present a potential or proven danger to the health or well-being of populations. Although it is not new in terms of public action, the reforms of which it has been the subject in recent decades have sought to mark a break with situations in which the roles and functions between control authorities, expert bodies and producers were not always clear and in which compromises, particularly in the name of economic interests, tended to prevail over public health issues.

The sociology of organizations was built around a founding opposition between formal or theoretical knowledge on the one hand and practical or informal knowledge on the other. This opposition underlined the gap between the overhanging vision of the leaders, equipped with scientific or legal knowledge, and the empirical knowledge of the executors. The transformations of organizations since the 1970s have led to the questioning of this founding opposition. Sociologists have studied how actors develop knowledge in practice that can then acquire formal properties. In doing so, the sociology of organizations has emphasized that the use of more formalized knowledge for control or coordination purposes can lead to bureaucratic processes.

Synthetic biology is an emerging biotechnology that aims to produce organisms that do not exist in nature for industrial purposes. Long before its applications were developed, this project aroused keen interest, but also early criticism. This technoscience attracted the attention of public authorities in France and in the United States very early on, seeking to govern it "upstream" of its applications - and to respond to the early protests that opposed it. This temporality of government is the object of study of the thesis, an investigation conducted with the tools of the sociology of science and risk. We follow the social construction of the risks and problems of synthetic biology, the devices put in place and the numerous actors they mobilize: bio-engineers, social scientists, FBI agents, amateur biologists, protesters. In France, the first problem of synthetic biology is its capacity to be contested, as genetically modified organisms were before. Its political and scientific promoters seek to develop it and to satisfy civil society through participatory mechanisms, but they have no control over this development. In the United States, the critics are marginalized, and it is especially feared that synthetic biology could be used by terrorists, which the authorities seek to prevent while preserving technoscience and its merchandise from any regulation. Thus, beyond the variety of these mechanisms, the thesis gives an account of two forms of "upstream" government, which have in common that they never question synthetic biology, but rather govern the problems that could hinder it: a science-society government in France, a security-market government in the United States.

The 3rd SFSE congress was marked by a remarkable presence of social sciences in its organization and proceedings: two sociologists and an economist in the scientific committee of the colloquium (including its president), an invited lecture, eight communications, and the presence of a manager, a historian and a jurist at the final round table. This presence reflects the SFSE's concern to open up to the social sciences, a concern that itself reflects the place they have taken in research on environmental health risks, but also in the field of expertise (with the increasing participation of sociologists, political scientists, economists and lawyers in the work of the Anses, in particular). This recognition has not, however, removed all the ambiguities surrounding the contribution of the social sciences. Although it seems to be accepted that they cannot be reduced to the sole domain of risk perception studies, in which they have long been confined, the nature and scope of their results nevertheless continue to raise questions and even confusion. [first three paragraphs].

A quarter of a century after the publication of The Risk Society in Germany (Beck, 2001), social science research on risk in Europe presents a paradox. Judging by the number of journals, books, professional associations and conferences devoted to it, it is undoubtedly a dynamic sector. Moreover, the social sciences now have their place in risk governance mechanisms, alongside the disciplines more traditionally associated with the management of collective risks. However, this recognition is accompanied by a low level of criticism in the way risk objects, activities or situations are viewed. More significantly, since Beck's work, which proposed a genuine sociological theory, few authors have attempted such a conceptual effort. [first paragraph].

The purpose of this thesis is to show how a government of disasters is elaborated in South Africa through the development of instruments, knowledge and a profession that equip and operationalize the state, build a sector of intervention, and thereby orient the meaning of disasters. The thesis traces the emergence of a concern for disasters with civil defense, which constitutes disasters as an object of intervention for the state through the development of emergency planning techniques and the formation of a profession in the 1980s, in connection with the securitization of the state at the time of the repression of the anti-apartheid struggle. The reconfigurations of politics at the time of democratization in 1994 took place in conjunction with global transformations that, at the same time, promoted models of "disaster risk management. To explain the consequent transformation of the state, the thesis shows the importance of the circulation of experts, knowledge and instruments, but also their localization, through a process of "academization" that anchors disaster sciences in the university. The latter contribute to redefining disasters as risks affecting vulnerable populations, and through their knowledge, reorient state action. These new tools, knowledge, and policies contribute to the establishment of a protective state for "vulnerable" populations, but whose scope remains limited by the political contradictions of the post-apartheid state, the bureaucratic constraints of local governments, and the reconfigurations of the profession.

The thesis focuses on the French Food Safety Agency, a public institution created in 1998 following the mad cow crisis. It seeks to understand where this agency comes from, why and how it was created, how it is organized and how it functions, as well as the impact of its action on the regulation of food risks, between 1998 and 2005. The central sociological question is that of the institutionalization of this new health agency, in the form of a border organization, located at the interface of science and public action, accountable to both the scientific and political communities and having to manage the socially constructed border between these two worlds. Using the approach of the sociology of organized action, we show how Afssa has become institutionalized both as a scientific organization, through a process of bureaucratization of expertise, and as a political actor fully engaged in the defense of the values and interests of health security. The thesis analyzes the mechanisms, effects and contradictions of this institutionalization process in order to understand the nature and extent of the change that Afssa has brought about in the regulation of food risks.

The law of 31/12/1982, known as the "P.M.L. law," established elected mayors and councils in the arrondissements of Paris, Marseille, and Lyon, giving them an essentially consultative role and little management capacity. The purpose of this research is to study the implementation of the reform in the three cities and the emergence of a level of political representation and public management at the infra-communal level. While the three mayors initially tried to minimize the impact of the reform on municipal government, this thesis highlights a process of institutionalization of the borough, fueled by a set of dynamics: the quest for legitimacy and capacity for action by the elected officials investing in the newly instituted level; the evolution of the modalities of public action in favor of greater recognition of the role of the sub-municipal level; and the emancipation of the borough, which is tending to become a political space in its own right.

The government of a city is the product of an interaction between four dimensions: politics, administration, urban society and other public authorities. Applied to two municipalities in the canton of Vaud, Lausanne and Yverdon-les-Bains, and two French municipalities, Besancon and Pontarlier, this definition highlights two distinct phenomena. On the one hand, the interactions between these four dimensions are constantly evolving as a result of the changes affecting each of them, and in so doing the form and content of city government is being transformed. The first part of the thesis focuses on the dynamics of these transformations. On the other hand, local elected officials play an essential role in the system of government that combines the four dimensions: the members of the collegiate executive in Switzerland, the deputy mayors in France, are at the hinge of these different dimensions and ensure their regulation. The difference between the two countries lies in the existence of a central and collegial place of authority in Switzerland, the municipality, as opposed to a strong differentiation of the deputies in France behind a facade mayoral unit, as well as in the existence of procedures for citizen participation in the affairs of the city in Switzerland, procedures that do not exist in France. The second part of the thesis focuses on the place of elected officials in the relationships that are established between the four dimensions of city government, on the comparison of the modes of government that are set up around the municipality in Switzerland and the mayor in France, and on the existence or not of a local public space.