Suchergebnisse

An effort to determine what research about institutional order owes to its use of the notions & analytical methods imposed in the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu reveals that his work is essential because it serves as an insistent warning against the temptation to put the theories that result from an exclusive choice to "explain" practices through structural determinism, or from the utilitarian research of profiles, or from the effects of creative interactions between subjects considered to have an almost unlimited freedom, into hypostasis. Bourdieu's work helps demonstrate that an institution is not a thing in itself, but the product of social practices. An effort must be made to understand the social logic that brings the institution into existence & to grasp the social practices that permeate the institution. 25 References. D. Weibel

A debate begun in a previous issue of the Swiss Political Science Review is continued in the current edition through two supplementary contributions. The idea behind the debate is to establish a forum through which various authors can clarify certain aspects of Pierre Bourdieu's work & raise questions about what he has brought to contemporary political analysis. The current article by Bernard Lacroix (2002) is dedicated to an analysis of the reception Bourdieu's work met in hexagonal political science, & is less an examination of his theoretical contribution than an empirical analysis of the social history of a scientific discipline. Jacques Lagroye's (2002) contribution looks at the classic object of political science, the institution, & shows how Bourdieu's work sidesteps the objectivist error that tends to reify the institution, showing instead that the institution is the product of social practices. D. Weibel

Bourdieu restores the philosophical dimension of all sociological constructions by showing the hard core of the philosophical anthropology that underlies his theoretical & empirical works. He underlines the specificity of practical reason & cogency through body. He explains what in his eyes constitute the ultimate reason of action: human beings are not machines to be maximized, nor automatons magically preprogrammed to realize the will of the structure, but the social & mortal body, although suffering & inhabited by an inextinguishable thirst of recognizance that only society can quench. It is evident that the principal category of his conceptual system is not reproduction but the fight, particularly the symbolic fight by social agents to create a difference & therefore accede to existence. 27 References. E. Sanchez

Amartya Kumar Sen proposes a democratic solution to the problem of social choice. This article examines what Sen has said about democracy as a political regime. We begin with Sen's definition of democracy & what he calls its intrinsic importance, constructive role & instrumental importance. Judging from certain case studies to which Sen refers in his work, however, we find that his conception of democracy is far from being that of a precisely defined political system & that its putative benefits are sometimes belied by empirical realities. Adapted from the source document.

This article provides a general overview of the anthropological resources of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, & particularly, how it applies to French political science. Three principal anthropological traits can be identified in Bourdieu's sociology: anthropology of interests, anthropology of the fight against symbolic death, & anthropology of relative liberty through knowledge. Furthermore, this article addresses three significant texts by Daniel Gaxie (1977), Michel Offerle (1987), & Bernard Lacroix (1992). 23 References. E. Sanchez

Admin'ive structures are of capital importance in every aspect of French life. Only through a sociol'al approach can we understand the factors which condition their present-day org & its evolution. The data collected during a psycho-sociol'al study of an important Parisian ministry allows us to study the principal org'al problems: effectives, adaptation of personnel to functions, org of lower ranks, & the integration of the entire personnel corps within the service. These problems cannot be resolved because of the poor distribution of power & the complete separation between those who conceive the idea & those who execute it. We can draw a certain number of general precepts from this study, regarding the admin'ive system & the 'cultural' type of the public servant, & from these, the general directions in which sociol'al res might produce solutions to the problems of public administration. IPSA.

The 2005 debate around the French colonial past can be turned into an object of sociological enquiry, provided one is keeping at bay the hypothesis of the "pied-noir conspiracy" to focus on the daily workings of parliamentarian politics. Taking the November 2005 debates as a documentary starting point, one can analyse the way in which the "colonial debate" became entangled with the larger ideological battle around the issue of the "republican integration" of the "immigration youths," under the influence of some new militant groups like Les Indigenes de la Republique. Adapted from the source document.

In the face of an over-hyped reform of the French prison system, Michel Foucault elaborated in Discipline & Punish a conception of the reform as a strategy to legitimize the penitentiary as such. To what extent is Foucault's view of the reform as a government tool heuristic in its perception of the 18 January 1994 law to reorganize prison management? It would seem that although focusing on the institution of prisons as such enables Foucault to adopt a more critical view, it runs the risk of relegating professional struggles to a matter of secondary importance -- & producing a disembodied sociology. So if we wish to study the 1994 reform, we need to give it back its historicity and, to that end, shift the sociological focus from the effects of the reform to the conditions that made it possible in the first place. Adapted from the source document.

A review essay on a book by Jacques Semelin, Purifier et detruire. Usages politiques des massacres et genocides ([Purify and Destroy. Political Uses of Massacres and Genocide] Paris: Le Seuil, 2005).

The communication shows that there are three broad ways social conflict can shape the future ; the clash of civilizations, according to the theory of Huntington, the Empire according to Negri and Hardt or a globalization of class struggle on the mode class struggle was "nationalized" in the 19th and 20th centuries. ; Peer reviewed