Suchergebnisse

The Centre d'études de l'emploi (CEE) is a Paris-based public research institute. This article will attempt to draw up a social history of quantification viewed through the lens of the Center's story. Positioned on the cusp of science and State, its own history relates the tension, hesitations, and upheavals that have marked relations between labor and employment administration and social science organisms over the last 45 years. More specifically, it provides insight into the role played by statistics in the effort to combine action and knowledge – and by this we understand both a field of actors with its rules, practices and a myriad of instruments, methods and results.

The result of a process begun in the nineteenth century, the French system of socio-professional classification (code des catégories socio-professionnelles) was drawn up between 1951 and 1954 and has only been slightly modified since. With no strong theoretical framework and conceived according to a realist approach, it gave substance to social classes in the description of postwar society. During a period of "reworking" (1978-1981), it became an exciting topic of sociological exploration, furnishing a representation of Pierre Bourdieu's two-dimensional social space and serving as a laboratory for the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. In a subsequent period of "updating" (1995-2001), administrative caution regarding changes contrasted with the evolution of categories used in labor law and the goal of analytical purity underpinned by econometrics. The history of this classification details the peculiar position of a statistical tool for representing the social world, ostensibly static amidst constant changes to the institution that managed it, the actors who used it, the social categories—everyday or legal—to which it referred, and, finally, the sociological theories that gave it a conceptual grounding.

RésuméFruit d'un processus engagé au XIXe siècle, le code des catégories socio-professionnelles est élaboré en France entre 1951 et 1954 et n'a que peu été modifié depuis. Alors sans habillage théorique fort et d'une tonalité réaliste, il donne corps aux classes sociales dans la description de la société d'après-guerre. Lieu d'effervescence sociologique à l'occasion de sa « refonte » (1978-1981), il figure l'espace social à deux dimensions de la sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu et sert de laboratoire à la sociologie pragmatique de Luc Boltanski et Laurent Thévenot. Lors de sa « rénovation » (1995-2001), la prudence administrative des changements opérés contraste avec l'évolution du droit conventionnel et une ambition de pureté analytique soutenue par l'économétrie. L'histoire de la nomenclature rend compte de la situation d'un outil de représentation du monde censé demeurer inchangé quand rien ne l'est, ni l'institution qui en assure la gestion, ni les catégories ordinaires ou juridiques auxquelles il renvoie, ni les théories et usages sociologiques qui lui sont liés.