After having mainly devoted its last two issues to the culture professions, the journal Sociétés contemporaines offers in its latest issue of 2007 a file entitled “ The employers’ worlds »Based on communications of a study day organized in 2006. Little studied in France, the employers’ universe is available here through French case studies.
Through the monograph of a retail family sales in retail and semi-Gros, Françoise de Barros and Claire Zalc underline the influence of the forms of kinship on the functioning of the company. In return, these positions are in the shop that change relationships within the family. Marie-France Garcia-Parpet tries to grasp the developments of the French wine world, and more particularly the passage and its effects of a commercial logic (AOC) to a brand logic in the international space. By relying on a survey carried out in Languedoc-Roussillon, the author highlights the new forms of recognition linked to the transformation of quality criteria.
Based on around forty biographical interviews carried out with business leaders of two employment pools, the contribution of Pierre-Paul Zalio is interested in the logic of engagement in the entrepreneurial activity and the forms of resources mobilized. This emerges a typology of careers which makes it possible to understand, on the one hand, the way in which entrepreneurs have used their resources, and, on the other hand, the consequences of their activities on the territories. By opposing the idea that the modernization of the French economy only started after the Second World War, François Denord and Odile Henry analyze the vast movement of “ rationalization of the economy »Built from the interwar period. This process could not develop without a employers who have rationalized and organized collectively in the context of the introduction of the methods of scientific organization of work within firms. The article by François-Xavier Dudouet and Éric Grémont returns to relations between big employers and the State between 1981 and 2007. The privatization movement of public enterprises contributed to moving the state elites to the business world, which indicates that the transformations of economic power are influenced by state action. The file is closed by the very useful article by Hervé Joly which realizes a critical review of the various sociological and socio-historical surveys on the recruitment of French employers since the 1960s, emphasizing the methodological difficulties that these works have been confronted.
Constituting a major contribution to the sociology of economic facts, this number of contemporary companies is also an essential reading for any subsequent investigation insofar as all of the articles provides important methodological and bibliographic benchmarks on the employers’ worlds.
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