Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier

Introduction. Les professionnels du marché : vers une sociologie du travail marchand

Le demi-siecle ecoule aura ete marque par un certain recul de la centralite du travail. Ce mouvement, qui a debute avec le glissement du travail a l’emploi, semble aujourd’hui se prolonger avec la migration des enjeux sociaux du monde productif vers l’univers de la consommation : apres plusieurs decennies d’inquietude sur le travail puis sur le chomage, l’attention se porte aujourd’hui sur des problemes directement lies a la maitrise du marche, tels la crise de la vache folle, la dissemination des OGM (organismes genetiquement modifies) ou la mondialisation des echanges. [premieres lignes]

A Market Mediation Strategy: How Social Movements Seek to Change Firms’ Practices by Promoting New Principles of Product Valuation

Social movement theory has recently paid a lot of attention to the diversity of strategies used by social movements to pressurize companies, and has spawned an abundant literature on the combined perspective of social movement studies and market organization studies. This paper adopts a rather different perspective, drawing on market theories from the economic sociology of evaluation to assess a specific strategy developed by a number of groups within the environmental social movement, which relies on the market’s capacity to mediate their claims. The literature has widely considered why some environmental social movement organizations (SMOs) choose to address consumers, even though it is not in their tradition to do so and even though their objective is not directly related to consumption issues. I seek to contribute to this debate by analysing the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’, by highlighting a specific social movement strategy which is mediated by market mechanisms. The paper provides an in-depth analysis of a strategy consisting of attempts to change the most prevalent valuation criteria within the market by introducing principles of worth that rely on products’ environmental performance. This involves activist organizations suggesting new product valuation criteria, and then seeking to convince firms that consumers’ preferences are changing. Their assumption is that firms will see new business opportunities, which will prompt them to adopt more eco-friendly practices. This market mediation strategy is designed to encourage firms to shift towards more eco-friendly supply practices, by creating business opportunities for them. It shows how SMOs, in order to directly shape consumers’ preferences, urge them to introduce eco-friendly principles of worth into their valuation of products by providing them with market devices to help in their purchasing choices. By applying these strategies, SMOs seek to shape the market and create business opportunities for firms. Their intention is to make companies see the value of changing some of their practices by introducing new eco-friendly features in their products, because consumers have been convinced by SMOs of the value of such features. SMOs must then pursue two important objectives: one is to shape consumers’ preferences for that kind of valuation category on the market by convincing them of their responsibilities and their role as agents of change; and the other is to convince companies that a real shift in consumers’ preferences is taking place in the market, so that they see it as an interesting opportunity to benefit from the SMOs’ shaping of the market.

Le prestataire, le client et le consommateur. Sociologie d'une relation marchande

Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier : Der Dienstleister, der Kunde und der Verbraucher. Soziologie einer Handelsverbindung. ; ; Dieser Aufsatz mochte den Aufbau einer besonderen Handelsbeziehung nachvollziehen, zwischen verschiedenen Aktoren einer Dienstleistung : dem Dienstleister, dem Kunden und dem Verbraucher. Gestutzt auf eine empirische Arbeit innerhalb eines Unternehmens fur Betriebsrestaurants, zeichnet diese Untersuchung die Mittel auf, die der Anbieter aufbringt um dem Verbraucher eine besondere Rolle zuzuschreiben im Spiel der Beziehungen, das die Grundbedingung ist fur das Zusammenfinden von Angebot und Nachfrage. Der Dienstleister gibt dem Verbraucher Aktions- und Ausdrucksmittel und wird damit zum Fursprecher gegenuber dem Kunden, womit er das Darstellungsspiel zwischen den Aktoren der Nachfrage umkehrt. Der Fall der Schulrestaurants, bei denen sich das politische Element starker ausdruckt, liefert hier eine zusatzliche Beleuchtung, da er besonders geeignet ist, die Sondermassnahmen deutlich zu machen, die der Dienstleister einsatzt, um den verschiedenen Aktoren eine Rolle und Aktionsmodalitaten zuzuschreiben, den Burgermeistern, den Kindern und den Schulereltern. Somit kann gesagt werden, dass die Ausdrucksformen der Handelsbeziehungen von den Massnahmen abhangen, die die Aktoren einsetzen um ein Produkt oder eine Dienstleistung zu definieren und in den Verkehr zu bringen.

Protester contre le marché : du geste individuel à l'action collective. Le cas du mouvement anti-publicitaire

La contestation sociale contre les formes de domination associees au marche prend de multiples formes aujourd’hui dans le monde : le boycott, les achats responsables, les gestes ecologistes, le detournement publicitaire, les petitions envoyes aux elus. L’article analyse le cas de la protestation anti-publicitaire en France. Celle-ci propose un repertoire d’actions tres heterogene, allant du geste individuel et quotidien a l’action de groupe, tout en construisant des formats d’action standardises. Elle peut ainsi recruter des militants dans des reseaux larges de la contestation sociale, attires par son repertoire d’action specifique. L’action anti-publicitaire fournit une grille de lecture de la contestation sociale contre le marche qui s’articule a la fois sur des collectifs associatifs fournissant des cadres collectifs, mais egalement sur des reseaux militants tres labiles en quete d’actions plus concretes.

Confiance et qualité des produits alimentaires : une approche par la sociologie des relations marchandes

L’article s’interesse aux solutions opposees par un collectif de mytiliculteurs, a l’homogeneisation de leurs produits par la normalisation. En identifiant ces produits et les manieres de les produire, ils forcent le marche a traiter avec une pluralite de qualites. Ces moyens permettent de resoudre le risque de desajustement entre des attentes de consommateurs et des qualites de produits alimentaires mis en marche, en associant des acteurs pluriels autour d’interets qui ne sont pas toujours stabilises. Cette tres forte indetermination, pesant sur toutes les composantes du jeu marchand, impose de mieux comprendre les formes d’association entre des acteurs et des dispositifs qui se jouent a travers la recomposition du marche autour de nouvelles formes d’ajustement.

How consumption prescriptions affect food practices

Food consumption has become the subject of many prescriptions that aim to improve consumers’ health and protect the environment. This study examined recent changes in food practices that occurred in response to prescriptions. Based on practice theories, we assume that links that connect practices with prescriptions result from evolving social interactions. Consistent with the life-course perspective, we focus on distinctions between public prescriptions and standards that individuals consider relevant to their lives. We rely on quantitative data and the results of qualitative fieldwork conducted in France. Our results suggest that consumers may change food practices when they reach turning points in their lives. They may reconsider resources, skills and standards. Middle- and upper-class individuals are more likely to adopt standards consistent with public prescriptions. Possible explanations are that they trust expert knowledge sources, their social networks are less stable and smaller gaps exist between their standards and prescriptions.Food consumption has become the subject of many prescriptions that aim to improve consumers’ health and protect the environment. This study examined recent changes in food practices that occurred in response to prescriptions. Based on practice theories, we assume that links that connect practices with prescriptions result from evolving social interactions. Consistent with the life-course perspective, we focus on distinctions between public prescriptions and standards that individuals consider relevant to their lives. We rely on quantitative data and the results of qualitative fieldwork conducted in France. Our results suggest that consumers may change food practices when they reach turning points in their lives. They may reconsider resources, skills and standards. Middle- and upper-class individuals are more likely to adopt standards consistent with public prescriptions. Possible explanations are that they trust expert knowledge sources, their social networks are less stable and smaller gaps exist between their standards and prescriptions.

Being Human in a Consumer Society

women—that they are lazy, unlovable, and isolated. Chapters Four and Five in particular stand out for their strength, even as they are also the chapters I most want Gailey to expand upon in future work. Chapter Four, ‘‘Fit and Fat,’’ engages the neoliberal discourse of ‘‘health’’ (and how health is conflated with thinness) to discuss the medicalization of obesity and fatness, the assumptions made about fat women’s culpability for their size, and the risks (often wrongly) associated with being fat. Gailey’s review of the literature and use of her informants’ words clearly show that being fat is treated, by medical professionals and regular people, like being ‘‘ill’’: she tells of a blogger who writes that she ‘‘has been prescribed weight loss for a broken toe, a separated shoulder, and strep throat’’ (p. 86). Under neoliberalism, illnesses that are constructed as avoidable (like fatness) are understood to constitute moral bankruptcy. Gailey argues that fat people are hypervisible in large part because their deviance— their seeming refusal to ‘‘be’’ healthy— renders them open to increased surveillance by the state, by health care professionals, and by the general public. She is clear: the abject fat body is a site of deviance that challenges both patriarchy and heteronormativity. It also is a site of neoliberal governance. The book begins to open a window onto the multiple ways that patriarchy, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism intersect. Chapter Five, ‘‘Ample Sex,’’ is a spectacular chapter. In it, the women that Gailey interviews talk about their sexual experiences, their dating histories, and their own attitudes toward and about their desirability. The chapter is strong for many reasons: it disabuses readers of their potential biases (fat women don’t have, or enjoy, sex, do they?) and challenges us to envision sexualities that don’t sync with popular culture imaginings. It also exposes reprehensible and repulsive actions and juxtaposes them with true care and commitment. The chapter is strong, as well, simply because it is rare for interview subjects to be so vulnerable—over the phone, no less—with an interviewer. Their vulnerability and honesty is a tribute to the women’s bravery, certainly. It is also a tribute to the strength of the methodologies used by Gailey in her interviews. In fact, the methodological appendix is perhaps the most fascinating and important part of the book, and Gailey could have made much more of it. Aside from her primary (intended) contributions to the literatures on embodiment, Gailey does some really nice auto-ethnographic work in this text, work that I would like to see her expand upon in self-contained and stand-alone pieces. Her early discussions of her own weight, how enmeshed she is (as a woman in the United States) in body normativity, how she found and approached her research subjects, and her assumptions about how her interview subjects might respond to her own body, give the reader wonderful examples of vulnerability and directness in the research project and will be interesting for graduate student readers in particular. Gailey’s work is well grounded in a distinct set of literatures, and she makes particularly good use of Goffman and Butler. I wished many times in the introductory section of the text and in the concluding portions of each chapter for more of Gailey’s voice—for an appropriation, perhaps, or rearticulation of the theories that she is engaging. The book is doing more work than her prose imagines or allows. Gailey is not only applying theory and extending an ocular ethic—she is making important interventions into theories of embodiment, performance, and gender. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind a bit less humility in the telling of that scholarly story!

Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture

Natalia Milanesio’s book, focused on the case of Argentina, is a timely contribution that fills a large knowledge gap in the history of consumption. It explores the changes in Argentine society triggered by the working classes’ access to mass consumption in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this respect, the author shows not only the conditions of the formation of a collective workerconsumer identity, but also the upheavals within relations between the various social classes. Workers Go Shopping in Argentina is underpinned by three main explanations for these very significant cultural and social changes. The first concerns the role of the State, which, with the coming to power of the Perón government, strongly promoted consumption as a new domain of public action. Its intention was to boost the country’s and especially the working-class’ economic development. The second explanation relates to the strategies of the advertising industry, which targeted the working classes in an attempt to develop the market for consumer goods and equipment manufactured by local firms. The third explanation is more unexpected: based on oral history, Milanesio shows how, in individuals’ memories, a consumer-worker ethos strongly associated with the Perón era took shape, in which class identity was structured around access to mass consumption. From this point of view, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina draws on the two main traditions in the historical study of consumption. From research focused on the emergence of consumer society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, it borrows the principle of an approach to consumption through the identification of specific stages. The historian thus considers that the second half of the twentieth century represents a significant shift in relation to the beginning of the century, precisely because this massive working-class access to consumption was to lastingly transform Argentine society. The other tradition in the historical study of consumption on which the book draws focuses on the practices and institutions that made consumption a mass phenomenon during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Milanesio puts consumption at the heart of her analysis with the aim of understanding its contribution to social stratification. One of the most original contributions of her book is that it highlights the way in which the working class’ access to mass consumption was to modify profoundly relations both with the upper classes, which were to lose many of their privileges, and with the middle classes, which were more strongly affected by economic difficulties and struggled to create a distinctive identity. The book consists of six chapters presenting various propositions around the role of the State and of advertising firms, the changes in class relations, and the shaping of a new working-class identity. The first chapter highlights the way in which the Perón government organized the conditions of working-class access to mass consumption. Whereas at the turn of the twentieth century the country had been a large exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods, in the 1940s the government set out to industrialize the country and to promote an autarchic economic system, based on a combination of loans and tariff protection. Several measures were taken to support the working classes, including wage increases, paid leave, freezing of rents, and social programs, some of which were even enshrined in the constitution of 1949. Finally, this public action was related to the organization of consumer protection via price control, the creation of consumer cooperatives, a regulation of product quality to combat fraud and falsification, a national food code, and a food police force. But as the author points out, such changes induced by public action would not have been possible without the private sector’s cooperation. This is clearly shown in Chapters Two and Three. The historian describes how advertising experts, who until then had focused essentially on the wealthiest 236 Reviews

Hervé Dumez, Alain Jeunemaître, Understanding and Regulating the Market at a Time of Globalization. The Case of the Cement Industry, MacMillan Press, London, 2000, 238 p.

Le lecteur qui pourrait etre reticent a l’idee d’entreprendre la lecture d’un ouvrage en anglais sur l’industrie du ciment sera tres vite rassure tant le livre d’Herve Dumez et Alain Jeunemaitre est stimulant d’une part, et bien construit d’autre part. Pourtant il n’est pas aise de prendre en main aujourd’hui une problematique aussi controversee que celle de la globalisation, car le discours mediatique a denature les enjeux d’une telle tâche en confondant globalisation et internationalisation...