Since Mark Granovetter's seminal work on the access to employment of white collars in the Boston suburbs, studies on the embeddedness of the labor market in social networks have multiplied. They all agree on the fact that a significant proportion of access to employment is based on interpersonal relations, either because these relations are decisive in ob-taining information on jobs (for future recruits) and on possible candi-dates (for recruiters), or because they lead to direct recruitment (if the recruiter and the future recruit already know each other) or because recommendations by intermediaries result in hiring. The proportion of jobs obtained on the basis of personal relationships varies according to the methods studied and the study sites but it's often a significant one. In this article, we study the relational chains of access to employment based on the questions used in a questionnaire survey carried out in 2028 on a sample of 1,676 persons living in mainland France. This sur-vey confirms previous results: relationships are important, and this im-portance varies according to the characteristics of the respondents and the jobs they obtained. Relationships are more important for executives and prestigious jobs. Moreover, these prestigious jobs were obtained by involving colleagues or former colleagues to a greater extent than other jobs. Being located in a privileged environment and knowing other peo-ple in that environment provides additional resources for […]
Cet article porte sur les dynamiques de l’encastrement relationnel des créateurs et créatrices de plateformes numériques dans le secteur agricole français, entreprises qui se sont considérablement développées ces dernières années. A partir d’une analyse qualitative et quantitative reposant sur des données mixtes collectées auprès d’entrepreneur.e.s, nous observons d’abord un processus de découplage, qui est majoritaire parmi les entrepreneur.e.s rencontré.es. Ces dernier.e.s n’échapperaient donc pas à la dynamique propre à « l’activité entrepreneuriale », à savoir le recours de plus en plus faible aux relations personnelles à mesure que l’entreprise se développe, phénomène qui a déjà été documenté par de nombreuses études. Toutefois, une analyse plus fine des profils montre que le taux d’encastrement d’une partie non négligeable des enquêté.e.s s’écarte de la distribution générale, ce qui interroge les conclusions d’ensemble. Un type de profil retient notamment notre attention, pour lequel le taux d’encastrement progresse au fil du temps. Nous montrons dans cet article que si cela est le signe pour certain.e.s d’une baisse d’activité de l’entreprise, pour d’autres il pourrait s’agir d’un mode original de développement. La singularité du monde professionnel sur lequel porte notre analyse (les mondes agricoles) et du type d’entreprise créée pourrait alors expliquer de tels résultats.
What does the place of residence change in the trajectory of a person who grows up or lives there, in terms of access to employment, career path? Access to employment is based on the social relations available to family and friends or on the intervention of professionals from training or support organisations, particularly at the start of a career or when a career changes direction (Chauvac 2013).Career choices are also linked to family and friends, with family and friends providing resources to find information, make contacts or receive encouragement, but also models or counter-models, influences, support or constraints (Bidart 2008). The place of residence conditions the wider environment, and can therefore have an impact on an individual's trajectory.Research conducted on the trajectories of people who grew up and/or still live in a urban area qualified as a priority in the sense of urban policy shows that they denounce an effect of assignment to low-skilled or precarious jobs, the mourning of major jobs (Zunigo 2008) and a phenomenon of discrimination. They consider that "the urban area" is a strong explanatory factor of the difficulties and obstacles encountered, more than a resource, even if this may also be the case. Analyzing pathways by taking into account social relations enables us to understand how this "urban area" effect is constructed, but also how the accumulation of social and economic difficulties that characterize the situation of the inhabitants of a […]
Collective action among farmers is regularly presented as a driver for the adoption of agroecological practices on farms. This study proposes to extend the analysis of relational drivers in the implementation of changes in practices beyond peer groups, by looking at their collective organization around territorialized supply chains involving other actors. More specifically, this paper proposes to study the role that this collective organization around territorial supply chains plays in the changes toward agroecological practices carried out on farms.The study of the individual farm trajectories as a chain of events is an approach that allows the understanding and analysis of changes in practices. As we are interested in coordination mechanisms based on interactions between actors as a driver for agroecological transition, we mobilize the framework and tools of social network analysis. In particular, in order to analyse the relational drivers in the trajectories of changes practices, we mobilize the relational chain approach through the method of quantified narratives. This approach allows us to understand changes in practices on farms as collective actions, through the study of relationships activated by farmers in order to have access to different types of resources during their trajectory. Thus, our work feeds the literature mobilizing the method of quantified narratives for the analysis of farm transition trajectories, which we modulate by focusing on the trajectory of a […]
Numerous projects, which today are described as social innovations, are being developed in response to the recent crises to meet various unsatisfied social needs (housing, climate, ageing, inequalities, etc.). Their highly collective nature implies a better understanding of the ways in which the partners involved in these projects are connected, which we propose to do using the relational chain method. The data collected using this method highlights the significant use of non-personal arrangements (circles and calls for projects) to obtain the support of institutions (local authorities) or organisations (foundations); interpersonal relationships—essentially professional—appear to be mobilised less frequently and mainly to access the world of research.
From as early as the 1950s, J.C. Gardin's work spanned both archaeology and the emerging automation of numerical computation and documentation. In 1961, with P. Garelli, he published the first automated application of graph theory to historical materials, working from Assyrian cuneiform tablets documenting economic relations. This work was then widely ignored both in archeology and network analysis. However, in the past twenty years, socio-epistemic claims related to the growth of the Internet and computing (digital humanities, computational archaeology, etc.) have brought a surge of interest in Gardin's work, which is now regarded as pioneering. Working from archive materials and publications, this paper shows how a historical sociology of scientific writings can be relevant to the history of automation in historical sciences. The paper examines Gardin's recognition as an influential forerunner of computational archeology, showing that : 1) although Gardin had access to resources (financial, instrumental, etc.) that were rare at the time, and could have provided material for the foundation of a school or a specialty, he did not however pursue this ambition; 2) the demonstrative purposes pursued by Gardin with his study of 1961 economic networks varied between the 1960s (demonstrating the relevance of non-numerical computation) and the 1980s (legitimizing simulation in the social sciences), but were never concerned with network analysis as such.
