This dissertation aims to understand the organizational and professional foundations and dynamics that underpin student success. Various political, economic, and social issues justify the relevance of this topic. Indeed, student success has been at the heart of public policies on higher education pursued by successive governments over the past few decades, particularly in areas pertaining to universities. Today’s organizational landscape of universities encompasses a wide variety of manifestations of more or less explicit efforts to integrate the goal of student success into the organization. These developments are partially documented, for example through research studies—and particularly dissertations—that detail the emergence of new professionals in the field of pedagogy. However, these changes in organization and professional roles are rarely addressed in an integrated or even systemic manner.

This PhD project, situated at the intersection of sociology, anthropology and law, aims to examine the issue of emotional bonds between parents and children and what it means to be a family during institutional care. The originality of this project lies in its approach to institutional care, which focuses on emotions within the context of institutional placement. To this end, a range of research methods and analytical approaches will be employed, including an analysis of the legal frameworks governing placement and the maintenance of family ties, as well as an ethnographic study, involving observation and interviews, in several facilities run by Les Apprentis d’Auteuil. Within this framework, the PhD student will aim to address several questions that will inform this research: How do children in care perceive their emotional relationship with their parents? In what ways do they identify this emotional bond in relation to their conceptions of what constitutes a family? In what ways is this parental and emotional bond governed by the law following recent amendments? In what forms does this parental bond manifest itself? Finally, what space is actually afforded to this emotional bond by the institution and social workers?

This doctoral thesis aims to conduct a concrete analysis of the experiences of students at elite institutions, in order to understand the influence of gender on the internalisation of professional models specific to positions of power. Situated at the intersection of the sociology of elites and gender studies, it aims to analyse the gender norms conveyed within these educational settings, their effects on gender relations, and the diverse ways in which these norms are internalised. The comparative approach will thus shed light on the variety of factors that encourage the adoption of specific gendered social relations: including the division of academic disciplines, the influence of gender mix ratios, and positioning within the social sphere. Ultimately, it will therefore enable us to examine the gendered division of space within the grandes écoles – an issue that has recently been raised by the institutions themselves.

In France, 95% of Catholic churches are owned by local authorities. These buildings are therefore affected by changes in local public policy, particularly with regard to the management of public heritage. At the same time, as places of worship, churches are also affected by developments specific to the religious institution to which they are allocated. They thus act as interfaces between local public policy and the religious institution, revealing the shifting nature of their relationship. This thesis therefore examines the management of municipal churches by the local authorities that own them, and in particular their use in local public policy through local energy and cultural policies. It is structured around three main themes: firstly, an analysis of the development of national policy frameworks (financial, regulatory and organisational) concerning local public action by and in relation to municipal churches. The aim is to understand how the current treatment of municipal churches at national level encourages, constrains and shapes their use by the local authorities that own them. A second strand focuses on the design of public policy involving churches, examining both the characteristics of local authorities that engage their local churches in local initiatives, the process of designing local policy, and the influence of the buildings’ specific characteristics on this design. Finally, the third strand examines the latent effects produced by the political integration of churches, both on public policy in general, sector-specific policies in particular, and church-local authority relations. This project therefore aims to identify the conditions and reasons underlying the inclusion of parish churches in local public action, as well as its effects, in order to determine what the management and inclusion of these buildings in public action reveal about the relationship between public authorities and religious bodies.

This doctoral research is set against a backdrop of climate change characterised by an increase in heatwaves and the emergence of new forms of social and territorial vulnerability. Whilst energy poverty has long been considered primarily in the context of winter, focusing on domestic heating and the difficulty in paying bills, summer energy poverty (SEP) has only very recently emerged as a subject of scientific debate and public policy. It refers to the inability of certain households to protect themselves from excessive heat, due to a lack of suitable housing, financial resources or access to cooling facilities. This situation is exacerbated in urban areas by heat islands, and can have direct effects on health, quality of life and energy expenditure. Whilst the European Commission has already broadened its definitions of energy poverty to include the summer issue, in France the national framework remains largely focused on the cold. At local level, a variety of stakeholders – local authorities, social housing providers, charities and energy suppliers – are trialling initiatives, often driven by the aim of improving summer comfort, such as greening urban spaces or renovating buildings. However, these initiatives do not yet fit within an established definition of the PEE, and how they relate to existing policies to tackle energy poverty remains unclear. The proliferation of approaches reveals both a dynamic spirit of innovation and a fragmentation that raises issues regarding coordination between stakeholders and the effectiveness of the measures. The aim of this thesis is to understand the conditions under which summer energy poverty has emerged as a public issue and the processes by which it is framed in different contexts. The study is structured around three main strands: (1) To identify and analyse national frameworks for summer energy poverty, comparing them with European frameworks and those of other countries, in order to understand how this issue is constructed and which aspects are emphasised or overlooked. (2) To study how local authorities adopt and translate these frameworks, by examining the definitions, instruments and networks of stakeholders involved. This analysis will focus on two contrasting local contexts, enabling an examination of how socio-spatial and institutional contexts influence the structuring of responses. (3) To analyse the modes of coordination between the actors involved – whether through cooperation, overlap or competition – and the effects this has on the households concerned. To this end, the research will draw on contributions from political science and the sociology of public action. The concepts of framing will enable us to explore the processes through which a phenomenon becomes a recognised collective problem. The sociology of translation will help us understand how definitions circulate and are transformed through interaction with local instruments, mechanisms and actors. Finally, approaches to energy vulnerability, energy justice and capabilities will provide a framework for analysing the inequalities generated by the PEE, by integrating material constraints (housing, climate, resources), social constraints (status, networks, access to support schemes) and symbolic constraints (representations of warmth and comfort). This project therefore aims to document and compare the ways in which the PEE has emerged, been adopted and implemented, in a field that has as yet been little explored by research. It will help to shed light on our understanding of climate-related environmental inequalities, whilst examining contemporary changes in public policy in response to the challenges of the energy transition and adaptation to heatwaves.

This research will focus on the interactions of safety officers working in high-risk companies. Our analysis of their work will be conducted from an organisational perspective, examining how the relationship between head office and industrial sites or construction sites is structured. As key players in safety, they carry out their work in contexts characterised by a rise in regulations, standards and processes, and therefore by an increasingly strong bureaucracy (in the sociological sense), particularly in facilities classified for environmental protection (ICPE). The aim here is to examine how, within this highly regulated and bureaucratic environment, they can develop, implement and drive a policy of prevention and anticipation that combines both regulated and managed safety.

In an increasingly regulated working environment, occupational health and safety professionals are seeing a rise in bureaucracy that tends to create a divide within their work between occupational safety and operational safety (Rae et al., 2019), which, for some professionals, can contribute to a growing sense of ‘blues’ in their practice (Le Coze, 2024). The tendency for organisations to attempt to address in advance and formally the multiple requirements they set themselves or which are imposed upon them (ambitious economic targets, regulatory constraints, vigilance regarding risks now extending to include cybersecurity) encourages the production of standards that raise questions about how these relate to site-specific circumstances.

How can this be reconciled with site-specific contexts? How can we strike a balance between central standards and the constraints and challenges faced by sites in their role as prevention practitioners? Our subject places us at the crossroads of several traditional approaches within sociology, and the social sciences more generally: the analysis of organisations, their dynamics and, in particular, the relationships between actors; the analysis of activity; and the analysis of occupational dynamics and professional identities. We will situate our approach at this intersection, anchoring the study in an analysis of the activities of occupational safety professionals within a multidisciplinary field shaped by safety science (Le Coze, 2019). The company chosen as the field of study is a high-risk industry.

In a manner relevant to the thesis and our research question, the organisation has implemented a reorganisation aimed, amongst other things, at decentralising the work of its prevention officers from head office in order to bring them closer to the sites. This organisational change provides a particularly suitable context for understanding the dynamics at play in the role of prevention officer from the perspective of interactions between head office and the sites. It also has the advantage of potentially revealing the transformations that will take place in terms of perceptions of their practice and the profession more generally, or even the construction and application of rules. Having access to a structure in flux and observing it through an ethnographic approach also allows us to see how the construction of safety may evolve.

This will provide an opportunity to consider whether this decentralisation has enabled a new type of organisational structure, facilitating the creation of forums for discussion and spaces for communication, with a view to pooling information to be fed back to head office. One might also ask whether prevention workers have seized upon this change to influence standards (Gherardi, 2019). We can observe whether other tools or spaces have been deployed to disseminate information in a uniform manner to sites with very different characteristics.

In the context of a globalised, highly competitive economy that increasingly relies on companies’ ability to manage information that is both volatile and crucial, the relationships between companies and their environment are expanding and fundamentally reshaping innovation processes. As a new manifestation of the dialectical complementarity between innovation and organisation, companies’ openness to increasingly complex external ecosystems makes the ability to integrate the talents of dispersed individuals and organisations a crucial skill for managers and firms.

Online user communities, which are integrated into the innovation processes of certain large companies, provide a unique example of organisations opening up to their ecosystem. Exploring the variety of structures, actors, resources and skills deployed by companies in managing these communities will be one of the main focuses of our research. In particular, we will focus on the role of the user community facilitator who, as a figure situated at the organisation’s periphery, must act as a translator between the diverse representational systems of users and those of the company. We will seek to understand how this translation takes place and how users’ experiences and expertise are integrated into innovative offerings currently being designed.

From the users’ perspective, the aim of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of both the ways in which users engage with these co-innovation platforms and the reasons behind their involvement. Given that an increasing number of user-centred co-innovation sites offer rewards (such as gift vouchers, concert tickets, etc.), the aim will be to determine whether individuals’ engagement in these schemes is more a matter of leisure activities, or, on the contrary, a complement to their professional activities; the Manichean opposition between these two categories is, of course, intended to be transcended, perhaps through the definition of an intermediate category between leisure time and working time, of which the social web (Web 2.0) would be the indicator

Since the mid-1990s, the armed forces have faced organisational changes that have called into question certain founding principles of the contemporary French military. The concept of the ‘revolution in military affairs’ has come to be used to describe the range of restructuring measures faced by Western armed forces during this period: professionalisation, changes in missions, and the digitisation of the battlefield (NEB). This field of research has generated a wealth of literature, characterised by multidisciplinary contributions (sociology, political science, management science, history, etc.) which illustrate the interest of the social sciences and the military institution in these issues. It is recognised that the Digitalisation of the Battlefield (NEB) constitutes one of the three major ‘transformations’ that have shaped the Army over the past twenty years (Lebraty, 2010). The introduction of information and command systems (SIR, SICF, CITEL) in the late 2000s and their widespread adoption across regiments during the 2010s represented a major turning point in military equipment and, subsequently, in the structure of the armed forces and the methods of conducting military operations (Godet-Sanchez, 2008). This trend continues as the armed forces are engaged in the development of new technical systems (Scorpion, Titan) and the associated doctrinal considerations.

Thus, like various sectors of activity and a wide range of professions, the military sector is no exception to the trend sometimes referred to as ‘digitalisation’ (Bouiller, 2016).Information and command systems, and more recently artificial intelligence, are the subject of numerous technological promises, which claim to herald a revolution in the purposes served by the armed forces, in military equipment and even in soldiers’ practices. This research project aims to better understand the realities associated with this introduction of digital technology in its most recent forms, through an analysis of operational activity. The thesis will seek to understand how digital technology is integrated into the operational activities of regiments, how it fits into the broader ecosystem of tools used by military personnel, and how combat practices are consequently reshaped to varying degrees. The focus will be on the adoption of new equipment, the effects on individual and collective professional practices, and the potential transformation of these practices and forms of collaboration and cooperation in an operational environment. This research thus aims to make a twofold contribution: to our understanding of the effects of the introduction of digital technology in the armed forces and the corresponding changes; and to the emerging sociology of military activity (Jankowski, Thura, Muxel et al., 2021).

The thesis will focus specifically on the digitisation of the battlefield and will seek to answer the following question: how does the prescribed and actual use of information and communication systems in an operational context contribute to redefining ‘military combat activity ’ (Bardiès, 2011) (practices, skills, hierarchical relationships, environment, etc.); and the subsequent effects on the organisational structure of the Army’s tactical groups. To this end, we will endeavour to carry out a detailed analysis of the activity undertaken, of the visible and less visible dimensions of what is being done, of the materiality of the work and in particular the handling of tools, and to seek to understand the practices, the actions, their logic, and their individual as well as collective aspects. Several subsidiary questions will inform this research, such as the effects of ICT on officers’ decision-making autonomy and individual strategies to avoid the potential loss of their traditional prerogatives; organisational changes (increased control and reporting or the maintenance of a constant level of subsidiarity); and the actors’ perceptions of technical transformations, etc.

Surveillance cameras have been a feature of our urban – and even rural – landscapes for several years now. However, these devices have not resolved all the issues that led to their deployment in many public spaces. One of the solutions proposed to address this shortcoming of video surveillance is therefore to add automatic detection software to the existing system. These additional modules come in various forms: people counting, vehicle type detection, fly-tipping detection, analysis of abnormal situations, facial recognition, etc. The first applications of these new forms of video surveillance took place in France, although they are not as widespread as in other countries.

This thesis aims to offer initial reflections on these new surveillance tools and the context in which they operate, examining them from three main perspectives. The first of these concerns the scientific developments that contribute to the development of these new surveillance solutions. The second focuses on the public debate surrounding automated video surveillance and the specific form that this debate takes. The third and final aspect examines the uses, mostly experimental, taking place in France, as well as the objectives and conditions of these applications.

With regard to the first aspect, this study aims to demonstrate the particular importance of infrastructure to the success of these artificial intelligence tools. Whether at the development stage or during use, artificial intelligence relies heavily on all the tools and resources deployed in its operation. Data, networks and sensors act as filters through which the software’s processing passes, imposing technical limitations. Regarding the second aspect, the research has explored the issue of how these technical solutions are presented, promoted or criticised as a problem, both in public debates and within economic spheres. It emerges that, despite widespread criticism within society, economic arguments dominate in official reports. Regarding the third aspect, whilst there is no consensus on the subject of automated surveillance, the thesis analyses the range of strategies and resources deployed to build a market for automated video surveillance nonetheless.

Jury members:
Gilles JEANNOT, ENPC, Thesis Supervisor
; Anne-Cécile DOUILLET, University of Lille, Examiner;
Sylvain PARASIE, Sciences Po Paris, Examiner;
Valérie NOVEMBER, CNRS, Examiner;
Clément MABI, UTC, Examiner

Innovating innovation. This is the essence of open innovation, which, ever since its formalisation within management science, has been hailed as the ‘new imperative for creating and capitalising on technologies’. Presented as a new management paradigm, this concept nevertheless encompasses a wide variety of definitions and realities depending on the stakeholders—who are increasingly seeking to adopt its organisational models. This thesis focuses specifically on this search for new models that are constructed neither within companies nor solely by innovation collectives, but through physical spaces and mechanisms of cooperation emerging within digital worlds to operate in the in-between, as third spaces distinct from the former. It aims to demonstrate that this ongoing search, far from being haphazard, is organised beyond a mere assemblage of management tools, through modes of action and representation that take shape within these spaces, in a situated manner, in the form of new practical and relational conventions of cooperative work.

Taking an empirical approach, this thesis offers an ethnographic immersion into the experience of ‘La Cantine’, the first co-working space to establish itself as a hub for digital innovation in Paris, managed by a business association, Silicon Sentier. Initiated in 2010 as participant observation, the research was conducted between 2011 and 2014 on three fronts: the venue, open innovation mechanisms, and the intermediation work carried out at the interface of heterogeneous worlds. Rather than treating open innovation as a given, the description enables us to trace how a particular conception emerges within the venue’s institutionalisation process (Part 1), through its physical dimension and hybrid framing mechanisms (Part 2), as well as in the intermediation work carried out by its staff (Part 3). The thesis draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks to analyse each of these aspects: an ecological approach to social worlds, a situationist approach to frameworks and framings, and, finally, an interactionist approach to cooperative work. By bringing these approaches together, it ultimately offers a conclusive study that broadens the scope of the reflection developed within La Cantine, extending beyond it, as open innovation mechanisms spread throughout the organisational world. This broadening makes it possible to characterise these ‘frontier mechanisms’ by a constant movement of framing and overflow, of shared structure and interpretative and organisational flexibility, of formalisation and destabilisation, through which the principles of cooperation originating in digital worlds are not only translated into the realm of interactions, but also institutionalised in increasingly distant worlds.

Members of the jury

• Valérie BEAUDOUIN, Director of Studies at Télécom ParisTech (Rapporteur)
• Alexandre MALLARD, Research Director at Mines ParisTech (Rapporteur)
• Dominique CARDON, Professor at Sciences Po Paris (Examiner)
• Franck COCHOY, Professor at the University of Toulouse II (Examiner)
• Alexandre MATHIEU-FRITZ, Professor at the University of Paris-Est (Examiner)
• Patrice FLICHY, Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris-Est (Director)

The law of the 20th of August 2008 « on the renewal of social democracy » brought important changes to professional elections in companies. Previously strictly circumscribed to internal company issues, the elections of employee representatives now also determine the access and weight of trade union organizations in collective bargaining. By calling employees to the ballot box, the reform aims to democratically justify the powers granted by the State to organizations considered as « representative ». Nevertheless, research has shown that the conditions in companies were not always met to make voting a vector of democratization.

Within the framework of professional elections, the vote is rather an object of dispute between actors (trade unions, candidates but also informally the management of the company) who seek to legitimize their own interests. This situation is particularly clear in the cleaning sector, where employees usually have precarious statuses.

The thesis will focus on the way in which the actors have grasped the reform, the transformations in the elections (in terms of organization and results) and the consequent changes in industrial relations at the branch level.