Sociology seminar – Thursdays

Time: 10:00 am – 11:00 am 
Date: 4th April 2024
Place: room 3060

Anne BELLON (University of Technology of Compiègne) – Careers linking fields. Ministerial special advisers and the government’s field environment

Abstract:

While the social influence of the state over society is a common assumption in sociology, the mechanisms through which the state relates to other social spaces still remain an open question. The sociology of fields has offered new theoretical perspectives in order to understand how fields interact, without addressing the specificities of the nation-state, both regarding its structure – formed by various institutions whose boundaries may be unclear – and its relationships with other fields. In this context, the article articulates an agenda and a methodology for the analysis of fields’ relationship based on the study of cross-field careers. Focusing on the government as a key organization within the state, it examines the job careers of the 769 ministerial special advisers who made up the French government between May 2012 and March 2014. Coming from various social spaces  , these advisers experienced at the same time a job mobility from one field to a ministerial office. Career patterns of these advisers thus differ both relative to the fields they worked in and relative to patterns of mobility and stability between and within these fields. In this article, we assume that these various patterns give us a strong insight into the relationship between the government and its field environment.

The article operationalizes the study of “careers linking field” by using a mobility-oriented dissimilarity measure between sequences of job positions. That enables us to identify and describe 22 consistent career patterns within and between fields proximate to the government, shedding a new light on the job careers of special advisers. Besides, using regression models, the article also demonstrates that these patterns are key to understand the division of work and the allocation to power positions within the offices. These results raise insights on the spatial extension of the State in France, and its strong autonomy, despite several decades of neoliberal transformation.

Organizers: Annina Cleasson, Paola Tubaro, Patrick Präg (CREST Sociology unit)

Sponsors: CREST