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French sociology and the state

Philippe Masson
Current Sociology 2012 60: 719 originally published online 14 June 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0011392112447128
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447128
2012

CSI0010.1177/0011392112447128MassonCurrent Sociology

Article

CS

French sociology
and the state

Current Sociology
60(5) 719729
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0011392112447128
csi.sagepub.com

Philippe Masson

UFR de sociologie, Universit de Nantes

Abstract
This paper examines the role of the state in the development of French Sociology after
1945. This role was important in the institutionalization of the discipline. It favoured
the creation of research teams, resarch centres or laboratories. The State favoured the
funding of french sociology too. This funding, in the form of research contracts with
various public bodies, has contributed to the emergence of the figure of the expert and,
more broadly, to the involvement of sociologists in sectoral policies.
Keywords
French sociology, funding, state, institutionalisation

Introduction
In the USA, private foundations such as the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund,
the Carnegie Corporation and the Russell Sage Foundation played a fundamental role in
the development of the American social sciences (Bulmer, 1984; Chapoulie, 2001;
Fisher, 1993). The development of French sociology was based on another model. In
France, the universities where sociology is taught are public bodies, and their lecturers,
assistant professors and professors, or the researchers, are civil servants; the research
published in the learned journals of the discipline is mainly produced by them. For teaching and for jobs, as for funding, French sociology is closely tied to the state. The state
has, through its senior civil servants, ministries, and governments, played a decisive role
in the development of sociology since the late 1950s. The relationship between sociologists and the state is, therefore, a central issue in the history of French sociology; the
debate that it raises is a recurrent one, around the classic opposition between autonomy
and dependence. But because the terms it starts from are ambiguous (since when is one

Corresponding author:
Philippe Masson, UFR de sociologie, Universit de Nantes
Email: philippe.masson@univ-nantes.fr

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autonomous or dependent?) it cannot be finally resolved. Moreover, the issue is generally

examined without grasping the different aspects of the relations between sociologists and
the state; some features of those relations are presented here.

The development of French sociology after 1950

Let us note, first of all, that French sociology was really only developed after the Second
World War particularly from the second half of the 1950s. In 1945, it did not appear to
be a discipline much developed in France. Despite the appointment of Durkheim to the
Faculty of Letters at Bordeaux in 1887, it remained marginal in relation to the other
disciplines (principally philosophy, history, psychology and anthropology) within the
system of faculties. For a long time the only two chairs held by sociologists were at
Bordeaux and Paris, and it was only later that they gained the title of chair of sociology.
In 1910 there were only four holders of teaching posts with the title of sociology. The
growth of courses in sociology was not rapid; there were fewer than a dozen in 1900, and
little increase up until the First World War. Though Durkheim and his colleagues succeeded in establishing the scientific norms of French sociology at the end of the 19th
century and the start of the 20th century, they failed in the professional organization of
research, and did not establish institutional autonomy for the discipline (Karady, 1976).
By 1939 there were only four posts of professor of sociology in the faculties of letters.
Thus the 20 years after the end of the Second World War are generally regarded as the
period when French sociology became institutionalized (Chapoulie, 2001). Certainly the
foundation in 1946 of the Centre dEtudes Sociologiques (CES), within the framework
of the new Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) created in 1939 marked
the beginning of the institutionalization of contemporary French sociology. Chapoulie
(1991: 332) underlines that about a third of the study directors appointed before 1961
claim affiliation with the new discipline of sociology. As at the beginning of the CES, the
title of sociology implies an imprecisely defined intellectual perspective rather than a
disciplinary affiliation. In practice the difficult economic situation meant that few university posts were created in the immediate post-war period. Sociology therefore became
a research activity carried out at the CES, on the fringe of the university. One had to wait
until the second half of the 1950s for two new chairs of sociology to be created at the
Sorbonne (these new chairs went to Raymond Aron in 1955, and in the following year a
chair in social psychology to Jean Stoetzel), and for a degree in sociology to be introduced in 1958 which allowed the new discipline to distance itself from philosophy, to
which it had been linked until then. It was also at the end of that decade that several
sociology journals were launched (Sociologie du Travail in 1959, the Revue Franaise
de Sociologie in 1960, the Archives Europennes de Sociologie/European Journal of
Sociology in 1960 and Communications in 1961). From this period on, institutionalization
was steadily pursued. There were increases in the number of research teams, of university departments of sociology, of posts as professors or researchers, and of specialized
journals such as Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, set up by Pierre Bourdieu
in 1975, Socits Contemporaines in 1990, or the brand new Sociologie initiated by
Serge Paugam in 2010. In addition, sociology was extended into secondary school
teaching in 1970, and has found its place in the agrgation examination in social
science for the recruitment of qualified lyce teachers.
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Today, sociology is taught in more and more varied courses, including ones on
education, information/communication, or medicine, for example; it also figures in
institutions training midwives and social workers. This expansion of teaching has
brought considerable growth in the numbers of professors from 20 in 1958 to nearly
800 at the beginning of the 21st century and to those must be added nearly 300 research
officers in various public bodies such as CNRS and the Institut National de la Statistique
et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE). However, although the state really favoured the
development of sociology teaching from 1958, the expansion since the mid-1980s is
more the unintended effect of the national policy for secondary education followed by
the Ministry of Education. There has been significant growth in the numbers of holders
of the baccalaurat; the proportion of the cohort holding one has risen from 29% in
1985 to 64% in 2005. Since in the French system obtaining the baccalaurat gives the
right to university registration, with fees that have remained moderate in relation to
those charged by private higher educational institutions, this has led to an increase in the
number of university registrations, especially in the human and social science departments; the number of university places is not limited (except after the first year in medical schools, which are more selective). This has also encouraged growth in the number
of holders of doctorates in sociology, who with the development of teaching of sociology find themselves in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, PhD students and
young people with recent doctorates often have a precarious position in the universities,
because they have to take on what are sometimes heavy teaching loads, and take work
on research contracts, in order to fund their theses or to ensure future integration into
higher education teaching. On the other hand, they make a strong contribution to the
vitality of research in the sociological journals and in the book market. In practice
publication opportunities have increased, and the editors of collections and learned journals often now publish the research reports of these early-career sociologists, especially
given that those already in post as professors are more involved in the ever-increasing
number of administrative tasks.
The attraction of sociology is, then, the result of neither sociological strategy nor the
real political will of the state, but of state policy for secondary education, combined with
the selectivity of other forms of higher education such as the grandes coles, university
institutes of technology and private establishments. Thus a cleavage has progressively
emerged between the mass teaching of sociology in the universities on one side, and
training for sociological research in the prestigious and selective establishments (Ecole
Normale Suprieure (ENS), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS),
Institut dEtudes Politiques (IEP)) where there are professors in sociology, though not
many. They have therefore been selected by members of other disciplines, and carry little weight in the decision-making of these prestigious establishments. Thus, as Chenu
(2002 : 61) rightly notes, the process of creation of sociological elites largely avoids the
collegial game internal to sociology as a scientific discipline. The remit which the state
gives to sociologists is in fact reduced mainly to the provision of university degrees in
sociology. If professors do some research, in addition to performing their role as
teachers, so much the better, since they are supposed to do some. But the state does
not guarantee to sociologists a specific licence to do sociological research, as it does for
the practice of medicine, reserved for medical doctors. This means that sociologists have
to struggle with other disciplines in the human and social sciences - not to mention other
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groups such as journalists or politicians - to support the legitimacy of their analyses of

society, and to stabilize the boundaries of their discipline. These boundaries always
seem uncertain and are in perpetual dispute, with geography, history, political science or
anthropology depending on the epoch.

The funding of sociology

Urban sociologist Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, recalling the difficult working conditions that he experienced at the Muse de lHomme up to the middle 1950s, emphasised the relative penury of the social sciences in the immediate postwar period. An
initial improvement in funding followed from the commissions launched by the Agence
Europenne de Productivit, and the Commissariat Gnral la Productivit at the
Institut des Sciences Sociales du Travail (ISST). This institute for teaching and research
in the social sciences was created in 1951 by the Ministry of Labour and the University
of Paris. As Lucie Tanguy (2008: 726) stresses, it was founded within the framework of
the productivity policy promoted with the economic cooperation of the US Marshall
Plan, and opened up a field of action where the Ministry of Work, and especially its
Directorate on industrial relations, could set in motion research on work problems. By
creating an institution which offered funding for empirical research projects the Ministry
encouraged the growth of industrial sociology in France. It also encouraged it by sending French sociologists to the USA to study the work carried out there by sociologists
on industrial relations. The ISST research section, set up in 1953, was made up of
industrial sociologists, most of them born in the second half of the 1920s, who played
an important role in the French sociology of following decades (they included, for
instance, Michel Crozier, Jean-Daniel Reynaud, AlainTouraine and Jean-Ren Tranton:
all four were involved in the creation of the journal Sociologie du Travail (Borzeix
and Rot, 2010). Crozier would be well known for his analysis of Le Phnomne
Bureaucratique (1963) and the development of the sociology of organizations in France.
Touraine made himself known through research on the working class, and then on
social movements (Masson, 2008). They found there a work situation very different
from the relative penury of the CNRS Centre dEtudes Sociologiques in the 1950s.
Research was undertaken on workers attitudes to technical change and its effects on the
organisation of work and payment systems, on the adaptation to work and the forms of
participation of workers, on the vocational progress of young workers, and on the
functioning of social security institutions and the relationship with their clients. For
example, it was here that Michel Croziers study of tobacco manufacture and of office
work in an insurance company was carried out.
There were two reasons for the importance of the ISST. First, it supported the development of empirical research on social problems of the day, of a sociology more
oriented to action, though, even if its researchers benefited from a real autonomy within
the institute, that was not easily reconciled with the researchs dependence on official
commissions (Tanguy, 2008: 756). Second, it contributed to the spread of the survey
model, with its variables, testing of hypotheses, and sampling procedures, in French
sociology. Thus although they could make room for interviews and non-participant
observation, its work rested mainly on questionnaire studies. In that they differed from

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the first monographs on the industrial sociology, carried out in the first half of the
1950s, which rested largely on factory participant observation (Peneff, 1996). From this
point of view they anticipated the mode of enquiry that spread widely through other
specialisms within sociology over following decades.
It was above all from the beginning of the 1960s that the provision of funding for
sociology grew considerably, within the framework of the national Plan and with the
setting up of bodies with the remit to support the development of research. This provision had no comparison with the funds to which sociologists had had access before, or
with what the CNRS allocated to its laboratories. The first three Five-Year Plans, before
1961, had been Plans of modernisation and re-equipment, and had not been concerned
with the social sciences. Planning as a rational mode of governing public affairs started
in 1953, when the USA decided not to continue the Marshall Plan in France. The Second
Plan, which started in 1954, established its principal objective as the increase of production, with prices and quality adequate from the point of view of opening frontiers.
Research was to participate in the development effort, as long as that was associated
with economic development. But the planners were thinking above all of research in the
hard (and experimental) sciences. In the second half of the 1950s, the apparatus for
public funding of research was progressively created. The advent of the Fifth Republic
opened a period of stability which was favourable for the development of planning of
public affairs. For obvious reasons, it was experimental and spatial research that
benefited at first from most of the grants. It was, therefore, under the Fourth Plan
(19621965) that the social sciences started to be widely funded, even if the funding
was modest as compared with that of the other sciences. The first plans defined other
priorities reconstruction, the economy - and national research policy was only gradually
put in place in the second half of the 1950s. The Fifth Republic gave it a decisive
impetus, especially by the creation of the Dlgation Gnrale la Recherche
Scientifique et Technique (DGSRT), which managed the total set of research grants
from the different ministries.
The goal assigned, by the government ant the DGRST, to the human and social
sciences is particularly broad. It is to study the means of swift and balanced economic growth...; to ensure economic and social adaptation to accelerated technical
change; to satisfy the psycho-sociological needs of individuals at the same time as
their material and biological needs (Report of the DGRST, Centre des Archives
Contemporaines de Fontainebleau, CAC 1977 1624, article 23). In this setting the
human sciences must, among other things, take into account the problems of teaching, of vocational training and employment, of the social economy of agriculture, of
urban structures and development, of the processes of economic growth, of regional
expansion and under-development, of migration, and of the organisation of work and
automation. Besides these general considerations, the planners thought that a high
rate of growth would produce a general increase in the standard of living and a reduction in social inequality, leading to more peaceful social relations (Tanguy, 2002). The
Plan Commissioner nominated in 1959, Pierre Mass, hoped that social conflict
would be humanised, and the study of the mechanisms and conditions of economic
growth, entrusted to sociologists, should make it possible to avoid imbalance and
social and political conflict.

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This first stage of the massive funding provided by the DGRST in the 1960s was
decisive, because it contributed to the definition of the mode of funding which is still
dominant today in French sociology (Masson, 2006). Thus an original form of funding
was chosen, one different from either the American model or the Russian state sociology.
It is a form that combines a greater variety in the sources of funding (the Plan, administrative bodies of governement, local administrative bodies, firms), often from public
bodies where the researchers take part along with members of other categories in the way
in which grants are allocated. These funds have no doubt contributed to the development
of quantitative methods in sociology sampling and questionnaires look serious and
scientific but they have not ended in defining a specific research formula which is stable for the longer term. The enquiries which followed the DGRST conventions adopted
a research formula similar to that used in the second half of the 1950s, like the ISSTs
studies. On the other hand, this funding contributed to the introduction of a new, rather
general, research theme, that of the modernization of French society, which can be taken
in two ways: the adaptation of the population to social and economic change, or the
effects of these changes. Then the effects on the provision of funding of the student
unrest of May 1968 were ambivalent. On the one side, they emphasize the critiques made
of contract research by one group of sociologists, particularly those of younger generations
who had been students in the first half of the 1960s. The planners themselves became
more cautious about the benefits for their work of sociological studies, which seemed to
take directions hardly compatible with their managerial concerns and their liberal ideas.
On the other side, May 1968 did not interrupt the provision of funding, either in the
number of contracts signed or in their total value.
The enquiries funded by the DGRST did not introduce into sociology major methodological innovations which would form part of the history of the discipline, because
they followed a model which was already active. To the extent that they retained a very
marked empirical character, using few abstract analytical categories, they did not propose innovations which remain in the history of the discipline there either. However,
DGRST funding did make an obvious contribution to its institutionalization. It favoured
the creation of research teams, sometimes set up within a centre or laboratory. It also
contributed to the subdivision of the discipline into areas of specialization and to their
further development. Rural sociology, sociology of education, sociology of consumption, life styles, sociology of medicine, are all areas which became autonomous from
this period with the incentive of this massive funding. In addition, the wider availability
of grants also had indirect consequences for careers. It helped some people to gain relative independence from the great patrons of the discipline, while it gave career opportunities and professional socialisation to younger members.
At the end of the 1960s, other bodies took up the baton from the DGRST. Some,
such as the Comit dOrganisation des Recherches Appliques sur le Dveloppement
Economique et Social (CORDES), were transversal bodies across administrative sections and arose from the Plan, others were created by ministries which had gradually
developed research sections or directorates, like the Mission Recherche, established in
1961 by the Ministry of National Solidarity, which invited bids for grants. Certainly the
relationship with the social sciences, and with sociology in particular, has varied with
the colour of the government, and for researchers it has also varied, in ways no doubt
due more to the economic situation of the day than to a deliberate political decision.
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Gradually this particular mode of funding, on the basis of a public call for applications,
which used to be seen by sociologists as a supplement to the insufficient funding of
their protecting ministry, has become the ordinary system and the main source for the
laboratories, to the point where contract research is considered the norm, and an
informel positive criterion in career evaluation. But fundamentally the system remains
the same. From the 1980s, funding sources have become more diversified, involving
new bodies. Laws of decentralization in 1982, and the emergence of territorial groupings (regions, federations of municipalities or urban areas) have created new partners
to offer project funding for sociologists; these have also encouraged sociologists to be
interested in taking into account the local dimension of sociological phenomena, and
have contributed to the popularity of ethnographic approaches, although there have
also been other reasons for the latter. In the 2000s, the European Union also became a
new actor in the funding of projects, and thus European comparisons became commoner in sociological research. On the other hand, sociologists are less in evidence in
the great institutions for the production of statistical data; a division of labour has
emerged in which the latter produce the data on which sociologists work.

The indirect effects of sociological work

If the state has contributed to defining the setting for the activities of French sociologists,
have they not had some influence on the states policies and reforms since the 1960s?
The significant funding of sociology, in the form of research contracts with various
public bodies, has contributed to the emergence of the figure of the expert and, more
broadly, to the involvement of sociologists in sectoral policies such as those for schools.
Their participation has taken at least three different forms since the Second World War.
A first mode of involvement follows from their membership of ministerial or administrative committees; the sociologist there plays the role of advisor, more easily if s/he
is socially and academically close to the senior civil servants with whom s/he can speak
as an equal. This situation was typical in the period from 1950 to 1970, when the first
sociologists benefited from the status of intellectual, a model embodied by Jean-Paul
Sartre. Sociologists such as Georges Friedmann also participated from the mid-1950s,
in the context of reforms in the organization of pupil pathways in secondary education
(Chapoulie, 2006), but their influence there was very limited. Other sociologists, such
as Raymon Aron and Michel Crozier, had influence which was a little more important.
Aron, who combined his past of professor with that of journalist on Le Figaro, was a
member of several government commissions. Membership in political clubs favoured
relations with politicians and senior civil servants; Michel Crozier is a good example of
this. Among his generation (he was born in 1922), civic involvement was taken for
granted, and he acknowledges that he was strongly influenced by Sartre. His involvement was mainly shown in his active participation in the Club Jean Moulin. This was
founded in 1958, and it was a club for political discussion whose participants included
several senior civil servants, intellectuals, journalists and newspaper editors, prfets
and sous-prfets some of whom would make political careers, and politicians. He
pressed there for administrative reform. His participation helped the diffusion of his
book Le Phnomne Bureaucratique, and opened doors to him for further studies within
the administration. He found himself at a point of convergence between his research on
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organisation and the modernising goals of the senior civil servants in the Plan plus the
arrival at administrative responsibility in roles such as prfet of new generations
strongly influenced by what they had heard at the Ecole Nationale de lAdministration
or the Institut des Sciences Politiques of Paris, both expanding greatly in the 1960s. The
evolution of personnel work in firms and of human relations services, as well as the
development of schools training groups suitable for employment in such services, also
favoured the reception of Le Phnomne Bureaucratique. Finally, there was a convergence between the sociology of organizations proposed by Crozier, which looked
towards expertise and advice for the managerial concerns of politicians or the firm, and
the interest for the people in power exemplified by the network of relations among the
members of the Club Jean Moulin, the general magazine Esprit, and politicians and
senior civil servants.
The influence of sociologists could take a second, yet more indirect, form. This rests
on the audience that they can find among mid-level managers, and the wide distribution
of their findings. Pierre Bourdieu is a good example of this. The relations in the 1960s
between Bourdieu and his team within the Centre de Sociologie Europenne (CSE) and
the statisticians in charge of the INSEE led to exchanges of statistical methods of analysis
of data and, above all, to the transfer of the definitions of problems, and the diffusion
of sociological concepts in studies of social statistics (Seibel and Oeuvrard, 2005 : 87).
It was at the beginning of his career, during his time in Algeria between 1958 and 1962,
that Bourdieu made contact with INSEE statisticians such as Alain Darbel and Claude
Seibel. After meeting Bourdieu, Darbel contributed to the planning and production of
several of Bourdieu and his teams statistical enquiries at the CSE, in particular Lamour
de lArt (1966). He also drafted the annexe on the measurement of the probabilities of
access to higher education of Les Hritiers (1964). At INSEE, in 1973 he launched the
collection Donnes Sociales of statistical analyses by theme. This was largely inspired
by the plan of a work that he had produced with Bourdieu a few years earlier; that
had analysed the continuity of social inequality despite the economic growth through
the thirty glorious years of 1945-1975 (Le Partage des Bnfices, 1966). But above all
he helped to diffuse the concepts created by Bourdieu among INSEEs statisticians. This
was probably facilitated by Bourdieus teaching at the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique
et de lAdministration Economique (ENSAE) from 1964; it was from this background
that several INSEE administrators held internships with Bourdieu at the CSE.
Bourdieus influence was also carried by the big circulations of some of his books,
such as Les Hritiers. Like other disciplines such as linguistics, history and anthropology,
sociology in the 1960s and 1970s aroused great interest among the cultivated public.
First of all, the development of schooling in secondary and then higher education, obviously played an important role in the diffusion of the social sciences in the 1960s, leading
to the appearance of a readership capable of being interested by sociological works.
Many private publishers then set up collections suitable for the inclusion of sociological
works, such as the Le sens commun, collection directed by Bourdieu for Editions de
Minuit, or the one directed by Henri Mendras for Armand Colin. During the 1960s several works in this way became classics of French empirical sociology, thanks to reaching
an audience wider than the narrow circle of specialists. Among those were Le Phnomne
Bureaucratique (Michel Crozier, 1963), Les Hritiers (Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude
Passeron, 1964), La Conscience Ouvrire (Alain Touraine, 1966), Commune en France.
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La Mtamorphose de Plodmet (Edgar Morin, 1967), La Fin des Paysans (Henri

Mendras, 1967), La Reproduction (Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, 1970),
LEcole Capitaliste en France (Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, 1971).
Bourdieu and Passerons Les Hritiers contributed to the public recognition of the
existence of educational inequalities according to social class (Chapoulie, Kourchid,
Robert and Sohn, 2005 : 117). The national Ministry of Education was aware of those
inequalities, and had already produced some statistical data on the subject, and before
Bourdieu and Passerons book there had also been, since the mid-1950s, several articles by demographers from the Institut National des Etudes Dmographiques. However,
the book offered a new analytical framework, showing the mechanisms producing the
empirical patterns that were already known. The educational inequalities were no
longer seen as a simple consequence of the inequality of economic resources between
families; they were understood in terms of the functioning of the educational institutions and the relationship that each class had to that. The events of May 1968 contributed to the books success, and opened a phase when a more critical view of the school
was predominant. For some time, Bourdieu and Passerons analyses thus dominated
the discussion of educational inequalities.
A third mode of involvement appeared after 20 years, that of specialized expertise.
Bourdieu was probably one of the last examples in French sociology of the generalist,
who published in a number of fields and who put forward a theory which claimed to
account for the functioning of society as a whole. The growth of sociology had encouraged specialization in narrower and narrower fields. The generalist became rarer, and
that stance surely gave lower professional returns. In addition, the publishing market
for books on social science has been profoundly transformed with, to put it simply, the
marked increase in small works of synthesis on a precise topic (such as sociology of
prisons, sociology of the hospital). These are aimed at a wider public, especially
lyce students and undergraduates, at the expense of the publication of research reports,
especially when those take the form of a monograph. The mass university has, since the
1980s, led to a significant growth in the number of university teachers, and perhaps to
a broadening of their social recruitment, at least in social science disciplines such as
sociology. At the same time, however, their status in relation to the states senior civil
servants has been devalued. To the extent that specialization has increased, expertise
becomes more technical. It is not in the name of a general theory or of a particular
approach to the social that sociologists are consulted, nor does it owe anything to their
social and educational proximity to elected politicians and senior civil servants. It is,
rather, in the name of their specialized knowledge of a narrower field that their contribution is possibly drawn on. But it is difficult now, in the absence of empirical studies,
to grasp the range of their influence.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.

Acknowledgements
I thank Jennifer Platt for the important work of translation of the french version of this paper.

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729

Masson
Author biographies

Philippe Masson is Matre de confrences en sociologie at the University of Nantes (France). His
interests concern the sociology of education, the sociology of medecine and the history of sociology. His recent book is, Faire de la Sociologie. Les Grandes Enqutes Franaises depuis 1945,
Paris: Editions La Dcouverte, 2008.

Rsum
Cet article examine le rle de lEtat dans le dveloppement de la sociologie franaise
aprs 1945. Ce rle a t important pour linstitutionalisation de la discipline. LEtat
a favoris la cration dquipes, de centres et de laboratoires de recherche. LEtat a
aussi promu le financement de la sociologie franaise. Ce financement, sous la forme
de contrats de recherche signs avec diffrentes institutions publiques, a contribu
lmergence de la figure du spcialiste et, de manire plus large, lengagement des
sociologues dans les politiques sectorielles.
Mots-cls
sociologie franaise, financement, Etat, institutionalisation
Resumen
Este paper examina el papel del estado en el desarrollo de la Sociologa francesa
despus de 1945. Dicho papel fue importante en la institucionalizacin de la disciplina,
favoreci la creacin de equipos de investigacin, centros de investigacin o laboratorios. Adems, el Estado favoreci el financiamiento de la Sociologa francesa. Dicho
financiamiento, en forma de contratos de investigacin con varios organismos pblicos,
ha contribuido para la emergencia de la figura del experto y, ms ampliamente, para la
participacin de socilogos en polticas sectoriales.
Palabras clave
sociologa francesa, financiamiento, Estado, institucionalizacin

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