Based on the case of luxury hotel concierges, this paper addresses the question of how to make night work an object for the sociology of professional groups without producing an essentialist or relativist categorization of what “night time” is. To make this argument, I assemble different temporalities observed at different scales of analysis. Firstly, the micro-sociological scale of day-to-day tasks is analyzed with the tools of the sociology of work. Secondly, the scale of career paths is seen from the perspective of the sociology of employment. Finally, the broader scale of the professional group is looked at from the viewpoint of the sociology of collective mobilizations. These three scales of observation all show that the marginality of night concierges actually outlines the hidden face of the entire group. Their inclusion in the analysis, which obliges the sociologist to widen his scope of inquiry and to acquire somewhat of a night vision, is therefore vital.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Berlin police precincts, this article focuses on the so-called “intercultural prevention” policy implemented in Berlin since the early 2000s. The author analyzes how police work is informed by a culturalist framework, particularly regarding Muslim communities. The article shows how the link between prevention strategies and the culturalist approach to the treatment of minorities has broadened the police mandate, making police work closer to social work. Yet, this culturalist framework has ambivalent effects: on the one hand, it limits the effects of individual stereotyping during police interventions; on the other hand, it produces forms of reification of groups labeled as “cultural minorities.”
This article intends to explain the transformation of the foreign policy since the end of the Cold War through the hypothesis of the evolution of the interactions between the professional groups: military, diplomats and industrialists. Using the genesis of French civil-military activities in Bosnia and in Kosovo between 1992 and 2001 as empirical framework, we endeavor to objectify the cross-sector dynamics which permeate with the bureaucratic competition between administrations, the mobilizations of senior officials and the interministerial division of labor in matter of international crises management. We wonder to what extent the international crises “managers” form an institutional space, a professional group or a social field in process of empowerment within the current foreign and defense policy.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, International Cooperation, War, History, and Sociology
Based on two separate studies in sociology and geography, this article emphasizes the effects of “armour-plating” borders in the European Union through a focus on the confinement measures used on migrants at the Greece-Turkey border. Analysing both the construction and contention of detention centres on Lesbos Island, this paper shows that migration control is situated in a myriad of formal as well as informal sites, therefore going beyond the walls of official centres and sanctioning the immobilization or locking up of migrants. Consequently, this article places official detention centres and spaces created by civil society in a wider continuum. While the latter provide an alternative form of detention, in extending and reproducing logics of confinement, in the end, they too build barriers.
Topic:
Migration, Sociology, Border Control, Refugees, and Geography