This article presents, in a programmatic way, the histoire croisée approach, its methodological implications and its empirical developments. Histoire croisée draws on the debates about comparative history, transfer studies, and connected or shared history that have been carried out in the social sciences in recent years. It invites us to reconsider the interactions between different societies or cultures, erudite disciplines or traditions (more generally, between social and cultural productions). Histoire croisée focuses on empirical intercrossings consubstantial with the object of study, as well as on the operations by which researchers themselves cross scales, categories, and viewpoints. The article first shows how this approach differs from purely comparative or transfer studies. It then develops the principles of pragmatic and reflexive induction as a major methodological principle of histoire croisée. While underlining the need and the methods of a historicization of both the objects and categories of analysis, it calls for a reconsideration of the way history can combine empirical and reflexive concerns into a dynamic and flexible approach.
RésumésCet article dessine une présentation programmatique du concept d’histoire croisée, de ses implications méthodologiques et de ses possibilités d’application concrète. L’histoire croisée prolonge les débats et réflexions qui, au cours de ces dernières années, ont été menés en sciences humaines et sociales autour des thèmes de la comparaison, des études de transfert, de la Connected ou de la Shared history. Elle invite à repenser les interactions entre sociétés ou cultures, entre disciplines et traditions savantes, plus généralement entre productions sociales et culturelles, en tenant compte à la fois des croisements empiriques qui se produisent au niveau des objets d’étude et des opérations par lesquelles le chercheur lui-même croise échelles, catégories et perspectives pour construire son enquête. L’article montre d’abord en quoi cette approche se distingue des démarches purement comparatives et des études de transfert. Il développe ensuite les principes d’une induction pragmatique et réflexive comme axe méthodologique majeur de l’histoire croisée. Enfin, en insistant sur la nécessité et les modalités d’une triple historicisation des objets, des catégories d’analyse et des procédures de recherche, il ouvre la voie à une réagrégation des éléments de connaissance permettant de conjuguer des préoccupations d’ordre empirique et réflexif.
Lifelong learning has become one of the keys to making workers' career paths more secure at both the French and the European policy level. However, the implementation of these policy lines raises delicate questions as to how the responsibility for vocational training should be shared among employees, employers and public institutions. The capability approach is used here to elucidate the ambiguous relationships between responsibility and freedom that characterized French training reforms in 2004. The study, based on quantitative and qualitative surveys in which employers and their employees were consulted, shows that the environment provided by the company contributes more decisively than employees' previous training and career paths to the capability of the latter to attend vocational training and develop professionally at work. Relying on these empirical findings, it proposes a scheme for a capability‐based conceptualization of professional development.
The article discusses the impact of organizational configurations on employees’ training capabilities. Inspired by the capability approach, it uses qualitative data to question under what organizational conditions firms in France provide their employees with the opportunities and means to participate not just in training programmes, but in those programmes they have reason to value. The results suggest the existence of three different training models – skill-updating, skill-developing and capability-enhancing – depending on the choice processes involved, the importance they accord to employee agency, and the training outcomes. While human resource policies offering training opportunities are important in French organizations, enabling individual capability ultimately depends on employee participation schemes. The article further argues that this goal cannot be achieved through collective voice alone; in vocational training, individual voice plays an equally central role.
This article asks about the conditions of a sociological operationalization of the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Raising the question of freedom and social opportunities, the capability approach has so far mainly been discussed by economists and philosophers. In order to adopt this approach for a sociological and pragmatist perspective, it engages with methodological and theoretical issues. Whereas capabilities have until now mainly been studied within quantitative frameworks, the author opts for a qualitative method of inquiry that draws on a pragmatist and configurational approach. Such a shift towards qualitative inquiry is a key condition for a better sociological understanding of notions like freedom and opportunities that stand at the core of the capability approach.
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