While much of the international debate on the future of work focuses on the links between new forms of employment and social protection, and especially on transitions between jobs, this paper addresses a still under-researched issue: the interconnections between employment regulations and business strategies in the production of precarious employment. It seeks to make a contribution to a new strand of research which has emerged in France, Britain and the United States and has cast light on the link between new modes of business organization and new forms of employment. The paper particularly highlights labour recommodification processes as the key instrument in this link and illustrates the dynamics at play in three service sectors known for a high incidence of precarious employment - call centres, performing arts, and domiciliary care for the elderly, in five European countries.

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the deployment of labour market and career guidance as an instrument of liberal governmental rationality, and hence as a key tool for shaping attitudes suitable for the labour market. We characterize such processes and their effects on both those in receipt of guidance and those delivering it, on the basis of a three-year study in France, Slovenia, Spain and the UK. This leads us to put forward the problematic character of the notion of 'conduct of conduct', especially owing to the conflation implied between adaptation to governmental ends and freedom. We suggest that Max Weber's categories for depicting active adaptation in bureaucratic capitalism provide a more grounded grasp of the processes involved, and that the radical distinction he establishes between adaptation and the possibility of conduct may provide a new basis for conceptualizing resistance to liberal governmental rationality.

Jïïii-MnJI Formés et formateurs face à la « double contrainte » des programmes de formation à 'employabilité des chômeurs de longue durée1 Par Isabelle Darmon, Carlos Frade, Didier Demazière, Isabelle Haas' Prendre en charge les chômeurs les plus en difficulté, assurer un taux d'insertion élevé : face à cette double contrainte, les organismes de formation relaient une conception standard de l'employabilité qui pèse lourdement sur les stagiaires. ' * l'emploi précaire en Europe. Elb a notamment publié : ? « Activation strategies or the labour market imperative. An outline far a comparison of contemporary rationales ' and practices of social engineering in the UK,

Max Weber's music writings (including his unfinished Music Study) have always mesmerised readers but their importance for analysing music as a cultural domain has only started to be acknowledged. This paper focuses on Weber's approach to the inner 'developmental momentum' of the music domain through his study of the particular tension that pervaded Western harmonic music. By showing how composers, performers, instrument manufacturers, art recipients and the instruments themselves had to grapple with such tension, Weber was able to give an account of the inward connection to an art sphere and its structuring effects, whilst also bringing social, economic and technological factors to bear. In the current debate on the desirable ways for a renewed sociology of culture, Weber's music writings present us with a path at once precarious and bold, an account of inner connections and outer relations, which, against Weber himself, also provides bases for aesthetic judgment.

This paper examines processes of habit reshuffling and change in different contexts of household formation, looking specifically at habits regarding eating and commensality. It is based on a study of 14 couples, each with one English and one French partner, half of whom live in France, half in England. We examine the interplay between partners, their determination to eat together as a couple, and the various 'orders' associated with their commensal pact (diets, routines, extra-marital commensality), both when they start as couples and as parents of young children. We draw on the specificity of cross-national couple experience to cast light on processes of adjustment - to one another, and to the new country of residence for the migrant partner. In particular, we explore the potential of notions of 'split' and 'solid' 'patrimonies of incorporated habits', 're-shuffling' of habits and dispositions, and 'habit memory', to characterize the dynamics of habits at play in each of the orders under scrutiny. Overall, the paper contributes to the analysis of habit as the 'stuff' of orders of everyday life.

Our purpose in this article is to explore the reasons for the continued attractiveness of Simmel's thought today and to probe the contemporary affinities to his philosophical stance towards the world. Simmel anchored the ‘philosophical attitude' in the philosopher’s particularly developed disposition for Erlebnis, i.e. the unified pre-conceptual experience of each moment of reality and life, as well as in a particular mode of objectivating this experience. We provide an illustration of such an approach and its implications through Simmel's analysis of ‘remoteness from oneself’ and the restlessness it entails in The Philosophy of Money. We argue that Simmel's attempt at phenomenologically unveiling the contours and depths of life moments and fragments, as well as his emphasis on constant movement, provide much reassurance to contemporary subjectivities. But his philosophical stance is also driven by a quasi-mystical yearning for the One that lies beneath and beyond the fragments. We propose an initial assessment of the main implications of such a stance by relating it to the philosophical path it opened up (a path directly linking to Heidegger and his followers, but also in part to Deleuze) and by placing it in what we understand to be the new philosophical situation today.

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