Papers by François DEDIEU
Gouvernement et action publique, 2020
Les mutations institutionnelles des deux dernieres decennies dans le champ de la sante publique p... more Les mutations institutionnelles des deux dernieres decennies dans le champ de la sante publique portent la promesse de decisions politiques prenant mieux en consideration l’etat des savoirs, et, en particulier des donnees epidemiologiques qui mettent en evidence des facteurs de risque de maladies chroniques. Le secteur de la sante au travail met neanmoins en evidence les limites de la conversion des donnees epidemiologiques en instruments d’action publique. De nombreux travaux ont montre que les rapports sociaux de domination entre employeurs et salaries empechent d’aligner la reconnaissance des maladies professionnelles sur les connaissances epidemiologiques disponibles. Dans cet article, nous mettons plutot en evidence les logiques administratives qui filtrent la prise en compte politique des donnees epidemiologiques sur les pathologies induites par les toxiques professionnels. Nous nous appuyons pour cela sur une enquete sur la creation de deux tableaux de maladies professionnelles reconnaissant – a minima – les maladies induites par les pesticides parmi la main-d’œuvre agricole.
Sociologie du travail, 2012
Bien que consacre au cas de l’usine AZF, l’ouvrage de Gilbert De Terssac et Jacques Mignard ne tr... more Bien que consacre au cas de l’usine AZF, l’ouvrage de Gilbert De Terssac et Jacques Mignard ne traite pas de la catastrophe survenue a Toulouse le 21 septembre 2001 mais de l’organisation de la securite dans l’usine au cours des 20 dernieres annees qui ont precede l’accident (1981–2001). Le point de depart de l’analyse vise a concevoir la securite comme une activite paradoxale qui concilie une optimisation continue avec l’omnipresence de risques d’accidents. Prenant appui sur la theorie de la...
Une catastrophe ordinaire, 2013
Une catastrophe ordinaire, 2013
Public authorities in charge of preventing occupational diseases related to pesticide exposure mo... more Public authorities in charge of preventing occupational diseases related to pesticide exposure mostly rely on laboratory experiments to identify and assess the toxic effects of these substances. However, in some cases, officials are able to build alternative methods to measure this kind of danger. In particular, in situ observations of farmers daily activities offer the possibility to discover unexpected sources of occupational exposure to pesticides. Such a method has been used by the Social security agency in charge of the medical surveillance of farmers, so as to assess workers exposure to a known carcinogenic pesticide, sodium arsenite. By describing how the investigation has been launched and conducted, we highlight the conditions of possibility of this kind of innovation in measuring the chemicals dangers to which farmworkers are exposed.
Deviance Et Societe, 2010
Using an organizational analysis of the daily work in a “surete departementale,” that is a detect... more Using an organizational analysis of the daily work in a “surete departementale,” that is a detective organisation who belongs to the DDSP (Direction Departementale de la Securite Publique), this article shows that a competition for the “good cases” helps to converge the professional’s interest of the policemen and the objectives of this detective unit. More than the convergence between the institutional mandate and the mission of the organizational’s police forces – the crime fighting it contribute to explain the mobilization of the policemen. More generally we show that two organizational characteristics – a particular system of evaluation on the quality of the case and a system of cooptation – promote this competition for the “good cases” which in its turns, entails a virtuous circle which is in favor of the unit’s performance.
Although innovation is considered as creative destruction, policies oriented to the withdrawal of... more Although innovation is considered as creative destruction, policies oriented to the withdrawal of sociotechnical assemblages, have not been specifically studied so far. The goal of this paper is to contribute to fill this gap and to provide some elements of analysis of these policies that we call 'outnovation policies' in sustainability transitions. As template, we use the case of the withdrawal of DDT, one of the major post World War II innovations, as an emblematic case of outnovation. So far, the literature on DDT represents DDT withdrawal as a major public decision that resulted from environmental damages related to its massive and pervasive use. DDT ban is represented as a victory of the environmental movements in a period of constitution of an environmental policy stream. The literature perfectly captures the process of problematization of DDT, once considered as a magic solution to eradicate crop pests and fight insect-borne diseases like malaria and which becomes an iconic poisonous product. Based on the analysis of its ban in three countries (USA, France and UK), this paper focused on the missing parts of the DDT ban narratives through the lens of the dynamics of the regime of regulation. The story of the DDT could then be rewritten on very different grounds. The paper advocates that the DDT ban wasn't a major turning point for the pesticide regulation. On the contrary and by many ways it has enhanced the legitimacy of the pesticide regulatory' s actors to control pesticide hazards. On this basis, we discuss general questions related to outnovation, and point out the dialectic relations between external contestation and re-stabilisation of the incumbent regime. The key lesson for outnovation policy is that external contestation does not necessarily lead to a radically new regime. Rather, it may lead to major adaptations of the incumbent regime that are aimed at restabilization through integration of the critique and care of some of the externalities. Hence, outnovation policies should not be considered only as policies of radical change aiming at disruptive transitions, but also as finely tuned paradoxical processes of destabilization / restabilization of a given sociotechnical regime, which might be profoundly transformed in its composition and sustainable properties, but nevertheless still there.
L'ergotoxicologie, qui cherche a appliquer la demarche ergonomique a la comprehension et a la... more L'ergotoxicologie, qui cherche a appliquer la demarche ergonomique a la comprehension et a la prevention des risques lies aux expositions a des substances chimiques sur le lieu de travail, est aujourd'hui un savoir relativement marginal dans les politiques de controle des toxiques professionnel. Ces dernieres demeurent largement dominees par des approches d'hygiene industrielle classiques, reposant sur la definition de valeurslimites d'exposition et des preconisations relatives au port d'equipements de protection. Pour comprendre cette situation, nous proposons ici de restituer la maniere dont les savoirs ergotoxicologiques ont ete mobilises, formalises et interpretes dans le cadre d'une enquete conduite par la Mutualite Sociale Agricole au debut des annees 2000 et qui a conduit a l'interdiction de l'arsenite de soude en viticulture. Nous montrons comment ces savoirs ont ete retraduits par les acteurs des politiques de prevention du risque professionn...
Large areas of uncertainty still surround the relationship between environmental exposure to toxi... more Large areas of uncertainty still surround the relationship between environmental exposure to toxic materials, on the one hand, and human health, on the other. Several historical accounts have recently shown that this state of ignorance is not only due to the complex nature of the interactions between toxic agents and human bodies. Most of these accounts cast light on the strategies set up by big corporations to hide the dangers of the toxic materials they use, sell or dispose of in the environment. The cases of tobacco smoke (Proctor 2012), global warm-ing (Oreskes and Conway, 2010) and toxic chemicals (Markowitz and Rosner, 2003) provide evidence of these strategies contributing to the “social production of ignorance” over environ-mental health issues. Until now, these accounts have tended to focus on how industry draws on specific networks of scientists, politicians and experts in regulating agencies to produce doubts about the harmfulness of their products. These approaches tend t...
Preventive Veterinary Medicine, 2021
Passive surveillance is based on spontaneous reporting to veterinary authorities of disease suspi... more Passive surveillance is based on spontaneous reporting to veterinary authorities of disease suspicions by farmers and other stakeholders in animal production. Stakeholders are considered "actors" in sociology of organisations research. In veterinary public health, passive surveillance is considered to be the most effective method to detect disease outbreaks and to generate epidemiological information for decision-making on surveillance and control strategies. Nevertheless, under-reporting of cases is an inherent problem, reducing the ability of the system to rapidly detect infected animals. Previous studies have shown, for example, that passive surveillance for bovine brucellosis in France, through compulsory reporting of all bovine abortions, has limited sensitivity, with variability in reporting rates despite similar cattle farming profiles. Based on this observation and on sociological literature in health surveillance, we hypothesised that oversight organisational factors in different areas influence health actor contributions to passive surveillance. Therefore, to improve the efficiency of surveillance systems, we need to understand the organisational levers (supporting factors) and organisational drags (hindering factors) on the production and dissemination of health information. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the surveillance actors in two administrative geographic divisions in France (Departments A and B) with similar cattle farming profiles but contrasting abortion reporting rates (low and high, respectively). We assumed that these rates were related to health actor organisation in each administrative division. We mapped actor relationships and looked for behavioural recurrences and differences between the two departments. This analysis led to two socio-economic models explaining the configurations observed: pro-curative in Department A, and pro-preventive in Department B. These models showed a link between the level of competition endured by veterinarians on the sale of veterinary medicinal products and the overall contribution of the actors to health surveillance. The pro-preventive model had a higher contribution to surveillance than the pro-curative model. Importantly, the nature of the information produced in this configuration of actors corresponded to the needs of surveillance, providing collective and early information that circulated more readily between actors. We highlighted three characteristics that help to identify the configuration of a system of actors: 1) the pressure of competition exerted on veterinarian activities; 2) the dominant business model and form of organisation of veterinary clinics; and 3) the frequency of interactions between the main surveillance actors outside of crises. The first two characteristics affect the local contribution to data reporting for surveillance, and the third affects network responsiveness in a health crisis.
Regulation & Governance, 2021
Comment en est-on arrive a confiner l’ensemble de la population francaise de mars a mai 2020 ? A ... more Comment en est-on arrive a confiner l’ensemble de la population francaise de mars a mai 2020 ? A quelles conditions a-t-on pu presenter cette mesure inedite, aux effets considerables, comme la seule solution possible face a la pandemie de Covid-19 ? Et pourquoi a-t-on cree de nouvelles instances pour gerer la crise en lieu et place de celles concues pour faire face a ce type de situation ? A partir d’une enquete sociologique menee « a chaud » aupres d’acteurs de la crise, et en tirant parti des acquis des sociologies des crises, de la decision et des organisations, les auteurs formulent un ensemble d’hypotheses originales. Plutot que d’expliquer le caractere chaotique de la gestion de la crise a partir de defaillances individuelles ou de dysfonctionnements techniques, ils en soulignent les determinants systemiques et organisationnels. Ils analysent ainsi les problemes de cooperation et de coordination entre acteurs publics ainsi qu’au sein du secteur hospitalier. Ils montrent egalement que l’effritement progressif des moyens alloues au risque pandemique au cours de la derniere decennie n’a pas dissipe le sentiment collectif d’etre « bien prepare ». Ce livre demontre aussi que la creation de nouvelles instances reproduit de vieux travers qui consistent a croire que les instruments organisationnels, pourvu que ceux-ci soient rationnels, garantissent la cooperation entre les acteurs. Or, comme le manifeste de maniere spectaculaire cet evenement, il est urgent de se defaire de cette croyance, afin de pouvoir saisir les veritables determinants de la cooperation : les relations de pouvoir. En sortant des discours qui cherchent deja a singulariser cette crise, ce livre propose finalement des pistes d’amelioration permettant de tirer les vraies lecons de la gestion de ces situations extremes en repensant la preparation des prochaines crises et la formation des decideurs.
Revue d'anthropologie des connaissances, 2019
La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que d... more La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.
Une catastrophe ordinaire
Une catastrophe ordinaire
Une catastrophe ordinaire
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Papers by François DEDIEU