Seize the State through its administration.

Summary For a sociology of the workings of public action-Government by performance between bureaucratization, the market, and politics-A comparative sociology of administrative labor markets-French local governments between autonomy and state regulation-Understanding centralization from the periphery Studying the administrative workings of public action to better understand the state: this is the purpose of the thematic dossier in this issue, which reports on a conference organized by the Center for the Sociology of Organizations (CSO) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Far from a simple commemorative aim, its contributions offer a transversal look at the contemporary metamorphoses of the state. A third edition of the bibliographic chronicle on political ethnography enriches this issue.