The institutionalization of the French Food Safety Agency as a border organization: bureaucratization of expertise and regulation of food risks.

Summary The thesis focuses on the French Food Safety Agency, a public institution created in 1998 following the mad cow crisis. It seeks to understand where this agency comes from, why and how it was created, how it is organized and how it functions, as well as the impact of its action on the regulation of food risks, between 1998 and 2005. The central sociological question is that of the institutionalization of this new health agency, in the form of a border organization, located at the interface of science and public action, accountable to both the scientific and political communities and having to manage the socially constructed border between these two worlds. Using the approach of the sociology of organized action, we show how Afssa has become institutionalized both as a scientific organization, through a process of bureaucratization of expertise, and as a political actor fully engaged in the defense of the values and interests of health security. The thesis analyzes the mechanisms, effects and contradictions of this institutionalization process in order to understand the nature and extent of the change that Afssa has brought about in the regulation of food risks.