PILMIS Olivier

The current crisis is not only a health crisis but also an economic one: confinement is certainly a barrier to certain consumer practices, but it is also an obstacle for a large portion of productive activity. The situation calls for comparison with the great recessions and depressions of the past: certain indicators bring to mind the 2008 crisis, and others 1929… But such parallels leave us with many unanswered questions: to what depths will the health crisis plunge world economies, and the French economy in particular? Will the anticipated recession be short-lived or long-lasting? The COVID-19 epidemic inaugurates a period of great uncertainty that calls for forecasts that it paradoxically makes more difficult to produce.

The popularity of labels as tools of government is growing in many policy areas. This chapter focuses on the creation and implementation of one specific kind of label, which we have defined as a “rewarding label”. These labels are granted by governments or public authorities and reward organizations for their contribution to public welfare. Governance by rewarding labels relies on the mechanisms of competition and social distinction at play within a given field, in order to orient actors towards options that governments consider to be in the public interest. Taking eco-labels and nutritional charters as case studies, this chapter shows the difficulties involved in governing through this tool. Rewarding labels are designed to satisfy a range of conflicting objectives and interests and their application has become a site of conflict among public authorities and private actors. Four limitations to this approach are highlighted: management of labels’ reputations, consumer enrolment, competition between companies, and competition between government labels and other market devices or actors.

The economic crisis triggered by the decision to confine the population living in France is unprecedented in many respects. First of all, its scope, which led the French Treasury to estimate in mid-April that French GDP would be down by 8% by the end of 2020 - the largest decline since the end of the Second World War. Secondly, by its nature, since this crisis concerns both supply and demand, production and consumption: it is "the crisis of an economy at a standstill". Finally, it has one of its implications, since this crisis prevents us from projecting into the future, even a few months into the future: while the French government, with the agreement of the European Commission, limits the outlook of its stability program to the year 2020, INSEE has temporarily given up issuing quarterly or annual forecasts. Similarly, the "emergency plans" put forward by the Minister of the Economy and Finance and the Minister of Action and Public Accounts are intended to mitigate the immediate effects of the crisis, without constituting "recovery" or "revival" plans. [First paragraph].

In a way, the Covid-19 crisis has stopped time as well as the economy. Economic information therefore focuses on the present moment, but what elements of comparison can be mobilized to make it intelligible? How can we measure an activity that does not take place? After highlighting how the originality of the current crisis prevents us from establishing scenarios for its future development, we will examine the way in which economists and statisticians improvise and innovate in order to describe the paradoxical state of an economy that is at a standstill. Finally, we will see what procedures can be used to compensate for the lack of historical precedent in order to guarantee the reliability of the estimates produced using these original methods.

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This text presents some hypotheses and first results of an ongoing survey on the profession of actuary, which focuses on actuarial education. It is not the intention of these pages to propose an exhaustive vision of the whole actuarial world, nor even of the actuarial education world, but more modestly, at the end of the exploratory phase of the survey, to expose some of the tracks that are emerging and to outline some hypotheses, in order to submit them to the discussion. In this sense, it is important not to take this text for anything other than what it claims to be. This is why, on the one hand, the choice has been made to anchor this text in the empirical material collected during the first months of this survey and, on the other hand, the text concentrates, as far as possible, only on the elements relating to the challenges of actuarial education - an organization as central in this world as the Institute of Actuaries therefore only appears in dotted lines, mainly through the relations established with actuarial training, on the occasion of actuarial dissertations for example. Finally, the subject of this text corresponds to that which guides all the research conducted within the framework of the PARI Chair, which focuses in particular on recent transformations in the world of actuarial science, for example, the Solvency 2 reform (François, 2015 . Frezal, 2016). This explains the space devoted to this particular theme in the following pages.

By taking as its object a public policy measure to combat obesity, this article emphasizes the conditions for building trust in a public action mechanism. These conditions are all the more demanding when, as in the case of the voluntary nutritional progress charters studied, a public action instrument is intended to initiate market dynamics. Far from being guaranteed by the support of public authorities alone, the effectiveness of such a tool also depends, in a decisive way, on its capacity to ensure the alignment of the interests of the parties it brings together (public authorities, but also industrial economic actors). This alignment of interests is nevertheless undermined by the management of the mechanism which, guided by the concern to preserve its reputation, undermines its effectiveness by regularly contributing to the misalignment of the parties' interests.

The chapter claims forecasting is a process during which forecasts are regularly updates and revised. Paying attention to the dynamics of expectations provides the opportunity to study changes in expectations formed by professionals, and thus give insights into how their labor unfolds. Drawing upon data from a purposelybuilt database of forecasts running from September 2006 to September 2017, linear and logistic regression models investigate the informational and organizational grounds of forecasts revisions. It suggests that similar forecasts form a consistent sequence, so that revisions mostly consist in the adjustments of ‘old’ forecasts with respect to newly available information. By and large, forecasting means updating former forecasts. Besides, data shows the core activity of forecasting organizations, and in turn their audience, matter to understand the extent to which they revise their forecasts: despite what forecasters claim in interviews, public institutions, among which the IMF or the OECD, tend to revise their forecasts on a wider scale than private banks or insurance companies. Eventually, scrutinizing how forecasts revisions distribute according to the years during which they are produced, stress that during major economic crises, such as the Great Recession, forecasters not only revise their former expectations downward but also upward. This hints at a Durkheim-inspired interpretation of economic crises as re-opening the future.

Health scandals, police violence, environmental pollution, breaches of the labor code, evaluation of public policy... all of these issues are the subject of mobilization by inspection services. The fact that they are regularly convened does not exempt them from criticism: if they were fussy, they would impede the smooth running of the economy; if they were disconnected from the field, they would embody a bureaucratic power that was deaf to claims; if they were subject to the authority of a supervisory body, they would deliberately "whitewash" wrongdoing by the inspected. The contributions gathered in this book show that inspection services do not only have a name in common but that their activity makes them intermediaries between inspected persons and principals. Inspecting is as much about shedding light on the course and causes of certain crises as it is about controlling, in a more routine manner, the conformity of the practices of actors and private individuals with a set of regulations and rules. The inspector is not only the one who verifies that the inspected apply the rule, he is also the reporter of what they have given him to see.

Created in 1800 under the Consulate, the Banque de France constituted a remarkably stable institutional environment, both in terms of the missions entrusted to it (the distribution of credit to the economy and, rapidly, the monopoly of monetary issuance) and in terms of its governance structure, which, set by its fundamental statutes (imperial decree of January 16, 1808), did not evolve until the reforms of the Front Populaire in 1936, which increased the control of public authorities over its operations [Asselain, 2011]. At the same time, the development of the Bank's activities throughout France led it to set up a network of branches. Discussed as early as 1802 [Prunaux, 2009a], its establishment began in 1808, and its organization was regulated that same year by the imperial decree of May 18. Article 40 of this decree stipulated that "the particular supervision of the Government of the Bank over the Comptoirs d'Escompte shall be exercised by one or more inspectors appointed by the Governor. However, the modesty of the profits made by the counters, and their subsequent disappearance between 1818 and 1836, justified the abolition of the post of inspector in 1812, barely a year after its effective creation, and soon of the function itself. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the Banque de France absorbed the departmental banks which, covering the territory, paradoxically contributed to its fragmentation by making it a juxtaposition of relatively watertight credit markets: this completed the institution of the Banque de France as a central bank [Leclercq, 1999]. This monetary and banking unification implied the reappearance of branches, and then their multiplication. Making the practice of unannounced and irregular visits by members of the General Council unrealistic, it led to the re-establishment of inspection in 1852. [First paragraph].

By taking as its object a public policy measure to combat obesity, this article emphasizes the conditions for building trust in a public action mechanism. These conditions are all the more demanding when, as in the case of the voluntary nutritional progress charters studied, a public action instrument is intended to initiate market dynamics. Far from being guaranteed by the support of public authorities alone, the effectiveness of such a tool also depends, in a decisive way, on its capacity to ensure the alignment of the interests of the parties it brings together (public authorities, but also industrial economic actors). This alignment of interests is nevertheless undermined by the management of the mechanism which, guided by the concern to preserve its reputation, undermines its effectiveness by regularly contributing to the misalignment of the parties' interests.

What is the purpose of inspection? Over the last few years, each scandal has raised this question. Whether it is a question of lasagne fraudulently stuffed with horse meat, the maintenance of Mediator on the market by the health authorities, or the use of an offensive grenade by the police that caused the death of Rémi Fraisse, the inspection is systematically called upon to shed light on the events, their causes, the failings of the services or even the faults of individuals, the possible responsibilities and the conclusions to be drawn. Its mission is to collect new information that will reveal the causes of a serious dysfunction within a field of public action. In this context of crisis, the criticisms directed at the inspection focus on its probity and denounce its partiality, questioning the ability of inspectors to issue a word independent of their supervisory authority and / or those they inspect. Thus, in the summer of 2019, the drowning of Steve Maia Caniço after a police intervention on the day of the Fête de la Musique in Nantes led to the referral of the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN), in order to investigate the course of events and to determine whether police violence had taken place. The conclusions of the IGPN report, published in the press, were strongly criticized on the grounds that, since the police were both judge and jury, it was hardly surprising that they exonerated the police of all responsibility. In response to the mobilizations, the Prime Minister, claiming his "desire for total transparency", commissioned the Inspection générale de l'administration (IGA) to conduct a new investigation, the scope of which was extended to the public authorities and the organizers of the event. Although exceptional, this situation shows that criticism of an inspection service does not delegitimize the use of inspection as such. [First paragraph].

The chapter claims forecasting is a process during which forecasts are regularly updates and revised. Paying attention to the dynamics of expectations provides the opportunity to study changes in expectations formed by professionals, and thus give insights into how their labor unfolds. Drawing upon data from a purposely-built database of forecasts running from September 2006 to September 2017, linear and logistic regression models investigate the informational and organizational grounds of forecasts revisions. It suggests that similar forecasts form a consistent sequence, so that revisions mostly consist in the adjustments of ‘old’ forecasts with respect to newly available information. By and large, forecasting means updating former forecasts. Besides, data shows the core activity of forecasting organizations, and in turn their audience, matter to understand the extent to which they revise their forecasts: despite what forecasters claim in interviews, public institutions, among which the IMF or the OECD, tend to revise their forecasts on a wider scale than private banks or insurance companies. Eventually, scrutinizing how forecasts revisions distribute according to the years during which they are produced, stress that during major economic crises, such as the Great Recession, forecasters not only revise their former expectations downward but also upward. This hints at a Durkheim-inspired interpretation of economic crises as re-opening the future.

The current crisis is not only sanitary, it is also economic: confinement is an obstacle to certain consumption practices but also to an important part of the productive activity. The situation prompts comparisons with the great recessions or depressions of the past: some indicators recall the 2008 crisis, others the one that began in 1929... But such parallels leave many questions unanswered: to what depths will the health crisis precipitate the world economies, and the French economy in particular? Will the announced recession be short-lived or, on the contrary, long-lasting? The Covid-19 epidemic is ushering in a period of great uncertainty that requires the production of forecasts, which it paradoxically makes more difficult.

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The paper claims forecasting is a process during which forecasts are regularly updates and revised. Paying attention to the dynamics of expectations provides the opportunity to study changes in expectations formed by professionals, and thus give insights into how their labor unfolds. Drawing upon data from a purposely-built database of forecasts running from Sep-tember 2006 to September 2017, linear and logistic regression models investigate the infor-mational and organizational grounds of forecasts revisions. It it suggests that similar forecasts form a consistent sequence, so that revisions mostly consist in the adjustments of ‘old’ fore-casts with respect to newly available information. By and large, forecasting means updating former forecasts. Besides, data shows the core activity of forecasting organizations, and in turn their audience, matter to understand the extent to which they revise their forecasts: de-spite what forecasters claim in interviews, public institutions, among which the IMF or the OECD, tend to revise their forecasts on a wider scale than private banks or insurance com-panies. Eventually, scrutinizing how forecasts revisions distribute according to the years dur-ing which they are produced, stress that during major economic crises, such as the Great Recession, forecasters not only revise their former expectations downward but also upward. This hints at a Durkheim-inspired interpretation of economic crises as re-opening the future.

Review of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique. Course at the Collège de France 1992-1993. Le Seuil and Raisons d'Agir, Paris, 2017.

Note from the Sociological Dictionary of the Grey Areas of Labor and Employment Relations devoted to intermittent workers in the entertainment industry.

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Economists and behavioral psychologists have identified a series of cognitive biases that alone would explain why our decisions, which should always be in our best interests, are often irrational. They propose that public action relies on these same biases in order to orient our choices, by considering us as organ donors by default, by bringing vegetables closer together and keeping French fries apart at the canteen, by sticking flies to the bottom of urinals, by making speed detectors smile or grimace, or by telling us that we recycle less than our neighbors. Thanks to these "nudges", which are so easy to implement and so inexpensive, we are encouraged to adopt a behavior that helps solve many problems, whether ecological, sanitary, financial or fiscal, without thinking about it or even understanding the issues at stake. Isn't the main bias to reduce political and social issues to problems of individual behavior? This book offers a critical analysis of this knowledge and its application, and explains its success and limitations.

Repeated experiences seem to have brought clear-cut evidence that predicting future economic reality is impossible. The mere existence of an activity such as forecasting therefore turns out to be puzzling: how do forecasters manage to fend off criticisms and persuade themselves and others of their own credibility and that of their activities? The contradiction between what had been anticipated and what actually happened is a common challenge for all belief-based practices, and serves as the basis for comparing present-day macroeconomic forecasters to the magicians that Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss analysed in the early twentieth century. Rather than presenting the condescending claim that sophisticated macroeconometric models barely conceal primitive forms of reasoning, the aim of this chapter is to suggest that, though different, magic and forecasting share important traits. Both are activities whose results become apparent somewhere down the line, and in each case their performance relies on precise forms of representation, purposively designed materials, defined sets of procedures, and trained professionals.

The activity of macroeconomic forecasting is based decisively on the description of the present situation of economies, bringing the activity of the forecaster closer to that of the statistician. Using the typology proposed by A. Desrosières, this text highlights the way in which forecasting activity articulates four different relationships to "data", on the basis of which their "realism" is assessed. It also studies some of the principles by which it is possible to account for their combination: division of labor, categories of classification used by forecasters, instruments used to forecast, temporalities of forecasting exercises.

Behavioral economics (or nudge) is all the rage. How can we explain its success? Can we expect it to revolutionize both economic research and public policy? Its initial use by governments tends to temper optimism.

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This book, devoted to the conditions under which economic actors project themselves into the future in a capitalist regime, is both an ambitious theoretical essay and the outline of a vast research program that J. Beckert intends to include in a more general project: to build a bridge between the tradition of political economy (oriented towards institutional dynamics and macro-social phenomena) and that of economic sociology, more inclined to observe, at the microsocial level, individual actions and interactions. [First paragraph].

A "bi-media" press title, i.e. one with a print and a web support, is understood as a space in which two different journalistic production spaces coexist, generally under the same name, which do not address the same people or, in any case, not in the same way, which are consumed differently and which do not present the same editorial properties. One of the challenges facing a bi-media title is to create the conditions for a peaceful, or harmonious, articulation between the two media, or else risk the resurgence of their rivalry. This text proposes to contribute to the reflection on this combination of web and print media by describing some of its concrete modalities. First of all, this undertaking presupposes a reorganization of the division of labor within an editorial office, which is not limited to associating certain editors exclusively with a particular medium. The setting up of conditions of non-rivalry between print and web invites, then, to organize the circulation of readers as well as texts between the two media. In both cases, the difficulty of setting up a real collaboration between two media whose respective attributions remain partly unclear, and whose "status" differs widely, becomes apparent.

Review of Benjamin Lemoine's book, L'Ordre de la dette. Enquête sur les infortunes de l'Etat et la prospérité du marché (La Découverte, 2016).

Tracing the way in which an accounting category has become a "problem" for public action, Benjamin Lemoine proposes a political sociology, both in the academic sense of the deployment of a reflection that takes politics as its object, and critically, since it is a question of denaturalizing "obviousness" and reminding us how much they are the consequence of choices and contingencies. In some respects, the thesis defended in the book appears from the nod to Sade in the subtitle, which implicitly associates "the State" with virtue and the market with vice. (first lines).

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Insofar as journalism corresponds to an activity of information production, its stakes are fundamentally temporal. As Alban Bensa and Éric Fassin remind us in their introduction to the dossier that the journal Terrain devoted to the notion of "event" in 2002, media discourse easily relies on the "event" insofar as it constitutes a break in intelligibility: better still, this is its very project - unlike the social sciences, which are accustomed to paying attention to structures and their permanence in the long term, and as such are hampered in apprehending such breaks. In some respects, journalism works with temporality, whether it is a question of its disruptions (in the case of the "event"), of its repetitions (as shown by those recurring subjects that the professional jargon calls "chestnuts"), of its anticipation (when reports follow one another while converging on the same point, e.g. an election), or of its twists and turns (examples of "media soap operas" abound) (first lines).

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Two books highlight the importance of quantification in contemporary technologies of power and the forms of resistance to it. Yet, is activism for an emancipatory and non-subjugating use of numbers a reality or a desirable horizon? About: "Benchmarking. The State under statistical pressure" and "Statactivism. How to fight with numbers" (Isabelle Bruno, Emmanuel Didier and Julien Prévieux for the second book).

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Considered from the angle of work or profession, political jobs are now among the objects of sociology, beyond the sole scope of the social sciences of politics. Sebastien Michon's book claims to be part of this line. It invites us to pay attention to the European parliamentary space, which has been relatively neglected in favor of its national or local counterparts, and to take an interest in parliamentary work by focusing not on its "scene" (embodied by the hemicycle), but on its "backstage", populated by assistants who form the empirical object of the study. The underlying question, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, concerns the nature of the capital that these positions allow to accumulate. It sheds an original light on the nature of parliamentary work in this particular political space that is the European Parliament (EP), and is based on the exploitation of abundant material, both qualitative (interviews and ethnographic observations, which are used sparingly in the book) and quantitative [First paragraph].

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Economic forecasting aims at outlining possible futures and thus forming actors’ expectations. It describes an institutional environment actors conform to. Expectations look similar to what Keynes (1936) named “convention” and may give rise to speculative bubbles and self-fulfilling prophecies (Orléan, 2011). The latter provides paradoxical evidence of the institutional nature of foreseen environment: the common belief that behaviors shall take future states of the economy into consideration contributes to the actual coming of these states. To put it in the classical economic terms of F. H. Knight, (1921), economic forecasting is a way to shift from uncertain to risky futures by translating scenarios about the future into numbers, e.g. GDP growth forecasts. Forecasts may be regarded as “beliefs” which guide economic actions. They emerge and endure because the reasons for which they are endorsed make sense to actors located in a peculiar historic environment (Weber, 1905). A key issue is thus that of beliefs-standing in adverse situations and of the conditions under which rational actors interpret a sign as a “confirmation” or an “invalidation” of their beliefs. One of the key issues of the presentation is to understand how beliefs and expectations maintain when challenged, or proven “wrong” – and therefore to deal with the issue of “error” in the field of economic forecasting. The word “error” (as well as adjectives like “right” or “wrong”) is kept between quotes to underline it is not here considered from a positivist point of view which attempts to assess forecasts accuracies to a so-called “reality”, but regarded with respect to how actors react to what they regard as “erroneous” statements. In other words, the presentation studies the conditions under which beliefs are “suspended” in situations of fictional expectations (Beckert, 2013). It argues “error” can be defined in various ways, depending on the way forecasting is regarded: the technical limit of a practical activity, a drawback with the founding beliefs of a field, or a threat to forecasters’ trustworthiness and market positions. Firstly, “error” is to be understood with reference to the practical activity of macroeconomic forecasting. Economic future is not known and the coming economic situation is too singular and complex to be exhaustively described, hence forecasting involves conjectures and deliberation: it implies “prudential practices” (Champy, 2011). This process decisively relies on the gathering of information through different channels, including both fellow forecasters and economic actors (Evans, 1997. Reichman, 2013). The forecasting “work in progress” leads to continuous revision in order to reduce “residual errors”. In such perspective, “error” marks the ever-postponed limit to knowledge and highlights the discrepancies between what is known (of the relationship between variables in an econometric model and the values they are expected to take) and the actual economic situations. Secondly, ex post-assessed “errors” are not usually considered as “mistakes” (from a forecaster) but as results of events that could not have been anticipated: the more forecasters missed them, the more unexpectable they were. Drawing from the example of the Survey of Professional Forecasters conducted by the ECB, the presentation shed light on the ways “errors” are explained by forecasters, who emphasize unforeseen inflationist shocks or the similarities of information used by forecasters (Garcia, 2003.

[This book is the result of a common concern among various studies conducted in recent years on the use of statistical data in research on journalism. Indeed, statistical data often appear both as an indispensable tool for objectification and as an obstacle to analysis. Whether they come from institutions (CCIJP, Audiens pension fund, INSEE) or are developed by researchers themselves from different corpuses (surveys, questionnaires, online professional social networks), these data must be questioned from the point of view of their production conditions, since these influence the types of research permitted and the results produced. In order to cross these different researchers' views, the book is organized according to three levels of analysis of the journalistic field. The first one takes into account the space of the professional group as a whole (France and Belgium). The second level examines the smaller but more fragmented space of media companies and newsrooms. Finally, the third one is directly interested in the actors through the journalists' careers. This collection follows two study days organized on January 15 and December 13, 2013 by CARISM-ANR/AMMEJ and CRAPE.

Considered from the perspective of work or profession, political professions are now among the objects of sociology, beyond the sole perimeter of the social sciences of politics. Sébastien Michon's book claims to be part of this line. It invites us to pay attention to the European parliamentary space, relatively neglected in favor of its national or local counterparts, and to take an interest in parliamentary work by focusing not on its "stage" (embodied by the hemicycle), but on its "backstage", populated by assistants who form the empirical object of the study. The underlying questioning, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, concerns the nature of the capital that these positions allow to accumulate. It sheds original light on the nature of parliamentary work in this particular political space that is the European Parliament (EP), and is based on the exploitation of abundant material, both qualitative (interviews and ethnographic observations, which are used sparingly in the book) and quantitative [First paragraph].

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Journalistic work is structurally confronted with urgency. Contrary to other sectors based on a just-in-time flow, urgency is not only due to the random failures of the production cycle: it is also due to the very nature of the raw material, the news, which must be processed in the context of a collective organization. Based on observations and interviews conducted within the print media, this article studies the way in which urgency is part of daily journalistic production. It highlights, in this flow of unique products, the efforts of serialization and the slim possibility of negotiating irreversibility - inherent to industrial processes. The solution to the problems posed by urgency is mainly through stock management, which underlines the central role and the resources of forecasting in situations where the very content of the work is marked by uncertainty.

Two topoi relating to the artistic retributions cohabit curiously. A first one, that of "art for art's sake", insists on the gratuity of the engagement in an activity defined as vocational and which would be accomplished fully only in its perfect autonomy. The monetary retributions are considered as a threat or a defilement altering the purity of the activity. The commitment to work is then based on the exclusive quest for symbolic rewards (pleasure, prestige of the profession, etc.). The second scheme insists on monetary rewards, and on the existence of a star system involving spectacular inequalities of income in the world of the arts, which paradoxically remain legal (Menger, 2002).

This work aims to study the effects of various measures for compensating intermittent workers in the entertainment industry. Using a model and data from the Caisse des Congés Spectacles (on contracts, salaries, length of employment, and periods of non-employment), the aim is to measure the differences between these systems in terms of the number of people concerned, the contributions received and the benefits paid by unemployment insurance. Why work with data from the Caisse des Congés Spectacles rather than UNEDIC? Because their scope is broader and they make it possible to take into account not only the intermittent workers compensated by Pôle Emploi but also those who are not compensated but could be if the eligibility rules were to change (.).

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Journalistic work is confronted structurally with urgent situations. Unlike other sectors using just-in-time methods, here urgency is not only the result of random failures in the production cycle, it also relates to the nature of the commodity itself— current affairs—which must be handled within the context of a collective organization. Based on observations and interviews in the written press, this article examines how urgency impacts journalistic production on a daily basis. It brings to light attempts at serialization within this flow of unique products and the slim possibility of negotiating irreversibility—inherent in industrial processes. The solution to the problems posed by urgent situations principally stems from inventory management, emphasizing the central role of prediction making in situations where the content of the work is itself characterized by uncertainty.

Work is becoming more precarious and employment is crumbling. From subsidized contracts to temporary work, from part-time to fixed-term contracts, the mechanisms and statuses have multiplied to fuel a movement that brings an ever-increasing number of workers to a world of shortened employment. On the model of the art world, they are sometimes called "intermittent": in addition to the intermittent workers in the entertainment industry, there are intermittent workers in research, writing, teaching, catering and journalism. All of them are confronted with the uncertainty of their remuneration, their working hours, and even the possibility of remaining in the labor market or reconciling their personal and professional lives. Finally, turbulence appears in their careers: how to build a long trajectory from brief commitments? The joint study of intermittent actors and freelance journalists provides an answer. It shows what intermittence does to work, and how it affects individual destinies. This sheds light on the organizational principles of careers marked by discontinuity. The markets of actors and freelancers are thus revealed to be anarchic only in appearance. The domestication of the worlds of intermittence remains possible, even if it does not take the same form everywhere.

While the development of fixed-term or part-time employment has been one of the major changes in the labor market in recent decades, making intermittent employment the norm in the labor market is problematic. Indeed, this is to forget that the labor market in France is organized around the full-time permanent contract. Discourses calling for the advent of liberated work fail to take into account the fact that special forms of employment are mainly found in the dominated parts of the labor market. Finally, this article describes the salient features of the intermittent entertainment market, which is regularly taken as a model for recent developments.

Intermittent artists consent to very large variations in salary. The artists' positions on their salaries and the reasons they give for choosing to participate or not in a project provide a methodological entry point into the labyrinth of remunerations, salary and otherwise, associated with artistic work. This case highlights the fact that, far from having a compensatory relationship in a zero-sum game, monetary and non-monetary rewards are not disjointed dimensions and are not necessarily opposed. The two registers are apprehended together in the anticipation of the quality of the projects.

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The aim of the thesis is to highlight the processes by which markets are organized in which uncertainty reaches very high levels and the very nature of the good exchanged is problematic. These markets, described as "uncertain", would mark the exhaustion of a Fordist ideal of labor exchange, now replaced by brief, ephemeral relationships with multiple employers. This hypothesis is examined through the study of the case of freelance journalists and intermittent actors. The analysis mobilizes the tools of economic sociology and highlights the relevance of exchange relations in describing these markets. They first reflect their structure. The examples of the social construction of these relations show, in their divergences, the way in which these markets are organized around segmentation phenomena. The degree of confusion about the nature of the goods exchanged, whether products or labor, as well as the positioning of firms in this system of markets, contribute to defining the temporalities in which these employment links are inscribed. These then inform these markets. In particular, several regimes of relationships coexist in uncertain markets, and the engagement of individuals in a durable exchange relationship profoundly modifies the competitive constraints that are exerted on them and introduces predictability and organization into individual activity. The existence of this second regime of relations also questions the market structures themselves, and blurs the boundary between market and organization.

This thesis aims to highlight the processes by which markets are organized in which uncertainty reaches very high levels and the very nature of the good exchanged is problematic. These markets, described as "uncertain", would mark the exhaustion of a Fordist ideal of labor exchange, now replaced by brief, ephemeral relationships with multiple employers. This hypothesis is examined through the study of the case of freelance journalists and intermittent actors. The analysis of the drama and freelance markets mobilizes the tools of economic sociology and highlights the relevance of exchange relations in the description of these markets. First of all, they reflect their structure. The examples of the social construction of these relations thus show, in their divergences, the way in which these markets are organized around segmentation phenomena. The degree of confusion about the nature of the goods exchanged, whether products or labor, as well as the positioning of firms in this system of markets, contribute to defining the temporalities in which these employment links are inscribed. These then inform these markets. In particular, several regimes of relationships coexist in uncertain markets, and the engagement of individuals in a durable exchange relationship profoundly modifies the competitive constraints that are exerted on them and introduces predictability and organization into individual activity. The existence of this second regime of relations also questions the market structures themselves: they blur the boundary between market and organization, and complicate the segmentation of these markets.