Vincent Dubois
Fellowship 2014
ARCHIVE
Vincent Dubois, sociologist and political scientist born in 1966, belongs to the SAGE research unit (UMR CNRS 7263). A former a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2007-2012), and of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, USA (2012-2013), he is currently Professor at the Institute for Political Studies-University of Strasbourg, where he runs the master programme in political and social science. He received the bronze medal of the CNRS in 2001. His research proposes a critical sociological approach to public policy that he mainly applied in the fields of culture, language, poverty and welfare. He has published more than 70 papers in scientific journals and volumes and eight books, including recently The Bureaucrat and the Poor: Encounters in French Welfare Offices, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2010; La politique culturelle [Cultural Policy], Paris, Belin, 2012; Le politique, l’artiste et le gestionnaire [The political leader, the artist and the manager], Bellecombe, Croquant, 2012 (co-authored); La vie au guichet. Relations bureaucratiques et traitement de la misère, 3rd edition, Paris, Economica; The Sociology of Wind Bands. Amateur Music Between Cultural Domination and Autonomy, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2013 (co-authored); La culture comme vocation [Culture as a Vocation], Paris, Raisons d’Agir, 2013 [English version forthcoming, Routledge, 2015].
Link to the home page of Vincent Dubois.
Crédits photos : Pascal Bastien
Controlling the entitled: a new watchword of the welfare state?
Among numerous innovations and changes, welfare reform in western countries has recently revitalized welfare control, defined as the institutional arrangements and practices aimed at checking that recipients comply with the rules of welfare benefits. Why did this revival of control occur? How has welfare fraud been constructed and promoted as a public problem? How has a bureaucratic routine been raised to the status of a political and policy issue? How is control organized and implemented? What are its impacts on the lives of the recipients? By addressing these questions, this research provides an original contribution to the analysis of the new balance between politics, economics and morals that define the contemporary social state. It shows how legal regulation, financial constraints, surveillance technologies and direct interactions between bureaucrats and clients intertwine in the new government of the underprivileged. This project is based on empirical research on the French case, set in an international perspective, from the 1990s to the present. It focuses on the control of minimum benefits recipients and on the control of the unemployed.
