Christian de Montlibert

Christian De Montlibert (-), is a sociologist. Professor emeritus with the University Marc Bloch (Strasbourg), member of the CRESS (Research center and of studies in social sciences). Christian de Montlibert is the publication director of the review sociological Regards (two numbers per annum). Christian de Montlibert is the President of the Association of the Friends of Abdelmalek Sayad.

Topics of studies of predilection

Christian de Montlibert produced an original work. After having supported a thesis of third cycle on the aspirations with the promotion of paid according to courses of the evening, then a doctorate of State on the relationship between the formation and professional mobility, it continued searchs for Sociologie of work (studied the tasks of the workmen of a rolling mill, workmen of maintenance, the activities of the agents of control in companies of electronics, the practices of the nurses, the functions of the production engineers, the evolution of the employment of the young people, interventions of the welfare workers in the family life, conditions of exercise of the architectural professions), analyzed the changes and changes of the world contemporary (the violence of unemployment, social conflicts pulled by the closing of companies, collective mobilizations regional), worked with a Sociology of education (continuing education, transformations of the organization of research and higher education), led analyzes of the political domination and capacity of the administrations of State.

Professor and reader, Christian de Montlibert knew to bring the researchers who worked under his direction to explore new ways with rigor: the work completed under its direction is known for their great quality and many its former students are now teacher-researchers in French and foreign universities.

Today Professor emeritus, it continues to frame work of young researchers and directs the review which it founded - Sociological Regards.

Christian de Montlibert is also known for his political standpoint on the social world within the framework of association Raisons To act.

Biography

Christian de Montlibert, born in 1937 in Orleans, whose father was killed in June 1940 (quotation with the order of the army corps), knew the conditions of existence generated by the war then many constraints which obliged it to be a House master in schools of investigating Orleans then for Parisian research departments at the same time as it follows the course of the studies of psychology of the Institute of Psychology of the University of Paris directed then by Paul Fraisse.

Very interested by the statistics, the experimental method and social psychology, it will be supported by the professor Jean Stoetzel who will direct his thesis of third cycle and by the director of the Laboratory of Social Psychology of the Sorbonne, Robert Pagès, which will propose to him to enter its team where it will learn in contact with this defender from an imaginative and rigorous social psychology, the requirements of research. In 1959 Christian de Montlibert marries Nadia Warlamow with whom they will have three children: Catherine, Renaud, ARIANE.

Continuing education in Nancy

After his military service in a psychiatric unit of tracking (1961-1963), Christian de Montlibert was selected by the team of professors that Bertrand Schwartz was setting up to develop the search and the practices for training of the adults with the University center of Economic cooperation and Social of Nancy (CUCES) initially then, as Maître Assisting within the National institute for the Training of the Adults (INFA). During ten years it furrowed Is France, of iron and steel Lorraine to the companies of Belfort, met the most various groups (foremen, engineers, workmen, nursery nurses, welfare workers…). Its open-minded and its adhesion with an ethnographic approach enabled him to acquire a knowledge of very varied social practices.

During this period, at the same time as it concluded its thesis of third cycle on “the aspirations with promotion; pupils of the courses of the evening” under the direction of Jean Stoetzel then his thesis of State “social mobility and education of the adults: to be promoted tallies; the higher promotion of work, organization, tendencies and results” under the direction of Alain Girard, it worked out, with Marcel Lesne and Philippe Fritsch, of the elements for a sociology of the Continuing education and especially a methodological new approach of the sociological analysis of the work which will lead it to observe a rolling mill of the iron and steel industry, to inquire in the cement factories, to analyze the functions of nurse, production engineer, technicians of control and architect.

Its work on further education will lead it to meet Pierre Bourdieu and to feel very near to its analyzes. Very implied in the tensions generated by the concurrent forces which traversed the “Complex of further education of Nancy” he will be opposed to the transformation, after 1968, of the National institute for the Training of the Adults (INFA) in agency in matter industrial and commercial.

The University of Strasbourg

After the closing of the institute of higher education which was the INFA, Christian de Montlibert will join the university of Nancy initially then will be elected university lecturer then professor with the Université of the Letters and social sciences of Strasbourg (become then Université Marc Bloch).

From 1973 to 2006 (departure with the retirement) Christian de Montlibert will ensure its teaching in first year of DEUG (introduction to the sociological reasoning), in license (fundamental concepts and concepts), controls some (various types of domination) in DEA (practical of research). He will direct several theses of State, Habilitations and theses like many reports of DEA, controls and license. It directed the Research center and of Studies in Social sciences of the university Marc Bloch (CRESS).

It ensured of the lesson in Greece, with the Université of Lausanne, the Frankreich Zentrum of the university of Freiburg. In 1971, benefitting from the increase in the appropriations to the doctoral formations, it has creates Sociological the Regards review. Elected official professor emeritus, it animates a group of research within the research center in Social sciences (CRESS) of the university Marc Bloch of Strasbourg.

Very implied in the social movement of 1995 it did not cease since giving an opinion, within association Raisons to act and in the press, on the industrial relations policies and educational.

Contributions to the sociological analysis

Its work, registered in the structuralist-constructiviste orientation of Pierre Bourdieu and characterized by a requirement of constant confrontation with the data, is guided by an interest for the forms of Domination: that it is the domination of the constraints of the work stations, the néo-liberal economic domination and the violence of unemployment, the interiorized domination which results from the forms of “soft domination” of the welfare workers or continuing education, the domination symbolic system of the political discourses, journalistic or of the architectural forms, official institutional domination. Its contribution to the development of sociology is organized around the comprehension of the forms and the effects of the dominations “of their structuring in things and various objects - the material world -; in organizations, bureaucracies, undertaken - the world of the institutions -; in manners of seeing and of saying - the world of the culture -; in manners of thinking and of acting - the world of the agents…”

Remain that for him the forms of domination do not exist that as much as groups of agents implement them from where an interest for the practices of those which exert it in various fields of the social practice (banking, managers of undertaking, journalists, consultants, trainers, welfare workers, politicians and leaders official, engineers). To approach the forms of domination also led it to study its effects and consequences and the individual and collective reactions which they can cause: psychological contradictions and tensions, inventiveness of knowledge and knowledge to make to control the work conditions, strategies of promotion, demonstrations collective against the dismissals or of the political decisions considered as unjust, reports/ratios of violence.

The interiorization of the social reports/ratios is analyzed in various research devoted to the “social Trajectoires”, (work undertaken between 1964 and 1968). It is known that the positions and situations of the individuals and the groups are not only determined by the conditions of existence and the initial inequalities but also by the manner of reaching it. Thus the search for a promotion by a diploma obtained in the course of the evening can, for some, being the continuation of a social rise already started with the former generation but can, also, for a big number of individuals, being an attempt at reclassification making following a downgrading (compared to the situation of the members of the family group). Whereas the tables of Social mobility which compare the professional position of the father with that of the son or the girl hold account, at best, of the transformation of the structure of employment, the social trajectory makes it possible to integrate the courses in a structure itself in transformation. The use of the concept of social trajectory also makes it possible to pay a larger attention to the temporal effects and the combinations of elements and to combine an objectifying analysis (slope, length, form of the trajectory) and an analysis of the structure, volume and modes of acquisition of the resources that agent can mobilize.

At the same period, Marcel Lesne and Christian de Montlibert, guests to build a method of analysis of the situations of work in order to release from the “requirements in formation”, not only underlined the social relativity of the concept of needs which receives different significances according to the adopted ideological point of view but showed, in an article published in 1969 in sociological Epistémologie , which the social practices - in fact professional practices - are always the result of an interaction between two processes: that of the constraints produced by former social reports/ratios crystallized in payments and objects and that in the manners of thinking, of making, of seeing and of feeling which result from the interiorization of the same former social reports/ratios and which, under these conditions, only the “modus operandi” could be the object of a sociological analysis of work. Crystallization (objects, organization) Practical former reports/ratios social social Interiorization (manners of thinking)

The study of the practices of the Welfare workers (social workers, nursery nurses, instructresses of family economy) enabled him to show how the relative autonomy of social work rested on a process which made it possible to emerge from the institutions of supervision which were the Church and the State thanks to a psychologisation of the actions of moral framing which, although soft manner of intervention, did not remain less one means of social control of the private life of the popular family members and contributed about it to the social Reproduction since this vehicle system of the “models of control” which organize the reports/ratios with the dominated fractions of the Popular classes.

In the continuity of these studies of the effects of the social situations, the work of Christian de Montlibert “the violence of the Chômage” treats effects of the economic domination of the Néo-libéralisme - pulled by a will of the managers of the Investment trust to increase the financial profits and justified by an apology for the risk, reason and mondialized modernity - by showing the sufferings which it generates at the discharged employees and social costs (situation of the children, stigmatization of the young people, etc) such decisions.

The analysis of the collective Mobilizations in the Lorraine iron and steel while making it possible to articulate a monographic study of a situation concretes and a theoretical reflection as well challenges the explanations which seek in the needs or the desires of the individuals the causes of the dissatisfaction then with the class action suit that those which privilege the any power of the mobilizing capacities of the bureaucratic “apparatuses” of the trade unions and political parties. This design dismisses the mechanist explanation between an objective situation and the action by showing that the dominated categories are not intended by nature, or automatically, to be opposed and to revolt. “the claim, far from being a immanente production of the relation of domination is also the result of a social construction” . The Revendication depends on a “work” of the agents most mobilized at every time of the process, aiming at giving a direction to reality, to put at the day the dissatisfactions, to make them perceive, to make them dicibles, to transform them into “asserted” reasons. The process which leads to the collective mobilization is thus unceasingly crossed by fights.

Under these conditions a essentialist definition of the social groups becomes impossible since the group called to not only mobilize itself neither is given in advance nor necessarily homogeneous but that it is in perpetual redefinition. Christian de Montlibert, from this point of view, studied various mobilizations of which regionalistic mobilizations, demonstrations of 1995, the violences made at the time of the sporting meetings (Heysel) and the ways in which the press, while giving an account of it, takes part in their construction.

The forms and types of domination primarily rest on a control of the social Reproduction or more exactly on an organization of the social reproduction so that it is as well as possible made interests of the social groups which ensure such or such type of domination. From this point of view Christian de Montlibert analyzed the processes which allow the perenniality of the forms and models of the Domination symbolic system well beyond the social situations which allowed their development as it is the case with architecture and town planning. The State and the political struggles to control its administrative machinery occupy an essential place in these devices. The analysis, articulated around the concepts of political capital (which one can study the various forms) and of political field (which one can study the relation with double direction with the remainder of social space), makes it possible to better include/understand in what the political domination contributes to the reproduction of the economic and social domination. Concomitantly, today, one attends the rise to power of supranational organizations, privileged places of the exercise of the capacity and the reproduction of the new international leading classes, which contribute, with a deterritorialisation resulting from the economic field, with the deterioration of “the Social state”. This set of themes led Christian de Montlibert to be interested in the current transformations of higher education and research. These reforms are led according to a logic manager which rest on a Néo-liberal design of the individual and the social one which develops to the extreme the individuals considered as “subjects” “undertaking”. This néo-liberal prospect regards as exchanges of the terms like “modernization”, “adaptation”, “communication”, “optimization of the human stock management” and wants for this reason to subordinate higher education and research to the “request” of the market.

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