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Revisiting the History of Socio-professional Classification in France*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Thomas Amossé
Thomas Amossé*
Affiliation:
Centre d'études de l’emploi (Center for the Study of Employment)
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Abstract

The result of a process begun in the nineteenth century, the French system of socio-professional classification (code des catégories socio-professionnelles) was drawn up between 1951 and 1954 and has only been slightly modified since. With no strong theoretical framework and conceived according to a realist approach, it gave substance to social classes in the description of postwar society. During a period of “reworking” (1978-1981), it became an exciting topic of sociological exploration, furnishing a representation of Pierre Bourdieu’s two-dimensional social space and serving as a laboratory for the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. In a subsequent period of “updating” (1995-2001), administrative caution regarding changes contrasted with the evolution of categories used in labor law and the goal of analytical purity underpinned by econometrics. The history of this classification details the peculiar position of a statistical tool for representing the social world, ostensibly static amidst constant changes to the institution that managed it, the actors who used it, the social categories—everyday or legal—to which it referred, and, finally, the sociological theories that gave it a conceptual grounding.

Type
Stratifications
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 68 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 697 - 732
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2013

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Footnotes

*

This essay owes much to the writings of Alain Desrosières, and to the discussions I had with him about the evolution of the socio-professional classification. The initial reflections to which these gave rise were shared with him before his sad decease in 2014, and this article is humbly dedicated to him. Apart from possible errors or imprecisions that remain my full responsibility, the analyses presented here have benefited from discussions with Emmanuel Didier, and above all with Laurent Thévenot who, being both witness to this history and actor in it, took the time to meet with me at length. Cécile Brousse, Cyprien Tasset, and Loup Wolff also agreed to read and comment on preliminary versions, while Sylvie Le Minez and Louis Meuric, currently with the Employment division of INSEE, opened their office to me. My thanks go to them all. † In Anglophone contexts, and indeed on the European level, the standard term is “socio-economic classification.” However, throughout this article we have chosen to translate the French nomenclature socio-professionnelle as “socio-professional classification” in order to reflect the specificity of the French system. This follows the practice adopted by INSEE in translations of its policy documents—Annales.

References

1. This article will not discuss the origins of the classification, which go back much further than the 1950s or even 1936, when the question of using statistics according to socio-economic category was first raised. See Desrosières, Alain, “Éléments pour l’histoire des nomenclatures socio-professionelles,” in Pour une histoire de la statistique, vol. 1, Contributions (Paris: INSEE, 1977), 155–231 Google Scholar.

2. Desrosières, Alain and Thévenot, Laurent, Les catégories socio-professionnelles (Paris: La Découverte, 1988)Google Scholar.

3. Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Ève, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Elliott, Gregory (London: Verso, 2005)Google Scholar.

4. One might mention, for example, the difficulty of estimating the number of children belonging to non-cohabiting or separated couples with shared custody, or the impossibility of counting same-sex couples discussed in Laurent Toulemon, “Individus, familles, ménages, logements: les compter, les décrire,” Travail, genre et société 26, no. 2 (2011): 47-66, or again the problematic exercise of delimiting budgetary households.

5. Amossé, Thomas and Peretti, Gaël de, “Hommes et femmes en ménage statistique. Une valse à trois temps,” Travail, genre et société 26, no. 2 (2011): 23–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Desrosières, “Éléments pour l’histoire.”

7. As well as the various editions of the code (dated 1951, 1952, 1954, 1962, 1968, 1975, 1982, 1994, and 2003), these include: Porte, Jean, “Les catégories socio-professionnelles,” in Traité de sociologie du travail, ed. Naville, Pierre and Friedmann, Georges (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), 240–50 Google Scholar; Joëlle Affichard, ed., Pour une histoire de la statistique, vol. 2, Matériaux (Paris: INSEE, 1987); Alain Desrosières and Laurent Thévenot, “Les mots et les chiffres. Les nomenclatures socio-professionnelles,” Économie et statistique 110, no. 1 (1979): 49-65; Alain Desrosières, Alain Goy, and Laurent Thévenot, “L’identité sociale dans le travail statistique. La nouvelle nomenclature des professions et catégories socioprofessionnelles,” Économie et statistique 152 (1983): 55-81; Desrosières and Thévenot, Les catégories; Paul Champsaur, ed., Cinquante ans d’INSEE ou la conquête du chiffre (Paris: INSEE, 1996); Pierru, Emmanuel and Spire, Alexis, “Le crépuscule des catégories socioprofessionnelles,” Revue française de sciences politiques 58, no. 3 (2008): 457–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. These archives contain working documents relating to the reworking of the classification between 1978 and 1981, manuscript notes, and transcriptions of interviews conducted by Desrosières in connection with his study of the genesis and uses of the classification (1975-77), as well as an interview with Jean Porte from March 1976 and two additional letters received from him, dated September 2, 1977 and February 12, 1979. These original documents are part of a collection currently being assembled by the French National Archives.

9. Jean Porte, interview with Alain Desrosières, March 1976.

10. Desrosières, “Éléments pour l’histoire,” 227nn37 and 38.

11. Paul Champsaur describes him “coming to meetings not wearing a tie, with the look of a ‘mad scientist.’” Champsaur, Cinquante ans d’INSEE, 58.

12. Ibid., 55.

13. Porte, interview; Porte, “Les catégories,” 243.

14. This code contained eleven “major groups,” two of which were further divided into two subgroups. The groups included “farmers and farm managers,” “proprietors, managers, and officials, except farm,” etc. Occupation and Industry Classifications, US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (Washington DC, 1940), 3-15, http:// www.archives.gov/research/census/1940/occupational-codes.pdf .

15. Porte, interview.

16. However, as Desrosières notes in “Éléments pour l’histoire,” 179, the compressed level of the first edition of the code in 1951 was close to the code used by Raymond Lévy-Bruhl and Pierre Thionnet in 1948.

* The term “cadre,” sometimes translated as “middle manager” or “executive staff,” is notoriously difficult to render into English as, unlike “manager” or “executive,” it also includes a company’s professional staff. What is more, the evolution of cadre status over the twentieth century means that the French word is strongly nuanced by its links to the emergence of a new, professional middle class. For a discussion of the term, see the translation of Boltanski’s, Luc Les cadres. La formation d’un groupe social (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1982 Google Scholar) by Goldhammer, Arthur, The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, which likewise declines to provide a direct translation of “cadre.”—Annales.

17. Desrosières, “Éléments pour l’histoire,” 230.

18. Ibid., 231.

19. Porte, interview.

20. These classifications for collective bargaining agreements are named after Alexandre Parodi, minister of labor from September 1944 to October 1945, on account of the decrees regarding the classification of workers that he issued in 1945. These enshrined in law the definition of the major occupational categories of i) manual workers, ii) employees, technicians, and supervisory staff, and iii) engineers and cadres. For more detail on the connections between the Parodi categories and the socio-professional classification, see Desrosières, , “Éléments pour l’histoire,” 172 Google Scholar.

21. Porte, interview.

22. Ibid.

23. Preserving his links with philosophy, Porte “remained in contact with comrades who were still oriented towards sociology or social psychology (such as René Pagès)” and “wanted to establish sociological projects at INSEE, as there were at the INED (Institut national d’études démographiques, National Institute of Demographic Research).” Porte, interview.

24. The gradual adjustment of the code was made after its application in different surveys that Porte lists in the letter to Desrosières dated September 2, 1977. Three of these operations involved researchers external to INSEE: Pierre Clément and Nelly Xylias, Suzanne Frère, and Ida Berger.

25. Porte, “Les catégories,” 243.

26. Desrosières, “Éléments pour l’histoire,” 230.

27. INSEE, Code des catégories socio-professionnelles (Paris: INSEE, 1954), 6 and 8.

28. Boltanski, The Making of a Class.

29. “These groups [the grouping together of socio-professional categories by the first figure of their code] do not seem [to me] to have a major significance in themselves. It was envisaged that this first figure would be used for convenience. That is why we wanted this grouping to be the least incoherent possible. It can be used for certain works, but does not make any further claim.” Cited in Desrosières, “Éléments pour l’histoire,” 230.

30. This architecture reflects the need to classify the whole population, which implies having groups that are not exclusively hierarchical in order to take the incommensurable spaces between different social groups into account. The positions taken by Porte in the mid-1970s indicate his attachment to the idea of a hierarchy, which could have been the basis of the classification if the measure of income had been available. Porte, interview.

31. When he published the results of the study on radio audiences in 1952, Porte included a “factorial analysis of tastes” (based on the centroid method of Louis Thurstone, derived from psychology), on the table of correlations between socio-professional categories and preferences for different types of program. Jean Porte, “Une enquête par sondage sur l’auditoire radiophonique,” Bulletin mensuel de la statistique, supplément trimestriel 1 and 3 (1954): respectively 31-58 and 22-24.

32. See the initial analyses of Desabie, Jacques, “La mobilité sociale en France,” Bulletin d’information de l’INSEE 1 (1956): 25–63 Google Scholar, conducted on the basis of the employment survey of 1953.

33. See the survey that Alain Girard conducted in 1959, Le choix du conjoint (Paris: PUF, 1964).

34. A rapid consultation of journals such as Population, Revue française de sociologie, Revue française de sciences politiques, and Annales ESC published during the first half of the 1960s is enough to convince one of this point. Not to mention, for example, the works of Bourdieu and his coauthors in the 1960s, in which the code was systematically used.

35. For a more precise description of the academic context in these postwar years, see Pollak, Michael, “La planification des sciences sociales,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2, no. 3 (1976): 105–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. “Le code des catégories socio-professionnelle,” Économie et statistique 4 (1969): 65-67, here p. 65. This article was published on the occasion of the fifth edition of the code, which was used for the 1968 census.

37. For a formulation and some initial results, see INSEE, “L’utilisation du code des CSP, de la théorie à la pratique,” memo no. 194/930, October 29, 1975.Google Scholar

38. It formed part of a series of works initiated by Guibert, Bernard, Laganier, Jean, and Volle’s, Michel article “Essai sur les nomenclatures industrielles,” Économie et statistique 20 (1971): 22–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, to which Desrosières’s article “Éléments pour l’histoire” was one of the major contributions.

39. Affichard, Pour une histoire, 13-14.

40. They were however qualified further into the introduction, when Malinvaud recalled that “statisticians have the duty of collecting all information that is pertinent for whatever group is in question.” Affichard, Pour une histoire, 14. While historical analysis is necessary, it does not invalidate the possibility of positive knowledge and objective information.

41. For a list of all INSEE staff involved, see Desrosières, Goy, and Thévenot, , “L’identité sociale dans le travail statistique,” 73 Google Scholar. Gollac and Seys were in charge of the presentation of the reworked classification from 1982 on.

42. Alain Desrosières describes the sociologist’s encounter with INSEE statisticians in “Une rencontre improbable et ses deux héritages,” in Travailler avec Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Pierre M. Encrevé and Rose-Marie Lagrave (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 209-18, especially pp. 209-10.

43. Champsaur, Cinquante ans d’INSEE, 67.

44. Pollak, “La planification,” 118-19.

45. Desrosières, Alain, “Les origines statisticiennes de l’économie des conventions. Réflexivité et expertise,” Œconomica 1, no. 2 (2011): 299–319 Google Scholar, here p. 301.

46. Laurent Thévenot, interview with Thomas Amossé, May 2013.

47. Boltanski has recently used similar terms to describe the prevailing atmosphere in “the boss’s” laboratory. He stresses the critical freedom that inspired the young sociologists of this time, and was exerted against the “ruling ideology.” See Luc, Rendre la réalité inacceptable. À propos de La production de l’idéologie dominante (Paris: Démopolis, 2008), 15ff.

48. Besides INSEE, the Ministry of Education and Research, the Ministry of Labor, the Civil Service secretariat, the Planning Commission, CÉREQ, ANPE, ONISEP, and the Center for the Study of Employment (Centre d’études de l’emploi, CEE) all took part, along with trade associations and trade unions, consultative bodies, etc.

49. INSEE, “Vers un système cohérent de nomenclatures d’emplois-professions et de formations,” memo no. 410/956, presented and discussed at the first meeting of the group.

50. Ibid., 22.

51. Ibid., 26.

52. “Alongside other approaches (working conditions, possibility of transition to other jobs, etc.).” Ibid., 28. The two main approaches were supported by different definitions of skill: the former referred to the abilities and knowledge necessary to occupy a post, the latter to the organization and division of labor. A third approach was mentioned, but “is not located on the same level,” as it combined several professional and social criteria that “end up creating types that have a real social existence, even if the boundaries between the different types are not always clear.” Ibid., 28-31.

53. These would not appear as such, but in the form of simpler criteria such as waged/ non-waged, maintenance/manufacture, large-scale/small-scale, etc. Ibid., 32.

54. As attested in several publications: Salais, Robert, “Qualification individuelle et qualification de l’emploi. Quelques définitions et interrogations,” Économie et statistique 81, no. 82 (1976): 3–11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Commissariat général du Plan, La qualification du travail: de quoi parle-t-on? (Paris: La documentation française, 1978); Cézard, Michel, “La qualification ouvrière en question,” Économie et statistique 110, no. 1 (1979): 15–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55. INSEE, “Vers un système cohérent,” memo no. 410/956, p. 32.

56. To move in such a direction would require the creation of a universal grid of job descriptions that was meaningful in itself and made it possible to identify individuals in a stable manner, like the one proposed in the Netherlands in 1952, or that existing in the United States (these examples are mentioned in the memo). This was “resolutely dismissed” because “many authors hold that this approach, very much marked by the imperfections of the industrial psychology of the 1950s, is today superseded.” The memo states: “It is impossible to deny that jobs have demands and individuals have aptitudes, but neither the one nor the other can be reduced to a simple and well-defined combination of elements.” Ibid., 32-33.

57. Ibid., 34.

58. Desrosières, “Une rencontre improbable.”

59. Bourdieu, Pierre, Darbel, Alain, Rivet, Jean-Paul, and Seibel, Claude, Travail et travailleurs en Algérie: données statistiques (Paris: Mouton et Cie, 1963)Google Scholar.

60. INSEE, “Éléments d’appréciations pour le choix du rattachement des contremaîtres au groupe des professions intermédiaires ou à celui des ouvriers dans la nouvelle nomenclature des CSP,” memo no. 215/NEF, June 9, 1981.

61. It is important however not to imply too strict an opposition between the updating of statistical categories according to legal categories and the respect for a representation of social space taken from Bourdieu: both these orientations and/or principles guided the reworking and often led to the same classifications.

62. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

63. The first memo presented to the CNS identifies the initial domains examined as electricity and electronics, company management, commerce, and computer services, etc. INSEE, “Vers un système cohérent,” 46.

64. Desrosières and Thévenot, “Les mots et les chiffres,” 49-55. This article was based on a more detailed memo also authored by Desrosières and Thévenot, “Catégories socio-professionnelles et étude des inégalités sociales,” INSEE, memo no. 029/NEF, November 29, 1978.

65. Desrosières and Thévenot, “Les mots et les chiffres,” 54.

66. Desrosières and Thévenot, “Catégories socio-professionnelles,” 5.

67. This characteristic of occupational designations was examined through the comparison, at the individual level, of seventeen thousand 1975 census returns and the employment survey conducted in the same year. The stability or variability of the occupations reported in the two sources was taken as an indicator that a designation was more or less “solid” or “firm” within linguistic space.

68. Topalov, Christian, “Un paysage intellectuel renouvelé,” in Lagrave, and Encrevé, , Travailler avec Pierre Bourdieu, 195–207 Google Scholar.

69. Particularly in Boltanski, The Making of a Class.

70. The former went to see the coding workshops for the 1975 census (Desrosières, “Éléments pour l’histoire,” 189), while the latter carried out a specific study of the surveying staff and the drawing up of the surveys, in addition to visiting the coding workshops.

71. Champsaur, Cinquante ans d’INSEE, 43 and 55.

72. Ibid., 56.

73. See, for example, the account of the strike by the typist-coders at Nantes in 1980, ibid., 137; more broadly, see Gollac, Michel and Volkoff, Serge, Les conditions de travail (Paris: La Découverte, 2007)Google Scholar.

74. INSEE, “Incertitudes de mesure et conditions de recueil des données: l’exemple des variables professionnelles,” memo no. 057/NEF, September 17, 1979, 29.

75. Ibid., 22. This interpretation of the origin of pragmatic sociology is partly retraced by Boltanski and Thévenot in their preface to On Justification: Economies of Worth, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), especially 3ff.

76. The “logic of the statistician” is explicitly contrasted with the “practice of surveys” in Laurent Thévenot, “Un emploi à quel titre? L’identité professionnelle dans les enquêtes statistiques,” in Archives et documents, vol. 38, Les catégories socioprofessionnelles et leur repérage dans les enquêtes. Études méthodologiques (Paris: INSEE, 1981), 9-39.

77. Without, however, forgetting the attention to practice present in Bourdieu’s works. See, for example, Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78. For example Thévenot, “Un emploi à quel titre?,” 12, which invites the reader to follow “a simple guiding thread, that of the chain of statistical operations needed for the collection of data on occupational situation” through the analysis. There follows a “summary listing of the different links of the chain,” including the persons surveyed, the coders, the statisticians, and the representatives of occupational groups.

79. INSEE, “Projet de classification des professions de la santé et du travail social,” memo no. 078/NEF, December 18, 1980, 3; diagram on p. 43.

80. Thévenot, “Un emploi à quel titre?”; Desrosières and Thévenot, Les catégories socioprofessionnelles. Some passages from this text were later published in Thévenot, Laurent, “L’économie du codage social,” Critiques de l’économie politique 23-24 (1983): 188–222 Google Scholar.

81. Here one can observe the influence of several authors who worked on the notion of plurality in this period, for example Michel Foucault or Ian Hacking’s rereading of Alistair Crombie.

82. Boltanski and Thévenot, Les économies de la grandeur (Paris: PUF, 1987).

83. For instance health and social work, as Desrosières and Thévenot explain in Les catégories socio-professionnelles.

84. This game was used in the training of nearly five hundred people, and was then analyzed in connection with works of social psychology: Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent, “Finding One’s Way in Social Space: A Study Based on Games,” Social Science Information 22, nos. 4-5 (1983): 631–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Its contributions are also presented in Desrosières and Thévenot, Les catégories socio-professionnelles. It is currently being adapted for work on the development of a European socio-economic classification.

85. INSEE, Données sociales (Paris: INSEE, 1984), 1–2 Google Scholar. We can note in passing that the distinction between cultural and economic capital becomes less important where they are both lacking, making way for other forms of division.

86. Kramarz, Francis, “Déclarer sa profession,” Revue française de sociologie 32, no. 1 (1991): 3–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87. According to Maurin, the intuitions used for grouping occupations during the 1982 reworking referred, implicitly but fundamentally, to different registers that captured ways of taking decisions, justifications, forms of legitimacy, and assessments of and at work, through work organizations. In conclusion, he proposes a “pragmatic” rereading of the evolution of the socio-professional structure between 1982 and 1990, noting that this tends to show that the “categories that increased are those corresponding to registers of subjective justification and assessment rather than objective ones, affective and aesthetic rather than rational or technical.” Éric Maurin, “La nomenclature française des catégories socio-professionnelles: une interprétation” (paper presented at the conference “Class Analysis,” CREST/Nuffield College, Oxford, December 1993).

88. Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, 1.

89. Ibid., 90.

90. If the founders of the economics of convention are included. Desrosières, “Les origines statisticiennes.”

91. Desrosières, “Une rencontre improbable.”

92. Pierru and Spire, “Le crépuscule des catégories.”

93. INSEE, “Lettre de mission. L’usage de la nomenclature des professions et des catégories socio-professionnelles,” memo no. 296/B005, April 25, 1995.

94. Pierru and Spire, “Le crépuscule des catégories.”

95. “Histoire et sciences sociales, un tournant critique,” special issue, Annales ESC 44, no. 6 (1989); Lepetit, Bernard, “Histoire des pratiques, pratiques de l’histoire,” in Les formes de l’expérience. Une autre histoire sociale, ed. Lepetit, Bernard (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 9–22 Google Scholar.

96. See for example Burnod, Guillaume and Chenu, Alain, “Les représentations ordinaires de la division du travail. Une étude fondée sur les déclarations de profession,” in Les professions et leurs sociologues, ed. Menger, Pierre-Michel (Paris: Éd. de la MSH, 2003), 119–31 Google Scholar.

97. Chamsaur, Cinquante ans d’INSEE, 202.

98. Ibid., 190.

99. A second version was presented to the CNIS in October 2001, after a detailed consideration of whether the March 2000 version could be implemented in the employment survey had led to the removal of many of the new rubrics. See INSEE, “Compte rendu de la réunion du 12 octobre 2001 devant la formation ‘Emploi, Revenus’ du CNIS,” memo no. 001/D130 Google Scholar. This second version has been in force since 2003.

100. Apart from the official presentation documents for the new classification, known as PCS 2003, no synthetic article tracing the updating process or presenting the new classification has been published. The only exception is the partial publication of the audit by Guy Neyret and Hedda Faucheux, “Extraits du rapport ‘Évaluation de la pertinence des catégories socio-professionnelles,’” in “Enjeux et usages des catégories socio-professionnelles en Europe,” ed. Kieffer, Annick, Oberti, Marco, and Préteceille, Edmond, special issue, Sociétés contemporaines 45-46, nos. 1-2 (2002): 131–55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101. Four plenary meetings with an average of forty members were held every year between May 1996 and March 2000. The different meetings were the occasion for discussions centered on the progress of the work carried out by each subgroup (“Employees,” “Collective Bargaining Categories,” etc.), as well as the consultations with different sectors that were carried out at the end of the updating project. See INSEE, “Mandat du groupe de travail ‘Rénovation de la PCS,’” memo no. 271/D130, June 11, 1996.Google Scholar

102. See INSEE, “Lettre de mission. L’usage de la nomenclature.”

103. At this time, Cézard held a position at DARES and Gollac was a researcher at CEE. For Cézard, “the Callies report finally rediscovers the questions that had been raised at the time that the classification was drawn up.” Gollac, for his part, remarks that “the search for a ‘super-classification’ capable of responding to all uses is illusory; the difficulties emphasized by Jean-Marie Callies in his audit existed already in the late 1970s.” INSEE, “Compte rendu de la réunion du 16 avril 1996,” memo no. 169/F233.

104. The raw material provided in these sources is not the same as that of the household surveys: the notion of “main occupation” requested from individuals may differ systematically from the occupation or position title reported by managers or administrators responding to statistical surveys within companies. Two different “semantics” are at work, to use the expression of the audit report, and these must be taken into account in order to obtain comparable structures of employment in both types of source.

105. These grids locate all jobs on a scale, according to “classifying” criteria such as degree of autonomy, responsibility, etc. The first example was the subject of a collective agreement in the engineering industry in 1975, and the model was increasingly adopted throughout the 1980s.

106. See DARES, “L’utilisation de la PCS dans les systèmes statistiques sur l’emploi, les salaires et le marché du travail: le point de vue de la DARES,” memo no. JLD/39/97, April 7, 1997, which questions the subordination of the level of occupations to that of the socio-professional categories: “The major difficulty arises from the fact that the PCS is principally structured by social categories (the two first figures of the CS).” It goes on to ask that the two levels of the PCS be detached from one another.

107. INSEE, “Vers une nomenclature des fonctions et des familles professionnelles?,” memo no. 246/B005, September 11, 1997.

108. Numerous sectors were consulted. See INSEE, “Compte rendu de la réunion du 1er mars 2000 devant la formation ‘Emploi, Revenus’ du CNIS,” memo no. 381/D130.

109. It is important however to note that, in contrast to the sectors that were at the forefront of these social issues in the late 1990s—the engineering, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries—other employers emphasized the pertinence and interest of the classification for categorizing their labor force. This was particularly the case in sectors such as the construction industry where small companies were numerous, as these had fewer resources for developing their own “investment procedures.” See the reports on the project to update the classification and the interviews conducted by Neyret and Faucheux. On the Parodi categories see above, note 20.

110. INSEE, “Compte rendu de la réunion du 24 février 1999 avec l’UIMM,” memo no. 13/F203, March 2, 1999.

111. Cadres-non cadres. Une frontière dépassée, a booklet published by the employer-oriented think tank Entreprise et Progrès in 1993.

112. According to this amendment, which was not accepted and went against precedents established in the court of appeal, it was the system of working time that should define the status of “cadre,” not the status that should inflect the modalities of working time.

113. Boltanski, The Making of a Class.

114. The explanatory literature attached to the letter sent out to companies in this sector referred once again to the history of the notion of cadres (which belonged to “yesterday’s companies”) and its incongruity with “the companies of today and tomorrow,” the description of which is highly reminiscent of the “projective city” of Boltanski and Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism.

115. INSEE, “Compte rendu de la réunion du groupe ‘Classements conventionnels,’” memo no. 9418/D201, April 22, 1997.

116. INSEE, unnumbered memo of December 12, 1996, on the “proposal of a ‘classifying criteria’ subgroup” presented at the meeting of the CNIS group for updating the PCS, January 9, 1997.

117. INSEE, “Rapport d’étape du sous-groupe ‘Classements conventionnels,’” memo no. 9452/D201, June 18, 1997.

118. Maurin, “La nomenclature française.”

119. Chambaz, Christine, Torelli, Constance, and Maurin, Éric, “L’évaluation sociale des professions en France. Construction et analyse d’une échelle des professions,” Revue française de sociologie 39, no. 1 (1998): 177–226 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 177.

120. Herpin, Nicolas and Verger, Daniel, “Consommation et stratification sociale selon le profil d’emploi,” Économie et statistique 324-25 (1999): 57–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121. INSEE, “La nomenclature des catégories socio-professionnelles: éléments pour la définition d’un niveau intermédiaire d’agrégation,” memo no. 261/F230, September 6, 1999.

122. In the generic sense of the term as it is used in the context of the European harmonization process (inaugurated at that time) to qualify classifications such as the PCS.

123. INSEE, “Compte rendu de la journée d’étude à l’Observatoire sociologique du changement, division ‘Emploi,’” unnumbered memo, April 28, 1997.

124. INSEE, “Évaluation de la pertinence des catégories socio-professionnelles,” memo no. 49/B005, March 23, 1999.

125. In memo no. 183/930 (May 17, 1977), at the conclusion of the study of uses conducted by Desrosières between 1975 and 1977, we can read for example: “In a general sense, the code is rarely challenged as a whole, except by people who restrict themselves to pure speculation about ‘social classes’ conceived in a very abstract fashion. For most users, the CSPs ‘are part of the furniture,’ to the point that many people are surprised when asked to reflect on them, just as people never reflect on very familiar objects,” 29.

126. CNIS, “Compte rendu de la réunion du groupe ‘Rénovation,’” December 18, 1998.

127. According to those interviews conducted during the two surveys on the uses of the classification that I have been able to consult, the criticisms were no less sharp in the 1970s than they were twenty years later.

128. Desrosières and Thévenot, “Les mots et les chiffres.”

129. For a recent synthesis, see Brousse, Cécile, “Réflexions sur la nomenclature socio-économique européenne en gestation,” and Penissat, Étienne, “La difficile production d’une nomenclature socio-professionnelle à l’échelle européenne,” Revue française de socio-économie 10, no. 2 (2012)Google Scholar: respectively 241-50 and 251-57.