CORPORATISM ANALYZED BY PROFESSION. THE CASE OF CIVIL ENGINEERING (ROAD CONSTRUCTION, WATER AND FORESTRY) IN FRANCE: A RESILIENT PROFESSION?

Abstract

In France, corps of top public servants are a sign of
survival of a society of orders. They are not immune
to a questioning about their position with the rise of
controls, leading to a weakening of the autonomy
and the arrival of other stakeholders on their professional territories. Both their perimeter and the nature
of their mission become deeply disturbed, and this
is questioning on how such large corps of public
servants adapt or resist. «Licence » and «mandat »,
according to Hughes concepts, are endangered. This
article aims at understanding better their evolutions
throughout the contributions on professional analysis,
researches dealing with sociology of elites and
analysis of public policy to identify the composition
of a large corps of public servants and indicators of
its reset based on a positional approach and career
trajectories. The research is based on a 35-years
monitoring of the civil servant engineers’ corps of
and it is based on sociographic analysis. The results
highlight the everlasting anchoring of these corps in
the public service, a relative disaffection for expertise
functions, and a real thin for younger promotions to
invest new frontiers. The authors question some form
of corporatist resilience.