Entre étudiants sur le tard et apprentis-professionnels

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Abstract

This article evidences that the development of new devices favoring PhD students’ professional integration are aligned with political, institutional and scientific conditions. I analyze the evolution of young researchers’ situation from above, as one can derive it from the reforms and discourses held by actors who orientate France’s scientific policies since the 1990s. The diversity of doctoral students’ situations in the humanities and social sciences invites to apprehend their working condition and their professional orientations as depending on social factors – such as the openness of their discipline to the market and civil society, the degree of labor division and the dominant modes of knowledge production, which vary across disciplines. Thus, France’s doctoral students’ heterogeneity reveals how the scientific work is organized in France.