Les cadres salariés du secteur social et médico-social. Quand le managérialisme instrumentalise l'encadrement

This doctoral thesis in sociology aims to provide the analysis of a process of change that has taken shape in the French social and medico-social sector. More precisely, this analysis will focus on staff members with managerial status employed by public action associations that are part of this field of activity. Even though internally in this sector, managerial salary positions have been constructed as extensions of social professions, several elements have impacted this situation. Whereas the struggles to obtain status recognition for managers have long been a means to reinforce the stability of social work as a whole; they have progressively gained autonomy from demands made by social practitioners. Simultaneously, a new managerial structure has developed and was based on a dissociation between operational management of social work and a new remote management responsible for activity administration. Finally, although social executives have for a long time been linked to identities that are relatively close to those of social workers, new subjectivities have finally emerged. According to the hypothesis of this PhD study, these metamorphoses stem from the disembedding of this sector toward the socio-historical anchorage which had caused it. This professional field is inextricable linked to the “social treatment of the social question” and it is being reworked through a neoliberal logic at the very heart of public action. This is within this transformation that the production of a domain in itself—that of managers—is being disconnected from social work