Area 4 - Progress workshop: Cesare Mattina, "Publishing an HDR. Presentation of ideas and main results".

Friday 28 November 2025 | 14h-17h | Mmsh, room A154

On the programme:

> News from the’Axis 4 «Socio-spatial dynamics and political mobilisation».», seminars to come, a round table on Marxist urban sociology to be held in the spring...

> Speech by Cesare Mattina : Publish an HDR. Presentation of the ideas and main results of ’Industrial social orders. Firms-territories and hegemonic social groups in cities and single-industry territories with environmental challenges«.»

Summary of the original volume (volume 1)

Industrial social orders. Enterprises-territories and hegemonic social groups in cities and single-industry territories with environmental challenges».»

Which social and socio-professional groups govern small and medium-sized industrial towns in coalition? How are the terms of political hegemony changing over the long term in single-industry chemical and nuclear plants? What part do economic transformations and environmental mobilisations play in the transformations that have been taking place since the 1970s? These are the main questions addressed in this original volume of the Habilitation à diriger les recherches.

It is based both on an analysis of the empirical and theoretical literature on the question of power and social groups at local level and on socio-historical research carried out over the last fifteen years by the author of these lines on several single-industry sites in the heavy chemicals and nuclear sectors in France and Italy: the heavy chemicals site at Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence (04) and the Solvay site at Rosignano Marittimo in Tuscany (in the province of Livorno); the nuclear sites at Cadarache in the north of the Bouches-du-Rhône (13) and Saluggia in Piedmont, as well as the nuclear power production site at Trino (in the province of Vercelli), both of which are currently being dismantled.

The central thesis defends the existence of local industrial social orders, formed by hegemonic alliances between social groups, evolving according to historical configurations. These orders go beyond the simple framework of the factory town to shape «territorial enterprises». This paper shows how these orders stabilised and then destabilised from the 1980s onwards, less as a result of environmental mobilisation than of multi-scalar changes in production and the economy, leading, depending on the site, to a weakening of the dominant socio-professional groups.

This HDR thesis consists of three parts:

• the first is a review of the American and European literature (since the 1920s) on local power in cities in relation to issues of social stratification, the distribution of power and resources, and the relationships, tensions and balances between different social groups;
• The second part deals with the socio-historical ways in which the power of industrial companies is structured and the domination of company bosses and managers over local space through the urban hierarchisation of social groups in low-density industrial towns and territories;
• The third part, which looks at the processes by which industrial social orders were put to the test from the 1970s-1980s, shows that the challenge to the power of the single-industry company-territory stems less from the emergence of environmental issues linked to accidents, pollution and environmental mobilisation than from phenomena deriving from structural economic and production dynamics at different levels (international, national, local) and weakening, through job losses, the beneficent aura of these companies and their hegemonic social groups.