Defense of Habilitation to direct research - Cesare Mattina

Thursday 4 September 2025 | from 2pm | Université lumière Lyon 2

We are pleased to invite you to the HDR defence of Cesare MATTINAscheduled for Thursday 4 September 2025 from 2pm at the following address: Room DEMETER 206 - Université lumière Lyon 2 - 4bis rue de l'université - 69007 Lyon.

His work in the social sciences focuses on the following theme: "Industrial social orders. Companies-territories and hegemonic social groups in cities and single-industry territories with environmental challenges".

The viva will be open to the public (room seating 50). It will last until approximately 6-6.30pm and will be followed by a drink in room BEL142 in the same building.

Members of the jury :

• Mr Jean-Yves AUTHIERProfessor of Sociology, Université Lumière Lyon 2 - Centre Max Weber, HDR supervisor
• Mr Gilles PINSONProfessor of Political Science, Sciences Po Bordeaux - Centre Emile Durkheim, Rapporteur
• Nicolas RENAHYDirector of Research in Sociology, Institut National Recherche Agronomique - CESAER, rapporteur
• Ms Hélène REIGNERProfessor of Urban and Regional Planning, Aix-Marseille University - LIEU, rapporteur
• Ms Annamaria ZACCARIAUniversity Professor, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, examiner
• Mr Michel GROSSETTIDirector of Research in Socilogy Emeritus, CNRS - LISST Toulouse, Chairman of the Jury

The HDR consists of three volumes:

Volume 2 retraces the researcher's career, while Volume 3 contains his main publications. These two volumes are entitled 'With whom do we govern cities? Social groups, industrial firms and political hegemony in urban areas in France and Italy'. Volume 1 is an original, unpublished manuscript.

Summary of the original volume (volume 1):

"Golddres sociaux industriels. 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 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 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 oflocal 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 "business-territories. The work 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 groups.

This HDR thesis is in three parts: the first is a review of the American and European literature (since the 1920s) on local power in cities in relation to questions of social stratification, the distribution of power and resources, and the relations, tensions and balances between different social groups. The second part deals with the socio-historical ways in which the power of industrial companies was 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 onwards, shows that the challenge to the power of the mono-industrial 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 scales (international, national, local) and weakening, through job losses, the beneficial aura of these companies and their hegemonic social groups.