Axis 4 seminar: Emmanuel Martinais, "La fabrique administrative des lois et règlements" (The administrative manufacture of laws and regulations)

Friday 14 March 2025 | 11am-1pm | MMSH (room A154)

As part of Axis 4, Emmanuel Martinais will present his book La fabrique administrative des lois et règlements, Investigation at the Ministry of the Environment after the AZF disaster (Peter Lang, 2024).

Book summary:

Surprisingly, the sociology of the State and of administration tends to ignore the intermediate bodies of civil servants who make up the bulk of ministerial staff and are essential cogs in the wheel of State action. In France in particular, analyses are most often limited to the two ends of bureaucratic structures, systematically leaving in the shadows all the administrative players in the middle, who are neither senior civil servants nor street level bureaucrats. Who are these officials? What exactly do they do? What do they actually do? Where do they work? How do they work? What do they decide? This book sets out to answer these questions, following step by step the process of reforming public policy on industrial risk prevention that began almost twenty years ago in the wake of the AZF disaster in September 2001.