Investigating globalization

Since the turn of the century, diplomacy has undergone an unprecedented change: gay and lesbian diplomats have become visible in states that explicitly excluded them only a few decades earlier. The article shows that this shift goes beyond inclusion and affects diplomatic representation itself, by moving the boundary between public and private life that structures the profession. Against the backdrop of the globalization of state homophobia, it examines dilemmas between career and private life, the management of visibility for same-sex couples, the narrowing of available postings, and the renegotiation of invisibility in order to serve in countries that criminalize sexual minorities.

Quantitative research on gender in diplomacy has focused on women ambassadors and on two approaches: the glass ceiling and diplomatic signalling. This article broadens the focus to all French career diplomats, drawing on 12,024 assignments across 286 cities between 2000 and 2020, 17.1% of which were held by women. It shows that these two approaches do not explain the disparities observed below ambassadorial level and identifies three neglected patterns: a distance effect, regional specialization, and path dependence in assignments.

Using a matched random sample of 300 women and 300 men serving as diplomats in 2015, this article measures the gendered geometry of transnational careers. Men cover one and a half times as much distance over their careers, travel 1.3 times farther with each assignment, and spend fourteen years abroad compared with eleven for women. Women remain in each post for one additional year on average to avoid moving. The article proposes treating assignment practices as “gendered diplomatic practices”, which can be measured in ways that go beyond simply counting women in leadership positions.

The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs promotes “feminist diplomacy” while facing financial penalties for failing to appoint enough women to senior positions, a shortfall it attributes to the “weakness of the candidate pool”. Drawing on records of 1,727 women recruited since 1945 and a comparative database of 2,927 diplomats, the article establishes that, by 2015, between 150 and 200 women already possessed the qualifications required for the 300 senior positions, of which women held only a quarter. The obstacle lies in male congestion in the feeder corps and the ENA bottleneck, revealing a form of discrimination specific to organizations with long career paths.

A concise version of the quantitative argument, written for students and a French-speaking North American readership. The chapter makes the findings on male congestion at the top of diplomatic hierarchies accessible and places them within the debate on feminist foreign policies.

International trade shows offer an original sociohistorical vantage point on globalization. Far from experiencing a gradual opening to international trade, their organizers faced a conflictual turning point in the 1980s. Previously organized around professional federations and supported by the state through a mercantilist and corporatist approach to the internationalization of professions, trade shows faced competition from, and were subsequently acquired by, multinational event companies. These companies redefined them as market products and imposed organizers with commercial backgrounds: the professionals of globalization. Challenging the overly gradual ecological approaches of the international sociology of professions, the article tests the strengths and limitations of Neil Fligstein’s theoretical framework, inspired by the concept of field.

The growth and internationalization of trade shows have been documented; their survival had not. Drawing on 35 interviews with organizers of major trade shows based in France, the article shows that fragility lies at the heart of their activity: a show’s “bubble” can deflate under pressure from competition, relocation, new regulations, or the withdrawal of major firms. Organizers describe a threefold effort to retain participants: readjusting to markets, redrawing professional boundaries, and personalizing the event. Together, these practices outline an exclusive imaginary of globalization.

The article examines a paradox: while remote communication should enable exchanges to become less personal, events bringing professionals together have multiplied since the 1980s. Through observations of interactions at two international audiovisual markets, it shows that these events are primarily sites of sociability and socialization, rather than merely places for gathering information or symbolic competition. By encouraging insider relationships, they define a transnational professional community. Commercial stakes are downplayed in favour of personalized relationships, in what the article calls “market civility”.

The introduction to a special issue devoted to professionals who are rarely studied because they belong neither to diplomatic elites nor to major international organizations. The article argues for an ethnographic approach to these occupations and proposes tools for understanding what the international dimension does to their work, and vice versa. The journal’s editorial board selected this issue, from all those published in 2018, for full translation into English.

The chapter defines international professionals as actors whose activities and expertise concern subjects presented as international. It advocates an approach that is both transnational and cross-sectoral, challenging the literature’s segmentation by geographical area and sector. It proposes three avenues: the uneven value of international experience in careers, attention to peripheral actors and “positional suffering”, and the use of national stereotypes as a resource for both socialization and hierarchy.

An examination of the invention of the international professional trade show as a trading instrument in 1960s France, before the vocabulary of globalization emerged. The chapter shows how a public instrument for promoting exports became an autonomous market infrastructure.

The book traces the invention and trajectory of a French policy of audiovisual “counter-globalization”, born in the 1980s with transnational channels such as TV5, which invested in the diplomacy of cultural diversity rather than box-office success. It establishes, in particular, that French companies dominate the international distribution of “auteur films” made on every continent, while also contributing to their standardization. Reviews appeared in Critique internationale, Revue française de science politique, Politix, and Réseaux (2020).

Why does France, unlike other countries, have two doctrines of international broadcasting? One is Francophone and cultural, embodied by TV5 from 1984 and promoted by diplomats and senior civil servants. The other is national and news-centred, championed by media professionals following the CNN or BBC model, around Canal France International and later France 24. The article explains the persistence of these antagonistic doctrines and the abrupt reversals that accompany them through the growing politicization of appointments in the political-bureaucratic field since the 1980s. It examines four sequences in which candidates returned international broadcasting to the agenda, multiplied reports and counter-reports, instrumentalized scandals, and aligned their positions with partisan divisions.

Alongside career diplomats, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sends agents abroad who are not civil servants: “audiovisual attachés”, recruited from the audiovisual sector and expected to return to it. Straddling public and private spheres, they embody a limiting case of the “organizational hybridity” characteristic of the “ill-defined occupations” of post-bureaucratic administrations. They differ from their colleagues through their precarious status, contested specialization, and loosely codified careers, while benefiting from the substantial rewards of diplomatic expatriation.

Comparing two audiovisual markets in Cannes, the MIF and MIPTV, the article shows that they are sites for evaluating and valuing goods more than for setting prices. They are better understood through an economic sociology attentive to market metrics than through the neoclassical definition of a market. It distinguishes two regimes: an “exhibition regime” at MIPTV, where the aim is to transfer as many programmes as possible from one broadcast schedule to another, and a “festival regime” at the MIF, where the festival and its Palme organize competitive bidding.

A French market diplomacy of cultural diversity supports auteur films from less dominant national cinemas throughout their trajectories, from co-production to export. Far from redressing global production inequalities, this support reinforces them. Analysis of the Fonds Sud, which financed 484 films between 1984 and 2011, reveals a process of standardization in which the demand for “authenticity” pushes films towards a common register. Ultimately, the aim is to entertain a “Northern” audience of festivals and art-house cinemas.

The article reconstructs the formation, since the 1960s, of an international circuit of audiovisual markets centred on Cannes, at a time when international exchanges of programmes still seemed exotic. It traces the chronology of this circuit and follows the professional paths of those who travel it, showing how a circuit of events structures a profession.

The article uses recruitment as a lens through which to analyse the institutional, social, and economic logics of a public policy. By reconstructing who is recruited as an audiovisual attaché, according to which criteria, and through which trajectories, it shows that French “external audiovisual policy” has no stable doctrine and is assembled “à la carte”, according to the profiles available and the expectations of individual postings.

The article seeks to remove globalization from the realm of the self-evident, necessary, and irreversible. Without separating it from the international trade with which it is inseparable, it resituates globalization by showing how it connects a national field, transnational circulations, and international spaces. It thereby restores a history, that of its divergent appropriations in the French bureaucratic field since the 1980s; actors, the intermediaries in audiovisual trade mobilized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and places, the international audiovisual markets that offer privileged sites for observing globalization in the making.

How can the dismantling of an administration be explained? Examining the directorate for external broadcasting, the article identifies three ideal-typical moments of bureaucratic entrepreneurship: a “Schumpeterian” entrepreneur who legitimizes an illegitimate object, television, in the early 1980s by redefining it as a technological innovation; a “manager” who establishes an autonomous directorate using private-sector methods in the late 1990s; and a defensive entrepreneur who must liquidate the directorate in the 2000s, amid new managerial reforms and competition between administrations.

Cannes is much more than its festival: it is the leading global market for film rights and a crucial site of French external audiovisual policy. The article places this importance in the context of American dominance, accompanied by the universalization of a conception of success that reduces a film to its box-office performance. It analyses the concrete production of the competing universalism promoted by France: cultural diversity, at once symbolic and commercial.

The concept of globalization rapidly gained prominence by bringing together disparate phenomena, including international trade and investment, emerging economies, relocation, global civil society, and migration. Yet it has almost always been approached from an economic perspective. The book treats globalization as a multicausal and multidimensional process and reconstructs how sociology and neighbouring disciplines have addressed it. It organizes a vast body of literature around five major perspectives and brings English- and French-language scholarship into a dialogue that had remained incomplete. Translated into English in 2017.

A collective methodological volume bringing together around twenty researchers, designed to address an increasingly common practical difficulty: how can we empirically investigate objects and field sites whose boundaries do not coincide with any national unit? The first part contains ten methodological overview chapters; the second presents selected and annotated texts in three sections: theories and the construction of research objects, places, and investigations. I co-coordinated the volume with Cécile Rabot, Bertrand Réau, Sébastien Roux, and Anne-Catherine Wagner, under the direction of Johanna Siméant, and co-authored two chapters. The book has become a French-language methodological reference for transnational research.

Research in the social sciences of international relations is permeated by overarching theories, including imperialism, hybridity, world-systems theory, and neo-institutionalism, that often neglect specific actors and groups, their social properties, their positions in national fields, and their contributions to the construction of transnational spaces. Challenging the disembodied perspectives made possible by concepts such as advocacy networks, epistemic communities, and soft power, the chapter advocates a detailed sociology of actors and institutions. It proposes recruitment processes as an entry point, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ audiovisual attachés providing an exemplary case. It also addresses hard-to-access field sites and the depoliticizing effects produced by technical framings of these policies.

The international success of The Artist, celebrated at Cannes in 2011; a Chilean group’s ranking above Bordeaux wines at the London International Wine Fair; the global recognition of Latin American and Eastern European literature in Frankfurt: these examples show that international marketplaces, including fairs, trade shows, and markets, are sites of consecration for symbolic goods as much as sites of exchange, following Polanyi’s distinction between market and marketplace. Drawing on three independent investigations of wine, audiovisual production, and Latin American books, the chapter turns the apparent mundanity of these places into a means of sociologizing international trade. It examines hierarchies of fair cycles and circuits, marketplace sociability and professional socialization, symbolic competition, reformulations of national and regional identities, and the concrete conditions of access for this form of ethnography.

Bourdieu has become one of the most frequently cited authors in English-language international relations, although he wrote almost nothing about international affairs. The article reconstructs three paths through which his work entered the field around the turn of the millennium: Yves Dezalay’s sociology of cosmopolitan elites, Didier Bigo’s sociology of transnational fields, and the practice turn associated with Vincent Pouliot, Frédéric Mérand, and Rebecca Adler-Nissen. While drawing on different parts of Bourdieu’s theoretical system, these approaches cite one another and have been received very unevenly across linguistic spaces. The article argues for a convergence of these compartmentalized legacies.

Far from being a “post-Westphalian” virus that ignored borders, COVID-19 remained embedded in unequal patterns of international mobility. Using a methodology inspired by thing-following studies and a database of 287 patients zero identified in 206 countries, the article challenges several myths. Europe, rather than China, was at the centre of the spread: four Western European countries exported half of all patients zero to entire regions along postcolonial lines. Two-thirds were nationals bringing the virus back to their own countries, and most were engaged in transnational business, family, religious, or educational activities rather than tourism.

The economy has remained a neglected area in the political sociology of international relations, which has prioritized security, international law, and European integration. The introduction to this special issue proposes a sociology of inter- and transnational public action on subjects previously left to international political economy and begins a critical dialogue with that field. It argues for treating these subjects as ordinary objects of sociological inquiry, renewing the critique of methodological nationalism without presupposing the autonomy of an “international sphere” or an irreducible opposition between state and market.

Reducing globalization to transnational movements and exchanges makes it impossible to grasp what is distinctive about its contemporary form, which was preceded by earlier waves. As early as the 1850s, Marx diagnosed a “global” expansion of capitalism that shared many of its characteristics. The article therefore asks what is new and explores six successive dimensions, ranging from the invention of the terms “global” and “globalization” to the rise of transmigrations, value chains, logistics, and “emerging” countries.

A synthesis of the period that began in the 1980s and the signs of its exhaustion, written for a broader readership. The article distinguishes, among the phenomena grouped under globalization, those that reflect a genuine retreat from those that reflect a shift in circuits.