When politics make markets, regulation in France in the 1980’s

This communication presents the exploratory results of a research program concerning both the administration and the policy of economics within the French State during the Eighties. We consider the Bottin Administratif (a book which, each year, lists State's whole staff) as an interesting source in order to retrace the institutional and hierarchical environment of actors, by focusing more particularly on social networks. Our goal is both methodological and theoretical. Regarding the methodological aspect, we plan to use the organization charts of the economic French administrations (such as: ‘Direction du Trésor', ‘du Budget', ‘de la Prévision'), and of French State's "cabinets" (such as: ‘ministère de l'Economie', ‘Premier Ministre', ‘Président de la République'), and to transform them in relational networks. These networks will be, thus, interpreted as a proxy of the structure of this ‘milieu' and as an indicator of the bureaucratic and political forms of capital of these actors. On the theoretical aspect, we aim at highlighting that, beyond the humdrum and bureaucratic running of French State and its administrations, we face a field which has the capacity to auto-reform itself. Thus, we postulate that this ‘milieu' is able to renew economic institutions and the French forms of market regulation, and to move the frontier between Capital and Travail. This research wants to contribute to the understanding of the transformation of the social and economic relations within the French society by focusing, especially, on the period of the financial markets reform in 1984-1986.