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ABSTRACT
This paper is devoted to the regulation of architectural activity in Europe and especially in France and to the ways architects manage this regulation. The globalization of this activity has generated a strong consciousness that supranational regulation is necessary, both among architects’ professional associations and in governments. One of the main difficulties is the differences in the division of labour from one country to another. But European regulation supposes that national states will implement the directives into national law. France is an example of the lightest possible adaptation. This is all the more surprising as the architectural profession in France is characterized by structural weaknesses to resist international competition and as the administration is willing to help it adapt to this competition. The history of trade unionism and the structure of representation explain some of the difficulties because of a particular trait of the architectural profession: what I call a weak ‘reflective capacity’. The paper is partly devoted to defining this notion and showing its relevance for the sociological analysis of professions. This weakness encourages individual strategies of adaptation to increasing international competition, without the professional associations and their representatives being able to control these strategies and their consequences for the profession. This demonstrates that the various sources of regulation are not exclusive and must be studied together so as to understand their interrelations.
Notes
1Sector-related directives have been devoted to seven professions: architects, dental surgeons, doctors, general nurses, midwives, pharmacists and veterinary surgeons.
2For instance, an association called AFEX (Architectes Français à l'Exportation; French Architects Overseas) was founded both to help architects to be competitive abroad and to promote the idea that firms must adapt to the international competition.
3Council Directive of 10 June 1985 on the mutual recognition of diplomas, certificates and other evidences of formal qualifications in architecture, including measures to facilitate the effective exercise of the right of establishment and freedom to provide services (85/384/EEC).
4For more details about the history and contents of this text see Champy (Citation1998).
5Actually, observations in France confirm this fear but this conclusion cannot be generalized as debates in competitions had been rare elsewhere in Europe.
6The Bologna Declaration is a Joint Declaration of 31 European Ministers of Education on ‘the need to establish a more complete and far-reaching Europe, in particular building upon strengthening its intellectual, cultural, social and scientific and technological dimensions’ (1) through bringing the higher education systems closer together and making them more integrated.
7The themes of the four think tanks were: (1) the exercise of the profession (law on the firms, wage earning, interprofessional relationships); (2) the evolutions of the international environment; (3) the jurisdiction of the architects and the protection of their activity; and (4) the professional organizations and the representation of architects.
8Seven professional associations’ representatives were invited. They are presented in more detail in the next sub-section. I had the opportunity to take part to these think-tanks, which was an exceptional research opportunity. 38 work meetings took place. Hundreds of pages of reflections were written by architects. Within the professional associations and unions, the national representatives had endless debates with the local representatives. For two years, I also regularly attended the debates in the oldest and most representative trade-union: the UNSFA (Union Nationale des Syndicats Français d'Architectes – National Federation of the French Unions of Architects).
9The ARPAE, the Academy of Architecture, Mouvement des Architectes, la Société Française des Architectes.
10The Order was founded in 1941 both to control the practice of its members and to represent them to the State. Unions were forbidden. In 1945, when unions were allowed again, the Order kept its ambivalent status.
11A systematic study of this evolution will be necessary to answer these questions more precisely. At that point of this research, this evolution is both obvious and impossible to measure. What I want to emphasize here is that this kind of articulation between policies and individual strategies deserves considering in the researches on the Europeanization of practice.
12They associated with architects who were already allowed to sign projects and worked on an egalitarian base. This kind of association was usual for instance between an architect freshly qualified and registered and one of his fellows in the school of architecture who was on the point to get his diploma.