Toward a depoliticising civic style. How public-led partnership life socialises the leaders of an association in a French deprived neighbourhood

ABSTRACT

This article questions the logics through which neighbourhood social policies such as the ‘Politique de la ville’ in France have effects on the style of action deployed by the associations that participate in their implementation. Through an ethnographic investigation within a particular association, combining observations, interviews, and archive analysis, it shows how the integration of associative leaders into partnership mechanisms led them to professionalise and socialise to a grammar of partnership life, based on a feeling of belonging to a community of partners and on the sharing of certain values. In the case studied, this socialisation is achieved both through rationalised governance technologies and through affective techniques. Thus, this paper shows that it is important not to limit the research’s scope to the study of actions undertaken toward the residents: deprived neighbourhood policies are also composed of a set of measures aimed at governing the intermediaries involved in their implementation.

KEYWORDS:

• Neighbourhood social policies
• territorialised governance
• associations
• depoliticisation
• affective citizenship

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks go to Nina Eliasoph, Camille Herlin-Giret, Thibault Boughedada and Clémence Guimont, and the anonymous reviewers for the careful readings and advices they gave me at different stages of the production of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To preserve the anonymity of the respondents, the names of the persons and the association investigated have been changed.

2 We could also refer to P. Lichterman's rich study about the forms of Christian commitment, very diverse in terms of (de)conflictualization, that can be found in the United States (Lichterman, 2005).

3 For a comparison of WoB with another case and the development of a budget ethnography approach, see Chevallier, 2022.

4 Observations, 09 December 2013.

5 Observations, 21 November 2014.