Revisiting the History of Socio-professional Classification in France*

Abstract

The result of a process begun in the nineteenth century, the French system of socio-professional classification (code des catégories socio-professionnelles) was drawn up between 1951 and 1954 and has only been slightly modified since. With no strong theoretical framework and conceived according to a realist approach, it gave substance to social classes in the description of postwar society. During a period of “reworking” (1978-1981), it became an exciting topic of sociological exploration, furnishing a representation of Pierre Bourdieu’s two-dimensional social space and serving as a laboratory for the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. In a subsequent period of “updating” (1995-2001), administrative caution regarding changes contrasted with the evolution of categories used in labor law and the goal of analytical purity underpinned by econometrics. The history of this classification details the peculiar position of a statistical tool for representing the social world, ostensibly static amidst constant changes to the institution that managed it, the actors who used it, the social categories—everyday or legal—to which it referred, and, finally, the sociological theories that gave it a conceptual grounding.