An article of the French Journal of Sociology deals with a sociological object, which was belatedly set up as such. That is the fact that an object acquires a social visibility? How such or such a phenomenon becomes an object of inquiry?
Pierre Merle Bertrand and the Beautiful in ” Alcohol and alcoholism in the workplace “, French Review of Sociology, 2004, 45-1 demonstrate that alcoholism is not an object of sociology, not because he is invisible, but may well be because the alcohol is commonplace. Citing Got and Weill, in alcohol the figures are open, Paris, Seli Arslan,1997, they note that ” sociological knowledge limited practices of alcohol has a number of origins. First, the generalization of these practices : the French are the first consumers of a good part of different types of alcoholic beverages. The trivialization extreme decline in usage, paradoxically, its social visibility. Like traffic accidents, the practices of alcohol are in a way too day-to-day to constitute an object of research or news (except for periods usually limited in time). The distance is in fact much more difficult to build that the object is an integral part of social life”
They offer to come back on this gap, making state of a search conducted in a postal sorting centre breton, which is based on the interviews and observations. The object of the research is ” to study the practices of drinking and the social construction of the border between these two practices in order to understand a paradox : why are the executives of The Post office, despite their regulatory obligations, the incentive to report people tell alcoholics, they seem to so often liabilities ? “How to distinguish the practices of alcohol and the practice of alcoholism” ask Merle, and The Beautiful? One is a normal phenomenon, the other is deviance. Durkheim if you’re there…