The nights of the handrail. The scriptures at work, a book by Jean-François Laé (Stock, et al. “An order of ideas “, 2008, 20€)
The handrail is an object of sociological rebel, unexpected. Especially for its authors. If we had to find for this academic year, an instructional example, to explain to students, how an object becomes liable to a questioning of the sociological, the handrail will do the trick. Can we find, in effect, a more piecemeal, discontinuous,? The facts and actions reported in a handrail are not ordained. The handrail is a simple consequence of incidents, ratings for the flight and read the result, without additional evidence, their meaning is often lacking, because these ratings are elliptical by construction, are highly related to a geographical context, social that informs and gives meaning to the comments. Not an official Document, most of the time destroyed at the end of a given period, the hand loses its consistency when it is extracted from the context in which it was written. As well as defined by Jean-François Laé, what are the ” scriptures of the non-place “, because events that are reported have not been followed up. How, then, to the sociologist, to get them out of their indexicalité and their forgotten ? There is the whole issue of the book, The nights of the handrail. The construction of what, at first, seemed innocuous, and even without interest, as a space of meaning and reflection. Elevate to the rank of an object of sociological study, of the scriptures predestined to oblivion and especially to the secret. The handrail is, in effect, reserved to the strict professional context, to read between colleagues of the same service.
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