La construction sociale d'une économie d'insertion au Québec : le cas des entreprises d'insertion sociale

Abstract  This thesis analyzes the process by which integration enterprises try to neutralize the exclusion of marginalized populations. These are individuals who are often unemployed, without income and without social protection who struggle to exist socially. They are variously named and understood by sociological theory, either in terms of "useless in the world" or "disaffiliated", or in terms of "disqualified persons", "human rejects" or "vanquished in the struggle for the world".   By giving their interest exclusively to those excluded and by transforming the income from social assistance into working wages, integration enterprises have, since the 1980s, played a crucial role in their struggle for social existence and placed them on the fringes of society. We understand the social embeddedness and the emergence of these companies as a vector of social inclusion in connection with social dispossession which takes place through the rise of atypical work, the obligation of social activation and the decline in social protection to understand what is really going on in these organizations. Namely, how do their interventions make it possible to rehabilitate and reintegrate the defeated post-Fordists into the labor market? What is their real mission? Is it a mission of adapting workers to the needs of the labor market, activating potential social assistance providers, re-qualification of the excluded or the fight against exclusion and poverty?  In line with Pierre Bourdieu for whom “the social world, armed with this knowledge, can undo what the social world has done”, this thesis questions the mission of these companies in relation to the mandate received from Emploi-Québec from the perspective of the author's field theory. This perspective defines social exclusion and inclusion as the position occupied in social space, resulting from the relationship of the capital possessed to its habits, the social arrangements inherited from its social trajectory. In doing so, social exclusion remains a process of social dispossession, that is to say of decapitalization, the lack of resources and powers necessary and essential to the occupation and maintenance of a given social position in a field. Therefore, reversing social exclusion is quite possible and corresponds to the implementation of a process of social repossession, that is to say of capitalization or recapitalization, understood as the endowment of the excluded with the necessary resources and powers to pay their entry fees to the field, invest in it and play the game.  We demonstrate here this object of analysis by implementing a double methodological device. On the one hand, we gave the floor to managers and workers in integration enterprises who willingly agree to talk about their practices. This makes it possible to trace the forms of intervention in order to understand what is done and what is undone in companies in order to provide the beneficiaries with the capital necessary for their integration into the labor market. On the other hand, we gave the floor to participants to understand the structuring facts of three moments in their social and professional trajectories, the pre-journey, in-journey and post-integration moments. Using material from 69 in-depth interviews (36 with executive members and speakers and 33 with participants), we analyze the fabric of precarious and versatile workers, endowed with a meta-capital. It is the specific capital of this insertion sub-field, the production of professional habits, to function as a general and universalizing capital, called "transferable skills". The typical portraits of beneficiaries thus make it possible to reveal the opportunity of the integration process for the development of their trajectories.

Keyphrases: Pierre Bourdieu, capital acquis, Integration enterprises, employability, social integration economy, capitalization of the excluded, precarious workers, participants, acquired capital, professional habits