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

Abstract

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.