Une vie sociale encore bien normée. L’exemple d’un campus universitaire français

• Main Authors: Hervé Marchal, Jean-Marc Stébé
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Catholique de Louvain 2013-07-01
• Series: Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques
• Subjects: incivility; law and order; ritual; university
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rsa/961

Based on a questionnaire distributed to a selected sample of students, teachers and members of the administrative and service staff of a French university campus, we have shed light on the normative standards common to founding a social life. This observation casts doubt on the thesis suggesting that a vast gamut of social life, and most particularly in urban environments, is in a state of generalized “meltdown” today, synonymous with a collapse of collective reference points and the dissolution of normative reference frames. In other words, the article shows that an institutional urban territory like the university still belongs to a Durkheimian-Goffmanian world, i.e. a world structured around consolidated ways of being.