| Summary: | A large-scale process of "modernization" has taken place in Belgian courts in the past few years. Since the Dutroux scandal, which underlined the dysfunctions of Belgian courts and police, many initiatives have been taken in order to improve the quality of Justice. Various categories of instruments have been developed to achieve this purpose. This article focuses on one of them: the introduction of "human resources advisers" in several courts’ staff. Using the analytical framework of the sociology of organizations, we had hypothesized that the emergence of a new actor in judicial "local orders" would lead to a reassessment of the roles, strategies and behaviors of other actors. However, our investigations showed that this instrument has had a low impact. The human resources advisers should rather be considered as "cognitive operators" of organizational change. Elaborating on this argument, this article studies the ideology on which these instruments are grounded and analyzes the emergence of a new ‘professional ethos’ in the judiciary sphere.
|
|---|
