La question « SDF » est étudiée au sein de deux paradigmes : l’approche critique qui insiste sur les phénomènes de domination sociale et l’approche interactionniste qui souligne les adaptations successives que les individus mettent en oeuvre. Ces adaptations sont étudiées à travers des situations particulières dans lesquelles l’identité de sansdomicilese construit et une carrière se dessine. Cette carrière est abordée soit comme une carrière de désocialisation dont la clochardisation constitue l’horizon, soit comme une carrière de survie dont le maintien de soi forme la perspective quotidienne et biographique. Dans ce cadre, les travaux menés sur les questions de la « sortie » et du « chez soi »ouvrent la voie à une approche renouvelée du maintien de soi au-delà de la gestion de la « face » en situation. C’est dans cette perspective que s’inscrit notre ethnographie des pratiques numériques comme supports pratiques du maintiende soi. L’expérience de l’errance est traversée par un certain nombre d’épreuves rassemblées dans une lutte pour le maintien de soi. Ainsi, le maintien de soi est à la fois une préoccupation quotidienne et une question biographique englobant les temporalités passées, présentes et futures. Il se travaille dans le quotidien de la survie mais aussi dans le travail de mémoire, de présentation, d’expérimentation et de projection de soi. Si la lutte contre la déprise est un travail essentiellement invisible, les pratiques numériques, observées dans l’écologie de l’activité, offrent une entrée pourl’observation et l’analyse. Ainsi, les pratiques numériques supportent, dans le quotidien de la survie, les démarches d’accès aux droits et la négociation de marges d’autonomie. Elles sont également un support des sociabilités familiales etamicales. Les pratiques numériques, à l’interface entre le privé et le public permettent aux personnes à la rue de s’aménager des temps et des espaces pour se soucier d’elles-mêmes. Enfin, notre recherche montre que les pratiques numériques constituent un support ambivalent, tantôt habilitant, tantôt disqualifiant. En effet, le support ne s’actualise pas nécessairement positivement et peut, au contraire, se retouner contre le sujet, alimentant l’émiettement identitaire et renforçant les sentiments de solitude et d’indignité. / Homelessness is studied within two paradigms: the critical approach, which emphasizes the phenomena of social domination and the interactionist approach that underlines the successive adaptations that individuals implement. Those adaptations are studied through particular situations within which the "homeless" identity is built and a career takes shape. That career is looked at either as a un-socialization career or as a survival career in which self-preservation forms a daily and biographical perspective. In this context, working on issues such as "Getting off the streets" and "Home" paves the way for a renewed approach to self-preservation beyond situational facework. In this perspective, our ethnography of digital practices forms a practical support for self-preservation. Our fieldwork within social support structures shows that all the people surveyed, despite their heterogeneity, experience wandering as an intimate and social experience, and as a form of extreme precariousness which is lived between street and assistance, and marked by a self-weakening and an alteration of the capacity to look to the future. This experience is punctuated by many trials, gathered in a struggle for self-preservation. Self-preservation is then both a daily concern and a biographical question encompassing past, present and future temporalities. It is a work in the daily reality of survival but also through a memory work, selfpresentation, self-experimentation and self-projection. If the struggle against disengagement is almost invisible, digital practices offer a new approach for observation and analysis. Digital uses make it possible to access to rights and margins of autonomy. They also support friendship and family links. Between private and public life, digital uses allow homeless people to set up times and spaces to care about themselves. Eventually, our study also shows that digital uses create an ambivalent form of support: sometimes enabling, sometimes disqualifying. Indeed, it can turn against the subject, feeding identity crumbling and strengthening the solitude and unworthiness feelings

This thesis examines the development of self-help as an ideology and as an organisational principle for poor relief and how it came to dominate discussions over poverty and crucially inform the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The continuity of self-help with earlier discussions and reviews of the poor laws is explored and emphasised, as is the continuing moral core of poor relief despite historians’ frequent ascription of de-moralisation to the new political economy that came to heavily influence poor law discourse. The thesis analyses the evolution of the poor laws and of attitudes to poverty and begins with an examination of a divergence in the discourse relating to poverty between a more formal and centralised institutional approach and a more devolved, permissive institutional approach; the latter gained precedence due to its closer proximity to a dominant mode of thinking (as analysed by A. W. Coats) about the poor that held self-betterment as offering a solution to poverty most appropriate to the governance structures of the day. The greater role given to self-betterment and the natural affinity of more devolved schemes with a macroeconomic political economy framework pushed the evolution of poor law discourse along a route of emphasising individual probity and agency over the established model of community cohesion. Parallel to this divergence was the development of distinct intellectual traditions within poor law discourse between the older natural-law tradition of a natural right to subsistence and a new ideology of the natural law of markets and of competition for resources. By analysis of the thought of writers such as Thomas Robert Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, David Davies, Frederick Morton Eden, Edmund Burke, etc., it is shown that this newer conception of natural law, encompassing a less interventionist and more macroeconomic approach (involving the deployment of statistics and abstraction, as explored by S. Sherman), proved more compatible with the devolved, more permissive institutional approach and so came to take precedence over that of the natural right to subsistence, which was associated more with traditional paternalism and community-level responses to scarcity and poverty. The natural law tradition spoke more to the abstract conceptions of poverty associated at this time with the greater deployment of statistics and tables in the analysis of social problems. It is demonstrated how writers of the period utilised utilitarian conceptions and nascent political economic arguments to portray the greater good of the country as a whole as possessed of greater moral and economic authority than more traditional ‘moral economy’ responses, and that vocabularies of virtue and duty were used to illustrate and justify such a shift. This set the scene for self-betterment as an economic strategy to evolve into an ideology of self-help which was developed as the panacea of poverty and the answer to the social dislocations caused by industrialisation. Self-help came to the fore as an approach that was more politically resonant in the era of revolutionary France and which enabled a more permissive institutional apparatus to be advanced. These institutions, such as allotments, savings banks and schools of industry, came to prominence in the period 1816-1820 and pertained more to macroeconomic understandings of poverty. They were expounded using a theme, that of ‘character’, that described poverty as the result of personal imprudence and hence as treatable, the most appropriate level for this treatment being that of the individual. The reforms of 1818-19 and the debates that informed them are given an extended analysis as they formed the crucial juncture in the cohering of self-help as an ideology and a paradigmatic shift in poor law policy towards greater discrimination underwritten by self-help. Finally, the 1834 Poor law Reform Act is explained in terms of the ideological development of arguments of self-help and character towards a more punitive and disciplinarian platform for enforcing self-help, with the cost-efficient and systematic institutional approach of Bentham adapted to the purpose.

This Thesis applies one of the most popular household models to the allocation of resources within poor rural households. Based on Browning and Goertz (2007) seminal Collective Household Model, the first Chapter conducts a literature review and derives conditions for identifying and testing the model. The next Chapter amends this model to evaluate efficiency of the intra-household allocation of male and female labour inputs in the domestic production of multiple crops. Using survey data from Uganda it is found that the division of labour between food and cash crops is made according to comparative advantage, but that Pareto improvements could be achieved by reallocating labour between male- and female-controlled plots. The final Chapter analyses the distribution of private consumption and leisure within rural couples in Tanzania. The findings provide limited support for the Collective Model, but are consistent with non-unitary household behaviour.

La présence de personnes sans-abri dans l’espace public est un problème social ancien auquel depuis longtemps l’État cherche à remédier. À partir des années 1990, et plus encore après la promulgation, en juillet 1998, de la loi de lutte contre les exclusions, l’action publique s’incarne dans des dispositifs dits de « veille sociale » dont la mise en œuvre est majoritairement confiée, par délégation de service, au monde associatif. Parmi ces dispositifs, les « maraudes » désignent l’action d’équipes mobiles dont la mission est d’aller à la rencontre des sans-abri directement dans la rue. Les maraudes constituent l’objet empirique de cette thèse dont l’objectif est d’étudier cette activité en tenant compte à la fois de la pluralité de ses opérateurs – particulièrement des associations – et de la diversité de ses intervenants salariés et bénévoles, professionnels (notamment du travail social) ou non-professionnels. À partir d’une enquête ethnographique menée à Paris dans trois associations de solidarité et combinant observation participante et entretiens biographiques, l’enjeu est d’éclairer les tensions inhérentes à cette situation de coprésence d’acteurs collectifs et individuels en analysant conjointement les maraudes comme un monde du travail et comme un espace d’engagement. Par ces entrées analytiques, il s’agit plus généralement de contribuer à la compréhension des dynamiques de frontières dans un secteur – celui de l’urgence sociale – où persistent des ambiguïtés entre travail social et bénévolat, entre action publique et secours privé, entre valorisation de la professionnalité et reconnaissance du dévouement altruiste, et dans lequel les limites entre les missions sont incertaines. Une perspective interactionniste, inspirée à la fois de la sociologie du travail et des professions, permet en premier lieu de soulever le rôle central des pouvoirs publics dans la régulation de l’activité par la diffusion de multiples injonctions – notamment à la « professionnalisation » et à la « coordination des maraudes » – auxquelles les trois organisations enquêtées souscrivent différemment, allant d’un rapport d’alliance à un rapport d’autonomie. L’étude de la division du travail éclaire ensuite la hiérarchie de noblesse des tâches ainsi que leur distribution, qui valorisent les fonctions d’accompagnement social prioritairement attribuée aux « maraudes professionnelles » et déprécie les missions de distribution, notamment alimentaire, qui incombent aux « maraudes bénévoles ». L’observation de stratégies de résistance à cette division – les équipes bénévoles souhaitant également assurer le « suivi » des sans-domicile – révèle dès lors l’existence de luttes de juridiction qui ont pour enjeux le contrôle d’un territoire à la fois spatial et professionnel mais aussi la maîtrise des savoirs essentiellement tacites et acquis par l’expérience. Empruntant à la sociologie de l’engagement, un regard resserré sur les maraudeurs et leurs trajectoires autorise en second lieu le dépassement de cette opposition (professionnel/bénévole). D’abord en montrant l’intrication et l’hybridation des carrières bénévoles et professionnelles, les maraudeurs salariés ayant très souvent eu une pratique de bénévolat préalable et certains bénévoles utilisant la maraude comme une expérience de préprofessionnalisation dans le travail social. Ensuite, en identifiant des continuités dans les façons de voir et d’exercer l’activité qui transcendent les appartenances associatives et les conditions statutaires pour mieux révéler l’influence de modes de socialisation (familial, militant, professionnel). / The presence of homeless people in the public space is an ancient social problem that the State has been attempting to solve for a long time. From the 90’s on - and especially after the enactment, in 1998, of the law fighting against social exclusion - government intervention has been embodied in a package of social measures under the umbrella term of “social watch” (“veille sociale”). Its implementation has been mainly entrusted to not-for-profit associations and charities, through delegation of public service programs. Among these measures, the mobile outreach programs describe the action of mobile teams given the mission to connect and engage with homeless people in the streets. The mobile outreach program constitutes the empirical subject of this thesis. The aim is to study this activity by taking into account the plurality of its actors - especially the not-for-profit associations - and the diversity of its contributors, both employees and volunteers as well as professional and non-professional social workers. Based on an ethnographic study led in Paris involving three different charity organizations, it combines participant observation and biographical interviews. The aim is to bring into view and clarify situations of inherent tension in this copresence of collective and individual actors through an analysis of mobile outreach programs as both places of work and social commitment. This analysis more generally enables an understanding of the dynamic boundaries within the field of social urgency, in which there are many persistant ambiguities. Ambiguities abound between social work and volunteering, public actions and private initiatives, between the prominence given to promote professionalism and the acknowledgment of altruistic dedication. The boundaries among these different missions remain vague and uncertain. An interactionist perspective inspired by the sociology of work and employment enables us to raise the issue of the main role played by the public authorities. They regulate the social outreach activity through multiple injunctions, notably with particular emphasis on professionalization and coordination of the mobile outreach program. The three different organizations that are the subject of enquiry take different approaches to those injunctions, whether in a relation of alliance or autonomy. The analysis of work divisions sheds light on the hierarchical division of labour as well as the question of how tasks are delegated. Social support and follow up missions are prioritised to professional outreach workers while responsibility for the less well considered missions such as food runs and distribution are handed over to the volunteer outreach workers. Observation of the different strategies of resistance towards this division reveal a struggle over jurisdiction – volunteer outreach workers equally want to be a part of the support and follow up missions and highlight what is at stake: the control of territory both physical and professional, as well as the mastery of knowledge which is essentially tacit and acquired through experience. By looking closer at volunteer outreach workers and their trajectories through the lens of sociology, the boundary between professional and volunteer can be seen to be an artificial one. First, by showing the overlap and hybridisation between the trajectories of volunteers and professionals: wage-earning outreach workers have a lot of the time practiced volunteering before, while on the other hand, some volunteers use the outreach programs as a way to enter the professional world of social work. Then by underlining the continuity in the way of seeing and practicing the activity that transcends organizations’ affiliations and status to better reveal the influence of different modes of socialization, be it through family, advocacy or work.