Industrial Life Insurance (ILI) was introduced in Sweden in the beginning of the 1900s. Following models already used in the United Kingdom and the United States, this insurance was specifically aimed at manual labourers, promising pension savings and compensation to surviving relatives. The insurance was an immediate success, with almost three million insurance policies in force by the mid-1900s. ILI was characterised by extensive and carefully monitored marketing practices. By managing an army of agents, the companies sold policies and collected premiums on a regular basis in the homes of the insured. The purpose of the dissertation is to analyse the development of a commercial business with social policy aspirations, and how it interacted with other social security institutions. How could ILI thrive in the emerging Swedish welfare state that, according to existing research, allowed little space for market-based welfare alternatives? The dissertation also seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of the contemporary “welfare market” in Sweden today. From a perspective of welfare formation as a social process, the emergence and expansion of ILI is interpreted as a phenomenon that has shaped, and been shaped by, the social policy arena. The insurance industry’s capacity to adapt to the changing ambitions of the state in this arena is emphasised. Furthermore, its leading representatives’ ability to continuously locate the role of life insurance in the shifting landscape of social policy is underlined. By locating welfare in separate but complementary public and private spheres, the industry contributed to the shaping of the compulsory pension scheme introduced in 1913 and the overall regulation of insurance in the mid-twentieth century. The social security of Swedish citizens was now to be ensured according to the vision of complementary spheres that the insurance industry had advocated for almost fifty years. The insurance companies’ commercial activities are analysed as a form of governmentality, where the agency system is scrutinized as an interventionist practice that created a long lasting relationship between the companies and the working classes. The dissertation shows how the industrialists’ role as “insurance experts” was used to influence public policies. As public figures and experts on various committees, representatives of the industry advocated a welfare formation that left ample space for their own business interests. The scientisation of security was also essential in creating a product where social aspirations and commercial logics could be united. The success of ILI thus rested on the interaction with the state apparatus. An arena of social policy was established where commercial companies were to be the supplier of all welfare above the level of “meagre basic security”. Through intense marketing measures, commercial actors influenced the perceptions of security and welfare. The process of welfare formation led to the internalisation of commercial ideals about social security that now constitutes an essential dimension of the Swedish welfare state.

L’étude de l’ingénierie territoriale dans les Pays du Beaujolais et du Roannais en Rhône Alpes, en liaison avec de nombreux autres dispositifs (Contrats d’agglomération, Contrats Territoriaux Emploi Formation, Leader) met en lumière une tendance forte à la recentralisation de la gestion publique territoriale.L’ingénierie territoriale est une bureaucratie professionnelle territoriale coincée entre les injonctions autoritaires de l’État et les velléités d’autonomie du pouvoir local. D’un côté, on observe que l’Europe, les services centraux de l’État diffusent des représentations et les bonnes pratiques aussi strictes que les règles impersonnelles du modèle bureaucratique wébérien. De l’autre côté, les pouvoirs locaux, face aux insuffisances des services déconcentrés de l’État structurent une ingénierie territoriale composite pour se doter de l’expertise nécessaire à leur stratégie de développement. Paradoxalement, c’est dans le cadre des politiques constitutives, que le pouvoir local en se dotant d’un appareil d’expertise, gage d’autonomie, crée les conditions de son propre contrôle et de sa soumission au régime d’agence qui s’impose comme nouveau mode de régulation de l’action publique au détriment de la négociation contractuelle.En d’autres termes, les instruments d’action publique et les savoir mobilisés par l’ingénierie territoriale dans la démarche de projet participent d’une technologie de gouvernement qui ne met pas fin à la rationalité bureaucratique, elle la transforme. / The study of territorial engineering in two “Pays” (rural areas) of the Rhône-Alpes Region – the “Beaujolais” and the “Roannais”, linked to a number of other measures (urban area contracts, territory/employment/training contracts, Leader) reveals a strong trend towards re-centralising the public management of territories.Territorial engineering is a professional bureaucracy caught between authoritarian dictates from the State and local authority desires for autonomy. On one hand, Europe and central State services convey representations and good practices as strict as the impersonal rules of Weber’s model of bureaucracy. On the other hand, local authorities, faced with the insufficiencies of decentralised State services construct their own composite territorial engineering to acquire the expertise necessary for their development strategies. Paradoxically, it is in the context of constitutive policies that local authorities, in acquiring a system of expertise – guarantee of autonomy, create the conditions of their own control and their submission to an agency system which asserts itself as the new way of regulating public action to the detriment of contractual negotiation.In other words, the instruments of public action and the expertise mobilized by territorial engineering in project planning participate in a technology of governance which, rather than bringing bureaucratic rationality to an end, transform it.

La tesi cerca di rispondere alla domanda: 'La libanese intifadha al-Iqtad poteva essere prevista?'. la tesi prima definisce l'evento politico, e. Successivamente esamina le condizioni epistemologiche in base alle quali una predizione del futuro possa essere considerata scientifica. In terzo luogo, propone uno schema di previsione organizzato in funzione del coinvolgimento degli agenti nella creazione della storia umana. Infine, analizza la intifadha al-Iqtad in base allo schema analitico proposto. / The thesis aims to answer the question 'could the Lebanese Intifadha al-Iqtad have been predicted?' In order to do so, it first of all tries to define the political event, in terms of features, dynamic, and outcome. Secondly, it outlines the epistemological assumptions on which a scientific prediction of the future could be based. Thirdly, it puts forward a framework for foreseeing the future organised on different levels and divided into macro-categories. Finally, it analyses the Lebanese Intifadha al-Iqtad according to the proposed framework.