Novelty is a widespread notion that has not been given commensurate critical attention. This research is an ethnographically-inclined exploration of practices surrounding the accomplishment of novelty in an institution for which novelty is a central notion: the patent system of the United Kingdom. The research is based on interviews with patent examiners at the UK patent office, interviews with patent attorneys at various legal firms, and documentary analysis of legislation and numerous legal judgments. The thesis brings to bear themes from Science and Technology Studies and ethnomethodology to assess the extent to which they can account for the practices surrounding novelty in the UK patent system. As a fundamental legal requirement for the patentability of inventions, novelty is a central part of the practices of patent composition, assessment and contestation. Rather than being a straightforward technical criterion, however, novelty is shown to be a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon emerging from interwoven legal, bureaucratic and individual practices. The local resolution of whether or not a given invention is new, and the cross-institutional coherence of novelty as a practicable notion, raise questions concerning ontology, accountability, scale and inconcludability, and provide an opportunity for empirically grounded engagement with these longstanding analytical concerns.

En nous intéressant aux facteurs qui incitent les individus à devenir chef-fe-s d’entreprise, nous avons analysé le sens qu’ils donnent à l’acte d’entreprendre ainsi que les divers leviers mobilisés pour mener à bien leur projet entrepreneurial. Le propre du travail indépendant est de disposer d’un patrimoine productif transmissible aux générations à venir : l’entreprise. Or, notre recherche montre que l’héritage relatif à l’indépendance professionnelle est multiforme. Pour autant, nous montrons qu’il s’agit toujours d’une place à transmettre. En comparant les trajectoires d’héritier-e-s de l’entreprise familiale, d’héritier-e-s de l’indépendance et de chef-fe-s d’entreprise sans ascendant entrepreneur, nous avons mis en perspective la distinction de sexes opérante dans la famille concernant le patrimoine. En effet, la transmission du patrimoine n’emprunte pas les mêmes canaux pour les filles et les garçons de la fratrie. En somme, cette thèse revient sur l’influence de la transmission familiale sur les trajectoires des entrepreneur-e-s. Les manières d’appréhender le travail, l’entreprise, la vie conjugale et la famille à l’aune de cette dernière ainsi que les représentations qui s’y attachent dépendent des modalités de transmission familiale relatives à l’indépendance et plus précisément de la transmission d’une place professionnelle - de successeur-e, d’indépendant-e - ou non. / In this work, we focus on factors that made some people become business leaders. We analyze how they understand the entrepreneurship and what are the levers used to manage their entrepreneurial projects. The fundamental aspect of self-employment is to have productive assets and a business that you can pass down to the next generations. However, we will show that professionnal inheritance can be multiform even if, in any case, it is about a place to transfer. We compare trajectories of family business inheritors, self-employed inheritors and business leaders without business ancestors and put the difference between genders that occurs in the family about inheritance into perspective. Indeed, inheritance turns out to be different between daughters and sons.