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This study is about the school teachers’ positions in contemporary Swedish society. In order to grasp the social characteristics of their profession and its transformations it has been important to conduct thorough analyses of the recruitment of teacher students and the recruitment to the teaching professions. The explanations to the findings are mainly based on analyses of how different kinds of assets – such as for example cultural capital and educational capital – are distributed among the students and within the school teacher corps. The data material consists of individual based statistic of all teachers 1978–2008 and all students enrolled in higher education 1977–2009, and of interviews with teachers and students. Regarding theory and methods, the study belongs to the sociological tradition founded by Pierre Bourdieu, which means that capital, strategies and social space are key concepts. The statistical techniques employed comprise mainly of different variants of correspondence analysis as well as logistic regression. As shown in the first part of the thesis an increasing share of the teacher students possess small amounts of acquired school capital, as well as weak resources inherited from their parental home. This change has been especially noticeable within the programmes educating upper secondary school teachers. In the second part, the focus is on the social positions of those upper secondary teachers. The correspondence analyses indicate a cleavage within the profession based on the teachers’ qualification and merits. Teachers richer in educational capital tend to occupy more stable professional positions and are also overrepresented at schools where the pupils feature significant educational and social assets, which in turn further contributes to the density of educational capital. One of the main results is that school teachers have been exposed to two partly opposing processes during the past decades. On the one hand, there has been increasing homogeneity, namely convergences between the employment conditions of different categories of school teachers and between different teacher education programmes. On the other hand, the social divergences within the profession tend to widen. Those gaps have increased over time because of the more differentiated school system and changes in recruitment patterns.

The Swedish educational reforms in the beginning of the 1990s, introducing a public-funded voucher system, free school choice and the right to run schools as commercial enterprises, had an important impact on upper secondary education. The Stockholm region, the most populous in Sweden, offered favourable conditions for the growth of a previously non-existent educational market. A massive expansion of independent schools took place, managed primarily by larger companies, along with the extensive marketing of profiled study programmes and the import of management models from the private sector. In 2011 alone, schools competed for 75 000 pupils representing an annual economic value of approximately 8.5 billion SEK. Covering the period 1988 to 2011, this thesis analyses the relationship between the educational market and upper secondary education as a social field structured by the educational strategies of social groups. Building on Bourdieu’s relational sociology, the study combines quantitative and qualitative methods, using correspondence analysis as a major analytical tool. While free school choice and the voucher system established a supply-demand relationship between schools and families and pupils, the analysis shows that the market has submitted to the same forces that structure the field of upper secondary education within which it unfolds, primarily the volume and composition of symbolic and other assets that students, families and schools possess. In fact, the social structure of the field of upper secondary education in Stockholm remains remarkably stable over time, opposing on the one hand female and male dominated education and on the other hand education with high social and scholarly recruitment to that with low. Euclidean clustering analysis unveils a complex social structure reflecting how the increasingly differentiated educational supply has adapted to the needs of various social groups. Elite schools, market-oriented schools and market-exposed schools develop different strategies in the battle over pupils. Competing amongst themselves for pupils rich in inherited and acquired capital, the elite schools withdraw from the openly market-oriented approach that characterises the other type of schools and instead opt for more subtle, long-term strategies for building up trust from their audience, involving investments in staff and other institutional assets.

La première partie de la thèse traite d’inférence combinatoire en Analyse Géométrique des Données (AGD). Nous proposons des tests multidimensionnels sans hypothèse sur le processus d’obtention des données ou les distributions. Nous nous intéressons ici aux problèmes de typicalité (comparaison d’un point moyen à un point de référence ou d’un groupe d’observations à une population de référence) et d’homogénéité (comparaison de plusieurs groupes). Nous utilisons des procédures combinatoires pour construire un ensemble de référence par rapport auquel nous situons les données. Les statistiques de test choisies mènent à des prolongements originaux : interprétation géométrique du seuil observé et construction d’une zone de compatibilité.La seconde partie présente l’étude de l’absentéisme dans les Industries Electriques et Gazières de 1995 à 2011 (avec construction d’une cohorte épidémiologique). Des méthodes d’AGD sont utilisées afin d’identifier des pathologies émergentes et des groupes d’agents sensibles. / The first part of this PhD thesis deals with combinatorial inference methods forGeometric Data Analysis (GDA). We propose multidimensional tests that make no assumption on the process of generating data or distributions. We focus particularly on problems of typicality (comparison of a mean point to a reference point or comparison of a group of observations to a reference population) and on problems of homogeneity (comparison of several groups). These methods consist in using combinatorial procedures to build a reference set with respect to which we situate the data. The chosen test statistics lead to original extensions: geometric interpretation of the observed level and construction of a compatibilityzone.The second part of this thesis presents the study of absenteeism in the French Electricity and Gas Industries from 1995 to 2011 (with construction of an epidemiological cohort). GDA methods are used to identify emerging diseases and sensitive groups of agents.

Education is a neglected area within globalisation research, and, within educational research, very few studies have been devoted to transnational phenomena. In this study, transnational educational strategies are analysed as ingredients in social groups’ strategies, while the transnational investments of higher education institutions are understood primarily as resources in national educational field struggles. Three investigations are presented, two on Swedish students studying abroad – Paris and north-eastern USA – and one on transnational investments at educational establishments in Stockholm. The material consists of two surveys, interviews with Swedish students abroad and administrators at Swedish educational institutions, and analyses of statistics and documents. Central methods include those of geometrical data analysis, such as correspondence analysis and Euclidean classification, and interviews. The most significant concepts – field, capital and strategies – have been taken from Bourdieu’s sociological toolbox. The studies show that those who study in Paris constitute both a social and meritocratic elite, while the students in north-eastern USA have more social than meritocratic resources. Three types of transnational educational strategies appear. For one group of students, studies at prestigious higher education institutions constitute a complement to their main studies at leading Swedish counterparts. Another group has chosen to make nation-specific or international investments rather than invest in Swedish higher education. A third group comprises students lacking access to the Swedish system, and for whom studies abroad provide a second chance. One of the main results is that the most sought-after positions at foreign educational institutions are often attained through substantial investment in the Swedish educational system. The leading institutions have sufficient resources to ensure viability in a transnational educational market and take their place in exclusive networks. Those students who reach the top of the national hierarchies thus gain access to the most sought-after positions in a global educational market.

Le volume de données disponibles est en perpétuelle expansion. Il est primordial de fournir des méthodes efficaces et robustes permettant d'en extraire des informations pertinentes. Nous nous focalisons sur des données pouvant être représentées sous la forme de nuages de points dans un certain espace muni d'une métrique, e.g. l'espace Euclidien R^d, générées selon une certaine distribution. Parmi les questions naturelles que l'on peut se poser lorsque l'on a accès à des données, trois d'entre elles sont abordées dans cette thèse. La première concerne la comparaison de deux ensembles de points. Comment décider si deux nuages de points sont issus de formes ou de distributions similaires ? Nous construisons un test statistique permettant de décider si deux nuages de points sont issus de distributions égales (modulo un certain type de transformations e.g. symétries, translations, rotations...). La seconde question concerne la décomposition d'un ensemble de points en plusieurs groupes. Étant donné un nuage de points, comment faire des groupes pertinents ? Souvent, cela consiste à choisir un système de k représentants et à associer chaque point au représentant qui lui est le plus proche, en un sens à définir. Nous développons des méthodes adaptées à des données échantillonnées selon certains mélanges de k distributions, en présence de données aberrantes. Enfin, lorsque les données n'ont pas naturellement une structure en k groupes, par exemple, lorsqu'elles sont échantillonnées à proximité d'une sous-variété de R^d, une question plus pertinente est de construire un système de k représentants, avec k grand, à partir duquel on puisse retrouver la sous-variété. Cette troisième question recouvre le problème de la quantification d'une part, et le problème de l'approximation de la distance à un ensemble d'autre part. Pour ce faire, nous introduisons et étudions une variante de la méthode des k-moyennes adaptée à la présence de données aberrantes dans le contexte de la quantification. Les réponses que nous apportons à ces trois questions dans cette thèse sont de deux types, théoriques et algorithmiques. Les méthodes proposées reposent sur des objets continus construits à partir de distributions et de sous-mesures. Des études statistiques permettent de mesurer la proximité entre les objets empiriques et les objets continus correspondants. Ces méthodes sont faciles à implémenter en pratique lorsque des nuages de points sont à disposition. L'outil principal utilisé dans cette thèse est la fonction distance à la mesure, introduite à l'origine pour adapter les méthodes d'analyse topologique des données à des nuages de points corrompus par des données aberrantes / It is primordial to establish effective and robust methods to extract pertinent information from datasets. We focus on datasets that can be represented as point clouds in some metric space, e.g. Euclidean space R^d; and that are generated according to some distribution. Of the natural questions that may arise when one has access to data, three are addressed in this thesis. The first question concerns the comparison of two sets of points. How to decide whether two datasets have been generated according to similar distributions? We build a statistical test allowing to one to decide whether two point clouds have been generated from distributions that are equal (up to some rigid transformation e.g. symmetry, translation, rotation...).The second question is about the decomposition of a set of points into clusters. Given a point cloud, how does one make relevant clusters? Often, it consists of selecting a set of k representatives, and associating every point to its closest representative (in some sense to be defined). We develop methods suited to data sampled according to some mixture of k distributions, possibly with outliers. Finally, when the data can not be grouped naturally into $k$ clusters, e.g. when they are generated in a close neighborhood of some sub-manifold in R^d, a more relevant question is the following. How to build a system of $k$ representatives, with k large, from which it is possible to recover the sub-manifold? This last question is related to the problems of quantization and compact set inference. To address it, we introduce and study a modification of the $k$-means method adapted to the presence of outliers, in the context of quantization. The answers we bring in this thesis are of two types, theoretical and algorithmic. The methods we develop are based on continuous objects built from distributions and sub-measures. Statistical studies allow us to measure the proximity between the empirical objects and the continuous ones. These methods are easy to implement in practice, when samples of points are available. The main tool in this thesis is the function distance-to-measure, which was originally introduced to make topological data analysis work in the presence of outliers.

This study analyzes, the structure of the Erasmus Mundus scholarship program by utilizing mixed methods, and is being analyzed within the contextualized framework of the Cambodia’s Higher Education system as well as its relationship with the Erasmus Mundus scholarship program. Mixed approach has been employed for this study, combining both quantitative data to construct the social space, which acts as a backbone for interpretation, and qualitative data from interviewing the scholarship program coordinator and scholarship holders in order to investigate the recruitment process and the students’ perception respectively, presenting the macro-micro relationship that makes up the entirety of the scholarship program. Collectively inspected, the findings reveal a new contextualized result that contributes not only to the development of the Cambodia’s Higher Education, but also to its position and its students within the space of the scholarship program of Erasmus Mundus. Through the close inspection using interview method, the underlying complexity of the recruitment process of the scholarship program is illustrated, indicating a multi-layer hierarchy and multiple decision-making processes. There are also implications of oppositions between the properties of the students, signaling the diversified student body in the scholarship program. Prominent theme of the opposition in the space appears to be related to the colonial past of the Cambodia’s system as well as the differences between local and international experiences that the students possess. Students interviewed in the study, furthermore, reveal how they prepared themselves to apply for the scholarship program and to be successful candidate, which depicts their assets and strategies that can be derived from the constructed space. Unanimously the students show strong confidence and great insight of information which can be understood as the compatibilities between the recruiter of the scholarship program and the students’ assets. Finally, overall findings give a new perspective of the profile of the scholarship program within the Erasmus Mundus mobility scheme. It shows that while students are required to possess certain objectively set requirements, there are also exception cases that students who possessed lower amount of capitals can also be successful, provided that the conditions like the credentials of their degree from Cambodia, as well as minimum requirements to pass the university admission have been met, and their “motivation letter” is exceptionally well-written which shows the subjective side of the recruitment process.