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The article presents information on confusion over various terms in social sciences. Several years ago the author participated in an interdisciplinary panel on "development," at an international sociological congress. Some persuasive and sharply analytic papers were presented, but very little meeting of minds took place simply because the participants had different things in mind when they talked about development. In that context it did little good to explain the fact that development is a polyseme and hence communication between the panelists could be achieved only after people had learned which sense of this word was intended by each scholar using it. Moreover, the effort to prescribe a correct meaning of development led only to contention and disagreement, not cumulation of knowledge or enhanced understanding. The meanings of word "nation" also vary with the disciplines. Political scientists usually have something like the state in mind and they may use the compound, "nation-state," to help remove the ambiguities in both words. By contrast, anthropologists and sociologists are more likely to use "nation" in an ethnic sense, applying it to communities that share a sense of common ancestry and make political claims, typically for control of a single state. In this sense it is not the French "state" that builds the French nation, but rather the French nation that created the state.

Until quite recently, questionnaire surveys, semi-structured interviews and the gathering and interpreting of various documents have been the main kinds of empirical research to be found in French sociology. Observation plays a leading role in none of them, even in the latter. The researchers who use it do not seem convinced of its legitimacy, because what can be expected from systematic observation does not fit the prevailing purpose of developing abstract, general theories. After having sketched out the institutional and intellectual background, this paper examines a few examples of French studies using observation. Most of them fail to clearly distinguish between indirect evidence and direct observation, between meaning as construed by the observer and that experienced by the people observed; they rarely report dated and situated facts (even more seldom behaviors than settings), and they replace the expected analyses of these messing facts with the interpretation of would-be typical or usual facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding social processes (trajectories of relationships among stakeholders), political constraints, cultural aspects and public opinions is essential for efficient design, sustainability and evaluation of restoration operations. However, few restoration projects involve the participation of social sciences., The ecological restoration of the Rhône River involved increasing flow below dams and better connecting floodplain channels at multiple sites along the river. Therefore, it provided a unique opportunity to identify the commonalities and differences among social processes associated with ecological restoration., We used qualitative analyses of speeches and interviews with stakeholders to understand their relationship to the Rhône. These analyses revealed that social values, relating local residents to the river, played a major role throughout the restoration projects., The comparison of social processes among three sites of the Rhône shows that they generally followed three stages: managing a crisis, transforming the relationship to the river and valuing the local social space (the territory)., Consistent patterns emerging across sites included the following: (i) the role of a local public figure able to mobilise stakeholders in supporting the restoration project; (ii) the importance of the organisation of the stakeholder community and its commitment to the project; and (iii) the major role of interactions between local and national levels. Variation across sites also occurred and may be related to unforeseen events such as political changes and natural hazards (e.g. floods and pollution)., Involving social science in restoration projects requires taking into account commonalities in social processes as well as the diversity of local experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exposes the developments of qualitative methodology in French sociology with respect to methods proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Touraine: `provoked and accompanied' self-analysis and the sociological intervention. In addition to the presentation of these two methods, the propose of this article is to describe and discuss the position of these two authors on certain problems such as representativeness, objectivity, status of data, epistemological rupture and lastly on the question of the writing by which sociological knowledge is formed from common sense knowledge contained In the data. This brings to a broader discussion on these questions. The strengths and weaknesses of these two methods are finally examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]