La construction d’une expertise : le cas de la prévention du dopage

• Main Authors: Olivier Le Noé, Patrick Trabal
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires du Mirail 2009-05-01
• Series: Sciences de la Société
• Subjects: expertise; prevention; doping; health; State; policies
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sds/8236

In the 90’s, the French State began to worry about doping prevention and started to rely on some actors, who gradually established themselves as a Group of Experts. The aim of the present paper is first to describe this process by analyzing the relations between a Sports’ Administration which does not enforce many constraints, and ‘preventologists’ (as they designate themselves) who manage to become unavoidable. In a second time, we have studied how this group built its scientific expertise together with the messages it spreads during prevention campaigns. Our work highlights on the one hand the tensions between the difficulties they encountered when linking this knowledge with academic disciplines, and, on the other hand, the propensity they had to assert their scientific legitimacy by using arguments of authority. Last but not least, we showed that the relations between these experts and the actors dealing with the targets of this prevention are profoundly asymmetric. Analyzing the conditions of sustainability for this Group of Experts, we highlight the fact that this distance with the realities of fieldwork is both a resource and a menace.