La cohérence des comportements professionnels et privés chez les viticulteurs biologiques alsaciens

• Main Authors: Jean Nizet, Denise Van Dam, Marcus Dejardin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Catholique de Louvain 2008-12-01
• Series: Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rsa/346

This contribution looks at the strong level of coherence observed in the behaviours, both professional and private, of a small sample of Alsatian winegrowers whom we interviewed at length. First there is an attempt at describing these behaviours and identifying the principles by which the actors justify them. We then propose two hypotheses liable to account for the coherence observed. The first suggests that this coherence is in part constructed out of the speech of the interviewees. The second asks about the socialization mechanisms. Three mechanisms are identified : the identitary tensions these people feel when they abandon the principles evoked ; the controls, formal and above all informal, that they exert on one another ; the hierarchy installed in the field of organic winegrowing, due precisely to this more or less reinforced coherence in behaviours. We show that these mechanisms combine their effects in producing a powerful and uniform socialization, which makes the organic winegrowers interviewed much more integrated individuals than what sociological theories advancing the diversity or, perhaps, the bursting forth of the experience of the contemporary individual, would have predicted.