This chapter begins by highlighting that incomes from work, of course, differ widely in France, particularly for those who experience periods of unemployment. This provides an initial occasion to underscore the existence of poverty in France, together with the social protection measures which seek to alleviate it. A link is then made to research into the sociology of work and its meanings, and this in particular to tackle an enigma arising from comparative research which shows that many French workers are highly engaged in their work, but also that many are deeply dissatisfied with its conditions and practices. This point is developed using data on the relationship between managers and workers, which shows that hierarchical practices continue to predominate in France’s companies and administrations. The argument developed here is that the reproduction of this top-down form of social relations is perpetuated in part by the route to being a manager continuing to be dominated by educational success rather than through achievements at the workplace. Such forms of hierarchy are also reproduced because of the way trade unions and peak-business organizations are structured in this country. Consequently, trade unions are rarely set up to be systematic forces for change in workplace conditions. Meanwhile, business associations are structured in such a way that any move to attenuate hierarchical relations within companies will seldom stem from this source. The overall result is stalemate – which also explains why, periodically, French workplaces tend to ‘explode’ into arenas of angry and often violent protest.

Chapter 4 traces the transformation of Royal Dutch Shell’s expatriate at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the mid-1990s, in the context of a broader corporate restructure and in response to gendered challenges to its management model, Shell enacted a neoliberal reform of its system of expatriation and introduced a diversity agenda. It transformed its expatriates from loyal ‘Shell families’ that migrated within the ‘Shell world’ into individualised and flexible mobile workers circulating within a global labour market. This reform, however, did not change the patriarchal constitution of the Shell expatriate, or decolonise this managerial institution. Meanwhile, a group of ‘Shell wives’ founded the Shell Ladies’ Project to collect their own memories and position themselves as expatriates in their own right. The Shell Ladies’ Project and its subsequent development into an independent archive of expatriate social history mirrors organisational and societal trends in the gradual transmutation of women’s identity, from the company-rooted ‘Shell wife’ into the ‘global expat’ at the heart of globalisation. Chapter 4 thus traces, through the transforming Shell expatriate, the fashioning of neoliberal forms of elite migration and its ideological ideal-type: the transnational professional, commanding a global consciousness and skill set, moving self-directed and flexibly, at home in the world.

This chapter explores the way in which Research Ethics Committees (RECs) use written materials – application forms, information sheets, and consent forms – to assess researchers’ trustworthiness. Historically, drawing on material from a range of sources, it highlights the way in which REC application forms have developed over the years and the social and political pressures that have shaped the form they take. A crucial aspect of this will be the role of RECs in changing standards around informed consent, from witnessed verbal consent (the gold standard promoted by the Medical Research Council in the mid-1960s) to written informed consent, which became a requirement less than a decade later. Ethnographically, this chapter explores how RECs use certain aspects of application forms as ‘trust warrants’, attesting to researchers’ trustworthiness and competence. These include specific forms of terminology – for example, converting the US term ‘research subject’ into the UK REC-approved ‘research participant’ – willingness to expend resources to improve information – for example, translating information sheets into different languages to allow wider recruitment into research – and the way in which potential threats to NHS resources (particularly in the case of commercially sponsored research) are mitigated.

This chapter explores the characterisation of sugar as both hidden and actively hiding in the everyday food supply, tricking consumers into accidental overconsumption. Focusing on the popular media devices of the ‘hidden-sugar shock’ exposé, the food diary and the ‘mortified mother’ story, the chapter explores the ways in which consumers are encouraged to become sugar detectives. These communicate life lessons that not only share techniques for spotting hidden sugar but also reproduce the moral imperative to do so. The chapter argues that this work is never straightforward, constantly raising new tensions as categories of food clash and the health/unhealthy binary divisions fracture under the shifting realities of everyday consumption, the sociality of food and the need to walk the fine line between vigilance and giving way to dangerous obsession and inflexibility.

This chapter outlines how memories of past events are relayed in several ways, for example, through popular culture, the media, in demonstrations in the public sphere, political speeches and pamphlets, as well as in narratives, folk tales, stories and popular histories and local history events. It is through such mechanisms that existing memories not only find a way of being transmitted across generations but also are often distorted and shaped to meet the present needs, political concerns and purposes of a particular group. Here, they tend to rely on a pre-given and ‘common-sense’ narrative, to ensure coherence and commitment among group members. Thus, perceptions of the individual, the self, others and collectives are created through struggles with identity and belonging, both of which are used to support a selective and reconstructed past. Finally, the chapter discusses the various contributions to the volume and how, albeit from different perspectives, the contributors raise important questions about why certain individuals and memories hold attention and are commemorated, while others do not and are forgotten.

This chapter argues that although the ‘wrongness’ of sugar as an understood and urgent problem appears unproblematically singular, there is a lack of consensus about the nature of that problem. Drawing on policy documents, news reporting and popular science texts, the chapter explores two competing understandings of the ‘problem’ of sugar as a source of ‘empty’ calories and as uniquely toxic. The chapter argues these rely on different models of metabolism and are in many ways inimical to each other, with mainstream anti-sugar advocacy suspicious of the absolutism of claims that sugar is toxic and the sugar-as-toxic advocates seeing the dietary mainstream as intractably wedded by vested interests and corrupt science to a dietary model that is doomed to fail.

This introduction first highlights why it is important to study countries in depth and why France has been chosen in this instance. I argue that it is vital that more detailed knowledge about each society and its politics is, once again, given precedence. The French case provides an appropriate vehicle for this argument because its society–politics linkage has been under considerable strain since the early 1980s. In summary, the claims I make are that if neo-liberalism and globalization have undoubtedly been highly present in French socio-economic and political life over the past four decades, their direct effects should not be overestimated. Instead, where they have had influence, as political discourses, neo-liberalism and globalization have been mediated by much deeper shifts in society that reflect both the impacts of previous French history and a reordering of social structure and mobility. As the introduction also sets out and explains, this societal structuring can only be grasped by examining the power relations which both link and separate social strata but also organizations and other forms of collective action. The aim is to show how and why different sets of actors have, with varying degrees of success, worked politically to change the institutions that participate so strongly in societal structuring. In so doing, my concept of ‘political work’ is defined as a combination of three processes: problem definition, policy instrument setting and legitimation. This concept is thus used to strengthen analysis of the agency-led causes of institutional and power-relation change or stasis.

The Introduction sets the scene for the growing sense of crisis around sugar that arose in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It highlights the ways in which the attack on sugar is embedded in familiar dietary continuities while being a crisis of its time, reprising familiar anxieties around fatness and nutricentric understandings of food while aligning with the growing molecularisation of the body, the intensification of healthism and the socio-political context of austerity. As both more of the same and a fresh departure, the Introduction highlights the book’s core lines of enquiry into the multiple (and often competing) understandings of sugar’s ‘wrongness’, what gets lost along the way and to what effects. It also sets out the research on which the book is based, and highlights some of the dilemmas faced by the author in writing critically about the attack on sugar while repudiating any alignment with Big Sugar.

This chapter focuses on the institutional connections between Research Ethics Committees (RECs) and hospitals, exploring the way in which such links provide ‘local knowledge’ of applicants’ trustworthiness, helping committees decide whether to approve specific applications or not. Historically this chapter explores the longstanding tension in policy debates between the need for RECs to remain autonomous local forms of professional self-regulation and the desire on the part of government for centralisation of decisions to reduce the regulatory burden on specific applicants (e.g. pharmaceutical companies). Focus will be paid to two specific cases: the attempt by the British Medical Association in the 1980s to mandate a central REC and the development of Multi-centre RECs (MRECs) in the mid-1990s.The ethnographic aspects of this chapter will set how, in the current context of what I label ‘distributed centralisation’, RECs not only draw on existing ‘local knowledge’ but also set out to impose restrictions that actively generate additional local knowledge about applicants, helping make decisions about their trustworthiness.