Toward a depoliticising civic style. How public-led partnership life socialises the leaders of an association in a French deprived neighbourhood

This article questions the logics through which neighbourhood social policies such as the ‘Politique de la ville’ in France have effects on the style of action deployed by the associations that participate in their implementation. Through an ethnographic investigation within a particular association, combining observations, interviews, and archive analysis, it shows how the integration of associative leaders into partnership mechanisms led them to professionalise and socialise to a grammar of partnership life, based on a feeling of belonging to a community of partners and on the sharing of certain values. In the case studied, this socialisation is achieved both through rationalised governance technologies and through affective techniques. Thus, this paper shows that it is important not to limit the research’s scope to the study of actions undertaken toward the residents: deprived neighbourhood policies are also composed of a set of measures aimed at governing the intermediaries involved in their implementation.

In various European countries, localised governance mechanisms specifically targeting disadvantaged neighbourhoods tend to promote depoliticised ways of dealing with the problems affecting these areas. According to the discourse supporting these policies, the problems stem less from inequalities and power relations at the societal level than from the behaviours of certain populations and their concentration in certain neighbourhoods (Tissot, 2007; Uitermark, 2003). Articulated with urban planning programmes aiming to change the structure of populations, the social component of these policies often consists of a series of measures and techniques aimed at changing the behaviours of groups considered problematic: young school dropouts or delinquents, adults who are far from employment, parents perceived as disengaged, immigrant populations withdrawn into their communities, etc. With regard to these measures, existing research showed how institutional actors, associations, and social workers present in the territories work conjointly to enter into contact with these populations and to transmit to them certain values and certain emotions corresponding to the standards of the majority society (Carrel, 2013; Neveu, 2003; Shoshan, 2016; Uitermark, 2014; Wekker, 2017). Notably around the ideas of ‘governing through community’ and ‘affective citizenship’, some scholars are interested in the practices through which localised governance actors seek to cultivate a sense of belonging to a peaceful and vibrant neighbourhood community among residents and a willingness to actively participate in it (De Wilde & Duyvendak, 2016; Duyvendak, 2011; Fortier, 2010; Haapajärvi, 2021; Muehlebach, 2012; Rose, 2009; Vollebergh, 2020). In doing so, they would invite them to overlook the inequalities of class, gender, race, and institutional power relations that run through social relations in neighbourhoods and thus, in the end, reproduce them by themselves. That is why most of studies speak of a depoliticisation in sense of a deconflictualisation of their practices (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2015) – even if we could also see them as an involvement in the dominant neoliberal project (Chua, 1991). But, by focusing on the work conducted with the residents, these studies often tend to indifferentiate the actors carrying out these policies by placing them on the side of ‘governance’ or ‘participation’. Thus, they don’t address the issue of the connection between different types of actors, particularly between institutions and associative or community actors.

This question is, however, central in other works that are more in line with the epistemologies of the sociology of nonprofit sector, the social movement studies and the urban studies. In territorialised public policies, through watchwords like partnership, participation, or governance, community organisations, leaders, and collectives are supposed to play an intermediary role that facilitate dialogue and cooperation between institutions and residents. But this role is far from self-evident. In fact, research showed that enrolment in the conduct of policies often leads intermediary actors to forms of dependence (particularly financial), subordination and, ultimately, depoliticisation and conformation of their action to institutional expectations (Mayer, 2006; Rosol, 2010; Uitermark & Nicholls, 2014). In their case, these studies tend (surely because of the imperatives linked to comparative restitution and ambitions to generalise) to remain in an overhanging posture that does not allow for a fine grasp of the complexity of the interactions and logics that lead the participants, and especially the leaders of organisations enlisted in the partnership to adapt their style of action. Moreover, these studies are mostly interested in the conversion pathways of social movement organisations or informal mobilised groups to partnership, leaving aside a whole range of community or welfare-oriented organisations that are not oriented towards politicisation activities (such as discussion of problems, collective mobilisation, challenging institutions, etc., see: Carrel, 2015; Luhtakallio, 2012) from the outset. However, such collectives or organisations could still contribute to making such activities legitimate (Eliasoph, 1998). On the contrary, they often contribute nowadays to the fact that such activities have no place in the territories concerned (Eliasoph, 2011), and it is worth asking what this tendency owes to their integration into partnership arrangements.

It is such an ambition that the present article pursues, based on a field investigation within an association, involved in a deprived neighbourhood of Lille in France, that we will call ‘Weavers of Bonds’ (WoB).¹ Lille is a medium-sized city in the north of France whose development has been coupled with strong industrialisation. From the 1970s onwards, factories closed, which created a high level of unemployment and precariousness, particularly in certain neighbourhoods. WoB was initiated in 2003 in one of them by actors from the Catholic community and the field of popular education with the support of the local Church. It is involved in cultural, educational, social, and leisure activities such as a knitting workshop, a cooking workshop, literacy courses, paperwork assistance, schoolwork help, parent–child workshops, regular meals, and the organisation of neighbourhood events such as the Christmas market. Thus, it is a hybrid form between neighbourhood initiative and welfare organisation. Since its beginning, WoB’s slogan has been ‘Together, let’s create bonds’ and its participants’ goal is to ‘fight against isolation’. Its agenda was never oriented toward politicising problems that residents face, even if we will see that it was initially more open to some kinds of conflictualised practices than it later became through contact with local institutions. Its action was based on the commitment of a salaried coordinator on a permanent contract employed since 2007, employees (between two and four depending on the period) on precarious contracts that were regularly renewed and about thirty volunteers coming from neighbourhood and the Catholic communities.

WoB is financed for the most part by local public institutions, notably within the Politique de la ville. This French policy programme targeting deprived neighbourhoods was born and institutionalised since the late 1970s (Neveu, 2003; Tissot, 2007). The research studying this type of policies in Europa and the new arrangements of governance, partnership and participation set up through them have pointed out specific technologies and processes through which citizens, associations, and community groups’ conducts are governed and influenced: professionalisation (Neveu, 2003; Nicholls, 2006), managerialisation (De Maillard, 2000), but also informalisation (Koster, 2014), ‘governing through affect’ (Fortier, 2010), and ‘engineering community spirit’ (De Wilde & Duyvendak, 2016). However, these studies either focus on the discourse and intentions of the institutions, or often remain at a general level of practices and effects observed at a given moment, without giving an insight into the diversity of the interacting actors and the dynamics of the influences in the making. Through the case study of WoB, this article shows the relevance of an analysis, both retrospective and dynamic, of the logics through which associative actors involved in dedicated governance spaces are socialised to the (depoliticised) forms of participation expected by the institutions, corresponding to what we will call a grammar of partnership life. Because one of the most central effects of the partnership arrangements is professionalisation, the paper will focus on interactions between protagonists of this process, i.e. between institutional agents and staff leaders of WoB who play a key role considering the activities and interactions deployed by and in the association.

The paper begins with a presentation of the analytical framework used to study the sensitising, learning and internalisation by associative leaders of a grammar of localised partnership that take place in different scenes of interactions with local institutions. Then, methods and materials are described: based on ethnography, interviews and archive analysis, the case study allows to understand, in the collective and individual trajectories, the kinds of interactions that lead to the shaping of a depoliticising style of leaders’ action. Before exploring the results, the global trajectory of WoB is presented, especially how it has moved from a Catholic affiliation to a municipalisation and how this move has been associated with a closing of political possibilities. Then, the results about technologies of governance and how associative leaders appropriate them are presented in two steps: first, the focus is on the formal constraints and prescriptions that lead the associative actors to professionalise in ways promoted by institutions; then, the analysis is conducted on how the affective dimension, informality and symbolic gratifications are used as key tools to attach associative actors to the partnership life.

How do local institutions encourage WoB leaders to develop a depoliticising style of action consistent with their expectations? The idea of ‘style’ is developed by Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman to study different patterns of civic action in the social world. In their approach, an action can be considered as civic when ‘participants are coordinating action to improve some aspect of common life in society, as they imagine society’ (Eliasoph & Lichterman, 2014, p. 809). While civic action is most often studied within delimited groups or organisations, the two sociologists stressed the relevance of approaching it through the scenes where it is developed. It also allows to take into account cases where different collective entities coordinate around the same projects, goals, or principles of action. For them, these scenes are structured around styles, i.e. certain ways of considering the bonds between participants, the symbolic boundaries through which they define and situate themselves in relation to their environment, and the norms that govern their interactions between members and with the outside. A civic action can be professionalised or not, and politicised or not. In the case of WoB, one can of course study the way leaders, staff members, volunteers, and participants coordinate internally around a common style: in my thesis (Chevallier, 2020), I actually showed how their interactions were structured by bonds, boundaries and norms that imposed humour and compassion but ultimately led to what N. Eliasoph called ‘avoidance of politics’ (Eliasoph, 1998). Yet, in this article, the focus is on understanding how this style was cultivated by leaders within another type of scenes that can be referred to as ‘neighborhood partnership’.

In France, the neighbourhood policy is based on governance and partnership mechanisms, most often coordinated by municipalities, which encourage community and social organisations like WoB to interact and cooperate with local institutions. Within bodies such as neighbourhood councils or consultation meetings, dynamics such as partnership projects, or of course through funding measures, the associative leaders, often on the salaried side but sometimes also on the volunteer side, are brought into contact with elected officials and agents and thus coordinate with them on a common style of action. The hypothesis tested in this article is that these interactions, whether they are physical co-presence or mediated by communication technologies (computer, telephone), are the site of socialisation of associative leaders to institutional expectations. In the same way that certain studies identified a ‘grammar of civic life’ governing interactions within participatory democracy arrangements (Talpin, 2011), the investigation within the interactions between WoB’s salaried leaders and institutional actors leads to speak of a ‘grammar of partnership life’ that the former have been encouraged to adopt with a view to being recognised and funded by the latter. This grammar represents a set of patterns of practices and representations that define ‘good’ participation in the neighbourhood partnership. Overall, this grammar feeds depoliticised forms of action in the sense that it doesn’t lead the actors to take charge of the conflicts underlying the problems they face (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2015), and this at a double level: that of the inequalities and injustices of which the residents of the neighbourhood are the subjects, but also that of the asymmetry of power associative actors themselves experience in relation to institutions. It is then interesting to open the black box of the technologies, practices, and processes that led to the socialisation of WoB leaders to this depoliticised and depoliticising grammar.

To do this, we’ll draw on different bodies of literature. Certain studies focus on the effects of governance and partnership arrangements on nonprofit and nongovernmental actors. In the case of social movement organisations or activist collectives, the research emphasises the shift from politicisation to policing (Mayer, 2006; Uitermark & Nicholls, 2014). Thus, the enlistment of community or associative organisations in public policy leads them frequently to become professionalised and to fall into certain forms of dependence and subordination to the institutions that fund them (Enjolras et al., 2018; Rosol, 2010). The arrangements around public policies targeting deprived neighbourhoods and their consequences have been given special attention. In his study of the Politique de la ville, W. Nicholls showed how this has led to an ‘associationalism from above’ (Nicholls, 2006). He described the constitution of a bureaucratic infrastructure that ‘has produced a division of labour, with public ‘partners’ assuming oversight and decision-making functions and associations assuming implementation functions’ (Nicholls, 2006, p. 1785). This infrastructure would have the effect of ‘caging’ associations like WoB. In order to be financed, they have to comply with constraints and rules that encourage them to professionalise, to play the game of clientelism and to individualise their action vis-à-vis other associations. W. Nicholls finally spoke of an internalisation of these rules by the associative professionals, and even used the expression ‘self-instrumentalization’ from one of his interviewees (Nicholls, 2006, p. 1797). In his work as in others, it is however difficult to grasp the interactions and processes through which these socialisations are constructed over time. This article focuses on the ways in which the rules and constraints of the Politique de la ville are appropriated, and even internalised, by WoB leaders.

Moreover, W. Nicholls mentioned but didn’t stress enough the important role of the informality in these processes. To do so, this paper draws on recent research that rely on notions of informality and affective citizenship. In his study of the Dutch policy targeting deprived neighbourhoods in Utrecht, Martjin Koster focused on new spaces of governance created by institutions to ‘bridge the gap’ between them and the residents (Koster, 2014). In these arrangements, informalisation became a new technology of governmentality. To show it, he analysed the institutional discourses that promote the contact-making and intermediation practices and initiatives of some ‘active citizens’ or ‘exemplary practitioners’ involved as political brokers. Through the ethnographic and longstanding investigation within the association WoB, it is although possible to analyse how this informalisation is performed and has socialisation effects upon community leaders and their style of brokerage action.

In addition, it is relevant to approach this informalisation process by drawing on the literature on affective citizenship. Initially, this notion was developed, notably by Monica Mookherjee (2005), to explore the forms of affective and intimate relationships that are or should be recognised as legitimate, promoted and encouraged by governments. It has been further explored through studies of urban policies designed to govern multicultural territories. For Mandy De Wilde and Jan W. Duyvendak, ‘the notion of “affective citizenship” refers to how governments acknowledge, harness, and try to influence citizens’ emotions and intimate relationships within the construction of citizenship’ (De Wilde & Duyvendak, 2016, p. 975). Through this definition, they related directly to the idea of ‘governing through affect’ developed by Anne-Marie Fortier in the case of the ‘community cohesion’ agenda developed in Great Britain since 2001, through which government aimed to manage diversity and ‘white unease’ in urban neighbourhoods by ‘delivering mixing and meaningful interactions’ and create a community sense of belonging (Fortier, 2010). In their investigation of a neighbourhood on the periphery of Amsterdam, M. De Wilde and J.W. Duyvendak showed how some municipal employees sought to instil a sense of attachment to and responsibility for the neighbourhood community among residents. Through ‘sensitizing policy techniques’ such as caring, appreciating, and branding, residents were encouraged to commit themselves to the community by following depoliticised citizenship norms. However, upstream of the work with residents, the present article shows the interest in focusing on the techniques through which, in the various coordination scenes between associations and institutions, associative leaders are themselves encouraged to develop a sense of belonging to a community of partners and to attach themselves to certain norms defining what a ‘good’ partner should be. Though, the policies studied by A.-M. Fortier, by M. De Wilde and J.W. Duyvendak, or by M. Koster assume explicitly to seek ways to motivate residents to adopt some behaviours by offering them meaningful interactions and intime relationships: that is why M. Koster described a state that ‘creates new forms of informality, yet also tries to regulate and formalize these’ (Koster, 2014, p. 60). In contrast to them, the use of informality and affects in the governing of associative actors as WoB in France isn’t so much consciously formalised: it is more an obvious part of the work public agents have to perform if they want to achieve their goals, giving that neighbourhood policies are nowadays dependent of the associations to be deployed.

The materials and results used in this article are taken from a doctoral work on associative action in deprived neighbourhoods in France and Germany (Chevallier, 2020). Through the case studied, the ambition of this article is to build a long-term understanding of how associative leaders can learn, appropriate, and internalise the grammar of partnership life promoted by public authorities. How to situate the observed practices in the long term of individual and collective trajectories? How to evaluate their relative contribution to the socialisation process of the leaders? In this purpose, the analysis is based on an ethnographic investigation conducted during 2013 and 2018 within the association WoB combining:

• regular observations of the both internal and partnership life of the WoB’s leaders, recorded in notes made up of quotations collected at the time and put into narrative descriptions after the fact;

• interviews with leaders and with some institutional agents and elected officials;

• analysis of archives presenting the associative project in its beginning, and documents as financial reports.

Repeated observations and interviews inform what patterns of practices and what representations of bonds and boundaries – so, what we will call a ‘grammar’ – guided leaders in the partnership scenes. Moreover, these methods allow to grasp how institutions prescribed this grammar of partnership life to leaders through different techniques, incentives and constraints. But interviews combined with archive analysis give also elements about the different scenes where this grammar have been cultivated in the past as well as in present scenes I couldn’t access. Since the beginning of the investigation, the immersion work has been facilitated by the current staff leader of the association, Simon, who gave me access, not only to the different scenes of the associative life (activities, Board and staff meetings), but also to his partnership life, that means from high formalised to informal meetings and activities organised with institutional actors and other associative professionals.

The depoliticisation of the civic action style followed and deployed by the WoB’s leaders doesn’t stem solely from their involvement and professionalisation in public-driven partnership arrangements. As always, such a style emerged through the convergence of several influences including other sources of socialisation. In the case of WoB, the inclination to deal with neighbourhood problems in a depoliticised manner was already present from the beginning and was largely influenced by the catholic socialisation of the actors involved in the early years. While some studies show how catholicism has been a matrix for French leftist commitments, especially during the 1970s² (for example: Dulong, 1982), many others also underline how contemporary catholic socialisations can contribute to orienting commitments towards charity and compassion rather than towards practices of questioning inequalities and denouncing the logics and actors that feed them (for example: Muehlebach, 2013). In the case of WoB, the interviews with the association’s instigator, Jérôme, and with the current head of staff, Simon, showed however that things were nevertheless more open at the beginning than they became later, when the association became more and more municipalised.

In 2003, WoB was founded by participants of a network of Catholic organisations involved in deprived neighbourhoods. Among these organisations, we find notably the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (JOC) and the Scouts de France, all of which marked by progressive sensibilities related to popular education. Under a contract as a ‘pastoral animator’, Jérôme, that was since then animator for the Scouts, was mandated to federate the actors of the catholic commitment around an innovative initiative. From the start, he was in an in-between position: although he was a believer and a churchgoer, he had little interest in the religious dimension of the project and found himself more at home in the categories of the sociocultural animation and territorialised social policy as they were developing at that time within the Politique de la ville. However, in order to obtain the support of the Church and of all the catholic actors for a project that largely set aside the religious dimension, Jérôme strove to, according to the terms he used in the interview, ‘translate it into Church words’:

These ‘values’ evoked by Jérôme were embodied in certain projections which already turned out to echo the positive, non-conflictual style observed at the time of the investigation. As early as the prefiguration project, Jérôme spoke of ‘positioning the christian options (openness, proximity, accompaniment, dignity, solidarity, self-education, links with families …) in the social and animation landscape’. All the categories used here have in common their positive connotation, their designation of consensual realities to defend.

From the beginning, Jérôme has sought to promote a professionalised associative action that fit with the Politique de la ville’s framework. In the early years, he came into contact with the municipality by participating in partnership instances and in the neighbourhood council. The double institutional affiliation allowed then a certain autonomy from the expectations coming from both sides: while WoB benefited from the (financial) support of the Church for its global project, it remained free to set its own agenda and position vis-à-vis the municipality. Thus, within participatory democracy procedures, Jérôme and his allies have sometimes been led to ‘fight’ (according to his terms), to claim and to oppose the municipality or large institutionalised structures as the community centres. But this propensity to ‘fight’ quickly disappeared, certainly when Jérôme left the association in 2005 and when the coordination of the association gradually passed into the hands of Simon.

In the early 2000s, Simon was a college student living in the neighbourhood. His parents were from the stable working classes. They separated in his youth and Simon was raised by his grandmother who lived in a social housing in the neighbourhood. The destabilisation of his life trajectory continued when he started to drop out of college. In the interview, Simon himself presented his relationship with Jérôme and his involvement in WoB as a compensation for a disaffiliation: ‘that was family’. His first contacts with Jérôme took place even before the official creation of the association, in which he took part. He then became an active volunteer. In 2004, at the age of 18, he joined the Board as secretary. Jérôme, who planned to stay only three years at the helm of WoB, tended to put forward Simon to the municipality. When he left the association, Jérôme proposed to the municipality that Simon replaced him on the neighbourhood council. Simon was then constantly praised by the municipality for his local anchorage, his knowledge of the families in the social housing sector and his ability to build bonds and bridges: he was seen to promote as a political broker (Koster, 2014). In 2007, he was employed by the association on a subsidised contract, but as a ‘local mediator’, which meant that, in addition to his internal missions, he was also invested with the role of an intermediary between the residents and the municipality. From this assemblage of roles came a blurring of hierarchies, as Simon became more and more obliged to the municipality, which cofinanced his position with the State.

His involvement in WoB then allowed not only a reaffiliation, but also a professionalisation and thus a certain form of socioeconomic stabilisation. It is in this trajectory, which had already lasted more than ten years when the investigation began, that Simon learned and appropriated the grammar of the partnership life. In his early years, if his participation blossomed mainly in leisure and support activities and in cooperation with institutions, he had been led, with Jérôme, to invest certain forms of relative conflictuality. For example, within participative urban workshops concerning municipal projects of rehabilitation of the social housing block where he lived, Simon told me that he then criticised the choices imposed by the municipality’s services and which, in his opinion, contravened the residents’ uses and demands. However, his involvement in the association quickly became the vehicle for learning the depoliticising grammar of partnership life through interactions with agents and elected officials.

The partnership discourse refers to the idea of an equitable cooperation from which all stakeholders would benefit. Nevertheless, Jacques de Maillard spoke of a ‘partnership myth’ that plays a ‘role of enchanting reality’, i.e. it veils the reality of an asymmetrical relationship, of subordination of associations to institutions (De Maillard, 2000). But, in order for this subordination not to appear as such, the associative actors must internalise the myth. Through its contact, they must professionalise so that they believe in it, or at least find they benefit from it. This internalisation pushes them to play the game by acting how institutions expect and by diffusing the representations of civic action they promote. In the case of WoB, this socialisation of the associative leaders to the practices and representations of partnership life took place through a set of governance technologies that rely on both formalised mechanisms and informal modes of interaction. If we know, notably thanks to M. Koster (2014), that formal and informal dimensions are always intertwined, the following results will be presented by separating formal constraints and prescriptions inscribed in rationalised systems, and techniques and interactions that are informal and affective.

The influence of institutions on the style practiced by WoB leaders operated very much by their adaptation to the norms and constraints that ruled the partnership mechanisms and on the specific professionalisation that this adaptation required. According to W. Nicholls, professionalisation ‘refers to the systematic rationalisation of the discourses, methods and actions of associations according to the standards and norms established by public partners’ (Nicholls, 2006, p. 1795). In the case of WoB, the aim is to understand how this professionalisation has been coupled with an instrumentalisation of the association and a depoliticisation of its action through the integration of its leaders into the neighbourhood partnership. We can distinguish four dimensions in which this professionalisation took place, referring to different types of governance technologies: national policy framing; financial dependence; managerial schemes; and enrolment in cooperation bodies and in a division of the partnership labour.

From the end of the 1970s onwards, the Politique de la ville was promoted by various actors at different levels of the State and local authorities as an innovative way of dealing with the problems observed in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and in particular with the episodes of rioting that regularly broke out (Tissot, 2007). While the 1980s were a period of experimentation, the 1990s saw an establishment of the rules and categories of this policy at the national level (Neveu, 2003; Warin, 1997). This institutionalisation has had a significant influence on actors interested in working in neighbourhoods, who must learn to territorialise their actions and conform to watchwords such as partnership in order to remain legitimate. One thinks of course of social workers and associations, but the example of WoB also shows the adaptation of another sector: the Catholic world.

At the level of the Diocese of Lille, the multiplication of riots in France and the emergence of the Politique de la ville pushed some members of the clergy and some lay people to seek to renew the forms of their ‘pastoral’ action – by this term of pastoral, catholic actors refer in a vague way to the whole range of actions going from the Church, as a community, to society. This was notably the case of a priest of the Lille area, theologian, who published a book entitled ‘Church in banlieues’. When he became an auxiliary bishop in the Diocese in 2000, he met Jérôme, who was then a young scout leader employed in civic service within the programme ‘Scouting in the open air’. Developed in partnership with public institutions within the Politique de la ville, this programme aimed to adapt scouting to young people in poor neighbourhoods by putting aside the objective of religious education to focus on the prevention of exclusion and the learning of citizenship. It was therefore, at that time, a way of bringing catholic associative action closer to the policy categories. The auxiliary bishop and some local Church leaders saw with Jérôme the possibility of developing a way of renewing the Church’s action in the neighbourhoods of Lille. Under a contract as a ‘pastoral animator’, Jérôme was commissioned to federate the actors of catholic action around an innovative initiative which became WoB.

From the beginning, Jérôme has sought to undertake a professionalised associative action that fit with the national framework of the Politique de la ville. In the statutes voted in 2003 at the time of the foundation and kept since, the association’s objective is to work ‘on the notions of togetherness, conviviality, social bond, accompaniment, citizenship, service and solidarity’. These are all watchwords that echo those of the national policy. In an article published in 2004 in the newspaper of the Diocese of Lille, Jérôme defended that ‘the Politique de la Ville has to do with the Evangile’. In front of other catholic actors, he promoted an approach of ‘partnership’ which is, according to him, a discovery for them: ‘This word suddenly appeared in our meetings: we were no longer a gathering of movements; no, we were partners in action and it really changed everything’. As a guarantee of a certain modernity and professionalism of the project, the partnership became a real tool to encourage the support and involvement of catholic actors in an initiative close to the forms of action promoted by the public authorities and the State.

For many works, it is clear that money, fundings to employ workers are a pivotal source of instrumentalisation and depoliticisation of associative actors and social movements (Nicholls, 2006; Uitermark & Nicholls, 2014). However, studies almost never undertook to really open the black box of financial issues. The alignment of WoB, and in particular of its leaders, Jérôme and then Simon, with institutional expectations was very much based on the construction of a financial dependency. While the association was initially funded primarily by the Catholic Church, its dependence on public institutions was built up in the early years, when WoB began to be part of public funding arrangements, in particular with the municipality within Politique de la ville projects. A study of the financial reports of WoB³ showed that, between 2011 and 2018, the majority of the financial revenues came from public authorities in the forms of subsides (94% on average per year). Even if these subsides came from several entities as the State, the municipality, the Regional Council, or the Caisse d’allocation familiales (Familiy allowance fund), these were all linked together in co-funded projects and depended on the same calls for projects.

One of the main features of this dependency is the insecure nature of the public fundings allocated through the neighbourhood partnership. Most subsidies were allocated on an annualised basis through calls for projects, which put Simon in the position of having to constantly adapt to the changing priorities of institutions in order to hope to have fundings, and thus his job, renewed. In addition, between one-fifth and one-half of the sums dedicated annually to employees in the period came from subsidised insertion contracts, which only allow the employment of people with no qualifications for a maximum of two or three years. Besides imposing precarious working conditions, these contracts hindered the association from developing its action in the long term. The allocation of these contracts by the municipality and the State was also done through relatively discretionary logics that did not allow the association to anticipate. Moreover, the budgetary rigour policies that have been put in place since the 2000s have had an effect on the precarisation of fundings. During the investigation, significant cuts were made in the fundings allocated to certain other associations in Lille. This type of event created an austerity atmosphere, with associations as WoB being aware that cuts might be made in the future.

All these logics that make public fundings more insecure put WoB in a situation of subjection to institutional offers, especially municipal ones. Simon’s employment trajectory is interesting in this respect. He was first employed for five years on two types of subsidised contracts supported by the municipality in the framework of his mission as a ‘local mediator’. When all these possibilities were exploited, the project manager in charge of the Politique de la ville at the time built a financing package to extend it with a permanent contract through the opening by WoB of a leisure centre for children. In an interview, Simon described this episode as an important moment of interference of the municipality in the association’s affairs:

When I entered the investigation at the association, its daily life and its workers were largely busy with the organisation of the leisure centre to the detriment of other dynamics, especially the more bottom-up ones, that could take place before. Financial dependence unbalanced the negotiations, with Simon, as well as the volunteer leaders of the Board, being forced to adapt to the offers of the funders.

This financial dependence was exacerbated by the application of public management principles. Taking up the notion developed by Paul J. DiMaggio and Walther W. Powell (1983), Bernard Enjolras and other researchers in the field of the social and solidarity economy described a phenomenon of ‘institutional isomorphism’, i.e. the adaptation of the forms of associative action to the rules that govern the fields of state action and market economy (Enjolras et al., 2018). In the context of the neighbourhood partnership, this isomorphism takes place in particular through the adaptation of associations like WoB to the managerial mechanisms that are set up and imposed by the public authorities.

The associative employees in charge of managing fundings, like Simon, are thus required to master the instruments and language of project management with its specific categories: ‘target groups’, ‘expected results’, ‘evaluation indicators’, ‘provisional budget’, etc. Among the technical constraints, those concerning financial elements are not the least important, as the actors must prove their ability to construct balanced and feasible financial accounts. Another key element of this project-based management is the obligation to individualise activities: calls for projects within the scope of the Politique de la ville have as a principle to finance only specific actions and not the ‘functioning’, i.e. the daily and recurrent action of associations. A related aspect of this rule is that associations are encouraged to ‘innovate’ by proposing new short- or medium-term projects each year, which is of course to the detriment of more structuring social support actions for individuals or long-term dynamics. Nonetheless, in the framework of the call for projects for the Politique de la ville, a part of the subsidies actually concern actions that have been renewed for several years. In an interview, the last project manager for the Politique de la ville during the period of the investigation explained how the associative actors are still subject to the obligation to update their applications:

In order to be funded, associative leaders must adapt to certain rules conditioning the ‘technical admissibility’ of their applications, and this in a way that is relatively autonomous from the work that their association deploys in the community: they must ‘play the game’.

In French law, calls for projects dedicated to the allocation of subsidies should not impose too precise objectives or frameworks in order to leave the initiative to associations. In practice, the calls for projects to which WoB was exposed set out ‘themes’, ‘axes’, ‘priorities’, and ‘orientations’ in which the applicants must fit their proposals. These priorities are defined by the elected officials or decision-makers of the different funders. At the level of the city of Lille, they are included in ‘territorial projects’ that are adapted to the news – for example, citizenship and radicalisation were brought to the forefront after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in 2015 – and the associative partners are expected to adapt to them. During a meeting at the local city hall between Simon, three members of the association’s Board and two municipal employees, including the director of the Politique de la ville department and the project manager in charge of the neighbourhood, the association’s secretary asked the director how she felt about the association’s work. She answered:

Thus, it conferred to the association’s agenda an institutional validation.

Conversely, it is also through sequences of trials and sanctions that associative leaders learned the rules and institutional expectations. A sequence of this type was observed during a meeting between Simon and a municipal official in charge of allocating ‘Civic Services’ to associations – these are state-compensated commitment measures for young people. When Simon presented him with a job description on which he would like to employ someone he knowed through a civic service contract, the official cut him off: ‘I’ll stop you right there, but where is the general interest? That’s not right at all. The civic service is about social link and citizenship, it cannot be used to finance jobs’. Then, he showed Simon a document with standard positions, inviting him to write down the association’s needs in these categories: ‘you have to translate into needs, actions, public targets and decline into action verbs’.⁴ The civic service is a state programme for which association professionals like Simon must learn to handle the forms: officially, it is a ‘commitment’ and not a job, and even if associations see it as a substitute for employment, they must play the game in order to benefit from it.

Finally, the professionalisation of associative leaders is achieved through their involvement in more or less ephemeral or lasting partnership dynamics, such as institutionalised participation bodies or the organisation of events. The socialisation of Jérôme and Simon to the categories of neighbourhood governance notably took place through their participation in the neighbourhood council as representatives of the ‘living forces’. In Lille and most of the time in France, this body is conceived as a place for consultation bringing together elected officials, associations and residents to discuss the various projects supported by the municipality in the neighbourhood (Sintomer & de Maillard, 2007). It has only paltry funds, and its deliberations cannot invalidate decisions made by elected officials. As it is conceived, this body is therefore mainly a place to explain municipal policy to the ‘partners’. Participation, as in other governance spaces opened by the municipality, makes it possible to be counted among the partners.

Within the actions and events promoted by the municipality involving several associative partners, the expected participation is differentiated according to the actors. While W. Nicholls (2006) spoke of a division of labour between institutional and associative actors, my investigation led also to stress a differentiated distribution of roles among associations. In the case of WoB, the association was referred to a function of mobilising the resident groups in order to bring them to participate in the activities set up by other associative or professional actors. For example, within the framework of a participative cultural project commissioned by the municipality, the association was mandated to connect the residents with an artist who was in charge of ‘translating into artistic gestures’ the residents’ experience. This function of mobilisation of the residents was also affirmed during the meeting at the city hall with the two employees of the Politique de la ville mentioned above. While the director had just mentioned the adjustment of the association’s actions to the municipal priorities, the project manager added: ‘You have the people’. However, later, she reproached the association for no longer participating, through its workers, in a dynamic of professionalisation coordinated by the municipality around homework help activities: ‘There is the resident dynamic, with the volunteers, okay, but the participation in the Politique de la ville?’ For the municipality, involvement in certain dynamics was not an option, it was required, obligatory. By the way, we see here how institutional requirements are partly communicated through more informal logics.

If the professionalisation and socialisation of association leaders to the grammar of neighbourhood partnership were properly fed by this set of rationalisation and formalisation technologies, the ethnographic investigation showed how much these technologies’ impact depended on their articulation with certain informal and affective arrangements. In their article, M. De Wilde and J. W. Duyvendak described certain ‘sensitizing policy techniques’ which ‘suggest directions along which to approach and understand everyday life’ in the neighbourhood they studied (De Wilde & Duyvendak, 2016, p. 979). The ‘governing through affect’ (Fortier, 2010), according to them, went in particular through caring, appreciating and branding techniques. In the case of WoB, these categories are also useful for understanding how informality and affect were mobilised by institutions to govern through partnership. Nevertheless, the focus here will only be on the techniques of caring and appreciating, as branding is less present in the case studied.

In French deprived neighbourhoods, the grammar of partnership life is not only based on a professional, rationalised, managerial register, but also on a more informal and affective register. In particular, it is normal for an institutional agent or an elected official, especially a municipal one, to invest in ‘caring’ practices that express themselves ‘through acts of informality and intimacy between policy practitioners and neighbourhood residents. The technique of caring is part of the strategy to not appear bureaucratic’ (De Wilde & Duyvendak, 2016, p. 979). In the interview, the most recent project manager for the Politique de la ville showed enthusiasm about his relationship with the associations:

In his speech, the project manager expressed commitment to the associations, as he was an ally: the fact that they see each other regularly and ‘help each other’ allowed the boundaries between the associations and the municipal institution to be crossed, and to form a community.

In the moments of interaction between associative leaders and institutional managers, the formers learn not only to handle managerial categories, but also to conform to a certain professional positivity: interactions must be relaxed and convivial; the associatives must laugh when jokes are made by the institutionals, and even learn to propose certain lines of humour at the right times and in forms adjusted to the expectations of the institutionals present. This professional positivity leads to being caught up in the frantic march of partnership projects and leaves only a residual place for reflective discussion on the relevance of actions or on the rules of the partnership. It is also crucial in order to obtain funding when it takes the form of ‘accompaniment’ (accompagnement), especially for the association leaders who are the least competent in managerial forms like Simon in his beginnings. In fact, through a series of informal interactions and micro-sanctions, prescriptions and symbolic gratifications (Goffman, 1967), the institutional agents co-write the funding applications and therefore the projects with the associative leaders.

The ethnographic follow-up of Simon in the different scenes of the partnership in which he was evolving has more particularly enabled to bring to light the importance of this ‘accompaniment’ and the gestures of friendship, compassion or even humour in the interactions with the institutional actors. This ‘informal atmosphere’ (De Wilde & Duyvendak, 2016, p. 980) may not always lead to intimate relationships and go beyond superficial interactions. But the potential impact of this atmosphere could really be evaluated through Simon’s relationship with Lucie, who was project manager for the Politique de la ville at the beginning and during an important part of the investigation. The two of them talked very regularly by phone and text message. When they saw each other, they didn’t just talk about their partnership work, but also about other realities such as the news or their private lives. In this way, they also shared their moods. For example, one day when I was discussing with Simon the strong pressure exerted by the Politique de la ville on the association to account for the use of fundings, he explained these ‘tensions’ to me by the elements that Lucie had shared with him earlier: a ‘not simple’ context with a strong budget restriction, adding that Lucie was controlled for her work more than other municipal employees because of her predecessor’s bad practices.

This framework of trust and compassion enables to go quite far in the construction of a relationship of subordination that does not say its name. During a meeting between Simon and Lucie that I attended, which took place in Lucie’s office in the neighbourhood city hall, she presented the participatory cultural project mentioned above:

We see here how professional positivity can be executed in act: the delivery of a project from the top-down was naturalised, shown as an opportunity for the association as well as for the municipality. Simon welcomed this project with enthusiasm, and presented it to the association’s Board and volunteers as a matter of course: saying no or rediscussing the terms of the project were not really options because of the association’s situation of financial dependence. In this example, we see then how formal and informal dimensions can be intertwined (Koster, 2014). However, this affective modality of the partnership relationship inevitably led to complicated moments when Lucie was pushed to remind Simon and WoB of their duties, especially by the municipal representatives to whom she responded: street-level bureaucrats are themselves affected by the techniques of governing through affect that they are called upon to handle. Using the category developed by Arlie Hochschlid, we can question the emotional work they are led to do on themselves (Hochschild, 1983) and the unavoidable sequences of doubt they are confronted with, which could frustrate them – this is what Nitzan Shoshan has observed, for example, among social workers in charge of preventing the trajectories of radicalisation to the extreme right of young people in Berlin (Shoshan, 2016). Affective techniques are also crucial in the governing of public agents interacting with associative leaders: sharing an informality with the latter leads to share a part of their dominated status in the institutional order.

The socialisation of associative leaders also takes place within ‘appreciating’ practices (De Wilde & Duyvendak, 2016), i.e. symbolic recognition acts through which institutions, and most often elected officials, show them that they are part of the community of partners mapped by them. In Lille, these gestures of recognition are notably performed through ceremonies and events most often organised by the municipality. The invitation itself, through letters, has a certain symbolic charge. For example, Simon received an invitation for him and two extra people from the association to a secret lunch during which Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille, made a speech. In her speech, she didn’t only congratulate the partners, but combined that with a boundary work:

By using the informal and recognition dimensions, the mayor assumed to draw the partnership community’s legitimate social map and grammar by prescribing boundaries between good and bad people or postures. During the speech, Simon looked at me and enthusiastically exclaimed: ‘that’s what WoB is all about!’. The blurring of the formal/informal dimension was here certainly facilitating the reception of the prescriptions sent by the mayor. Similarly, the elected official in charge of the Politique de la ville regularly organised ‘rencontres’ with the association’s partners – the term ‘rencontres’ relies on the idea of informal and convivial meetings. The New Year’s Eve ceremonies were also an important moment of recognition. Through them, certain events were also organised to showcase the characteristics of the neighbourhood community that the partners must work to build. Between the speeches of the elected officials, children’s performances were for example offered, allowing the partners to warm up together. In their speeches, the elected officials recalled what the common values should be: ‘living together’, ‘citizenship’, ‘social link’. But they also delimited the boundaries of the partnership, by putting certain attitudes such as drug trafficking or violence outside the community. In doing so, they also emphasised that they must keep the monopoly of legitimate politics.

Sometimes elected officials gave out recognition by visiting associations. During the investigation, the neighbourhood representative attended the New Year’ s ceremony organised by WoB for its members. After a short introductory speech, Simon invited her to speak. In her speech, the elected official celebrated an association that managed to ‘do a lot with little means’. These gestures of recognition were also moments of reaffirmation of the association’s place in the division of the partnership labour. Here, the elected representative legitimised the precarious situation of WoB as a service provider. At times, the line between recognition and clientelism is difficult to determine. One day, the mayor of Lille asked Simon to lend him WoB’s headquarters to organise the press conference during which she announced the parachuting of a former minister in Lille. The next day, when I talked to Simon about this event, he answered:

To W. Nicholls (2006), partisan clientelism – what he also called ‘politicisation’ – is a logical consequence of the ‘associationalism from above’ he described. Here, we can see that it was mostly based on informal and even affective springs: while Simon clearly saw the risk of instrumentalisation, he couldn’t help but feel the prestige of the elected officials reflected on the association and on him. Nevertheless, he also showed by the way that he was not fooled but aware that some governing process was at stake. His relation to partnership was not completely enchanted, but also utilitarianist: he played the game at least to obtain (financial) support.

This article questions the logics through which deprived neighbourhood policies such as the Politique de la ville in France have effects on the style of civic action deployed by the association’s leaders that participate in their implementation. Through an ethnographic investigation within a french association, combining observations, interviews and archive analysis, it shows how the integration of associative leaders into partnership mechanisms has led them to professionalise and socialise to a grammar of partnership life. Yet, other actors, even in the same city or neighbourhood, were pursuing other kinds of styles by differentiating between the world of associations and that of institutions, or between the field of power and that of counter-power (see Chevallier, 2022), but they largely were in minority. For associations like WoB, the grammar of partnership life is based on a blurring of those differentiations and on the construction of asymmetrical bonds of allegiance that do not have to appear so. In that purpose, the institutions work on feeding a feeling of belonging to a community of partners and on the sharing of certain values and practices. In the case of WoB, the socialisation of leaders to this grammar was achieved through the articulation of rationalised governance technologies and processes such as the national political framework, the financial dependence, the managerial schemes and the enrolment in a division of the partnership labour, and of affective techniques as the construction of informal relationships and the distribution of symbolic recognition. Thus, this paper shows that it is important not to limit the research to the study of actions undertaken toward residents: neighbourhood social policies are also composed of a set of measures aimed at governing the social intermediaries involved in their implementation. Although it also has other sources (such as religious socialisation or the absence of militant socialisation), the depoliticisation of the practices implemented by the associations is largely achieved through the professionalization of their leaders within the scenes of territorialised partnership.

This is perhaps the most significant outcome of such policies when one realises to what extent the institutional and associative actors involved have difficulty interacting with the groups of residents they seek to reach. In the conclusion of their article, M. De Wilde and J. W. Duyvendak ask the question: ‘whether affective citizenship as a strategy works?’ (De Wilde & Duyvendak, 2016, p. 989). One hypothesis to be explored is that it works less with residents than an affective partnership with associative actors. Of course, it is also necessary to balance the effective impact of the socialisation of leaders to the grammar of partnership life. In the case of WoB, Jérôme in the interview or Simon during the ethnographic investigation certainly gave indications of a real internalisation of the partnership grammar, but they also sometimes showed doubts, criticisms and cynicisms. Studies should also be conducted on street-level institutional agents’ socialisations in the partnership: are they also led to keep distance with any forms of politicisation of their work? To use Nina Eliasoph’s expression (1998), ‘the evaporation of politics’ is never complete, and the configurations of relations between the associative leaders, the institutional actors and the rest of the participants in the associative life can always evolve and give rise to moments of questioning of the partnership order (Koster, 2014). Nevertheless, one of the elements that keeps associative and community leaders subjugated to partnership is the satisfaction of their professional interests: as long as they can live from it and do not find a place where the benefits will be better, both materially and affectively, they will be likely to invest themselves in the reproduction of a depoliticising style of action. The depoliticising effect of the partnership arrangements would be more preventive than corrective, as the potential orientation of the associative actors toward critical and claiming postures is cleared upstream. At the end, the term depoliticisation could even be abandoned in favour of a more precise term as deconflictualization. Through it, we see a disappearing of debates, struggles, and negotiations between social groups with different interests. The ‘governing through community’ (Rose, 2009) would thus have as its central spring the closure of political possibilities in which associative and intermediary actors are enrolled. In a way, we could talk about styles ‘not depoliticized but ideologically successful’ (Chua, 1991). But we also have to keep questioning the presence and the processes fuelling a ‘hidden transcript’ of the partnership life, following the theoretical proposition of James C. Scott (1990), that means a discourse built behind the backs of institutions about how things could or should be done differently.

My sincere thanks go to Nina Eliasoph, Camille Herlin-Giret, Thibault Boughedada and Clémence Guimont, and the anonymous reviewers for the careful readings and advices they gave me at different stages of the production of the article.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).