If the history of labour law developed a lot since around thirty years, the elaboration of the relative texts remains a very widely underestimated question. These take the shape of laws, of parliamentary or governmental origin, statutory orders, prescriptions, regulations, circulars. Multiple actors and institutions intervene in their manufacturing: parliament, government, Council of State, councils or consultative committees, social partners, experts, lobbies, etc. As Jean-Daniel Reynaud wrote it: "the legal rule takes its sense only brought back to a collective action and to an actor. It thus has the variety, the complexity and sometimes the incoherence of all collective actions".
The complexity of the manufacturing process of texts has to take into account the fact that institutions, taken separately, are themselves composites. In the elaboration of a bill, what is the part of politics (the Minister and his personal staff) and that of the administration? Within the administration, how articulate the respective contributions of a redactor, an office manager, an assistant or a manager assistant or of a manager of the Central Administration? What about the interministerial arbitrations, which seem to be particularly frequent in labour law? What is the contribution of the consultative organs in the process?
If it is about a private bill, it is also necessary to take into account the various aspects of the parliamentary activity.
The nature of the text and the institutional configuration also appear as determining elements to understand the relations that weave between the actors, and the result it ends to.

The issue is also to understand the connections and the part played by the legislator and the administration. The situation of the political balance of power has its importance, as well as the action of labour unions (employers associations and employees' labour unions), experts, pressure groups and opinion groups. In this sense, tactical combinations, as well as ideological and legal debates, are significant in the production of new standards.
Finally, the modalities of application of these standards introduce other actors, who, through their intervention within the administrations as at the level of the company, of the establishment, of the workshop or of the office, give effective consistency to the prescriptions.

So as to reflect about these general questions, the topic of collective representation of the work permits to gather at the same time the labour unions and the representative institutions of the staff, limiting the investigations to the period 1936-1968.
This period is indeed particularly rich regarding to collective representation. Without being exhaustive, we can quote:
- The law of June 24th, 1936 on the collective agreements which contains a clause touching the creation of elected staff delegates.
- The statutory orders of November 12th, 1938 and November 10th, 1939 on the staff representatives
- The prescription of February 22nd, 1945 establishing works councils
- The law of April 16th, 1946 fixing the status of the staff representatives
- The law of May 16th, 1946 on works councils
- The decree of August 1st, 1947 establishing Hygiene and Safety Committees
- The law of April 27th, 1956 tending to assure the labour-union freedom and the protection of the union law
- The law of June 18th, 1966 modifying the prescription of February 22nd, 1945 on works councils
- The law of December 27th, 1968 relative to the exercise of the union law in the companies.
Other texts such as decrees or circulars, lower in the hierarchy of the standards, can also be the object of fruitful investigations. We think for example of the circulars establishing the conditions of representativeness of labour unions.

From the point of view of the legislation on the representation of the staff indeed, the debates which have preceded the agreements and the law of 1968 remain relatively unknown. The main milestones are the impact of the works L’État et le citoyen, by the club Jean Moulin, in 1961 and Pour une réforme de l’entreprise, by François Bloch-Lainé, published at the beginning of 1963; the three colloquiums gathered on the initiative of labour unions in Grenoble and Paris in 1963, and in Lille in 1964; the presentation of the Mathevet report at the Conseil Économique et Social in 1964 and the debates which accompany the same year the transformation of the CFTC into CFDT, until the law of June 18th, 1966, which strengthens the representativeness and the information of works councils. It would also be convenient to credit note of more elements on the evolution of the case law and on the appreciations of the work inspection for this period. As regards year 1968 itself, few researches have been yet undertaken on the debates engaged on the question of the representativeness, so as on the numerous experimentations of representation of the staff unprized inside companies during the year 1968, and the discussions which preceded the examination of the bill by the Parliament and the other interested public authorities (Council of State, Prime Minister, interministerial levels, etc.).
This is why the retained propositions will call upon new archives and\or new testimonies. The contributors are also called to examine the incidence of the number of employees on the representativeness of the staff and in particular on the impact of the experiments and the realizations introduced into the SOHO on the legislation. Finally, the studies which concern the English, Belgian, German or Italian legislations will be received in a comparative perspective, limiting the interventions to the processes of elaboration of the law.

Through the processes of production of the standards, the scope is to question the notion of representation of the work. Should we consider the staff in a territorialized, category-specific, collective way? And how can we articulate the reality of the representation with the ideal of the representativeness and the conditions of its acquisition? Here, the doctrinal issues are in the line with the normative events.

This legislative and statutory production can be the object of specific investigations as well as of more general and crossed reflections. A particular interest will be carried on the examination of the doctrinal contributions, on the attention carried by the redactors on the effective practices, and in the exhumation of new sources or actors' testimonies.

In an interdisciplinary perspective, this call for papers is opened to all researchers in social sciences: jurists, in the variety of their skills, sociologists, political analysts, historians, etc. Comparative approaches will be also welcome.

Submission modalities:
Deadline of reception of the answers: September 1, 2010
Necessarily by e-mail and by mail before this date.
Answer on one to two pages maximum, including:
- The title of the communication;
- 20 lines of scientific description;
- Administrative information on one or the author (s) (title, address and e-mail);
The communicators whose propositions will have been retained will have to send their article before February 15th, 2011 at the latest.

Deadline:
Wednesday September 1, 2010.