Towards a (New) Mode of Organizational Regulation in Belgian Schools? Some Empirical Accounts of Mediation Practices and Devices

Considering mediation in general as a new mode of social regulation (Bonafé-Schmitt, 1996 ; Volckrick, 2005), we can consequently conceive school mediation as a new mode of organizational regulation (Reynaud, 1988; Friedberg, 1993). Nevertheless, it is necessary to account for the concrete practices and devices through which school mediation becomes visible and recovers a concrete social form (Simmel, 1999). In doing so, we will consider mediation as a set of concrete solutions designed to solve local problems.
With this in mind, this presentation will precisely aim at reporting and depicting concrete school mediation situations, through a double movement of decomposition and re-composition (Latour, 2010) settled in an experimental research method.
This study takes place in a doctoral research program introduced in 2011 (Kuty et al., 2012). It is based on fifty semi-directive individual interviews and sixteen collective interviews, led within six secondary schools in French-Speaking Belgium.