Community workers training: the emergence and structuring of a market between private and public actors ; La formation d’animateur professionnel : émergence et structuration d’un marché entre acteurs privés et publics

The world of animation appeared at the end of the 19th century with the holiday camps (Houssaye, 1989). Until the end of the Second World War, those involved in animation kept an occasional activity in parallel with the school. The militant movements have built-up this sector ofactivity and today attributes four main missions to popular education: (1) awareness-raising, (2) emancipation, (3) empowerment and (4) social and political transformation (Maurel, 2010). Social values carried by committed actors thus structure the world of animation. From the end of the 1960s onwards, a process of professionalization began, but it remains difficult to identify. Researchers have described it as slow (Mignon, 1998), unfinished (Lebon, 2009) or even impossible (Bordes, 2008). This research aims to analyze the professionalization of animation by focusing on qualifications. While the development of professional diplomas sheds light on the professionalization of the initial stakeholders in the field of youth animation, i.e., the associa-tions of popular education, it is also accompanied by the arrival of new stakeholders such as universities, cluster of local public educational institutions (GRETA: groupement d’établissements publics locaux d’enseignement), and companies. The transformations in the training of professional animators, combined with the multiplication of actors, lead to the progressive structuring of a market. In other words, this thesis questions about the relationship between the process of professionalization and the structuring of the market for the training of professional Community workers. In order to analyze the way in which animation actors organize this market, the thesis is displayed in five parts. The first part introduces the theoretical framework: built from an interactionist perspective (Becker, 1988), it aims to define the outline of the animation world and propose an analysis in terms of a market (François, 2005). The second part discusses the empirical approach, which combines several ...