Employment intermediaries and the labor market

In France, intermediate public structures of three sorts (ML, PAIO and ALE) are led to play a strategic role in processes for relating supply and demand in the job market, especially for people less than 26 years old. Beyond the institutional and organizational differences between these structures, an effort, based on Boltanski and Thevenot des Economies de la grandeur (1987), is made to analyze these processes and their effects on the operation of the labor market. A meticulous empirical approach sheds light on the contrasts in the "logics of action" of two types of institutions. The typical "logic" of the unemployment offices (ALE) refers to the "business world" whereas the "logics" of the other two structures lie closer to the "domestic world". Since these are public institutions however these dominant references combine, depending on the logic of action in each case, with the "civic world" and the "industrial world" so as to integrate citizen values of public service and organizational efficiency.