Abstract EN:

This research, conducted among a working class population in the nantes-saint-nazaire area, concerns working practices referred to as "de bricole", carried out on the fringe of regular paid employment. Following a lexicographical study making it possible to point out a category of thought and experience relating to the "travail de bricole" (almost to potter, to tinker), in turn followed by a rereading of monographic sources from the last century aiming at situating from a historical standpoint certain marginal forms of work discernable today, the author analyses the construction of a field of leasure in witch these practices were classified in the do-it-yourself category. This effort on elaboration answers a questionning formulated between the two world wars in literature dealing with working class leasure activity, in light of the evolution of working class living conditions and industrial labor. This concern encounters a sociological reflection on working class labor wich herein forms the subject of a critical examination. The end result is a definition of do-it-yourself/ odd jobs as a leasure activity, exempt from productive constraints and operating against the tide of professional life. The analysis of currently observed practices overturns this viewpoint. Indeed, it is shown that professional labor constitutes a matrix of do-it-yourself practices by those people concerned wich mobilizes, while reconstructing them, industrial logic and knowledge in the private sphere. They in turn reestablich a "productive order" and widen the scope of work.