Crisis Analysis: Between Normalization and Avoidance

French social science research on crisis has experienced strong evolutions over the past twenty years. Attention shifted from problems that the authorities had in managing industrial accidents and natural disasters, transportation accidents, to crisis associated with the idea of an ‘affair’ or ‘scandal’ (contaminated blood affair, asbestos issue) and to collective risks characterized by a high level of uncertainty and generating multiple scientific controversies and public debates (“mad cow disease”, GMO, etc,). Another change regards the issues at stake. Whereas management problems (regarding decision, communication, etc.) were the core issues, analyses are now more and more focused on multiple scientific controversies and public debates, on public authorities and scientific experts being held accountable for serious dysfunctions in the public health field, on media coverage and legal repercussions of such problems. Because of this double change, crises tend to become a more ‘ordinary’ research topic in the academic field. Consequently new trends of analysis develop, related less to a specific, critical situation than to changes and destabilizations in systems of actors. From this point of view, crisis has a strongly endogenous character and crises analysis tends to converge with the analysis of risks as public problems and with the analysis of ‘normal’ situations.