Based on an ethnographic survey carried out within six social housing organizations, this article reinvestigates the issue of social housing allocations from the angle of the professional practices of those who implement them. It draws on micro-institutionalist theory, combining contributions from street-level bureaucracy and neo-institutionalism, to overcome some of the pitfalls of "bottom-up" approaches to public action, by articulating different levels of analysis and prioritizing explanations of bureaucratic work. From this perspective, the survey highlights the weight of organizational logics, and qualifies the influence of situational and dispositional factors. Indeed, while agents' social properties shape their conceptions of the job and their registers of actions, they are less decisive when it comes to explaining counter behaviour. Similarly, while interactions can modulate certain allocation decisions, there are few such adjustments, and they are contained by the institutional environment.

The 3DS law closes a cycle of reforms to social housing allocation policy opened eight years earlier by the Alur law. These legislative changes led to the gradual generalization of demand rating as the main instrument for allocating social housing. The use of local experimentation has enabled certain towns to position themselves as model territories, and the State to regain its capacity for action in a sector historically regulated a minima .

For over twenty years, the French government has relied on inter-municipal cooperation to rebalance the presence of social housing in urban areas and combat social and spatial segregation. Établissements publics de coopération intercommunale (EPCI) have been given the tools to influence the production of new social housing and, more recently, its allocation. In this article, we attempt to measure the actual rise in power of EPCIs in these areas, based on a comparative study of six French conurbations (Bordeaux, Dunkirk, Grenoble, Meaux, Mulhouse and Saint-Étienne). The results show that the progress made by intercommunal bodies is clearer in regulating the production of new social housing than in allocations. These variations are the result of two series of variables: socio-spatial configurations, which cover the degree of tension on housing markets, as well as the socio-economic and demographic balances between central cities and outlying communes; and political and administrative configurations, and in particular the ability of reform coalitions mobilized at intercommunal level to assert themselves in the face of municipal machines.

The Equality and Citizenship Act, enacted in 2017, represents a major change in social housing policy in France. By reforming social housing allocation processes, it clarifies the objective of social diversity and strengthens the ability of intercommunal structures to combat the processes of socio-spatial segregation that affect disadvantaged neighborhoods in French conurbations. Based on a collective survey of allocation and settlement policies conducted between 2017 and 2020, this article examines how the national objectives of the reform have been implemented locally. We begin by showing that, despite the clarification of the principle of social diversity and the redistribution of roles brought about by the Equality and Citizenship Act, desegregation policies still appear to be as ineffective as ever in reorganizing settlement on an agglomeration scale. The failure of the reform is explained by both national and local dynamics. In particular, we insist on the mobilization of local players in charge of implementation, mainly municipalities and social landlords. Without calling into question the reform in its entirety, these players often succeeded in domesticating the law's instruments to weaken its scope. However, this has not prevented incremental changes in local actor systems and public institutions.

This article examines several methodological challenges associated with the multi-level approach, based on choices made during research aimed at explaining the recurrence of discrimination in access to social housing. Based on ethnographic surveys carried out mainly at micro and meso levels, this research adopts a dual focus on professional practices and contextual effects, in order to grasp reproduction processes at macro level. How can ethnographic inquiry be used to vary the levels of analysis? How can macro-level elements be extracted from data collected mainly at micro or meso level? How can we characterize the relationships between these different levels of analysis? To answer these questions, I begin with a brief review of the literature on bureaucratic work, laying the foundations for a multi-level approach to street-level bureaucracy. I then review my main methodological choices, the trajectory of my investigation, and the techniques implemented to analyze the empirical material. Finally, I show, on the basis of the survey results, how the multi-level approach makes it possible to characterize micro-meso-macro links in terms of coupling-decoupling and to prioritize explanations of bureaucratic work.