Ethos in Sociology: Research Perspectives on a Fertile Concept
From a sociological research on today’s working conditions and social status of artists in visual arts, this article presents a reflection on the Ethos concept in sociology. Beyond its long history, this concept still seems relevant nowadays, specifically for its analytical potential to link the study of practices and values, to conjugate individual subjectivity with common culture in the age of normative plurality. The article proposes secondly an overview of the heuristic potential of the concept of Ethos in the context of a sociological survey - inspired by ethnography in this case - that I conducted between 2008 and 2013 about visual artists who evolve in the Province of Quebec and in French speaking Belgium.