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Since the 1990’s there have been considerable changes regarding compensation for health-related risks. Some major cases have made their mark, with compensation as the central issue (the cases of contaminated blood, growth hormone, asbestos and the Perruche affair in particular). A new type of victims’ group has appeared on the public stage. A longstanding debate now focuses upon the increasing number of legal actions. Voices have been raised with regard to the validity of the mechanisms currently in place to ensure – in many areas – that compensation is paid (professional risks, damages relating to the medical profession, environmental risks). The moral economy of compensation is changing, both from the victims’ point of view and from that of the authorities in charge of these matters. The aim of this project is to examine these changes, using two key examples that we wish to put into perspective: the area of work-related accidents and illnesses, and the area of damages relating to the medical accidents. We would like to show how the current compensation crisis is part of a new risk policy that emerged in the 1980’s, the effects of which are now being felt in many different sectors. But, above and beyond this transversal question of risk, we also wish to see how the changes to the compensation economy have been affected by specific changes in each of these two areas. We will try to discover how compensation for work-related injuries is dealt with in the new phase of capitalism. We will make a comparative examination of how (particularly with regard to the question of legal action) the medical world, which has always thought of the authority and responsibility of its members in terms of the professional tradition model, has gradually come to discover new forms of tension and dispute proper to clinical modernity. We will concentrate on two axes of investigation for each of the chosen areas. Firstly, we will look at the creation and transformation of the established compensation mechanisms. For this, we will essentially rely on an analysis of the debates which, in the 1990’s and in the two fields concerned, surrounded the development or attempted development of new legal tools. We will pay especial attention to the way in which the current compensation crisis is part of a deeper socio-historical perspective (criticism of a device inherited through the creation of social security systems for the one; emergence of a new type of insurance solidarity regarding clinical mishaps in the other). We will make a comparative examination of the new area of dispute that has developed, within this framework, with regard to increased judicial criticism of the institutions in question. The second axis looks at victims’ experiences - how important and in what ways compensation is important to victims of work accidents (or work-related illnesses) and medical accidents. By interviewing such victims, and as a counterpoint to the doctrines analysed in the first axis of research, we aim to show how these people build their own moral economy of compensation at the junction of the different spheres of their existence that have been affected by the injury.