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This summary note focuses on French research studies (between 1985 and 2015) which address the topic of disruptive behaviors in school. Disruptive behaviors in school cannot be considered an autonomous field of research; the concept is more a way of covering a plurality of sociological issues which together provide an overall picture of what causes problems at school and identify “those” who create problems for public policy including politics in education. This note consists of two parts (the second will be published in a future issue of the journal). We used two procedures to compile the corpus of studies relating to disruptive behaviors in school: firstly, a review of all the articles published in a sample of eleven significant academic journals (N=152); and secondly, a keyword search in the Eric, Francis, SAGE and Cairn search engines, which enabled us to select 458 academic articles and 149 books. The first part of this note defines the subject and its scope and provides an overview of how it will be studied. It also describes the major influence of New Sociology of Education (NSE) research on the study of disruptive behaviors in school, in relation to the field of the sociology of education. We then examine the dialectical relationship between order and disorder, the second paradigm specific to research into disruptive behaviors in school, which is, however, viewed and dealt with differently in the works listed. The ways in which studies on disruptive behaviors in school were set up and developed provide information about the modalities and movements which led to the development of the sociology of education.