Archives de l’auteur : GdL

Ideological foundations of capitalism and its organizational models: A study using popular management content on LinkedIn

Ricardo Mello Duarte & Silvio Eduardo Alvarez Candido (2024)

Sociology Compass, 18(2), pp. 1-18

Abstract. The paper investigates the ideological foundations of contemporary capitalism and its organizational models in Brazil. Our analysis considers three positions present in the literature: the thesis of the new spirit of capitalism; the literature about financialization and the shareholder value model; and the configuration of a managerial mode of domination. A content analysis was conducted to investigate normative business content from Brazilian “top voices” on the LinkedIn network. A total of 180 influential texts from 32 authors composed our corpus and were assessed based on an abductive approach that had as references the economies of worth model and a related framework for assessing the dynamic configuration of capitalism justifications. Results support the idea that contemporary capitalism is characterized in ideological terms by the fluidity of normative references restricting the market logic, configuring a complex or managerial mode of domination.

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Quelle coordination territoriale pour la valorisation de la donnée en région ? L’hypothèse DataLab Normandie

What kind of regional coordination is needed to make the most of data? The DataLab Normandie hypothesis

Marie-Hélène Gauthier (2024)

Thèse de doctorat en géographie, soutenue le 11/09/2024 à l’université Le Havre Normandie
PhD thesis in geography, defended on 11/09/2024 at the University of Le Havre Normandie

Jury : Fabienne Leloup, Amael Cattaruzza, Philippe Vidal (directeur/supervisor), Arnaud Brennetot, Thierry Joliveau, Emmanuelle Tixier, Marina Dufeal

Résumé. Cette thèse débutée en septembre 2020 et financée par un support CIFRE s’est déroulée au sein de la Région Normandie et de l’UMR IDEES 6266 LE HAVRE. Elle porte sur la question des conditions d’émergence et d’évolution d’un dispositif territorialisé de valorisation de la donnée à l’échelle régionale. L’hypothèse principale considère que l’échelon régional offre à l’ensemble des acteurs concernés des repères territoriaux et des raisons objectives de coopérer au travers d’un dispositif dédié, le DataLab Normandie. Celui-ci, expérimenté sous la forme d’un consortium entre 2020 et 2023, constitue le coeur de ce travail. Ce dispositif régional est susceptible d’assurer la coordination des acteurs (publics, privés et académiques), de les faire adhérer à une cause commune (la donnée) pour en faire une ressource territoriale et la valoriser autour de projets concrets. La thèse prend appui sur d’autres exemples de dispositifs territoriaux français pour discuter des modèles possibles d’organisation et révèle, à partir de la théorie des conventions, un certain nombre d’épreuves territoriales de la donnée qu’il convient d’organiser et de faire passer. Le principal résultat est que si le DataLab Normandie assume très correctement un rôle “d’impulsion”, notamment dans le cadre d’appels à projets, il peine toutefois pour l’instant à apparaître comme une structure incontournable d’ingénierie au service des acteurs régionaux.

Extrait: “C’est pourquoi, le choix est fait de retenir une approche par les conventions. Celle-ci associe à la fois une adhésion s’appuyant sur une dimension pragmatique (convention de coordination) et sur une approche plus cognitive et réflexive (convention légitimée). Elle est donc tout à fait appropriée à la donnée dans la mesure où, par exemple, « l’adhésion aux projets de partage de data seraient plus liée à des valeurs et principes altruistes généraux » (Petr et al., 2023 : 2) ce qui renvoie directement au principe d’une convention légitimée. Par ailleurs, cet exemple du partage de données par les habitants fait également appel à la convention de coordination puisque comme l’écrivent les auteurs, « distinct d’un comportement chauvin, il s’agirait plutôt d’un comportement opportuniste puisque le résident voit, dans le projet d’intérêt collectif localisé, une forme d’annonce et de garantie d’en obtenir in fine un intérêt personnel. » (Petr et al., 2023 : 2). Enfin, les conventions permettent à la fois d’adopter une analyse des dynamiques territoriales tant d’un point de vue individuel que collectif mais aussi d’en saisir les ressorts qu’ils soient implicites ou explicites, contrôlés ou non.” (p. 78)

Abstract. This thesis, which began in September 2020 and was funded by a CIFRE, was carried out within the Normandy Region and the UMR IDEES 6266 LE HAVRE. It focuses on the question of the conditions for the emergence and development of a territorial system for exploiting data at regional level. The main hypothesis is that the regional level provides all the players involved with territorial reference points and objective reasons for cooperating through a dedicated mechanism, the DataLab Normandie. The DataLab, which will be piloted as a consortium between 2020 and 2023, forms the core of this work. This regional mechanism is likely to ensure the coordination of players (public, private and academic), to get them to adhere to a common cause (data) in order to turn it into a regional resource and develop it around concrete projects. The thesis draws on other examples of French territorial systems to discuss possible organisational models and reveals, on the basis of convention theory, a number of territorial tests of data that need to be organised and passed on. The main finding is that, while DataLab Normandie does a good job of providing ‘impetus’, particularly in the context of calls for projects, it is still struggling to establish itself as a key engineering structure serving regional players.

Excerpt: “This is why we have chosen to adopt a convention-based approach. This combines a pragmatic approach to membership (coordination convention) with a more cognitive and reflexive approach (legitimated convention). It is therefore entirely appropriate to the data insofar as, for example, “adherence to data-sharing projects would be more linked to general altruistic values and principles” (Petr et al., 2023: 2), which refers directly to the principle of a legitimated convention. Moreover, this example of data sharing by residents also appeals to the convention of coordination since, as the authors write, “distinct from a chauvinistic behavior, it would rather be an opportunistic behavior since the resident sees, in the localized collective interest project, a form of announcement and guarantee of ultimately obtaining a personal interest from it.” (Petr et al., 2023: 2). Finally, conventions make it possible to analyze territorial dynamics from both an individual and collective point of view, as well as to grasp the driving forces behind them, whether implicit or explicit, controlled or uncontrolled.” (p. 78)

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Imagining beyond nature-culture dualism: An exploration of ecological justice

Claire-Isabelle Roquebert & Gervaise Debucquet (2024)

Organization, 31(2), pp. 221-246.

Abstract. In the face of rising sustainability issues, increasing numbers of organisations are trying to build compromises between their economic purpose and ecological objectives. Organisational studies focus on the analysis of such compromise processes but most studies do not seek to grasp the substantial changes advocated by ecological critiques. Our research is aimed at addressing that gap by clarifying the radical view sustained by ecological imaginary beyond conventional compromise processes. We engage in a qualitative study of biodynamics – an agricultural method based on a radical ecological imaginary – to evaluate its moral underpinnings through Boltanski and Thévenot’s Economies of Worth framework. Our findings help us to grasp the radical moral substance of ecological critique and to extend that framework beyond its dualist assumption. By highlighting antagonisms between meta-conceptions of justice rather than analysing compromises, our research provides insights into the radical organisational changes advocated by ecological critiques.

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Growing Green: On the Moral Pluralism of Individual and Collective Ecological Embeddedness

Claire-Isabelle Roquebert & Jean-Pascal Gond (2024)

Business & Society, Online first

Abstract. Prior research on sustainability suggests that ambitious sustainability strategies are often turned into “business-as-usual” practices. Although ecological embeddedness – that is, actors’ physical and cognitive anchoring in their ecological environment – can help maintain sustainability ambitions, its collective dynamics and pluralistic moral foundations remain understudied. We rely on the economies of worth framework and the revelatory case of a biodynamic farm business experiencing sustained commercial growth to explore these blind spots by analyzing how ecological embeddedness was maintained despite this growth. We found that moral threats moved the organization away from its initial sustainability commitment and demonstrated how the farm maintained its ecological embeddedness through three mechanisms that involved multiple moral foundations: nurturing ecological inspiration, networking green projects, and unifying a green ethos. By inducing such mechanisms of moral recombination, our analysis advances sustainability studies by clarifying and bridging individual and collective dynamics of ecological embeddedness while revealing their multiple moral foundations; we also extend economies of worth research by demonstrating the role of ecological materiality in the alignment of organizations with the green world.

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Making sense of sensing homes: exploring ‘regimes of engagement’ in a smart urban energy context

Ingrid Foss Ballo & Kjetil Rommetveit (2024)

Urban Geography, 45(4), pp. 691-712

Abstract. Visionary imaginaries of desirable ‘smart’ urban energy futures entice city governments into innovation and collaboration aimed at large-scale urbanism. As part of attending to actualizations and materializations of ‘smart’ urban imaginaries, this paper contributes to moving beyond idealized framings of smart urban publics, towards more embedded reflexive accounts of how ‘real people’ in urban contexts make sense of and reason about smart urban developments. Through a living lab intervention in Bergen, Norway, we open up a space for critical deliberation, to explore situated imaginations and geographies of smart urban futures. We analyse how people reason about their experiences with smart technological devices, expanding on existing practice-oriented urban studies by applying the pragmatic framework of ‘regimes of engagement’. We analyse shifts people make between different regimes of argumentation and justification, showing how participants pragmatically handle their (simultaneous) status as energy consumers, urban citizens, and responsible users in an urban energy grid.

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Organizing Life: A Sociological Study on the Action of Organizing from the Activity of “Personal Organizers”

Victor Pimentel Ferreira (2024)

New Sociological Perspectives, 4(1). Open access, pp. 30-44

Abstract. This paper is dedicated to the mapping and analysis of the values and devices commonly mobilized around the action of organizing. To this end, I investigate the justifications of personal organizers (POs) and examine the definitions explained in personal organizing manuals/books. Methodologically, the work is divided into three fronts: semi-structured interviews with POs, analysis of manuals on the subject, and participant observation at a Brazilian event in this market. In the theoretical field, I draw on the tools of the sociology of morality and French pragmatic sociology. The results of the research point to the possibility that, at certain times, social actors recognize the existence of conflicts in the relations with different entities in their environment (time, money, objects, people, etc.) and, therefore, manifest an impulse to order social reality, trying to mitigate its unstable and potentially problematic character. In this way, this research contributes, on the one hand, to the complexity of the debate on the regimes of engagement pragmatically mobilized by social actors in the coordination of their daily actions and, on the other hand, to the discussion on how the problem of social order appears not only as an important problem of sociological theory, but also as a practical problem of social actors themselves in their daily lives.

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Rankings and their limits: the role of global university rankings in university mergers in Finland

Mikko Kohvakka & Arto Nevala (2024)

Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 68(1), pp. 22-35.

Abstract. Studies of global university rankings often assume that rankings as Anglo-American policy scripts have an increasing influence resulting in a convergence of policies and practices, or that the ideas of rankings continue to diverge into national types. In this article, we take a middle ground by arguing that when an idea of ranking is grounded in a particular place, it takes on hybrid forms because of individual agency and of national and local contingencies that are found at that place. A key concept is “a frictional translation”, by which we refer to more than one way in which capable actors can interpret and translate the idea of ranking within a given geographical and organizational context. We use university mergers in Finland as an example of the translation process, in which global university rankings are interpreted through nationally and locally specific assemblages of institutional forms that support, resist or hybridize them.

Figure 1. A visual representation of the theoretical framework

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Making a deal with the devil? Portuguese and Finnish activists’ everyday negotiations on the value of social media

Carla Malafaia & Taina Meriluoto (2024)

Social Movement Studies, 23(2), pp. 190-206

Abstract. This article explores how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices. Considering the near ubiquitous intertwinement of online-offline environments, and its contradictory promises for social movements, we look at these negotiations through the moral principles drawn upon to critique and justify social media practices. Based on ethnographic data from Portuguese climate activists and Finnish mental health activists, we build on pragmatist sociology as an analytical frame to investigate value and meaning-making within these social movements. Results show how activists predominantly criticize social media for its fame-valued logic, which they consider leading to the individualization and depoliticization of communication and the ‘marketization’ of messages and practices. These challenges are managed with reference to the groups’ civic values through two sets of practices: 1) grounding the online and 2) repurposing individualism. Yet these practices reveal different compromise strategies in each country to accommodate social media demands and core group values, highlighting different interpretations of civic values that materialize in competing stances in relation to ‘political’ content and ‘individual’ action. We argue that an analytical framework focusing on values as they unfold in everyday practices is particularly apt to understanding meaning construction in social movements, whose very essence is the evaluation and critique of existing justifications within certain socio-political arrangements.

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Crime, culture or war? Justifying military responses to violence against civilians

Sine Vorland Holen (2024)

Acta Sociologica. Online first

Abstract. Interpreting violence against civilians is necessary for eliciting appropriate protection responses, yet the structuration processes through which military personnel make sense of observed violence are underexplored. This article draws on the experiences of Norwegian military officers, applying Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of justification to investigate how officers discern violence targeting unarmed individuals and justify their reactions. Although they frequently categorize violence into ‘war’, ‘crime’ and ‘culture’, employing civic, industrial and humanitarian logic structures, officers grapple with the realities that transcend such neat classifications. Rooted in the sociology of justification and violence, this article provides insights into how actors navigate plural violence in conflict and their struggles in making justifiable decisions that ultimately prepare the ground for action to take place.

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The Moral Work of Participation: Disillusio, Expertise, and Urban Planning Under Neoliberalism

Hillary Angelo & Gianpaolo Baiocchi (2024)

Qualitative Sociology, Online first

Abstract. How do urban professionals morally orient themselves toward their work to transform the built environment? Contemporary urban planning is a field that is defined by both a strong ethos of equity and social reform and a widely shared realization that the profession itself is relatively powerless. The question of whether justice can be planned, and whether exercises in planning can ever achieve just outcomes has been a perennial question facing progressive planners. A generation ago scholars of a critical bent made the persuasive case for “no.” Yet planning continues, and the profession continues to attract and train equity-minded, reform-oriented individuals. This paper examines how planning theory and theorists reconcile their motivating civic visions and moral stances with constraints on practice that thwart their efforts to achieve a just society. We find that far from being naïve, planners adopt a reflexive, pragmatic morality that allows them to maintain normative commitments even in highly constrained environments. From this case, we argue for more attention to the moral work involved in professionals’ formulation of strategies for environmental change.

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The EU’s normative justifications of refugee resettlement

Natalie Welfens (2024)

Journal of Refugee Studies, 37(2). Open access, pp. 552-569

Abstract. The UNHCR promotes resettlement as an important protection tool to express solidarity with vulnerable refugees and countries of refuge. Yet, as resettlement is discretionary, its guiding principles and objectives are not binding and can be reinterpreted by states and supranational organizations. Against the background of UNHCR’s resettlement guidelines, this article examines the EU’s justifications of resettlement. Advancing theories of pragmatic sociology and based on an in-depth qualitative analysis, it teases out justifications of (1) humanitarianism, (2) border security, and (3) assimilability in EU discourses and policies. Revisiting EU policy advancements from the early 2000s until 2023, it shows that these justifications increasingly interlace and present resettlement as an instrument to protect refugees as well as EU borders and access to EU polities. The article argues for the need to understand the EU as a resettlement actor in its own right, with significant power to reshape resettlement as a protection tool.

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Electromagnetic economies of worth: Repurposing a radio dish and debating technoscientific modernity at the equator

James Merron & Siri Lamoureaux (2024)

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Online first, open access

Abstract. In 2017, an old satellite dish in Ghana was repurposed into a radio telescope. While highly celebrated in public, complications surrounding this conversion resulted in criticism in the African astronomy community. While ‘repurposing’ has been optimistically embraced in recent Science and Technology Studies literature, we challenge ‘repurposing’s’ seemingly natural alignment with the common good, defined here as the path towards technoscientific modernity in Ghana. Instituting a distinction between a project of ‘repurposing’ for capacity development and building a new radio observatory in South Africa for global science presupposes a difference between real ‘inspired’ science and technology that serves a ‘civic’ orientation. In postcolonial societies, we cannot speak of singular ‘orders of worth’, but inevitably multiple orientations towards technoscientific modernity and visions for the ‘common good’. We locate a converted radio telescope and its digital infrastructure within such contested visions through phases of materially inscribed ‘orders of worth’. Over time, successive ‘worths’ are materially inscribed Ghanaian ground station as a site for 1) global telecommunications, 2) capacity building, 3) satellite data transfer. We present the material politics at work between various stakeholders: astronomers, government, the private sector and residents living near the observatory.

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Statistics as politics: a methodology for the critical approach of tourism quantification

Valérian Geffroy, Victor Anduze Rivero & Davide Ceccato (2024)

Tourism Recreation Research, Online first, open access

Abstract. Quantification is a central instrument of tourism governance, as numbers are perceived as a solid factual basis for action. However, critical studies of quantification reveal the political, performative and constructed nature of statistics. Adopting this perspective, we offer an original methodological and conceptual framework for the analysis of tourism quantification systems. The framework includes the mapping of actors and datasets, ethnomethodological observation applied to statistical work, and discourse and controversy analysis. Such an investigation illuminates how the production of quantitative knowledge reflects and is embedded in power structures and power shifts in the tourism sector. It also allows to study quantitative observation as part of the sector’s response to contemporary challenges, such as overtourism, the rise of big data, or sustainability.

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The farm shop as a retroscaped place of experiential consumption

Robert Geary Griffin & Martin Phillips (2024)

Sociologia Ruralis, Online first, open access

Abstract. Alternative food network research has referred to farm shops but rarely examined them in detail. This article argues that farm shops are not simply places of exchange but are complex, immersive, sensory-rich places of meaning and experience. These arguments are developed through a study that adopts an interpretive/embodied perspective on conventions and applies them through a multi-methods approach, incorporating autoethnography, interviews, a questionnaire and website analysis. The influence of farm shop interiors and farm context were investigated through thematic analysis. It was found that consumers desired a rustic interior aesthetic, an external ambience enabling exploration and an opportunity to escape time poverty through consumption. Farm shop owners endeavoured to provide a rich multi-sensory interactive consumption experience, encompassing both enterprise buildings and surrounding farm sites. It is argued that use of ‘farm-site’ consumption experiences distinguishes these enterprises from each other, contributes to consumer immersion and positively contributes to the collective identity of ‘farm shops’. Furthermore, the provision of retroscaped experiential consumption promises resilience from supermarket co-optation.

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Generational conflict and middle-class decline in higher-density housing debates

Morgan Hamlin (2024)

New Zealand Sociology, 39(1), pp. 22-38

Abstract. Utilising the pragmatic sociology of critique, this article qualitatively analyses how middle-class housing activists publicly oppose or support higher-density housing or intensification in the Auckland Unitary Plan. With growing concerns about inter-generational housing inequalities and the impacts of intensification, there has been a rise in resident opposition groups and pro-development activists who clash in public debates. While these groups are often in conflict with each other, this article seeks to understand how they both invoke public justifications to go beyond their personal interests in housing and to also reveal the broader political and economic drivers of the housing crisis, which are not widely discussed by these activists. Exposing the broader issues underlying intensification and the housing crisis, such as middle-class decline, helps contribute to a less divisive public discourse that highlights the shared concerns of housing activists while going beyond polarising generational narratives.

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