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Inventing Value

Dave Elder-Vass (2024)

October 17, 2024
First talk of the Canadian Sociological Association Economic Sociology RC 2024-25 Speaker Series on “Confronting Contemporary Capitalism”.

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French-Japanese Joint Meeting around the American Institutionalist John RogersCommons

French-Japanese Joint Meeting around the American Institutionalist John Rogers Commons was held in online in November 2 and 9, 2024. It contributed to activate the institutionalist and pragmatic sociologist network across France and Japan.

The meeting was organized by Véronique Dutraive (Lyon 2 University) and Takayuki Nakahara (Hannan University), inspired by the publication of French translation of J.R. Commons’ masterpiece, Institutional Economics 1934 (L’Économie institutionnelle: Sa place dans l’économie politique. Translation supervisors: Jean-Jacques Gislain and Bruno Théret. Garnier, 2024).

Presenters drew his economic-legal perspective, economic-ethic perspective, institutional evolution approach, and pragmatist approach. The participants eagerly exchange their knowledge on the multiple perspectives and approaches contained in Commons Institutional Economics. This knowledge will be presented in the annual meeting of Japan Association for Evolutionary Economics, March 22-23, 2025.

On the Economics of Convention (EC), Christian Bessy (IDHES ENS Paris-Saclay) and Kota Kitagawa (Kansai University) demonstrated the convergences between EC and Commons’ Institutional Economics (IE) on their viewpoints of the transformations of the employment relationship.

Working Paper of C. Bessy and K. Kitagawa is published in following URL :“John R. Commons and Convention Theory around the transformations of the employment relationship”, https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04896550

Whole program of the meeting is following:

French-Japanese Joint Meeting AROUND JOHN ROGERS COMMONS

Saturday, 2 November – Session 1

  1. Hiroyuki UNI (Otemon Gakuin University): John R. Commons’s Two-layered Theory of Reasonable Value
  2. Laure Bazzoli and Véronique Dutraive (Lyon 2 University): John Commons and John Dewey: a cross-fertilized reading
  3. Akihiro Abe (Otemon Gakuin University): The Conditions for a Reasonable Institution: Comparing the Positions of J.R. Commons and Amartya Sen
  4. Guillaume Vallet (University of Grenoble): John R. Commons and Sociology: More Than an Influence

Saturday, 9 November – Session 2

  1. Takayuki Nakahara (Hannan University): Basic Model of Evolutionary Institutional Economics on J. R. Commons’ Institutional Economics
  2. Christian Bessy (IDHES ENS Paris-Saclay) and Kota Kitagawa (Kansai University): Commons and Convention Theory around the transformations of the employment relationship
  3. Shingo Takahashi (Tokyo College of Transport Studies): Social Security Theory of John R. Commons
  4. Thierry KIRAT (CNRS): John R. Commons: A Legal Theorist

Convention theorist presentations at SSA congress at Basel 9-11 September 2024

Congress report by Rainer Diaz-Bone

From 9 to 11 September 2024 the congress “Vulnerable Societies: Risks and Responses” of the Swiss Association of Sociology (SSA) took place at Basel (Muttenz). Two workshop sessions were organized by Rainer Diaz-Bone (University of Lucerne, Switzerland) and devoted to economics and sociology of conventions (EC/SC).

On Tuesday 10 September the first (out of two) workshop session “Crises, conflicts, catastrophes – on the relationship between «self-vulnerabilization» and collective capacities for action from a convention theory perspective” took place. The main aim of this session was to grasp self-vulnerabilization as resulting out of societal process. The loss of social self-evidence or consensus can be regarded as caused by social mechanisms as emerging populisms, increasing social inequality, ageing societies, environmentally destructive lifestyles, the inadequate handling of migration consequences (as failing to integrate migrants). There have been four presentations at this workshop. First, Rainer Diaz-Bone introduced some of EC/SC’s core concepts which can be fruitfully applied in the analysis of self-vulnerabilization. For him, self-vulnerability can be conceived of as the damaging of fair evaluation, critique and justification as well as the institutional corruption of coping capacities. He pointed to EC/SC’s concept of bad conventions (Philippe Batifoulier and Guillemette de Larquier), self-referentiality (André Orléan) and the power of evaluation (François Eymard-Duvernay) which could be employed. Also, he argued that the difference between conventions and institutions (Robert Salais) could cause effects of self-vulnerabilization.

Ross Wallace

Valentin Rottensteiner

Luca Perrig

Ross Wallace (University of Lisbon, Portugal) presented research on a local project for energy transition and the resistance against it in Cercal in Portugal. In his lecture “From place imaginaries to regimes of engagement with alternative energy futures: A report from a Portuguese” Wallace shared insights from his research project team (with Kaya Schwemmlein and Susana Batel) about how a local social movement emerged to act against a planned solar plant in 2021/2022. The analysis focused on the discourse and how critique was mobilized in it. One of the key findings was that the state is accused to ignore the vulnerability of the Portuguese community of Cercal. In the third lecture on supply chain vulnerabilities titled “Conflicting worlds of production: How the strive for supply chain vulnerability creates conflict in the semiconductor industry” Valentin Rottensteiner (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany) employed the model of worlds of production (developed by Michael Storper and Robert Salais) to study how actors in different worlds identify supply chain vulnerabilities. He argued that vulnerabilities are identified and solved in different ways – depending on the world of production. The last presentation “Enrolling hackers into a market for cyber-vulnerabilities” was given by Luca Perrig (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland). He referred to the market of hacking services and the hacking activist movement of “hactivism”. Perrig tracked the way how the mobilization of justifications for hacking (“ethical hacking”) goes hand in hand with the construction of a market for hacking service and hacking activism.

The second workshop session took place on Wednesday 11 September and was entitled “The Pluralization of Social Knowledge Production and the Paradox of Vulnerability”. Four lectures were given which were focusing the “paradox” that science is at once regarded as a resource for tackling uncertainty and crises as well as a realm which generates uncertainty and becomes vulnerable itself. The pluralization of knowledge production and the questioning of academic knowledge now lead to the fact that its analyses and solution perspectives for vulnerability(ies) themselves come under social criticism (e. g. “climate deniers”).

Frithjof Nungesser

Léonie Bisang and Guy Schwegler

Valeska Cappel

Walter Bartl

​The first presentation was given by Frithjof Nungesser (University of Graz, Austria) on “Forms of valuing livestock: On the pluralization of justifications, vulnerability claims, and the uses of science in animal welfare debates”. Nungesser offered first elements of a beginning analysis of two situations of animal welfare legislation in Germany (the 1972 Animal Welfare Act and the 2023 introduction of a mandatory animal husbandry label). Relying on the notion of order of justification (Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot) he sketched the pluralization of justifications and critiques on the two legislation initiatives. The second presentation by Valeska Cappel (University of Lucerne) on “Health-Apps: The pluralization of knowledge production and its consequences” presented first results of a research project on health app users’ practices. Cappel demonstrated how actors invent “multiple truth” and different justifications about the validity and usages of health data. Guy Schwegler and Léonie Bisang (both University of Lucerne) showed in their presentation “Is place the new social? Geodata and the encounter of data worlds” how geodata can be used to generate a different kind of representation of “the social”. They based their presentation on the notion of “data worlds” and questioned the approach to replace class concepts by geodemographic classifications as explanatory principles (e.g. postcodes as it was proposed by Richard Webber and Roger Burrows). The last presentation in this workshop session was given by Walter Bartl (University of Halle, Germany). Entitled “Worlds of scientific knowledge transfer” Bartl’s presentation applied the “worlds of production” model and showed how scientific knowledge transfer can be understood in different worlds. Bartl made the perspective of EC/SC evident by applying it to two examples of scientific knowledge translations in Germany.

Beside the eight presentations in the two workshop sessions, there have been other presentations based on EC/SC, too, as Kenneth Horvath’s (University of Teacher Education Zurich, Switzerland) presentation “Beyond resilience and vulnerability: employing the Sociology of Critique to explore the social foundations and implications of the AI-transformation of educational organisations” or Jessica Pidoux, Núria Sànchez-Mira and Philip Balsiger’s (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland) lecture on “Algorithmic Predictions in Uber’s Digital Labor Market: A Study on Economic Risks and Autonomy of Drivers” in which they used Robert Salais’ concept of labor conventions.
The convention theorist presentations at the SSA congress in 2024 continued the series of workshops and presentations included in the SSA congresses for almost ten years now (SSA congresses in Lausanne 2015, Zurich 2017, Neuchâtel 2019, Geneva 2021), which are devoted to convention theory’s research in Switzerland and abroad.

EC/Sociology of Conventions Workshop – Sustainability, conventions and compromise

Workshop report by Adèle Sébert (University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne )

What is going on at Paderborn? In between railway turmoils and a German wind coming with fall, another EC/SC Workshop took place on 26th and 27th September 2024.
Overview: Over two days, 5 sessions and 1 three-way roundtable took place, with a succession of 15 presentations, ranging from projects to be or just-submitted, to research projects or in-progress thesis, to published articles and chapters. Sessions covered a variety of themes: from the workshop, to training and work – a theme strongly present in the Department of Sociology at the University of Paderborn – and a variety of topics, as well as a session dedicated to the methodological issues involved in convention theory.
Expertly managed by the session moderators, each presentation was discussed at length with the audience, focusing on the research topics or the implications for EC/SC. Discussions focused on the units of analysis of the convention theorist’ approaches presented, the relevance of mixed methods for EC/SC, the use of typologies if they lead to an increase in generality, the translation issues of the EC/SC (its degree of internationalization and appropriation by non-French-speaking researchers). All of this in an open and spontaneous setting, to enrich everyone’s research and provide an interdisciplinary (sociology, history, economics, management), pluralist (in the sense of EC/SC frameworks applied) and inter-European viewpoint.

Wednesday 25th
The traditional pre-workshop diner took place on the evening of Wednesday 25th September, giving participants a chance to get together at the start of this academic year.

Thursday 26th
After the welcoming words of the organizers, and a first round of coffee, the session “Sustainability and conventions” opened the dance.

Felix Rossmann and Eltje Gajewski

Eltje Gajewski (University of Duisburg-Essen) introduced one of the results from her thesis: a typology of entrepreneurs according to the degree of ecological focus of their companies. She described her methodological approach, based on a qualitative design mixing interviews and documents analysis. Crossing this material study with the On justification framework (Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot), she ended showing there are four types of what she called “ecopreneurs”: minimalists, self-actualizers, world-saviors and strategists. In what it describes, the typology raised some questions from workshop participants, as well as the way in which one (or more) types can diffuse or not. Workshop participants shared a global interrogation about the relevance of typologies, which EC/SC’s researches tend to end with. A question that went through most presentations for the rest of the workshop.
Then Felix Rossmann and Lisa Knoll (Paderborn University) took the lead by discussing sustainable financial regulation in order to transform the manufacturing industry. Comparing different programs and standards while focusing on the East-Westphalia-Lippe, they showed that different logics are coexisting today, relying on diverse standards and engaging worlds of justifications. Using Alain Desrosières research, the ended their presentation by posing that different standards also imply different ways of managing the economy, then not complying with the ordoliberal scheme promoted by the EU’s programs.

Felix Rossmann

Questions were asked on both green finance and effects of the financial crisis of 2008 when accessing these financial programs and governing the green transformation for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). The unit of analysis led to a back and forth discussion with workshop participants for EC/SC is not solely about programs but also about coordinating actors maneuvering those programs.

To complete this dedicated session, Alan Shipman and Ann Vogel (University of Applied Sciences of Güstrow) joined forces to introduced a working-progress project on which they try to overcome the Baumol effect encountered for some goods when it comes to environmental issues.

Alan Shipman and Ann Vogel

Drawing on a comparison with arts, they explained how costs in the art sector are bound to increase because other goods and services, in other sector, also increase. Using Kenneth E. Boulding definition of “saving”, they wished for a better integration of temporality and future when looking at consumptions. Colleagues asked questions about connections to convention theorists’ research of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, and about the adequacy of the orders of worth to understand specificities of environmental goods and services.Helped by a coffee to break ice, the participants partook to the second session “Convention theories”. This session investigated differently what was discussed previously, as typologies, units of analysis, adequacy between theoretical frameworks.

Rainer Diaz-Bone

Simon Schrör

Christian Schneijderberg

​Drawing on a chapter published in the Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions, Rainer Diaz-Bone (University of Lucerne) chose to focus on specific designs of convention theorists researches: comparative studies, historical analysis and case studies. He reminded everyone that other designs are possible, but this proposition is a way to sum up what he encountered for the last years. He insisted on two shared questions faced by EC/SC researches: how to identify the boundaries of situations and how to identity conventions (and conversely the population, that is to say object of the disputes, institutions refers to by people, people coordinating with each other). Both unit of analysis and situation raised questions from participants, and it was stated that referring to unit of analysis avoided too early decision about causes and consequences, which are key to operate situations within the course of analysis.
Simon Schrör (Weizenbaum Institute e.V.) addressed physical goods in the realm of applied arts. He studied cases on protection in processes and laws designs, targeting the role of lawyers in the valorizing process, even valorization of things that were not thought as art before. In order to do so, he used Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre Enrichment and applied it to modular shelving system. Since the framework referred to was not the orders of worth, questions from colleagues focused on the choice made up here. Consequently, linking theory with methodology and methods, a second wave of questions dealt with data chosen to approach such judiciary subjects with this framework.
To round off the morning, Christian Schneijderberg (University of Kassel) presented his reflections on “good” and “bad” conventions, questioning the relevance of the idea of bad conventions, currently being explored by Paris Nanterre French colleagues. He introduced these conventions to characterize economies relying on illegal or marginal activities, showing how orders of worth can be turned the way round in order to qualify regimes of violence. Three cases were proposed in conceptual tables: mafia, prostitution and human trafficking, associating them with industrial, domestic and civic orders of worth. This presentation led to two sets of theoretical questions. One on the limits of the application of the order of worth’s toolkit when qualifying non-western European economies, in which On justification was thought about. Another set of questions focused on the adequacy of the model of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot to conceptualize bad conventions.

The afternoon opened with the first session “Education and Work”.

Christian Imdorf and Philipp Gonon

The education system was firstly addressed through the vocational education and training (VET) by Christian Imdorf (Leibniz University Hannover) and Philip Gonon (University of Zurich). They showed that VET is a recent phenomenon and is based on individual initiatives, making it difficult to fully grasp the coherence behind it. Using a convention theorist framework, they considered VET as a hybrid structure relying on a compromise that stabilizes demand coming from different actors (broader than firms level). Then they took time to draw on a diversity of researches, in different countries, that could lead them to better theorized VET. Colleagues vividly discussed their presentation by referring to different countries and varieties of perceptions towards such training, thus underlining the value of EC/SC framework for achieving greater coherence.

Kenneth Horvath and Stephan Dahmen

Following their path, Stephan Dahmen (University of Paderborn) and Kenneth Horvath (Teachers University of Zurich) took over and introduced their work-in-progress about potentials at school. They put under scrutiny the testing situation as a social one which enroots in a test chaining throughout education, and which results in effects on career guidance. Reactions of participants built on insights of EC/SC when it comes to understanding inequalities (and why they persist even if we know them) and on how EC/SC helps to consider test as investment in form (Laurent Thévenot), even when people and testing changed through time.

Léonie Bisang

Finally Léonie Bisang (University of Lucerne) chose to present a preliminary results of her PhD study on students path from secondary to higher education level in Switzerland. She explained her choice to go for a reintroduction of structure (agency) to consider students’ decisions and perceptions, but she also took into account their reflexivity. She introduced to workshop participants a game she designed, based on cards and videos (for her to analyse students’ reactions). With this game she aimed at getting students’ perceptions of higher education (entertaining vs. hard facts) and splitting those according to students’ expectations when it comes to higher education (quality criteria and conception of higher education). Colleagues raised questions on methodological implications behind this design and on how she evolved her presentation through times, Léonie Bisang partaking in different research events.
Last session of this eventful day put under scrutiny “various themes”. Laverne Iminza Chore and Julia Brandl (University of Innsbruck) presented a research based on a focus group with actors, who know each other, in order to address temporary workers issues. They created a setting relying on workshops and rounds of opinions in order to produce scenarios and somewhat failed to ensure the realisation of those scenarios afterwards. Reminding the audience that scenario planing is uncertain and may be shaped by social conventions. They discussed the fact that scenarios are compromise device themselves. Which led to many questions from workshop participants about the method behind this particular scenario planing setting, the type of actors involved, the possibility to create cooperation between actors in absence of hierarchy in such settings (even though underlying power relations might arise). Participants agreed to further discussion about the role of researchers that designed such setting and used it as both tool and research material. They also raised a related question when it comes to such a research process: who takes responsibility for ideas and what comes out of them? EC/SC enables researchers to embrace both the diversity of economic and institutional actors (coordinating in a way they were not used to before) and the effects of researchers themselves when trying to provoke a coordinating setting.
Relying on a variety of maps of work activities in Sweden, Rebecca Ye (University of Stockholm) presented a project, CYCLE, she launched and the way she envisions realising it, where it to be funded. She explained the Swedish cyclical context about skills shortages, often presented in the media as a problem and more and more intensively with green transition. Using data registers (available in Sweden), mixing their analysis with three case studies in diffferent municipalities and the frameworks of On justification (Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot), she wishes to study how public programmes have been justified and why people do engage in them. Participants had questions on the skills targeted with these programmes she intends to look at, and on the availability of quantified data in Sweden, compared to other countries. This reminded everyone how EC/SC is linked, all at the same time theoretically, methodologically and in methods, to data and successive operations of quantification (Alain Desrosières).
Last to present her research for the day, Adèle Sébert (University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne) discussed an article to be published in a French journal and that she wanted to present the participants, as a first time to introduce herself in the EC/SC network. In this article about French households energy access difficulties, she posed that Michael Storper and Robert Salais’ framework, Worlds of production and the concept of conventions of the state, is adequate to analyse the role of the state and expectations towards it in a situation where the state involves a diversity of economic actors to take in charge a public problem. Less used by colleagues than On justifications, the choice of the Worlds of production framework brought questions on how it helped saying something that do not stop at being another typology to describe a variety of actions.

Julia Brandl and Laverne Iminza Chore

Rebecca Ye

Adèle Sébert

The first day of the workshop ended with a diner in the city center, a wonderful opportunity to catch up and to get to know with each other.

Friday 27th
Chaired by Christian Schneijderberg, the roundtable featured Sarah Lenz (University of Hamburg), Adèle Sébert (University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne) and Lisa Knoll (Paderborn University). Designed to go back and forth with the participants, the roundtable aimed at questioning the links between sustainability and conventions. Each featured participant began by choosing a starting point: sustainability as a new principle of justice (for future generations), the adequate framework for analysing a research subject that crosses social and ecological issues, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seen as compromise or a dynamic of unsolved conflicts. The discussion then opened to a shared reflection between featured participants and the moderator, tackling sustainability as a battlefield, and a built discussion between them and other workshop participants. This discussion can be summed up in three stages and a forward-looking statement. The first stage led to come back on how EC/SC is learned in Germany and France as well as on how a new generation of French convention theorists is trying to integrate EC/SC and environmental issues. The second stage spinned around convention theorist tools and concepts that were discussed during the workshop: the vision of temporality and the way EC/SC deals with it, the need to assess the plural nature of quantification and the diversity of wealth indicators, the dynamics that helps standards (private or public) to emerge and to diffuse. The third stage questioned the relationship between social and natural sciences and the degree of interdisciplinary that makes sense or, on the contrary, may put social sciences at risk. The final words of the roundtable were given by Rainer Diaz-Bone who pointed that the main question such crossing between sustainability and conventions raises is the one of identity: “why do we exist as convention theorists?” and how this identity enables us to consolidate an added-value to address environmental issues. To avoid falling into either a form of “service science”, which hyper-individualises things and paradoxically excludes plurality while promoting a systematic benchmarking and way of thinking, or a “media science”, which selects trendy subjects and cannot delve into issues, the convention theory researchers insight is that of a detection of non-intended perverted effects of addressing environmental issues and of a shedding light at compromises and their dynamics.

Christian Schneijderberg, Lisa Knoll, Sarah Lenz, Adèle Sébert

Last session of the workshop: “Education and work” second session. Three scholars presented in-progress researches while showing the participants that they took the previous day’s discussions into account while formulating their thought processes.

Sophie Gigl

Sophie Gigi (University of Bielefeld) begun by introducing the audience to her PhD project questionning the (de)stabilized goals of Germany’s upper secondary school level and which focuses on lesson preparation. She explained how she wishes to address the issues of the mode of preparing and adapting social sciences lessons (which is an uncertain situation of action) and of the social material environmental of social sciences lessons (the situation of planing and adapting being the unit of analysis), thus putting the light on horizontal and vertical pluralities. Methodologies and methods were discussed in order to reinforce the data collection and analysis process to come with such a research.

Laura Seifert-Uhl

Laura Seifert-Uhl (University of Tubingen) took over and described a project, StellaA, she coordinates as research assistant from 2022 to 2025. The research object being the occupational profiles of public adult education, the team wants to question both the development of public adult education centers in Germany and the occupational profiles themselves. The project articulates historical documents since the 1960s and job advertisements, thus creating a massive database to deal with. Laura pointed some of their interrogations when dealing with such an amount of data. Discussions ensued on analysis issues, on tips to avoid being too descriptive, on the way to find a convention using historical documents and databases (the answer being none because of the distance between data and conventions, relying on Alain Desrosières’s sociology of quantification).

Lena Nüchter

Lena Nüchter (University of Gießen) had the heavy task of closing the morning’s dynamic. She chose to discuss theoretical compatibilities of sociology of conventions and graduate capitals. Coming from a Bourdieusian perspective, she underlined the difficulties she has currently to characterise recruitment situation and the so-called employability. The main problem being that graduate capitals are not necessarily the driving force behind recruitment decisions. Rather she identified three examples of capital assessment (social, cultural, identity) that manifest what can be considered as domestic conventions. To what extent are capitals not only built within a situation? A lively exchange ensued, with colleagues wishing to contribute on the relevance of such a mixed framework with regard to the research object (discussing François Eymard-Duvernay and Emmanuelle Marchal research on recruitment, suggesting a comparison with financial capitals studied by André Orléan) but also from a disciplinary perspective (degree of compatibility of Bourdieu’s tools, capital theory).

After a quick lunch, closing words ended the workshop and gave perspectives for the next edition, in September 2025. Many thanks to the organising team: Lisa Knoll, Stephan Dahmen and Maurice Paaschen !

Stephan Dahmen and Lisa Knoll

Felix Rossmann, Maurice Paschen, Lisa Knoll

Questioning perception in (organized) valuation

Workshop report written by Nadine Arnold (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Christian Bessy (IDHES ENS Paris-Saclay)

At the end of October 2024, the working group on Organization and Valuation from the Sociology of Organizations section of the German Sociological Association convened to explore the role of perception in valuation at the Centre “Futures of Sustainability” of the Unviersität Hamburg. For this endeavor, the working group invited Christian Bessy from IDHES ENS Paris-Saclay, to discuss his conceptualization of “prise” referred to as the “sense of things,” as elaborated together with Francis Chateauraynaud in their well-received book ‘Experts et Faussaires’ (1995, 2nd ed. 2014)).

The group of sociologists who explored the role of perception in organized valuation processes in Hamburg on October 24th and 25th. Back row, left to right: Ronny Ehlen, Thorsten Peetz, Christian Bessy, Désirée Waibel, Sarah Lenz, Konstantin Hondros, Christopher Dorn. Front row, left to right: Marco Hohmann, Frank Meier, Nadine Arnold

Christian Bessy (ENS Paris-Saclay) kicked off the workshop by presenting how the sense of things unfolds when abstract evaluation templates that are socially accepted (referred to as landmarks) align with sensory apprehension, which is not pre-given and occurs situationally (referred to as folds). While, he explained how this conceptualization developed in relation to two widely recognized theoretical currents: Actor Network Theory (ANT) and Convention Theory, the most relevant claim for the workshop was that it is not only metrics, standards, and other formalized elements from the organizational domain (i.e., landmarks) that guide valuations; full engagement of the sensory faculties (perception) also plays a crucial role in valuation processes, particularly in identifying, maintaining and authenticating objects. During his introductory lecture, Bessy emphasized that the link between these two levels (perceptions and qualifications) is based on conventions of trans-identification of things in different contexts. These conventions presuppose a collective learning of description languages and collections. He also highlighted the fact that paying attention to things makes it possible to link aesthetic and environmental aspects.

Two contributions directly engaged with the differentiation between the formally organized aspects of valuation (i.e., landmarks) and the more perceptive aspects (i.e., folds, traces and signs), in which situated body-to-body interactions matter. In this regard, Désirée Waibel (Universität Luzern) raised the question of whether valuation can be distinguished into the abstract and the concrete, hypothesizing that amateurs, rather than experts, are ascribed to the realm of the concrete, where valuation relies heavily on perception and senses. Christopher Dorn (Universität Bielefeld) also addressed the contrast between organized and perceived valuation, elaborating on a causal chain that begins with the rationalized evaluations of hospitals through rankings. He noted that patients attending poorly ranked hospitals may face stigma, which can lead to shame and stress, presenting a case of abstract valuations that may have bodily consequences.

Building on compelling empirical cases, another group of workshop contributors highlighted the centrality of sensory perception in assessing value(s) and authenticity. Thorsten Peetz (Universität Bamberg) and Frank Meier (Universität Bremen) captivated the audience with their analysis of Therese Neumann, known as Resl von Konnersreuth (1898-1962), who was famous for her reported stigmata and extreme fasting. Therese Neumann sparked public fascination and pilgrimage due to her bleeding wounds resembling those of Christ. While the dominant discourse has focused on the controversial debate regarding the authenticity of Therese Neumanns’ stigmata, Peetz and Meier used her case to argue that bodily changes and perceptions serve as valid means for valuation, especially for laypeople, going beyond the conventional level.

Konstantin Hondros (HSU Hamburg) expanded the discussion on perception in valuation processes by illustrating how senses are utilized to evaluate art and student papers generated by AI. He argued that AI can evoke a range of emotions, from appreciation to rejection and fear, calling for a better understanding of the role of perception in the valuation and appreciation of AI and the authenticity of the things it generates. An empirical case where individual senses play a recognized role in valuation conventions was presented by Marco Hohmann (Universität Hamburg). Reporting from his multi-site ethnography of upcycling startups in the textile sector, he demonstrated how perception is pivotal in transforming wasted textiles into desirable products. These startups selectively choose materials for upcycling, consciously avoiding scaling, in contrast to conventional mainstream textile businesses that prioritize large volumes and low prices.

Two further contributions focused on food valuation, where sensory experience might intuitively seem paramount. While this is particularly true for individual food consumption, Nadine Arnold (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Allison Loconto (Université Gustave Eiffel) illuminated that the international trade of food produced in the Global South is structured in a highly standardized way that enables cheap food and sidelines perception. Interestingly, this logic also applies to newer standards that invoke social and ecological values. Ronny Ehlen (Universität Hohenheim) echoed this observation by emphasizing the omnipresence of quality standards in food commerce, making the relevant argument that in everyday supermarket contexts, abstract standards are subject to interpretation. In these spaces of interpretation, one can expect that shopfloor workers’ individual sensory experiences will matter, even though the quality standards are intended to mask or suppress them.

Overall, the workshop provided a rich exploration of the intricate ways perception conditions and shapes valuation across various domains, encouraging participants of this workshop to consider and rethink the theoretical and empirical implications of the body and sensory experiences in valuation processes that appear stable and rationalized. Particularly, when valuation comes to unique items such as works of art, local produce, discarded and composite objects (upcycling) or the evocation of sanctity.

Relevant literature and links:

  • The workshop was mainly building on this book: Bessy, Christian, & Chateauraynaud, Francis (2014). Experts et faussaires : pour une sociologie de la perception (2e éd. Augmented by a postscript translated in English, Being attentive to things: Pragmatic approaches to authenticity). Paris: Pétra. The English postscript can be downloaded here.
  • The workshop program can be found here and more information about the working group on Organization and Valuation from the Sociology of Organizations section of the German Sociological Association here.

Presentation of the Handbook of economics and sociology of conventions at AFEP Congress

At the 13th congress of the Association française d’économie politique (AFEP) [French Political Economy Association], held in Montpellier from July 3 to 5, 2024, a plenary session organized by Nicolas Postel (University of Lille) and Thomas Lamarche (University of Paris City) focused on collective publications in the field of institutionalist economics. The session was entitled “Institutionalist syntheses, what synthesis exercises teach us about institutionalism”.

Four collective publications were presented by a member of each editorial team: (1) Le Grand manuel d’économie politique presented by Anaïs Henneguelle (University of Paris City); (2) Théorie de la régulation, un nouvel état des savoirs presented by Thomas Lamarche (University of Paris City); (3) L’économie post-keynésienne, Histoires théories et politiques presented by Jean-François Ponsot (University Grenoble Alpes); and (4) the Handbook of economics and sociology of conventions presented by Guillemette de Larquier (University of Lille).

Jean-François Ponsot, Guillemette de Larquier, Thomas Lamarche, Anaïs Henneguelle and Nicolas Postel

Nicolas Postel asked each speaker to explain the origin of his or her project and its position in the field of institutionalism in economics (in particular, its contribution). This provided an opportunity to promote the Handbook, co-edited by Rainer Diaz-Bone (University of Lucerne) and Guillemette de Larquier, and to recall what convention theory can contribute to other institutionalist approaches (and vice-versa).

Guillemette de Larquier introduces the Handbook as a response to the lack of introductory works on the economics and sociology of conventions (EC/SC) in French, and a fortiori in English for an international audience. When Master or PhD students want to familiarize themselves with EC/SC, there is no single text to recommend. Within EC/SC there are a number of authors who can be described as founders. EC/SC is not a school, but a research program in which researchers, mainly economists and sociologists, develop their own analyses. This plurality makes it difficult for a novice student, or even a researcher from outside the program, to identify what the core of EC/SC is.

Rainer Diaz-Bone and Guillemette de Larquier’s aim was to publish the first handbook introducing EC/SC to an international and interdisciplinary scholarship. It systematizes and presents the results of four decades of EC/SC’s research and it includes foundations, applications, comparisons, and methods. The handbook comprises more than a hundred chapters, divided into conceptual, disciplinary and applied sections. A student or researcher interested, for example, in the concept of investments in form, or in human resource management approaches or in the ecological crisis, will thus have at his or her disposal one or more chapters providing an overview of the state of knowledge on the issue as addressed by EC/SC. The handbook’s international and multi-disciplinary character can be illustrated by a few figures: 50% of contributors are French, 24% are German-speaking and the others are mainly European, but also (South)American or Japanese; 36% are economists, almost 50% are sociologists and the others are management researchers, political scientists, historians or geographers.

Guillemette de Larquier

As for EC/SC’s contribution to the field of institutionalism in economics, paradoxally its early work says little about institutions. This is not the object EC/SC seeks to explain, nor the concept by which it explains economic coordination. In fact, EC/SC’s approach to institutions as instituted rules, accepted or imposed, as resources or constraints, is quite common in the social sciences. The contribution of EC/SC to institutionalist economics is to explain how institutions are applied in practice, how they are interpreted, readjusted to the context, reinforced or distorted, on the basis of conventions, i.e. representations of what is appropriate to do in a given context. Conventions enable actors to give institutions a meaning appropriate to the situation. If we take the example of the institutions that regulate wage-earning (in other words, the “rapport salarial”, one of the fundamental institutional forms of French regulation theory), EC/SC are interested in the conventions underlying their implementation, justification, criticism and evolution.

Guillemette de Larquier concludes by stressing that it would be a mistake to limit EC/SC to a microeconomic approach. It’s true that many analyses focus on the practices of actors in well-defined, small-scale situations. However, the conventions highlighted by EC/SC can be operational at several scales: local, national or international. They can, for example, explain how employability is interpreted in recruitment, in the implementation of a public training program for the unemployed, or in the construction of job quality indicators in the European Union. Let’s not forget that John M. Keynes, to whom macroeconomists (and post-Keynesians) largelly refer, introduced the concept of convention to explain the functioning of financial markets. Also, the work of Alain Desrosières on statistical conventions has an immediate macroeconomic application: the numerical analysis of GDP, inflation or unemployment is based on conventions that need to be studied to understand economic policies. This is exactly the work produced by Florence Jany-Catrice in her chapter published in the book on the state of knowledge in French regulation theory (TR) presented in the same session: “Articuler analyses conventionnaliste et régulationniste : le cas de la mesure de l’inflation”: she shows how statistical measurement conventions (concept of EC/SC) act on capital accumulation regimes (concept of TR) and also evolve with the transformations of these regimes. On the contrary, to confine EC/SC to a micro-economic approach, even a non-standard and heterodox one, would lead to the failure of any attempt to mutually enrich the different institutionalist approaches.

Text: Guillemette de Larquier
Photos: Martine Pernod-Lemattre

Regula Julia Leemann’s farewell lecture at Basel

On 21 June 2024, Prof. Dr. Regula Julia Leemann, Professor & Chair of Educational Sociology, gave her farewell lecture at the University of Teacher Education at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) in Basel. With Regula Julia Leemann, one of the key German-speaking representatives of the Economics and Sociology of Conventions (EC/SC) in the field of education is retiring.

Lecture hall at Basel/Muttenz

Over the past 15 years, Regula has been intensively pursuing the reception and empirical application of EC/SC to questions of Swiss educational institutions, partly in collaboration with Christian Imdorf, another scholar in the field of EC/SC. A core result of these endeavors was the edited volume “Bildung und Konventionen” (Education and Conventions) with Christian Imdorf and Philipp Gonon (published in 2019; see https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-23301-3).

In Regula’s last three research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (“Training networks in practice” with Christian Imdorf, “Specialized middle school as an independent educational pathway alongside vocational training and baccalaureate schools” with Christian Imdorf, and the current project “Governance of transitions in the Swiss education system“, whose proposal was awarded an excellence grant by the SNSF), she also productively applied and further advanced EC/SC in the field of education, generating important insights for educational sociology, teacher training as well as evidence-based education policy.
In 2014 Regula has – together with Julia Brandl (University of Innsbruck) – invented the workshop series “Sociology of conventions” (first time held in Basel). This series has been institutionalized since then and become very important for the establishment of EC/SC outside of France. In sum, Regula’s Team has organized three of these biennial workshops, which bring together researchers from different disciplines to discuss theoretical, methodological and methodological issues relating to the EC/SC.

Leanna

On 21 June 2024, after a long career, Regula Julia Leemann was given a well-deserved farewell. The lecture theatre was filled with many important representatives of German-speaking educational sociology, as well as family and friends of Regula. LEANNA provided the live music for the event. After a welcome address by the head of the Institute, Prof. Dr. Claudia Schmellentin Britz, Prof. Dr. Christian Imdorf gave a speech on the importance of universities of teacher education for the establishment of educational sociology as a reference discipline for teacher training, thereby emphasizing the role of EC/SC in contemporary sociology of education. He paid tribute to Regula’s work and her great commitment, not only to the EC/SC in particular, but also to educational sociology in general. Regula was a persistent advocate of the institutionalization of a sociological perspective in teacher education.

Christian Imdorf

 One expression of these efforts was a handbook on sociology of education for prospective and practicing teachers, which Regula published with colleagues from the Universities of teacher education in Zurich and Bern. The teacher training that Regula and her team initially conducted in seven degree programs in four cantons at seven locations also benefited greatly from the high-quality research projects, Regula has trained and supported “a second Swiss” generation of EC/SC researchers in the field of sociology of education. This way, EC/SC was also productively used and further developed in their dissertations.
In addition to her commitment to teaching, research and the EC/SC, Christian Imdorf also recognized Regula’s dedicated work for the scientific community.
Christian also paid tribute to Regula’s long-standing commitment (2008-2020) to the board of the Education Section of the German Sociological Association. For many years, Regulas chair of sociology of education has been responsible for the monthly newsletter for this section and for the section of educational sociology of the Swiss Society for Sociology. Since 2020, Regula has been a member of the board and treasurer of the latter.
Regulas team then took the opportunity to say goodbye with some personal tributes to the many years of close collaboration and thanked Regula for her tremendous support, encouragement and excellent leadership in both research and teaching over the past 15 years.

Regula’s Team (from the left to the right): Damaris Wittwer, Rebekka Sagelsdorff, Andrea Fischer, Luca Preite, Raffaella Esposito, Sybille Bayard, Sandra Hafner, Fanny Klaffke, Bettina Weller, Jasmin Näpfli, Kim Stäheli.

To conclude, Regula herself gave a speech on the importance of sociology of education for the teacher education. She provided an overview of the most important research findings that have been produced by the staff of the Chair of Sociology of Education in the last years, and showed how these findings can be put to practical and fruitful use in teacher education.
The event closed with a heartfelt and moving thank-you speech from Regula, in which she expressed her gratitude to her relatives and friends, current and former colleagues, professional and personal companions, acquaintances and, in particular, her long-standing team.

Regula Julia Leemann

Sandra Hafner, Raffaella Esposito, Rainer Diaz-Bone

Comment s’invente la sociologie

How sociology is invented

Luc Boltanski, Arnaud Esquerre & Jeanne Lazarus (2024)

Paris: Flammarion

A propos du livre. La sociologie, mode d’emploi. Aimée par des écrivains et des artistes, sollicitée par des journalistes, des militants, des responsables politiques pour comprendre l’actualité, qu’on s’en réclame ou qu’on la critique, comment se pratique cette science sociale qui attire tant l’attention? Trois sociologues de générations différentes nous ouvrent les portes de leurs laboratoires et nous introduisent à leurs œuvres. Ils expliquent, en dialoguant entre eux, comment on enquête, comment on écrit, comment on forge des concepts, comment on procède à des comparaisons, quels rapports entretenir avec d’autres disciplines. Ils partagent ainsi leurs méthodes pour analyser des problèmes sociaux à partir de questions sociologiques. Ce livre s’adresse à toutes celles et tous ceux qui s’intéressent à la sociologie et souhaitent savoir comment elle s’élabore”

About the book. Sociology, instructions for use. Loved by writers and artists, sought after by journalists, activists and politicians to understand current affairs, whether we claim it as our own or criticize it, how is this social science that attracts so much attention practiced? Three sociologists from different generations open the doors of their laboratories and introduce us to their work. They explain, in dialogue with each other, how to investigate, how to write, how to forge concepts, how to make comparisons, and how to relate to other disciplines. They share their methods for analyzing social problems based on sociological questions. This book is for all those interested in sociology and how it is developed.

Lien / Link

L’ouvrage a donné lieu à un entretien dans l’émission “Les Midis de Culture” de France Culture.
The book was the subject of an interview on France Culture’s “Les Midis de Culture” program.
(04/03/2024; 00:38:06)

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-midis-de-culture/luc-boltanski-et-jeanne-lazarus-comment-s-invente-la-sociologie-8458039

Les sociologues Luc Boltanski et Jeanne Lazarus nous ouvrent les portes de la sociologie: le livre “Comment s’invente la sociologie”, qu’ils signent avec Arnaud Esquerre, est un dialogue à trois retraçant leurs parcours et les fonctionnements de cette discipline, de ses débuts à notre époque. Ils sont les invités de Géraldine Mosna-Savoye et de Nicolas Herbeaux.

Sociologists Luc Boltanski and Jeanne Lazarus open the doors of sociology to us: the book “Comment s’invente la sociologie”, which they have written with Arnaud Esquerre, is a three-way dialogue tracing their careers and the workings of this discipline, from its beginnings to the present day. They are guests of Géraldine Mosna-Savoye and Nicolas Herbeaux.

Conference report: Calculation – Design – Cultivation. Ways of Designing Fair Business Models in the Data Economy

Conference report

Philipp Dieterich (University of Kassel)

The conference (titled “Calculation – Design – Cultivation. Ways of Designing Fair Business Models in the Data Economy”), which took place at the University of Kassel (Germany) from February 21st to 22nd 2024, addressed various approaches of fair value mediation in data economic business models, through sociological and (business) informatics lenses, considering the Sociology and Economics of Conventions (EC/SC). It served as the concluding conference of the project ‘Fair Digital Services: Co-Valuation in the Design of Data-Economic Business Models (FAIRDIENSTE)’, conducted by the Departments of Sociological Theory (University of Kassel, Prof. Dr. Jörn Lamla, project coordination), Participatory IT-Design (University of Kassel, Prof. Dr. Claude Draude), Knowledge and Data Engineering (University of Kassel, Prof. Dr. Gerd Stumme), as well as the Institute for Digital Management and New Media (LMU Munich, Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess). Also involved in the project were the two practice partners BurdaForward and the registered association ‘Institut für Technik und Journalismus e.V.’ (ITUJ, Institute for Technology and Journalism). The conference took place at the Research Center for Information System Design (ITeG), which promotes development towards a socially desirable IT design. Approximately 40 participants, including 20 speakers, attended the conference over the two days. It included introductory presentations on the FAIRDIENSTE project, two keynote speeches, and three panel discussions. In each case, the FAIRDIENSTE consortium gave a presentation on a co-evaluation approach, followed by a panel discussion with external guests from academia and practice. The following conference report will provide a chronological summary of each of these contributions and subsequent discussions.

Introduction to the FAIRDIENSTE Project
J. Lamla and Jonathan Kropf (Department of Sociological Theory, University of Kassel) provided an introduction to the FAIRDIENSTE project, which was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research from February 2021 to April 2024. The project aimed to develop a scientific concept of fairness for the data economy and to produce well-founded results for the design of digital services. The Economics and Sociology of Conventions (EC/SC) was used as its theoretical foundation. A fundamental concept in the FAIRDIENSTE project is the idea of Co-Valuation, which involves considering fairness through the mediation of different values. Approaches chosen included Design (channeling value conflicts through design), Calculation (translating different values into the language of prices), and Cultivation (promoting a culture of fairness for negotiating value conflicts through the cultivation of critical competencies). The field of analysis was digital journalism, due to the numerous value conflicts observed there (e.g., distribution of data-economic revenues, blurred boundaries between journalism and advertising, crises in public debate culture, professional standards of journalistic work, discrimination or manipulation by algorithms). However, insights were intended to be beneficial for fairness in data economy as a whole.

The contents of the conference built upon the “White Paper” (https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/index.php?eID=dumpFile&t=f&f=9915&token=f0ee2575f3c555cfcbc35c4bb68a7a36d16c1a50), previously developed by the consortium. This serves as an analytical and practical resource for the implementation and design of fair business models in the data economy, akin to a toolbox. The aim was to make this toolbox as practical as possible in order to reach not only scientists but also practitioners from politics, business, and civil society.

Keynote I: ‘Data Worlds and Fairness – Perspectives from the Economics and Sociology of Conventions’ by Rainer Diaz-Bone (University of Lucerne)
In his keynote speech, Rainer Diaz-Bone provided insights into EC/SC (https://uni-kassel.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=f6bbcb35-9bf6-4883-a1f5-b12500e9ea6b). He then outlined potential points of connection between EC/SC and the project at hand, along with the associated data-economic issues of fairness. R. Diaz-Bone explained that conventions serve as a justification for cognitive, organizational, and technical data infrastructures. He identified five different data worlds (academic, official statistics, market research, big data, civic data), each following conventions, and emphasized the importance of analyzing the circulation of data production, usage, revaluation, and reciprocal observations across these worlds. From the plurality of data worlds, he inferred that there can be no universal definition of fairness. He also noted that definitions of fairness must be developed empirically. In doing so, attention should be paid to how these definitions conflict with each other, in which constellations they are found, and where compromises can be identified. Fairness, he suggested, is often empirically linked to multiple logics. He concluded by stressing that analyses of fairness must begin with the production of data, as data does not consist of given facts but results instead from statistical chains.
In the subsequent discussion, J. Lamla described various ideas on how fairness could be conceptualized within EC/SC: firstly, fairness could be its own convention; secondly, each convention could have its own concept of fairness; thirdly, the concept of fairness could be approached at a meta-level to empirically trace how challenges of fairness relate to issues of value mediation. J. Lamla noted that the project had opted for the third perspective, which focuses on a procedural understanding of fairness. Consequently, R. Diaz-Bone highlighted the interesting approach of the FAIRDIENSTE project. He pointed out that the meta-analyses and questions that were raised regarding fairness oriented towards EC/SC can be helpful for developing guidance ideas for politics and governance without specific criteria catalogs.

Calculation
Regarding the calculation approach, Simon Engert (Institute for Digital Management and New Media, LMU Munich) elucidated that perspectives were developed on how fairness can be examined and achieved using economic mechanisms. The central aim was to translate different values into the language of prices, addressing questions such as the fair distribution of data-economic revenues. He summarized that fairness is both normatively desirable and economically relevant.

Christopher Buschow, Mena Teebken, Richard Weber and Thomas Hess

The panel featuring Christopher Buschow (TU Hamburg), Mena Teebken (Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation), Richard Weber (BurdaForward), moderated by T. Hess, delved into the transformation of the media landscape and the challenges of fairness in digital journalism. The discussion focused on proposals for creating a fair business model. C. Buschow opened the panel by referring to various understandings of fairness, depending on historical experiences and linked to the fundamental transformation of the media world over the past 30 years. He emphasized that (lack of) fairness is relevant, both in the remuneration of journalists, and in ensuring non-discriminatory access to platforms. Following this direction, M. Teebken noted that a fair business model crucially depends on how fairly it treats users’ data, highlighting the importance of data. At the same time, she pointed out the necessary pragmatic balance between overly lenient and overly restrictive handling of data privacy. R. Weber emphasized the societal mission of a publisher to provide journalistic content, which necessitates direct and indirect payment methods. He stressed that implementing fairness does not solely lie with publishers, due to the multitude of stakeholders, thus requiring a consideration of the entire value chain.
The panel discussed possible processes for developing acceptable solutions for all stakeholders in journalism. Suggestions included negotiations through unions, the relevance of user interests, and creating a counterbalance to large platforms. The importance of negotiating fairness collectively among all stakeholders was repeatedly emphasized. Subsequently, the possibilities and limitations of tools to support journalism were discussed, highlighting the importance of user engagement and a transformative understanding of science. R. Diaz-Bone argued, based on the EC/SC, that an understanding of privacy that is related to information control and individual autonomy, that often guides many discussions, is actually an outdated bourgeois model from the 19th century and no longer relevant to current ways of thinking. However, the empirical relevance of privacy in the data economy presents an interesting case.

Design
Viktoria Horn (Participatory IT-Design, University of Kassel) referred to a comprehensive concept of design as the basis of the approach, encompassing technical, regulatory, and infrastructural aspects. The focus was on questions of democratizing design processes and reflecting values in artifacts. Therefore, much work was done with ‘participatory design’, where participation entails the early and continuous involvement of stakeholders in design processes, incorporating both technical and non-technical solutions. Fostering fair value mediation requires a multi-perspective process considering power asymmetries, which can be achieved, for example, through a participatory workshop with various stakeholders. Such a workshop was developed in collaboration with BurdaForward as part of the FAIRDIENSTE project and was conducted with different stakeholders.
The subsequent panel discussion with Alina Hang (BurdaForward), Tahireh Panahi (Public Law, IT Law and Environmental Law, University of Kassel), Peter Sörries (Institute of Computer Science, FU Berlin), moderated by C. Draude, began with considering the positive experiences of previous participatory workshops, which had lead to increased empathy among stakeholders. The feasibility of such concepts in reality was questioned, for instance by A. Hang, due to the diversity of actors and existing competitive situations. Challenges were also discussed regarding the implementation of values into technical artifacts and the implementation of fairness business models, particularly regarding financial and time resources. P. Sörries emphasized, based on his own experiences in conducting participatory workshops, the difficulty of deriving and maintaining design requirements, especially considering possible updates or changed data protection concepts. T. Panahi pointed out attempts to introduce more regulations at an EU level, which often allow companies a certain degree of leeway. She concluded that cultivation should be the prerequisite for legal regulations and laws. The panel participants agreed that users’ participation and co-creation is central to a fair data economy. R. Diaz-Bone emphasized the importance of testing and verification in the EC/SC, meaning that it must be tested and must work in reality to endure. This implies that a solely pluralistic perspective is not sufficient, but must always be tested and verified under the given conditions.

Alina Hang, Tahireh Panahi, Peter Sörries and Claude Draude

Cultivation
Markus Uhlmann (Department of Sociological Theory, University of Kassel) introduced the cultivation approach, which aims to explore possibilities for public negotiations of value conflicts and to promote critical valuation competencies. Starting from a problem-oriented presentation of recommendation systems’ popularity metric and personalization, Uhlmann proposed an alternative navigation paradigm. This is based on a cartographic approach, and structures a variety of content through conventions that users can explore independently. This cartography utilizes formal concept analysis linked to the EC/SC, as explained by Johannes Hirth (Knowledge & Data Engineering, University of Kassel).
In the subsequent discussion with Renate Fischer (University of Zurich), Karolin Kappler (Catholic University of Applied Sciences of North Rhine-Westphalia), and Miriam Ruhenstroth (ITuJ e.V.), moderated by J. Lamla, questions regarding the development of critical valuation competencies played a distinct role. In this regard, J. Lamla introduced the concept of ‘critical space’, which must necessarily be created, and asked how such a critical space could emerge. K. Kappler pointed out that its creation, especially in the field of digitization, is not sufficient. As long as exploitative relations of work, environment, and human in relation to data are not considered, a critical space is merely a sham. Instead, she suggested bringing attention to the plurality in a power-sensitive manner. R. Fischer, on the other hand, argued that while plurality exists, there are no skills to recognize it. She concluded that users lack critical evaluation skills and a navigation paradigm could be helpful. M. Ruhenstroth emphasized that ‘critical spaces’ such as the association ITuJ exist, and that cultivation often already takes place among users. She described the desire of users for simplification, such as using grades. However, this logic corresponds to a different logic than the EC/SC uses, as the EC/SC does not solely engage in accounting and tends to authoritatively determine what is good or bad, as J. Lamla explained. This led to a debate about the compatibility of the EC/SC logic with practicality in digital journalism. M. Ruhenstroth noted that people are capable of learning and interested in the topic. There is more demand than the association ITuJ can meet. K. Kappler identified the problem that children and young people are not taught how to act in a self-determined manner in the digital space, but rather they get mainly focused on predetermination and control. M. Ruhenstroth added that digitization in schools currently does not aim to teach the handling of digitization. Conventions could help address ownership and power relations. R. Fischer suggested focusing on imparting skills rather than mere knowledge. K. Kappler emphasized that media literacy means using media sensibly, the EC/SC being helpful in that regard. She further pointed out that competence also means using digital artifacts creatively and subversively against the algorithm.

Miriam Ruhenstroth, Renate Fischer, Karolin Kappler and Jörn Lamla

Keynote II: ‘On the Designability of Power Dynamics in the Platform Society: Insights from Digital Journalism’ by Sarah Ganter (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
Sarah Ganter’s presentation focused on the challenges and opportunities of digital journalism in the context of the platform society (https://uni-kassel.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=1ab14570-457b-4bfa-b808-b12500e9f632). The aim of the presentation was to illuminate the specific problems of digital journalism within this framework and to highlight the design spaces of news organizations. S. Ganter described the asymmetric distribution of power between platforms and news organizations. On digital platforms, fairness had no value as it did not represent a profitable business model. Earlier attempts, between 2005 and 2015, to shape the power dynamics of platforms, had shown that this asymmetric distribution of power could not be overcome despite various strategies. Aspects that manifested the power of digital platforms, as mentioned by S. Ganter, included the ability to set and break standards, comprehensive expertise and reach, cross-domain actions, and the secrecy of strategies. Platforms could empower digital journalism to be quickly actionable without making high short-term financial investments. Building on this, S. Ganter described possible design spaces for news organizations that exist despite asymmetrical power relations. News organizations were actively involved in the process of platformization and saw it as an opportunity to increase their reach and consolidate or expand their power positions. S. Ganter worked out how news organizations pursued different strategic approaches in dealing with platforms, ranging from confrontation, to coexistence, to collaboration, depending on various endogenous and exogenous factors.

Sarah Ganter

Outlook
J. Lamla concluded with a positive assessment of the conference in the light of the numerous new insights. For him, it became clear once again that there is an empirical and practical relevance of the concept of fairness, especially in journalism. He observed that, taking the EC/SC into account, there are some theoretical challenges regarding the significance of conventions and norms in the data economy, such as the question of why the justification of central concepts such as privacy is not keeping pace with developments. T. Hess praised the productive work of the interdisciplinary team, which contributed to the project’s great success. He advocated for utilizing the existing design space. As a summary, he added that the interdisciplinary team with different perspectives was a great success of the project, and emphasized that there are design opportunities that must be seized. He hopes to be able to address this, together with others, in another research project in the future.

“Expropriation by Law”: On the Financialization of Intellectual Property Rights and the Effects on Labor, Creativity and Value

Interview with Christian Bessy

By Simon Schrör (Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin)

Christian Bessy is CNRS-researcher at the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) at Paris-Saclay and works at the laboratory “Institutions and historical dynamics of economy and Society” (Institutions et dynamiques historiques de l’économie et de la société, IDHE.S), of which he is assistant director.

Christian Bessy

He belongs to the French approach of the economics of conventions (in short EC) and has written many articles and five books: “Les licenciements économiques. Entre la loi et le marché” (1993), “Experts et faussaires. Pour une sociologie de la perception” (together with Francis Chateauraynaud, 1995), “La contractualisation de la relation de travail” (2007), “L’organisation des activités des avocats” (2015), and “L’expropriation par le droit. Propriété intellectuelle, valeur, travail“ (2022).

Bessy also has co-edited five books : “Les intermédiaires du marché du travail” (together with François Eymard-Duvernay 1997), “Des marchés du travail équitables? Approche comparative France/Royaume-Uni” (together with François Eymard-Duvernay, Guillemette de Larquier and Emmanuelle Marchal, 2001) and “Droit et régulations des activités économiques et institutionalistes” (together with Thierry Delpeuch and Jérôme Pelisse, 2011), “Les biens communs en perspectives” (together with Michel Margairaz, 2021), “L’économie est une science réflexive (in tribute to Robert Salais)” (together with Claude Didry, 2023).

The recent publication of his latest book, “Expropriation by Law. Intellectual Property, Value and Labor” is the occasion for this interview about his work and the long-term developments in his field of research. The interview was conducted via email exchange between January and February 2024.

SSc:  Your new book is entitled “Expropriation by Law”. How did you get the idea to write this book?

CB:   This book is the translation of my French 2022 book “L’expropriation par le droit” with a few additions to make it readable for an international audience. It represents over 30 years of research, which began with the study of counterfeiting cases with my sociologist colleague Francis Chateauraynaud (EHESS) from the point of view of expertise capacities that these affairs presuppose (Bessy and Chateauraynaud, 1995). Afterward, I delved deeper by studying the collective management of intellectual property rights, in short IPRs (Brousseau and Bessy, 2006), particularly through the practices of licensing technology agreements (Bessy and Brousseau, 1998). My work in the early 2010s on the role of lawyers in the definition of law and the emergence of highly profitable law firms specializing in IPRs led me to question the way in which they participated in their financial valorization, constructing them as a new asset class that could be traded on a market. The rampant financialization of IPR in the contemporary era will have consequences for the allocation of these rights, generating increasing litigation, particularly within companies. It is this chain of events that my book seeks to analyze, using a database of court cases and interviews with legal professionals in the field. It’s a project that I had put off for a while, and it was the period of confinement that gave me the availability I needed to find this thread of “expropriation by law”, by cross-referencing virtually all my previous research.

SSc: You mentioned the rampant financialization IPR and brought up the role of actors like lawyers. Looking back on the developments in the IP-driven sector over the last 30 years. How was it possible to implement and stabilize such changes?

CB:   Our analytical framework shows different conventions for valorization IPRs and their synergy over time, making patents into negotiable assets. The market for patents nonetheless is not developing on a large scale and testifies to the failure of modern finance, as we have shown using the example of Silicon Valley and the key role of new patent intermediaries who have allied themselves with financiers. Nonetheless, it’s a market that’s developing with the strengthening and development of IPR on other objects, as well as companies’ open innovation strategies. This financialization of IPR can be explained by institutional factors and corporate strategies, particularly in the new information and communication technologies.
But the whole thesis of this book is that, far from playing a passive role, IP attorneys play a decisive role in shaping policy and its globalization by contributing to strong inequalities between firms, between countries and between workers. Katherina Pistor (2019) has clearly highlighted how global lawyers, with their codifying engineering of know-how, create exclusive, sustainable, universal, and convertible capital, to the benefit of companies and often against nation states. In this way, they participate in a veritable global legal industry, which is highly prized by investment funds. The success of this IP market is based more on the collective belief in the value of IPRs than on their intrinsic qualities.

SSc: Before talking more about the role of these intermediaries, can you describe the sectors and the kinds of IPs, that are particularly relevant nowadays?

CB:   In the book, we use patent law as a starting point, since this is the field we began to investigate and in which financialization began very early on, calling into question the way patent offices operate. Although the focus is on patent rights, our analysis applies to all IPRs, in particular to copyright, the economic stakes of which have become increasingly important with the development of cultural industries following an entrepreneurial logic and predatory behavior. Moreover, many objects that were protected by other IPRs, such as software, perfumes, or recipes, are now protected, under certain conditions, by the patent. In addition, the criteria of patentability, such as novelty and inventiveness, are penetrating the jurisprudence concerning copyright, leading to the introduction of an economic logic that is more and more prevalent in IPRs. Finally, lawyers and counsels in different areas of IP law are grouping together in the same firms, with the added bonus of their concentration within the same geographical jurisdiction that deals with litigation in this area. Finally, European law is evolving in an identical way on all IPRs, with the emergence of an intellectual property market that is more and more attractive to investors that finance law firms and IP brokers.

SSc: In “Expropriation by Law”, so-called legal intermediaries play a central role – you already mentioned IP lawyers. Can you give a brief overview of these intermediaries and describe why they are so important?

CB: We distinguish between different legal intermediaries and analyze their transformation, in particular through the evolution of IPR valuation and attribution conventions that they help to define and disseminate. We mention the decisive role played by patent office examiners and judges in defining patentability criteria in each technological field.
But our focus is on patent attorneys, who play an important mediation role in the institutionalization of rights. They connect different levels and tailor legal statements to the specific needs of industries, particularly in terms of patentability and the appropriation of knowledge. Mobilizing both their legal skills and their knowledge of markets, these legal intermediaries develop models of compliance with the law that minimize companies’ risk of litigation. Like any legal intermediary (Bessy et al., 2011), they can also fulfill a purely strategic role by taking advantage of a system flaw, which subsequently raises the question of their regulation. Nevertheless, they are able to capture this regulation by lobbying, particularly the global lawyers at European level. The power of legal intermediaries contributes to renewing the vision of capitalist development by raising this group of actors to the level of financiers, with whom they maintain privileged relations, and of innovative entrepreneurs, whom they confirm in their superior status.

SSc: This sounds like lawyers – with their structural connection to financiers – utilize their legal strategies to also impact the value of assets. How are the construction of the value of things and their legal assessment entangled?

CB:  I think we need to distinguish between two levels. At the global level, how IP lawyers have contributed to making IPRs tradable assets on a market through a series of “investments in forms” (Thévenot, 2024), and how in a particular case they will fight to defend the value of a title or the recognition of a particular right, such as the fact that know-how will be protected with reference to a patent or copyright, thus aiming to increase its economic value.
The emphasis in this book is first on their contribution to the social construction of the value of IPRs, even if an individual intellectual property title may have no value at all. The central idea we combat is that this economic value, the price, would be determined on a market with reference to “fundamentals”. Yet despite the normative proposals of certain economists to create a market for patents, attempts to organize auctions, for example, have ended in failure. The market for patents only operates on a small scale, and essentially by mutual agreement. Yet IP lawyers, as a professional group, have done everything upstream to reduce uncertainty about the legal value of titles, as illustrated in recent years by the construction of a European patent law by these lawyers and patent office judges. In particular, the creation of a specialized patent court (European unified jurisdiction) similar to the one in the United States (Chapter 5 of the book).

SSc: Even if, or maybe because, the market for patents is not functional, it has created a number of new intermediaries that exploit the system. Especially when it comes to holders of IP-Portfolios, where you distinguish between defensive and offensive patent aggregators. What makes the latter offensive, or even aggressive?

CB:   These new intermediaries acquire patent portfolios either to secure them or, on the contrary, to search for infringements. Based on the American case, an author such as Allen Wang (2010) distinguishes between “defensive patent aggregators,” who license their patent portfolios in complete security to subscribers, and “offensive patent aggregators,” who also seek to provoke infringement situations in order to make money, like the famous patent trolls. It is, in fact, to counteract this strategic use of the patent system that the first ones appeared, thus increasing the potential of the IP market. These defensive patent aggregators are similar to the intermediary organizations that collectively manage patent licenses, since they deal with the use authorization, control use of the license, the collection of royalties, and the settlement of disputes. The difference lies in the fact that they are real companies driven by a profit logic and not professional associations based on the pooling of resources, as are societies of authors (Brousseau and Bessy, 2006).
So, these new “players” pose a problem of competition with traditional IP intermediaries. They pursue private goals that do not contribute to the advancement of public knowledge. If some of them contribute to the fluidity of the market for patented technologies, the offensive aggregators are more at odds with the objective of the patent system, which is to encourage innovation.

SSc: You address the tension between different justifications of intellectual property. Private pursuit of profit versus public knowledge and resources. Are there actors or intermediaries in this system who defend and uphold the latter, civic idea of IP?

CB:   All the legal intermediaries we have analyzed (patent attorneys, examiners, and office judges) do not always make strategic use of the law, and therefore converge on what makes a “good patent” and promote the construction of a public domain. Schematically, they seek to ensure that the allocation of IPRs is proportional to investment in creative activities. Or they promote the creation of knowledge commons, or combat inequalities in the attribution of IPRs, particularly within companies or in asymmetrical subcontracting relationships.

SSc: To conclude the area of financialization and legal intermediaries: What role has the rise of tech companies like Google, Apple, or Meta played in the global IP system? These companies have enormous financial resources and concentrate a large potential for innovation.

CB:   The economists Cecilia Rikap and Bengt-Åke Lundvall (2020) have developed the notion of a “Corporate Innovative System” to account for the predation of knowledge by multinational companies, such as the GAFAs, on the ecosystem of SMEs that they dominate and that has gradually aggregated to initially form a global knowledge common. The success of these “big tech” companies is based on IPR and strategic acquisitions, as Neil Fligstein (2001) has also highlighted. These big tech companies share some projects with the open-source community by placing them on their development platform and taking ownership of some of the developments that are integrated into complex systems. Such an asymmetry of power exists not only in the pharmaceutical sector, but also, more generally, within each country, between large companies and SMEs rooted in territories and lacking the legal resources to protect their expertise.

SSc: Now the financialization is by far not the only area, where IPRs have an impact. What about the people who create the basis for what is protected in the end? E.g. the creatives, designers or developers. How is their situation affected?

CB:   The financialization of IPRs and their exchange on a market presupposes that their holders are not constrained by forms of co-ownership with those who are at the basis of the creation of these intangible assets, which presupposes that innovators or creators cede their rights, sometimes with monetary compensation, which they sometimes consider insufficient. This form of expropriation by law is then a source of disputes. It is the emergence and resolution of these disputes that we analyzed in the last two chapters 6 and 7 of the book.

SSc:  Chapter 6 is primarily concerned with court disputes over these issues of financial participation and expropriation. What did you find out about the system of court disputes on remuneration issues?

CB:   I long wanted to work on disputes over employee inventions, because I had learned that there was a National Conciliation Commission (Commission Nationale des Inventeurs Salariés in French, CNIS) that could help employees avoid going to court. Modeled on the German commission, it was created in France in 1978 to accompany the French politics of patent. It is made up of non-professional judges who represent different sectors of activity, and who therefore judge rather fairly (en équité in French), according to the conventions specific to the world of production.
We wanted to explore the functioning of this conciliation body from the perspective of the search for “good law” (bon droit in French) as a field of normativity that is an intermediary between positive law and practices within the company (Cottereau, 2002). This institution can be considered as a legal intermediary, articulating different sources of normativity and highlighting the importance of professional circles in the definition of work and employment rules. It allows for a final settlement of 80% of disputes. However, for reasons of confidentiality, we do not have access to the conciliation decisions of this commission. We have therefore fallen back on judicial decisions, which are more imbued with formalism. The fact remains that they are sufficiently detailed to fully understand the nature of the disputes and the characteristics of the parties.SSc:  Analyzing this empirically on a broad scale is a major undertaking. Can you elaborate a little on the methodological challenges that arose with the study?

CB:   The construction of our basis for judicial decisions was not easy because certain decisions are unique and pose a problem of equivalence (n=123, 2000-2018). In a first stage of exploitation of this database, we proceeded to a rather simple statistical coding (about 40 variables): the protagonists and the nature of the disputes, the characteristics of the companies and of the salaried inventors, the amounts of the remunerations or more generally of the compensations. The main objective is not to go back over the judgment criteria used by the judges, but to link the nature of the disputes to the characteristics of the actors involved in these disputes.
From these variables, we have built a statistical typology of cases around two axes. The first axis would reflect the degree of objectification of inventive missions and of the remuneration policy. The chances that the employee inventor will succeed in some of his claims before the court increase along this axis. The second axis opposes inventors according to their socio-professional category, in particular “engineers” in consulting and R&D activities, to “intermediate professions” working in consumer goods or other industries. Each class therefore refers to a world of production.
Thus, we were able to identify an important class of decisions where the dispute concerns the insufficiency of the additional remuneration, as illustrated by the cases of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Nevertheless, our typology of judgments reveals another important type of litigation, in particular in innovative SMEs where IP policies are less objectified and where the creators–founders of the start-up seek to fully appropriate the inventions.

SSc:  The analysis of the legal disputes reveals some of the disputes that creative workers have with their employers over the appropriation and ownership of creative results. What other forms and fields of conflict exist here?

CB:   In the last chapter of our work, we sought to give more extension to the processes of expropriation of workers’ know-how. In particular, by emphasizing the decline in forms of co-ownership of intangible assets, and therefore of “intellectual commons”. This decline is linked to the financialization of these assets and the development of a platform economy, modifying the forms of work organization. More generally, we question the attribution of IPR between those who design new products and those who produce them, knowing that traditionally, rights are more attributed to the former than to the latter. Following this perspective, we have distinguished different conventions for IPR attributions according to the worlds of production (Storper and Salais, 1997). In the so-called creative industries, we are witnessing a form of dualization between designers who are considered as artists giving a certain aura to things and, at the other end, forms of self-exploitation based on free work.

SSc:  Looking back on the entire book and its findings: How would you summarize what you have discovered about the interplay between labor, value, and intellectual property in general?

CB:   The challenge in this book has been to articulate two projects that I had initially conceived separately. A reflection on what makes patents valuable and the role of intermediaries in this valuation process. A study that I had put off for a long time on disputes regarding employee invention. It follows on from my previous work on the contractualization of the employment relationship (Bessy 2007), which began with an analysis of institutional transformations concerning the termination of the employment contract (Bessy 1993).
There was indeed the idea that the value achieved by certain patents could lead inventors to have a piece of the pie, but it was necessary to highlight a whole series of mediations to account for the two dimensions. In particular, we have shown the role played by patent attorneys in the legal security of titles and the limitation of forms of co-ownership. It is also important to underline their rather individualistic conception of innovation, particularly when they magnify the start-up model, which refers in a certain way to the initial revolutionary intellectual right based on individual genius.

SSc:  You mentioned that the book is also a review and summary of over thirty years of research into intellectual property. As retrospectives always define a starting point for something new: What plans do you have for further research and what unanswered questions have you identified?

CB:   We will continue to analyze the development of the intellectual property market, particularly through its extension to new objects (AI, genome) developed by start-ups. The idea would be to identify “varieties of capitalism” in this area and the role played by lawyers. But we began to explore the issue of IPRs in the world of design in which they play, as you know, a more and more important role (Bessy and Schrör, 2024). The recent trend is for designers’ lawyers to defend their work by relying on copyright, in particular by proposing narratives that mobilize the ‘collection form’ of valuing things (Boltanski and Esquerre, 2020). The development of geographical indications also goes in this valuation form. Another current research is to focus on the development of copyright (droit d’auteur in French) in terms of moral rights concerning respect for the integrity of works. A particular question is whether this right of preservation diminishes or not with different generations of rights holders.

The Book “Expropriation by Law. Intellectual Property, Value and Labor” has been published in February 2024 at Edward Elgar (Cheltenham, UK). 204 pages, ISBN: 9781035326143, DOI:  10.4337/9781035326150

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

  • Bessy, C. 1993, Les licenciements économiques. Entre la loi et le marché, Paris CNRS éditions.
  • Bessy, C., 2007, La contractualisation de la relation de travail, Paris: Ed. L.G.D.J., collection Droit et Société.
  • Bessy, C., 2015, L’organisation des activités des avocats, entre monopole et marché, Paris: Lextenso éditions, collection forum.
  • Bessy, C., 2022, L’expropriation par le droit. Propriété intellectuelle, valeur, travail, Paris: EHESS, series: “En temps & lieux”.
  • Bessy, C., 2024, Expropriation by Law. Intellectual Property, Value and Labor, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
  • Bessy, C. and F. Chateauraynaud, 1995, Experts et faussaires, pour une sociologie de la perception, Paris: Métailié.
  • Bessy, C. and F. Eymard-Duvernay (eds), 1997, Les intermédiaires du marché du travail. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
  • Bessy, C and E. Brousseau, 1998, Licensing of technology: Various contracts for diverse transactions, International Review of Law and Economics, 18, 451–89.
  • Bessy, C., Eymard-Duvernay, F., G. de Larquier and E. Marchal (eds), 2001, Des marchés du travail équitables? Approche comparative France/Royaume-Uni, Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang.
  • Bessy, C., T. Delpeuch and J. Pélisse (eds), 2011, Droit et régulations des activités économiques: perspectives sociologiques et institutionnalistes, Paris: L.G.D.J. Lextenso éditions, collection Droit et Société.
  • Bessy, C. and M. Margairaz (eds), 2021, Les biens communs en perspectives – Propriété, travail, valeur, XVIIème–XXIème siècles, Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne.
  • Bessy, C. and C. Didry, 2023, Law in Convention Theory: Regulation in Regularities, in: R. Diaz-Bone and G.d. Larquier (eds), Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions, Cham: Springer.
  • Bessy C. and S. Schrör, 2024, Creative labor, design and convention theory, in: R. Diaz-Bone and G.d. Larquier (eds), Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions, Cham: Springer. (Forthcoming)
  • Boltanski, L. and A. Esquerre, 2020 (2017), Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, Catherine Porter trans, Cambridge, Polity Press.
  • Brousseau E. and C. Bessy, 2006, Public and Private Institutions in the Governance of Intellectual Property Rights, in B. Andersen (ed), Intellectual Property Rights: Innovation, Governance and the Institutional Environment, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 243–77.
  • Cottereau, A., 2002, Droit et bon droit: Un droit ouvrier instauré puis évincé par le droit du travail (France XIXè), Annales HSS, 6, 1521–57.
  • Fligstein, N., 2001, Le mythe du marché, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 139, 3–12.
  • Pistor, K., 2019, The Code of Capital: How Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Rikap, C. and B.-A. Lundvall, 2020, Big Tech, knowledge predation and the implications for development, Innovation and Development, 12(2), 1–28.
  • Storper, M. and R. Salais, 1997 (1993), Worlds of Production: The Action Frameworks of the Economy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Thévenot, L., 2024, Investments in Forms. Background and Continuing Developments, in: R. Diaz-Bone and G.d. Larquier (eds), Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions, Cham: Springer. (Forthcoming)
  • Wang, A., 2010, Rise of the patent intermediaries, Berkeley Law Journal, 25(1), 159–200.

« Tout écrivain met en lumière des contradictions qui sont au principe d’un trouble collectif. » Entretien avec Luc Boltanski

“Every writer brings to light contradictions that belong to the roots of a collective trouble” Interview with Luc Boltanski

Interview de Luc Boltanski par Chloé Chaudet and Ivanne Rialland (2023)

Études de la littérature française des XXe et XXIe siècles, 12, Online.

Introduction. “Dans Énigmes et complots. Une enquête à propos d’enquêtes (Gallimard, 2012), le sociologue Luc Boltanski s’appuie sur des œuvres littéraires – romans policiers, romans d’espionnage – pour analyser les formes symboliques de l’enquête et du complot. Plus spécifiquement, il s’agit de montrer en quoi ces romans, à la fin du xixe siècle et dans la première moitié du xxe siècle, traduisent une inquiétude concernant « la réalité de la réalité » que le sociologue associe au développement de l’État-nation comme projet d’organisation du réel, et aux tensions que créent les logiques divergentes du capitalisme en expansion. Loin d’être un hapax dans l’œuvre du sociologue, Énigmes et complots trouve ses racines dans son étude du sens de la justice, ses prolongements dans l’analyse du fait d’actualité, et son fondement dans ses réflexions sur le rôle de la sociologie et du sociologue.”

Introduction. “In Énigmes et complots. Une enquête à propos d’enquêtes (Gallimard, 2012), sociologist Luc Boltanski uses literary works – detective novels, spy novels – to analyze the symbolic forms of investigation and conspiracy. More specifically, the aim is to show how these novels, at the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century, reflect a concern about “the reality of reality” that the sociologist associates with the development of the nation-state as a project for organizing reality, and with the tensions created by the divergent logics of expanding capitalism. Far from being a hapax in the sociologist’s oeuvre, Enigmas and Conspiracies finds its roots in his study of the meaning of justice, its extensions in the analysis of current events, and its foundation in his reflections on the role of sociology and the sociologist.”

Report on the Conference on the economics of convention and social policies

by Olivier Gayot (Clersé, University of Lille)

Compte-rendu en français

The Economics of Convention and Social Policies study day was held at the University of Lille on 10 November 2023. Organized by Cécile Vasseur and Olivier Gayot, with the support of Guillemette de Larquier, and funded by Clersé (UMR 8019) (https://clerse.univ-lille.fr/), the day provided an opportunity to share questions and the results of numerous studies at different stages.


The day brought together around twenty-five researchers, including nine participants, to discuss economics of convention and social policies. Several categories of work were presented: chapters of collective works, state of the art, results of surveys and calls for projects or articles. The diversity of these works and convention theory gave rise to rich exchanges.
The day was organized around three workshops: (1) economics of convention and the question of work, (2) economics of convention and forms of justification for social and ecological action, and (3) economics of convention and health.

 

1. The economics of convention and the question of work

Géraldine Rieucau, Olivier Gayot et Philippe Semenowicz

Philippe Semenowicz – The contribution of convention economics to the understanding of inclusion policies
Philippe Semenowicz presented part of his chapter on work integration in the Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions (https://conventions.hypotheses.org/handbook-of-economics-and-sociology-of-conventions). This presentation, based on a review of the literature on convention theory to work integration, shows that work integration policies can be divided into two categories: those aimed at employers and those aimed at people in work integration.
An analysis of inclusion policies aimed at commercial companies shows that the aim of inclusion organizations is to influence companies’ human resources policies by influencing their perceptions of inclusion. In order to do this, inclusion  organizations, as intermediaries in the field of integration, rely on a range of actions that help to shape these uncertainties (skills assessment, partnership relations, etc.).
An analysis of policies aimed at beneficiaries shows that support for these people is provided “below the conventions”, i.e. upstream of the recruitment process, in order to make it easier for them to pass the various “tests” that give them access to the labor market.
However, convention theory’s analysis shows that these measures tend to individualize the issue of unemployment and encourage the sorting of jobseekers on the basis of behavioral and psychological criteria, which accentuates discrimination in recruitment. These actions have been further reinforced by the recent introduction of activation policies. These policies are based on conventions of individual responsibility, the management of unemployed people who enter into their private lives and the production of judgements about the usefulness and uselessness of certain professional activities by Pôle Emploi, the French institution that aims to decrease unemployment.
Philippe Semenowicz concludes that, in the light of the analyses already carried out, it might be appropriate to focus more on people in work-integration, particularly the uses of work-integration, or to analyze the work-integration process in certain specific professional sectors.

Géraldine Rieucau

Géraldine Rieucau – Jobs, work and the ecological transition: elements for a approach of convention theory
Géraldine Rieucau presented an ongoing research project funded by ADEME, the aim of which is to establish the link between public policy measures for ecological and social transition and the world of work. The project, known as COMETES, began in 2022 and brings together seven partners in two areas with a high incidence of poverty and unemployment (Picardy and Seine-Saint-Denis).
The project has a number of different objectives: identifying green jobs, developing “good quality” green jobs and promoting these jobs. To do this, the author relies on around sixty semi-structured interviews carried out in the two areas, some of which were with directors of organizations involved in integration through economic activity.
First, the analysis reveals three categories of green jobs: 1) green jobs, where the tasks are ecologically oriented; 2) greening jobs, which include ‘green’ tasks; 3) support jobs, which support the ecological transition without tasks specifically oriented towards ecology.
Second, the presenter highlights the fact that transition jobs are currently mainly jobs in the work-integration sector. This raises the question of the continuity of these jobs, insofar as they tend not to provide specific outlets outside the integration structures in the field studied. In this way, the ecological transition is putting pressure on jobs that are a priori low-skilled and temporary, whereas this transition requires long-term investment. This paradox raises the question of how these jobs should be valued in public policy, how economic players should coordinate their efforts and how ecological tasks should be justified in the world of work. These various questions, studied with the help of the powers of valorization, conventions-institutions and the articulation between the registers of ecological justification and the other forms of justification present in capitalism, are still being analyzed. However, it would appear that a form of compromise is emerging between commercial and industrial conventions and a new form of ecological justification that is still struggling to be valued within the current institutional framework.
Géraldine Rieucau concluded with the idea that, if the ecological and social transition is to succeed, green jobs need to be developed and made sustainable. First, by enhancing the individual career paths of people on integration schemes. Second, by further developing training and awareness-raising on the ecological transition, while seeking to avoid distorting existing schemes.

Olivier Gayot

Olivier Gayot – Social clause facilitators as intermediaries in the work-integration labor market
Olivier Gayot presented the main findings of an article (accepted for publication) on the role of social clause facilitators in training and stabilizing the work-integration labor market.
The presentation sought to show how these facilitators, by encouraging the introduction of social clauses in public procurement contracts, are helping to create the conditions for the emergence and stabilization of the work-integration market. This particular market, seen as a form of sub-market adjoining the labor market, aims to promoting access to the labor market for people in situations of integration through economic activity.
The contributor shows how, by carrying out various tasks on behalf of local authorities, social clause facilitators act as intermediaries in this market and participate in the commodification of the work-integration market. First, by shaping the uncertainties involved in recruiting people for work-integration schemes using “profiles” based on objectified social characteristics. Second, by helping to define the price of an hour of work experience. In this way, facilitators help to make the work-integration labor market run more smoothly and ensure its two main characteristics: the presence of a workforce and a price to coordinate exchanges.
The facilitators also help to stabilize the work-integration market. First, by identifying the supply side of this market (beneficiaries of social clauses) and the demand side (hours of work experience included in public contracts). In this way, they seek to influence local authorities in the implementation of social clauses in order to stabilize, or even increase, the number of hours of work-based integration included in public contracts from one year to the next. What’s more, by helping to identify the beneficiaries of the social clauses, the facilitators ensure that they have the workforce available to meet the demand for the work-integration schemes that they are helping to create.
Finally, the author shows that two quality conventions for social clauses coexist, and that these two conventions modify the way facilitators carry out their missions. The first, known as the “quality convention for social clauses directly aimed at integration through economic activity structures”, tends to favor people who are further away from employment and female beneficiaries. The second agreement, known as the “quality convention for social clauses aimed at commercial enterprises”, emphasizes the competitive rules that dictate the operation of public contracts. By promoting these competitive rules, the facilitators are also helping to ensure that social integration structures compete with each other and with commercial enterprises. What’s more, the application of these rules reinforces the logic of “sorting the unemployed” according to their “distance” from the labor market, which translates into competition between beneficiaries.
Olivier Gayot concludes that, through their actions, facilitators have the power to regulate the work-integration labor market, and that this form of regulation varies according to the quality of the social clauses they implement.

2. The economics of convention and forms of justification for social and ecological action

Rainer Diaz-Bone

Rainer Diaz-Bone – Epistemological evaluation of convention theory – evaluation research with convention theory
In his presentation, Rainer Diaz-Bone suggested that evaluation should be seen as a field to be explored by the economics and sociology of conventions. More specifically, he invites researchers in this field to get involved in the issue of program evaluation, which is a form of evaluation that exists both within and outside the academic world and should be based on convention theorists’ foundations.
Rather than a simple evaluation carried out after the implementation of a public policy, program evaluation can use the tools of economics and the sociology of conventions to explore the different stages of evaluation. First, by questioning the objectives of the evaluation, the way in which it is constructed and the choice of criteria used. Then, by drawing on the various approaches in convention theory: the institutional approach, the dispute, the question of values and valorization, the emergence of standards, indicators and categorizations in measurement. Finally, by producing an evaluation of the policy in terms of its objectives and the way in which it has been deployed by public players and received by users.
All these tools, already used in current convention theory, make it possible to question program evaluation at different levels: how it is created, why it is created, what the different stages will be, etc., but also to question the gap between what is expected of a public policy and its effects on the territories in which it is applied. Rainer Diaz-Bone points out that convention theory, thanks to its realistic approach and the fact that it already includes questions about evaluation and value, is today the best approach for training and discussing with evaluation professionals.
However, there are two points of friction between convention theory and program evaluation: 1) convention theorists systematically stand back from their object of study, which is undermined by evaluation processes that involve personal involvement; 2) convention theory is not very well equipped to question its own practices and conclusions in the short time available for evaluation.
In conclusion, Rainer Diaz-Bone suggests two areas for improvement: 1) to gear convention theory towards an ex ante analysis of the implementation of public policies, so that conclusions can be drawn quickly and clearly at the time of evaluation; 2) to improve communication between public authorities and universities in order to overcome the lack of data that limits the work of researchers.

Andriamanalina Razafindrakoto

Andriamanalina Miorintsoa Razafindrakoto – Coordination issues for public players in the social construction of a children’s flour market
Andriamanalina Miorintsoa Razafindrakoto came to present the main findings of her thesis on public health policies relating to infant milk in Madagascar. The Madagascan government is aware of the challenges posed by child malnutrition in a country where 81% of the population lives below the poverty line, and has been taking preventive health action on this issue for 25 years.
The author highlights the successive forms of coordination of these policies: initial national management, based on the actions of the World Bank; regional management, coordinated by UNICEF and the Madagascan Ministry of Health; and current management, based on decentralized cooperation between the Madagascan government and the social enterprise Nutri’zaza.
The author shows that the coordination methods are based on different conventions. The first convention used, a market convention, failed to match the profitability objectives of the social enterprise with the population targeted by public policy. As a result, the coordination of players based on this agreement was abandoned. The second form of coordination is based on a compromise between a civic convention (social aspect) and an industrial convention (production aspect), giving rise to a social action whose hybrid management raises questions.
This hybridization has enabled the social action of distributing infant milk to be maintained over time and to reassure investors and private funds, shareholders in the social enterprise that produced the milk in the first place (industrial agreement). However, local political institutions, which wish to see the distribution of the product as a form of public service (civic agreement), sometimes refuse to apply tax benefits to the social enterprise because they consider that this policy should not result in the generation of profit for a private company. Thus, the compromise at the origin of the institution is made visible by the existence of an ethics committee within the association that distributes the products, a marketing activity (to sell the product) and an activity focused on nutritional education.
Andriamanalina Miorintsoa Razafindrakoto concludes that the implementation and roll-out of this public child nutrition policy, in the form of a hybrid social action, is creating points of tension across the country.  The National Nutrition Office, which coordinates the policy across the country, promotes three principles: the principle of free access to the public service, the empowerment of beneficiaries and a principle of non-exclusivity. These three principles are in contradiction with the industrial agreement that enables the social action to be maintained over time, which sometimes obliges the Regional Nutrition Office to buy the products directly and distribute them free of charge in order to achieve the objectives of the public policy.

Anaïs Henneguelle

Anaïs Henneguelle – The greening of French social protection: in search of lost indicators
Anaïs Henneguelle presented the results of a survey, funded by social protection, on the “greening” of this administration. The project, called Proseco, was the result of a call launched by EN3S and was carried out between September 2021 and June 2023.
The call for tenders had two objectives: to identify the environmental pressures caused by social security and to highlight the obstacles and levers for creating more environmentally-friendly social protection. The main question was how to ensure that social protection would be less polluting in the future.
Anaïs Henneguelle explains that the solutions initially envisaged by the social protection system were to make benefit payments conditional on more ecological use, or to pool health transport. For the time being, these solutions have been shelved. However, the project led by the author, Alexandre Berthe (University of Rennes 2) and Lucile Marchand (Agrocampus Rennes), focused more on the very idea of ‘greening social protection’, and the effects that this environmental injunction may have on this institution.
The analysis carried out for this report was based on three questions: 1) why produce indicators; 2) what are statistical indicators used for; 3) who are they used for?
In response to the first question, the presenter explained that several studies exist on the ecological effects of health and its environmental impacts (Shift Project, Ademe). These studies reflect a form of political injunction to produce ecological health indicators. In this way, the production of indicators makes it possible to put people in “working order” by means of figures and objectives, and to justify the implementation of action. The solution favored by the social security system was to use a carbon footprint, despite the irrelevance of some of these indicators to the activities managed by social protection (the carbon cost of paying pensions, for example).
On the second question, the authors show that the statistical indicators used are in fact based on an industrial convention. This convention, which was ill-suited to social security, was nevertheless not called into question, and the use of carbon footprints was generalized to the various regional departments. In so doing, the administration was able to respond to the political injunction to produce figures, even though these were not particularly relevant to the activity of social protection. The contributor shows that, in reality, the figures produced by the administration take the form of ex post justifications for numerous internal organizational changes rather than serving as decision-making aids. Their use therefore allows a form of coordination in the absence of a common representation of the notion of the greening of social security (multiple representations and justifications of what this greening is).
To the third and final question, the presenter explained that the figures created (carbon cost, number of drugs thrown away by doctors, etc.) are not really used in explicit governance policies. If there is a suspicion of implicit governance using these figures, it is not clearly identified and specified by the administration. Nevertheless, the authors of the report show that a narrative is developing around the production of these figures, rather than the figures themselves. This narrative is based on the need to quantify an action and its effects before taking action, which makes it possible, when figures are not available, to justify a certain form of inaction, or to justify certain actions that have already been implemented in another context.
To conclude, Anaïs Henneguelle points out that despite the various existing ecological reports, the actions implemented by the regional social security funds do not offer any scenario for getting “below two degrees”.

Rainer Diaz-Bone, Anaïs Henneguelle et Nicolas Postel

3. The economics of convention and health

Hélène Croguennec – Le Saout

Hélène Croguennec – Le Saout – The commodification of old age in public EPHAD: from user to customer
Hélène Croguennec – Le Saout presented the results of a field study conducted as part of her thesis on the supposed dynamics of financialization in public EPHADs. The study, based on semi-directive interviews and passive observation, revealed that several conventions run through these EPHADs.
The first convention identified by the author is a market convention. It applies to all public EPHADs and is reflected in: standardization of the offer, competition between public and private players in EPHADs within a market that is intended to be homogenous, and the introduction of regular evaluations and a benchmark of good practice. The second agreement is a civic agreement, based both on the fact that these establishments are public and on the health service they provide.
According to the presenter, the predominance of the commercial agreement in EPHADs is leading to two phenomena. The first is the invisibility of public funding (departmental council and social security contributions) for these establishments in favor of private funding (accommodation provided by users). The second is the use of standardized indicators and the systematic use of equations to determine the care and dependency packages that influence the funding of these facilities.
Nevertheless, the two conventions (industrial and civic) coexist and, for the time being, a fragile compromise is emerging. This compromise is expressed by the author as the fact that the market convention is valued in practice as long as it does not imply a lack of quality in the support (civic convention). However, this state of affairs is systematically called into question and is subject to change whenever there is a situation of tension (requests from residents that are not anticipated or considered unwarranted by staff) within the establishments.
Hélène Croguennec – Le Saout concluded with the idea that it might be relevant to extend her analysis not only to private EPHADs, but also to other sectors (disability and early childhood) in order to analyze existing agreements and compare the way in which compromises are made in these structures.

Nicolas Da Silva

Nicolas Da Silva – The industrialization of healthcare and its critics
Nicolas Da Silva presented a summary of the chapter he wrote for the Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions (https://conventions.hypotheses.org/handbook-of-economics-and-sociology-of-conventions). The chapter focuses on the evolution of convention theory applied to healthcare, moving from an analysis of the mechanisms by which healthcare is commodified to the phenomenon of the industrialization of healthcare. The presentation focuses on the question of the industrialization of healthcare, showing how this has become an integral part of medical practice over time.
The author shows that doctors have constructed their representation of healthcare in contradiction with the market and its imperative of profitability. They are also opposed to the state, as employer, which has the power to change the way doctors work, just as it has the power to change the quality of patient care.
Thus, the convention that dominated medical practice until the 1980s was the result of a compromise between the inspired city (creativity, innovation, medical art) and the domestic city (taking into account the individuality of each patient). In this way, the medical practice that was valued was that based on interpersonal relations between doctors and their patients: a good doctor is one who knows his patients.
However, the domestic convention that predominated in the compromise that underpinned medical practices was criticized. This criticism is based in particular on the deleterious effects of medical paternalism, the cognitive limitations of doctors who have difficulty keeping their knowledge up to date, and a form of denunciation of medical opportunism (abuse of the asymmetry of information between doctor and patient). In this way, the compromise between the inspired city and the industrial city has been destabilized, and is tending to be replaced by a conception of health derived from the industrial city (efficiency).
The influence of this approach on medical practices is reflected in the development of randomized clinical trials, which make it possible to compile data and provide information deemed more relevant than that produced by “traditional” practices. In addition, the industrial city is giving rise to: the creation of norms (standards, certifications produced by health agencies, etc.); the monitoring of practices; the introduction of financial incentives to encourage doctors to adopt certain practices considered to be “quality”; the introduction of financial penalties for practices considered to be deviant; the introduction of soft law and self-regulation by doctors; payment for performance (compliance with imposed norms).
The author concludes that the introduction of industrial logic into the way doctors work implies at least two criticisms: 1) the relationship with illness, which may be seen as a break with a standard state (industrial city) or because the patient feels ‘different’ (previous compromise), is poorly defined; 2) the tendency for doctors to become hyperspecialized, which leads them to distinguish between ‘technical’ care and ‘intellectual’ care, tends to limit the effects of care from a systemic point of view. In so doing, the author shows that the State and doctors tend to promote the industrial convention, without giving it the means to function.

Cécile Vasseur, Hélène Croguennec – Le Saout, Nicolas Da Silva et Léo Delpy

 

Cécile Vasseur

Cécile Vasseur – The use of healthcare networks by mutual insurers: a market-industrial compromise
Cécile Vasseur presented the results of her thesis, defended on 23 November 2023 at the University of Lille (https://www.theses.fr/s336693). The work, which focuses on mutual health insurers, uses a conventionalist approach to show how these organizations, which claim to be non-profit-making, tend to adopt practices and behaviors similar to those of private insurers.
On the one hand, the author highlights the fact that the care network section is a blind spot in the economic analysis of mutual insurance companies. Yet it is within these networks, which are partnerships between mutual insurers and optical, hearing aid and dental care professionals, that mutual insurers adopt the most competitive practices. On the other hand, by analyzing the players’ discourse, Cécile Vasseur highlights the existence of an industrial market compromise. Thus, the practices of mutual insurance companies are based both on the development of standards and norms (industrial agreement) and on competitive logic (market agreement).
The industrial agreement is mainly used in the development of care networks because it makes it possible to set ceiling prices and control the expenditure of the mutual health insurance companies. By promoting an industrial approach to healthcare networks, mutual health insurers are encouraging the emergence of regulated standards and practices, which are not always readily accepted by healthcare professionals. The growing importance of healthcare networks is forcing hearing aid, optical and dental professionals to become part of these networks, even if this integration contradicts the representations of healthcare that they value.
The commercial agreement enables mutual insurance companies to maintain their position in a competitive environment established by various governments and the European Union through a succession of laws. This legislation, which tends to deny the special nature of mutualist players (no profit motive, democracy), pushes these organizations to adopt practices similar to private insurance. In so doing, the author notes an erosion of mutualist values, in particular the democratic aspect of decision-making (reduced representation of customers in decision-making, professionalization of mutual directors). This agreement also influences the relationship that mutual insurers have with their healthcare networks (competition between healthcare providers, competition with other mutual insurers, etc.).
Finally, Cécile Vasseur concludes that despite the discourse of the mutuals, they play an important role in the development of this competitive environment. The players within the mutual health insurers can thus adopt an anti-competitive position through their discourse, while at the same time favoring practices taken from the world of private insurance. By adopting practices similar to those used by private insurers, mutual health insurers reinforce the commercial conception of their activity. In the same way, by importing some of their practices into their organizations and their healthcare network, mutualist players encourage the emergence of a market conception of healthcare. In so doing, the presenter shows that the players act within the institution when they apply the rules imposed on them, but also on the institution when they help to reinforce certain conventions or representations of health.

From original institutionalism to the economics of conventions and Inventing Value: An interview with Dave Elder-Vass

Dave Elder-Vass & Jamie Morgan (2023)

real-world economics review, issue no. 105, pp. 87-110

[…]

JAMIE: In any case, we still haven’t said much about conventions theory so we should start to turn more explicitly to that. Who would you say have been the most prominent of the conventions theorists?

DAVE: Over the years prominent figures associated with the tradition include Alain Desrosières, Francois Eymard-Duvernay, Olivier Favereau, André Orléan, Robert Salais and Laurent Thévenot. But perhaps it would help to say a little about where conventions theory first came from. It originated in the 1980s when a group of French economic statisticians, partly under the influence of the sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (so interdisciplinarity was baked in from the start), became critical of some of the positivist assumptions of traditional statistics (Desrosières 2011). Statistics were widely seen as objective neutral reflections of self-evident facts about the world. The conventions theorists, however, recognized that statistics reflected judgements about what should count and thus what should be counted, judgements about how to count, and in particular judgements about how to classify (or “qualify”) the things being counted. Once statistics had been produced in a particular way, this tended to embed and be perpetuated. Judgements were repeatedly re-used in further work and became stabilised as taken for granted assumptions. The conventions theorists took the essentially social constructionist view that these assumptions represented somewhat arbitrary choices, yet once made they became stabilised by social use, but those choices could have been made differently (Diaz-Bone and de Larquier 2020: 5–6). This core concept of conventions then came to be extended and applied in different contexts beyond statistics.
[…]

JAMIE: And, to reiterate, like any other approach conventions theory exhibits dispute and diversity…

DAVE: That’s right, and as a result the concept of a convention has been used in a variety of rather different ways in the tradition, making it difficult to provide a clear and unambiguous definition. Diaz-Bone and de Larquier, in the introduction to their Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions (still under construction), describe them as “institutional logics for the valuation or valorization of goods, actions, and persons” (Diaz-Bone and de Larquier 2020: 1–2). That has the merit of being loose enough to accommodate the full range of cases, but at the inevitable cost of leaving it rather unclear what would count as a convention.

JAMIE: Still, before moving on to discuss your recent book Inventing Value and how it relates to conventions theory, it might be worth here just summarising what conventions theory “is”…

DAVE: Well, I can’t guarantee to be any more definitive than Diaz-Bone and de Larquier, but perhaps I can give a definition that complements theirs: conventions theory is a trans-disciplinary tradition that focuses on how stabilised shared understandings shape our classification, evaluation, and valuation practices and as a result influence our social interactions, including our economic interactions. In a sense it therefore provides a more socialised and realistic alternative to the mainstream view of decision-making as purely a process of the rational calculation of self-interest. So, for the statisticians for example, shared understandings of different classes of labour are employed to generate labour statistics. Or for Boltanski and Thevenot, shared understandings of standards of judgement are used to resolve social disputes. Or for André Orléan, shared understandings of how we should value financial assets, like Keynes’s conventions, shape outcomes in financial markets, which I hope we can discuss in more depth shortly. From a critical realist perspective, I would want to extend the argument a little further: we should see decision-making as multiply determined by many different causal mechanisms, so that a fully realistic account of it would take into account both conventions and rational calculation, but also other factors, such as the habits or dispositions we take for granted (as stressed by some institutionalists) and our emotional commitments.
[…]

JAMIE: When you first became interested in the subject of value, valuation and pricing was it immediately obvious that your work and conventions theory overlapped?

DAVE: No, it took me a while to realise (or perhaps decide?) that the work I was doing on value fell within the conventions tradition as well as the critical realist one. It had struck me that the concept of value, in the sense of the monetary value of assets and commodities, was central to the operation of our contemporary economy and yet it had almost disappeared from view, in the shadow of two enormously powerful misconceptions of value and its origins: the neoclassical sense of value as the equilibrium price of a good and the Marxist sense of value as a quantity of socially necessary labour power. I recognised that we only buy things because we ascribe value to them, and hence the commodity and asset economies depend utterly on the processes through which buyers (but also sellers) come to ascribe and quantify monetary value. But the Marxist analysis ignores that, and the neoclassical analysis collapses the whole question of the prices people are willing to pay to the exogenous preferences of buyers, thereby ignoring many of the most important factors that shape what prices people are willing to pay for things.
[…]

DAVE: […] One of the more important arguments I develop in Inventing Value is that valuation conventions, and value narratives that are used to connect individual assets and commodities to particular valuation conventions, are strongly shaped by deliberate discursive work, in particular work done by people I call value entrepreneurs (I mentioned this with the Snap example if you recall). Value entrepreneurs, usually operating on behalf of larger structures like corporations, actively seek to influence how the assets or commodities in which they have an interest are valued by influencing the discursive environment. The luxury goods industries, for example, have gradually but cumulatively built a sense that the goods they produce have status because they embody heritage and heritage should be valued – as Boltanski and Esquerre have argued in their recent work on enrichment (Boltanski and Esquerre 2020). One extraordinary example is the way in which the guitar company Fender, having recognised that worn guitars have a prestige arising from the sense that they have served expert players well for many years, have started to produce pre-damaged new guitars and sell them at a premium.

JAMIE: These are interesting examples, but they seem to rest on physical qualities of commodities. Your main focus though is financial assets…

DAVE: Because they don’t have clear material consequences for our well-being on which to hang valuations, conventions are even more significant for financial assets. Their value rests entirely on future revenue streams, which of course takes us back to your quote from Keynes. As Keynes said, financial valuations rest quite heavily on the thoroughly unreasonable expectation that things will continue as they are, and hence that future income streams can be taken as read for the purpose of valuing assets. But what does it mean for things to “continue as they are”? Does it mean, for example, that a stock will continue to yield the same percentage dividend indefinitely or perhaps that internet firms will be able to extract a certain number of dollars of advertising revenue per user per annum, or…? What versions of “continuing as they are” are going to be transformed into conventions, and which one of them (or which ones) is going to apply to any given asset? Each of these is a different way of imposing a sense of predictability on an inherently uncertain future, and the prices that can be achieved for financial assets are highly sensitive to which of them is applied. Just as in commodity exchange, firms have a powerful interest in influencing the conventions applied to assets and so engage in shaping value discourses. Financial value entrepreneurs are in the business of developing favourable conventions for the assets they are marketing and producing a sense that this is the natural and obvious way of valuing the assets concerned. But different conventions could have been applied, with the result that investors would have valued the assets concerned quite differently.

Download the full interview

La Sécurité sociale a-t-elle besoin d’être sauvée ?

Does Social Security need saving?

Entretien avec Nicolas Da Silva (2023)

Arte – Les idées larges

Pour l’économiste de la santé Nicolas Da Silva, la Sécurité sociale est en excellente santé financière, et la plus grande menace à laquelle elle fait face n’est pas seulement la liquidation ou la privatisation, mais aussi l’étatisation. Étatisation qui est déjà en cours. Quand et pourquoi ce processus a-t-il commencé ? Quelle est la différence entre le “public” et “l’étatique” ?

For health economist Nicolas Da Silva, Social Security is in excellent financial health, and the biggest threat it faces is not just liquidation or privatization, but also nationalization. State control is already underway. When and why did this process begin? What’s the difference between “public” and “state-owned”?

Lien / Link

Economics and sociology of conventions – Taking stock, Looking ahead

From July 5 to 7, 2023, the 12th congress “Crises and inequalities: how to inhabit the world of tomorrow” [Crises et inégalités: comment habiter le monde de demain?] of the French Association of Political Economy (AFEP, https://twitter.com/AFEP_EcoPo) was held at the Université Paris Cité – which is located at the former area of the Parisian mills (“Grands moulins de Paris”).

Four sessions, organized by Rainer Diaz-Bone (University of Lucerne) and Guillemette de Larquier (University of Lille), were devoted to economics and sociology of conventions (EC/SC) entitled “Economics and sociology of conventions – Taking stock, Looking ahead”. The 13 presentations in these four sessions were (mainly) based on chapters to be published in the Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions (Springer). The handbook aims for more than 100 chapters, 32 first chapters had been published online first before the AFEP congress. The presentation were grouped by topics, beginning with three of the founders, who presented main achievements of EC/SC since the middle of the 1980ies, but also gave insight into their ongoing work. The next two sessions were devoted to main fields of EC/SC: labor market analysis, the analysis of finance and the study of values and valorization. The fourth session presented considerations devoted to EC/SC’s methodology, but also ongoing research on social and regional economics.

Session1: “Perspectives of the founders” – 05/07/2023

  • Olivier Favereau (Paris/France): “The economics and sociology of conventions, a critical theory?”
  • André Orléan (Paris/France): “Où en est l’économie des conventions?”
  • Robert Salais (Paris/France): “Convention et capacités”

Robert Salais, André Orléan and Olivier Favereau

Session 2: “Labor and finance” – 05/07/2023

  • Julia Brandl (Innsbruck/Austria): “Economics and sociology of conventions in the field of human resource management: taking stock and looking ahead”
  • Guillemette de Larquier (Lille/France): “Labor, conventions and conventions of labor”
  • Tom Duterme (Louvain-La-Neuve/Belgium): “Standards as reforms. The role of conventions in sustainable finance”

Julia Brandl

Guillemette de Larquier

Tom Duterme

 Session 3: “Value and valorization” – 06/07/2023

  • Christian Bessy (Paris/France): “Valuation and Enrichment”
  • Samuel Zarka (Paris/France): “The power of valorization : a concept to link political economy and the sociology of work?”
  • Daniel Urrutiaguer (Paris/France): “Art Worlds facing the socio-ecological stakes”
  • Antoine Rieu (Paris/France): “The conventional construction of the
    economic values of Social Joint Ventures”

Session 4: “Methodology and explanatory strategies” – 07/07/2023

  • Rainer Diaz-Bone (Lucerne/Switzerland): “Methodological positions and perspectives of economics and sociology of conventions”
  • Cécile Vasseur (Lille/France): “Conventions, democracy and social economy”
  • Kenkichi Nagao & Junya Tatemi (Osaka/Japan): “Regional development. How convention theory explains economic development”

The sessions were attended by 15 up to 30 visitors each. The presenters as well as the audience gathered scholars from EC/SC from three different generations. EC/SC is an approach in which many PhD projects are proceeded – an indicator for EC/SC’s future. Also, the mostly English offered presentations and the audience demonstrated the ongoing internationalization of EC/SC. All in all, discussions of the presentations made evident that EC/SC is a developing scientific movement, which has many applications and fruitful concepts to offer for contemporary research issues in the social sciences. 

Last but not least, we can point to other presentations at the congress, which were related to EC/SC too: Philippe Batifoulier, Franck Bessis, Géraldine Rieucau, etc. See AFEP programme: Programme_XIIe_Congres_AFEP

Also, at the congress, the Grand manuel d’économie politique was presented, including sections devoted to convention theory. See the blog report.