Lors des crises financières, la panique prend brutalement le pas sur l’euphorie. L’économie casino conduit alors à des situations a priori incohérentes. Cette exubérance des marchés n’est pourtant pas irrationnelle. Bien au contraire, elle révèle la nature autoréférentielle des anticipations sur les marchés financiers. La prise en considération du mimétisme des comportements permet ainsi d’appréhender la déconnexion de la finance avec l’économie réelle et souligne l’impérieuse nécessité de la réguler.
“We have a detailed picture of how inequality impacts people’s lives, but a much weaker sense of how people perceive, interpret and understand issues of inequality. What shapes people’s everyday understandings of inequality? How are understandings of inequality located in everyday concerns, moral values and principles of justice?
This book considers what provokes everyday ‘views’ or framings of inequality. It examines how different approaches can help us understand this process, drawing on a range of literatures, including social attitudes and perceptions research, class identities and neoliberalism, theories of the psychosocial, affect and the abject, social constructionism, social movements research, and pragmatism. The book examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, explores how they come to be understood as ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘racial’ or other kinds of inequality, and considers how such inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change.”
EXTRACT
THE NORMATIVE BASIS OF ‘ORDINARY’ CRITIQUE
“Analysts who qualify accounts of symbolic domination are often reluctant to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’, and seek to retain an emphasis on people as embodied, dispositional beings (Sayer, 2005b: 51, 52). Others make a more decisive break, adopting a more rationalist stance on critique. One such departure is Boltanski’s (2011) attack on Bourdieusian ‘critical sociology’. Boltanski (2011: 20, original emphasis) argues that in critical sociology, ‘domination’ becomes overextended into a notion of ‘symbolic violence’ in which ‘actors are dominated without knowing it’, a process explained by ‘the illusions that blind them and appeals to the notion of the unconscious’. But this creates major explanatory problems. Trying to ‘explain virtually all . . . behaviour by the internalization of dominant norms’ places too much weight on the dispositions of actors ‘at the expense of the properties inscribed in the situations into which they are plunged’ (Ibid.: 20). And for Boltanski, arguing that people’s behaviour is in accordance with innate dispositions makes it impossible to account for ‘the disputes actors engage in’ (Ibid.: 20–21). It treats actors ‘as deceived beings or as if they were “cultural dopes”’ in which their critical capacities are underestimated or ignored2 (Ibid.: 20). If we want to take seriously the claims of actors when they denounce social injustice, criticize power relationships or unveil their foes’ hidden motives, we must conceive of them as endowed with an ability to differentiate legitimate and illegitimate ways of rendering criticism and justifications. It is, more precisely, this competence which characterizes the ordinary sense of justice which people implement in their disputes. (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999: 364) The space for critique is provided by the plural criteria of justification which govern social institutions (with no single axis of domination or legitimation) where people can draw on competing regimes of evaluation and justification for their actions. Boltanski and collaborators examine the critical capacities of actors and their ‘ordinary denunciations’ of injustice, focusing on how people justify themselves in the face of critique, the disagreements that emerge over the legitimacy of social practices and how people resolve disputes using different principles of justification (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007; Boltanski, 2011, 2012). In this framework, the social world ‘does not appear as a place of a domination suffered passively and unconsciously but more like a space intersected by a multitude of disputes, critiques, disagreements and attempts to produce fragile local agreements’ (Jagd, 2011: 345–46). Here the exercise of ‘ordinary’ critical competences is a routine feature of social life. This reflects the normative character of social interaction, in which individuals must justify (or be able to justify) their actions to each other, appealing to legitimate principles of action which they hope will command respect or agreement (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). People engage in confrontation when their sense of justice is affronted, with such interventions not simply strategic but instead drawing on arguments that claim a more general validity.” (p. 94-95)
Résumé. L’heure, la qualité d’un restaurant, la température, le taux de chômage, le QI, la durée d’un entraînement, la réussite d’un lycée, la richesse, une cote de popularité… Il semble impossible d’échapper aux chiffres ! Mais à quoi servent-ils exactement ? D’où viennent-ils ? Et pourquoi met-on le monde en chiffres ? Les chiffres régissent une bonne partie de nos vies : ils servent à coordonner nos actions, à établir des règles de vie commune et à trouver des conventions au sein des collectifs. Ils contribuent aux prises de décision et à l’exercice du pouvoir. Ils participent à nos quêtes de justice et d’harmonie, et à la construction de la confiance. Et ils prétendent aussi refléter la réalité de façon objective. La puissance des chiffres provient-elle de leur capacité à énoncer des certitudes, de notre soumission volontaire à des artifices utiles, de leur aptitude à fabriquer un monde et à nous l’imposer, ou des leviers qu’ils nous offrent pour s’entendre et agir ? À travers une analyse sociologique et historique de la quantification, Olivier Martin nous montre toute l’étendue de l’empire des chiffres dans nos sociétés.
Extrait. “L’ouvrage s’appuie sur plusieurs domaines de recherche : l’histoire sociale des pratiques ordinaires de mesure et la métrologie historique; l’histoire sociale du temps et de ses usages sociaux (encadrés ici et ici) ; la sociologie historique de la quantification; l’histoire et la sociologie des pratiques savantes de mesure; la sociohistoire des pratiques évaluatives ; et bien sûr les quelques travaux de philosophies, historiens ou anthropologues consacrés à des analyses transversales de la mesure. Nous souhaitons ici souligner quelques points généraux concernant l’ensemble de ces sources. Alors que chacune de ces gammes de travaux aborde, à sa manière, les questions de « mise en chiffre », il est frappant de constater à quel point ces travaux partagent très peu de références et ne se citent presque jamais entre eux : par exemple, les travaux consacrés à la mesure de l’heure ne s’intéressent pas à ceux étudiant la mesure des faits sociaux ; et ces derniers ignorent très largement les publications sur l’histoire des systèmes de poids et mesure ; qui à leur tour n’intègrent pas les résultats en sociologie historique des statistiques. Même les textes récents qui prétendent proposer des synthèses ne traitent que de quelques aspects de la manière dont le monde s’est fait nombre (Bardet, 2014 ; Bruno, Jany-Catrice, Touchelay, 2016 ; Diaz-Bone, Didier, 2016 ; Rey, 2016 ; Muller, 2018 ; Berman, Hirschman, 2018 ; Bartl, Papilloud, Terracher-Lipinski, 2019 ; Jaclin, Wagner, 2019), y compris lorsqu’ils soulignent « l’importance de comprendre la pluralité de la quantification » (Mennicken, Espeland, 2019). Ils oublient très généralement toutes les pratiques de mesure du temps ; et ils ne traitent, au mieux, que marginalement de la métrologie (ordinaire comme savante). C’est aussi le cas des nombreux travaux conduits par un des initiateurs de la sociologie de la quantification en France, Alain Desrosières (cf. encadrés ici et ici). Nous aurons de nombreuses occasions de revenir sur ses travaux mais, pour l’instant, retenons qu’il excluait de ses analyses les opérations de mesure du monde naturel, les pratiques de mesure des poids, longueurs et durées. Il maintenait, d’une certaine manière, ce type de pratiques dans le giron de la philosophie réaliste de la mesure : « l’idée de mesure, inspirée de l’épistémologie traditionnelle des sciences de la nature, implique que quelque chose existe sous une forme déjà mesurable selon la métrologie réaliste, comme la hauteur de la tour Eiffel » (Desrosières, 2008a, 10). Il distinguait les pratiques de quantification des sciences humaines et sociales et les démarches de la statistique sociale et économique d’une part, et les pratiques de mesure des sciences de la nature d’autre part. De fait, ses travaux n’ont jamais inclus de recherches sur la mesure des « grandeurs physiques ou naturelles » et se sont concentrés sur les domaines des faits sociaux, culturels, économiques, démographiques : il définissait la sociologie de la quantification comme la sociologie de la statistique, de la comptabilité et de l’évaluation des politiques publiques (Desrosières, 2005, 23). Son ouvrage phare La politique des grands nombres (1993) comme ses articles ultérieurs ont toujours acté, de manière au moins implicite, l’existence d’une différence entre la mesure du monde physique et la mise en nombre de l’économiste ou du sociostatisticien.”
Abstract. The time of day, the quality of a restaurant, the temperature, the unemployment rate, the IQ, the duration of a training session, the success of a high school, the wealth, a popularity rating? It seems impossible to escape the numbers! But what exactly are they used for? Where do they come from? And why do we put the world in numbers? Numbers govern a good part of our lives: they serve to coordinate our actions, to establish rules for living together and to find conventions within collectives. They contribute to decision-making and the exercise of power. They participate in our quest for justice and harmony, and in building trust. And they also claim to reflect reality in an objective way. Does the power of numbers come from their ability to state certainties, from our voluntary submission to useful artifices, from their ability to make a world and impose it on us, or from the levers they offer us to agree and act? Through a sociological and historical analysis of quantification, Olivier Martin shows us the full extent of the empire of numbers in our societies.
Extract. “The book is based on several fields of research: the social history of ordinary measurement practices and historical metrology; the social history of time and its social uses (framed here and here); the historical sociology of quantification; the history and sociology of scholarly measurement practices; the sociohistory of evaluative practices; and, of course, the few works by philosophers, historians or anthropologists devoted to cross-disciplinary analyses of measurement. We would like to highlight a few general points concerning all of these sources. While each of these lines of work deals, in its own way, with the question of “numerical measurement”, it is striking to note how little reference is made to these works, which almost never quote each other: for example, works devoted to the measurement of time are not interested in those studying the measurement of social facts; and the latter are largely unaware of the publications on the history of systems of weights and measures, which in turn do not integrate the results of the historical sociology of statistics. Even the recent texts that claim to offer syntheses deal only with a few aspects of the way the world has become numerous (Bardet, 2014; Bruno, Jany-Catrice, Touchelay, 2016; Diaz-Bone, Didier, 2016; Rey, 2016 ; Muller, 2018; Berman, Hirschman, 2018; Bartl, Papilloud, Terracher-Lipinski, 2019; Jaclin, Wagner, 2019), including when they stress “the importance of understanding the plurality of quantification” (Mennicken, Espeland, 2019). They very generally forget all time measurement practices; and they deal, at best, only marginally with metrology (ordinary as well as scholarly). This is also the case of the numerous works conducted by one of the initiators of the sociology of quantification in France, Alain Desrosières (see boxes here and here). We will have many opportunities to come back to his work but, for the moment, let us remember that he excluded from his analyses the measurement operations of the natural world, the practices of measuring weights, lengths and durations. In a way, he kept this type of practice within the realist philosophy of measurement: “the idea of measurement, inspired by the traditional epistemology of the natural sciences, implies that something exists in a form that is already measurable according to realist metrology, such as the height of the Eiffel Tower” (Desrosières, 2008a, 10). He distinguished between the quantification practices of the humanities and social sciences and the approaches of social and economic statistics on the one hand, and the measurement practices of the natural sciences on the other. In fact, his work never included research on the measurement of “physical or natural quantities” and focused on the fields of social, cultural, economic and demographic facts: he defined the sociology of quantification as the sociology of statistics, accounting and public policy evaluation (Desrosières, 2005, 23). His seminal work The Politics of Large Numbers (1993), as well as his subsequent articles, have always acknowledged, at least implicitly, the existence of a difference between the measurement of the physical world and the enumeration of the economist or sociostatistician.”