Abstract.Moral disputes regarding consumption issues are increasingly mediated by social media platforms. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research explaining how social media platforms shape consumer morality. Thus, this article combines large-scale quantitative text analysis with qualitative methods to explain the construction of moral discourses concerning guns on YouTube and Twitter among Brazilian users. We contribute to theory on consumer morality by proposing the Process of Morality Formation on Social Media Platforms, which explains how moral discourses are fueled by social actors displaying and commenting about news pieces and political events; how the expressive and connective affordances of social media platforms mediate the dynamics of moral discourses; and how social actors differently appropriate content, frame and justify their public positions by adopting different “worlds of justification” (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). The implications of this work for marketing and society are discussed, and government and corporate initiatives are suggested.
In Rainer Diaz-Bone & Guillemette de Larquier (eds.), Handbook of economics and sociology of conventions. Cham: Springer, Online first
Abstract. The birth moment of economics and sociology of conventions (EC/SC) was partly based on the questioning of institutional categorizations that shape work and economic activities. Within this framework of EC/SC, the sociology of quantification and categorization offers a fruitful approach to this line of research: the relationships that are built between official (or scholar) classifications and ordinary categorizations of the social space. Laurent Thévenot and Luc Boltanski’s survey based on games constituted an original empirical operationalization of this question in the early 1980s. The chapter first looks at the design of this innovative survey, the aim of which was to put individuals in a position to produce their own classification of the world of work and then at its main contributions. It then shows how this survey is the basis for a number of questions and concepts in convention theory. Finally, the chapter presents the subsequent uses and posterity of this survey in the social sciences in France and other countries.
Abstract.Based on observations and in-depth interviews with Catholic Religious Education teachers in Italy, this sociological study tackles ‘spirituality’ as a register of legitimization in their professional settings. Compared with more established topics of “religious culture”, the motives of “spirituality” appear as a lesser category of justification in teachers’ discourse in two significant aspects: teaching about ‘spirituality’ as a necessary component of human experience, and talking about their own relationship to ‘spirituality’ as proof of sincere commitment and/or professionalism. Thus, in the context of teachers’ labor, “spirituality” constitutes an ambivalent category that can serve the purposes of Catholic institutions as well as forms of criticism of authority.
Elk Sam Van, Juliane Reinecke, Susan Trenholm & Ewan Ferlie (2024)
Human Relations. Online first.
Abstract. How can actors use the future to politically navigate moral disputes today? This article examines how projected futures are constructed and mobilised to suspend present-day moral dilemmas. Utilising the Economies of Worth and Barbara Adam’s sociology of time, we discursively analyse the moral dilemma between civic virtues and financial savings in UK healthcare austerity (2010–2018). This reveals how the pro-austerity government avoided moral scrutiny of their posited solutions to apparently intractable moral struggles using future projections we term ‘promissory futures’. Promissory futures project desirable futures that ambiguously seem both secured enough to be reliable, and open enough to escape today’s moral dilemmas. Thus, government could use them to shift the temporal focus away from present-day moral critique of how they were balancing austerity’s financial savings against civic virtues, and into a future where savings and civic virtues were compatible. However, promissory futures contain a contradiction: the future cannot be both already-secured and still-open. Thus, critics could eventually deconstruct promissory futures, requiring government to repeatedly reconstruct them. There thus emerges less a definitive moral settlement and more a continual process of moral settling, whereby a series of promissory futures together forestall critique of underlying settlements, thus delaying moral struggles’ denouements.
European Review of Service Economics and Management, 17(1), pp. 57-88.
Abstract.The aim of this article is to show that recent developments in healthcare systems worldwide call for a return to the parallel history of economic thought and medical epistemology. While the reforms of the last forty years are based on the idea that medical care can be tailored to numerical standards, a growing body of literature shows that it leads to a decline in quality. Solving these problems means returning to the pioneering writings on medical care published in the 1960s. Two texts that are of major importance are examined. The first is the paper by Arrow (1963) the reception of which was paradoxical. The second text is the book by Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and The Pathological published in French in 1966. It is proposed to demonstrate here that the development of economic policy on healthcare is problematic because it disregards the teachings of Arrow and Canguilhem.
Philippe Batifoulier, Victor Duchesne & Ariane Ghirardello (2024)
European Review of Service Economics and Management, 17(1), pp. 29-55.
Abstract.The private health insurance market in France has undergone significant development over the last two decades. This evolution stems from the State’s entrustment of a new role to the market concerning social cohesion, marked by a hyper-regulation of health insurance contracts, resulting in substantial standardisation. Contrary to being a major challenge, standardisation, inherent in the insurance market, compels insurers to distinguish themselves not solely based on guarantees but by offering a myriad of services. This approach enables policyholders to manage their health individually. This strategy not only signifies an adaptation of insurers’ business models but also reflects a new ethos in health insurance, championed by the State, which legitimises market players as contributors to public health and the common good.
Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Online first.
Abstract. This article presents a review of Christian Bessy’s book Expropriation by Law, Edward Elgar, 2023. It is a rare and unique book that analyzes financialization from the institutional change approach elaborated by French institutionalism known as the Economics of Convention. We tend to think of patents as merely one of the increasingly fluidized rights in the trend toward securitization. However, Bessy convinces that the growing importance of intellectual property rights is not a minor and collateral consequence of financialization. In the eight chapters of his book he abductively creates and demonstrates the following thesis: the interactions among the legal intermediaries on patents have been a significant driving force of financialization because it has driven the reformation of business and financial management in corporations. This, he writes, has led to the current linkage between the corporations and the stock market. In this review two issues from the book from the perspective of the original American institutionalist John R. Commons are highlighted. First, the book focuses on the characteristics of the entrepreneur of the intermediaries that affect the reformations of internal, external, and collective aspects of public and private going concerns. This is by way of transforming conventions for patent valuations. Second, the book links financialization with the transformation of employment institutions under the proposition of endogenous dynamics of law driven by legal intermediaries.
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”.
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
The role of social clause facilitators in the emergence and stabilization of the work-integration market
Olivier Gayot (2023)
Socioéconomie du travail, 13(1), pp. 85-120
Résumé. Les facilitateurs des clauses sociales sont des spécialistes chargés de soutenir le recours aux clauses sociales dans les marchés publics. L’article étudie les relations qu’entretiennent ces facilitateurs avec les collectivités locales dans les Hauts-de-France. Il montre leur rôle dans le choix des formes que prendront les clauses et les effets de ces formes sur les publics bénéficiaires : facilité d’accès au dispositif pour certains publics-cibles, exclusion des publics considérés comme moins employables et des publics féminins… L’article présente également la participation des facilitateurs à la création d’un sous-espace du marché du travail : le marché du travail en insertion. Il montre comment les facilitateurs régulent et stabilisent ce marché du travail particulier et en quoi leurs actions peuvent entraîner une forme de réencastrement partiel de celui-ci dans la sphère sociale.
Extrait: ” L’économie des conventions permet d’analyser les justifications fournies par les facilitateurs lors de leurs choix relatifs aux clauses sociales. En s’appuyant spécifiquement sur les conventions de qualité, cette section met en évidence que les formes de clauses mobilisées par les facilitateurs sont le résultat de compromis entre des représentations plurielles de la qualité des clauses sociales. Par ailleurs, cette section montre en mobilisant l’analyse institutionnaliste polanyienne, que les facilitateurs, par leurs missions, créent les conditions de réussite du marché du travail en insertion. ” (p. 99)
Abstract. Social clause facilitators are specialists responsible for supporting the use of social clauses in public procurement contracts. This article examines the relationship between these facilitators and local authorities in the Hauts-de-France region. It shows their role in choosing the forms that the clauses will take, and the effects of these forms on the beneficiaries: easy access for certain target groups, exclusion of groups considered less employable and of women… The article also presents the facilitators’ involvement in the creation of a sub-space of the labor market: the market for work-integration. It shows how facilitators regulate and stabilize this peculiar labor market, and how their actions can lead to its partial re-embedding into the social sphere.
Extract: “The economics of convention makes it possible to analyze the justifications provided by facilitators when making their choices regarding social clauses. Focusing specifically on quality conventions, this section shows that the forms of clauses mobilized by facilitators are the result of compromises between plural representations of the quality of social clauses. In addition, using Polanyian institutionalist analysis, this section shows that facilitators, through their missions, create the conditions for success in the insertion labor market.”
In Rainer Diaz-Bone & Guillemette de Larquier (eds.), Handbook of economics and sociology of conventions. Cham: Springer, Online first
Abstract. This chapter elaborates on the potential of economics and sociology of conventions (EC/SC) in the field of consumption. The concept of quality conventions has often been exemplified by differences in consumer taste or consumer goods. This illustrative use of empirical aspects of consumption will be taken as the starting point of the chapter. In doing so, works of different scholars in the field of EC/SC can be accommodated, then proceeding to the systematization of research questions, which have already been examined in detail, as well as those, which need more attention in future research. The chapter then deals with the theoretical implications of EC/SC for a sociology of consumption. The difference of EC/SC regarding other theories will be employed to advocate a widening of the scope on symbolic orders of consumption. Drawing on several theories, which help to differentiate the symbolic as well as material orders of consumption, the chapter aims to elucidate the idea of a plurality of conventions and points especially to the fallacies of productivism in the sociology of consumption. The impact of valuation and recommendation practices in the field of digitalized consumption is then discussed as an empirical test case, especially regarding the role of technological infrastructures. Finally, future tasks to identify the modes of critique related to consumption are summarized and the possibilities of enhancing consumer democracy by using EC/SC as a tool for the mapping of controversial issues of consumption are outlined.
