Monika Berg (2024)

Environmental Sociology, 10(3), pp. 294-307

Abstract. With the current technology-based transition strategy, prospecting for new mines has increased, and the extractive damage involved in mining is justified as a means of protecting the climate. The mining permit process involves fundamental trade-offs between values and goals (environmental, social, and economic) relating to global security and local livelihoods, as well as conflicting understandings of sustainability. These value conflicts and dilemmas lie at the heart of sustainable transformation. Drawing on pragmatic sociology and the orders of worth established by Boltanski and Thévenot, this paper illustrates that competing standpoints claim legitimacy by referring to different modes of judging what is good, right, and sustainable. The analysis shows that institutionalized ideals about legitimate forms of proof constrain and limit the possible ways of justifying a position, and this shapes the way nature is valued, as well as how contestation is formulated. When critics adopt legitimate forms of justification, they might win the case, but at the same time, strengthen the dominance of specific ways of ascribing value. The paper concludes that active engagement with diverging ways of ascribing worth, and thus different forms of proof, may enable governance that leads to more just and sustainable futures.

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Nathalie Magne (2024)

In Rainer Diaz-Bone & Guillemette de Larquier (eds.), Handbook of economics and sociology of conventions. Cham: Springer, Online first

Abstract. This chapter explores the relevance of the economics and sociology of conventions (EC/SC or convention theory) as a theoretical framework to study cooperatives. Three main arguments are developed. First, cooperative institutional characteristics make them more transparent, egalitarian, and reflexive than capitalist firms which is likely to produce more situation of disputes and uncertainty that can be analyzed through EC/SC. Second, the economies of worth framework allows authors to explore the microfoundations of individual and organizational responses to institutional pluralism. To demonstrate this point, empirical articles on cooperatives are reviewed, and comparisons and perspectives for future researches are suggested. Third, EC/SC brings light to one of the crucial questions in the literature on cooperatives: their level of autonomy from capitalist institutions. To address this question, the empirical literature on cooperatives uses EC/SC in an effort to characterize the conditions under which some cooperatives can develop autonomy and criticism of the capitalist institutions.

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Pierre-Yves Gomez (2024)

In Rainer Diaz-Bone & Guillemette de Larquier (eds.), Handbook of economics and sociology of conventions. Cham: Springer, Online first

Abstract. This chapter presents the development of convention theory in management sciences since the 1990s. The first part explains the reasons for and sources of inspiration of this current of research. It shows the bifurcation between management and economics research made possible by the recognition of the mimetic dimension of individual rationality. The second part describes the structural model of conventions, which identifies conventions as “information screens” and proposes a systematic description of their content. In particular, this structuralist model makes it possible to analyze the dynamics of conventions, i.e., their transformation over time. The third part presents two major developments in convention theory in management sciences: on the one hand, the effort conventions that govern activity in organizations and the adjustment between workers to implicit norms of “normal” effort and on the other hand, the qualification conventions that govern relations between the organization and its environment (including markets) and determine who is in charge of defining the level of quality in a transaction. The articulation of these two conventions has renewed our understanding of managerial decisions, although promising work remains to be done.

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Julie Bérubé & Jacques-Bernard Gauthier (2024)

Canadian Review of Sociology, Online first, open access

Abstract. Artists-entrepreneurs struggle with the tension between their artistic and entrepreneurial values. Previous research on this tension focuses on urban creative hubs and shows the presence of politicians to create, with the artists, a structure constituted of investment formulas to ease this tension. Based on Boltanski and Thévenot’s On Justification theory, our research focuses on the case of artist-entrepreneurs located outside Canada’s creative hubs. The tension between artistic and entrepreneurial values is expressed as a tension between the inspired and market worlds, which is managed through the civic world in Canadian creative hubs. The results of 50 semi-structured interviews with non-urban Canadian artist-entrepreneurs reveal that politicians are less implicated in these regional cultural industries. In order to manage the tension between artistic and entrepreneurial values, artists themselves are developing individual and collective investment formulas to create structure in the cultural industries that compensates for the low-level of involvement by politicians. Thus, we identify that the tension between the inspired and market worlds is managed through the presence of the projective world in the case of Canada’s non-urban artist-entrepreneurs.

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