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.