Archives mensuelles : décembre 2025

(Re)Inventing influence: valuation and justification in the influencer marketing industry

Arturo Arriagada and Matías Valderrama (2025).
In: Journal of Cultural Economy, online first, pp. 1–17.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2025.2559312

ABSTRACT
“This article examines how influencer marketing companies and their algorithmic tools define and measure ‘influence’ in Latin America. Drawing on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ framework, and based on case studies and interviews with executives from three Chilean companies, the study analyses how these firms deploy digital quantification practices to identify, monitor, and manage influencers. The findings show that agencies seek to calculate influencers’ value through opaque indicators, pricing structures, and monitoring systems that remain largely invisible to content creators. Despite the volatility, lack of regulation, and risks that characterise the industry, these companies promise brands greater certainty by offering algorithmic tools that select, control, and evaluate influencers. Far from acting as neutral intermediaries concerned only with brand safety, agencies actively shape influencer practices by setting expectations, defining performance metrics, and enforcing pricing standards-often to the detriment of creators. By tracing how agencies justify and operationalise metrics to assign value to influencer labour, the article highlights how processes of quantification reproduce asymmetrical relations of power. It argues that these dynamics undermine influencers’ agency whilst consolidating the dominance of platforms and intermediaries in the wider influencer economy.”

Value struggles and place: Looking at tradition, authenticity, and heritage through the wine glass

Stefano Ponte (2025)
In: Competition and Change, online first, pp. 1-24.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10245294251399855

Abstract. Wine is one of the most fragmented and diversified agro-food industries in the global economy, and one that is not yet utterly dominated by large corporate interests. It is also where all sorts of antagonisms to the power of capital are happening, and where the expansion of uniform and branded offerings is counterbalanced by alternative discourses and practices that attempt to instil appreciation for how ‘place’ can deliver a large range of different wines. At the same time, a large proportion of wine has industrial and ‘placeless’ qualities – just like in many other commodities circulating globally through value chains. In this article, I draw on the sociology of value to explore how different ‘worlds of valuation’ shape the ways place becomes a site of value struggles in wine, particularly through contested notions of tradition, authenticity, and heritage. I conclude that capital accumulation along value chains is based not only on superior bargaining power and regulatory and institutional setups that benefit capital against smaller producers and labour but also on the normative work around conflicting worlds of valuation related to place.

Visualising state-led gentrification in Tāmaki, Auckland

Morgan Hamlin (2025)

Visual Studies, online first, pp. 1-20.

Abstract. This article examines how artist-activists deglamourised the large-scale Tāmaki regeneration programme and visualised the impact of state-led gentrification in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Extending Laurent Thévenot’s sociology of engagements to the analysis of visual data, I argue that familiarity, as a type of valuation, can be evoked effectively to critique gentrification. The positive aspects of state-led gentrification can make it difficult for housing activists to justify their arguments and expose the negative effects of a redevelopment/regeneration project. However, in the case of the Tāmaki regeneration, the artist-activists used images of gentrification to reveal displacement and the privatisation of state housing. Analysing interviews, public exhibitions, and researcher-produced images, I highlight the important role that visual activism and research plays in resisting and documenting state-led ‘positive’ gentrification.

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The Transformation of Conventions for Artistic Quality. The Case of the One Percent-for-Art Program in France (1951-2022)

Christian Bessy (2025)

Œconomia [En ligne], 15-3 | 2025, Online and Open access

Abstract. From the very first years of its creation in France, the public commissioning system known as the 1% artistic contribution (to the cost of construction) has been the subject of much criticism, fueling controversy surrounding contemporary art and the denunciation of avant-garde academicism. This article departs from this critical sociology of cultural policy, based on the hypothesis of a plurality of conventions for evaluating the quality of public commissions. By taking a historical perspective (1951-2022), the analysis of artistic quality conventions provides a privileged vantage point from which to observe changes in the aims of this regulatory mechanism and the criticisms to which it is subjected. The text begins by characterizing each of the three periods distinguished with reference to a dominant quality convention supported by a certain type of market intermediary. In the fourth part, it offers a summary, showing the specific nature of each of these conventions, according to different characteristics, as well as their interrelationship.

Résumé. Dès les premières années de sa création en France, le dispositif de la commande publique dit du 1% artistique (du coût de la construction) a fait l’objet de nombreuses critiques qui ont alimenté les controverses autour de l’art contemporain et la dénonciation d’un académisme d’avant-garde. Ce texte s’éloigne de cette sociologie critique de la politique culturelle à partir de l’hypothèse d’une pluralité de conventions d’évaluation de la qualité de la commande publique. En retenant une perspective historique (1951-2022), l’analyse par les conventions de qualité artistique constitue un point d’observation privilégié des évolutions des finalités de ce dispositif réglementaire et des critiques dont il fait l’objet. Le texte commence par caractériser chacune des trois périodes distinguées en référence à une convention de qualité dominante portée par un certain type d’intermédiaire marchand. Dans une quatrième partie, il propose une synthèse en montrant la spécificité de chacune de ces conventions, suivant différentes caractéristiques, ainsi que leur intrication.

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Vocational Education and Training as a Research Topic for Convention Theory: A Historical and Comparative Perspective

Philipp Gonon & Cristian Imdorf (2025)

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

Abstract. Vocational education and training (VET) has been discovered as a field of research for economics and sociology of conventions (EC/SC) since the turn of the century, first in France and Switzerland and then in other countries. The dispositive of VET is mainly based on civic, industrial, and market orders of worth as shown in historical debates and studies summarized in this chapter. This historical approach makes it possible to trace the role and importance of competing orders of justification, promoted by various actors, in particular industry and the state. Moreover, an interregional and international comparative perspective helps to identify several quality claims for VET that are crucial for the development of a VET system. The current form of a VET is dependent on historical pathways, which are based on different often nationally specific values and orders of worth. Nevertheless, VET research based on EC/SC could be extended to a broader theory and more complex studies by integrating more actor- and dispositive-centered perspectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of VET.

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Propriétés et économies entre matériel et immatériel XVIe-XXIe siècle

Properties and savings between tangible and intangible assets, 16th-21st centuries

Michela Barbot, Christian Bessy et Anne Conchon (dir.) (2025)

Vincennes: Institut de la gestion publique et du développement économique (Open access)

A propos de l’ouvrage. Quel est le point commun entre le canal de la Loire à l’Yonne, un tableau de Jean-François Millet, un immeuble à Milan et un étang de Camargue ? Ces biens appartiennent tous à une personne physique ou à une institution. Les chapitres de ce livre envisagent la genèse et les évolutions d’un large éventail de régimes de droits, qu’il s’agisse de la propriété éminente, utile ou divisée, des fidéicommis, des maîtrises de métier, des privilèges pour l’Ancien Régime, des fonds de commerce, du domaine royal puis public, ou encore, pour la période la plus récente, des droits de reproduction et de suite d’un artiste ainsi que des conséquences des « droits » à polluer et à prélever des ressources naturelles. Les contributions de cet ouvrage apportent ainsi un éclairage historique sur les mutations contemporaines des différents droits régissant les propriétés matérielles et immatérielles.

About the book. What do the Loire-Yonne Canal, a painting by Jean-François Millet, a building in Milan, and a pond in Camargue have in common? They all belong to a natural person or an institution. The chapters in this book examine the origins and evolution of a wide range of legal regimes, including eminent domain, beneficial ownership, divided ownership, trusts, trade guilds, privileges under the Ancien Régime, business assets, royal and then public property, or, in more recent times, artists’ reproduction and resale rights, as well as the consequences of “rights” to pollute and extract natural resources. The contributions in this book thus shed historical light on contemporary changes in the various rights governing tangible and intangible property.

Extrait: “Structuré en trois parties, cet ouvrage pose la question de la définition des droits de propriété, et de leur caractère plus ou moins tangible, à partir des processus d’accumulation et de transmission des actifs, de leur régulation et des modes d’évaluation qui sont mis en œuvre par des professionnels. Si chaque partie traite plus particulièrement d’un type d’opération, tous les textes les abordent d’une façon ou d’une autre, du fait de l’interdépendance entre ces processus. Cette présentation permet d’articuler différentes échelles d’analyse et de bien mettre en évidence les pratiques des acteurs intermédiaires. De ce point de vue, l’esprit de cet ouvrage s’inscrit dans une méthodologie proche du « structuralisme pragmatique » défendu par Luc Boltanski et Arnaud Esquerre dans leur essai Enrichissement présentant la structure des formes conventionnelles de mise en valeur des choses. Néanmoins, à la différence de ces sociologues, les contributeurs de ce volume mettent la focale sur la définition des droits de propriété qui rendent possibles ces formes de valorisation (droits qui restent un angle mort dans l’ouvrage précité) en se centrant autant sur les questions de la transmission de la richesse que sur les processus de sa formation et les politiques de redistribution.” (Michela Barbot, Christian Bessy et Anne Conchon, Introduction générale)

Excerpt: “Structured in three parts, this book examines the definition of property rights and their more or less tangible nature, based on the processes of asset accumulation and transfer, their regulation, and the methods of valuation used by professionals. While each part deals more specifically with one type of transaction, all the texts address them in one way or another, due to the interdependence between these processes. This presentation makes it possible to articulate different levels of analysis and to highlight the practices of intermediary actors. From this point of view, the spirit of this book is in line with a methodology close to the “pragmatic structuralism” advocated by Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in their essay Enrichissement, which presents the structure of convention-based forms of valorization of things. Nevertheless, unlike these sociologists, the contributors to this volume focus on the definition of property rights that make these forms of valorization possible (rights that remain a blind spot in the aforementioned work), concentrating as much on issues of wealth transmission as on the processes of its formation and redistribution policies.” (Michela Barbot, Christian Bessy, and Anne Conchon, General Introduction)

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