(2018)
In: Bonaccorsi A. (eds) The Evaluation of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities. Springer, Cham
Abstract. Controversies about research evaluation in SSH do not depend mainly on technical issues, such as coverage and reliability of indicators, but on deeper epistemic reasons. This chapter argues that entering into the way in which scientific communities produce valid knowledge is a promising avenue to make research evaluation legitimate and productive. The chapters, expanding a work initiated in a book, combine two levels of analysis: a historical reconstruction of the academic institutionalisation of disciplines, and a discussion of epistemic issues, such as the explanatory orientation, the methodology, and the overall position with respect to two epistemological challenges.
English Abstract. Conventions of Occupational Integration. The Employment of Disabled People in Swiss Enterprises (1950 to 1980). Disabled people’s access to the labour market is one of the leading ideas in disability policy. Its success depends on the willingness of employers to employ handicapped people. Both historical and social studies focus on the welfare state or the people in question, while the perspective of the employers is often neglected. Under what conditions are companies willing to employ people whose performance diverges from the common interest to maximise economic output? Switzerland is well suited for a case study, since there are no regulations for employers, such as a quota-system. Incorporating the theory of «économie des conventions», this study investigates how employers’ associations and companies justify employment of disabled people and how these people are valued. The timeframe investigated spans from the immediate post-war period to 1980.
Barman’s new Caring Capitalism: The Meaning and Measure of Social Value illustrates how the pursuit of social good through business has become a more capacious activity than previously recognized, embedded in almost every arena of the modern corporate world. She demonstrates how the pursuit of social good has become integral, almost ingrained, across practically all industries and private organizations operating under capitalism today. She makes the point through the book’s three sections. The first covers the least surprising and earliest examples of this kind of activity: nonprofit organizations that self-consciously pursue do-good missions, as an alternative to or directly through market activity. The second part follows those who operate on the outside and attempt to force or nudge for-profit corporations to create social goods (or avoid social bads) by, for instance, labeling consumer goods as “fair trade” or “organic” or by crafting investment priorities around avoiding tobacco and guns. More broadly, these are cases of what is often called private regulation, including early initiatives to enforce “corporate social responsibility” and “socially responsible investing.” The final part of the book puts the most surprising developments on display: for-profit, multi-national corporations of all kinds that are taking on the charge. Here Barman highlights corporations that are being pressured to orient their activities toward the social good. This section includes the mainstreaming of investment evaluations by Bloomberg and colleagues that link social welfare to corporate profit. It also tracks the development of multi-national “inclusive businesses” whose core goals include poverty elimination and community development. Caring Capitalism does not examine what these corporations are actually doing to achieve social goods; instead, the book is focused on how they demonstrate such achievements across practically all corporate fields of activity.
Abstract. Institutional theory, and the institutional logics approach in particular, lacks the feelings that produce, sustain and disrupt institutional practice. This is due in part to rational, instrumental understandings of the individual in practice, and in part to the cognitive and linguistic understanding of that practice, sustained by classification, qualification and belief. Emotion, a joining of language and bodily affect, is ready at hand for institutional theory. There is increasing recognition that emotion is a powerful device for institutionalization and de-institutionalization. In this essay, I consider emotion’s position in institutional theory and how we might position it in an institutional logics approach. I will argue that emotion not only mediates institutions, but can itself be institutional.
