French Pragmatic Sociology Research Articles

Attachments to the common-place: pragmatic sociology and the aesthetic cosmopolitics of eco-house design in Kyoto, Japan

This article builds on ethnographic work concerning on-going collective efforts in the Japanese city of Kyoto aiming to reposition a vernacular style of wooden housing, known as kyō-machiya, into a hybrid eco-design widely considered an appropriate local response to the global challenges of climate change. To understand the dynamic interplay of architecture and community-building in this case, the article stages a theoretical debate on the politics of shared attachments between three proponents of French pragmatic sociology: Bruno Latour, Antoine Hennion, and Laurent Thévenot. Drawing in particular on Thévenot's notion of ‘commonality in the plural’, the article shows how a range of personal affinities to the architectural form of the kyō-machiya, positioned as an urban ‘common-place’, serves to coordinate across otherwise divergent interests. By taking seriously the role of attachments to common-places, the article concludes, pragmatic sociology helps focus attention on the aesthetic (cosmo-)politics at stake in contemporary urban ecology worldwide.

Non-normative critique

The close ties between modes of governing, subjectivities and critique in contemporary societies challenge the role of critical social research. The classical normative ethos of the unmasking researcher unravelling various oppressive structures of dominant vs. dominated groups in society is inadequate when it comes to understand de-politicizing mechanisms and the struggles they bring about. This article argues that only a non-normative position can stay attentive to the constant and complex evolution of modes of governing and the critical operations actors themselves engage in. The article outlines a non-normative but critical programme based on an ethos of re-politicizing contemporary pervasive modes of governing. The analytical advantages and limitations of such a programme are demonstrated by readings of both Foucauldian studies and the works of and debates regarding the French pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot.

EXPERIMENTAL ENGAGEMENTS AND METACODES

This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science” (Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 [Spring 2014]: 337 – 62), which concerns the “postcritical” work of Richard Rottenburg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Helen Verran. Rottenburg's response clarifies the key argument of his book Far-Fetched Facts (2002 in German, 2009 in English), situates it in a biographical and political context of despair and hope, and extends it in ways stimulated by Jensen's article and by reading in the sociology of critique that Rottenburg has done since writing the book. He here reformulates the main argument of his book as concerning the indispensable necessity of what Nietzsche calls “legislated language,” along with its performative effects and insurmountable fallibility. By situating that argument in a biographical and political context that the book does not emphasize, and by explaining the “plot” of the book, Rottenburg emphasizes that Far-Fetched Facts was intentionally and principally written from a perspective that does not allow the maintenance of a clear-cut distinction between fact and value and that, therefore, is a contribution toward a methodology of hope. This essay moreover indicates ways in which Far-Fetched Facts is linked to developments in the French pragmatist sociology of critique, which offers a compatible and, at the same time, well-established language to make similar points. This sociology starts from the assumption that practices of ordering depend on the establishment of forms for commensuration, classification, qualification, valuation, and calculation of equivalence that imply reference to realities “out there” and to perceived common goods. A convention (or the element of a “metacode”) is a temporarily established, dynamic, and reflexive material-semantic form that enables interpretation and evaluation. By raising expectations of how things must be done in order to pass as appropriate, valid, and legitimate, conventions facilitate cooperation, yet at some stage in their lives conventions become controversial and need to be replaced. In order to communicate and to coordinate actions, conventions and metacodes are as indispensable as they are fallible, Rottenburg argues, and instead of being replaced by “good faith” and “hope,” conventions and metacodes actually depend on them.

Distributing leadership across people and objects in a collaborative research project

This paper examines how distributed leadership involving actor–object couplings may contribute to coordinated action across disparate thought worlds. We draw on ideas from French pragmatist sociology and on a case study of a successful collaborative research project involving participants from academia, government and practice settings to show how various kinds of objects (including material artifacts, more abstract concepts and human-material assemblages such as committees and procedures) come to participate in the leadership practices of multiple individuals, allowing the connection among different worlds. We suggest that adjustments between groups involved in collaborative work do not necessarily occur through the sharing of a common vision but through the ability of leaders to translate projects in terms that can be appreciated by the groups that must be mobilized. These translation activities are distributed widely between leaders and objects that co-construct each other. Objects frame action and give meaning to people, participating in the construction of leaders' roles.

The Competent Actor

Traditional institutional analysis and the conceptualization of a competent actor—an ordinary individual at times culturally disembedded and capable of proactively engaging with institutional complexity—have not made the best bedfellows so far. This is about to change. Limitations in the institutional logics perspective regarding its microfoundations are now beginning to be addressed and attention has shifted to the theorizing of actorhood. Recent work on institutional biography and reflexivity stresses the importance of agency in bringing the actor back into the debate around institutional logics or institutional orders in a broader sense. This commentary speaks to the growing research interest in actor’s “on the ground” dealing with multiple logics. The notion of the competent actor and its potential to be further developed from an institutional logics perspective together with French pragmatist sociology are discussed.

Toward a Situated Stance in Organizational Institutionalism

Organizational Institutionalism is gradually embracing a more situated, actor-centered stance that is prompting empirical inquiry into how embedded actors respond to institutional complexity. French Pragmatist Sociology can contribute to this endeavor because it provides a situated, relational, and practice-oriented framework for studying how actors negotiate and justify actions through shared moral “worlds” that are akin to institutional logics. French Pragmatist Sociology can help illuminate three questions that are key to a situated stance in Organizational Institutionalism: (a) How free are individuals to engage with non-institutionalized mind-sets? (b) How institutionally determined are individual interests? and (c) How deliberate are individuals about provoking institutional effects? The discussion includes concrete proposals for empirical study as well as limitations and potential pitfalls that should be taken into consideration.

Family Affairs

French Pragmatist sociology (FPS) and—more recently—the institutional logics (IL) perspective share an interest in micro-level actions, in particular, how individuals construct their identity and engage in material practices facing pluralist institutional contexts. IL researchers perceive the micro-level categories as directly determined by one or few dominant IL. In other words, the characteristics of society-level IL pervade all types of situations and are perceived as coordinating every kind of coordination between individuals. FPS, however, discusses pluralism with regard to different forms of grasping reality (regimes of engagement), which range from highly standardized situations to informal situations with little institutionalization. Only in standardized, public situations, individuals are likely to refer to higher common principles. I draw on an example that brings together family logic and the familiar regime of engagement to outline the differences between the IL and the French Pragmatist approach to individuals. Main points of departure are whether higher order common principles or logics dominate every kind of situation, what the appropriate level of analysis of micro-actions is, and how to empirically access them. I discuss the conceptual and epistemological implications for future studies.

Vocabularies of Divergent Legitimizing Strategies and their Effect on Ethical Standardization

Due to increasing environmental complexity firms can no longer rely on their taken-for-granted legitimacy but instead have to actively manage their image in society through communication. This is particularly true for firms operating in industries characterized by severe ethical challenges such as commodity farming. With the help of quantitative text analysis, this paper seeks to scrutinize the firms’ legitimizing strategies in the coffee, tea and chocolate industry, assessed through archival website content. Based on the institutional logics literature and the French Pragmatist Sociology, my theorizing suggests that firms will mostly rely on vocabulary associated with two distinct worlds, the ‘domestic world’ and the ‘civic world,’ when seeking to maintain their legitimacy vis-à-vis western consumers. I argue that the prevalence of each world within firm communication affects the organization’s effort to ensure work standards by collaborating with ethical labeling organizations. The impact of the firm’s legitimizing strategy on the organization’s standardization effort in turn depends on whether the firm can be classified as family firm as the latter is less likely to engage in decoupling.

The Logic of Institutional Logics

Research on institutional logics has exploded in the last decade. Much of this work has taken its inspiration from Friedland and Alford’s call to “bring society back in” to organizational analysis. Interestingly, when Friedland and Alford published their seminal piece, another body of work with similar focus emerged in France under the banner of French Pragmatist Sociology. In this article, we discuss how French Pragmatist Sociology complements institutional logics by helping it address its main limitations or blind spots. These include (a) microfoundations and recursiveness (how institutions are formed, maintained, or changed at a micro level), (b) legitimacy struggles (how struggles are resolved on a day-to-day basis), (c) morality (as an important element underscoring institutional logics), and (d) materiality (as physical and tangible instantiations of logics). We conclude by suggesting that a rapprochement between both approaches provides an elegant means of bridging the lingering divide between “old” and “new” institutionalism.

Paul DU GAY & Glenn MORGAN (2013) New Spirits of Capitalism? Crises, Justifications and Dynamics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Du Gay and Morgan’s edited collection offers a thorough volume focusing on The New Spirit of Capitalism (NSC), a book published in France in 1999 and translated into English in 2005. There is no doubt that New Spirits of Capitalism? Crises, Justifications and Dynamics is a timely landmark work among the growing body of organization studies inspired by approaches developed in the field of French pragmatist sociology (Jagd, 2011; Patriotta, Gond & Schultz, 2011; Cloutier & Langley, 2013; see also the M@n@gement special issue with Dansou & Langley, 2012; Taupin, 2012). This is particularly due to the fact that, as noted by the editors, Boltanski and Chiapello’s seminal work is a weighty tome that presents several complex contributions to domains as diverse as sociology, political economy, social history, social critique etc. Whilst elucidating one theoretical approach stemming from that articulated in Boltanski and Thevenot’s On Justification (published in France in 1991, eight years before NSC but translated into English in 2006), Du Gay and Morgan also take the opportunity to clarify the approach of the French pragmatist sociology (also termed sociology of critical practices or sociology of critique), which is often misunderstood. With New Spirits of Capitalism?

Organic food and the plural moralities of food provisioning

The aim of this paper is twofold. The first aim is to unfold the moral complexity of organic food consumption as part of household food provisioning. By acknowledging this complexity, and the difficulty of determining what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ in food provisioning, the idea is to allow for a better understanding of how organic food may, or may not, fit in with the various concerns of food provisioning. The second aim is to analyse how food provisioners handle this complexity so that food provisioning can proceed as an ordinary everyday activity.The paper analyses empirical material from a study of household food provisioning in Denmark. Theoretically, it draws on French pragmatic sociology as represented by the work of Boltanski and Thévenot on moral conventions and regimes of engagement. The analysis illustrates that food provisioning involves several competing sets of moral conventions and that the status of organic food in relation to these is often uncertain and contested. However, it also identifies among provisioners different strategies for handling this moral complexity in ordinary everyday life. The paper calls for some modesty in trying to change consumer behaviour in favour of organic products. Providing consumers with more information about organic food may not make it easier to determine what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ when buying food. It may only add to the complexity of food provisioning and thus to the need for compromise and pragmatism.

Beyond a subjective theory of value and towards a ‘fair price’: an organizational perspective on Fairtrade minimum price setting

This article explores Fairtrade minimum price setting as an organizational formulation of a critical response to economic liberalism and its underlying notion of value—a subjective theory of value. The aim of the article is to show what happens if such meta-level philosophical debates on fairness and markets are lived out organizationally. This is achieved by using an ethnographic study of the price setting process of the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations. The case unpacks the complexities of defining a ‘fair’ price beyond the principle of marginal utility. I draw on French pragmatist sociology in order to decompose the political and moral constructions that underpin the organizational practices of minimum price setting. Challenging the assumption of free choice in neo-classical economics, Fairtrade redefines not only how value should be calculated, but also what it is it that should be valued and who values. This makes visible the political confrontation at the point of price determination, notably by providing a social arena for where conflicts of interest between opposing parties are played out. Once the producer enters price formation processes as a person and not only as the alienable owner of a commodity, the social, political and ecological and relations of production come to the fore that are otherwise concealed through the spontaneous market mechanism.

What, if anything, is specific about having a rare disorder? Patients' judgements on being ill and being rare.

Growing efforts are made to improve the situation of persons with rare diseases, but the specific nature of these disorders remains unclear. To establish (1) to what extent people with rare disorders think that their disease's rarity causes particular difficulties, (2) to what extent these difficulties relate to other causes than rarity (i.e. other characteristics of the disease or other components of the illness experience), (3) to what extent the rarity of the disease may relate to components of patients' experience other than those that are traditionally addressed (i.e. personal or daily life aspects). Semi-structured interviews with 29 patients and 15 parents of children with one of six rare diseases (cystic fibrosis, fragile X syndrome, Wilson's disease, mastocytosis, locked-in syndrome and a sixth syndrome). The interviews were conducted in France. The analysis draws on French pragmatic sociology and focuses on the participants' judgements of their experience. Findings The participants considered as normal and acceptable a range of situations that are often viewed as specific to rare disorders and unfair. This rather positive evaluation was conditional on some specific moral criteria being met. The participants attributed the cause of their difficulties to the failure of health professionals to meet these criteria. In the participants' experience, disease-related associations play a key role and rarity seems to contribute to making them especially important. Patients' experience would be considerably improved if health professionals more often fulfilled their moral expectations, especially regarding diagnosis disclosure and information. (250 words).