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Pluralist
Integration in the Economic and Social Sciences:
The Economy of Conventions
François Eymard-Duvernay,
Olivier Favereau, André Orléan,
Robert Salais,
and Laurent Thévenot (l’université Paris X, l’université
Paris X, l’École Polytechnique, l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan
, Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
The Economy of Conventions [EC] programme
incorporates, in a new perspective, three issues that have been dissociated
by a century and a half of economic thinking: the characterization of the
agent and his/her reasons for acting; the modalities of the coordination of
actions; and the role of values and common goods (for former discussions of
the programme, see Dupuy et al., 1989, Orléan, 1994, Salais, Thévenot, 1986). Standard economic theory was built on
strict compartmentalization between the two issues of rationality and
coordination that were axiomatized separately, the
former by decision-making theory and the latter by general equilibrium theory
(Favereau, 1997). These two issues were in turn
isolated from the third, which concerns value judgments and normative
considerations. In contrast, the frameworks of analysis that we have
constructed propose an articulation between these three issues. If we agree
that the coordination of human actions is problematical and not the result of
laws of nature or constraints, we can understand that human rationality is
above all interpretative and not only or immediately calculative. The agent
first has to apply conventional frameworks to understand others’ situations
and actions before he/she can coordinate him/herself. This understanding is
not only cognitive but also evaluative, with the form of evaluation
determining the importance of what the agent grasps and takes into account.
This is where we recognize the role, in coordination, of collective values
and common goods that cannot be reduced to individual preferences but provide
the framework for the most legitimate coordination conventions. This is also
where language plays a part as a key component of institutions. EC aims for
an integration that concerns the economic, social and political sciences equally.
In this way, they should be brought closer together, rather than each one
expanding separately at the expense of the others.
In the first part, we note that the economic and
social sciences are confronting each other today as both try to expand and
conquer ground in the rival discipline’s domain. This effort at
generalization is of interest to us. Yet it reveals the limits encountered
when extensions retain a core of hypotheses that do not incorporate all the
dimensions of coordinated human action. In the second part, we revert to
these core hypotheses in order to highlight the shifts effected by EC. The
uncertainty weighing on coordination is no longer only a question of the
distribution of information; it is contained by the interpretative rationality
of agents and limited by the common frameworks of evaluation that qualify the
relevant elements of the situation. These conventional frameworks of
coordination are plural without necessarily leading to relativism. The third
part reveals a ‘horizontal’ pluralism of conventions of qualification that
correspond to the same grammar and all present the highest degree of
generality and justification. This initial pluralism enables us to analyse
the complexity and diversity of markets and economic organization without
reducing them to a calculation about contracts or transactions. We are thus
better equipped to study business enterprises and the particularity of the
labour and finance markets. In the fourth part, we introduce another
pluralism, a ‘vertical’ one this time, where the degree of generality or
publicity of conventions of coordination is varied. This second pluralism
allows for the differentiation of the generic notion of convention by
distinguishing modes of coordination and information formats of more local
types. But it also enables us to refine the analysis of political and moral
evaluations. It accounts for the tensions between fairness, based on
equivalence, and assessments which rely on closer interactions. Finally, the
shift from micro to macro is thus rendered twice as complex, once by the
intrinsic variety of ways of generalizing, and a second time by a deepening
of the local/general relationship.
1. Confrontation or Efforts to Integrate the
Economic and Social Sciences
We need to
pay serious attention to the aspiration to generalization currently apparent
in both economics and sociology, in the form of an attempted extension into
the other discipline’s preferred domain. This leads to an interesting
situation in which there is no longer a clear-cut division between
territories, and in which we can compare approaches in the overlapping
advances of the two disciplines.
Based on a diagnosis of the extension observed on
both sides, we are going to plead in favour of the theory of conventions approach
grounded in a reflexive attention to each of the two disciplines. Rather than
a pluri- or multi-disciplinary approach that would
simply combine the contributions of different disciplines, our perspective
seeks to cross the boundaries between economics and sociology in order to
uncover their common foundations, and to re-examine them. The idea is not,
however, to ignore the original contributions of each discipline, or to
confuse them. Reconsidering the common foundations of these two disciplines
is particularly urgent, for politics (the role of the State and intermediate
authorities; creation of a general interest; individual engagement in the
public sphere) is currently being profoundly reshaped by the construction of
Europe and the search for international regulations within the new context of
globalization. In so far as it is occupied to a large extent by themes
borrowed from economics (governance, rational action, strategic manipulation,
etc.), political science offers no original adequate resources for
reconstructing politics.
From a Science of Market Exchange
to a General Science of Human Relations
The economy
is spreading to non-commercial relations through such mechanisms as
‘contracts’ and ‘games’ which are more transactional than the picture formerly
painted of general market equilibrium, and which depart in that respect from
the first extensions (in G. Becker’s style, in particular). The New
Institutional Economics is typical of such extensions. The areas affected are
the family, power, politics, organizations; the market goods exchanged in
commercial trade are no longer the mainstay of coordination. There remains a
notion of generalized preference that extends to the modes of interaction
with others. Formerly closely articulated within the sphere of commercial
goods and services, this notion of preference is becoming more important – as
seen, in particular, in the extreme case of game theory. Goods are replaced
by strategies directly concerned with the relation of preference.
This extension raises several questions:
- It is intended to cover all
human behaviours and to turn economics into a universal social science
occupying all the ground of the other sciences of society, both social
and political. But how can its coherence with the initial core of
economic theory and its required unity be maintained? The link with the
core of market relations, maintained by reference to competition and
incentives, stems from the fact that, despite its apparent reference to
legal contractual forms, the notion of a ‘contract’ is above all an
extension of that of ‘equilibrium’, a balance between interests that
have nothing in common and are often even antagonistic. To allow this
extension, new notions of equilibrium are introduced (J. Nash).
- By trying to link all the
‘equilibriums’ of behaviors to the original
core of competitive market coordination, the extension opens only
superficially onto a variety of contractual devices or modes of
transaction. The core excludes recognition of an interpretative
rationality, of an ethical judgement and a reference to collective
objects and beings. Yet these notions are fundamental elements of a
grammar common to the multiple modes of coordination analysed in the
conventionalist programme. Without such recognition, the variety of
contractual devices taken into consideration is limited by the single
mould of Nash equilibrium or refined versions of it. There is, indeed, a
very close link between standard rationality in situations of
interaction and Nash’s concept of equilibrium, as many authors have
noted, from L. Johansen to D. Kreps.
The Social Embeddedness
of Economics and the Social Construction of Markets
Economic
sociology offers a counter-attack to these extensions and is intended to
reduce economics to a field equivalent to the other social actions in which
it specializes. The advantage of this opposing extension consists in
inscribing so-called economic relations in a far wider space by highlighting
their entanglement with social actions. With the common aim of denaturalizing
economic relations, a rich body of research on ‘the social construction of
markets’ has emerged.
Sociology encompasses a far wider range of social
actions than the one allowed by the specifications of the economic theory of
contracts (whose limitations are intended for a conceptual economy).
Consequently, the reduction effected by sociology when it expands into the
economic domain is not as radical as the symmetrical reduction. Certain
extensions are, moreover, facilitated for sociologies of actions motivated by
self-interest or strategic goals, inspired by the models of economic action,
that can thus form certain alliances with a Becker-type economics.
This extension of sociology nevertheless raises
questions comparable to those generated by the enlargement of the domain of
economics. The models of social action, even when they more or less
metaphorically employ the language of markets and interests, imply modes of
coordination that are profoundly different because they are based on social
groups, social representations, social practices, a sense of the social, and
social intercomprehension. They fail to
characterize the specificity of frames of action and coordination involving
market objects. Despite its fecundity, the notion of the embeddedness of economic
transactions in social relations attests to this reduction to models of
social links.
A Non-Reductive Integration
Our
undertaking is different from these efforts at extension based on a core of
hypotheses of standard economics or classical sociology. It takes into
account the effort of integration motivating the preceding two movements, but
it also recognizes that each disciplinary tradition highlights different
aspects and different modes of coordination which can hardly be assimilated
into the other disciplinary frame in its present state. For this reason, we
have constructed a framework of analysis devoted to an issue common to both
traditions, one that can be used to identify the matrix underlying a
plurality of modes of coordination to which the different heritages of the
disciplines bear witness.
2. Underlying the Social and Economic Sciences, a
Common Issue: Problematical Coordination of Actions
An Issue Common to the Social and
Economic Sciences
The
limitations of the two types of extension referred to above lie in the
reductions they effect with respect to the notions of action and elementary
coordination peculiar to each discipline, whether economic or social. Yet if
we go back to more fundamental questions, we recognize an issue common to
both sociology and economics: the problematical coordination of human
actions. Each discipline has concentrated on different specifications of this
coordination. We would like to preserve the resulting pluralism, without
however reducing it to differences between disciplines or remaining at the
stage of relativism.
Renewed Frameworks for Analyzing
the Uncertainty of Coordinations
How are we
equipped in terms of agents or devices (dispositifs), to account for
coordinated actions? The answer obviously depends on our interpretation of
the word coordination. As indicated in the introduction, EC is not confined
to the definition of coordination that economists base on the assumed
methodological individualism in the neo-classical currents and transaction cost
economics. The notion of coordination developed by EC highlights the role of
collective forms of evaluation. The most public forms subject coordination to
the demand for justification; modes of coordination with a less extended
scope imply forms of evaluation that correspond to more limited goods.
Moreover, the notion of coordination thus extended is not opposed to the idea
of conflict. Coordination is put to the test and achieved against a
background of failure and particularly of conflict and criticism.
‘Classical’ authors in both economics and sociology
have remained close to the reference models of the natural sciences and have
developed economic and social physics that highlight equilibriums, orders and
structures of social reproduction. Coordination is systematically guaranteed
there by powerful forces embedded in agents and in external constraints. More
recent developments have highlighted the uncertain nature of coordination,
which implies that we need to pay more attention to the modes of transactions
and interactions.
For interactionist
sociologists, uncertainty remains part of the idea of an ‘order of
interaction’, even if it is ‘negotiated’ locally in the situation. Order is
particularly doubtful for ethnomethodologists who,
in this respect, differ from ‘classical’ sociologists. But they assume that
actors actively strive to maintain a common sense, at all costs, in the
particular context of the situation, through ‘ethnomethods’.
More broadly, the notion of intercomprehension
extends the idea of an agreement through meaning, to which sociologists,
unlike economists, are very attached. For sociologists of actors’ networks
(some authors prefer to use the term ‘actant
networks’), coordination is reduced to the unique form of ‘association’ and
‘interest’, without further specification of the plurality of modes of
engagement.
For economists, the problem is concentrated on
notions of uncertainty and information. Standard theory, even extended to
problems of bounded rationality, has not called into question its model of
action. Paradoxically, disorder remains highly calibrated while leaving the
path open to opportunism. One of the most significant certainties stems from
the idea of the space of options, even though it transcends the space of
objects traded (‘hypothesis of nomenclature’: see C. Benetti,
J. Cartelier, 1980) to become a space of actions in
game theory. Common knowledge remains a heroic hypothesis as long as the ways
in which it emerges and is observed within coordination have not been studied
(Dupuy, 1989). This implies that we take seriously
the material, social and institutional conditions that allow those who
coordinate to engage in action. It also implies that we open the black box of
rational action to seek reflexivity and reason, both perspectives that
economics basically refuses, despite the repeated plea of leading authors.
How to Improve? Qualifying Uncertainty on the Basis
of a Form of Evaluation that Allows for Coordination
The
above-mentioned currents take into account an uncertainty weighing over the
coordination of behaviours, whether that uncertainty is conceived on the
basis of an asymmetry of information or on that of the particular context of
a situation. How can we do better? By differentiating forms of uncertainty
and thus of information, and then relating them to different forms of
evaluation, for evaluation is at the centre of coordination.
With the notions of ‘incompleteness’ or of
‘radical’ or ‘critical’ uncertainty, we attempt to go further back than the
formatting of the information on which the calculations of contract
economists are based. We distinguish the operations through which doubt is
channelled and treated in keeping with various formats of knowledge and
information, the relevance of which is related to a mode of coordination. In
this way, we are able to understand how forms of non-market coordination
appeal to other formats of knowledge, even though they are frequently reduced
by the economist to terms of inequality of information primarily concerning
the essential qualities of market goods and services (Favereau,
2001; Thévenot, 1984, 2002a).
In all coordination, whether it occurs in the
market, the enterprise, or is intended to achieve political agreement, there
is no regularity at the start of the action that can be considered as a sure
support. In this sense, uncertainty exists for everyone (including for the
theoretician who tries to understand and not only to explain the course of
events from the outside, afterwards). In its ordinary singularity, any coordination
is uncertain in so far as it brings into play heterogeneous actors, takes
place over time, and focuses on a product (or service) that is never entirely
predefined.
Overcoming that uncertainty requires the
conventional construction of products, services and expectations that are the
media of the commercial interaction and productive activity of firms. The
notion of a convention enables us to characterize this moment of common
construction. Note that overcoming uncertainty is a feature of daily life in
society. Observation shows that the actors often succeed in doing so, at
least to a certain degree. It suggests that this conventional construction is
a permanent individual and collective activity, incorporated into the action
itself.
Conventions channel uncertainty on the basis of a
common form of evaluation that qualifies objects for coordination. Thus, we
distinguish market conventions of qualification, in the limited sense of a
competitive consumer good market, from other conventions of qualification
that, at the cost of a sharp departure from the dominant paradigm, make it
possible to cover a broader range of transactions – which satisfies the
current ambitions of the economic and social sciences. Recognition of a
plurality of such conventions is a response to the critique of an excessive
extension of the market to all interactions, without transferring non-market
relations to a ‘social frame’ of the market. Apart from the plurality of
modes of coordination and the resulting discontinuities, it is therefore
necessary to account for a frame common to these different modes of
coordination, without which the agents’ switching from one to the other would
be incomprehensible.
Qualifying uncertainty, or specifying conventions
that allow the qualification of the objects of the transaction, result in a
recognition that the relevance of a format of knowledge depends on a form of
evaluation. Evaluation is at the centre of coordination; it is not an
argument, among others, of the individual function of utility, an invisible
bedrock – sub-contracted for analysis to other disciplines – of the
individual function of utility, or a value added to rationality to complete
or correct it.
3. The First Pluralism of General Modes of
Coordination: What Legitimacy and What Integration?
Legitimate
forms of evaluation support institutions. By recognizing that the most
general modes of coordination are based on such forms, we take the demands
for justice and democracy that weigh on organizations seriously, along with
the sense of fairness, public good or common good expected from the actors
engaged in such coordination. The importance of these expectations, which lie
at the core of political philosophy, has been diminished considerably in
prevailing economic and sociological approaches. Either they reduce all
evaluations to individual preferences incorporated into prices, or they limit
them to arbitrary social values in their diversity. The fact of taking the
legitimacy of these forms of evaluation and their pluralism seriously
modifies our understanding of both actors and organizations.
Politics, justice, democracy
If we
recognize a pluralism of legitimate modes of coordination, can we integrate
them into the government of organizations or States? Can we avoid relativism
that the social and economic sciences commonly associate with the plurality
of values?
A positive answer was formulated by analysing
relations between the most legitimate modes of coordination and the sense of
just and unjust. Instead of stopping at a typology of values, or Weberian ideal types such as those that differentiate
modes of domination, we have shown that different orders of qualification
that confer their legitimacy on general modes of coordination correspond to
the same grammar of just and unjust (Boltanski, Thévenot, 1991, 1999, 2000). Forms of evaluation, test
procedures that lead to judgment, and relations between orders of evaluation
are all denounced as unjust if they fail to satisfy a set of conditions
described in a model common to a plurality of orders of worth. We have
identified certain convergences between these conditions and two contemporary
theories of just and unjust: Rawls’ and Walzer’s.
The fact remains that the pragmatic entry via coordination of actions rather
than directly via the distribution of goods leads away from these authors. It
enables us to specify the procedures of the coordination test and its basis
of qualified objects, as well as the relation between procedures and
substantial goods, that are often ignored, especially in the opposition
between fair and good as radicalized by the liberal grammars. EC benefited
from a large amount of previous research on statistical information (Desrosières, 1998), ‘investments in forms’ which are
needed to formalize such information (Thévenot,
1984) and different forms and principles of evaluation. This last equipment,
which is used for ranking policies and evaluating their effectuation, is
taking an increasing place in the governance of the European Community. There
is a risk that the procedures for evaluating ‘good practices’ rely mainly on
closed expertise instead of remaining open to a democratic debate about the
plurality of principles of justice which are implied in these policies. By
analysing coordination devices on the basis of these grammars of fairness,
their democratic openness and its limits can be assessed. This assessment
concerns various loci such as the State, public policies relayed by
associations, standardization committees, regulatory authorities, conferences
and forums, etc., without being limited to an opposition between the State
and civil society. Civic order illuminates an essential demand in any
democratic policy, because it qualifies a quest for equality and solidarity
and relies on regulatory objects equipped by the law. The clear distinction
with a market order makes it possible to avoid the confusion resulting from
possible compromises between liberal political grammars and the convention of
market coordination, compromises which are often covered by the expansion
towards the politics of an economics focused too sharply on market relations.
Agents in Different States for
Evaluating
In the
economic model, evaluation by agents is concentrated in the utility function
that is assumed to be either stable or subjected to exogenous variations.
Several research currents try to endogenize
preferences, either by likening them to routines selected by the environment,
or by introducing an order into preferences: metapreferences.
Each of these strands of research has its appeal.
We are trying, however, to go beyond that by relating evaluation to a state
of individuals that depends on their engagement in their coordination
environment. We thus relate routine conditions not to basic automatic
regularities but to one of these modes of engagement in which habituation to
a familiar environment means that evaluation is carried out at the level of
local adjustment. We also relate the ethic content of metapreferences
to an engagement at a very different level, in which the collective
underpinning of evaluation is essential.
Unlike the extended standard theory that tries to
view the problem of coordination or cooperation by confining the cost/benefit
calculation of homo œconomicus
to the level of the individual self, social psychologists (H. Tajfel, J. Turner) have highlighted the complementary
role of two other levels, that of social selves (through membership in
groups) and that of the self as a human person. In this way, the shift from
one level to another can be understood.
Compared to sociologies that assume the existence
of stable determinants of social behaviours, the fact of taking into account
a plurality of states of evaluation leaves room for different engagements and
introduces movement into people’s dispositions. Moreover, this EC approach
relates these movements to modifications of the settings in which actions
take place, and which offer external support for evaluation. This type of
analysis does not prevent us from considering relations between these
dispositions and social affiliations; it authorizes their movement, as
observed among members of societies in which everyone has to accept diverse
modes of evaluation.
Constituent Conventions of the
Market and Firms…
Markets are
above all places where the quality of goods is tested and evaluated. Their
organization is contingent on activities that prepare those tests and format
them: activities of codification, measurement, certification, regulation,
etc. These are activities that are situated upstream or downstream from markets,
although linked to them. The State is present, as either prescriber
or guarantor.
The state of persons that has occupied economists
most is that of actors in a market. Clearly, the fact of reducing what
happens in a market to the laws of supply and demand is regrettable. First,
actors are identified only as buyers and sellers, whereas ‘behind’ that
identification consumers and producers are equally if not more important.
Consumers and producers have conventional expectations regarding the traded object
that cannot be made to coincide simply by means of a mechanical adjustment in
supply and demand. Each has an essential prerogative. Consumers are the sole
parties who determine the quality of what they buy and their decisions to do
so. Producers alone determine the rules of their production of products and
services. These two prerogatives form the starting point of agreements on the
quality of goods in a market and make them possible. Effective competition in
each type of market will depend on the type of test and evaluation that
predominates within it. Operations of evaluation differ, depending on the
market and on the nature of the objects of the transaction: products and
services of various kinds and destinations, labour, securities. As shown below,
in all these markets a plurality of principles of evaluation exist, which has
to be integrated into theoretical analysis.
The collective form of the state of persons, their
qualification, is induced by the constraints of coordination. For a common
evaluation to emerge, a procedure of composition of individual evaluations is
required. The consumer in the market is not an independent individual,
unattached to anything, as hasty critiques of the market assume. He/she has
access to all the goods in the market provided he/she is solvent and puts
him/herself into the state of a consumer, which involves certain rights and
duties. In particular, he/she must agree to the supply of goods and the
market price. Under these conditions, an aggregated demand can be constituted.
We have constraints here that are similar to those impinging on the counting
of votes in politics. The state of a consumer is based on devices, especially
market goods, that establish a format of knowledge in relations. More local
approaches emphasize behaviours that move away from this general state: the
price may be negotiated, adjustments may be made to the objectives of the
transaction, etc. This leads to a second pluralism introduced in the
following section.
…And Those of Other Legitimate Modes of
Coordination
We can
introduce other modes of coordination by varying the state of agents
governing their evaluation as to what a good is. The term ‘a good’ is
obviously ambiguous in economics since it can denote either the appropriated
thing or that which, more generally, guides an evaluation. It is not only a
source of misunderstanding, for we try to relate the good that is the object
of the transaction to plural possibilities of evaluation, not reduced to
market evaluation. In this pluralistic approach, the concept of a good is
very open and enables us to move away from the market good. The classical
distinction between good and service, reduced by the extensive frame of the
market, has a profound meaning: it already suggests states of the object of
the transaction that open onto different forms of knowledge and evaluation.
The extended concept of a good can then cover an equally broad range of modes
of coordination as those that are recognized in economics and modern society,
without reducing them to a single form.
Various strategies exist to introduce different coordinations of the market (Favereau,
Biencourt and Eymard-Duvernay,
2002). They share the fact of defining states of evaluation that differ from
that of the consumer. We can thus more satisfactorily analyse productive
activities, work that bring into play evaluations of goods whose format of
knowledge differs entirely from that of the consumer. The function of
production is the economist’s way of modelling these forms of coordination,
but by reducing them to technical constraints, so as to safeguard the
sovereignty of the market. This tension between several coordinations
has been from the origins of economics, through the debate between labour
value and use value. It is currently apparent in interest in the analysis of
firms, but contract theory is inadequate as a tool for studying it. The fact
that H. Simon developed an alternative paradigm of rationality by focusing
primarily on organizations is significant.
Once we have recognized the pluralism of
evaluations, we see the limits of the information economy more clearly:
asymmetry of information between agents is most often a problem of the
distribution of the ability to evaluate and the mode of evaluation. For
example, in a doctor’s relationship with his/her patient, we can refer to
asymmetry of information in so far as the doctor has more information than
his/her client. He/she could take advantage of that to deceive the patient by
putting less effort into treating an old person, for example, who will
nevertheless still pay the same price for the service delivered. This stems
from a capacity for evaluation that, if present only in the doctor, leads to
an abuse of power since the patient cannot participate in this mode of
evaluating the effectiveness of treatment. The positive side of the
asymmetry, which stems from this capacity, is ignored in the purely negative
approach to contracts. The plurality of forms of evaluation is reduced to an
ordered asymmetry. As a result, the economy of information neglects the
decisive operations of the production of formats of information (categories
of knowledge and evaluation) that will become relevant and will be considered
common knowledge.
The plurality of coordinations
does not correspond to the boundaries of organized or instituted categories
of activity. A given economic activity, even finely divided up, can concern
several forms of coordination which are not the same for each firm. The
problem of coordination in such pluralistic worlds is that of the encounter
between several principles of evaluation, or of the distribution of power of
evaluation between the different states of persons (Table I.2.1).
To incorporate this plurality into a common
framework of analysis, it is necessary to review the question of equilibrium.
Equilibrium between supplies and demands enabled economic theory to extend
the market model. This was followed by a new extension by Nash equilibrium.
These equilibriums are based on the agents and objects of transaction that
have been put into the state of the market, or of a pseudo contract market.
If this concept is retained in a pluralistic context, ‘equilibrium’ will
relate to the stability of that state, prior to the contextual regulation of
prices (or of other references for coordination). Disequilibrium exists when
the principles of evaluation that qualify the state of persons and things are
called into question, especially by relying on alternative coordinations. H. White’s modeling
of consumer markets is a particularly stimulating way of formalizing this
renewed notion of equilibrium, in a pluralistic context. Equilibrium, that is
the renewal of the quality convention, then concerns a dispersion rather than
a central tendency.
Table I.2.1 Orders of worth
|
Inspired
|
Innovation, creativeness
|
Emotional
|
Emotionally invested body or
object: artistic, religious
|
Passion
|
Creative
|
Disrupted
|
In the presence
|
|
Civic
|
Collective interest
|
Formal
|
Regulation, right
|
Solidarity
|
Representative
|
Stable
|
Homogeneous
|
|
Opinion
|
Renown, fame
|
Semiotic
|
Sign, media
|
Recognition
|
Famous
|
Trendy
|
Space of visibility and
communication
|
|
Domestic
|
Esteem, reputation
|
Oral, exemplary, anecdote
|
Patrimony, specific asset
|
Trust
|
Trustworthy
|
Customary
|
Polar: anchoring in proximity
|
|
Industrial
|
Productivity, technical efficiency
|
Measurable: series, statistics
|
Investment, technique, method
|
Functional link
|
Professional, expert
|
Long-term, planned future
|
Cartesian space
|
|
Market
|
Price
|
Monetary
|
Market goods and services
|
Exchange
|
Interested
|
Present, short-term
|
Global: market place
|
|
|
Mode of evaluation (order of
worth)
|
Format of relevant information
|
Qualified objects
|
Elementary relation
|
Human qualification
|
Time formation
|
Space formation
|
The Constituent Convention Movement
‘Classical’ economics and sociology tend to
consider the founding institutions (the market, the community) as exogenous,
universal and stable. The introduction of radical uncertainties (lack of a
mode of coordination containing uncertainty within the limits of an order of
qualification) and of critical dynamics (challenging an agreement) into
analysis leads to the conception of conventions that are deformed by action
and are plural and evolving. People are placed in a conventional environment
(formed mainly by texts, legal corpuses, accounting units, evaluation tools)
that they rearrange to remedy the lack of coordination and cooperation. To
introduce this conventional dynamic into the analysis, the actors have to be
endowed with a reflexive behavior regarding their
own state, as well as a capacity to remodel forms of community life – in
other words, a political capacity.
Attempts to introduce political behaviors
by starting with rationality are short-lived. Contract theory adopts this
type of approach but equilibrium is maintained only at the cost of an unrealistic
hypothesis of rationality, with the maintenance of a general market in the
background. Introducing ethical, altruistic behavior
alongside rational behavior does not allow one to
account for the plural and evolving nature of the goods involved in the evaluation
of behaviors. It is necessary to incorporate
politics into the analysis by reference to the conventional dynamic and to
the type of reference good.
Strange Markets: Labor Market, Financial Market
For a long
time, institutionalist currents have criticized the
apparent extension and unification allowed by the concept of a market. K. Polanyi’s critique of a process of merchandization
was followed by criticism of the undifferentiated neo-classical treatment of
all markets. The principal-agent model augurs badly for the behaviour of a
human resources manager. D. North and O. Williamson are aware of these limits
to extension, but are content to treat politics as a good source of
incentives. Considering the economic agent only in his/her ‘individual’ state,
they force themselves to think politics in a register that precludes
political or even social capacities in humans. EC makes it possible to go
further and recognizes the theoretical specificity of each type of
institutional market device, thus reviving the tradition of the classics.
Labor markets Market reduction of labour to a
factor of production commanded by consumers distorts the common perception of
evaluations attached to work. In the market model, labour is a sort of
negative consumption, the only aim of which is to provide buying power. The
worker is, therefore, in the state of a consumer who chooses between baskets
of goods, including leisure. Hence, the focus on ‘skiving’ behaviors to describe work. The skills, methods and
efforts deployed to accomplish a professional activity are thus reduced to a
disutility. Turning it into an altruistic behaviour is simply a largely
unsatisfactory inversion of the same model. A better solution consists in
introducing a state related to the activity of work, based on a specific
conception of industrious activity as a good. Instead of involving only
remuneration, which makes it possible to isolate a labour market, the aim of
work also involves the good consisting of an activity consolidated in a
product, whose value indexes that of work. This approach is open to the
plurality of forms of work. It can be used to analyse the tensions between
different evaluations of the good through those of the product. In the
orthodox approach, the evaluation of labor is strictly
limited to the evaluator’s subjective interest. EC questions the legitimacy
of evaluations. In which conditions, evaluations are taken as legitimate, and
how is legitimacy related to rationality? Such questions are particularly
significant when it comes to dealing with lasting unemployment, if we reject
the usual simple cleavage between the economic space which is governed by
egoistic individual interests and the altruistic space of social solidarity.
EC initially developed around labor qualification
issues (Salais, Thévenot,
1986; Salais, 1989) and suggests a reform of the
devices which are used in labor evaluation and
recruitment (Eymard-Duvernay, Marchal,
1994). Such reforms would reduce inequalities before the implementation of
welfare policies, and alleviate the cost of these policies.
This approach also renews the role of firms. In the
continuity of the transaction cost economics, the firm is seen as a framework
of coordination distinct from the market. R. Coase’s
or O. Williamson’s firm has an effect only on the efficiency of coordination
and extends the neo-classical tradition of reduction to trade, via
transactions and contracts. For us, the firm organizes the articulation
between products, labour and capital markets. We also pay attention to areas
of coordination that are broader than the firm, for example the professional
branch if the rules of valorization of goods and
work are produced in this framework.
Moreover, the firm is at the intersection of
several forms of coordination, managing the tensions that result from such a
situation by compromises between them. The diversity of corporate models and
worlds of production that the analysis of conventions of coordination leads
to, challenges the view of the firm as a unified and simply hierarchical mode
of coordination. EC serves to break the firm down into a plurality of
coordinative conventions which frame interactions. It analyses the
organisation with regard to the kind of ‘compromise’ which makes several
conventions of coordination locally compatible (Boltanski,
Thévenot, 1989; Eymard-Duvernay,
1989, 2002; Storper, Salais,
1997; Thévenot, 1986, 1997, 2001b, 2002a).
Financial
markets Owning a
share confers a right to the future flow of expected dividends. It is only a
promise of money. There is an ensuing risk for the owner who, faced with
unexpected expenses, can find him/herself in great difficulty if unable to
transform his/her shares immediately into money. Stock markets are
institutional creations invented to meet a specific demand by creditors:
making property rights liquid. With this statement, we are diametrically
opposed to orthodox analysis of finance in terms of which securities are
considered to be naturally exchangeable, like merchandise. EC is entirely
devoted to criticizing this natural state of goods ready for trading. EC
analysis of financial markets reveals the gap between them and two modes of
evaluation and coordination with which they are often unfortunately confused
(Orléan, 1999).
First, disconnection from the industrial world of
productive investments is witnessed in the fact that the share price is not
the expression of a ‘fundamental value’. Financial liquidity makes a clear
cut between the time of production and the time of financing. Whereas the valorization of productive capital is a long-term process
since it requires the irreversible immobilization of capital, liquidity
constantly produces opportunities for re-evaluation and thus profit. In our
view, this difference in timing, already found at the heart of J. M. Keynes’
analysis of capitalism, clearly shows the gap between evaluation in financial
markets and evaluation of productive capital corresponding to an
industrial-type convention of qualification.
For all that, financial markets cannot be reduced
to a competitive mode of coordination based on a market qualification of
goods, like other consumer markets. Finance implies coordination by opinions,
where a set of heterogeneous opinions is transformed into a reference value
agreed to by all. Agents’ expectations are turned towards the expectations of
the other stakeholders. Mimetic behaviours are thus encouraged. Such
imitation at an individual level leads to highly regrettable situations for
the economy, as in the case of speculative bubbles or lasting gaps between
stock market prices and ‘fundamental value’.
In coordination based on a convention of
qualification by opinion, it is the character of a sign and hence of
recognizable salience that qualifies things and makes the ‘objectivity’
format peculiar to this mode of coordination. As long as the conventional
object is accepted, the speculative dynamic is simplified for in order to
predict what the others are going to do, it is enough to refer to the
convention. Through the game of the self-validation of beliefs, there follows
a relative stability of the convention that, for the agents, becomes second
nature.
4. The Second Pluralism of Levels of Convention,
From Public Coordination to Close Coordination
Our study
of most official institutions and public policies, but also of organizations,
firms or associations whose democratic demands we wish to take into account,
led us to focus above all on the most legitimate modes of coordination.
However, the analysis cannot remain at this level aimed at a requirement of
public legitimacy in evaluations and qualifications of people and things. Our
programme turned to a second pluralism to address more situated coordinations and more personal conveniences. Without
stopping at the cognitive aspects of so-called ‘tacit’ or ‘informal’
knowledge, we have considered the evaluations and goods involved in these
more local coordinations.
In both sociology and economics, various currents
of research have focused on modes of action that fall short of the
requirements of deliberation and public critique, and even of individual
reflection. They have located non-reflexive relations with the world in habitus, routines and practices, based on incorporation
and dependent on context, at least in so far as their learning is concerned. By dropping
hypotheses on reasoned calculation and on the completeness of the
agent’s knowledge, the hypothesis of bounded rationality has also caused more
weight to be placed on the situation of action. Interest in the context and
conceptions of a situated action have shifted attention away from
deliberation, the choice of regulated options or a plan, to circumstances. In
their own ways, analyses of networks consider circumstances from the
viewpoint of a multitude of links.
Yet these advances have concentrated on the
cognitive organizations of these relations brought closer together, without
taking into account the evaluations and goods they imply. These theories are
likely to remain too exclusively concentrated on models of local action,
thereby disqualifying demands for more extensive coordination and overlooking
the operations needed to move towards commonality and generality, as required
by the public and politics. This is clearly the case of evolutionary models
of routine behaviours that model ‘local’ links, just as models of contracts
remain models of partial inter-individual equilibrium, with connection to the
rest of the market taking place arbitrarily and exogenously through the
so-called condition of participation. Economic theory thus proposes two local
models, one with weak rationality (routines) and the other with strong
rationality (contracts), both of which are unsatisfactory.
Conversely, theories that focus too closely on the
public sphere, institutions or citizenship, tend to overlook the prerequisite
of a person maintained by close relations. Ignoring the variety of formats of
action, they cannot account for the movements required to shift from one to
the other when a rule or law is applied with careful attention paid to the
specificity of the case, when a public policy ‘moves closer’ to people, or
when the functional object or plan is adapted for a particular use. In
contrast, an increased focus on public qualifications requires changes in the
state of things, but also of individuals who need to break away from close
relationships to acquire the autonomy to lead a project or support an
opinion, or to obtain a public qualification.
Closeness is not only the particular of the
general, it is based on specific modes of engagement in the situation (Thévenot, 2001a, 2000, 2002b) (see Table I.2.2).
Evaluations based on close engagements enrich not only the forms of knowledge
taken into consideration but also evaluations and judgments on the unjust,
abuses of power and attacks on individuals. Therefore, our programme
developed in the sense of a differentiation of forms of action and
coordination intended to understand the passages between them, and to
highlight the abuses resulting from the predominance of some over others. A
programme that is already attentive to pluralism of the most legitimate modes
of coordination has to encompass a second pluralism stemming from the unequal
scope of regimes of coordinated action, from the most public to the most
familiar.
Table I.2.2 Pragmatic regimes of
engagement
Reductions of Close Actions and Relations in
Economics
Economists
often treat close actions and interactions negatively, as if they lacked
standard properties. Considerations on asymmetries or incompleteness of
information, or on the opposition between centralized and decentralized
information, concern situations that are often asymmetrical from the point of
view of formats of information and evaluation that the different agents use.
In contract theory, several currents try to formalize close relations that
have not been treated adequately by standard models based on the substantial
rationality of agents. Models of incomplete contracts are a case in point.
Yet, by failing to review the hypothesis of substantial rationality in depth,
they revert to the standard approach. A more satisfactory option would
require one to recognize the anchorage of knowledge in devices (dispositif)
that retain traces of interactions with the environment, as well as the kind
of evaluations in use.
Evolutionists promote the model of the routine as
opposed to that of the plan in their approach to work and productive
organizations. Thus, they are intended to highlight the non-reflexive
character of the activity and its dependence on the past. Unable to calculate
in a complex environment, agents rely on former habits, and coordination is
based on routines. Despite its contributions, the drawback of this approach
is that it neglects the upper levels that are required for the sense of
legitimacy, as well as the lower level of personal habituation, since routine
is most often treated as a regular and frequently collective habit, such as
social practices and customs. The distinctive features of personal engagement
in the familiar are not taken into account, nor are the resulting
difficulties of coordination with other persons who are foreign to that
familiar. Yet the question of learning encounters such difficulties.
Just as the actual activities of work and
production involve the worker’s close relation with the equipment and product
used for which contractual formalisms or the functions of production fail to
account, so too real uses of products and services involve the consumer’s
particularized close relation with them and are neither limited to the
standard functional treatment of things to which the notion of utility
attests nor exhausted in the relation of destructive consumption. Economic
literature shows some traces of a regime of use that specifies the type of
progressive and particularized adaptation of a person to his/her
surroundings. The concept of ‘experience good’ emphasizes a dependence
vis-à-vis experience instead of remaining in a relationship of consumption.
But by reducing this regime of use to the properties of merchandise, we lose
the characterization of an attendant way of doing things. Path-dependence
models also recognize the role of contingent particularities of the
environment in the subsequent trajectory, but relate them to a lack of
optimality in technical choices.
From Regulated Institutions to
Interactions
Coordination
of actions is unequally instituted. Even though institutions are based on the
most legitimate conventions, as indicated in the introduction to the third
part, many actions digress from the institutional format and borrow from
other formats more favourable to closeness, even when they remain linked to
institutions. We see this today in the movement through which public policies
are localized and designed to be closer to people and situations.
Of those conventions that have a maximal collective
range, we can start by distinguishing the first level of constituent
conventions (Convention 1). These support the most legitimate modes of
coordination, which consequently have a very broad scope as regards the
common judgments and goods underpinning evaluations. They are more than rules
allowing the coordination of actions considered as normal. The space of their
interpretation is that of justification and critique peculiar to the demand
for democratic debate. On the other hand, second-level conventions
(Convention 2) encompass more limited rules intended to coordinate normalized
action plans. They leave only a smaller space of interpretation, confined to
a relationship to the rule that prescribes the right action.
The analysis of institutions or public policies
highlights activities that cannot be reduced to these conventions with the
widest collective range: actions of agents from public organizations, aimed
at moving closer to ‘users’ (Eymard-Duvernay, Marchal, 1994); situations of evaluation in which the
evaluator establishes direct interaction with the evaluated person, such as
recruitment (Eymard-Duvernay, Marchal,
1997). These actions are expressed in the standard, non-formalized language
of narration, devoid of the orthodoxy required by institutions. Designation
of acts, intentions and objects in ordinary language employs a format that
authorizes tolerance compared to institutional forms. Coordination between
actors is not subjected to an operation to move towards commonality and
generality that guarantees conformity with the institution; it involves
interactions in which the instituted tests are lightened, even suspended, to
the benefit of accomplishments evaluated in a more tolerant format of the
appropriate action.
This form of interaction is most often considered
only negatively in relation to the instituted action, as an ‘informal’ or
‘local’ action. Our conception is rather of a coming and going between the
different levels of coordination that highlights the benefits of people
drawing closer together. This type of dynamic perspective has to be careful
to avoid two frequent reductions of institutions: a holistic conception that
presents them as collective structures that rigorously determine all social
practices, and an individualistic conception that limits the institution to
an aggregation of self-interested individual actions. These two options
substantially reduce the range of forms of evaluation that guide people in
their ways of apprehending their own behaviour and that of others. Taking the
law into account implies that it must also be considered from the point of
view of its procedures in action, by situating it in this type of
differentiation of levels where it is not reduced to a literal
interpretation.
By construction, institutional rules mobilize the
general categories needed to build equivalence, due to the cognitive
constraint of generalization and the political constraint of identical
treatment of actors by the institution. They also imply an evaluation of a
wide-ranging common good, where the actors act as ‘legislators’ by adopting a
critical stance as to what a good rule ought to be. As regards this judgement,
the level of situated interaction and the coming-and-going that it allows
with more formalized coordinations, present four
types of opening.
First, evaluation can depart from general
categories that allow pre-judgments, to move on to an individualized judgment
which takes into account a series of the individual’s actions. Less formal
than a degree or diploma, this judgement allows an assessment of the
individual’s competencies attested by his/her actions, and that have not been
publicly formatted. Instituted categories such as degrees are not enough to
guarantee an accurate evaluation. Taking abilities to act into account, as
revealed in interaction, can lead to more accurate treatment owing to a
weakening of the biases induced by these instituted categories.
Second, the evaluation is finalized by the
objectives pursued in the situation that frame it in a more restricted plan
than the goal of a common good. When it transcends the frame of a
well-accomplished individual action, the targeted good can remain local,
beneath a goal of universalization. Thus, firms are
supported by arrangements that are usually satisfied only by local demands
for coordination, and the targeted good is limited to the firm without
spreading to society as a whole.
Third, evaluation can open up to the plurality of
legitimate principles of justification that often enter, by compromise, into
more local goods supported by compound arrangements. This type of opening
creates the unexpected by revealing the situation from a new angle. The
judgement can be said to be ‘balanced’ when it becomes stable after
variations induced by these changes of principle, and not by prior
‘purification’ of the situation so that it qualifies for only one of them.
Fourth, evaluation can generate dialogue in
interaction, that helps to reduce asymmetries between evaluator and
evaluated, and thus to benefit the most disadvantaged by making it easier to
take into account their rights. We can then talk of ‘negotiated’ judgment and
consider that it facilitates the expression of injustices that previously had
no access to critique. This regime of interactions must not be reduced to a
deterioration of justice, with the explanation that equality is undermined by
the breakdown of general categories, and objectivity of judgment jammed by
the plurality of principles. It affords the conditions for an enrichment of
evaluations of individuals.
Note, to conclude, that this form of situated
interaction is found in a range of diverse institutions, including the market
when the evaluation of goods exceeds pre-judgments based on general
categories.
Beneath the Individual Subject:
Familiar Engagement that Maintains the Person
When public
policies are amended to bring them closer to people, with respect to the
return to employment, reintegration, habitat or, more generally, social work,
they appeal to an individual plan, an individual project, to individual wills
and intentions that have to prove themselves. They target a state of the
person as an individual capable of coordinating him/herself within his/her
plan and of demonstrating an autonomous will and opinion. This appeal causes
a demand to weigh on the people concerned that is taken to be the
prerequisite of their access to a more public level of coordination, based on
the most legitimate conventions. If the individual’s state thus constitutes
the basis of engagement in the public sphere, it already corresponds to a
level of consolidation of the person in the accomplishment of appropriate
actions, as noted in the preceding section.
Yet the experience of the agents of these public
policies reveals failures to achieve this required individual autonomy. Most
often, they are referred to a set of failings: lack of will or perseverance,
passiveness or inactivity, incapability of keeping promises. Economists
usually see in this a preference for inactivity. In contrast, sociologists
highlight social factors and determinations that relieve individuals from the
responsibility for such shortcomings.
These two approaches overlook the fact that, before
reaching the stage of the autonomous individual, a person must first be
maintained by close ties that engage him/her in the familiar. The various
personalized accompaniments extending public policies are grounded in this
type of relation of familiarity participating in this maintenance of a
person, below the state of the individual, the subject of action. The dynamic
of personal conveniences is based on landmarks that appear with use, during
frequentation of the surroundings in which the person is accommodated. That
is where he/she resides above all, maintained by attachments. The social
sciences commonly grasp this dynamic of familiar adaptation with a bias to
the discredit of a passive dependence that hinders the subject’s autonomy,
using the rigid and repetitive notion of routine or a deformation that
collectivizes these personal appropriateness in customs or culture. Political
constructions cannot ignore this essential good engaged in a familiar element
in which the person is anchored, if they care about dignity, promise a more
hospitable common world to that in which persons differ, and concern
themselves with forms of recognition of these differences and of the struggle
against the discriminations they spawn.
* * * * *
At the end of this journey that we concluded with
the characterization of a second pluralism, ‘vertical’ pluralism
distinguishing more local conveniences from essentially public conventions,
we again encounter the limits of standard economic theory. But we have the means
to shed new light on the extensions from which we started at the beginning of
this text. In opposition to the social scientist criticized for his/her
openness to collective beings, the supporter of an extended standard theory
claims to address all human actions – including those that other disciplines
treat in terms of social collectives or political communities – by limiting
him/herself entirely to what he/she has of the most elementary and realistic
state of the human being, that of a self-interested individual. In our
construction, the individual incorporates into his/her behaviour a normative
design on coordination with others and the common good, instead of
withdrawing into selfish calculation. Moreover, we can now recognize that
this individuality, which in particular makes the person a centre of
decision-making and calculation, is neither the prime state nor the base of
all human coordinations. This autonomous individual
format is accessible only on the prior basis of a personality maintained by
familiar engagements that, if they are torn apart by a disintegrated activity
or habitat, deprive the person even of his/her privacy. We thus understand
the dual weakness of the extensions of standard theory when they concern
social policies, especially integration. They ignore any reference to the
common good in coordination with others, here a civil good of solidarity, and
take for granted this individual state that, precisely, integration policies
aim to reconstruct.
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___________________________
SUGGESTED CITATION:
François
Eymard-Duvernay, Olivier Favereau,
André Orléan, Robert Salais, and
Laurent Thévenot, “Pluralist
Integration in the Economic and Social Sciences: The Economy of Conventions”, post-autistic
economics review, issue no. 34, 30 October 2005, article 2, pp. 22-40, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue34/Thèvenot34.htm
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