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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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