Laurent Thévenot

Bio: Laurent Thévenot is an academic researcher from École Normale Supérieure. The author has contributed to research in topics: Sociology of culture & Economic sociology. The author has an hindex of 39, co-authored 101 publications receiving 9625 citations. Previous affiliations of Laurent Thévenot include INSEE & School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.

Les catégories sociales en 1975 : l'extension du salariat

Abstract: La extension del salariado - Entre 1968 y 1975, las transformaciones intervenidas entre la poblacion economicamente activa se realizaron en conformidad con las pasadas tendencias; tal es la primera ensenanza que se desprende del censo de la poblacion llevado a efecto en febrero de 1975. La primera parte de este articulo, la que intenta suministrar un bosquejo de las evoluciones, destaca hasta que punto algunos movimientos se fueron accelerando durante los pasados anos en comparacion con los ritmos anteriores; en primer lugar, la merma rapidisima de los agricultores asi como de los patronos y de los comerciantes o de los trabajadores familiares; tambien y al contrario, el salariado se fue extendiendo. Todas esas transformaciones llevan la serial de la extension de la actividad de las mujeres, las que al abandonar la empresa familiar, agricola o artesanal, desempenan mas y mas cargos asalariados. La segunda parte, la que examina cada una de las categorias sociales y profesionales, desde agricultores y hasta cuadros superiores, precisa el contenido y significado de las mayores evoluciones actualizadas. ? Es oportuno, con objeto de definir el incremento del numero de empleados y de cuadros medios y superiores, agruparlos dentro de un con junto denominado «terciario» ? ? Se obscurecieron los limites entre las diversas categorias o por lo contrario aparecen con mayor claridad? ?Por donde el reajuste de la poblacion activa viose facilitado e incluso accelerado a razon del incremento del trabajo femenino asalariado?

From social coding to economics of convention: a thirty-year perspective on the analysis of qualification and quantification investments

Abstract: »Von der sozialen Kodierung zur economics of convention: Eine dreißigjährige Perspektive auf die Analyse der Investitionen in Qualifizierung und Quantifizierung«. Among the contributions to the presently growing sociology of quantification, a long-standing French tradition has built on an approach to the \"politics of statistics\" based on the formatting practices of the transformative chain that leads to data. It resulted from statistician-economists who, in the critical spirit of the 1960s, were reflexive and largely open to the social sciences, and cooperated with historians and sociologists. The article offers a 30 years’ perspective on the avenue of research that began with the article \"L’économie du codage social\" which goes from labour designation and qualification to ways of making occupation worthy. It leads to the broader notion of \"investments in forms\" which produce equivalence and economies of coordination. While making available in English large extracts of the original paper, the author adds comments from today perspective on the development of this trend which has fuelled both On Justification (co-authored with Luc Boltanski) and convention theory more generally.

Statistique et politique. La normalité du collectif

Abstract: Statistique et politique. La normalite du collectif. ; Laurent Thevenot. [5-20]. ; L'idee d'une politique des statistiques consequente doit se comprendre dans les relations nouees entre des operations statistiques engageant une qualification des personnes et des operations qui font equivalence par reference a d'autres registres, moraux, sociaux ou economiques. Il s'agit des lors d'analyser les intrications entre des formules d'equivalence differentes, statistitique et politique. L'illustration en est fournie par les modalites de composition de l'operation de la moyenne a des constructions politiques antagonistes chez Quetelet et Durkheim. La moyenne realise chez Quetelet la construction d'une norme morale, celle de l'individu ideal, permettant l'evaluation differentielle des grandeurs politiques et morales. Chez Durkheim, la moyenne apparait comme une modalite — discutee — de construction d'une physique sociale du fait collectif et d'assomption d'un etre moral realiste irreductible aux etres particuliers.

We Have Never Been Modern

Abstract: What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay

Abstract: This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism (impartiality between actors engaged in controversy), generalised symmetry (the commitment to explain conflicting viewpoints in the same terms) and free association (the abandonment of all a priori distinctions between the natural and the social), the paper describes a scientific and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population. Four ‘moments’ of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their definition of the situation on others: (a) problematisation: the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by denning the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the ‘obl...

Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay

Abstract: This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism (impartiality between actors engaged in controversy), generalised symmetry (the commitment to explain conflicting viewpoints in the same terms) and free association (the abandonment of all a priori distinctions between the natural and the social), the paper describes a scientific and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population. Four ‘moments’ of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their definition of the situation on others: (a) problematisation: the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by defining the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the ‘obligatory passage point’ of the researchers’ programme of investigation; (b) interessement: a series of processes by which the researchers sought to lock the other actors into the roles that had been proposed for them in that programme; (c) enrolment: a set of strategies in which the researchers sought to define and interrelate the various roles they had allocated to others; (d) mobilisation: a set of methods used by the researchers to ensure that supposed spokesmen for various relevant collectivities were properly able to represent those collectivities and not betrayed by the latter. In conclusion it is noted that translation is a process, never a completed accomplishment, and it may (as in the empirical case considered) fail.

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

Abstract: What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification -- the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

Political power beyond the State: problematics of government

Abstract: This paper sets out an approach to the analysis of political power in terms of problematics of government. It argues against an overvaluation of the 'problem of the State' in political debate and social theory. A number of conceptual tools are suggested for the analysis of the many and varied alliances between political and other authorities that seek to govern economic activity, social life and individual conduct. Modern political rationalities and governmental technologies are shown to be intrinsically linked to developments in knowledge and to the powers of expertise. The characteristics of liberal problematics of government are investigated, and it is argued that they are dependent upon technologies for 'governing at a distance', seeking to create locales, entities and persons able to operate a regulated autonomy. The analysis is exemplified through an investigation of welfarism as a mode of 'social' government. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of neo-liberalism which demonstrates that the analytical language structured by the philosophical opposition of state and civil society is unable to comprehend contemporary transformations in modes of exercise of political power.(1).