Pragmatic Inquiry: Critical Concepts for Social Sciences 9780367472061, 9780367472030, 9781003034124

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PRAGMATIC INQUIRY

This book examines a range of critical concepts that are central to a shift in the social sciences toward “pragmatic inquiry,” refecting a twenty-frst century concern with particular problems and themes rather than grand theory. Taking a transnational and transdisciplinary approach, the collection demonstrates a shared commitment to using analytical concepts for empirical exploration and a general orientation to research that favors an attention to objects, techniques, and practices. The chapters draw from broad-based and far-reaching social theory in order to analyze new, specifc challenges, from grasping the everyday workings of markets, courtrooms, and clinics, to inscribing the transformations of practice within research disciplines themselves. Each contributor takes a key concept and then explores its genealogies and its circulations across scholarly communities, as well as its proven payoffs for the social sciences and, often, critical refections on its present and future uses. This carefully crafted volume will signifcantly expand and improve the analytical repertoires or toolkits available to social scientists, including scholars in sociology or anthropology and those working in science and technology studies, public health, and related felds. John R. Bowen is Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Nicolas Dodier is Sociologist, Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and Researcher at the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, France. Jan Willem Duyvendak is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Anita Hardon is Professor in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she also leads the interdisciplinary research priority area Global Health.

PRAGMATIC INQUIRY Critical Concepts for Social Sciences

Edited by John R. Bowen, Nicolas Dodier, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Anita Hardon

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, John R. Bowen, Nicolas Dodier, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Anita Hardon; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editor to be identifed as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bowen, John R. (John Richard), 1951- editor. | Dodier, Nicolas, 1957- editor. | Duyvendak, Jan Willem, editor. | Hardon,Anita, editor. Title: Pragmatic inquiry : critical concepts for social sciences / edited by John R. Bowen, Nicolas Dodier, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Anita Hardon. Description:Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020019811 (print) | LCCN 2020019812 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367472061 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367472030 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003034124 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences—Research—Methodology. Classifcation: LCC H62 .P6477 2021 (print) | LCC H62 (ebook) | DDC 300.72/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019811 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019812 ISBN: 978-0-367-47206-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-47203-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03412-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Contributors Introduction John R. Bowen, Nicolas Dodier, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Anita Hardon

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PART 1

Institutions

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1 Fields Tim Bartley

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2 Ecologies of institutions Daniel Cefaï

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PART 2

Complex objects

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3 Dispositif Nicolas Dodier and Janine Barbot Translated by Nathalie Plouchard-Engel

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4 Assemblage Anthony Stavrianakis

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5 Market devices Olav Velthuis

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6 Complexity Talia Dan-Cohen

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PART 3

Framing stances

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7 Justifcation John R. Bowen

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8 Narrative James V. Wertsch and Nutsa Batiashvili

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9 Qualifcation Giselinde Kuipers and Thomas Franssen

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PART 4

Practices

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10 Demonstrating Claude Rosental

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11 Caring Annemarie Mol and Anita Hardon

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12 Making home Paolo Boccagni and Jan Willem Duyvendak

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PART 5

Postface

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13 Making sense of reality together: Interdisciplinary “Ways of Seeing” Michèle Lamont

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Index

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CONTRIBUTORS

Janine Barbot is Sociologist at the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, France and a member of the Center for the study of social movements at the EHESS. She has conducted research relating to treatment activism. Her current projects explore the issue of reparation for victims of medical accidents, from the standpoint of the public policies and of victims’ experiences. Tim Bartley is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His most recent book, Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy (OUP, 2018) examines fair labor and sustainable forestry standards as implemented in Indonesia and China. He is currently conducting research on inequality and accountability in global production networks and the transformations of surveillance capitalism. Nutsa Batiashvili studied at Tbilisi State University and Oxford Brooks University before receiving her PhD in sociocultural anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis in 2010. She is now on the faculty of the Free University in Tbilisi, where she continues her studies of national narratives and memory. In 2018 she published the volume The Bivocal Mind: Memory and Identity on the Edge of Empire. Paolo Boccagni is Professor of Sociology, University of Trento, and principal investigator of the European Research Council StG HOMInG – the home-migration nexus. His main areas of expertise are migration, diversity, transnationalism, social welfare, and homemaking after displacement. Recent publications include the monograph Migration and the search for home (Palgrave, 2017), as well as co-edited special issues of the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment (2017) and of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology (2019).

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John R. Bowen is Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He studies questions of Islam, law, and society in Indonesia and Europe. His latest book is On British Islam (Princeton, 2016), and he is currently writing on technology and politics of halal in six countries. He chaired the Council for European Studies in 2012–2014. Awarded a Guggenheim prize in 2012 and named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2016, he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Daniel Cefaï is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His main interests include the history of sociology in the United States, in connection with classical American pragmatism, and with the projects and experiments of social reform during the Progressive era. He is the chief editor of Pragmata. His last book published was: L’Urgence Sociale en Action: Ethnographie du Samusocial de Paris, based on feldwork on outreach social work and nursing with homeless in Paris. Talia Dan-Cohen is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work is situated at the interface between the anthropology of knowledge and science and technology studies. She is the author of A Simpler Life: Synthetic Biologists in the Lab (forthcoming) and A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles (with Paul Rabinow). Her new project examines the meanings and uses of complexity in anthropology and beyond. Nicolas Dodier is Professor of Sociology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and a researcher at the National Institute for Health and Medical Research. He is currently working on victims’ itineraries, redress devices, and criminal trials. He recently published (with Anthony Stravrianakis) Les objets composés.Agencements, dispositifs, assemblages, série Raisons Pratiques, 2018, Paris, Editions de l’EHESS, and (with Janine Barbot): “The Force of Dispositifs,” Annales. Histoire et sciences sociales (English Edition), 2017, 71(2), 291–317. Jan Willem Duyvendak is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. His main felds of research currently are the transformation of the welfare state, belonging and ‘feeling at home,’ and nativism. In 2017–2019, he was the Chair of the Council for European Studies. Since 2018 he is the Director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (NIAS-KNAW). Thomas Franssen is Researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University. He has a PhD in cultural sociology from the University of Amsterdam (2015) and works on the intersection of sociology of science and STS. He currently studies changes in research governance (in particular funding

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and evaluation arrangements) and digital technology development and their effect on epistemic properties of research across different scientifc domains. His work in cultural sociology has appeared in Poetics, Socio-Economic Review, and Cultural Sociology. His work in the sociology of science has appeared in Minerva, Science Technology & Human Values, Journal of Informetrics, and JASIST. Anita Hardon is Professor in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, where she also leads the interdisciplinary research priority area Global Health. Her research interests include the use of medical and self-care technologies in different social settings, their effcacy in everyday life, and the dynamics of care and policymaking involved in their provision. From 2012–2018, she conducted the ChemicalYouth project (Indonesia, Philippines, France, Netherlands, USA) which was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant. She has co-authored the Social Lives of Medicines (2002). She is a fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences, and at present she is fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University (2019–2020). Giselinde Kuipers is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.As of October 2019, she will be Research Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven. Her work focuses on the social shaping of cultural standards and their consequences for social inequalities and identities. She is the author of Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke (2006/2015) and numerous articles on culture, globalization, media, humor, beauty, and cultural industries. Most of her research is mixed-methods and comparative; she has done research in many European countries, as well as North American and Asia. Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies as well as the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. A cultural and comparative sociologist, she has written on culture and inequality, racism and stigma, academia and knowledge, social change and collective well-being, cultural processes and qualitative methods. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association in 2016–2017 and she chaired the Council for European Studies from 2006–2009. She received the 2014 Gutenberg Research Award and the 2017 Erasmus Prize, and she is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.Among recent publications is the co-authored book Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel (Princeton University Press, 2016); she is currently writing a book on selfworth and inequality in the United States and Europe. Annemarie Mol is Professor of the Anthropology of the Body at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research. She is the author of The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice and The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice, a co-editor of Care in Practice: Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms (with Ingunn

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Moser and Jeannette Pols) and of On Other Terms: Interfering in Social Science English (with John Law), and she has widely published on bodies, technologies, topologies, and what it is to eat. Claude Rosental is Research Professor of Sociology at Centre national de la recherche scientifque (CNRS) and a member of the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux in Paris, France. His publications include works on the sociology of logic and public demonstrations. He is the author of Weaving Self-Evidence: A Sociology of Logic (Princeton UP, 2008) and of Demonstration Society (MIT Press, forthcoming). Anthony Stavrianakis is Anthropologist and CNRS Researcher at the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative, Université de Paris Nanterre. He is the author of Leaving: A Narrative of Assisted Suicide (University of California Press), and he is currently conducting feldwork in Northern California on how people live with the motor neuron diseases. Olav Velthuis is Professor of Sociology of the University of Amsterdam, specializing in economic sociology, sociology of the arts, and cultural sociology. His research interests include the globalization of art markets, the interrelations between market and gift exchange, the valuation and pricing of contemporary art, and the moral and socio-technological dimensions of markets for adult content. In his most recent research project, he studied the emergence and development of art markets in the BRIC-countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Before moving to the University of Amsterdam,Velthuis worked for several years as a staff reporter on globalization for the Dutch daily de Volkskrant. James V. Wertsch is David R. Francis Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studies language, thought, and culture, with a special focus on national memory and narratives. His publications include the volumes Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind (1985), Voices of the Mind (1991), Mind as Action (1998), and Voices of Collective Remembering (2002). He is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Russian Academy of Education, and he holds honorary degrees from Linköping University and the University of Oslo.

INTRODUCTION John R. Bowen, Nicolas Dodier, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Anita Hardon

Theory and inquiry In the late twentieth century, many of us working in the social and historical sciences would orient our work with respect to the major alternatives offered by “grand theory.”What was our position on various versions of Marxism? Were we, instead, mainly Weberian in our approach? How did we draw on Durkheim, or Freud? Core graduate courses and qualifying exams were very likely to test our knowledge of these “big names.” Of course there were other theorists and myriad schools, but these tended to be either situated within a discipline, perhaps even associated with a particular department (interpretive anthropology at Chicago, ethnomethodology at UCLA, structuralism in Paris, Norbert Elias’ process sociology at Amsterdam), or to be outside all social science disciplines, to provide intellectual excitement more than a research program (Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan).1 The “grand theory” names remain “big” in the twenty-frst century, but now we are more likely to defne our research in terms of particular problems, specifc lines of inquiry, and suitable concepts. In doing so we may well draw from broad-based and far-reaching social theory, but we do so in order to analyze new, specifc challenges, from grasping the everyday workings of markets, courtrooms, and clinics, to inscribing the transformations of practice within research disciplines themselves. The present volume seeks to examine some of the critical concepts that have been central to this shift toward what we call “pragmatic inquiry.” One striking feature of these concepts is their transdisciplinary reach. Only one chapter, that by Tim Bartley on “felds,” treats a concept associated mainly with one discipline (sociology). Much more common are cases where social scientists have reorganized inquiry in order to better understand particular social practices, and where social scientists from various disciplines fnd that they are investigating similar themes and meet each other at unsuspected intersections. Such is the case with

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efforts presented here to recenter diverse analyses around “caring” (Annemarie Mol and Anita Hardon),“making home” (Paolo Boccagni and Jan Willem Duyvendak), or “complexity” (Talia Dan-Cohen). These new deployments of ordinary words produce new, fresh approaches to studying science, economics, fnance, and law, across diverse research communities. We speak of “pragmatic inquiry” to point toward this shared commitment to using analytical concepts for empirical exploration, not because we share a particular philosophical or theoretical position. We use this phrase to argue that research proceeds by allowing initial explorations of objects and practices to lead to related ones, generating new questions in the process.This general orientation to research favors an attention to objects, techniques, and practices, from trade regulations and legal argumentation to laboratory procedures, and from cultural consumption to emotional care and homemaking practices. It is methodologically open-ended, although it often starts with social interactions as processes of co-creating social meaning in specifc social, institutional, and symbolic environments. It also pays attention to the implications of research for public life. We now need to take stock of this critical shift in theory and analysis. If each of the new tools has generated its own literature, there are as yet few broad-based explorations of how anthropologists and sociologists are deriving and applying these concepts in the pursuit of pragmatic inquiry. In this book we set out to do just that. In a series of chapters, each of us takes a key analytical concept and then explores its genealogies and its circulations across scholarly communities, as well as its proven payoffs for the social sciences, and we offer critical refections on its present and future uses. The “we” refers to a working group of scholars in sociology and anthropology, with training and current engagements mainly in France, the Netherlands, and the United States. For several years we have been crafting a collective project to signifcantly expand and improve the analytical repertoires or toolkits available to social scientists, including scholars in sociology or anthropology, and scholars working in science and technology studies, public health, or related felds.This crafting has involved successive cohorts of graduate students, who have studied across these three countries and who have brought the idea of pragmatic inquiry to their varied projects. From the beginning, the project has tried out ideas and approaches against their payoffs for students and senior scholars alike.We have tried to practice inquiry as well as study it. It is this project of collaboratively attending to the articulations of concepts across specifc and diverse theoretical orientations that best exemplifes our understanding of pragmatic inquiry. In what follows, we expand on this shared understanding before refracting it through specifc concepts.

Pragmatist traditions Despite our shared attention to pragmatic inquiry, we do not share a commitment to any one philosophical position, including the diverse projects called pragmatist.

Introduction

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Or rather, we fnd affnities in the several pragmatist currents in philosophy and social sciences. Pragmatism as a philosophical tradition is most closely associated with the works of a small number of scholars writing in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Linking the diverse directions pursued by William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead was an idea of meaning and truth emerging from the crucible of experience. Drawing on new enthusiasms for Hegel, Kant, and Dilthey but also on Darwin and experimental psychology, crossdisciplinary formulations of pragmatism fourished in what was then the academically understructured world of American graduate studies.2 The open-textured academic context of the time permitted experimentation in philosophy, as well as the fourishing of defnitions and understandings of what might have been otherwise more closely-defned philosophical schools. Such a loosely-structured use of the term pragmatism continued, with later philosophers as diverse as Hilary Putnam and Jürgen Habermas fnding strong affnities with the earlier American pragmatists on the role of justifcation in truth claims and in the centrality of communication to democracy. American pragmatists share the idea that knowledge proceeds through experience.What does this deceptively simple declaration imply? First, that we gain knowledge by refecting on our experiences as they unfold in real time. John Dewey in particular argued that we learn when we fnd ourselves in a troubling situation, where we have to pull back from a routine mode of existence and fnd a solution to a problem. But we may not immediately know what the problem is, and thus we engage in a process of experimentation.3 By inquiry, Dewey meant this back and forth movement between experience and concepts. His examples were usually of the everyday sort, or in the laboratory, but we can also see inquiry, in this sense, in the intellectual journeys of thinkers and writers. In reading the transcripts of his lectures, one fnds Michel Foucault, for example, referring to how he approached a question in his previous lecture, his refecting on the problem, and then his decision to reframe the matter in a new way. Inquiry in this sense characterizes the ways some of us have examined a particular concept in this volume. For example, both Olav Velthuis, writing on “market devices,” and Tim Bartley, writing on “felds,” work their way through the development of their respective concepts, trying out different uses of each against concrete examples, before arriving at a balanced critique of the uses made by each of several authors. Second, knowledge through experience leads to claims that the validity, or truth of a concept lies in its real-world effects.This “instrumentalist” view of truth is most closely associated with William James, who famously claimed that theological ideas will be true if and only if they “prove to have a value for concrete life” (1907, 154). This claim was shocking at the time, and for many remains so. But as a commonsense claim it means something like: we draw on claims to truth when we think it will do some good: for us, or for another, or for society more generally. Third, that meaning is to be found in the ways people understand or interpret the statements of others. In other words, meaning proceeds as real-world chains of

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speaking and responding, rather than as ideas lying outside society. Charles Sanders Peirce, in particular, developed this approach to meaning using the phrase semiotic mediation (see the chapter by James V. Wertsch and Nutsa Batiashvili). Peirce saw meaning as a continual forward motion of actions (utterances, other kinds of signals) and interpretations.When, for example, someone directs attention toward an event, or toward an idea, other people interpret these actions, and they experience changes in their perceptions of the world. As they respond and still others interpret these new actions, new ideas are born, and the chain continues. Meaning is thereby mediated by social interactions, just as social interactions involve semiotic mediation.4 This social process of semiotic mediation has no inevitable resting point.We can compare it with how science works, when experiments yield results that may be interpreted by different observers in different ways, leading to (potentially) conficting inferences and conclusions. Here we have inquiry. And we can draw on this idea to see social life as consisting of tests of reality within distinct spheres of moral or cultural value.This last idea has been developed in recent years in France as the “pragmatic sociology of critique” and is most closely identifed with the sociologist Luc Boltanski and the economist Laurent Thévenot.5 The French approach develops two key ideas. First, that people formulate arguments and critical stances with respect to their experiences and situations. By attending to public debates and to the justifcations that people give for their stances and actions, the social scientist bases her approach on practical life as people evaluate it, and not on a putatively objective position, a “view from nowhere.” Second, the evaluations and justifcations that people formulate for specifc actions (their own and those of others) sort into a number of specifc moral worlds, or “orders of worth.” These are not limited in number, might emerge in several different areas of everyday life, and include “the world of renown” based on honor, “the civic world” based on the common good, and “the domestic world” based on personal dependencies.The orders of worth are mutually incompatible and debate often erupts when people argue about what starting point is most appropriate to evaluate a particular event or idea. The proponents of the sociology of critique developed their approach, and oriented their research activities, in explicit contrast to the approach taken by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.6 Bourdieu organized his studies of social life in France and (earlier) in Algeria largely around two ideas. First, that when people engage in social life they usually draw on ways of seeing and acting that have become ingrained in them, that they inhabit. He called these ways of living the habitus, and he contrasted his approach with one that saw people as acting out social models or norms, or, for that matter, a decontextualized notion of self-interest. Second, that the structures of domination in a society operate in specifc felds, through mechanisms of concealment and misrecognition.We often fail to see how those in power maintain their power, and indeed power relations depend on selective blindness. For Boltanski and Thévenot, by contrast, this way of looking at things itself fails to recognize the fullness of human action: that it is moral action, and not merely enactments of material and symbolic power.

Introduction

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Pragmatic inquiry, as we see it, draws on these related insights: about knowledge and experience, meaning-making as social processes, and about the moral stances that suffuse social life.7

Circulations and entanglements How do these ideas shape or impinge upon our own work? We began, and continue, our collaborative work by identifying concepts that, in our view, have proven fruitful in exploring specifc empirical challenges. In essence, and in each of our studies, we explore the back-and-forth between the developments of concepts and their capacity to help illuminate something about the social world. Here is another way to see how inquiry is pragmatic, by applying a test: what is the effect on our understanding of a particular analytical problem if we use this rather than that concept? We have found that in answering this question, in seeing how uses of a key concept shape our understanding of a research problem, we fnd it fruitful to explore the circulations and the local entanglements of that concept.This shared fnding speaks to a set of ideas about how we do social sciences.What do we mean here? We study circulations of concepts by examining their genealogies, and how they cross boundaries of disciplines and networks, tracing the forward movement of semiosis.We do so because we locate the meaningfulness of a concept in interactions and interpretations, not as a transcendental signifed.We also fnd problems of and opportunities in translations, even detachments of concepts from their genealogies, with mixed effects. By entanglements we mean the confgurations of political and intellectual associations, histories, and engagements around concepts. Often these entanglements are lost during circulations and translations, such that an idea becomes divested of its political implications in another time and place. A kind of naïve semantic conceptualism allows ignoring these entanglements – claiming that the meaningfulness of a concept is limited to its current explicit usages in a scholarly setting. We explore problems that arise from the translation or circulation of a concept across linguistic-national contexts or disciplinary contexts (or both at once), or from the often unacknowledged reduction or alteration of a concept when it is used for an empirical project. For example, Hardon and Mol show how the concept of “care” grew out of debates in moral psychology in the US, signaling distinct ways of ranking stages in moral development. By the time it entered into social science analyses and policy discussions in Europe, it had changed as a function of new priorities, without the putative older genealogy – signaled by the use of the English word – being distinguished from new, local uses for examining welfare policy (Netherlands) and genre (particularly, and very recently, in France). Care and “caring” came to signal distinct sets of concerns in each of these particular contexts. Or, when Bourdieu’s work was presented to an American anthropological audience, it was translated as “practice theory,” whereby a handful of examples from the early Kabyle work came to stand for the habitus-whole. Gone was the probabilistic

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analysis of life chances, though these were brought over into American sociology. But even for the latter, the multiple kinds of capital and the two- or threedimensional charts were often themselves squished down to a notion of social capital that would better ft individualistic theories of choice. In attending to circulations and entanglements, we fnd ourselves in broad and deep company. We have already recounted the semiotic approaches to meaningfulness in Peirce and other pragmatists and could add extensions of these ideas in one direction by Derrida, and in others by Elias, and by linguistic anthropologists and philosophers of science. Several of us draw on the attention to genealogies in Foucault, the varied versions of examining entanglements in science studies, and debates about power, practice, and moral vision in Bourdieu, Boltanski, and others.These works introduced concepts that themselves circulate and develop new entanglements. For example, the very broad applicability of Foucault’s dispositif gave rise to a multiplicity of research strategies under headings of devices, techniques, processes, and so forth (see the chapter by Nicolas Dodier and Janine Barbot). Science studies have proposed new approaches to older notions of constructivism and experiment. These recent developments foreground a real addition to how we conceptualize the pragmatist legacy in the form of material semiotics: the materiality of that which circulates, that which carries meaning forward in events of signifcation and becomes foregrounded in studies of science, art, narratives, legal evidence, and so forth (see the chapter by Anthony Stavrianakis). We see these concepts as components both of our approaches and of the social scenes we are studying. This hybrid quality of our critical concepts (as “shifters”: pointing to specifc objects and to the context of their study) is central to how we think about our work.When we develop ideas about the circulations and entanglements of concepts, we also begin an elaboration of the very concepts that we use as research analytics. For example, looking at how the concept of “justifcation” circulates and changes is also an example of how social scientists themselves justify their positions when they use the concept.We explore how to study concepts, but forms of “howness” themselves provide objects of study: how experiments produce artifacts over time, how interactions around product demonstrations create facticity, how felds and hierarchies affrm value (see chapters by John R. Bowen and Claude Rosental). By emphasizing the open-ended breadth of particularly useful analytical concepts,we can advocate for a refocus from “theory” to “inquiry.”Neither the concepts nor the approaches advanced here point to anything like a shared quasi-discipline; we derive from these quite varied ideas a set of exciting and fruitful points of reference for exchanges and debates.We could add other concepts (and readers doubtless will).These points of reference subtend, potentially enrich, or sharply challenge the particular research approaches that each of us prefers.They create an arena for exchange that we fnd productive to our research projects, and that we believe will prove so for colleagues across disciplines and networks. These conceptual analyses have developed from the very attentions to circulations and entanglements with which we began.And we hope that they provide examples of shared social analytics rather than Theory, examples of ideas that, by illuminating one case can also do so

Introduction

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for a very different one, transversally rather than as a demonstration of a higherorder set of propositions.

Interactions, institutions, and justifcations In our own interactions, lasting over several years, we have found ourselves drawn back to, in distinct ways, three starting points to social analysis.These components of our own methodological “tool kit” are places to look rather than philosophies; they recur as important dimensions of social life. One such starting point for social analysis is with interactions as processes of co-creating social meanings in formal or informal social settings. How do people interact in a courtroom, or on a playground? How do these interactions yield meanings? The meanings created in interactions are not necessarily expressed as accounts of what happens in a situation. Indeed, explicit accounts are re-accounts that themselves are part of the entire situation, as when a playground game leads to disputes about who was following the rules, or who was rude or generous. And then to what, in turn, do such moments of taking stock lead? This approach comes from the work of Mead and Dewey and their legacy in Chicago sociology (see the chapter by Daniel Cefaï). Its semiotic dimension came from Peirce, who situated meaning-making as acts of interpretation occurring in particular environments by particular persons, against a background of shared semiotic structures, but with the power to change those structures in the next iteration, an insight developed in American linguistic anthropology. Among later social scientists, Erving Goffman and Harold Garfnkel were particularly innovative, from the 1950s on, in the design of new models of social interaction. Second, we may enter the study of a situation or a structure by analyzing institutions. We think of institutions as forms of social life that have the capacity to reproduce and transform themselves, as with languages, family forms, corporations, or religions. They may emerge from changes in interaction patterns (as detailed by Goffman and Elias).We also take stock of several forms of “institutionalism” as diverse reactions to the defciencies of individualistic approaches in politics, economics, and sociology.There are many versions thereof, including: historical institutionalism, and an economic version that focuses on coordination and transaction costs. Of greater importance for our project have been cultural versions focusing on schemas and repertoires as developed by Michèle Lamont, Paul DiMaggio,Walter Powell, and others. These sociological approaches point to “practical schemas” and “repertoires,” as common sense constraints and resources for meaning-making activities. We can see this work as consistent with the earlier attention by Dewey and Garfnkel to everyday features of social life and operations of valuation, inquiry, and deliberation – and one that is well developed in sociology but that merits greater attention in anthropology.8 Our third way-in to understanding social life is through the study of justifcation as a process of meaning-creation. In a dispute, how does someone give an account of her actions? It is at that moment that an actor re-presents a stream of actions as a

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meaningful sequence of social life.These moments of giving accounts or justifying provide a way-in to meaning-in-action, the “moral worlds” mentioned previously. At a remove from the highly contextualized dispute, they may claim to be universalistic. We can then approach such claims – from human rights to democracy to ethical disinterestedness – as themselves objects of inquiry. Dewey argued that justifcation follows on judgment, rationalizing in skeletal fashion what was a much more multidimensional process of forming inferences, hunches, and feelings. And current legal thinking has returned to pragmatism for its experimental, scientifc character, which also allows linking science studies to legal studies by emphasizing “devices.” In anthropology, Franz Boas emphasized the risks of taking local accounts at face value; instead, we approach justifcation as itself an approach to human life, in terms of moral presuppositions and universalizing claims, and look to developments in moral philosophy (Walzer 1983) and political sociology (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), which have recent echoes in anthropology (see Bowen, this volume).

Logic of exposition Institutions In what follows, we present the concepts in a way that moves (loosely) from those that have been particularly useful in understanding institutional contexts for action, to those that refer to complex objects, to those that are better seen as stances, or as practices.The frst pair of chapters concern two distinctive approaches to studying social institutions that also have connections to pragmatism. They address ways in which relations of power are articulated through specifc social forms. Tim Bartley traces two distinct lineages of the concept of felds in sociology. One, connected to Bourdieu, emphasizes how forms of social capital and social networks structure action.A second, connected to organizational sociology, emphasizes how organizations structure arenas.The two lineages differ in scale, in underscoring either confict or coordination, and in disciplinary affnities, but Bartley, while warning of the dangers of mediocrity in trying to combine these tendencies, suggests areas of fruitful convergence. His conclusion, that “the concept works best as the beginning of analysis rather than the end” befts its place at the beginning of this volume, as a concept that has underpinned a wide range of studies of power in specifc domains. A distinct line of inquiry regarding the ecology of institutions was stimulated by an approach from human ecology that is examined here by Daniel Cefaï. If studying institutions as felds leads analysts to highlight confgurations of power, the ecological approach traces the emergence of institutions out of social movements and toward their dynamic relations to environments. Drawing on Chicago sociological tradition, as initiated by William I.Thomas and Robert E. Park, as well as on Dewey’s and Mead’s pragmatist philosophy, Cefaï stresses the fact that institutions are felds of experiences. In certain conditions, they are capable of self-organization, collective intelligence, and collective learning.The ecological and processual perspective

Introduction

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develops an alternative conception of power, different from feld theory: the power of acting-together, solving problems collectively and responding collectively to challenges and crises. Institutions are central for a pragmatist theory of democracy. They are, on the one hand, “accumulators, condensers and generators of experience, know-how, and knowledge” which support individuals’ capabilities and help them be more autonomous; and on the other hand, they take part in processes of public inquiry, experiment, and discussion, that Dewey called the “publics,” through which refective policies can be implemented.

Complex objects Several of our concepts develop from work by Foucault, and particularly with his analysis of the dispositif, a word that we, following others, keep close to the French original, as “dispositif ”; it also has been translated as “mechanisms,” “apparatuses,” and “devices.” Drawing on their studies of juridical processes, Nicolas Dodier and Janine Barbot set out several directions of the concept’s development and its relationship to alternative concepts. Foucault proposed dispositif as an open-ended and heterogeneous grouping of ideas, spatial forms, techniques, and so forth, that produced a tightly linked couple of power and knowledge, in a particular place and time. A second, “material-semiotic” version of dispositif highlights networks of actors and tools that align interests and produce new objects, particularly in science, as in work by Bruno Latour, John Law, and others (including Olav Velthuis on market devices in this volume).A third approach, associated with Michael Walzer and with Boltanski and Thévenot, starts from moral worlds, and traces how they shape judgment across distinct dispositifs, as explored by Bowen on justifcation in this volume. Dodier and Barbot treat how, across these diverse concepts, the prescription of sequences is particularly effective in organizing a dispositif and accounting for its force, in law, science, or other domains.They examine the processes of valuation internal to the dispositif and its articulations to moral domains (topics also explored by Kuipers and Franssen in their chapter on qualifying). They also underscore the plurality of normative conceptions even for any one actor engaged in the dispositif. Two other chapters offer further advances along the lines developed by Dodier and Barbot. Anthony Stavrianakis points to the value of the open-ended concept of assemblage (French agencement), a concept developed by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in opposition to an overly-determinant notion of structure in psychoanalysis and anthropology. Assemblage points to how individuals’ desires articulate with speech acts, and it resembles what Dodier and Barbot call the material-semiotic kind of dispositif.Yet assemblage offers a greater potential to underscore the singularity of events and desires, and to avoid assuming a fxed normative dimension to the object.The concept permits a heterogeneity of approach.Anthropologists have drawn on this concept to study forms that circulate across specifc environments, such as particular complexes of techniques and laws, as “immutable mobiles.” But others show a different possibility, as when from a similar baseline of diagnostic elements, clinicians in a US and a French clinic arrive at

10 John R. Bowen et al.

different diagnoses of a neurological disorder – showing diagnostic assemblages to be highly mutable. Assemblage affords well the combined focus on circulation and entanglements found to be generally characteristic of pragmatic inquiry. Olav Velthuis traces a very specifc trajectory of dispositif, whereby market device (remaining dispositif in French) “has become the most signifcant theoretical impulse for economic sociology in the new millennium.” Further refned as devices for judgment, trust, or calculation, market devices enable market activities to exist by compensating for cognitive weaknesses.Velthuis argues that devices and related concepts like assemblage and performativity have been crucial in bridging continental European and American traditions in economic sociology, in particular by infusing the subdiscipline with approaches and concepts from French Actor Network Theory, and thereby linking studies of science and economy.And yet, as used today market devices lead less to studies of constraint than was the case with Foucault. Velthuis’s analysis shows how as concepts circulate they transform in new environments – but his argument is also a call to regain the dimension of constraint, and the connection of knowledge and power, that brought such analytical value to dispositif. Talia Dan-Cohen examines complexity as an analytic whose popularity in certain corners of the social sciences responds to legacies of simplifcation and reduction. She calls attention to the artifactual dimensions of complexity, noting that diagnoses of complexity sometimes tell us more about the contexts in which knowledge is produced than about the phenomena being studied. She therefore argues that, alongside of its use as an analytic, complexity should also be framed as an anthropological and historical object, tied to specifc knowledge practices. She exemplifes this approach through an examination of the uses of complexity in cultural anthropology and archeology.

Framing stances Our third section highlights another dimension of the social world, namely, ways in which people act within, and with respect to, constraints and objects. Because action always is mediated by signs, networks, felds, dispositifs, and so on – under the several understandings presented previously – the stances and practices examined here are not to be seen as “agency” versus “structure,” but as themselves also implicating social and political relationships.They also highlight the role of language, as previous chapters highlighted the role of complex objects. But they are not immaterial: stances carry on the material quality of semiotics, in the forms of settings, objects of valuation, and privileged forms of speech and writing. In his chapter on justifcation, John R. Bowen points to Dewey’s bold claim that deductive logic grew out the social need to justify our actions. He draws on this claim to argue that justifying is a practice that generates much of our sense of a socio-moral order. Bowen draws on his own work in courts and other tribunals to argue that public justifcation involves drawing on socially-accepted normative resources and tailoring argument to the probable responses of the audience. This approach accords with Peirce’s view of the forward movement of semiosis.

Introduction

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On this view, codifed forms of law and morality result from myriad such situated practices. He then addresses the role of justifying in analyses of moral frameworks, with reference to the work of Walzer and of Boltanski and Thévenot but concludes that justifying is best studied as a complex set of practices, and not as an index to established moral or semantic worlds. James V.Wertsch and Nutsa Batiashvili argue that narrative, in particular,“provides a natural point of integration in the human sciences.” Drawing on the psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Daniel Kahneman as well as the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, they focus on the specifc role of national narrative templates, generic forms of representation of events.The contrast of Russian and Georgian templates concerning war and invasion illustrates this national specifcity and nationalist function. But actors may work from multiple, perhaps conficting narratives, which then function as schemas at a more fne-grained level.This chapter can be read as a semiotic illustration of Cefaï’s discussion of the emergence and adaptation of new institutions, and of institutions as sources of emplotment of experiences. Giselinde Kuipers and Thomas Franssen introduce the notion of qualifcation to bridge cognitive cultural sociology (Durkheim, via DiMaggio, Bourdieu, and Mary Douglas) with the pragmatist/ STS tradition (Latour, Michel Callon, Annemarie Mol) and its recent offspring, valuation studies. Both approaches recognize that social life is a constant attempt to make sense of the surrounding social and material world. In cognitive sociology, the focus has been on classifcation: the social and cultural creation of categorizations and the (often hierarchical) relations between these categorizations.The pragmatist tradition has focused on valuation – attempts to assess worth, often in markets – and has stressed the processual, situated character of “valuing in practice.” Taken together, these approaches lead to the insight that social life often revolves around qualifying: a simultaneous attempt to decide what something is, and whether it is a good instance of this category. This and other chapters (on caring, and on justifcation) emphasize a shared move away from an older idea of fxed values as constituting society, to the study of the social processes through which particular objects and relations are evaluated.

Practices In Claude Rosental’s analysis of demonstrating, he emphasizes, not the “objecthood” of demonstrations (which might be seen as an example of the sort of “materialsemiotic” dispositif mentioned previously), but the ways in which certain ways of presenting materials convince, persuade, show – or not. They have performative qualities, not only illustrative ones. Through his analysis of the Orion computer program developed for the space industry, he shows how demonstrations are also trials, recruiting tools, and in themselves research projects, as well as (following Robert Merton) ways for science to maintain its authority (and funding levels). They also serve as points in establishing markets, and as cognitive devices, in the sense set out by Velthuis previously. Rosental extends this analysis to Paris street demonstrations, which create levels of credibility of a political stance or message.

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Annemarie Mol and Anita Hardon make a case for using the term caring in talking and writing about situations in which people engage with themselves, others, other creatures, things, environments, all in ways that locally count as good.These engagements, then, seek to improve, restore, or sustain those being cared for. But the “good” envisioned is not necessarily a moral good, it may well have more do with health, wellbeing, ease, pleasure, durability, sustainability, thriving, and so on. The caring engagements never quite offer control. Instead, they are adaptive and explorative.They respond to surprises and expect these to occur. But that doesn’t mean that caring is soft and forms a counterpoint to the hardness of technologies. Instead, quite differently, attentive inquiries into practices in which technologies are put to work has taught us that their working often depends on a lot of adaptive tinkering. Hence, caring may be an appropriate term for handling, for living with, technologies.That said, the authors do not seek to solidify caring as a concept: its precise meaning is bound to change with the sites and situations, the cases, problems, pleasure, or otherwise that as scholars we might care to articulate. With making home, Paolo Boccagni and Jan Willem Duyvendak seek to turn attention to the myriad challenges to older public-private boundaries, from the bleeding of domestic conversations into public settings, to the “intrusion” of the state into family life. They note that social commentary on these processes is normative and negative; they call for pragmatic inquiry into how people recast boundaries, to what ends and with what effects. Taking security, familiarity, and control as some of home’s components, they seek to study “the socio-material practices through which a sense of home is reproduced.” In fast-evolving sociodemographic contexts, homing practices will be highly sensitive to inter-group interactions, and these can create feelings and slogans of not feeling at home, when one should feel so.

Disciplines Our arguments have not been disciplinary; our compass is broadly across several social sciences.We conclude by inviting the sociologist Michèle Lamont, who has been engaged in this project since its start, to extend our refections on interdisciplinary ways of seeing, and how this endeavor in pragmatic inquiry poses challenges to other ways of conceiving of explanation in social sciences.

Notes 1 Among the older orientations to grand theory one can mention the infuential “classic” by Anthony Giddens (1971), in which the author develops his own critical stance on modern capitalism by way of an analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.To chart the shift mentioned here, we can also contrast two different editions of a major collection of essays on sociological theory, Social Theory Today (Giddens and Turner 1987; Benzecry, Krause, and Reed 2017). If the earlier version starts with a chapter on the “centrality of the classics” and features “big names” writing on their own approach (George C. Homans on behaviorism; Immanuel Wallerstein on World-Systems Analysis), the recent volume

Introduction

2 3 4 5 6

7 8

13

includes many younger scholars critically reexamining some widely-followed approaches (rational choice, systems theory, feld theory), and in that respect resembles this volume. Despite the titles, both volumes were in fact about sociological theory. Attesting to the somewhat more distanced relationship of anthropology to social theory is that the closest comparable volume in which anthropologists play a major role (Dirks, Eley, and Ortner 1994) is centered in cultural studies, not anthropology. On the “big thinkers” whose uptake in the United States, at least, was as French theorists, decontextualized from their French disciplinary contexts, see Cusset (2008 [2003]). On the American pragmatists, see Bernstein (2010). See Dewey’s philosophical analysis of inquiry (Dewey 1938, 487–512). On C.S. Peirce see Parmentier (1985). See Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), and also Boltanski (2011) for his more recent position on critical sociology. For Bourdieu’s analysis of the habitus and of misrecognition in his Kabyle (Algeria) studies, see (Bourdieu 1977); his work on France is examined in a number of chapters in the present volume, in particular by Tim Bartley on felds and by Giselinde Kuipers and Thomas Franssen on qualifcation. For an analysis of social action as practices in line with some of the perspectives mentioned here, see Gross (2009) and for a methodological approach inspired by pragmatism, see Tavory and Timmermans (2014). For a comparative analysis of “repertoires of evaluation” see the essays in Lamont and Thévenot (2000).

References Benzecry, Claudio E., Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed, eds. 2017. Social Theory Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bernstein, Richard J. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boltanski, Luc. 2011. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation.Translated by Gregory Elliott. Cambridge: Polity Press. First published 2009. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. 2006. On Justifcation: Economies of Worth. Translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. First published 1991. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published 1972. Cusset, François. 2008. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.Translated by Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 2003. Dewey, John. 1938. Logic:The Theory of Inquiry. Chicago: Henry Holt and Company. Dirks, Nicholas B., Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds. 1994. Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1971. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, Anthony, and Jonathan H.Turner, eds. 1987. Social Theory Today. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gross, Neil. 2009.“A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review 74: 358–79. James,William. 1907.“What Pragmatism Means.” In Essays in Pragmatism, 141–58. New York: Hafner. Lamont, Michèle, and Laurent Thévenot, eds. 2000. Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Parmentier, Richard J. 1985.“Signs’ Place in Medias Res: Peirce’s Concept of Semiotic Mediation.” In Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Elizabeth Mertz and Richard J. Parmentier, 23–48. Orlando:Academic Press. Tavory, Iddo, and Stefan Timmermans. 2014. Abductive Analysis:Theorizing Qualitative Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice:A Defence of Pluralism and Equality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

PART 1

Institutions

1 FIELDS Tim Bartley

The concept of a “feld” has proven attractive to a range of social theorists. Intuitively, a feld can connote a recognized arena of knowledge and practice, as in the feld of higher education or the feld of medicine; or a physical terrain, as in a feld of grass, cornfeld, or even the Elysian Fields (champs-Elysées). It can be a space of infuence, as in a magnetic feld or a force feld; a surrounding context, as in a semantic or lexical feld; or a site in which actors compete, as in a playing feld. Though some meanings apply more in one language than another, the multiplicity of connotations is likely one reason the concept has been used widely across disciplinary and national traditions of social research.1 The earliest uses in the social sciences come from Kurt Lewin’s “feld theory” of the 1940s-50s, which adapted Gestalt theories into behaviorist research programs in psychology (Martin 2003).Around the same time, Karl Mannheim made reference to a feld as a “network of interdependent activities” akin to a magnetic feld (qtd in Cohen 2018, 218). Several decades later, Pierre Bourdieu borrowed from Gestalt psychology to develop a highly infuential grammar for studying social felds, with an emphasis on the particular habits of action and forms of capital they valorize. Martin (2018) argues that Bourdieu also drew from American pragmatism in incorporating habit (habitus) as a set of dispositions acquired via prior experience and through which felds are navigated. (See the introductory chapter by Bowen, Dodier, Duyvendak, and Hardon for an account of how a permissive version of pragmatism can anchor various traditions of social theory.) Through Bourdieu’s studies of ritual in Algeria and then of education, art, and political elites in France, the study of felds moved to the center of French sociology (e.g., Bourdieu 1977 [1972], 1984 [1979], 1996 [1989], 1996 [1992]; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977 [1970]). Bourdieu’s work would eventually make a splash in sociology and anthropology outside France, animating research on cultural consumption, symbolic boundaries, and so-called practice theory (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Brubaker 1985; Lamont 1992; Ortner 1984; Peterson and Kern 1996).2

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Meanwhile, organizational sociologists in the US began in the early 1980s to theorize the “organizational feld” as a more expansive concept than an industry, organizational population, or network (DiMaggio and Powell 1983).The same scholars were among those who helped to introduce Bourdieu to American audiences (DiMaggio 1979), though they also echoed several earlier uses of “felds” in organizational sociology.3 By the early 1990s, this “neo-institutionalist” approach had been fashioned into a recognizable and soon-to-be dominant paradigm, with the organizational feld as its central concept (Powell and DiMaggio 1991).4 Here, studies examined the structuration of felds surrounding various industrial or institutional change projects (Armstrong 2002; DiMaggio 1991; Powell et al. 2005) and documented the diffusion of organizational forms and policies through felds (Davis, Diekmann, and Tinsley 1994; Fligstein 1985). Despite some shared imagery, these traditions and their outgrowths have defned and studied felds in different ways. In this essay, I will highlight some divergent uses of the concept and try to discern what if anything ties different strands of feld theory and research together.5 Scholars often do not mean the same thing when they refer to “felds.” Among other things, they use the concept to point to arenas with quite different scales of specifcity and aggregation – from the “political feld” in France to the “feld of lesbian and gay organizations in San Francisco,” for instance. Sometimes the scale varies dramatically even within the same theoretical tradition. In addition, scholars from different traditions gear their analyses to quite different tasks – from revealing domain-specifc orthodoxies, status hierarchies, and forms of capital (for Bourdieusians) to charting the emergence of inter-organizational communities and explaining variation in the adoption of organizational policies (for neo-institutionalists). Yet there are also important parallels and overlaps. Those who use the feld concept seem to be loosely allied in fghting against methodologically individualist reductionism on one hand and totalistic structuralism on the other. Indeed, the disparate uses of “felds” are certainly more alike than the disparate uses of “institutions.”The latter term is used by reductionist rational choice theorists and cultural holists alike (and everyone in between), who mean very different things and promote essentially incommensurable research strategies (see Douglas 1986; Hall and Taylor 1996; Ostrom 2009). As described in the next chapter of this volume, by Daniel Cefaï,“institutions” meant different things even within a single tradition of research – the classic Chicago school of sociology – which differed from the new institutionalisms that followed. As various conceptions of institutions took hold in political science, organizational studies, transaction cost economics, and the study of natural resource governance, it became easy to wonder if there was any shared meaning left.Analysts of felds are more disciplinarily concentrated, with sociology at the core. In addition, they seem to share an attraction to loosely bounded arenas and forms of causal explanation that are more akin to magnetic forces and “making plain” (Martin 2003) than to one billiard ball striking another. In the past decade, feld theories have blossomed and matured. Some scholars have sought to combine insights from organizational and Bourdieusian traditions

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into distinct new approaches, most notably Fligstein and McAdam’s (2012) theory of strategic action felds. Others have sought to ratchet one or another version of feld theory up to the transnational level (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006; Go and Krause 2016). I will argue that these extensions and combinations are welcome and indeed crucial for making sense of emergent transnational orders – as I have sought to do in my own research on governance of land and labor (Bartley 2018a). However, the maturation of feld theory runs the risk of inspiring not only confusion about terms but also dull or misleading research. This is particularly the case if one relies on formalistic accounts of incumbents and challengers rather than attending to the substance of social confict and the marginalization or privileging of particular challengers.

Fields and streams: the circulation of a concept Bourdieusian social felds For Bourdieu, a feld is a confguration of social positions that exist in opposition and tension as actors vie for symbolic capital – that is, the sort of economic, political, social, or cultural capital that is valorized in this particular feld. Put differently, a Bourdieusian feld is a “structured space of objective positions that operates as a universe of possible stances” within which there is struggle among actors (Steinmetz 2008, 591). The actors in a feld can be envisioned roughly as players in a game, each with a “pile of tokens of different colors, each color corresponding to a given species of capital she holds” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 99).The social world as a whole, in this view, is an array of felds or “slices of social space, each slice structured according to the forms of capital valued in that institutional arena” (Hallett 2007, 152). Fields are “homologous” in that they are similarly structured around opposing positions, but they are semi-autonomous in that distinct forms of capital are valued in different felds. At the same time, particular felds are intertwined with an overarching “feld of power” – a meta-feld that the “the keystone of all felds” (Cohen 2018, 205). Here, the holders of feld-specifc capitals vie for the “power to dictate the dominant principle of domination” (Bourdieu 1996 [1989], 265, qtd. in Cohen 2018). Importantly, for Bourdieu, the relations and oppositions between positions that constitute felds “do not presuppose any direct interaction between the occupants of those positions” (Mische 2012, 212). As we will see, this is one difference from the neo-institutionalists in organizational sociology, who defne felds according to actors’ mutual regard, interaction, and close attention. Concretely, Bourdieu and colleagues studied a range of distinct felds in France, including the feld of higher education, the political feld, the state feld, the artistic feld, the literary feld, and the feld of cultural production, highlighting the specifc forms of capital that were most essential for dominance. Bourdieu was particularly interested in the ability of the winners to make their domination look impersonal, inevitable, and legitimate.“Every established order tends to produce (to

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very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness,” Bourdieu (1977, 164) argued, linking struggles over symbolic power to the enactment of symbolic violence.

Structures, capitals, and autonomy Bourdieusian analyses of felds have most commonly taken on two types of tasks. One is to reveal the structure of a feld, including the key oppositions and forms of capital. For Bourdieu, this was tied up with the use of geometric data analysis that allowed for the portrayal of a multidimensional space of relations (Duval 2018; Lebaron 2009). For example, Dubois and Méon (2013) used correspondence analysis of survey data to map the structure of a music scene in the Alsace region. Scholars have also used qualitative and historical methods to uncover the structure of literary, intellectual, political, and professional felds (e.g., Boschetti 2012; Dezalay 1990; Sapiro 2003). Along the way, Bourdieu and colleagues invented a number of new feld-specifc versions of capital – such as “academic capital,” “scientifc capital,” “linguistic capital,” and “juridical capital.” These sit somewhat awkwardly next to the more general forms of capital, and this ad hoc proliferation of capitals is often criticized (see DiMaggio 1979; Friedland 2009; Go and Krause 2016). But the specifcity of capital is precisely the point of recognizing semi-autonomous felds rather than a single totalizing power structure. “Within a feld,” Bourdieu noted in a lecture, “people fght to the death over things that are imperceptible to those who fnd themselves in the next room” (Bourdieu 2014 [2012], 318, qtd. in Cohen 2018). In essence, Bourdieusian feld theory is a call to identify domain-specifc status orders and the resources that are valorized therein. A second key task is to examine the process of autonomization – that is, the way in which one feld becomes partially independent from others and is constituted in the process. In one example, Bourdieu (1991) analyzed the emergence of the religious feld, which differentiated specialists from the laity and required a formalization of doctrine. Similarly, Charle (2015 [1990]) analyzed the rise of a semiautonomous intellectual feld in late-nineteenth century France and its evolving relationships with the feld of power. Sapiro (2003) analyzed how the French literary feld became partially independent of the state and market with the rise of pure aesthetic judgment. LeBaron (2001) argued that economics in France is to some degree a semi-autonomous feld, with its own criteria of inclusion and worth, although it remains somewhat heteronymous and dependent on politics, government funding, and media outlets. Conversely, autonomy can be lost as one feld is subordinated to another.The rise of New Public Management, in this language, represents the subordination of the state feld to the economic feld (see Sapiro 2018).

The fow of feld theory Bourdieusian felds are usually French, although as we will see in a later section, theorists from this tradition have been increasingly interested in moving beyond

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national borders to examine global or transnational felds. As Bourdieusian theory traveled to other national settings, felds came along, but often only in the background of burgeoning literatures on cultural capital, taste, and class habitus. Still, Bourdieusian conceptions of felds found American homes in both the sociology of culture and in cultural strands of comparative-historical sociology. Although research on cultural taste, social class, and “cultural omnivores” borrowed mainly from other strands of Bourdieu’s thought, Benson (1999) brought feld theory to the sociology of culture to describe the “journalistic feld” and its relationship to the larger feld of cultural production. He situated a feld theoretic approach to mass media in contrast to those emphasizing overarching class hegemony, national culture, and technological change. Similarly, Kuipers (2011) analyzed the formation of a “transnational television feld” as national felds opened up and key intermediaries directed the fow of shows, genres, and production practices across borders. (In the next stage of work, though, Kuipers (2015) distanced herself from Boudieusian oppositions to align more with the mutual attentiveness of the neo-institutionalists.) Field theory found a home in comparative-historical sociology in the US, including in work by Rogers Brubaker (1996) and perhaps most fully in the work of George Steinmetz.6 Steinmetz (2008) argues that the competition for “ethnographic capital” in the “colonial state feld” can explain the varied and shifting approaches of colonial powers to their subjects. Specifcally, he develops a feldtheoretical explanation for why German colonial authorities behaved more or less brutally in different areas in the early twentieth century. In essence, he argues that the genocidal slaughter of the Ovaherero people was an outgrowth of competition for ethnographic capital among local offcials in the Southwest African colonial state feld. In contrast, the more settled defnition of ethnographic capital in the Samoan colonial state feld allowed for a less murderous regime. Here we see the struggle over a specifc species of capital given both local texture and the power to explain variation across cases.7

Neo-institutionalist organizational felds Neo-institutionalists in organizational sociology occasionally pointed to Bourdieu but took the analysis of felds in different directions. Here the focus has been on “organizational felds” – that is, a relatively coherent though not strictly bounded arenas in which different organizations – and often organizations of different types – “take one another into account as they carry out interrelated activities” (McAdam and Scott 2005, 10).8 DiMaggio and Powell (1983) initially defned an organizational feld as a set of organizations that “in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or product” (p. 148). Here felds are socially constructed arenas – something like an “industry plus surrounding actors” (e.g., consultants, suppliers, regulators). As the concept gained steam, neoinstitutionalists increasingly cited mutual regard among a set of organizations as a

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defning feature of a feld (McAdam and Scott 2005), making the identifcation of a feld something of a balancing act between an emic defnition of who is watching whom and an etic defnition of a “recognized arena of institutional life.” It is worth noting that fow of feld theory has followed a complex combination of nation and discipline. Neo-institutionalism in organizational sociology has spread to many analysts of organizational behavior in business schools, not only in the US but also in many parts of Europe.Thus, a scholar of organizational behavior in a French business school is likely to use “felds” more like an American sociologist than like a colleague in a French sociology department – or perhaps even a British sociology department. Fields matter in this research because they are the arenas in which scripts and symbols of organizational legitimacy diffuse. Neo-institutionalism is often equated with the study of diffusion, legitimacy, and mimicry among organizations, whether these are corporations, nonprofts, or public sector agencies (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Meyer and Rowan 1977). But the organizational feld is a more fundamental concept, since it defnes “how organizations select models for emulation, where they focus information-gathering energy, which organizations they compare themselves with, and where they recruit personnel” (DiMaggio 1991, 267). The feld is the space in which the dynamics of “institutional isomorphism” are enacted. It is here that neo-institutionalists expect to see mimicry in the face of uncertainty (leading to “mimetic isomorphism” or structural similarity due to copying), demands for standardization by powerful partners or the state (“coercive isomorphism”), or professionals acting as the carriers of a particular organizational model or script (“normative isomorphism”). The burgeoning neo-institutional framework quickly became flled with studies documenting these processes – especially mimicry and follow-the-leader-dynamics (Mizruchi and Fein 1999). Often using quantitative analyses, scholars documented the diffusion of civil service reforms across U.S. cities (Tolbert and Zucker 1983), the spread of the multi-divisional model of the frm in the American corporate community (Fligstein 1985), the spread of human resource management practices through professional networks (Sutton et al. 1994), and numerous other organizational policies and practices. Fields were usually not studied directly in this research. Instead, they are implied by patterns of adoption that could not be explained by proximate power and effciency considerations – but that did correspond to growing popularity among other organizations. As neo-institutionalism expanded, though, more studies put felds at the center of attention – as both something to be explained and as an explanation for organizational change.

Field as explanandum Part of the attraction of the feld concept for organizational sociologists is that it provides a vocabulary for describing the emergence and structuring of heterogeneous new arenas that do not (yet) have a more authoritative, institutionalized moniker (such as “industry” or “sector”). Indeed, a number of studies seek to explain the

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emergence of new felds – including the feld of American art museums (DiMaggio 1991), a feld of actors surrounding the American biotechnology industry (Powell et al. 2005), a feld of lesbian and gay organizations in the San Francisco area (Armstrong 2002), and a feld of global sustainability standards (Bartley and Smith 2010; Dingwerth and Pattberg 2009). Other neo-institutionalists have looked at the transformation of existing felds – often due to the infuence of social movements, professionalization projects, and state policy changes (Chiarello 2018; Haveman, Rao, and Paruchuri 2007; Rao, Monin, and Durand 2005; Rao, Morrill, and Zald 2000; Weber, Rao, and Thomas 2009). In either case, charting and explaining variation over time is essential. The neo-institutionalist explanation for feld-level change typically includes some set of “institutional entrepreneurs” who assemble resources and stimulate collaborative action, a cultural process in which initially disparate organizations come to think of themselves as engaged in a common project, some competition over the appropriate model for structuring the feld, and ultimately settlement on one dominant model as others fall by the wayside. This interest in feld formation is not so different from Bourdieusians’ interest in the autonomization of felds, though neo-institutionalists have been far less concerned with identifying feld-specifc capitals. Some work on feld emergence effectively straddles this line, adopting a Bourdieusian emphasis on symbolic capital but also attending to the intermediaries and legitimating organizations emphasized by neo-institutionalists. This can be seen in Ferguson’s (1998) analysis of French gastronomy, Dezalay and Garth’s (1996) work on the rise of transnational commercial arbitration, Kuipers’s (2015) initial work on the global television feld, and Smith’s (2016) work on the feld of higher education in the US.

Field as explanans Fields also help to explain other organizational outcomes. While many scholars invoke “institutional isomorphism” without discussing felds directly, others have been more explicit in documenting how organizations and industries have been affected by “feld frames” (Lounsbury,Ventresca, and Hirsch 2003) and feld-level actors (Bartley and Child 2011; Rao, Monin, and Durand 2005; Sauder 2008; Schneiberg and Clemens 2006). The central point here is that projects to categorize and evaluate a feld of organizations – as done by rating bodies, professional critics, and advocacy organizations – can lead to a variety of new organizational practices, sometimes becoming a powerful constraint on organizational autonomy.9 Others have leveraged cross-national comparisons to argue that national differences in organizational strategies refect the different national felds in which the organizations are embedded (Wilde et al. 2010; Sallaz 2012). Some studies have emerged from the neo-institutionalist tradition but end up using “feld” in a way that is slightly more Bourdieusian – as spaces of opposition, not necessarily defned by mutual regard among a set of constituent organizations. For instance, Duffy et al. (2010) argue that a particular philanthropic foundation had more power in the “policy formation feld” of local politics than in the “policy

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implementation feld.” Evans and Kay (2008) explain debates over environmental and labor standards in NAFTA by looking at the overlaps between the “trade policy feld,” the “U.S. legislative feld,” the “transnational trade negotiating feld,” and the “grassroots politics feld.” In these studies, “feld” is nearly synonymous with “domain.” They are part of a growing tendency to borrow and synthesize across the neo-institutional and Bourdieusian traditions – a development I will address in a later part of this essay.

Divergences and parallels “Fields” clearly refer to different things in different works. At the very least, there is variation in the level of aggregation or specifcity in the named feld. Compare the scale and scope of the political feld in France (for Bourdieu) with the feld of lesbian and gay organizations in the San Francisco area (for Armstrong 2002) with a specifc German colonial state feld in Southwest Africa for Steinmetz (2008) – who is a Bourdieusian, complicating any simple claim about scale in the two traditions).10 There is also variation in the degree to which direct interaction and mutual attention among participants are required for something to be called a feld. Something like the religious feld as identifed by a Bourdieusian would not satisfy the defnition of a feld for many neo-institutionalists, who would instead see smaller, more self-referencing arenas (perhaps a set of Protestant denominations). There is a difference in whether the emphasis is on confict (a space of oppositions) or coordination (a community of mutual regard).Yet there is some convergence here, with Bourdieusians acknowledging relative consensus in “settled felds” (Steinmetz 2008) and neo-institutionalists foregrounding opposition and near-constant confict, as opposed to mere episodes that quickly settle (Fligstein and McAdam 2012; McAdam and Scott 2005).11 Traditions also vary in whether they see the most relevant players in a feld as being individuals (in a Bourdieusian social feld) or organizations (in a neo-institutional organizational feld).This likely simply refects different origins rather than a deep divide in epistemologies, though, and should not be diffcult to surmount. In addition, a neo-institutional analysis of felds is more likely to explain organizational or institutional change over time. Bourdieusians do sometimes look at change (especially autonomization), but they also seek to unpack fairly stable structures and capitals in a feld – a task that would rarely be the goal for neo-institutionalists. Perhaps most importantly, a Bourdieusian approach to felds is inextricably linked to the identifcation of feld-specifc capitals, and often to an account of one form of knowledge becoming orthodoxy. Neo-institutionalists have incorporated contestation, but they have less to say about the specifc currencies that hold sway in a given feld – or the valorization or marginalization of different possible currencies. Nevertheless, one can sense at least a vague coherence to feld theories. For one, they refer to arenas that are loosely bounded but somehow coherent nevertheless – as opposed to more tightly bounded concepts such as organization,

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industry, state, or party, where the criteria for membership and exclusion are clearer. Field theories are united in honing in on meso-level social orders, rejecting both macro-structuralism and micro-interactionism. Moreover, they seek to counter voluntarist and methodologically individualist imageries by showing how meso-level orders get institutionalized, naturalized, and reproduced. At the same time, feld theorists often want to undermine totalizing structural theories – whether of a Marxist or culturalist sort – by showing that felds work by their own distinct logics rather than being driven by one systemic master logic.There is a recognition of some degree of institutional plurality in the study of “felds” – otherwise, we would see the entire social order as just “one big feld” driven by a single master logic.

Integrating and globalizing feld theories A synthesis of these two traditions could strengthen the clarity and impact of feld theory. I see two primary rationales for integration. First, an integrated feld theory may provide a general theoretical language for social research, which could counteract methodologically individualist, de-contextualized, and socio-biological approaches on one hand and totalizing structuralism and holism on the other hand. This is seemingly the rationale behind Fligstein and McAdam’s (2012) account of “strategic action felds,” which they argue can provide a general framework for explaining stability and change in meso-level social orders. As I will argue in what follows, this rationale is appealing, but Fligstein and McAdam’s version of feld theory has several shortcomings. In particular, it risks elevating generalized processes over substantive and status distinctions. Second, integration is helpful for the types of social orders that scholars increasingly want to explain – especially those that operate across national borders. Over the past three decades, there has been dramatic expansion of transnational governance, including projects to set standards for global industries, harmonize national systems of professions, expand global access to medicines, and develop norms for new technologies (Bartley 2018b; Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006). These are based not primarily in the treaties and inter-governmental organizations of the post WWII era, but in loose agglomerations of multiple types of actors, including transnational corporations, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, and regulatory agencies, as well as key individuals from the public and private sectors.To make sense of these heterogeneous and evolving social orders, we need feld theories. In particular, we need neo-institutionalists’ consideration of emergent spaces of mutual regard and mechanisms of change; and we need Bourdieusians’ emphasis on persistent oppositions, feld-specifc forms of capital, and the valorization of particular forms of knowledge. Through a partial critique of Fligstein and McAdam and consideration of transnational felds of governance, one can see why it is crucial to attend to the substance of felds, not just their form or structure, and possibly fnd a path toward a more productive integration of paradigms.

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Strategic action felds: a critical perspective In this section, I highlight an approach that has been especially prominent in recent American sociology – namely, Fligstein and McAdam’s (2012) theory of strategic action felds.This approach provides an integrated, middle-range, and generalizable theoretical vocabulary, though I will argue that it over-draws parallels and misses a chance for fuller integration of Bourdieusian approaches. Drawing primarily from neo-institutionalism, Fligstein and McAdam see strategic action felds as spaces in which actors “are attuned and interact with one another on the basis of shared (which is not to say consensual) understandings about the purposes of the feld” (p. 9).Yet Fligstein and McAdam reject the neoinstitutionalist emphasis on consensus and routine reproduction, and they draw on Bourdieu to paint felds as always rife with opposition, contention, and power struggles.This is refected in their central set of arguments: Fields become “settled” to varying degrees as the power of “incumbents” becomes entrenched and recognizable. Change is most likely when felds are disrupted by exogenous shocks that are leveraged by “challengers” into moments of crisis. Fligstein and McAdam criticize Bourdieu, though, for being focused on individual actors and explicit powergrabbing, thus neglecting collective (organizational) actors and the “social skill” that allows some actors to forge robust collaboration and coordination. Although this work spurred some scathing criticisms (Fuchs 2014) and some milder worries that Bourdieu was being misappropriated (Swartz 2014), it has been widely cited and is increasingly being applied in organizational studies and sociology (Habinek and Haveman 2018; King and Walker 2014).12 My primary concern is that the theory’s reliance on a general set of architectural categories – “incumbent,”“challenger,”“governance unit,” and “shock” – that can be flled with a huge array of disparate contents risks paving a path to an overly abstracted and formalistic style of research.13 The problem can be seen in the comparative cases that Fligstein and McAdam employ. Their theoretical account is rooted in broad parallels between the “feld of racial politics” in the US and its reshaping by the civil rights movement and the “housing strategic action feld,” as it was reshaped by new strategies in the mortgage market. In essence, they see civil rights activism and entrepreneurial banking as the same sort of thing.14 In the frst case, they describe how the feld of racial politics was disrupted by the Great Depression and the Cold War then reconfgured by challengers from the civil rights movement. It ultimately settled on an institutionalized (rather than radical) course as international and domestic politics shifted and the movement splintered. In the second case, they show how the traditional originate-and-hold system of mortgage banking was disrupted by the recession of the 1970s and the federal government’s dilemma of how to expand housing for baby-boomers and upwardly mobile minorities without expanding government expenditures. The “challengers” here were upstart mortgage banks such as Countrywide Financial, enabled by new government-sponsored enterprises, FannieMae and FreddieMac. Soon, the

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feld settled on a fnancialized but “industrial” model, in which banks learned to earn fees from numerous links in the complex chains of mortgage origination and securitization. There are certainly parallels, and theorizing by analogy can be useful. But Fligstein and McAdam obscure two important differences. For one, Countrywide’s upstart model was surely a challenge to the prior order, but it was a market-expanding challenge, which was quickly and proftably incorporated by the incumbent banks. In contrast, the challenge of civil rights activism demanded an expansion of citizenship rights, protection from discrimination (via market-restricting regulation), and a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of racial dominance and subordination.A “minority rights revolution” arrived, but counter-revolution was widespread, from Nixon’s “southern strategy” to widespread evasion of civil rights law. Surprisingly, Fligstein and McAdam provide no theoretical tools for explaining these different trajectories. Second and relatedly, there is a difference in the marginality of the “challengers” in these two cases.The key challengers in one case – the NAACP, Urban League, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) – became known as the “big 5” civil rights organizations, but many also faced resource constraints, organizational turmoil, violent repression, and surveillance by the FBI (Cunningham 2005; Polletta 2002). In the other case, the challengers were large, government-sponsored fnancing entities and an upstart mortgage bank, Countrywide, which had modest origins but had already become the country’s top residential mortgage originator when its challenge to the big banks gained steam in the early 1990s (McLean and Nocera 2011). At root, the problem is that Fligstein and McAdam do not provide an account of marginalization to accompany their account of mobilization and institutionalization.They acknowledge obvious differences in actors and settings, but their theory ultimately treats all challengers (or all incumbents) as essentially equivalent, regardless of who they are or what they are fghting to change (or retain). Perhaps it is because they are insuffciently Bourdieusian. Fligstein and McAdam treat Bourdieu primarily as a theorist of structure and agency, but they ignore him as a theorist of domination, symbolic violence, and the valorization of particular types of capital. A more productive synthesis could take account of Bourdieusian studies emphasizing how symbolic capital rests on geopolitical and ideological contests (Dezalay and Garth 2002), how challengers confront deeply institutionalized symbolic structures (Paschel 2016), and how some challenges lead to felds that entrench inequalities rather than transcending them (Smith 2016).

Toward transnational felds Both Bourdieusians (Go and Krause 2016; Kauppi 2018; Sapiro 2018) and neo-institutionalists (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006; Suddaby, Cooper, and Greenwood 2007) have called for taking feld theory from the national to the transnational level.Yet there is signifcant borrowing across traditions here. Djelic and

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Sahlin-Andersson (2006) portray felds as defned by networks of attention and diffusion, but they argue that “felds of transnational governance are also battlefelds” (p. 23), referencing Bourdieu to emphasize persistent power struggles. Go (2008) combines approaches to provide a feld theory of imperialism, drawing attention to anti-colonialism as symbolic capital but also emphasizing dynamics of mutual regard to explain the divergence between British and American empires. Cohen’s (2018) Bourdieusian account of global felds at least recognizes that the term is being used in overlapping ways by neo-institutionalists and others. In addition, Dezalay and Garth’s (1996, 2002) Bourdieusian research on transnational felds has had crossover appeal to economic and organizational sociologists infuenced by neo-institutionalism. This includes my own research, which takes felds of transnational governance as heuristic cases in order to undertake both within-feld analyses and cross-feld comparison. In particular, I have compared transnational felds focused on the private regulation of land and labor – with a focus on sustainable forestry in one case and decent work in apparel/footwear production in the other (Bartley 2018a). Each feld consists of a loosely bounded set of actors – including transnational corporations, supplier frms, international NGOs, auditing/certifcation bodies, consultants, watchdogs, government agencies, and international organizations. The felds are defned by “a mix of mutual attention and deep confict” (p. 52), as multiple standard-setting initiatives compete for legitimacy and reformist agendas collide with the vested interests of companies and states in labor exploitation and environmental degradation. Yet there are differences between these felds that require moving beyond the content-free tendencies of Fligstein and McAdam and much of neo-institutionalism. Simply put, environment and sustainability standards have gained more legitimacy in the eyes of corporate and state elites than have labor standards. This is not to say that environmental standards are uncontested or easily incorporated in proftmaximizing rationales. I have argued, though, that a combination of differences in organizational structures, the objects of regulation (forests and factories), and framings of the global common good put sustainable forestry and fair labor felds on different trajectories. (See Bartley 2018a, for details.) One could go further in a Bourdieusian direction to more fully consider marginalization and valorization in these felds. For instance, it would be worthwhile to unpack the sources of symbolic capital in private regulatory felds, much as Hopewell (2015) does for the sources of “seriousness” in the international trade policy feld or Dezalay and Garth (1996) do in analyzing transnational legal orders.15 If the analysis were geared entirely toward this task, though, we could easily overlook dynamics of organizational change and rule implementation, which are also essential for an account of private regulatory felds. Ultimately, an integrated conceptualization of felds is needed to make sense of transnational governance. Such an account must take marginalization/valorization much more seriously than Fligstein and McAdam and most neo-institutionalists do; and it must hone in on mechanisms of change more than most Bourdieusians do.

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A feld is a generative concept that resonates across theoretical and national traditions. But the concept works best as the beginning of analysis rather than the end. The analysis of felds should be an invitation to delve into the co-evolution of coherence and marginalization, not a recipe for the explanation. Following this path, scholars should be well-positioned to carry forward the kind of pragmatic inquiry stressed in this volume.

Notes 1 The French equivalent, champs, should connote several of these meanings but not necessarily the arena of knowledge (domaine) or a site of sports competition (terrain). Nevertheless, Bourdieu sometimes used analogies to games when describing felds. 2 For a full tracing of Bourdieu’s infuence in Europe,Asia, South America, and beyond, see Santoro, Gallelli, and Grüning 2018; Hjekllbrekke and Prieur 2018. In the US, Bourdieu’s legacy in the sociology of culture seems largely orthogonal to his theorization of felds. Indeed, Lamont’s (2012) account of Bourdieu’s infuence on American sociology does not even mention the term “feld.” 3 See Thompson’s (1967) brief use of feld,Warren’s (1967) work on the inter-organizational feld, and Curtis and Zurcher’s (1973) account of “multi-organizational felds.” 4 The triumvirate of institutional isomorphisms – coercive, normative, and especially mimetic isomorphism – are more easily recognizable as the most prominent theoretical concepts in this paradigm, but importantly it is the feld that defnes the space of power, professional norming, and copying as the drivers of these isomorphic tendencies. 5 Unlike Martin’s (2003) purely theoretical inquiry, I will focus on the practical ways in which felds have been used in empirical research. 6 See also Smith (2016), Go (2008), and Krause (2014). Smith brings Steinmetz’s account of ethnographic capital to the invention of Appalachia. Go argues that British and American empires were differently situated in felds. Krause argues that global humanitarianism is a feld with its own inherent oppositions and competition for “humanitarian authority” as a form of symbolic capital. For a critique, arguing that Bourdieu’s popularity lies in its self-serving appeal to academics, see Riley 2017. 7 Concretely, Steinmetz is pointing to a semi-autonomous arena in which various actors from the Southwest African colonial state feld were vying for power. Different German colonies had different colonial state felds, as did other colonial powers. So unlike the neo-institutionalists, a feld is not made up of multiple organizations but seemingly of a set of individuals within a particular colonial state administration. Steinmetz must then also recognize a larger “colonial feld of power” that includes non-state actors, as well as relationships between colonial state felds and a “global feld of colonial strategies.” 8 See Wooten and Hoffman 2008 for a thorough review of this literature. 9 For examples, see Zietsma and Lawrence 2010; Sauder and Espeland 2009. Attention to legitimating intermediaries is not entirely absent from the Bourdieusian tradition. In an account of literary felds, Boschetti (2012) considers both the production of literature and the legitimation and consecration of genres, authors, and styles. 10 Note that the level of specifcity at which you name the focal feld can have some awkward consequences. Fligstein and McAdam have to use the awkward “broader feld environment” to get at what some would have called the feld in the frst place. Steinmetz highlights a highly specifc and localized feld, but then also references a global version that seemingly encompasses these. 11 Steinmetz veers toward neo-institutionalism in writing that “no matter how much a social feld is riven by dynamics of confict, it is also a space of mutual recognition” (p. 596). 12 See also Evans and Kay 2008 for a nice empirical illustration of what would become Fligstein and McAdam’s approach.

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13 The linguistic similarity between “strategic action felds” and Talcott Parsons’ “action systems” is not entirely coincidental, I think. 14 See Clemens 2005 for a critique of false equivalences in a related literature. 15 For a thorough consideration of Dezalay and Garth’s work vis-à-vis Bourdieu, see Cohen (2018).

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F. Davis, Doug McAdam,W. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald, 351–66. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cohen,Antonin. 2018.“Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz, 200–48. New York: Oxford University Press. Cunningham, David. 2005. There’s Something Happening Here:The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Curtis, Russell L. Jr., and Louis A. Zurcher, Jr. 1973.“Stable Resources of Protest Movements: The Multi-Organizational Field.” Social Forces 52(1): 53–61. Davis, Gerald F., Kristina A. Diekmann, and Catherine H. Tinsley. 1994. “The Decline and Fall of the Conglomerate Firm in the 1980s:The Deinstitutionalization of an Organizational Form.” American Sociological Review 59(4): 547–70. Dezalay,Yves. 1990. “Juristes purs et marchands de droit: Division du travail de domination symbolique et aggiornamento dans le champ du droit.” Politix: Revue des Sciences Sociales du Politique 3(10): 70–91. Dezalay,Yves, and Bryant G. Garth. 1996. Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dezalay,Yves, and Bryant G. Garth. 2002. The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DiMaggio, Paul. 1979.“On Pierre Bourdieu.” American Journal of Sociology 84(6): 1460–74. DiMaggio, Paul. 1991.“Constructing an Organizational Field as a Professional Project: U.S. Art Museums, 1920–1940.” In The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio, 267–92. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DiMaggio, Paul J., and Walter W. Powell. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review 48: 147–60. DiMaggio, Paul, and Walter W. Powell. 1991. “Introduction.” In The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dingwerth, Klaus, and Philipp Pattberg. 2009. “World Politics and Organizational Fields: The Case of Transnational Sustainability Governance.” European Journal of International Relations 15(4): 707–43. Djelic, Marie-Laure, and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson, eds. 2006. Transnational Governance: Institutional Dynamics of Regulation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Dubois,Vincent, and Jean-Matthieu Méon. 2013.“The Social Conditions of Cultural Domination: Field, Sub-Field and Local Spaces of Wind Music in France.” Cultural Sociology 7(2): 127–44. Duffy, Meghan M., Amy J. Binder, and John D. Skrentny. 2010. “Elite Status and Social Change: Using Field Analysis to Explain Policy Formation and Implementation.” Social Problems 57(1): 49−73. Duval, Julien. 2018. “Correspondence Analysis and Bourdieu’s Approach to Statistics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz, 512–27. New York: Oxford University Press. Evans, Rhonda, and Tamara Kay. 2008. “How Environmentalists Greened Trade Policy: Strategic Action and the Architecture of Field Overlap.” American Sociological Review 73: 970–91. Ferguson, Patricia. 1998. “A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in 19th-Century France.” American Journal of Sociology 104: 597–641.

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Fligstein, Neil. 1985. “The Spread of the Multidivisional Form Among Large Firms, 1919– 1979.” American Sociological Review 50(3): 377–91. Fligstein, Neil, and Doug McAdam. 2012. A Theory of Fields. New York: Oxford University Press. Friedland, Roger. 2009. “The Endless Fields of Pierre Bourdieu.” Organization 16(6): 887–917. Fuchs, Stephan. 2014. “How Not to Do (Field) Theory.” Contemporary Sociology 43(3): 312–314. Go, Julian. 2008.“Global Fields and Imperial Forms: Field Theory and the British and American Empires.” Sociological Theory 26(3): 201–29. Go, Julian, and Monika Krause. 2016. Fielding Transnationalism. Oxford:Wiley Blackwell/The Sociological Review. Habinek, Jacob, and Heather A. Haveman. 2018. “Professionals and Populists: The Making of a Free Market for Medicine in the United States, 1787–1860.” Socio-Economic Review 17(1): 81–108. Hall, Peter A., and Rosemary C.R.Taylor. 1996.“Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms.” Political Studies 44: 936–57. Hallett,Tim. 2007. “Between Deference and Distinction: Interaction Ritual Through Symbolic Power in an Educational Institution.” Social Psychology Quarterly 70(2): 148–71. Haveman, H.A., H. Rao, and S. Paruchuri. 2007. “The Winds of Change: The Progressive Movement and the Bureaucratization of Thrift.” American Sociological Review 72(1): 117–42. Hjekllbrekke, Johs, and Annick Prieur. 2018.“On the Reception of Bourdieu’s Sociology in the World’s Most Equal Societies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz. New York: Oxford University Press. Hopewell, Kristen. 2015.“Multilateral Trade Governance as Social Field: Global Civil Society and the WTO.” Review of International Political Economy 22(6): 1128–58. Kauppi, Niilo. 2018.“Transnational Social Fields.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz, 183–99. New York: Oxford University Press. King, Brayden G., and Edward T. Walker. 2014. “Winning Hearts and Minds: Field Theory and the Three Dimensions of Strategy.” Strategic Organization 12(2): 134–41. Krause, Monika. 2014. The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuipers, Giselinde. 2011.“Cultural Globalization as the Emergence of a Transnational Cultural Field: Transnational Television and National Media Landscapes in Four European Countries.” American Behavioral Scientist 55(5): 541–57. Kuipers, Giselinde. 2015. “How National Institutions Mediate the Global: Screen Translation, Institutional Interdependencies, and the Production of National Difference in Four European Countries.” American Sociological Review 80(5): 985–1013. Lamont, Michèle. 1992. Money, Morals, and Manners:The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lamont, Michèle. 2012. “How Has Bourdieu Been Good to Think with? The Case of the United States.” Sociological Forum 27(1): 228–37. Lebaron, Frédéric. 2001. “Economists and the Economic Order: The Field of Economists and the Field of Power in France.” European Societies 3(1): 91–110. Lebaron, Frédéric. 2009.“How Bourdieu ‘Quantifed’ Bourdieu:The Geometric Modelling of Data.” In Quantifying Theory: Pierre Bourdieu, 11–29. Berlin: Springer. Lounsbury, Michael, Marc J.Ventresca, and Paul M. Hirsch. 2003. “Social Movements, Field Frames and Industry Emergence: A Cultural-Political Perspective on U.S. Recycling.” Socio-Economic Review 1(1): 71–104.

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Martin, John Levi. 2003.“What Is Field Theory?” American Journal of Sociology 109(1): 1–49. Martin, John Levi. 2018. “Bourdieu’s Unlikely Contribution to the Human Sciences.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz, 435–53. New York: Oxford University Press. McAdam, Doug, and W. Richard Scott. 2005. “Organizations and Social Movements.” In Social Movements and Organization Theory, edited by Gerald F. Davis, Doug McAdam, W. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald, 4–40. New York: Cambridge University Press. McLean, Bethany, and Joe Nocera. 2011. All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. New York: Penguin. Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. 1977.“Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology 80: 340–63. Mische, Ann. 2012. “Bourdieu in Contention and Deliberation: Response to Lamont and Lizardo.” Sociological Forum 27(1): 245–50. Mizruchi, Mark, and Lisa Fein. 1999. “The Social Construction of Organizational Knowledge: A Study in the Use of Coercive, Mimetic, and Normative Isomorphism.” Administrative Science Quarterly 44: 653–84. Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(1): 126–66. Ostrom, Elinor.2009. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton:Princeton University Press. Paschel,Tianna S. 2016. Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. 1996.“Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61(5): 900–7. Polletta, F. 2002. Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Powell, Walter W., and Paul DiMaggio, eds. 1991. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Powell, Walter W., Douglas R. White, Kenneth W. Koput, and Jason Owen-Smith. 2005. “Network Dynamics and Field Evolution:The Growth of Interorganizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences.” American Journal of Sociology 110: 1132–205. Rao, Hayagreeva, Philippe Monin, and Rodolphe Durand. 2005. “Border Crossing: Bricolage and the Erosion of Categorical Boundaries in French Gastronomy.” American Sociological Review 70(6): 968–91. Rao, Hayagreeva, Calvin Morrill, and Mayer N. Zald. 2000.“Power Plays: How Social Movements and Collective Action Create New Organizational Forms.” Research in Organizational Behavior 22: 237–81. Riley, Dylan. 2017.“Bourdieu’s Class Theory.” Catalyst 1(2). Sallaz, Jeffrey J. 2012. “Politics of Organizational Adornment: Lessons From Las Vegas and Beyond.” American Sociological Review 77(1): 99–119. Santoro, Marco, Andrea Gallelli, and Barbara Grüning. 2018. “Bourdieu’s International Circulation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz, 21–67. New York: Oxford University Press. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2003.“The Literary Field Between the State and the Market.” Poetics 31(5–6): 441–64. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2018. “Field Theory from a Transnational Perspective.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz, 161–82. New York: Oxford University Press. Sauder, Michael. 2008.“Interlopers and Field Change:The Entry of US News into the Field of Legal Education.” Administrative Science Quarterly 53(2): 209–34. Sauder, Michael, and Wendy Nelson Espeland. 2009. “The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change.” American Sociological Review 74(1): 63–82.

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Schneiberg, Marc, and Elisabeth S. Clemens. 2006.“The Typical Tools for the Job: Research Strategies in Institutional Analysis.” Sociological Theory 24(3): 195–227. Smith, Christi M. 2016. Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Steinmetz, George. 2008. “The Colonial State as a Social Field: Ethnographic Capital and Native Policy in the German Overseas Empire Before 1914.” American Sociological Review 73(4): 589–612. Suddaby, Roy, David J. Cooper, and Royston Greenwood. 2007.“Transnational Regulation of Professional Services: Governance Dynamics of Field Level Organizational Change.” Accounting, Organizations and Society 32(4–5): 333–62. Sutton, John R., Frank Dobbin, John W. Meyer, and W. Richard Scott. 1994.“The Legalization of the Workplace.” American Journal of Sociology 99(4): 944–71. Swartz, David L. 2014.“Theorizing Fields.” Theory and Society 43(6): 675–82. Thompson, James D. 1967. Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill. Tolbert, Pamela S., and Lynne G. Zucker. 1983. “Institutional Sources of Change in the Formal Structure of Organizations:The Diffusion of Civil Service Reform, 1880–1935.” Administrative Science Quarterly 28: 22–39. Warren, Roland L. 1967.“The Interorganizational Field as a Focus for Investigation.” Administrative Science Quarterly 396–419. Weber, Klaus, Hayagreeva Rao, and L.G. Thomas. 2009. “From Streets to Suites: How the Anti- Biotech Movement Affected German Pharmaceutical Firms.” American Sociological Review 74(1): 106–27. Wilde, Melissa J., Kristin Geraty, Shelley L. Nelson, and Emily A. Bowman. 2010. “Religious Economy or Organizational Field? Predicting Bishops’Votes at the Second Vatican Council.” American Sociological Review 75(4): 586–606. Wooten, Melissa, and Andrew J. Hoffman. 2008. “Organizational Fields: Past, Present and Future.” The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism 1: 131–47. Zietsma, Charlene, and Thomas B. Lawrence. 2010. “Institutional Work in the Transformation of an Organizational Field: The Interplay of Boundary Work and Practice Work.” Administrative Science Quarterly 55(2): 189–221.

2 ECOLOGIES OF INSTITUTIONS Daniel Cefaï

The point of departure of this chapter is the kind of human ecology which was invented by Robert E. Park, Roderick McKenzie, and Ernest W. Burgess, in the department of sociology at the University of Chicago, in the 1920s. Park was close to William I. Thomas, who invited him to come to Chicago and who was the frst to analyze processes of social organization and disorganization. Both of them are considered among the inventors of feld studies – especially in migrant, race, and urban studies, in which they and their students innovated, shifting from more theoretical essays to empirical case studies. Both of them had strong connections with pragmatist philosophy. Thomas was a close friend of George H. Mead and John Dewey and developed his conception of social situations and organizations at their contact. Park attended William James’s courses at Harvard, and Dewey’s at the University of Michigan, before becoming Mead’s colleague at Chicago. All these authors contributed to the foundation of an original perspective on “social institutions,” one can fnd in the 1920s and 1930s PhD sociology dissertations.They have developed a vision of “social institutions” as processes of differentiation and functional integration, dependent on the environments in which they operate and take place, constantly recomposing themselves through their members’ efforts of solving practical problems.This tradition would last through Herbert Blumer and Everett C. Hughes’s teachings and writings and be renewed in different ways by their late students – Strauss, Becker, Gusfeld, Freidson, Goffman . . . until Andrew Abbott’s System of Professions (1988, 2009), which draws on this legacy. The following text proposes a reconstruction, in Dewey’s sense (1920), of a few seminal hypotheses of this sociology of institutions (Burns 1980). It mixes them with insights which were developed frst by pragmatist philosophy – on social experiments, collective intelligence, creative experience, public reason, evolutionary learning, and organizational empowerment (Ansell 2011). These hypotheses permeated Chicago sociology – often unwittingly.They point in the direction of an ecological and processual perspective

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on organizations, quite different from the versions developed in sociology of organizations from the 1970s on.

Natural history of organization and disorganization In the frst place, institutions are seen as a moment in a process of organization and disorganization (Cooley 1909; Thomas and Znaniecki 1919–1920). They are not only taken as structures, but above all as processes. The question of historicity is crucial in the study of institutions according to Thomas or Park. One has to explore the genesis of an institution, go back to the frst moments of its emergence in order to understand what functions it fulflled at its beginnings, what need was felt for it, which interests coalesced through it, and which conficts it created or solved. In any community, certain common solutions are given to problems: activities of co-defnition, cooperation, and communication generate common responses to problematic situations and after a series of processes of hypothesis invention, recurrent testing, collective diffusion, mutual ratifcation, sometimes political validation, habitualized and formalized forms of social lifeprocess grow up – which are called “social institutions” (Dewey and Tufts 1932, Part III; Dewey 1935; Mead 1934/2015, 260–73). Chicago sociology added one more step to this conception of the institutionalization of material “habitats” as well as of “habits” – attitudes, manners, and conventions (Mead 1934/2015). Park and Burgess (1921) had the project to catch institutional life-cycles, and their typical stages of growth and decline. The method they proposed was to study specifc cases, compare them and try to abstract more general patterns of development of one genre of institutions – with the ambition to discover, in the long run, the universal laws of the genesis of institutions. This process of institutionalization was thought, in the wake of Darwin and Spencer, as a natural history of institutions.This concept of natural history, applied by Park (1923) to the press, for example, was still in use in the 1970s sociology of social problems (Spector and Kitsuse 1977). Social scientists tried to catch stable phases of institutional life in their environment – today, we would talk about homeostatic phases of an ecosystem – and to reorder them into sequences.They described moments of crisis – the turning-points in the careers of institutions (Hughes 1971a) – and tried to understand which were the effcient mechanisms, actors, and factors of change.The prototypical example was the sect. Sects have their origins in social unrest to which they give a direction and expression in forms and practices that are largely determined by historical circumstances; movements which were at frst inchoate impulses and aspirations gradually take form; policies are defned, doctrine and dogmas formulated; and eventually an administrative machinery and effciencies are developed to carry into effect policies and purposes. (Park and Burgess 1921, 873; or Park 1927)

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Any sect starts as a social movement – a “movement of social reform and regeneration.” It burgeons, often to protest against injustice and to reform the mores, before going through a series of stages of institutionalization. A violent, confused, and disorderly, but enthusiastic and popular movement arises.The movement takes forms; develops leadership, organization; formulates doctrines and dogmas. Eventually it is accepted, established, legalized. The movement dies, but the institution remains. (Park and Burgess 1921, 873–74) For example, a religious movement will start with the fourishing of expressive behavior and the emergence of prophets or zealots; it will cool down and go through a dynamics of establishment of rituals and leaders: the movement becomes a sect; fnally, the receding of charisma, and the depersonalization of offces, lead to the substitution of legal and bureaucratic functions to personal authority: the sect becomes an institution.The collective effervescence and pungency of the frst days are lost – the social movement has become a social institution (Hughes 1942, 1962); this simple model will be complicated, later, by Hughes’s students in the 1950s, when they will analyze professional and organizational innovation as a social movement (Bucher and Strauss 1961; Strauss et al. 1964).

Institutions: crescive and enacted Many institutions – justice, law, ethics – are supposed to break with, as well as to stay grounded in folkways and mores.They meet needs and satisfy desires, they set ways and control habits. William G. Sumner’s Folkways (1906) was the important reference, there, and the Chicagoans drew on his evolutionary scheme, from folkways to mores, to rituals to conventions, and, last, to institutional forms. Institutions are considered as crescive and enacted, natural sprouts and rational initiatives at the same time, in various proportions.They keep a link with the collective experience of the communities in which they are grounded. These communities never stop facing challenges and defning problems, stating values, fghting around issues, secreting organizational and cultural forms – not differently from ants or bees, but with a greater fexibility that the one allowed by instincts – and projecting purposes that the institutions take in charge (process of natural selection).At the same time, institutions are designed on purpose to fulfll specifc functions: they are autonomous, they have their own collective habits of doing and thinking; they set their own agendas of issues and draw on their own patterns of problem-solving, depending on their perception and valuation of the ends-means dynamics (process of rational selection) (Ansell 2011). There was at Chicago a loose meaning of “institutionalization” that referred to any process of collectivization, organization, standardization, and formalization of behavior. Collective behavior, according to Park or Blumer, can lead to

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disorganization – think about crazes, mobs, and crowds – but in many cases, it acts as a driving force generating social order, including social institutions. Most of social institutions start as social movements. The 1920–33 anti-alcohol policy and Prohibition laws and institutions, for example, were the result of the Women Christian Temperance Union mobilization campaign (Gusfeld 1954).What people were interested in at Chicago is how these mobilizations, fuid at the beginning, become more and more complex and rigid, formal, and impersonal. Note the contradiction between two conceptions of historicity: according to a straight version of natural history (Park and Burgess 1921, 16ff), institutions develop in defnite and predictable ways, in accordance with a predetermined form or entelechy, actualizing characteristic internal processes, stages, and mechanisms; according to the pragmatist version, on the contrary, the institutional process is unpredictable and indefnite, its temporality is made of eventful moments of emergence (Mead 1932), the purposive acts which compose it involve the exercise of collective imagination and they entail unanticipated consequences. Besides this loose meaning, there is a more specifc use of the word “institution” to name institutional units that one can identify and which display a relative unity, self-organization, and self-refexivity. The two best examples in 1920s Chicago sociology were Everett C. Hughes’ study on the Chicago Real Estate Board (1928/1979) and Ernest H. Shideler’s on chain stores in business districts (1927). These two cases display how an institution or a complex of organizations selforganizes through processes of differentiation and unifcation, dissociation and integration which lead to more complexity.This implies that institutions are not only taken as unbroken wholes. The process of institutionalization is one of functional differentiation, aggregation, and disaggregation, with a division of work and specialization of tasks between the different “organs,” which goes hand in hand with the production of hierarchies, technical and political, of superordination and subordination. Of course, such a functional differentiation generates areas of coordination and intermediation, in which the indeterminacy favors activities of trading, dispute, inquiry, experiment, translation, discussion; and this means that they are not only natural processes, but involve a process of conventionalization, in a social, moral, and political order.We could borrow a nice metaphor from Emirbayer and Mische (1998, 968): institutions are “multilevel fows of nested events.” Institutions as objects of study are nothing else than frozen images (Strauss 1993) extracted from arrays, patchworks, and rhizomes of interlinked processes and interwoven histories. Institutions do not stop happening, not as discrete natural events as in Whitehead temporal ontology, but as complexes of “overlapping and interpenetrating strands of temporal systems” (Aviles 2020). The institutional present which is “passing” extends “in memory and history, in anticipation and forecast” (Mead 1932, 23–24) and unfolds, here and now, as moments in fuent careers of people and objects (Becker and Strauss 1956), complex architectures of “cooperative networks” (Becker 1981, about connections between suppliers, performers, dealers, critics, and consumers of art), and specialized “organizational segments” which embody different trends of time (Strauss et al. 1964, about psychiatric institutions and ideologies).

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Institutions as grounded in environments, permeated with stories Institutions are thus specifc organizations, which seem to act as ecological units, with a certain autonomy and individuality that make them recognizable – and even some kind of sovereignty and authority over their members (Dewey 1891, 172). The metaphor of an organ fulflling a physiological function in the social body has nevertheless its limits, and this is even truer when one goes down to the level of individuals as operators of the organism functionings. . . .The division of work in human organizations cannot be reduced to the coordination and regulation of life-processes, analogous to the complementarity of instinctual mechanisms one can observe in ants or bees communities – a point which was already clear for Park. Chicago sociologists nevertheless maintained this biological background in their human ecology – limiting it to the dimension of competition in a biotic order, while mechanisms of regulation and transformation of competition into processes of confict, assimilation, and accommodation were specifc to human societies. It is a mistake to treat Chicago sociologists as spokespersons for social Darwinism: Park and Thomas and Mead frst in line – were strongly opposed, theoretical and politically, to any kind of thesis on the biological causes of economic poverty of racial inferiority. Now, let us follow their intuition and consider this proposal from a pragmatist perspective. It may have been a pioneering point of view, in today terms of political ecology. Institutions are organisms grounded in environments: their structures, hierarchies, strategies, interests, and resources, are not examined per se, but as processual elements in the organizing process of a web of life. In this web of life, some of the living forms fnd and create their niches, develop relationships of solidarity and struggle with organizations of the same species, and outside, with other chains and complexes of living forms. Institutions are thus like plants or animals: they were born, grow up, fourish, wither, and die – if they fail at “adapting.” They respond to dynamics of invasion and succession, competition and selection, accommodation and domination, cooperation and symbiosis. In the wake of geography of plants (Humboldt) and animals (Wallace), the statistical and mapping work in Chicago sociology aimed at explaining the ecological process of functional and territorial, ethnic and racial differentiation, distribution and segregation.The spots on maps or the fgures in charts, which made a good part of Chicago ecology of social institutions – e.g., the historical cartography and statistics of the distribution over time of laundry shops, taken as Chinese business organizations (Siu 1953) – were indications of this life-process. What people call societies are such ecological arrangements in which different lifecommunities intertwine (Lee 1948) – today we would say that ecosystems interlock – cohabit and compete, grow more complex, fght each other but cannot live without. It is in such life-communities that individuals and groups fnd the bearings and resources to make a living and play the social games. This metaphor of embedded organisms was further developed by Mary P. Follett (1924). McKenzie (1936/1968) was aware that institutions are concrete things,

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made of “bricks and mortar” – using, then, a masonry metaphor – which actualize purposes and perform functions, which associate complexes of objects and clusters of persons. Follett stated that such material “arrangements” can be thought neither through a concept of mere “aggregation” of material elements, nor through a concept of “adjustment” or an “adaptation” to “external conditions.”They require processes of “creative experience,” through which unfold self-generating, self-sustaining, self-renewing, self-evolving, and self-refecting life-processes (Follett 1924). Institutions, taken as the fux of transactions between a social organism and its environments, are not “assemblages” in the sense popularized by actor-network theory, and no more systems of functions to which correspond specifc statuses and roles. The unity of institutions, taken as life-communities in their living environments, is partly given through the kind of functional integration of any living body, partly made of the “circular reaction,”“reciprocal relating,” and “endless interplay” between the different elements of the organizational experience – which generate the “group will,”“group feelings,”“group thinking,” and “group consciousness” (Follett 1918). No place here to develop such a powerful perspective – Chris Ansell (2011) proposed a few statements in this direction. What one can point here, too, is the limit of the ecological metaphor: the social institutions are unlike plant or animal communities. They are permeated with all kinds of “frames” or “scripts” – they are made of a nexus of ongoing stories. The conception of a natural history is overcome: it gives way to a historical and cultural ecology. Social institutions sense their temporality while they project themselves into scenarios of the future and reconstruct their past history (Mead 1932). They are represented by leaders as spokesmen on stage, who emerge from their dynamics of integration and perform on their behalf (Follett 1918).They need much talk to describe and valuate themselves and the situations their members have to master, to deal with their ends, means, and values, and to make possible their hangingtogether and doing-together.The activities of building strategies, coordinating with one another, analyzing problematic situations, warranting procedures and decisions, and reporting results include necessarily a moment of “meaning-making” or “sense-making” (to speak as Weick 1995). The institutions perceive themselves through different stories. One of them is the ecological. Another common story stages war conditions: institutions give marching orders, attack competitors, recruit constituents, discipline the troops, wage campaigns, launch operations, set traps, fghts for their territory, crush the enemy, and claim victory (Weick 1979, 49). Often, this metaphor of strategy is combined with an economic metaphor: the institutions check the ratio of investments and benefts, they aim at a balance between gains and losses, they spare their profts, they look for the most proftable business . . . and with an engineering metaphor: the institutions are made of pieces as engines and need to be as rational, that is as effective, as possible.These are different stories through which members of institutions organize their collective experience.After a process of naturalization, these plots are taken for the reality itself. But one should not lose sight of this crucial dimension of organizing: the emplotment of experiences, actions

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and situations, projects and identities into narratives (Ricoeur 1984).The collective process of co-constitution of social institutions, partly conscious, partly unconscious, involves temporally ordered series of sequences of problem-defning and solving, which enable the co-emergence and co-making of institutions and environments (what Bentley and Dewey 1949, call transactions).These ecological dynamics, through which social institutions emerge, reach objectives or realize values, ideas and ideals, can be perceived through different lenses – as well-adjusted, or highly proftable or warlike machines, or as living organisms in their ecological settings.

Institutions as experiential felds and cultural matrices Institutions have a very important function in shaping the “experiential felds” (Mead 1934/2015, 138, 155) of their members, in which they feel, perceive, valuate, choose, act, talk: the range of issues they can think of and discuss, the range of activities and interactions they can engage in, depend on what is allowed by their “experiential felds.” These “experiential felds” organize our private and common life in “experiential habitats” (Mead 1934/2015, 90). In the transactions between institutions and their environments, habits, concrete procedures, and practical conventions are set.The human animals shape their habitats (Mead 1934/2015, 349ff ) and develop what we could call, following Park (1936), cultural, moral, and political ecologies. On the one hand, they secrete the contexts of meanings, symbols, and tools, in which they live: they make the felds of experience and universes of discourse that make them – to paraphrase Marx’s famous sentence on history. They are entangled in the multiple webs of meanings they have woven, interwoven with one another, but differentiated into specifc cocoons; the “shapes” of their concrete experience are “ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and their encasements” (Geertz 1983, 4). On the other hand, they have enough freedom to try to “control consciously” the environmental forces to which they are submitted and to reorient them through action. Human ecology may be not completely modeled on plants and animal ecology – “not suffciently comprehensive to include all the elements that logically fall within the range of human ecology” (McKenzie 1924, 287–88). The capacity of human beings to shape their own environment, their “ability to contrive and adapt the environment to [their] needs,” to move and look for new habitats, choose, and modify the conditions of their living, is critical. Institutions are thus not the result of mere struggle for life and survival of the fttest: they are experiential felds and cultural matrices. In speaking of ‘culture,’ we refer to the conventional understandings, manifest in act and artifact that characterize societies. The ‘understandings’ are the meanings attached to acts and objects. The meanings are conventional, and therefore cultural, in so far as they have become typical for the members of that society by reason of intercommunication among the members. (Redfeld 1941, 132–33)

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Institution members, leaders and followers, clients and benefciaries, live in cultural environments, in which and through which they make sense of their situations. They build up felds of experience, personal and collective, in their transactions with their environments.They inherit certain confgurations of cognitive, and normative agency, which they perpetuate by re-performing them, and at the same time, they transform these repertoires of arguments and narratives, as well as of facts and artifacts, projecting new goals in future.“Experience is the dynamo station”: it generates will, beliefs, and habits. It is the “power-house” of thoughts, values, and ideals (Follett 1924, 85, 133). It is the home base in which different streams of organizational history converge, merge, and generate discontinuities, articulating new architectures of meaning, and requiring new efforts of social praxis, interpretation, and learning. It is the situated space-time span, out of which grow up and take off new horizons of memory and project. Sometimes, when the situations become “problematic,” the people have to defne “what’s going on there.”They discuss, criticize, denounce, claim – a collective activity which leads to the crystallization of new interests around front lines, and which is often related to stakes of right and justice, freedom, and equity.They get into conficts around issues, they have to defne and master. Social movement organizations and public policy institutions are crucial at echoing these troubles and concerns.They give them a public form, understandable and acceptable for the public, its offcers, and the media.They frame worldviews, channel collective emotions, formulate explanations and interpretations of problematic situations, attribute causes and ascribe responsibilities, build up interests and identities.They set confict issues, rhetoric points in controversies or stakes in strategic games – the interplay between organizations and institutions articulates a “problem-centered democracy” (Ansell 2011). They clarify valuation operations that were still muddled and connect them with other struggles or previous cases. They unfold interpretive and normative repertoires, and, drawing on previous social learning, they identify new problems, invent new hypotheses, submit them to new tests, and project new solutions in the public sphere. Organizational cultures and public cultures grow up thanks to the exercise of collective imagination, when people face new challenges. A good part of this growth is due to processes of discussion, inquiry, and experiment on factual or normative issues (Follett 1924; Lindeman 1924; Dewey 1927). And it is only after moments of turmoil and crisis that organizations reach new states of relative stability – that is consensual validation of common perspectives and common agreement about mutual expectations (“common” implies here a reduction of equivocality and contention – Weick 1979 – but does not mean “devoid of confict”).

Institutions, formal and informal structure Inside the organizations, an informal structure unfolds below fowcharts, legal rules, and formal offces.This has a methodological consequence: institutions can be only explored through a close-up feld, in-depth interview, and documentary inquiry.

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Most of the research projects, based on surveys or one-shot interviews with organizational leaders miss the point.This point was crucial in Park’s and Hughes’ teaching. . . . Their students were doing feldwork in order to become insiders and get access to the backstage of institutions – what was going on behind the scenes, off stage and sometimes in the shadows. They had to free themselves from the impression management of public façades (Goffman 1959) – the strategies of communication addressed by teams of insiders to audiences of outsiders. Differently from Parsons and Merton, Chicago sociologists were not only interested in highranking elites, as lawyers and physicians professional associations – clever at projecting images of themselves through strategies of communication – but they also studied more humble occupational organizations, too, as public schools, technical employees’ unions, or nursing departments in hospitals – and compared the latter with the former. Moreover, they did not pay attention only to formal organizations. In a micro-perspective, the person “acts in an offce” (Cooley 1909): she has to commit herself to a common goal and to follow established rules and procedures in order to be a ratifed member of the institution. An offce is “a standardized group of duties and privileges devolving upon a person in certain defned situations” (Hughes 1937). But the fact that a person holds an offce, determined by the sole allocation of a function and by the explicit prescriptions attached to it, goes with the fact that this person takes a place in a moral order, too, in which the standards for moral qualities, authority, or reliability, for example, are not the same as given in the organization chart job descriptions. The person is “expected to assume the burdens and to enjoy the honors of offce,” in compliance with a certain cluster of rights and obligations that circumscribe her institutional – offcial and informal – role. But she never merges with the offces she holds. Only one part of her Self is offcial, but she keeps a life outside – as member of a family, a clan, a class, a caste, a race, a gender, as Veterans, activists. . . . And even her offcial Self may have to make valuations and take decisions which are not programmed by the typical role and standardized function she performs. The members of social institutions have a capacity for “role-distance” (Goffman 1961), thanks to which they look at themselves acting, and for “autonomy.” Even in smooth-running and well-oiled organizations, they are expected not to be mere cogs, and, sometimes, disagree with the rules or the policies.This brings indeterminacy in the organizational process. After WWII, feld inquiry, inspired by Hughes as well as Warner and Whyte, started focusing on informal cooperation circuits or authority hierarchies, in big store departments, factories, or bureaucracies, below the staging of formal charts. From the top (Dalton 1949) to the bottom (Roy 1952) of organizations, feldworkers described how members organize in informal cliques and coteries, develop a multiplicity of micro-cultures, never stop creating solutions which shore up repertoires of routines (Dewey 1922), inevitably bypass the rules if they want things to work. From a collective viewpoint, the formal organization lives through this constant invention of new ways of doing and doing together in offces and workshops, the concrete unfolding of new managers-employees relationships, and the adjustment of authority structure through collective bargaining. The ecological

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dynamics is not only external, by internal to the organization: it continuously sets new milieus of experience and action for its members. The Chicago perspective was thus slightly different from the functionalist perspective. It took into account how the members and benefciaries of institutions defne situations with which they come to terms, and how the organization of their experience is bound with situated activities. Each process of problem-identifcation and problem-solving involves a certain kind of selection of competences, resources, offces, objectives, integrated into a certain confguration of the ends-means dialectics.The organization charts are only frozen snapshots of structures in fux, and moving sceneries (Strauss et al. 1964). The institutions make themselves through this ongoing collective activity of creative self-integration of their changing external and internal environments.

State institutions, collective intelligence, and public reason We mentioned previously the role of collective imagination in the making of open organizations which, as open societies, are capable of self-refection, selfinterrogation, self-organization.According to the pragmatists, social institutions are able of collective intelligence (Dewey et al. 1917) and collective learning (Argyris and Schön 1978;Ansell 2011). Just as individuals can leave their regime of habits – ways, beliefs, and opinions in which they are set – and gear on an attitude of exploration, institutions are able to get out of their routines and switch to processes of inquiry, experiment, and discussion (Follett 1918, 1924; Dewey 1922; Mead 1934). This ability to create solutions or invent betterments often comes from “active minorities,” which shake down the conformism of the majority and develop innovations – minor changes, which are more or less quiescently integrated into the day to day routines, or bigger alternatives, which can lead to the formation of social movements inside the organization setting and in the case of blocking situations, encourage strategies of voice or exit (e.g., sects which break with churches: Park and Burgess 1921; or alternative schools which break with the state system: Spector and Kitsuse 1977). Collective imagination, since it disturbs already coalesced habits and interests, generates power conficts, which can be overdetermined by class, gender, or ethnic variables, or more simply, by the turnover of generations (Gusfeld 1954). In a less dramatic way, social institutions are able of collective intelligence insofar as they can monitor themselves. They have an “organizational autonomy” – a concept one can build drawing on Eliot Freidson’s (1970) comments on “professional autonomy” of doctors. They have a power of self-regulation and self-government, they control the status of members and handle conficts among them, they valuate the quality of actions performed on their behalf, they take decisions concerning its investments and commitments, and, in order to implement them, they mobilize their circuits of cooperation and chains of command. This “organizational autonomy” has another dimension. Institutions can diagnose their problems, identify their causes and reasons, and transform their communities of practitioners into communities of inquirers, experimenters, interpreters, and debaters

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(Gross 2009; Ansell 2011; Hernes 2014; Lorino 2018). They evolve through this collective activity of refective thinking, observing, testing, measuring, knowing, judging, recording, archiving, remediation, by their members. This leads us, incidentally, to John Dewey’s (1927) conception of the “public.” Confronted with a problematic situation, individuals, groups, and organizations stop sensing, acting, thinking, judging as they are used to and do inquiries and experiments together, discuss new facts and hypotheses.This collective intelligence, Dewey writes, is “organized.” It is equipped with all kinds of instrumentalities and distributed on various institutions – in the frst place, nongovernmental organizations, high-education universities, trade unions, social movements, civic agencies, mass media, and so on. This ongoing public reason is different from a mere process of accommodation and compromise, or from the use of force and domination: it is embedded in the ecological dynamics of public inquiry, experiment, and discussion which generates new living environments, and it brings about a rearticulation of politics, legislation, and administration. Publics renew the state. Park (1929, 1193), in his review of Dewey’s Public and Its Problems (1927), approves this naturalistic approach of the state: “It is an attempt to describe the state realistically as a going concern (Hughes 1971b) rather than a philosophical abstraction defned in legal and normative terms.”The state is the emergent product of the public will. It embodies some of the beliefs, desires, interests, moral ideas, and political values that gained a public scope in the process of constitution of public problems.The institutionalization process is at the core of the transition from the public to the state – through experimental design and problem-resolution incorporated into public policies (from Campbell 1969 to Chisholm 1995 and Ansell 2011). Of course, the government and administration agencies have their own logic and dynamics, they are designed and founded by acts of institution and their growth depends mostly on the kind of problems they meet and solve, according to their own rationality.They have to comply with the laws, to obey the government and high-level bureaucracy decisions, to follow specifc rules and routines, and to be in line as much as possible with their previous performances. This autopoietic process – to borrow this concept from Maturana’s and Varela’s description of “circular organization of living systems,” quite in line with Follett’s statement on “circular reaction” – of the state administration, closed on itself, is paradoxically coupled, at least in a democratic regime, with a requirement of responsivity to the citizens’ needs and claims. The government agencies have to respect some of the manifestations of the popular will.They have to negotiate and intermediate organized interests in confict, register in the body of laws the progress of the mores as it is expressed by civic organizations, listen to the spokespersons of social movements or interest groups, stay open to civil deliberations and proposals.This is a basic dilemma between the state effciency and authority and the publics’ creativity and sense of freedom, right, and justice. Sometimes, in this post-WWI time of harsh criticism of the transcendence and sovereignty of the state, the pragmatists were tempted by its circumvention.They wanted to make of the state a “true” or “real” expression of the public will – the state had to be the public, no more (Follett 1918; Dewey 1927) – paving the way for a participatory

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democracy in which the citizens inquiries, experiments, and discussions would be the living source of the state institutions. More specifcally, this means that a “cooperative competition” has to exist between organized publics, the experts, and the representatives.The state institutions must be receptive to the queries and petitions, to the claims and sometimes outcries of the publics, take into account the issues raised up by conficts, and make some space to civic participation, through a range of mechanisms of consultation, deliberation, and representation. These state institutions should contribute to the organization of the public experience that is the defnition of public issues and the confguration of public conficts, warranting the rule of law and preventing the overwhelming dominance of big interest groups. But in no case can they supplant and replace the publics.

Institutions and capabilities: empowerment and disempowerment Here, one more link between Chicago sociology and pragmatist philosophy can be noticed and stressed. Social institutions (e.g., social settlements: Addams 1899 or Mead 1907–1908) are accumulators, condensers and generators of experience, knowhow, and knowledge. They contribute to build up favorable ecologies and enhance the capabilities of their members and beyond, of the publics. In a “self-conscious society” (Mead 1934/2015, 259), they foster collective intelligence, give the people tools of discussion, inquiry, or experimentation that help them fnding their way.They promote equality of opportunity through education, redistributing rare resources, or bringing about new careers. Or, they can prevent people from thinking and acting, shaping conservative habits, spreading out propaganda, or manufacturing consent. They hinder their power to act. They obstruct any attempt to get things moving. Institutions can be sources of oppression or of emancipation (Mead 1934/2015, 262).They can impose stereotypes and block innovation.Their “rigid and infexible un-progressiveness crush or blot out individuality, or discourage any distinctive or original expressions of thought and behavior.”They can, at the same time, foster the maturation of personalities and support the collective exercise of imagination, afford “plenty of scope for originality, fexibility, and variety” of conduct (Mead 1934/2015). But they always have a crucial role in the felds of collective experience and action.They are the pillars of the common world.They are the linchpins of an ecology of capabilities. Very early, Dewey (1891) stated strong hypotheses in that respect. Against too psychological or cognitivist a conception of capacities, he proposed to distinguish two dimensions of “individuality.”“On one side, it means special disposition, temperament, gifts, bent, or inclination; on the other side, it means special station, situation, limitations, surroundings, opportunities, etc. Or, let us say, it means specifc capacity and specifc environment” (1891, 97). Exercising one’s capacities depends on ecological conditions, including social, legal, and political arrangements that provide support, resources, bearings, incentives . . . by means of which the power to act becomes reality; and these ecological conditions do not exist objectively, but

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only as a “practical or moral environment” (99) as defned and mastered by socialized individuals in action. And Dewey insisted on the function of “moral” and “political” institutions (family, church, school, city . . .) (169ff) through which people meet common wants and ends and involve in “cooperative modes of action.” “These institutions are morality real and objective; the individual becomes moral as he shares in this moral world, and takes his due place in it.” These practical “expressions of common purposes and ideas” are “public will and reason” (170), Dewey wrote. In Human Nature and Conduct (1922), he stressed the power of freedom in action – against a “metaphysical freedom of will” (1922, 303). Freedom includes “effciency in action, ability to carry out plans, the absence of cramping and thwarting obstacles,”“the capacity to vary plans, to change the course of action, to experience novelties,” last,“the power of desire and choice to be factors in events.”Action requires organization to be effective, but “over-organization” may be a hindrance to freedom. At the same time, “there is no effective or objective freedom without organization”: we have no freedom without civil customs, social institutions, material arrangements, as well as formal templates and public laws to guide us. Institutions are “embodied habits” (108) that could “petrify into rigidity” (102), but which also make possible the “plasticity” and “creativity” of individual and collective action (Joas 1996).They provide concrete conditions for warranting the continuity and stability over time of life-worlds, and for exercising collective imagination and intelligence. Institutions organize the power or powerlessness to act.Thus, there is no social world (Dewey 1927) without agencies which impulse, coordinate, pilot, regulate, register, refect, gather, pressure, communicate, represent, claim, negotiate, compromise. No collective life free of such an ecology of organizations.

Constellations of institutions: functional sectors, social worlds, and public arenas Chicago sociology has often been blamed for its exclusive interest for local community organizations, but this questionable view obscures the fact that in many studies, institutions were taken as nodes in fux of resources, money, people, technologies, nation- or world-wide. Ecology of institutions was not necessarily parochial. In many aspects, it anticipated the current studies in global ethnography. The relevant scale of observation and analysis depends on the spatial and temporal extension of the transactions between institutions and their environments. This was already true in the 1920s: migrant organizations (Thomas and Znaniecki 1919–1920; Park, Miller, and Thomas 1921), chain stores (Shideler 1927), or “plantation systems” (Thompson 1932) were already studied in correlation with economic, demographic, and technological fows around the Pacifc Rim or between the Old and the New World. McKenzie, as soon as 1927, gave a panoramic picture of the World Economy and its dominance relations; Lind (1938) and Glick (1938) wrote historical ecologies of migrant settlements, status hierarchies, job markets, or urban changes, taking Hawaii as the focus of international processes. Thomas and Znaniecki (1919–1920) connected the small Polish associations they described in

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Chicago with the demographic movements of people between the United States and Eastern Europe and account for transnational transplantations of social networks, community organizations, and cultural forms. More specifcally, Hughes wrote that communities are made of “constellations of institutions” in transaction with one another. How do these constellations look like? Institutions usually gather into functional sectors, often situated in urban areas, as in Burgess concentric model of zoning, in which they share common interests.They can run into ecological relationships of isolation, symbiosis, crossbreeding, or predation, but are oriented by the same motives toward the same objectives. Huge conglomerates of frms or professions get together, become aware of and fght for their common interests, and beyond the competition process, ally to defend them in negotiations with adversaries. In the urban space, business districts, industrial or commercial zones grow up, often for fscal and legal reasons, but also to take advantage of the benefts of being in the same place, and of sharing infrastructures and services. But the constellation of institutions can take another form. As Dewey or Park demonstrated, institutions also cluster into organizational arenas around common but contested concerns, for example social problems that they try to examine, determine, and master (Cefaï 2020). In this case, they get into relationships of complementarity and hostility, cooperation and competition in their attempts to control the resolution of problematic issues.When the latter come to be perceived as matters of public concern, the institutions form what Park (1929) and Dewey (1927) call a public: different associations struggle around defnitions and valuations of the public good, look for practical solutions, enroll economic, civic, or religious organizations to fght for the same causes, resources, or clienteles, generate forums of ideological positions. As seen previously, through new processes of institutionalization, they sometimes create public offces and government agencies. Constellations, networks, clusters, or arenas: the ecological processes underpin a morphodynamics of social and political life.They help understanding how the market or the state, or what is now called the third-sector, develop, take roots, create niches, make available new goods and services, bring to existence new organizations of resources, personnel, interests, and values. How they struggle, split, merge, spread, colonize, incorporate, bankrupt, or to take another metaphoric line sprout, blossom, fower, crossbreed, pollinate, wither, and die. Institutions are at the center of the political process.They vertebrate the dynamics of problematization and publicization through which new public problems emerge and new public actions are implemented.They are crucial mainstays of the public sphere, as well as vectors to canalize the public energies, to turn them into material settings, and to preserve and cultivate this public interest. No room to develop here on this point, but Dewey’s theory of the “public,” based on processes of association, communication, and cooperation, could be turned empirically more convincing if it took into account this choreography of transactions between institutions and of institutions with their environments.

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Conclusion The ecological perspective in organization studies was rediscovered in the US in the 1960s–70s, albeit in a much more macro-sociological, formal, and economic form, through the legacy of Amos Hawley (1950), who took over from R. McKenzie at Ann Arbor, University of Michigan. This Michigan ecology of organizations, all the more ironic, came back to the University of Chicago in the 1960s, with Mayer Zald and Morris Janowitz. It was in some way the inheritor of 1920s Chicago sociology, stripped of its biological and spatial grounding. Hawley departed in 1966 for Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, where he trained J. Freeman and M. Hannan, the authors of “The Population Ecology of Organizations” (1977) – quite a different version from Chicago perspective. I do join with Andrew Abbott (2009) when he fnds his inspiration back in this frst wave of Chicago sociology and makes the case for this ecological and processual model. It still has virtues – maybe more than ever. Institutions, be they public or private, live in environments that “fuctuate steadily and strategically” and their respective ecologies come to resonate one into another (Abbott 2005).Their response seems to be one of dismantling and reassembling what in mid-twentieth century we would have called the organization itself, by selling it, loading it with debt, looting it, amalgamating it, spinning off parts, and so on.All this in order to lower labor force costs, or realize tax savings, or relocate profts to a new country, or shed pension obligations, or achieve technological returns to scale, or whatever. (Abbott 2009, 419) The same is true, in my view, if one considers the fact that public policies are no longer top-down, but involves all kind of collectives, associations, organizations, institutions . . . governmental and non-governmental, emerging or wellsettled, in the coproduction of private-public actions, in complex confgurations of competitive cooperation that human ecology is more apt to understand than any functionalist or culturalist model.The view of well-settled organizations, frms, or bureaucracies, which prevailed from the 1940s to the 1960s, is out of date. New hypotheses, based on social worlds theory, science and technology studies, cultural sociology, neo-institutionalism, have grown up.The Chicago perspective of a processual and ecological dynamics of institutions, as “going concerns” in changing environments, has a strong potential for broadening and deepening these attempts.

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Geertz, C. 1983. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Glick, C.E. 1938. The Chinese Migrant in Hawaii: A Study in Accommodation. Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Chicago:The Free Press. Goffman, E. 1961. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Gross, M. 2009. “Collaborative Experiments: Jane Addams, Hull House and Experimental Social Work.” Social Science Information 48(1): 81–95. Gusfeld, J.R. 1954. Organizational Change:A Study of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago. Hannan, Michael T., and J. Freeman. 1977. “The Population Ecology of Organizations.” American Journal of Sociology 82(5): 929–64. Hawley, A. 1950. Human Ecology:A Theory of Community Structure. New York: Ronald Press. Hernes, T. 2014. A Process Theory of Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, E.C. 1936.“The Ecological Aspects of Institutions.” American Sociological Review 1–2: 180–92. Hughes, E.C. 1937. “Institutional Offce and the Person.” American Journal of Sociology 43: 404–13. Hughes, E.C. 1939. “Institutions.” In An Outline of the Principles of Sociology, edited by R.E. Park. New York: Barnes and Nobles. Hughes, E.C. 1942.“The Study of Institutions.” Social Forces 20(3): 307–10. Hughes, E.C. 1943. French-Canada in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hughes, E.C. 1962. “Disorganization and Reorganization.” Human Organization 21(2): 154–61. Hughes, E.C. 1971a. “Cycles, Turning Points, and Careers.” In The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers on Institutions & Race, 124–33. Chicago and New York:Aldine-Atherton. Hughes, E.C. 1971b. “Going Concerns:The Study of American Institutions.” In The Sociological Eye, 52–64. Chicago:Aldine-Atherton. First published 1962. Hughes, E.C. 1979 [1928]. The Growth of an Institution:The Chicago Real Estate Board. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joas, H. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lee, Rose Hum. 1948. The Growth and Decline of Chinese Communities in the Rocky Mountain Region. Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago. Lind, A.W. 1938. An Island Community: Ecological Succession in Hawaii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lindeman, E.C. 1924. Social Discovery: An Approach to the Study of Functional Groups. New York: Republic Publishing Company. Lorino, P. 2018. Pragmatism and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKenzie, R.D. 1924.“The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community.” American Journal of Sociology 30(3): 287–301. McKenzie, R.D. 1927. “The Concept of Dominance and World-Organization.” American Journal of Sociology 33(1): 28–42. McKenzie, R.D. 1968. On Human Ecology (edited by Amos Hawley). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G.H. 1907–1908.“The Social Settlement: Its Basis and Function.” University of Chicago Record 108–10. Mead, G.H. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Edited by A.E. Murphy. London:The Open Court Company. Mead, G.H. 2015. Mind, Self, and Society, from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by C.W. Morris, D. Huebner, and H. Joas. Chicago: University of Chicago. First published 1934.

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Park, R.E. 1923.“The Natural History of the Newspaper.” American Journal of Sociology 29(3): 273–89. Park, R.E. 1927. “Human Nature and Collective Behavior.” American Journal of Sociology 32(5): 695–703. Park, R.E. 1929. “Readings in Public Opinion: Its Formation and Control by W. Brooke Graves:The Public and Its Problems by John Dewey.” American Journal of Sociology 34(6): 1192–94. Park, R.E. 1936.“Human Ecology.” American Journal of Sociology 42(1): 1–15. Park, R.E., and E.W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, R.E., H.A. Miller, and W.I. Thomas. 1921. Old World Traits Transplanted. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Chapter 6:“Immigrant Institutions.” Redfeld, R. 1941. The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. 1984. Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roy, D. 1952. Restriction of Output by Machine Operators in a Piecework Machine Shop:A Preliminary Analysis. Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago. Shideler, E.H. 1927. The Chain Store: A Study of the Ecological Organization of a Modern City. Ph.D. Sociology and Anthropology, University of Chicago. Siu, P. 1953. The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation. Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago. Spector, M., and J. Kitsuse. 1977. Constructing Social Problems. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Strauss, A. 1993. Continual Permutations of Action. New York:Aldine de Gruyter. Strauss, A., L. Schatzman, R. Bucher, D. Ehrlich, and M. Sabshin. 1964. Psychiatric Ideologies and Institutions. New York: Free Press. Sumner,W.G. 1906. Folkways:A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. Boston: Ginn and Co. Thomas, W.I. 1905. “The Province of Social Psychology.” American Journal of Sociology 10: 445–55. Thomas,W.I., and F. Znaniecki. 1919–1920. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, vol. 1–2. New York: Octagon. Thompson, E.T. 1932. The Plantation. Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago. Weick, K.E. 1979. The Social Psychology of Organizing. New York: McGraw-Hill. Weick, K.E. 1995. Sensemaking in Organisations. London: Sage Publications.

PART 2

Complex objects

3 DISPOSITIF Nicolas Dodier and Janine Barbot Translated by Nathalie Plouchard-Engel

Several strands of research highlight the signifcance of the concept of dispositif to inquiry in the social sciences. Examination of these studies reveals the variety of defnitions and uses of the concept. In this chapter, we aim to provide an overview of these studies and to suggest new uses of the concept. We will present and discuss three types of approaches. First of all, the approach developed by Michel Foucault, the frst author to make extensive use of the concept of dispositif, notably in his work on sexuality in the 1970s, and to contribute to the dissemination of the concept in many areas of the social sciences. Second, the material-semiotic approaches, which retained certain aspects of Foucault’s work, but defned the concept of dispositif differently and situated it within a broad set of concepts embedded in what would later become actor-network theory. These approaches were initiated in particular around science and technology studies in the early 1980s by Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law.1 Third, we will present the sociology of the regimes of engagement, an approach developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in the late 1980s.These authors frst used the concept of dispositif to account for the material supports that individuals turn to when they seek to assert a sense of justice, before extending the use of this concept to situations other than the “engagement in justice.” We will focus on the way in which these three approaches have helped social scientists open their eyes to realities previously neglected, and on the role played by the concept of dispositif in these new horizons of the social sciences. After analyzing how these approaches have addressed the crucial question of the purposes of dispositifs, we will argue for, and outline, an approach that centers on the processes of valuation around dispositifs and thus brings back to the heart of social science inquiry the study of the work undertaken by actors to assert or question the nature of these purposes.2 On the basis of our work on criminal trials and in particular on the victims’ place in it, we will examine how a criminal hearing

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can be viewed as a dispositif, what kind of study this statement leads us to, and what the resulting fndings may be.

Three approaches to dispositifs The approaches in terms of dispositifs emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when the great dualities the social sciences had previously been based on were being challenged. Indeed, until then, these dividing lines had made it possible to defne what, strictly speaking, pertained to the “social”: for instance, the dualities between “social beings” and “material objects,” “cultural factors” and “technical factors,” or “language” and “matter.” The approaches (Durkheimian, Marxist, and interactionist) took into account the relations between these various orders of reality but kept them within well-established boundaries. The new social science perspective aimed to consider the strong correlations between these various orders of reality, to overcome these dualities, and to devise a new way of analyzing the “complexity” of the objects the social sciences have to deal with (see Talia Dan Cohen in this volume). The three approaches (Foucauldian, material-semiotic, and based on engagement regimes) are part of this new perspective in that they use the concept of dispositif.3 In this chapter, we can distinguish them thanks to an interpretative framework that highlights four elements. For each of these approaches, we will specify the purposes associated with dispositifs. This will be a major point of discussion.We will also explain the nature of the constraints that dispositifs exert on humans. Given the variety of components of a dispositif, it is indeed important to question the mediations through which the dispositif in question guides (or imposes) human behaviors. We will also pay attention to actors’ and researchers’ respective skills needed to identify dispositifs. Indeed, if we can consider that what researchers defne as part of a “dispositif ” is based on both elements actors point out and observations researchers themselves make, the social science inquiry must allow us to understand how these two aspects are linked together. Finally, we will discuss how each of these three approaches situates a dispositif within a historical moment. According to Michel Foucault (1980), a dispositif, such as the “deployment of sexuality” (dispositif de sexualité), emerges at the level of a society and within a historical moment. It consists of a set of theories, techniques, architectures, instruments, words, forms of calculation, etc.The set of components dispositifs can be made of is very broad and specifc to each of them. The nature of the constraints exerted by a dispositif on each individual also varies from one dispositif to another. However, beyond this diversity, there is always a combination of power and knowledge. A Foucauldian dispositif is also an all-encompassing reality. Over a long historical period, a dispositif is generally able to dictate the words and instruments that enable individuals to refer to a reality; it prescribes the nature of what seems problematic to them; it provides the bases for calculated decision-making, so that they are able to act on things; and it orients what conficts are about, as well as how they can be resolved. A dispositif is also a reality endowed with a purpose. Researchers must

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discover its “dominant strategic function” (Foucault 1980, 196). From this perspective, it is historians who can see the dispositif and trace its genealogy – rather than the individuals immersed in it.That said, historians can produce knowledge about dispositifs only from within the dispositif in which they are themselves immersed. The development of the material-semiotic approaches is grounded in science and technology studies (Law 2009) and in particular through the development of actor-network theory (Callon 1984). Dispositifs hold an important place in these approaches, particularly in the form of devices that structure and align the participation of actors in networks (dispositifs d’intéressement).These dispositifs include all the tools and processes that make it possible to “translate” the interests of both human and non-human actants, in order to shape, consolidate, or expand socio-technical networks. Translating interests means identifying, representing, and shifting them, so that they ft other interests. Rather than speaking of constraints, actor-network theory speaks of “alignments” of interests, considering various degrees of alignment depending on the type of network.The composition of such a participation device can vary signifcantly according to the nature of the components (multiple, unpredictable, and irreducible to one another) that shape each network. The study of these devices is generally part of the account of an innovation.The analysis does not aim to document historical transformations – as Foucault did – but to expand on, or exemplify, a general theory of scientifc innovation.The approach is particularly broad as regards the orders of reality that the social sciences can embrace. In order to reveal the translation processes underlying the formation of these participation devices, researchers must be attentive to the forces (whether physical, chemical, biological, social, psychological, economic, or of any other nature) generating and shifting the actors’ interests. In the material-semiotic approaches that extend to felds other than science and technology, other dispositifs are also considered essential – to make markets work (see Velthuis in this volume), to form legal judgments (Latour 2009), or to practice medicine (Mol 2002) and health care (see Hardon and Mol in this volume). According to the pragmatics of justice developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2006), dispositifs4 are assemblages of material objects and social beings that allow actors willing to assert their sense of justice to enforce the constraints of generality attached to such a situation, while dealing with the particular realities they are faced with (see Bowen on Justifcation in this volume). In response to these constraints, these dispositifs must necessarily combine elements from various political models – the “polities” (cités) – to which the sense of justice refers within a particular society. Actors must refer to beings who belong to these polities.Thus, they are not immersed in a dispositif – as Foucault argues – but in a plurality of polities equipped with dispositifs that allow them to engage with the world.To convey this idea, the authors speak of a régime of justice in which actors are involved.This way of looking at dispositifs has been extended to other regimes of engagement (Boltanski 2012;Thévenot 2001). In any case, a dispositif is immersed in a regime or viewed as a combination of elements from various regimes. It enables actors to respond to the “grammatical” constraints associated with the regime. In the historical approach

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developed by Luc Boltanski, the regimes (and their dispositifs) constitute, at a given time in history, the way in which humans respond to the structural contradictions they are faced with (Boltanski 2017). Generally speaking, in the sociology of engagement regimes, researchers name and describe the dispositifs specifc to each regime, and identify, in the situations empirically observed, the combinations of regimes they are made of.Actors possess a practical skill that allows them to recognize the situations (and therefore the kinds of dispositifs) they are exposed to, as well as the kinds of combinations they can devise in order to adjust to, or counter, these situations. Thus, researchers’ work consists in formalizing the material, cognitive, and moral supports that actors themselves have the practical capacity to recognize and use.

The question of purposes Each approach assigns very specifc functions to dispositifs in social life: the Foucauldian approach assigns them a “dominant strategic function”; the material-semiotic approach assigns them an “intéressement” function to maintain socio-technical networks; and the sociology of engagement regimes views them as material supports that make it possible to assert a sense of justice anchored in reality (or, more broadly, to assert the purpose associated with the “engagement regime” in which the actors fnd themselves when they act). How can we concretely identify the purposes of the dispositifs empirically encountered in a social science study? And, above all, how can we conceptualize both the functions that researchers could attribute to them and the purposes that actors themselves attribute to the dispositifs they are faced with? This is a major point of discussion, with many implications for the conduct of a social science study and the interpretation of its fndings.We would like to shed some light on this point with an example from our work. We recently studied victims’ testimonies in a criminal hearing. These criminal proceedings were related to a treatment based on contaminated human growth hormone (hGH), which has resulted in France in the deaths of 122 children and young adults from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (Barbot and Dodier 2018).5 The victims often devoted part of their testimonies to say, or remind everyone, what they expected from the hearing. Upon careful examination of these testimonies, we found that the purposes that the victims attributed to the hearings were very diverse.Through their participation in the hearings, some wanted to understand what had led to the contamination. Others wanted to impose a sentence on the defendants. Still others wanted to prevent similar tragedies, confront the defendants (so as to be able to speak their truths, or get a confession or an apology from them), get their truths across to their families, etc. One could consider that these expectations are lay viewpoints on criminal hearings and that the latter serve specifc purposes, defned by the law and stated by jurists. Nevertheless, examination of the doctrinal work on the victims’ role in criminal trials shows that the nature of the purposes of trials and hearings is far from being set, as it is debated and changes over time, both in France and in the United States (Barbot and Dodier 2014).Thus, since the 1980s, defning

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the purposes of criminal trials has become a major point of contention for legal experts, as they disagree over victims’ growing role in the proceedings.While some wanted to keep the purposes of criminal trials within a “classical” framework (retribution, crime prevention, criminals’ neutralization, rehabilitation), others sought to expand the purposes of criminal trials, including by compensating the victims, by ensuring their psychological recovery, or even by “mending” the bonds between victims and perpetrators. How would each of the three approaches presented (Foucauldian, materialsemiotic, regimes of engagement) use the notion of dispositif to examine this kind of situation? Foucauldian researchers would immediately broaden the scope of the social science inquiry to identify the reality as a whole, in which this kind of criminal hearing takes place. To do so, they would look into many documents such as textbooks, administrative reports, parliamentary debates, professional publications (legal, medical, psychological, etc.), texts released by associations, etc. These documents could perhaps confrm the power of the “criminal dispositif ” as it formed in the late eighteenth century or the emergence of a new dispositif that organizes a novel approach to the truth through victims’ testimonies.They would then discover the “dominant strategic function” associated with this dispositif, which could shed light on the nature of the testimonies given in a hearing.6 This approach would certainly lead to a broader perspective, but this abrupt change in scale would overshadow the complexity of the normative bases that support the testimonies, as well as the network of purposes attributed to a hearing as it unfolds. In a material-semiotic approach, the criminal hearing could be viewed as one of the dispositifs enabling magistrates to weave compatibilities between texts in order to bring a verdict in line with the “regime of veridiction” characteristic of legal procedures (Latour 2009).The focus would be on the making of legal judgments, considering the criminal hearing from an essentially functional viewpoint. Indeed, shifting from the study of sciences to that of law, the material-semiotic approach has retained its functional approach. The initial question (How does a dispositif make it possible to “construct” and consolidate a scientifc fact?) shifted, while keeping its original appearance (How does a dispositif, such as a trial, make it possible to form and consolidate a legal ruling?). Such an approach would make it possible to describe the operations needed to form a legal ruling, in particular taking into account the materiality of the elements the ruling is based on (fles, media through which legal texts are made available, etc.).Therefore, like the Foucauldian approach, although for different reasons, the semiotic approach risks disregarding the plurality of purposes that the various actors attribute to a hearing. In the sociology of engagement regimes, one would examine the purposes that can be associated with a criminal hearing from the perspective of each of the regimes of engagement. The method would consist in viewing the hearing as a combination of various “polities.”The hearing of the growth hormone trial would frst be viewed as a dispositif particularly anchored in the “civic” polity insofar as it requires that reality be judged by agents who rely on laws enacted by citizens’ representatives.The dispositif would also be described as “civic” for a second reason:

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it allows victims directly involved in the case to speak. The hearing equally contains elements from the “industrial” polity, as, for certain expert assessments, it uses precise and standardized measuring tools that produce quantifed measurements. It is therefore a civic-industrial “combination.” Considering the expansion of the model of polities by Luc Boltanski (2011), the criminal hearing could also be seen – beyond its status as a dispositif at the crossroads of various justice systems (civic and industrial, in particular) – as an “institution,” that is, according to Luc Boltanski’s defnition, a social entity that humans need in order to reveal truths independent of the bodies of those stating them.The hearing would therefore perform another function for actors: it would serve as a “semantic security,” which corresponds to another engagement regime, the “regime of confrmation” (Boltanski 2011). Researchers would study how actors manage the tensions and possibilities generated by the mixed nature of the situation.As this approach takes account of the fact that the dispositifs organizing a situation may “combine” several regimes and that the words of the actors involved in this situation can point to tensions between regimes, it is attentive to a certain plurality of purposes. However, since it is based on the regimes the dispositifs are associated with, it remains confned to the purposes characteristic of these regimes and the combinations that they make possible. Indeed, this approach relies on the dynamics of theoretical or modeled situations to explore the dispositifs as well as the practices in which actors engage when they are faced with them, rather than observing the purposes that actors concretely assign to the dispositifs they are faced with in order to study the nature of these purposes and the way in which they are used. In this sense, the approach remains dependent on the “grand theory” model (see Introduction, in this volume). There is nothing exceptional about our example of victims’ testimonies. Such situations – in which actors assign various purposes to the same dispositifs, seek to combine them, and engage in conficts over purposes with other actors – are actually very common. However, to analyze them, the three approaches to dispositifs have the same limitation: they tend to center around one or more presupposed purposes of the dispositif. We suggest a different approach, whereby, as researchers, we suspend our own judgments on these purposes and, instead, examine how actors attribute purposes. Two shifts are useful to this end: changing the defnition of the concept of dispositif that we intend to use and focusing on the valuation work that the actors carry out around dispositifs. We will present these two shifts one after the other.

The dispositif as a stipulated series of sequences We will frst address dispositifs without defning them a priori with too specifc purposes.We will thus use the term “dispositif ” to refer to any stipulated series of sequences intended to qualify or transform a state of affairs through an arrangement of material and language elements (Dodier and Barbot 2017). Let us examine the various aspects of this defnition.

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As we have seen, this approach states the purposes of a dispositif broadly enough not to hinder the precise study of the way in which the actors assign purposes. It focuses partly on the qualifcation work performed by dispositifs, which are partly designed to put realities into words and to evaluate them (see Kuipers and Franssen, in this volume).What needs to be qualifed remains receptive to what the actors say about it and do with it. In the trial that we have studied, the victims seized the hearing to qualify many various realities by speaking during the sequence of testimonies: the ordeal of their children suffering from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease but also the children’s qualities before the tragedy, the mistakes made by some physicians, the victims’ gratefulness to various actors (other physicians, victims’ associations, and relatives), etc. Beyond this qualifcation work, we also take into account the fact that dispositifs can be designed to transform beings.While trials help impose sentences, award fnancial compensations, and so forth, the actors can grasp the hearing in terms of what it contributes to transform in its own right. This can mean for them “moving” the defendants, changing their viewpoints, punishing them merely by summoning them, fnding closure by being allowed to speak, etc.Again, the defnition does not need to specify the nature of the purposes associated with this power of transformation.The defnition also emphasizes the internal heterogeneity of the dispositifs as arrangement of material and language elements. It leads researchers to pay attention to very diverse elements of the hearing dispositif: rules and legal categories, of course, but also the space reserved for each actor, the technical objects the unfolding of the hearing is based on (microphone, software, for instance), written media, etc. The defnition points to another aspect: the temporal extension of the implementation of dispositifs.The consistency established between the various elements of a dispositif unfolds over time.Thus, the criminal hearing does not stipulate only one scene, but a series of sequences following on from one another: the questioning of defendants, the contribution of experts and witnesses, lawyers’ closing arguments, etc. Links established beforehand stipulate this series. We use the term “stipulate,” since the dispositif does not entirely determine the sequences.While it exerts certain constraints – sometimes very strong ones – on the individuals during a series of sequences, it also provides them with supports to act or to bring about bifurcations between several possibilities. Finally, while a dispositif stipulates a series of sequences, it can in turn be transformed by the practices of humans who contribute to its actualization.The victims’ order of appearance in the hearing we have studied was par example reconsidered following the statements of victims’ association leaders and their lawyers.These interactions between the state of the dispositif and the activities that it stipulates are also at the heart of the inquiry. The individuals can be faced with a particular dispositif for a relatively short amount of time, as is the case, for instance, in a court hearing.Yet, for other dispositifs, this encounter can last longer.This is the case for certain trials, or certain medical or psychological dispositifs, in which actors fnd themselves involved over decades. This temporal dimension highlights the usefulness of a processual

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approach to dispositifs, which emphasizes the sequences that punctuate its implementation, instead of merely examining the outputs of the dispositifs (rulings, productions, etc.).

The valuation work around dispositifs With this defnition of dispositifs, it is possible to account for the processes of assigning purposes, as well as the resulting conficts and tensions, by focusing on what can be called the valuation work around dispositifs. John Dewey (1939) defnes the notion of valuation as the process whereby individuals evaluate, positively or negatively, elements of their environment. Dewey’s notion of valuation is very broad. It includes any behavior that manifests a positive or negative attitude toward an element of the environment.Valuation manifests itself through gestures, movements, words, etc.We attach particular importance to the moments of valuation in which actors use language. Indeed, this focus allows us both to take advantage of the methods of interpretation, transcription, comparison, and aggregation that social scientists can then use, and to identify valuation “repertoires” (Lamont 2012).7 Yet we remain attentive to behaviors, particularly when they are associated with language acts. For instance, when we study victims’ testimonies in criminal hearings, while we pay particular attention to what people say, we are also interested in their actions (Where do they speak from? Whom do they turn to? Do they want to show or submit pictures, videos, etc.?) and in the reactions to these behaviors. This valuation work depends on the role occupied within a dispositif – for instance, it depends on whether one is a defendant, a civil party (in French law), a witness, an expert, a state prosecutor, a judge, a court clerk, and so on.The valuation work around dispositifs occurs in three interrelated dimensions: How do, in practice, individuals evaluate dispositifs when faced with them; How do they rely on them to build valuations; How do they evaluate the behaviors of other humans faced with dispositifs as well? Let us take, for example, the study of the valuation work carried out by “civil parties” testifying in a criminal trial.The three dimensions of the valuation work are defned as follows. First, researchers can examine how the civil parties view the hearing dispositif itself in a refexive way: what they expect, what seems appropriate or problematic to them in the organization of the hearing, what the hearing allows them to do or prevents them from doing, what their own roles entail according to them, what they think about them, etc. In line with what we argued previously, researchers should not try to formalize a priori the function of a criminal hearing. Instead, they should focus on the way in which the actors involved in the hearing attribute purposes.The second dimension of victims’ valuation work corresponds to the kind of valuation that victims produce on the world from this dispositif: the suffering they bear witness to, the responsibilities they impute, the benefts or happiness they want to bring to the attention of the court or audience, the links they wish to establish between the court case and other aspects of their lives, etc. Finally – and this is the third dimension of victims’ valuation work – researchers should pay close attention to the way in which each victim judges other participants in the hearing: other victims, defendants, and journalists, for instance.

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An important aspect of our approach is the way of describing the dispositif associated with this approach in terms of valuation work. Researchers do not aim to describe the dispositif as a whole but seek to gradually integrate into their analysis the elements of the dispositif that are activated in the actors’ valuation work.The property of heterogeneity associated with the concept of dispositif is quite helpful here. All elements that, in practice, prove to be relevant to the valuation, whatever their nature, are taken into account. When examining victims’ testimonies in court, for instance, researchers strive to identify all the components of the hearing (procedural elements, spaces, material objects, buildings, etc.) the victims themselves are mindful of. For example, researchers pay attention to the way in which the victims refer to the framework the experts have been heard in, the viewing conditions of the video recordings, the “face-to-face” situation with the defendants and its consequences, the space occupied by the journalists in the courtroom, the victims’ order of appearance, etc. In practice, the study goes back and forth between two lines of inquiry. On the one hand, researchers gather valuations expressed by the actors and identify the elements of the environment that seem to pertain to the examined dispositif. On the other hand, they carry out another line of inquiry, reconstructing both the possible links between these various elements and the way in which they are situated within the dispositif. For instance, researchers will examine what the victims’ order of appearance is based on: regulations from the Criminal Procedure Code? the freedom of action of the presiding judge? previous negotiations with victims associations and their lawyers? To do so, researchers will conduct interviews, consult documents relating to the trial, and examine what jurists may have written about the rules governing the order of appearance.The research ultimately aims for a form of convergence between the two lines of inquiry.This is achieved when researchers have a clear view of both actors’ valuation work and the links between the various elements problematized by this valuation work.They then identify how these interrelated elements form a dispositif, which acts on humans, who in turn evaluate, and act on, it. This study of valuation allows researchers to pay attention to a specifc order of constraints exerted by the dispositif: the constraints problematized by the actors. They examine what actors see as being a constraint and how they position themselves in relation to the various forms of constraints that they consider themselves being exposed to.The approach has the advantage of enabling researchers to grasp altogether the nature of certain constraints and the normativity that actors develop when faced with them. For instance, how victims respond to their obligations in a hearing: whom they should talk to, how they should speak, when and how they may bring pictures to the attention of the court, what hostile remarks they should endure from the other actors involved in the trial (and to what extent they should tolerate them), etc.

The normative structure of the valuation Whatever their roles, individuals can approach a dispositif as morally divided beings: in the valuation work, they then mobilize a set of normative expectations, which are not consistent with one another from the outset and which they will have to

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combine (see also Bowen in this volume on Justifcations).8 Furthermore, each individual is “multidetermined” in his/her way of approaching a dispositif, meaning that several forms of causality combine to orient how he/she evaluates things, without one order of determination prevailing on the others.9 First of all, the dispositions of each individual form at the crossroads of the various spheres of socialization. Individuals must therefore be viewed as “singular plurals” (Lahire 2013). Then, throughout their lives, before encountering the dispositif, they have been faced with “signifcant tests” (épreuves marquantes): times that have affected them and from which they drew, more or less explicitly, lasting lessons on the nature of beings and on what they can expect from them (Dodier 2005).10 Finally, each individual approaches a dispositif from a strategic line of action, a set of anticipations, and calculations on the future (Swidler 1986). A strategic line of action is more or less specifc. It is not necessarily defnitive, but it also infuences how the individual approaches the valuation. As a result of the combinations of causalities exerted on their valuation work, at the crossroads of socialization processes, signifcant tests and their strategic lines of action, actors interconnect – each of them in a singular way – the normative expectations that they are attached to.When we consider the aggregated valuation work carried out by all the individuals who, around a given dispositif, have the same role, we can posit that the existing overlaps between the sources of socialization, between the signifcant tests, between the strategic lines of actions tend to circumscribe the set of expectations mobilized by all of them, as well as the main patterns underlying the evaluation schemas.A normative structure emerges.As regards trials, this is confrmed by the many studies that examine how laypersons, situated in a specifc context (an urban district, a county, etc.), turn to legal proceedings (Merry 1990; Conley and O’Barr 1990; Silbey 2005). Given the morally divided nature of each individual, this structure does not appear to be a coherent schema. Rather, it takes the form of a “normative repertoire” (Comaroff and Roberts 1981), a general appearance of the valuation work generated by a heterogeneous set of expectations in which a certain regularity of the schemes used can nevertheless be observed (a “structure” as defned by Sewell 1992). In our research, we have highlighted the normative structure of victims’ testimonies and that of the lawyers’ arguments in a criminal hearing (Barbot and Dodier 2015a, 2018). We have applied the same method to other dispositifs, such as compensation funds (Barbot and Dodier 2015b).The method could be used to study either the valuation work undertaken during the implementation of a dispositif (Barbot and Dodier 2015a, 2018) or the valuation work on a dispositif from another dispositif.11 The multiplication of these approaches to the same dispositif or with other dispositifs allows us to compare these normative structures. The valuation around a given dispositif is infuenced by the ecology of the dispositifs involved. As actors are often faced with several dispositifs at the same time, their work on one of them depends on the constraints and possibilities conveyed by others, as well as their knowledge and understanding of them.This aspect is obvious when one follows, for instance, the trajectories of the victims of the contaminated

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growth hormone disaster, between legal proceedings (both civil and criminal) and compensation funds (Barbot and Dodier 2017).The ecology of dispositifs has two facets.The frst relates to what is provided for in the dispositifs. Indeed, some dispositifs include rules that allow (or prohibit) the use of other dispositifs. For instance, when victims receive money from an extra-judicial compensation fund, may they sue the person responsible for the damage? The second facet relates to the actors’ normative work.We therefore pay attention to the way in which actors use the results of certain dispositifs to back up their claims in other dispositifs. For instance, how, and to what extent, do victims rely on the damage assessment made by an extra-judicial compensation fund to claim compensation in court? Researchers must carefully reconstruct this ecology in each case studied, if they want to correctly interpret the appearance of actors’ valuation work.

Conclusion In the various domains of social life, actors are regularly faced with complex arrangements of elements that organize the series of sequences in which they are involved. The concept of dispositif helps approach these situations, whatever the nature of the elements – material or language-based – of these arrangements.The approach we have outlined focuses more specifcally on the normativity that actors use in such situations and shows how, in return, this normativity can affect the conditions of implementation of these dispositifs.The approach combines the careful examination of this valuation work, as it is carried out at the individual level, with the more aggregated approach to the normative repertoires that support this work within the various categories of actors involved. Compared to the three main approaches that have helped popularize the use of the concept of dispositif in the social sciences (Foucauldian, semiotic-material, based on engagement regimes), this approach in terms of valuation work is characterized by the fact that it does not take for granted the purposes of such dispositifs. Instead, it shows how actors’ work around these purposes is a central component of this normativity. The approach operates at various levels. It can follow, step by step, the implementation of a dispositif or study the debates over this dispositif, as they unfold in various arenas. It can focus on a specifc category of actors or globally consider the space of actors mobilized around a dispositif. It can shed light on a sequence of limited duration or reconstruct the place of a dispositif at the biographical level. Finally, it can look into the historical transformations of a dispositif, at various levels of temporality.While this approach in terms of dispositifs corresponds to a general method we have outlined in this text, its concrete implementation in each inquiry requires that connections be made with other notions developed in this volume.

Notes 1 See Olav Velthuis in this volume on the expansion of this use of the concept of dispositif starting from the concept of “market device.”

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2 The French word dispositif has a range of meanings in everyday usage, somewhat captured by the range of English translations, including “mechanism,” “apparatus,” and “device.” It can also come close to “arrangement” or “assemblage.” Usefully, as scholars have proposed different technical meanings for dispositif, they have chosen one or another English word as a fxed translation, as when “device” is consistently used for the material-semiotic approach described in what follows, and has come to be a standard term in economic sociology, as explained in Velthuis (this volume). 3 For a presentation of the approaches that also contributed to this new perspective based on the idea of assemblage, see Stavrianakis in this volume. 4 Translated as “devices” in the English edition. 5 In total, 116 people, mainly relatives of the deceased, came to testify in court.They were allowed to speak freely on the case. Most were parties civiles: they claimed compensation as part of the criminal proceedings, which is possible under French law. This series of testimonies lasted about six weeks, while the trial itself lasted four months, from February to May 2008. The defendants were six physicians, who had high responsibilities in the development and distribution of the treatment. 6 Such an approach was outlined by Alessandra Gribaldo (2014) for instance, when she mentions the “confession device” (dispositif confessionnel ) that battered women testifying as victims in an Italian court are now immersed in. 7 This focus on the linguistic dimension while examining valuation work relates to concepts referred to in the “Stances” section of this volume: “Justifcation” (Bowen), “Narration” (Wretsch and Batiashvili), and “Qualifcation” (Kuipers and Franssen). 8 The notion of normative expectation is similar to that of value, insofar as both notions refer to what actors rely on to make evaluations (Dewey 1939). Speaking of expectation rather than value has the advantage of less assuming the idea of a reference shared by a given group. In addition, speaking of “normative” expectation emphasizes that, when actors make evaluative statements, they feel entitled to express a certain normativity about their environment.This does not mean that actors are able to bend the environment to this expectation. 9 The idea of a “multidetermined” individual was introduced by Bernard Lahire (2011) about processes of socialization.We use a broader defnition, taking into account determinations that go beyond socialization processes. 10 The difference between socialization processes and signifcant tests lies in their relation to time. Socialization refers to a more diffuse process, while signifcant tests refer to what strikes actors. 11 For instance, by examining jurists’ texts on criminal trials published in specialized journals (Barbot and Dodier 2014) or by studying statements on trials relating to the growth hormone medical disaster, within the framework of the interviews with the victims (Barbot and Dodier 2017).

References Barbot, Janine, and Nicolas Dodier. 2014. “Rethinking the Role of Victims in Criminal Proceedings: Lawyers’ Normative Repertoire in France and the United States.” Revue française de science politique (English Edition) 64(3): 23–49. Barbot, Janine, and Nicolas Dodier. 2015a. “Dealing with Compassion at Work: Strategic Refexivity Among Court Lawyers.” Sociologie Du Travail (English Supplement) 57(1): e43–e62. Barbot, Janine, and Nicolas Dodier. 2015b. “Victims’ Normative Repertoire of Financial Compensation: The Tainted hGH Case.” Human Studies 38(1): 81–96. Barbot, Janine, and Nicolas Dodier. 2017.“Se confronter à l’action judiciaire. Des victimes au carrefour des différentes branches du droit.” L’Homme 223–24: 99–129.

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Barbot, Janine, and Nicolas Dodier. 2018. “Témoigner comme victime au tribunal. Le travail d’appropriation d’un dispositif de prise de parole.” In Les objets composés.Agencements, dispositifs, assemblages, edited by Nicolas Dodier and Anthony Stravrianakis, série Raisons Pratiques, 267–300. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS. Boltanski, Luc. 2011. On Critique.A Sociology of Emancipation. London: Polity Press. Boltanski, Luc. 2012. Love and Justice as Competences. London: Polity Press. Boltanski, Luc. 2017. “Pragmatique de la valeur et structure de la marchandise.” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 72(3): 607–29. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. 2006. On Justifcation: Economies of Worth. Translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Callon, Michel. 1984. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” Sociological Review (Supplement): 196–233. Comaroff, John, and Simon Roberts. 1981. Rules and Processes:The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conley, John, and William O’Barr. 1990. Rules Versus Relationships:The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, John. 1939. “Theory of valuation’’, in International Encyclopedia of Unifed Science, vol. II, n 4, Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, p. 1-67. Dodier, Nicolas, and Janine Barbot. 2017. The Force of Dispositifs. Annales. Histoire et Sciences Sociales. Dodier, Nicolas. 2005. “L’espace et le mouvement du sens critique.” Annales. Histoire et Sciences Sociales 1(Janvier–Février): 7–31. Foucault, Michel. 1980. “The Confession of the Flesh.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Colin Gordon, 194–228. New York: Pantheon Books. Gribaldo,Alessandra. 2014.“The Paradoxical Victim: Intimate Violence Narratives on Trial in Italy.” American Ethnologist 41(4): 743–56. Lahire, Bernard. 2011. The Plural Actor. London: Polity Press. Lahire, Bernard. 2013. Dans les plis singuliers du Social: Individus, Institutions, Socialisations. Paris: La Découverte. Lamont, Michèle. 2012. “Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation.” Annual Review of Sociology 38(1): 201–21. Latour, Bruno. 2009. The Making of the Law:An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat. Cambridge: Polity Press. Law, John. 2009. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by Bryan Turner, 141–58. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Merry, Sally Engle. 1990. Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness Among WorkingClass Americans. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Sewell,William. 1992.“A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98(1): 1–29. Silbey, Susan. 2005. “After Legal Consciousness.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1: 323–68. Swidler,Ann. 1986.“Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51(2): 273–86. Thévenot, Laurent. 2001.“Pragmatic Regimes Governing the Engagement with the World.” In The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, edited by Theodor Schatzki, Karin KnorrCetina, and Eike von Savigny, 56–73. London: Routledge.

4 ASSEMBLAGE Anthony Stavrianakis

The French noun agencement is an everyday word. It can be mean, among other things, organization, construction, combination, arrangement, and layout. It refers to both the action of, as well as the result of, putting together, combining, arranging, or laying out.As an example of a possible use of this everyday word in anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss used the term agencement as a means of grasping how “mythical thought” is capable of continually rearranging a limited set of elements: as he put it, mythical thought, works by analogies and comparisons even though its creations, like those of the bricoleur, always really consist of a new arrangement [arrangement] of elements, the nature of which is unaffected by whether they fgure in the instrumental set or in the fnal arrangement [l’agencement fnal] (these being the same apart from the internal disposition of their parts) . . . the characteristic feature of mythical thought, as of bricolage on the practical plane, is that it builds up structured sets, not directly with other structured sets but by using the remains and debris of events. (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 20–21) I cite Lévi-Strauss and his use of the term to three ends: (1) To show that the word has a relatively everyday sense; (2) That this everyday sense has been used by anthropologists as a term to specialized, although in this case un-fagged, conceptual purposes; (3) That in the case of structural anthropology, this conceptual purpose is to argue that any given “event” of thought, whether mythical or scientifc, is ultimately the effect of structural, structured, and structuring operations.As he put it: Mythical thought, that ‘bricoleur,’ builds up structures by ftting together events, or rather, remains of events, while science ‘in operation’ simply by

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virtue of coming into being, creates its means and results in the form of events, thanks to the structures which it is constantly elaborating and which are its hypotheses and theories. (ibid, 22) It was precisely against a certain form of structure-thinking, albeit within psychoanalytic and not anthropological thought, that philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari invented, in the course of the early 1970s, a specifc use of the term agencement – a term systematically rendered in English translations of their work as “assemblage” (Phillips 2006, 108). The term assemblage was conceptualized as a means of disrupting a tendency in psychoanalytic and philosophical practice and refection to stife and impede the ensembles, connections, arrangements that desire, action, and speech can produce. Psychoanalytic practice has a tendency to perform interpretations in the mode of an “exercise of suspicion,” in Paul Ricoeur’s well-known expression (1970, 52).The true and the false desire can be separated, and the answer to the truth of desire is ready-made in known mechanisms and already located in known structures: the true contents of desire are supposedly partial infantile impulses, and Oedipus is the genuine expression of desire (it structures the ‘whole’). As soon as desire assembles something, in relation to an Outside, to a Becoming, they [psychoanalysts] undo this assemblage, they break it up, showing how the assemblage refers on the one hand to a partial infantile mechanism, and, on the other, to a global Oedipal structure. (Deleuze 2006, 80) The subject, the individual subject, becomes the privileged site for locating the source of the expression of desire. Interpretation is constrained to the personal. Furthermore, the “assemblage” is described through prefabricated mechanisms in relation to a global structure. Thus, although Deleuze and Guattari’s target was not anthropological structuralism per se, in targeting psychoanalysis they were also conceptually targeting how “structure” had been mobilized in relation to language and desire. Both Deleuze and Guattari sought to fnd a different language and practice for grasping both “desire” and “enunciation,” understood as wholly a part of a functioning heterogeneous assemblage. It is a process, as opposed to a structure or a genesis. It is an affect, as opposed to a feeling. It is a hecceity – the individual singularity of a day, a season, a life. As opposed to a subjectivity, it is an event, not a thing or a person. (ibid) As Deleuze put it in the flmed interview “Abécédaire,” when he and Guattari sought to reinvent the concept of desire, they wanted to say something very simple

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and concrete, something which avoided two excesses: the frst excess is to think that to ask about desire returns the questioner to something secret and hidden, and the second is to think that there are singular objects of desire, that desire is desire of some particular thing.Very simply, Deleuze stated to Claire Parnet, “You never desire something by itself.You don’t desire an ensemble either, you desire within an ensemble.”This simple statement has consequences for how they approach and seek to assemble ensembles, ensembles which have as a defning quality a multiplicity composed of a heterogeneity of elements, relative to which the thinker/inquirer is caught up (vous désirez dans un ensemble). As such, unlike (at least a certain French line of) psychoanalytic thinking, desire in assemblage is grasped in its positivity and heterogeneity, rather than through oppositionality – reifcation of assemblage as single object (e.g., of desire) – and its constitutive lack. In order to avoid getting lost in the trap of trying to reproduce the inimitable style of thought and writing of Deleuze and Guattari, I will frst minimally lay out the initial object in relation to which they frst undertook the task of rethinking the concept “assemblage,” namely, the work of Franz Kafka; I will then indicate how and why the term assemblage found an anchor point in anthropology; fnally, I will give two instances of recent inquiries, taken from the collective volume that I co-edited with sociologist Nicolas Dodier, on the theme of “composite objects” (Dodier and Stavrianakis 2018).The instances are taken from the work of Laurence Tessier (2018) and my own work (Stavrianakis 2018), which in highly contrasting ways have endeavored to specify conceptual and methodological uses for the term within anthropological inquiry.

Kafka: heterogeneity, desire, enunciation The notion of assemblage (agencement) gradually took shape over a decade of thinking between Deleuze and Guattari, and indexes multiple ways of working within ensembles.The term assemblage (agencement) frst appears as a worked over concept in their book on Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari 1986).Their concern for the “multiple” and “multiplicity” of collective assemblages stems from their wish to take up aspects of Kafka’s oeuvre that in their view were obscured by structuralist readings, hermeneutics, as well as the then reigning doxa of psychoanalysis (ibid: 22). With respect to Kafka it is a question of working on a so-called minor literature, literature that has the characteristic of “de-territorializing” the major language in which the act of writing is immersed. Chomsky’s linguistics, which takes “language” as an object, is a particular target.A frst form of heterogeneity is thus at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s endeavor: the heterogeneity of a language made up of different “special languages.”A second form of heterogeneity is then added, relative to a principal type of object in Kafka’s novels, a type of object toward which the concept of the “machine” (machine) and the adjective “machinic” (machinique) point. The concern for “machines” indicates an ontological intensity specifc to Kafka’s universe.The conceptual payoff, though, goes beyond literary analysis. “Machinic” is a term that endeavors to grasp humans caught in the workings of complex fows

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and processes, and the movement of desire which fows within and animates that machinery.The ontological tension introduced by this word is deliberate: to speak of a “technical” machine is a way of referring to a “social” assemblage or confguration (agencement). A third heterogeneity is then introduced into their conceptualization: the interconnection between bodies (in the sense of a material body) and enunciation.Thus, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize two sides of any assemblage: in addition to its “machinic” face, there is the plane of enunciations. One example is their analysis of Kafka’s The Castle in which the machinic question of how to enter the castle, in order for the protagonist K to fulfll his duties, is complicated by the very dissolution of a distinction between inside/outside the castle in the statements of those who live around it. The focus on composites, in assemblage, provides the means of grasping a deep entanglement of matter and language. It is because the assemblage forms a unit through linkages between these two sides – machinic assemblage of desire/collective assemblage of enunciation – that heterogeneity becomes a relevant characteristic. Unlike the kind of complex objects analyzed by Michel Foucault, particularly that of dispositifs, as shown by Dodier and Barbot in their chapter in this volume, and unlike Foucault’s analyses of forms of bio-technical power, the “machinic” side of the arrangement should not lead us to consider that the assemblage has a single purpose, and that it “works” for that (strategic) purpose.An assemblage, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, does not fulfll a function: it proceeds, taking “lines of fight,” or else fying into pieces (voler en eclats).As Deleuze explained in an interview with anthropologist Paul Rabinow, in 1986, shortly after Foucault’s death: I remember we talked about this when Foucault published the frst volume of History of Sexuality. I realized then that we did not share the same view of society. For me a society is something that never stops slipping away. So when you say I am more ‘fuid,’ you are totally right: there’s no better word. Society is something that leaks, fnancially, ideologically – there are points of leakage everywhere. . . . It is truly a fuid – or even worse, a gas. For Michel it was an architecture. (Deleuze 2006, 280) With A Thousand Plateaus, published in 1980, the follow up to their 1972 work Anti-Oedipus, the spectrum of interests captured by Deleuze and Guattari with the concept of assemblage (agencement) widened. This time, the authors did not deal with “the novel” per se, but rather with anything that philosophy might work on. The main properties of assemblages are developed in the book, and the conceptual aims remain the same: to maintain both sides of the assemblage (machinic desire and enunciation); to break with the idea of reference to a world, and the formula of the One (the world) that becomes Two (the world and the book that refers to it), substituting for this vision a concept of the book, or writing, itself as assemblage that comes into relation with other assemblages; to turn away from structuralism, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis, through the production of reproducible

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“layers,” the drawing of “maps,” which arrange elements in their singularity; as well as reaffrming and generalizing the absence of ends, expressed in terms of the distance they take from organicist terms, refected in the formula, taken from Antonin Artaud, of the “body without organs.” A further quality of heterogeneity is also developed, which could be characterized as topological: an assemblage establishes (or can establish) connections between any points that it joins up, one to the other (in contrast to the trees through which structuralism proceeds).This approach does not rule out the possibility of comparing assemblages with each other. Deleuze and Guattari’s approach, however, is not only comparative – it is also evaluative. The assemblage has the form of existence that it has because of the speech and desire that sustains it. It is not only a matter of confronting different forms of heterogeneity, but of producing a specifc form of heterogeneity.The form of writing adjusted to this general program must be invented. Each time, it remains to be reinvented.

Events, forms, assemblages The term assemblage, drawing on the lineage of Deleuze and Guattari, was honed for use in Anglophone anthropological inquiry in the work of Paul Rabinow.Through his work with Foucault, and his engagement with Deleuze’s thought, he has drawn on their conceptual repertoires in order to further develop ways of conducting human science inquiry in a manner that distances itself from structuralism (concerned principally with the transformations of sign systems), hermeneutics (attached as it is to the webs of meaning of language or action, especially when it comes to identifying “culture” in Geertz’s sense), as well as the hermeneutics of suspicion (characterized, through an extension of the defnition given by Paul Ricoeur, as the unveiling of hidden meaning). Rabinow has previously characterized the anthropologist’s endeavor as one of “interpretive analytics” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1984). It is interpretive because Rabinow is committed to pragmatically guided readings of both the contingency and possible endurance of the practices in question. Analytic to the degree that the kind of inquiry to which he is committed emerged in the wake of the renunciation of ahistorical philosophical anthropology. To use a term he would later recuperate from Hans Blumenberg (Blumenberg 2011, 142), the work of interpretive analytics is situated within a historical movement space (Bewegungsraum) which refuses two extremes: the pole of self-assurance and self-understanding of a subject grounded in method (exemplifed by Husserl and Descartes), through which both knowledge of the world and action in the world are justifed, and the pole of contingency, dear to both different forms of “existential phenomenology” as well as other modernist orientations to the “always new.” The place and use of the term assemblage in Rabinow’s work can be rendered visible in relation to the prior work he conducted on apparatuses (dispositifs) of the social environment.This latter term frst enabled Rabinow to grasp and study long-term composite objects. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, is a genealogical account of the rise of the French “social” moving conceptually through domains as diverse as nineteenth-century epidemiology, sociology,

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the Beaux Arts, colonial administration, Lamarckian biology, statistics, and so on (Rabinow 1989). French Modern demonstrates the century long process of bringing these domains of knowledge and practices of power slowly into a common frame of rationality and eventually into an operative apparatus characteristic of the welfare state. One fnds in this research one of the central dynamics of the problem of heterogeneity: the concern to interconnect discursive and non-discursive elements of the bio-technical-political, as well as a concern to take into account, beyond reference to values mobilized in controversies, the interconnection of norms and forms around which practices are really built. With his inquiries in the 1990s into the then emerging feld of genomics, and specifcally the case of a nascent confguration of genomics, bioethics, venture capital, and legal issues in France, published in 1999 as French DNA:Trouble in Purgatory, Rabinow shifted his investigation from the apparatuses that arrange and support social-technical environments toward attention to assemblages (Rabinow 1999). The notion designated a less stable composite than an apparatus, a “singularity” whose possibility of disappearance was more palpable. Rabinow invents the term “form/event” to mark this different relationship to time. We thus fnd a clear demarcation, within anthropology between lines of work concerned with apparatuses and those concerned with assemblages. Rabinow then moves away,“secedes” in his terms, from the concern with problem of heterogeneity per se, a concern equally shared by scholars working in the feld of science and technology studies, for whom the term agencement was likewise a crucial operator, toward an attention to the mode in which objects of inquiry (by this point, necessarily composite and “in assemblage”) are taken up. In his 2003 work, Anthropos Today: Refections on Modern Equipment, Rabinow wrote that, My recent anthropological inquiries have taken as their primary object ‘assemblages.’. . .Assemblages stand in a dependent but contingent relationship to the grander problematizations. . . . They are a distinctive type of experimental matrix of heterogeneous elements, techniques, and concepts. . . .They are comparatively effervescent, disappearing in years, decades, rather than centuries. Consequently, the temporality of assemblages is qualitatively different from that of either problematizations or apparatuses. (Rabinow 2003, 56) As such, he distinguishes the kind of anthropological inquiry he was engaged in and the specifcity of the concept “apparatus” (dispositif ) in the work of Foucault: Foucault cast the elements in an apparatus as joined and disjoined by a strategic logic and a tactical economy of domination operating against a background of discursive formations. He identifed the apparatus as characterized by changes in the position of its elements, the multiplying modifcations of its functions, and an overall articulated strategic intent, albeit an appropriately fexible one. (ibid, 52)

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By contrast, work on assemblages of heterogeneous elements, for Rabinow, aimed “to identify conjunctures between and among these diverse objects, and between and among their temporalities and their functionalities” (ibid).What is then crucial is that the form of inquiry, and the form of writing, must be appropriately constituted and performed in relation to that object of inquiry. As he explains in French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, “The same object can be taken up under different modalities. If the object was the ‘event/form’ the question remains, how should an ‘event’ be approached?” Marshall Sahlins provides him with a contrast. For Sahlins, as he wrote in Islands of History, “An event is not just a happening in the world: it is a relation between a certain happening and a given symbolic system. Meaning is realized . . . only as events of speech and action. Event is the empirical form of the system” (Sahlins 1985, 153). Rabinow’s basic disagreement is that while one could take up events and their forms in their relation to an underlying semiotic system, to do so would miss the contingency, and specifcity, of the event in that particular form.The form/event is not reducible to the relations between the elements that constitute it. Rabinow’s concern was then to ask about the narrative mode through which to grasp such event/forms.

From global assemblages to inquiry in assemblages In line with what Rabinow calls forms/events, several anthropologists have aimed, since the mid-2000s, to account for the global rise of certain kinds of forms, seeking to characterize their existence and their effects from the angle of their internal heterogeneity, once again mobilizing the term “assemblage.” Collier and Ong, in the introduction to their edited volume Global Assemblages develop the notion of global forms and the capacity of the forms to be put into assemblage.They start from the observation of the particular stability of certain forms that have the specifc capacity of being able to move across diverse settings, forms that they thus characterize as global. To say that these forms are both heterogeneous and global is for these authors to position themselves against approaches that would see only the social or the cultural in the interconnection of forms and specifc practices. The substance and character of the elements that make up these forms remain open: “technical infrastructures, administrative apparatuses or value regimes,” for example (Collier and Ong 2005, 3).The authors also reuse the notion of immutable mobiles taken from material-semiotic approaches to indicate how these global forms emerge and how they are transported.They point out the decontextualization work that needs to be done in order to give them consistency. Moreover, they remind us how, by circulating, the forms are able to assimilate new environments, and thus to “code heterogeneous contexts and objects” (ibid, 11). If heterogeneity is found at the level of the composition of global forms, it is also found at the level of the entities on which global forms are practiced. Not only in the sense of the variety of situations thus coded, rather also in the sense of the heterogeneity of the elements to be assembled, to the extent that these forms must be to a degree “territorialized” (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term). Collier and Ong then assume that tensions of a specifc kind emerge from this double constraint: assembling the heterogeneous,

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while keeping a certain permanence/fxity. The concept of a “global assemblage” is designed for this purpose. It serves to qualify an arrangement of a certain type, and thus to open a feld of investigation into case studies. One of the reasons that the term assemblage has been solicited by anthropologists over the last two decades is that the term denaturalizes objects of inquiry while also avoiding the excess claim that therefore objects of inquiry are constructs or exist merely in the realm of ideas. In fact, for anthropological inquiry oriented to events and the form that events take, assemblage as a concept allows the inquirer to focus simultaneously on the composite elements, where they came from, how they change when brought into relationship, as well as the character of the ensembles produced in assemblage. What has been downplayed in anthropological work on assemblages however are the two sides that Deleuze and Guattari named as crucial to the concept, sides which are relevant for the form and practice of anthropological inquiry, to wit: desire of those involved in the assemblage, in relation to a gamut of material, technical, environmental things that afford a given practice, for the inquirer included, and the way in which speech acts are made, taken seriously, circulate, give form to a life within the assemblage in question. I would like to fnish therefore with a couple of instances of inquiry where the “machinic” confguration of desire and the collective confguration of enunciation are mobilized as ways of doing and conceptualizing anthropological inquiry.

Two instances of inquiry in assemblages 1 Comparing collective assemblages of enunciation in the diagnosis of neurodegenerative disease Laurence Anne Tessier has recently drawn on the concept of assemblage (agencement) as a means of approaching her anthropological inquiry into the medical and scientifc practices at stake in the diagnosis of the neurological disorder FrontoTemporal Dementia (FTD). FTD is taken up by Tessier (2018) as an assemblage of symptoms, fgures of sociality and sociability (both human and animal), theories of human nature inspired by evolutionary psychology or by a certain vitalism.The analytic strategy shows how these assemblages interconnect fundamental dualities, in this case, between the “cerebral” and the “social,” “nature” and “society.” What is striking about this work is how, in an original fashion, Tessier mobilizes the comparative potential of the concept of assemblage, looking at how a baseline of similar, material and semiotic, diagnostic elements are differently mobilized and arranged in a French and a US clinic. She shows the singularity of each of the diagnostic assemblages, precisely through their comparison, thus refusing to attribute the observation of coherence to a falsely determining concept like culture or society, or else reducing the coherence of practice to the routine of an institution. Even if in certain respects the elements of the two assemblages can be seen as opposed, the analytic strategy is precisely not structuralist, to the degree that inquiry

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underscores the historical contingency and singularity of the arrangements with a form of practice, that cannot be reduced to the confguration of its sign system. Although the comparative approach loosely recalls certain material-semiotic works from within science studies, it differs in its way of working on questions of both materiality and language.The anthropologist does not settle on the material reality of the bodies that pass through each of the sites studied (contrary to the approach in terms of enactment, for example). Rather, the approach has the means to go deeper into the entanglements constructed and revealed by the continuous fow of words exchanged in each of the places, to grasp how the same diagnosis can refer to a different confguration of elements, without taking on the status of a mere convention, the comparative ethnographic investigation giving access to how the assemblage of enunciations is part of a form of life for those that participate in, and who are caught up in, the assemblage.

2 A desire to seize desire My own work has drawn on the concept of assemblage and specifcally the rethinking of the term “desire” at its heart (Stavrianakis 2018). The work concerns an inquiry into the request for and the fulfllment of assistance with suicide in Switzerland. In light of my participation within the assemblage that constituted a person’s request for assistance with suicide, given the position I occupied during my inquiry, I observe that it is “desire” that serves to qualify the relations and movement of the elements of the assemblage. Indeed, one of the results of the inquiry was how the desire of the person to die, and to die in this particular way, was a core preoccupation of those who would accompany the person in question.The desire to die produced the desire to interpret desire. As such not only I but also the relatives of the person sought to interpret the “desire to die” of the person who prepares for assisted suicide. By following this desire to interpret desire I discovered the place occupied by the “images of prior deaths” within this “assemblage of desire.” The sources of heterogeneity and the targets of this process then appear in full light. In the case of a particular 80-year old Frenchman, whose parents were murdered by the Nazi regime, both I and family members were drawn toward totalizing interpretations of his request for assisted suicide in terms of the signifcation that such a death could have in relation to the sign of his childhood trauma. By following the movement of desire and the heterogeneity of discursive elements, an “assemblage” approach to his death became a way of fnding a manner to apprehend the desire to die that goes against “individualizing psychology,” against the claims of having access to a totalizing explanation in the interpretation of desire, such as reference to a determining chain of signifers, as well as against the reduction of the analysis to “strategies” or “power relations.”

Conclusion The brief sketches of two instances of inquiry serve to underscore the heuristic character of the assemblage concept.That is to say, unlike Deleuze and Guattari, my

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concern has been to present a pragmatic anthropological approach to uses of the term, and not a metaphysical philosophic one. Such a concept and use draws on the recent collaborative work I have been conducting with Paul Rabinow (Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2014, 2016, 2019) in which we have endeavored to understand points of overlap and points of distinction between heuristic concept formation for pragmatic anthropology and two other version of pragmatism available in the human sciences, outlined in the editors’ Introduction to this volume: (1) Inquiry infuenced or underpinned by the philosophical current of American pragmatism, which would include human science inquirers such as Robert E. Park, George H. Mead, the symbolic interactionists, as well as ethnomethodologists, and much of what came of science studies etc.; (2) Pragmatic sociology: although the latter shares some things with philosophical pragmatism, for example a commitment to pluralism, which in practice basically means situational variation, and commitment to indeterminacy, pragmatic sociology in the French sense gestured toward in the Introduction (c.f. Barthe et al. 2013), also seeks to account for how that indeterminacy and pluralism is socially constituted, i.e., it accepts Bourdieu’s critique of interactionism which states that interactionism describes a world with a weak degree of institutionalization and an absence of minimal knowledge of the most objective social and economic characteristics. Adjacent to these versions of pragmatism, Rabinow and I have written that A pragmatic anthropology takes up ‘ethics’ to the degree that it seeks to grasp situations in which there is an indeterminate, plural, and discordant relation between what anthropos does (actual), can (possible), and might (virtual) make of itself.To the degree that it focuses on how subjects conduct themselves, the forms in-and-through which they conduct themselves, we specify that the goal of a pragmatic anthropology is to seize signifcance about ethos and manners of living (bios; forms of life; pedagogy). (Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2019, 189) Recalling the basic methodological insight of Max Weber’s essay “‘Objectivity’ in Social Sciences and Social Policy,” (1949) we underscore the fact that grasping the quality of a situation and of lives in those situations as “ethical” is not something that situations possess “objectively”: such a characterization is rather conditioned by the orientation of our observation and the manner in which the signifcance of the observation is grasped, that is to say, as it arises from the specifc signifcance that we attribute to the particular episode, event, or turning point in a given situation.The concept of assemblage can thus clearly be mobilized within such an orientation. What I therefore seek to underscore here is that the concept, as invented by Deleuze and Guattari, is still of use today, and that in returning to it, it can be reinvented. Minimally, the concept’s heuristic power comes from three aspects: (1) It indicates how any assemblage of elements is constituted in part by the desire within the assemblage, which includes the desire of the observer/inquirer; (2) Oriented to events/forms the concept situates elements and relations in a movement space between their contingency and their being maintained in movement; (3) Oriented

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to the collectively produced actual forms of speech and discourse, the concept of assemblage opens up future paths for anthropological writing, and narrative (Stavrianakis 2020).

Bibliography Barthe, Yannick, de Blic Damien, Heurtin Jean-Philippe, et al. 2013. “Sociologie pragmatique: mode d’emploi.” Politix 103: 175–204. Blumenberg, Hans. 2011. Paradigms for a Metaphorology.Translated by Robert Savage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. First published (German) 1960. Collier, Stephen, and Aihwa Ong. 2005.“Global Assemblages,Anthropological Problems.” In Global Assemblages:Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, 3–31. Malden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing. Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Two Regimes of Madness. Translated by A. Hodges and M. Taormina. New York: Semiotext (e). First published (French) 2003. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka:Toward a Minor Literature.Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published (French) 1975. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. Anti-Oedipus.Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum. First published (French). Dodier, Nicolas, and Anthony Stavrianakis, eds. 2018. Les Objets Composés: Agencements, Dispositifs, Assemblages. Paris: Editions EHESS. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. 1984. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Translated by Anonymous. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., University of Chicago Press. Phillips, John. 2006.“Agencement/Assemblage.” Theory Culture and Society 23(2–3): 108–9. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1999. French DNA:Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rabinow, Paul. 2003. Anthropos Today: Refections on Modern Equipment. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rabinow, Paul, and Anthony Stavrianakis. 2014. Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropological Tests. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rabinow, Paul, and Anthony Stavrianakis. 2016. “Movement Space: Putting Anthropological Theory, Concepts, and Cases to the Test.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1): 403–31. Rabinow, Paul, and Anthony Stavrianakis. 2019. Inquiry After Modernism. Oakland: ARC. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy:An Essay on Interpretation.Translated by Denis Savage. New Haeven:Yale University Press. First published (French) 1965. Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stavrianakis,Anthony. 2018.“Survivances des images de la mort: L’agencement du désir dans une mort volontaire assistée.” In Les Objets Composés, edited by Anthony Stavrianakis and Nicolas Dodier. Paris: Editions EHESS. Stavrianakis, Anthony. 2020. Leaving: A Narrative of Assisted Suicide. Oakland: University of California Press.

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Tessier, Laurence. 2018.“Rencontres avec la démence. Comparaison des agencements entre le cérébral et le social aux États-Unis et en France.” In Les Objets Composés, edited by Anthony Stavrianakis and Nicolas Dodier. Paris: Editions EHESS. Weber, Max. 1949.“‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy.” In The Methodology of the Social Sciences, edited and translated by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, 49–112. New York:The Free Press.

5 MARKET DEVICES Olav Velthuis

1 Introduction “Devices are dead,” a Danish colleague whispered to me at a conference recently. We were listening to a paper presentation on devices within market settings, the umpteenth at the conference, and my colleague was obviously bored. During the break, he complained that devices did not do the trick anymore.They had been all the rage for almost a decade within the interdisciplinary feld of market studies, but now their magic was gone. For him, it was time to move on. To claim that they had been all the rage in market studies is certainly no exaggeration. Google scholar lists over 2000 articles mentioning ‘market devices,’ of which the vast majority (1770) was published in the new millennium, and more than 1200 since 2010. Because of the performative turn within economic sociology, new concepts like market devices, performativity, agencements, and assemblages (on the latter two terms, see Stavrianakis’ contribution to this volume) have been introduced to the subdiscipline, marking one of the most signifcant theoretical impulses for economic sociology in the new millennium. Indeed, this program has questioned the dominance of the embeddedness paradigm (Granovetter 1985; see e.g., Smelser and Swedberg 2010; Dobbin 2004) and has inspired many to start paying attention to material dimensions of markets, which hitherto received less scholarly attention (Mcfall 2009). Akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of capital, which has been extended to a wide variety of felds which Bourdieu had not scrutinized himself, ‘devices’ have been applied in a variety of ways within market studies: in the literature we fnd terms like calculation, status, legal, quotation, trust, encountering, mediation devices, and so on, which all have family resemblance and are part of the more encompassing category of market devices.Taking all these applications and small-time conceptual elaborations into consideration, it is no exaggeration to state that the proliferation of

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device-studies within economic sociology broadly defned, is one of actor-network theory’s major successes outside of the domain of science and technology studies. I see this proliferation as indicative of the mainstreaming of ANT within social science. At the same time, however, this mainstreaming may go hand in hand with the dilution of the analytical power of the concept. Increasingly, ‘device’ has been disconnected from the bodies of literature out of which it emerged.As a result, the concept is now also used as a substitute for everyday terms like ‘tool,’ ‘technology,’ or ‘instrument.’‘Device’ may sound more appealing intellectually, but its added analytical value is not always clear in recent studies using the term. In this essay, I assess the recent intellectual biography of the term ‘market devices.’ When and where do we fnd its frst uses? How was it introduced into economic sociology? What does it allow us to see which we otherwise would not see, and is it indeed successful in making us see these things? What are its blind spots? Should we make an effort to make it a fxed part of our analytical toolbox, and if so, what modifcations does it need? What I will not do is write an overall genealogy of the term, or, for that matter, of terms like dispositive or apparatus which have been used interchangeably (an issue of translation to which I will come back later on). Apart from the fact that parts of those genealogies already exist (see e.g., Beuscart and Peerbaye 2006; Agamben 2009; Bussolini 2010; Dodier and Barbot 2016), my poor commandment of French and limited grasp of Foucault, Deleuze, and other intellectual forefathers of the term, would make me particularly unft for that task (see however Dodier and Barbot’s and Stavrianakis’ contributions to this volume). Although my answers to the previous questions may to some extent be relevant for other domains where the term device has been in vogue (e.g., sociology of law, sociology of organizations, or political sociology), I focus on its use in economic sociology and the interconnected, interdisciplinary feld of market studies.The reason for this is partially one of scope (the market devices literature is overwhelming in itself) and again one of expertise: my knowledge of those other domains and the ways they have incorporated and elaborated on ‘devices’ is simply insuffcient. Moreover, economic sociology and market studies are among the domains where the impact of the term has been particularly strong.

2 A short history on the use of market devices Although unfrequently and irregularly, economists have used the term market device since many decades. Remarkably, the frst use of the term which I encountered is in Milton Friedman’s bestseller Capitalism and Freedom (1962). Friedman does so while debating fxed exchange rates: debunking a series of arguments against their liberalization, he writes about the “tyranny of the status quo.” Bankers for instance, are afraid what would happen to their business when exchange rates are allowed to foat freely, but unnecessarily so, Friedman argues, since “market devices . . . would arise to cope with fuctuations in exchange rates” (Friedman 1962, 62).Although at that point in the text he does not defne what market devices are, he immediately

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afterwards refers to “frms that would specialize in speculation and arbitrage in a free market for exchange.” The gist of his argument seems to be similar to what Michel Callon would argue more than four decades later, and surely very different from common critical depictions or representations of neoclassical economic thinking, in which markets would arise spontaneously and free economic exchange is a natural phenomenon.That is not at all what Friedman argues. Instead, he seems fully aware that “free” markets with fexible prices do not come about naturally, but need to be actively produced. This requires among others discursive changes, a change in dispositive, so to say, so that the “inevitable tendency for everyone to be in favor of a free market for everyone else, while regarding himself as deserving of special treatment” (Friedman 1962, 61–62) gets remedied. Moreover, switching from a system of fxed to fexible prices entails a different form of agencement, as Callon would call it more than two decades later (Friedman obviously does not use the term yet), including different types of frms which at once render exchange rates fexible and enable traditional fnancial institutions to cope with such a system by offoading risk upon those frms. My interpretation of Friedman’s use of the term in Capitalism and Freedom is supported by another instance, this time in his later bestseller Free to Choose (1990), co-authored with his wife Rose Friedman. And again the similarities with the recent Callonian device program are striking. In this instance, the Friedmans argue against government regulation of markets for consumer products. Countering the objection that in the absence of regulation, consumers would not be able to “judge the quality of complex products” (a comment that seems to come straight out of Lucien Karpik’s Valuing the Unique. The Economics of Singularities), the Friedmans write that “[t]he market’s answer is that he does not have to be able to judge for himself. He has other bases for choosing.” Prefguring Karpik’s work they acknowledge that consumers will, in these moments of uncertainty, indeed not collect all available information on consumer products, use it to make highly-informed, independent judgments, and then choose a product. Instead they will rely on “market devices.” The Friedmans give several examples: middlemen and brands (similar to what Karpik calls impersonal judgment devices in the so-called mega regime), as well as consumer reports and test magazines (Friedman and Friedman 1990, 223–24), which point at the materiality of markets and the technologies which are sine qua non for a market agencement of consumer goods.These devices assist in creating attachments between consumers and goods. After these frst appearances in Friedman’s oeuvre, the term keeps popping up erratically in neoclassical economics literature. For instance, in a widely cited paper on the economics of stardom, Moshe Adler argues that in cultural markets, stardom operates as a “market device” which serves “to economize on learning costs” (Adler 1985, 208). In other words, consumers of cultural products do not learn about, and select artists autonomously by collecting information but instead, by paying attention to stardom, they rely on the selections which other consumers have already made. Again, the similarities to Karpik’s notion of a judgment device,

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which consumers use in markets for singular products such as art and culture to effectuate choices, are striking. In economic sociology and social studies of markets more widely, the term would only be used much later. The frst instance I could fnd was in a French pragmatist analysis of evaluation in the context of frms (Eymard-Duvernay 1992), where the term dispositif de marché was used to point at the different ways in which goods are evaluated within a market setting as opposed to within a frm (dispositif d´enterprises). A decade later the term appears again in several other French studies of e.g., electronic markets (Kessous 2001), Napster (Beuscart 2002), the introduction of quota for CO2 emissions (Godard 2005), or the introduction of electronic trading on the Paris Bourse (Muniesa 2005), but in most of these studies, the term is used in a generic sense, without much analytical leverage, often in passing, and sometimes as no more than synonymous with the term “market.” That is about to change, however, for in the meantime, Callon’s contribution to and critique of the embeddedness paradigm in economic sociology, as originally formulated in The Laws of the Market (1998), is taking shape. For instance, in a widely cited article in Economy & Society he and two co-authors introduce the term socio-technical devices, to describe two processes which are crucial in the organization of markets: the singularization of goods and the attachment/detachment of economic agents to/from those goods (Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002).Together with Muniesa, Callon gives the term devices further substance in the 2005 article Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices which squarely puts the emphasis on the material character of markets.They do so in order to explain how economic calculation is performed within and generative of markets; this calculation, they emphasize, is distributed among human actors and material devices. Calculative agencies in other words singularize goods, objectify them, categorize them, frame them in terms of substitutes, etc., all in order to make it possible to calculate value and enable exchange. In 2007, Callon, Muniesa, and Yuval Millo published the edited volume Market devices. Together with Do Economists Make Markets (MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007), the book is a sequel to Callon’s Laws of the market and is programmatic in a number of respects. Where Do Economists Make Markets thematizes the discursive production of markets through the notion of performativity (in particular the role of economic science in shaping markets), Market Devices puts materiality and the material production of markets squarely on the research agenda of economic sociology.While theoretically programmatic, the concept gets applied in the volume to a wide range of empirical cases including consumer credit, pharmaceutical markets, fshing quotas, mass retailing and cotton pricing. With a British publisher, Market Devices makes the work of a range of French authors, who had until that time predominantly published in their native language, accessible to non-French scholars. It was strategic in presenting French actornetwork theory and, to a lesser extent, French pragmatism to wider publics. However, by mixing the contributions in the volume with those by scholars from e.g., Scandinavian and American-trained scholars working in other traditions than ANT,

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it avoided insularity and created a strategic, lasting bridge between literature on devices which had been developing in France from the 1980s onwards and international scholars of markets. In the introduction to the volume, Muniesa, Millo, and Callon defne market devices in passing as “the material and discursive assemblages that intervene in the construction of markets” (Muniesa, Millo, and Callon 2007, 2).The deployment of the term is part of a more encompassing project started in The Laws of the Market. Its overall aim is to demonstrate that, in contrast to new economic sociology which emphasizes the social and cultural embeddedness of markets, disembedded markets with relatively anonymous interactions between self-interested, calculating agents do exist. However, they do not come into being in and of itself.As Callon put it in his 1998 volume:“homoeconomicus does exist, but it is not an a-historical reality; he does not describe the hidden nature of the human being. He is the result of a process of confgurations” (Callon 1998, 22). Callon c.s. acknowledge in the volume that the device concept, or to be more precise its French equivalent dispostif, was coined by Foucault (for a discussion of the different approaches to the term dispositif, and the differences between the Foucauldian approach and the approach of actor-network theory, see Dodier and Barbot’s contribution to this volume). For Foucault, the term dispositive meant a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientifc statements, philosophical and moral propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of that apparatus.The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (cited in Agamben 2009, 2) This defnition, and the emphasis that Foucault put on the dispositive’s strategic nature, suggests continuity with Callon’s usage of the term. That’s indeed what some scholars have argued (see e.g., Dumez and Jeunemaître 2010). From the introduction to Market Devices it becomes clear, however, that Callon c.s. want to distinguish their own usage of the term from Foucault’s. It is telling that Callon c.s. choose to translate the French term “dispositif ” not by “dispositive” but by the distinct term ‘’device’’ (cf. Dodier and Barbot 2016). They legitimate this choice by arguing that it assists in positioning themselves vis-à-vis Foucault, and, for that matter, Bourdieu. While Bourdieu’s notion of disposition is too subject-oriented, Foucault’s dispositive is too object-oriented.1 Unlike Foucault, but more in line with how Deleuze elaborated on the term dispositive, Muniesa, Millo, and Callon seek to avoid such a bifurcation of agency. Instead, they stress the agency of material objects and emphasize that “subjectivity is enacted in a device,” an idea which they refer to, again following Deleuze, as agencement.This resistance against the bifurcation of agency is what distinguishes the notion of market device from more generic terms which point at the materiality of economic life such as “tool,” “technique,” or “instrument.”

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3 Mainstreaming devices Now what kind of agencements do we fnd in empirical studies of market devices? What kinds of subjectivities are enacted in them? In the frst place, many studies are about activities, processes and transformations needed for “free,” disembedded markets to come into being and exist: they assist actors for instance in making complicated calculations (e.g., of the worth of goods, services or fnancial instruments which are traded), in abstraction, objectifcation, or arranging the disentanglement of goods from their producers and the subsequent re-entanglement to their consumers. For instance, in MacKenzie’s by now classical study of the market for options, a formula for pricing options developed by the academic economists Black, Sholes, and Merton, which fnds its way to the Chicago Board of Trade, enables the options market to become mature and grow exponentially (MacKenzie 2006). In Cochoy’s imaginative study of the shopping cart, these carts contribute to the creation of consumer cognition and of bonds between consumers and goods (Cochoy 2008). In Poon’s study of mortgage markets, the explosive rise of mortgage lending from the 1990s onwards was enabled by the collective use of so-called FICO scores and the integration of these scores into the market’s automated fnancial architecture. FICO scores were originally developed to measure, standardize, and control risk in markets for consumer credit, but later on traveled to other fnancial domains, turning them into a “traceable technological system involved in aligning the decision-making of lenders with regards to the qualities of borrowers” (Poon 2007, 2009, 658). With its emphasis on calculation and abstraction, it is no coincidence that the concept has been particularly infuential in studying fnancial markets, as opposed to other economic sociological topics such as regulatory dimensions of markets, where the embeddedness paradigm has remained much stronger and new approaches, such as Bourdieusian inspired feld approaches, have become infuential (Fligstein and McAdam 2012. See also Bartley, this volume). Indeed, the performative turn in market studies has been constitutive for the social studies of fnance paradigm (Morgan 2012), which has institutionalized itself in the meantime as a subdiscipline, distinct from economic sociology, with its own conferences, self-identifed scholars, edited volumes, a blog, etc. While the core studies following the performative turn use “market devices” to account for the processes needed to produce disembedded markets, later studies have expanded the use of the term to e.g., trust devices which are used to judge the trustworthiness of claims made by counterparties in economic transactions (Bowen 2018); policy devices “that allow people to make sense of the world using statistics, measurement, and models” (Fligstein, Stuart Brundage, and Schultz 2017, 5); or judgment devices which assist in making judgments about the quality of goods (Karpik 2010).Attention for market devices has thus been further mainstreamed. In this process, the term’s ties to ANT were loosened. For instance, the term agencement is rarely used in these mainstream market studies, nor does the idea that agency is distributed across both human and non-human actors or that subjectivity is enacted in a device, surface very prominently.

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Later studies also add a layer of complexity by pointing at the sequential nature of devices.As Dodier and Barbot (Dodier and Barbot 2016, 301) argue, they should be “conceived as a prepared concatenation of sequences, intended to qualify or transform a state of affairs through the medium of an assemblage of material or language elements.” An empirical example is the global halal certifcation industry analyzed by John R. Bowen, where a product needs to go through a series of device-centered events (tests in a lab, inspections in a factory, the issuing of the right paperwork, etc.) before these devices will have transformed it into a halal product, and that transformation is trusted as such by e.g., consumers (Bowen 2018). What all studies have in common is a strong emphasis on the enabling character of devices. Reading one empirical study after another, the similarity in the type of pragmatic, “rolling-your-sleeves-up” language that is used is striking: the devices “afford” actors to do, see or perceive something, and without that “something” there would not be a market.They make sure that things get “enacted,”“ordered,” “rendered,” “settled,” “aligned,” “transformed,” or “organized,” and, again, without these interventions of devices a market would not come into being. To put it in terms of Dodier and Barbot, in the market device literature, the normative repertoire around the device is highly strategic. Its theoretical envelope, wider conceptual apparatus and understanding of agency may be entirely different, but the emphasis on the enabling, strategic dimension of devices at times reminds me of Swidler’s toolkit approach (Swidler 1986; Dodier and Barbot 2016, 304). Karpik’s Valuing the Unique is exemplary in this respect. In the book, Karpik introduces the term judgment devices and, like Callon c.s., refers back to Foucault as the source (Karpik 2010, 44).The starting point of his analysis is that the quality of what he calls singularities (think of cultural goods, restaurants, personalized services such as those from lawyers or psychologists) is hard to assess for consumers. This is because singularities are multidimensional, incommensurable, while at the same time their quality is radically uncertain. Consumers in other words face a cognitive defcit when they need to buy such a singularity: how to make a reasonable choice? That’s where judgment devices come in. They “are used to dissipate the opacity of the market” (Karpik 2010, 44). Examples of judgment devices which consumers rely on are consumer reviews, rankings, brand names, the stated opinions of experts such as art critics or museum directors (who Karpik calls “cicerones”), or personal recommendations.The reasoning is strikingly similar to cognitive strands within neo-institutionalist theory or even behavioral economics, where limitations in the capacity to collect and process information are a reason for actors to rely on schemata, scripts, or routines whenever decisions have to be made, situations need to be judged, or goods need to be evaluated (see e.g., DiMaggio 1997; Lamont 2012; Scott 2001).

4 Critical refections As was already mentioned, Callon explicitly distanced himself from Foucault in developing the concept of device.This also shows in the fact that questions related

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to power, governance, or discipline are rarely tackled in the market device literature. For some this surely is a virtue. Beuscart and Peerbaye, for instance, applaud the move away from Foucault, criticizing his use of the term for being “le lieu de l’inscription technique d’un projet social total, agissant par la contrainte, et visant le contrôle aussi bien des corps que des esprits” (Beuscart and Peerbaye 2006, 5) – just think of the panopticon as the quintessential Foucauldian dispositive. However, to me it seems that Callon’s program, with its almost exclusive attention for the enabling, creative or productive dimensions of devices and by almost completely ignoring constraining aspects, is vulnerable to the opposite critique. Where Dodier and Barbot optimistically write that an “advantage of the concept of dispositive is that it enables scholars to consider varying degrees of constraint,” from, at one end of the spectrum, tough Foucauldian discipline to, on the other end of the spectrum, more subtle, fexible forms of constraint which take the form of e.g., “guidance” or “coordination” (Dodier and Barbot 2016, 295), in my reading of the market device literature, only the latter part of the spectrum is drawn on.2 Moreover, empirical studies almost invariably present accounts of devices which have been successful in making markets by e.g., rendering objects calculable. We never hear about the myriads of devices which failed: the “misfres” (Butler 2010; Callon 2010) which have been designed, or were in the process of being designed, but did not materialize or did materialize but failed to perform the trick (see Hébert 2014 for a similar critique). If we accept this assessment, how should the relative lack of attention by Callon c.s. for the constraining dimensions of devices be made sense of? Let me provide a number of – I admit speculative – answers. First of all, the strong micro-orientation of market device studies, which zoom in so far on ethnographic detail and the meticulous workings of devices, makes it hard to clearly see and analyze these constraining dimensions. Second and relatedly, the term is used exceedingly narrow in the device literature, frequently synonymous with tool or instrument, which contrasts with the much wider usage of the term by Foucault: as an ensemble of which those material forms are surely part, but other, heterogeneous elements such as institutions, regulatory decisions, moral propositions, or administrative measures are part as well. We see a tension here between the adoption of this wider, more encompassing use of the term which Foucault originally proposed, and Callon’s critique of the embeddedness program in economic sociology: paying attention to the constraining (e.g., legal, cultural, power-related) dimensions of devices would almost automatically mean bringing the embeddedness of markets back in. Distancing the device program from the embeddedness paradigm in other words came at a price. A third reason for the relative neglect of the constraining dimension of devices may be that the attention of empirical studies has usually been focused on the devices themselves and their users (which in turn follows naturally from the idea of agencements). However, those whose economic lives are subjected to these agencements have received far less attention. For instance, we know a lot about how fnancial institutions developed FICO scores and other calculative devices which assisted

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in creating subprime mortgage markets, but in these studies we learn very little, if anything, about the home buyers who, through these devices, were pushed into unsustainably high levels of debt and were then forced to vacate their houses; there has been a lot of attention for the ways in which judgment devices shape the decisions of e.g., restaurant lovers, but relatively little for restaurants and many other organizations who have to cope with being ranked and rated (Orlikowski and Scott 2013; Mellet et al. 2014; Espeland and Sauder 2016); we have detailed studies on the ways in which shopping carts shape the behavior of consumers, but little about the shop assistants whose jobs became superfuous once the carts, or, more recently, self-checkout machines made their appearance. In this respect, the device literature is strikingly different from other bodies of literature which have also adopted the term dispositive. Think of the ways in which the term has been used in governmentality studies; remaining much closer to Foucault, these studies defned dispositive as “a common matrix through which knowledge and power are defned” (Silva-Castañeda and Trussart 2016, 492). Likewise, organizational studies using the term have been much more attentive to its constraining dimension. In these studies, it is used “as an interconnecting, broad, and diversifed analytical tool,” which permits an alternative access to the circumstances under which organizing and organizations take place. Deferring attention from the organization as an entity to a larger social feld, without reducing the former to a given, even more fundamental entity (e.g. society), dispositional analysis elucidates conditions for organizing and organizational processes, which managers and concrete organizations as well as organizational theory need to address and take into consideration. (Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, and Thaning 2016, 274) Another critique of the device program is the lack of attention for the ways in which devices themselves emerge, become dominant, or the circumstances under which they get adopted (cf. Kharchenkova and Velthuis 2018). If devices should be seen as the co-creators of markets, it would make sense to pay more attention to the co-creators’ creators. I do not claim that these devices are treated by Callon as a deus ex machina. In fact, some of the best social studies of fnance are detailed histories of the way a new market device was created and introduced to the market (see e.g., Preda 2006; Muniesa 2005).Also, the ways in which devices get translated (adjusted, interpreted, modifed, etc.; see Poon 2009, 659) when they travel from one market setting to another or when they get integrated into a market’s material infrastructure, have been thoroughly scrutinized (see e.g., Barman 2015 on the role of reporting standards and rating systems for frms in the creation of a market for impact investing). But how these processes of development and institutionalization ft in wider social structures, whose interests devices serve, or how specifc political economic constellations such as fnancialization or neoliberalism shape devices in particular ways, hardly gets addressed (see Fligstein and Dauter 2007 for

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a similar critique; Callon 2010).As Marion Fourcade has likewise argued regarding performativity: the mere availability of certain economic technologies does not guarantee their performative effects for the simple reasons that these technologies may not muster enough institutional and political support or that they may not resonate enough with the cultural claims they are supposed to represent. In fact, economic methods for the valuation of nature come in very different shapes and imply very different forms of calculability. Neither of these are incidental, of course; rather, both the methods themselves and the calculability they embody are the product of very specifc social processes that are of great relevance to the ‘performed’ outcome itself. (Fourcade 2011, 1724–25)

5 Conclusion The aim of this essay has not been to fuel skepticism of those who see ANT, as Liz Mcfall has phrased it, as no more than “a plethora of banal descriptions of processes and objects of limited, if any, general, interest” (Mcfall 2009, 275).With her I agree that devices and related concepts like agencements and performativity have greatly enriched the toolset of both economic sociology and market studies. The materiality of markets had indeed been mostly ignored, and the performative turn has proved to be an effective way to put it on the research agenda.Thus my critiques of this program should not be read as a defense of “new” economic sociology. In fact, some of these critiques could be leveled against new economic sociology as well: like the device program, new economic sociology, with its predilection for the social and cultural embeddedness of markets, paid relatively little attention to the wider political economy of markets. Why does this matter? One of the many possible tests which the market device program could be subjected to, is how it compares to both hegemonic, orthodox economic approaches, as well as to heterodox approaches such as new economic sociology and institutional economics, in explaining key economic events and processes such as the fnancial crisis of 2008 or, more recently, the increasing share of economic profts fowing to capital rather than labor (see Butler 2010 for a similar critique). What does it add to our understanding of these events? My tentative answer would be: not that much. In fact, in all the detailed studies of calculative devices conducted right before the fnancial crisis, no signs of upcoming disaster was picked up (see Fligstein 2009 for a similar argument); in the studies published after 2008, the crisis itself is addressed relatively infrequently, especially when compared to “mainstream” economic sociology or political economy (however, for exceptions, see e.g., MacKenzie 2011; Beunza and Stark 2010; Morgan 2012). To conclude, this chapter is meant as a friendly, not a skeptical critique.The market devices program has, over the last decade and a half, been highly successful in

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channeling attention to the material dimension of markets. But for the concept to get anchored in the mainstream, it needs to build bridges to other strands in market studies such as (old) embeddedness inspired approaches or (new) feld approaches (see MacKenzie 2019 for a similar plea), instead of continuing to defne itself in opposition to those. In particular, it needs to have attention for the restraining (instead of only the enabling) dimension of market devices. Moreover, the social structures, institutional confgurations, cultural contexts, and (political) power relations which shape devices, which co-determine if and how devices emerge and get (de-)institutionalized, need to be taken into account.3 In doing so, we can ensure that my Danish colleague will eventually be proven wrong, and that the term market devices turns out to be more than a conceptual hype.

Acknowledgements Thanks for the very helpful comments from Tim Bartley, John R. Bowen, and other participants in the Institutions workshop,Washington University St. Louis, September 29–30, 2018, where an earlier version of this chapter was discussed.

Notes 1 In the Foucault-exegesis literature, there is an ongoing discussion about the right way to translate the French term “dispositif ”: as apparatus (Agamben 2009), device, or simply dispositive (Bussolini 2010). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve into that discussion. 2 In recent literature on the impact of e.g., rankings and ratings (Espeland and Sauder 2016; van Doorn and Velthuis 2018) or the use of algorithms in digital markets (Fourcade and Healy 2016; Faraj, Pachidi, and Sayegh 2018) this constraining dimension of market devices has received much more emphasis. 3 For instance, the popularity of academic rankings as a judgment device of universities in the United States (Espeland and Sauder 2016), cannot be seen as disconnected from the relatively limited amount of government funding, high tuition fees, while their relatively limited popularity in e.g., the Netherlands, cannot be seen as disconnected from legal frameworks which prevent status hierarchies among universities from coming into being.

Bibliography Adler, Moshe. 1985.“Stardom and Talent.” American Economic Review 75(1): 208–12. Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barman, Emily. 2015. “Of Principle and Principal:Value Plurality in the Market of Impact Investing.” Valuation Studies 3(1): 9–44. Beunza, Daniel, and David Stark. 2010. Models, Refexivity, and Systemic Risk: A Critique of Behavioral Finance. Paper Presented at the Workshop Reembedding Finance, Paris. Beuscart, Jean-Samuel. 2002. “Les Usagers De Napster, Entre Communauté Et Clientèle Construction Et Régulation D’Un Collectif Sociotechnique.” Sociologie Du Travail 44(4): 461–80.

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Beuscart, Jean-Samuel, and Ashveen Peerbaye. 2006. “Histoires De Dispositifs.” Terrains & Travaux 2: 3–15. Bowen, John. 2018. “Performativité Et Materialité Dans La Certifcation Halal.” In Les Objets Composés, edited by Nicolas Dodier and Anthony Stavrianakis, 205–35. Paris: Éditions EHESS. Bussolini, J. 2010.“What Is a Dispositive?” Foucault Studies 10: 85–107. Butler, Judith. 2010.“Performative Agency.” Journal of Cultural Economy 3(2): 147–61. Callon, Michel. 1998. “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics.” In The Laws of the Markets, edited by Michel Callon, 1–58. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Callon, Michel. 2010.“Performativity, Misfres and Politicis.” Journal of Cultural Economy 3(2): 163–69. Callon, Michel, Cécile Méadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. 2002. “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy and Society 31(2): 194–217. Cochoy, Franck. 2008. “Calculation, Qualculation, Calqulation: Shopping Cart Arithmetic, Equipped Cognition and the Clustered Consumer.” Marketing Theory 8(1): 15–44. DiMaggio, Paul. 1997.“Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263–87. Dobbin, Frank. 2004. The New Economic Sociology:A Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dodier, Nicolas, and Janine Barbot. 2016.“La Force Des Dispositifs.” Annales.Histoire, Sciences Sociales 71(2): 421–48. doi:10.1353/ahs.2016.0064. Dumez, Hervé, and Alain Jeunemaître. 2010.“Michel Callon, Michel Foucault and the ‘dispositif.’” Le Libellio D’Aegis 6(4): 27–37. Espeland, Wendy Nelson, and Michael Sauder. 2016. Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Eymard-Duvernay, François. 1992. “Le Rôle Des Entreprises Dans La Qualifcation Des Ressources.” Cahiers D’Économie Politique/Papers in Political Economy 13–31. Faraj, Samer, Stella Pachidi, and Karla Sayegh. 2018.“Working and Organizing in the Age of the Learning Algorithm.” Information and Organization 28(1): 62–70. Fligstein, Neil. 2009. “Neil Fligstein Answers Questions on the Present Financial Crisis.” Economic Sociology:The European Electronic Newsletter 11(1): 41–44. Fligstein, Neil, and Luke Dauter. 2007.“The Sociology of Markets.” Annual Review of Sociology 33(1): 105–28. Fligstein, Neil, and Doug McAdam. 2012. A Theory of Fields. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fligstein, Neil, Jonah Stuart Brundage, and Michael Schultz. 2017. “Seeing Like the Fed: Culture, Cognition, and Framing in the Failure to Anticipate the Financial Crisis of 2008.” American Sociological Review 82(5): 879–909. Fourcade, Marion. 2011. “Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of ‘Nature.’” American Journal of Sociology 116(6): 1721–77. Fourcade, Marion, and Kieran Healy. 2016. “Seeing Like a Market.” Socio-Economic Review 15(1): 9–29. Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. 1990. Free to Choose:A Personal Statement. New York: Houghton Miffin Harcourt. Godard, Olivier. 2005.“Politique De L’Effet De Serre. Une Évaluation Du Plan Français De Quotas De CO2.” Revue Française D’Économie 19(4): 147–86. Granovetter, Mark. 1985.“Economic Action and Social Structure:The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91(3): 481–510.

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Hébert, Karen. 2014.“The Matter of Market Devices: Economic Transformation in a Southwest Alaskan Salmon Fishery.” Geoforum 53: 21–30. Karpik, Lucien. 2010. Valuing the Unique:The Economics of Singularities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kessous, Emmanuel. 2001. “Le Commerce Électronique Et La Continuité De La Chaîne Logistique.” Réseaux 2: 103–33. Kharchenkova, Svetlana, and Olav Velthuis. 2018. “How to Become a Judgment Device: Valuation Practices and the Role of Auctions in the Emerging Chinese Art Market.” Socio-Economic Review 16(3): 459–77. Lamont, Michèle. 2012. “Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation.” Annual Review of Sociology 38: 201–21. MacKenzie, Donald. 2006. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge: MIT Press. MacKenzie, Donald. 2011.“The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge.” American Journal of Sociology 116(6): 1778–841. MacKenzie, Donald. 2019. “Market Devices and Structural Dependency: The Origins and Development of ‘Dark Pools.’” Finance and Society 5(1): 1–19. MacKenzie, Donald, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, eds. 2007. Do Economists Make Markets? on the Performativity of Economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McFall, Liz. 2009.“Devices and Desires: How Useful Is the ‘New’ New Economic Sociology for Understanding Market Attachment?” Sociology Compass 3(2): 267–82. Mellet, Kevin, Thomas Beauvisage, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, and Marie Trespeuch. 2014. “A ‘Democratization’ of Markets? Online Consumer Reviews in the Restaurant Industry.” Valuation Studies 2(1): 5–41. Morgan, Glenn. 2012. “Constructing Financial Markets: Reforming Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets in the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis.” In The Consequences of the Global Financial Crisis: The Rhetoric of Reform and Regulation, edited by Wyn Grant and Graham K.Wilson, 67–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muniesa, Fabian. 2005.“Contenir Le marché: La transition De la criée À la cotation Électronique à la Bourse de Paris.” Sociologie du Travail 47(4): 485–501. Muniesa, Fabian, Yuval Millo, and Michel Callon. 2007. “An Introduction to Market Devices.” In Market Devices, edited by Michel Callon,Yuval Millo, and Fabian Muniesa, vol. 55, 1–12. Oxford: Blackwell and the Sociological Review. Orlikowski, Wanda J., and Susan V. Scott. 2013. “What Happens When Evaluation Goes Online? Exploring Apparatuses of Valuation in the Travel Sector.” Organization Science 25(3): 868–91. Poon, Martha. 2007.“Scorecards as Devices for Consumer Credit:The Case of Fair, Isaac & Company Incorporated.” The Sociological Review 55: 284–306. Poon, Martha. 2009. “From New Deal Institutions to Capital Markets: Commercial Consumer Risk Scores and the Making of Subprime Mortgage Finance.” Accounting, Organizations and Society 34(5): 654–74. Preda, Alex. 2006. “Socio-Technical Agency in Financial Markets: The Case of the Stock Ticker.” Social Studies of Science 36(5): 753–82. Raffnsøe, Sverre, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, and Morten S. Thaning. 2016. “Foucault’s Dispositive:The Perspicacity of Dispositive Analytics in Organizational Research.” Organization 23(2): 272–98. Scott, Richard W. 2001. Institutions and Organizations. New York: Sage Publications. Silva-Castañeda, Laura, and Nathalie Trussart. 2016. “Sustainability Standards and Certifcation: Looking Through the Lens of Foucault’s Dispositif.” Global Networks 16(4): 490–510.

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Smelser, Neil J., and Richard Swedberg. 2010. The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Swidler,Ann. 1986.“Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51(April): 273–86. van Doorn, Niels, and Olav Velthuis. 2018.“A Good Hustle:The Moral Economy of Market Competition in Adult Webcam Modeling.” Journal of Cultural Economy 11(3): 177–92.

6 COMPLEXITY Talia Dan-Cohen

This chapter offers some refections on the uses of “complexity” as an analytical concept.1 Unlike some of the contributions to this volume, my aim is not to specify and endorse a concept or analytical tool – complexity, in this case. Nor do I try to instruct the reader on how complexity could be made more useful. Complexity is too broadly diffused, and too naturalized, to be subjected to a project of remediation and rectifcation before a fair amount of ground has been prepared. My aim, therefore, is to do some of this initial work by framing complexity as a contemporary problem that crosses numerous knowledge spheres. From a normative standpoint, my approach should, however, encourage caution, in place of what has been a fairly celebratory stance toward complexity in some disciplinary corners. The celebratory stance has been, in large part, the result of decades of studies of the damage wrought by reduction and simplifcation. In the introduction to their edited volume, Complexities, Annemarie Mol and John Law draw attention to a variety of critiques of simplifcation within the social sciences and humanities. “The argument has been that the world is complex and that it shouldn’t be tamed too much,” they write (2002, 1). Examples include arguments from history and political theory criticizing rationalization and bureaucracy as menacing forms of power that reduce complexity by ordering, dividing, simplifying, and excluding (Mitchell 2002; Scott 1998). In science and technology studies, Mol and Law point to critiques of simplifcation that focus on the diffculties of shifting from controlled experimental settings to large-scale technologies or from clinical trials to sick patients.The general shape of these critiques, write the authors, is to argue that simplifcations that reduce a complex reality to whatever it is that fts into a simple scheme tend to ‘forget’ about the complex, which may mean that the latter is surprising and disturbing when it reappears later on and, in extreme cases, is simply repressed. (2002, 3)

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Thus, complexity has furnished a cadre of theorists and scholars with a way of resisting reductions and simplifcations seen to have inficted irreparable harm. In her 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges,” Donna Haraway argues, borrowing from Althusser, that “feminist objectivity ‘resists simplifcation in the last instance,’” situating feminism on the side of irreducibility and complexity (590). Yet, in these same decades, complexity has emerged as a major term for those with positivist inclinations seeking the unifcation of the sciences and battling for technoscientifc supremacy. In 1988, the renowned physicist Heinz Pagels wrote, “I am convinced that the nations and people who master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century” (Pagels, as cited in Lewin 1992, 10). Complexity has thus been simultaneously framed as the concept that will fnally deliver on modernity’s technoscientifc, unifcationist, and universalist ambitions, and as a way of defnitively rejecting them. Crucially, in both framings, complexity is usually taken to be a good thing, a kind of intellectual bonanza that responds to the unrealized promises of modernity.The result is a complexity concept underwritten by vastly different projects. Taking this split as a starting point, my aim in this chapter is to accentuate the specifcity and peculiarity of complexity evaluations and to explore some of their underlying logics. I do so not by examining recent social scientifc discussions of, and approaches to complexity, but rather, through a second-order case study of the way that complexity has been talked about and made use of in the feld of archaeology.2 I show how the adjustments that archaeologists have made to the notion of complexity have tended to enlarge the concept and further embed it, while also creating slippages and entanglements between different uses. In this sense, this chapter exemplifes a particular kind of inquiry, which involves tracing the specifc trajectory of concepts in a feld of knowledge, paying special attention to how practitioners adjust the scope and meaning of concepts to different sorts of exigencies. At the same time, I use the second-order case study as a way of thinking through some problems in pragmatic inquiry more generally. On this level, the case serves as a broader cautionary tale concerning the social life of concepts. It troubles the view that concepts can be honed for their usefulness, adjusted to needs and circumstances, and discarded when they cease to be useful. Instead, the case presented in this chapter suggests that concepts and terms can become embedded and entrenched, sometimes taking on something of a life of their own. And this can happen precisely through efforts to criticize, trim, and reorient them. Why archaeology? In the American academy, archaeology looks in both of the directions sketched previously – scientifc and humanistic – and therefore provides a particularly apt exemplar of the range of uses of complexity. On the one hand, many archaeologists today view archaeology as a scientifcally oriented venture. For understandings of complexity emanating from this more positivist heritage in archaeology, complexity has itself been an evolving concept subjected to critical examination and reexamination and conceived through different theoretical paradigms including evolutionary theory and neo-evolutionary theory, Marxism, systems theoretic approaches, thermodynamics, information theory, complex adaptive systems theory, and more, through its many years of use (see for example Spencer

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1857; Sahlins 1961; Flannery 1968; Van der Leeuw 1981; Kohler 2011; Wurzer, Kowarik, and Reschreiter 2015). On the other hand, archaeologists have also traced a trajectory of humanistic study infuenced by feminist and postcolonial critique, deeply suspicious of complexity’s reductive uses (see for example Miller, Rowlands, and Tilley 1989). Thus, archaeology has a by now long history of interventions against uses of complexity that are seen to be encumbered with Euro- or ethnocentric baggage (Rowlands 1989; McIntosh 1999; Chapman 2003; Alt 2010).Yet, crucially, these critical interventions have not meant the abandonment of the term. Rather, in a set of groundbreaking studies over many years, archaeologists have argued for the complexity of societies previously viewed as simple, in the process redefning the suite of traits linked to complexity in numerous ways (see for example McIntosh 1999). Moreover, some archaeologists today borrow understandings of complexity that emphasize situatedness and irreducibility and that are not grounded in the search for laws (see for example Alt 2010).Thus, the diffculties with complexity, rather than limiting the concept’s use, have in many instances expanded it, as both positive and critical interventions have brought more and more societies and forms of sociality once labeled “simple” into the complexity fold. Rather than provide a history of complexity in archaeology, or a comprehensive literature review, in this chapter, I analyze what can be thought of as a set of “epistemological motifs” that underlie the growth and expansion of complexity ascriptions in the subfeld. Such motifs include the relationship between scientifc and humanistic uses of complexity mentioned previously; the introduction of continuum theories of complexity that have far ranging implications for the emptying of the category of the “simple” and that sit uncomfortably with the continuing invocation of the distinction between “simple societies” and “complex societies”; and the ways in which critical interventions against uses of complexity seen to be colonial sometimes expand the reach of complexity.Together, these motifs help account for the impressive wingspan of complexity in archaeology, suggesting that it is in some ways artifactual and specifc to the changing concerns of the subfeld. The reader might object at this point that I have taken a lexeme for a concept – there is not one complexity, but many complexities (Mol and Law 2002). That there are many complexities seems indisputable. The complexity concept that grounds so much of social evolutionary theory, for example, is in some crucial respects different from the complexity of complexity theory.Yet, one central claim this chapter makes is that when we look closely, the relationship between these uses is promiscuous.That is, they are not kept neatly separated, each in their own little semantic container.Their users move between them in ways that both transform and further entrench complexity. In this sense, this chapter refects this volume’s broader interest in conceptual entanglements and residues, which sometimes persist despite repeated efforts to redefne a concept’s scope and thereby cut off its unwanted baggage.

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Moreover, acknowledging that there are many complexities, and that these complexities nevertheless interact, helps reign in the tendency to reify and naturalize complexity; to think of it as something that we can fnd unproblematically “out there,” and in large quantities. Such an ontological approach to complexity – which takes it to be an inherent quality of those things being studied – obscures relations between complexity and particular knowledge practices, which point us in the direction of epistemology (Mol and Law 2002; Miyazaki and Riles 2005; DanCohen 2017). Paying attention to these relations reveals the heterogeneous and sometimes conficting logics behind what gets to count as complex, when, and why, as well as behind the more general expansion of complexity’s reach in recent decades.

The evolution of complexity In his 1857 essay “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Herbert Spencer famously postulated a developmental sequence from the “simple” to the “complex” as the essence of progress, understood as a change from a state of homogeneity to a state of heterogeneity. For Spencer, that developmental sequence was most clearly observed in the process of biological differentiation, which was the grounding analogy for much social evolutionary thought, abstracted to many aspects of existence.As he famously postulated,“From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall fnd that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which progress essentially consists” (234). Spencer applied this principle of increasing heterogeneity to the observation of different facets of social life, from the “complex organization” of “governmental appliances” and “religious organization,” to the “highly complex aggregation of customs, manners, and temporary fashions” (237).All of these dimensions of sociality, in his view, traced a path from simplicity to complexity, which is to say, from homogeneity to heterogeneity. The rejection of evolutionism by Boas and his students in the early twentieth century is by now a well-documented chapter in the history of anthropology.The return of evolutionism mid-century came through the interventions of infuential theoretical synthesizers like V. Gordon Childe, Leslie White, and Julian Steward, who worked Marxist analysis and philosophy of history into positivist and empiricist frameworks (See Patterson 2003). For many archaeologists infuenced by Marxism, cultural evolution was a dialectical process of progressive stress and adaptation, that resulted in a more-or-less orderly succession of forms (Service 1971). Among the neo-evolutionists, Spencer’s concern with differentiation from homogeneity to heterogeneity was explicitly picked up by White and his students and recast as a problem in thermodynamics. As White declared,“Everything in the universe may be described in terms of energy” (1943, 335).Thus, in his infuential essay, “Evolution: Specifc and General,” Marshall Sahlins (1961), one of White’s acolytes, drew a direct line between his own approach to differentiating “higher” and “lower” forms and Spencer’s, yet he put the principles by which levels of

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progress were to be ascertained largely in White’s thermodynamic terms, understood as entailing a relationship between energy-harnessing and organizational structure. As Sahlins explained, “The more energy concentrated the structure, and the more complicated the structure the more energy that can be harnessed” (21). The main comparative dimension, for Sahlins, was the “level of integration,” where one system achieves higher levels of integration if it has more parts that are more specialized, and when the whole is more effectively integrated. Moreover, levels of integration were things that pertained to whole societies, the proper unit of comparison for the neo-evolutionary paradigm, to be placed in a typology according to a suite of symptomatic traits. Sahlins explains, Organizational symptoms of general progress include the proliferation of material elements, geometric increase in the division of labor, multiplication of social groups and subgroups, and the emergence of special means of integration: political, such as chieftainship and the state, and philosophical, such as universal and ethical religions and science. (36) The differences between the stages in the typology thus hung on relative levels of segmentation and integration, understood through a suite of symptoms assessed holistically. The levels Elman Service famously proposed – bands, tribes, chiefdoms, archaic states, and nation states – became taxonomic coordinates for an entire generation of anthropologists. By Norman Yoffee’s (2005) assessment, the resulting scholarship was “fundamentally concerned to identify a type of society in the archaeological record and then to place that type in the pre-ordained evolutionary ladder of development” (20), where “development” meant the ascent toward increased complexity, understood as a teleological process. Concern with “complexity” and “complex societies” continued to be pronounced in the new processual archaeology of the 1960s, addressed through the explicit importation of the language of systems theory into archaeology (Flannery 1968; Renfrew 1972). Since processualism grew near hegemonic in the American context (Patterson 2003), a focus on the opposition between “simple” and “complex” societies is pervasive in the archaeology of the time, as are attempts to defne and refne complexity, some of which remain important today. So, for example, archaeologists often distinguish between horizontal and vertical forms of differentiation, where horizontal differentiation means different units of equal rank, while vertical differentiation entails forms of hierarchical organization (see for example Blanton et al. 1981). By the early 1980s, evolutionary logics were losing their sheen among some, though not all, anthropologists. The neo-evolutionary synthesis of archaeological and ethnographic materials, and the philosophy of history on which it was based, came squarely under attack, as did teleological views of social evolution.The refexive turn in the discipline, coupled with the infuence of feminist and postcolonial critique, were also leaving a sizable mark. In the next sections, I turn to a number

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of discussions of “complexity” in the 1980s and beyond in archaeology, in order to bring into relief both changing concepts and changing times.

Expanding complexity In 1982, Jonathan Haas reviewed a book called Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Complexity. For my purposes here, his review is as interesting as the volume itself. Haas begins by noting that “archaeologists had grown disenchanted with the evolutionary models of the 1960s,” and had therefore turned to alternative frameworks (444). “One area that has shown increasing popularity is the study of social complexity,” wrote Haas. He continued: For the archaeologist unhappy with such concrete but controversial terms as state, ranking, and stratifcation, the word complexity offers a safe terminological haven. After all, it is possible to fnd true complexity in everything from the relationship between a mother and a child to the operation of the World Capitalist Economic System. (444) Haas’ brief gloss suggests some observations.The potential range of applicability of complexity was virtually unbounded. Perhaps for this very reason, the turn away from neo-evolutionism in archaeology did not do the concept of complexity in, despite its neo-evolutionary signifcance. In fact, Haas’ interpretation suggests that complexity was taken up as a potential conceptual salve, a way of pursuing the comparative study of societies without commitment to the broader neo-evolutionary framework. Of the volume’s many papers,T. Douglas Price’s contribution stands out as one of several foundational studies of “complex hunter-gatherers.” Man the Hunter was published in 1968, and contained a broad characterization of hunter-gatherers in terms of group size, mobility, hierarchy, diet, property, and so on. In subsequent years, archaeologists found signifcant evidence to undermine Lee and DeVore’s assumptions about hunter-gatherers. Price’s contribution, “Complexity in NonComplex Societies,” which presages the more systematic volume Prehistoric HunterGatherers (1985), is representative of attempts to revise both the timeline of the emergence of social complexity and the notion that complexity emerged only after agriculture and through rapid shifts in types and forms, rather than through a more gradual progression. Price’s contribution, to be clear, was not aimed at sundering complexity’s links to social evolutionism but rather at arguing for more complexity earlier on by identifying complexity among hunter-gatherers who were not expected to possess it. In this sense, his is an effort to stabilize a new constellation of traits around the complex hunter-gatherer as a historical passing point in the evolutionary chain, while also challenging the theory that posited agriculture as a necessary precondition for complexity.

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Price’s general argument is that sedentary habitations and “more complex cultural manifestations” developed in the Upper Pleistocence among some huntergatherers. His chapter concludes with the observation that ‘Complexity’ refers to that which is made up of many, elaborately interrelated parts and such a term clearly is applicable to the adaptations of advanced hunter-gatherers in the late Pleistocene and early Postglacial.These more complex adaptations are manifested in larger, sedentary communities, technological innovations, decorative art, intensive resource procurement, and organizational changes in activity and decision-making. (86) The passage nicely illustrates Haas’ point about the underdetermination of the move from abstract principles to archaeological fndings. It also exemplifes another problem. In its archaeological deployments, complexity was sometimes attributed to the parts, sometimes to the interaction between them, sometimes to the whole, and sometimes to all of the above. Moreover, in her own attempt to clarify what is meant by hunter-gatherer complexity, Francis Arnold notes that defnitions of complexity often fold together “causes, consequences, correlates, and conditions” (Arnold 1996), something that Price’s list could certainly be read as doing.Yet perhaps this is because, historically, attention to complexity was meant to aid in the diagnosis and classifcation of whole societies. If a doctor suspects Lyme disease in a patient, the tick is as good an indicator as the severe headache. Nevertheless, some of the subsequent attempts to revamp the concept would involve disaggregating complexity into separate categories and indices in order to isolate causation. Meanwhile, the study of hunter-gatherer complexity would quickly become a stabilized and productive research program in archaeology, bringing an array of societies into the complexity fold. The invention of the category “complex hunter-gatherers” wasn’t the only means by which the reach of complexity expanded. In the 1980s, a number of theoretical paradigms emerged that framed questions of social complexity as implicating a continuum, implicitly or explicitly rejecting dualistic understandings of complexity (you either have it or you don’t). I draw my example here from the study of collapse, which gained prominence in archaeology in the 1980s. Among the works on the topic published at that time was Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). In the book,Tainter defned collapse in terms of a sudden loss of complexity, where complexity stood for the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole. (23)

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Yet, crucially, for Tainter, collapse was a fate that could befall any society. In order for this to be the case,Tainter introduced an understanding of complexity that shifted focus from the opposition between “simple” and “complex” to a view of complexity as a continuous gradient. He explained, “Societies vary in complexity along a continuous scale, and any society that increases or decreases in complexity does so along the progression of this scale” (4). The dualistic understandings entailed the view that social complexity is something that emerges in the history of different societies, or in the archaeological record. In contrast,Tainter’s continuum view suggested that social complexity was not the sort of phenomenon whose origin could be pinpointed: There is no point on such a scale at which complexity can be said to emerge. Hunting bands and tribal cultivators experience changes in complexity, either increases or decreases, just as surely as do large nations. . . . Simple societies can lose an established level of complexity just as do great empires. (4) While Tainter rejects the view that social complexity is the kind of phenomenon that has conditions of emergence, he nevertheless employs the opposition between simple societies and complex ones – an opposition that recurs throughout the text. The use of these terms still suggests that somewhere along the scale there lies a threshold beyond which a society gains the label “complex.” Chapman (2003) has observed a similar confict between spectrums of complexity and absolute understandings operating in other archaeological writings (166). Tainter has recently noted that the question of thresholds, in his thinking about collapse remains a vexing one (see Tainter 2016). I make this rather pedantic point not to harp on the question of thresholds, but to highlight the superimposed and confounding coexistence of two senses of complexity – one relative, one absolute – sometimes in the same text. In this sense,“social complexity,” as a relative attribute, might carry different connotations, and have a different range of applicability, than does the old opposition between “simple” and “complex” societies.Yet the two views of complexity intermingle, as is clear in concern over the relative complexity of “simple societies.” Nevertheless, the continuum view opens a space for thinking about all societies as possessing complexity, partially evacuating the constitutive opposition between “simple” and “complex” societies.

Critiques of complexity If both Price’s contribution and Tainter’s exemplify logics by which the reach of complexity could be expanded while leaving the term largely intact, complexity proved a critical target for those whose work and names became associated with post-processualism. Here, I focus on the 1989 volume Domination and Resistance, edited by Daniel Miller, Michael Rowlands, and Christopher Tilley. A few

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preliminary observations seem warranted. As noted earlier, by the late 1980s, anthropology was coming to terms with the ramifcations of postcolonial and feminist critique, as well as Marxist structural and poststructural thought. As is well known, archaeologists were not exempt from this critical turn.The volume’s focus on domination and resistance can be understood within this critical context, as its major intellectual coordinates can be found in engagement with Althusser, Gramsci, Foucault, and Bourdieu. In this sense, the volume refects some concerns and debates that gripped the entire discipline. The book was the result of a discussion held at the World Archaeological Congress concerned with the comparative development of complex societies. As the Preface explains, participants concluded that the term complexity was overgeneralized and rife for deconstruction. The book’s introduction therefore commences with the following paragraph: The issue of ‘complexity’ has been in the forefront of archaeological investigation since the inception of the discipline. It is clearly premised in innumerable discussions concerned with the origin of the state, civilization, literacy or urbanization. Consideration of these problems of origin have almost always, at least implicitly, been bound up with conceptions of general evolution which remain one of the most powerful legacies of 19th century thought pervading contemporary archaeology. (1) The introduction continues with the observation that the dominant approach to complexity in archaeology had involved formal, mathematical, abstract models, to which one compares archaeological fndings. The mathematical models, contend the authors, are sophisticated enough, yet, the authors assert, echoing Haas, their translation to real world phenomena is not:“When attempts are made to effect such translation it is often through devices evoking concepts of ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ societies which repeat the worst excesses of the discourse of primitivism and general evolution” (1). How do the authors get from complexity, of which they are provisionally critical and suspicious, to “inequality,”“domination,” and “resistance”? The answer lies in the archaeological tendency to make social differentiation the primary form of heterogeneity that functions as a diagnostic for “complexity.”Tilley, Rowlands, and Miller write, “When considered in terms of social relations, heterogeneity appears almost inevitably to emerge as inequality” (2). In an Annual Review of Anthropology piece from the same year, Robert Paynter sketches out the correlation as follows: “Neoevolutionary theory holds that equality is found in simple societies, those that achieved social integration with little social differentiation. Inequality is found in societies that base integration on hierarchical and horizontal differentiation” (373). Yet the kinds of inequality that have concerned archaeologists, Miller et al. argue, have been too bluntly organized around conditions of rank or status, or the

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distribution of power in society, failing to encompass the “heterogeneity in social forms that might need to be addressed as being ‘complex’” (2). “For this reason,” explain the authors,“the more specifc concepts of domination and resistance were selected as a focus to elaborate a comparative study of all forms of societal complexity” (2).The volume is thus highly critical of the way complexity has been invoked in archaeology, yet, interestingly, it does not seek to discard the term, nor does it seek to narrow its use but, rather, to broaden it. It is also worth noting that the marriage of postcolonial, feminist, and poststructural approaches to archaeological ends could produce an endeavor at odds with the one such infuential critiques produced in sociocultural anthropology.The authors write: By addressing ourselves to the vocabularies that defne the nature of difference, the processes of subordination, the creation of social categories of the ineligible, the inferior and the outsider in different social and historical settings, we get closer to those forms of social closure, exclusion, and differentiation common to all social systems. (2) The postcolonial and poststructuralist imprints are easy enough to identify. They involve the study of power from below, and outside.Yet the ultimate payoff of this approach, as the previous passage frames it, is to be found at the level of nomothetic, universal generalization, a project quite pronouncedly at odds with the aims of some of the critical discourses that hover in the background of the volume. On this point, the volume equivocates in ways that seem consistent with the epistemic negotiation between positivism and postpositivism that characterizes much of the archaeology of the time. At a different point in the introduction, the authors argue for “radical contextualization” of complexity, among other concepts. They write, There is a need for a more radical recontextualization of social theory than has hitherto been the case. Part of this recontextualization will involve a requirement that the conceptual structures we employ be invested with new contents depending on the situation being investigated. Any attempt to search for and provide absolute and unchanging defnitions of these concepts that will be applicable to all societies is never likely to be very successful. All these concepts, like the notion of complexity, are radically contestable and will very probably take on rather different meanings according to the specifc analysis in hand. (3) These two different framings of complexity refect conficting understandings of the scope of the concept, as well as some tensions surrounding the aims that can legitimately be tied to it.

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The chapters of Domination and Resistance include one written by Michael Rowlands, titled “A Question of Complexity.” This short chapter is a striking indictment of the discourse of complexity in archaeology, which takes as its premise the extent to which in Western discourse, complexity defned in terms of differentiation has been accepted as a metaphor for social inequality. The result is that simple societies are believed to demonstrate their egalitarian nature simply by displaying evidence of a lack of differentiation, and complex societies the inverse. (29) For Rowlands, complexity is a “master discourse,” which resonates, in the history of the human sciences, through sociology, social and economic history, psychology, and linguistics. Rowlands does not mince his words: The meta-narrative of simple to complex is a dominant ideology that organizes the writing of contemporary world prehistory in favour of a modernizing ethos and the primacy of the West. Its historical context is that of the politics of colonialism and imperialism, and the construction of a civilized identity for all classes within the metropolitan centres. (36) The general discourse gets buried in specifcs, Rowlands argues: The ideological construction of the simple : homogeneous :: complex : heterogeneous narrative is disguised by the ability it has shown to sink into different academic discourses and become enveloped in distinct empirical clothings and reifed within particular methodological expertise. (36) Rowlands, however, does not frame the discarding of the simple-complex metanarrative as a straightforward emancipatory project, situating the critique of complexity within, rather than above, the fray of class interests: If the simple to complex meta-narrative served a dominant world order that was intent on modernizing itself, it did so within discrete historical conditions. If it no longer does so, then it is because these conditions have changed. . . . A simple to complex ideology may thus already be part of a passing global order when it was essential that cultural hegemony of the core would organize a colonial or neo-colonial periphery. It is by no means certain that this is the case any longer, and that a stress on radical heterogeneity and cultural difference would, in fact, be more compatible with the aims of dominant elites in an industrializing Third World seeking autonomy and

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identity in order to obscure and mystify the sources of their own power. . . . One of the unintended consequences of examining the notion of complexity in archaeology is, therefore, the irony of creating the very conditions for one mode of domination to replace another. (39) The passage captures something of the refexive concern taken up in much of the volume, which frames complexity as a concept that has itself served as a strategy of domination, the recognition of which does not open a clear path forward. Nevertheless, the critical work of dismantling the embedded picture “of change from simple to complex social forms as successive differentiation from incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity involving the emergence of specialization and hierarchy” (McIntosh 1999, 8) has itself born rich and empirically detailed fruit. Over the course of the late 1970s, 80s, and 90s, archaeologists decoupled an array of traits that the neo-evolutionary paradigm had taken to be functionally related. They did so by showing how certain elements of the complexity bundle could arise without other ones. In this regard, Barbara Bender’s contributions on the social structural roots of the development of agriculture were path breaking (Bender 1978). In 1983, the Marxist archaeologist Randall McGuire introduced a distinction between inequality and heterogeneity based on Near Eastern archaeological materials and argued that increasing inequality does not always accompany increasing heterogeneity. Expanding on McGuire’s arguments, archaeologists have shown that certain forms of hierarchy, such as gender or age, can be found even in those societies taken to have been egalitarian (see for example Flanagan 1989). Archaeologists decoupled inequality from agricultural intensifcation by providing evidence for institutionalized inequality among hunter-gatherers (see for example Feinman 1995). And archaeologists have also shown that wealth inequality can be separated from political inequality (Hastorf 1990).These interventions were, for the most part, not aimed at debunking complexity, but rather at pointing to the mistakes and biases that had led to its misuse. Archaeologists have also challenged the “bundle” view and its underlying holism by placing emphasis on the evolution of simplicity. Such emphasis subverts the normative assumptions through which simplicity gets undervalued and in which complexity is synonymous with forms of organization that are themselves held to stand for modernity. So, for example, in a paper titled “The Evolution of Simplicity” (2001), David Wengrow argues that archaeologists have paid almost exclusive attention to innovation and complexity in early state formation, and have neglected those aspects of life that were simplifed, such as daily consumption. Wengrow’s approach thus problematizes the emphasis on complexifcation, suggesting that complexifcation and simplifcation proceed side by side, making grand generalizations about whole societies harder to dissociate from questions about which features are being emphasized, and which de-emphasized.

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Democratizing complexity Another recasting of complexity has involved the often morally and politically charged attribution of complexity to societies and forms of sociality previously categorized as “simple,” a move that shares formal characteristics with some of the “complex hunter-gatherer” literature, with perhaps less emphasis on evolutionary questions. In her introduction to the edited volume Ancient Complexities, Susan Alt questions the way archaeologists evaluate complexity in North American pre-Colombian societies, and suggests some ways of refashioning archaeological approaches to complexity. At the outset, Alt’s orientation toward the more interpretive and humanistic variant of archaeology is made evident through an epigraph, borrowed from the introduction to the edited volume on complexity by Annemarie Mol and John Law, cited previously: “Simplifcations that reduce a complex reality to whatever it is that fts into a simple scheme tend to ‘forget’ about the complex, which may mean that the latter is surprising and disturbing when it appears later” (Mol and Law, as cited in Alt 2010, 1). Alt’s own text launches from the concern that the methods and theories that archaeologists have relied on increasingly hinder understanding. “Of particular concern” she writes, “is how we understand complexity, or how we fail to understand complexity, especially within a paradigm that labels all North American pre-Columbian people not complex at the outset” (1). Alt locates the search for complexity in “early evolutionary musings” (2), in which modern Western society was held up as the model and pinnacle of complexity that other societies had not yet achieved. While the evolutionary determinism has been discarded, she notes, the way complexity is operationalized still relies on some of this evolutionary scaffolding, which only recognizes and legitimizes certain forms of complexity, namely, the forms of complexity that inhere in modern Western societies. The project of the volume can thus be described as an attempt to question ethnocentric evaluations by submitting alternative accounts of what might constitute social complexity. As Alt explains, “We present chapters that we hope offer insights and approaches that move toward improving our understanding of North American societies by embracing complexity in its many forms and dimensions” (3). Alt thus frames the volume by sidestepping the categorical question concerning the level of complexity of different groups, instead asking,“How were people complex?” (1) where it is this latter question that also provides a way of interrogating what is meant by complexity in the frst place. She suggests that the putative markers of complexity, like palaces, royal burials, or settlement hierarchies, are all labeled complex a priori and in fact imply complex “like us.” Instead,Alt suggests that complexity should be looked for in the “particular histories and details of a society” (4). The reframed question, “How were people complex?,” borrowed from Ben Nelson (1995), provokes a different concern, however, namely one involving the expansion of complexity, now a characteristic that can be found along some dimension in all groups. In other words, the newly formulated question renders

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complexity a capacious and voluminous analytic and those groups that don’t possess it a near empty set. I write near because even this capacious complexity concept can still entail a pre-complex existence. In her book Cahokia’s Complexities (2018), Alt reiterates the call to ask the question “how were Mississipian relationships complex?” (6). She continues:“To ask how is to encourage researchers to seek the social, religious, and political processes whereby complexity emerged” (6). In this sense, the question “how” can still be implicitly linked to the question “when,” and to historical and evolutionary questions about the emergence of complexity, as such. In a short and pithy last chapter to Ancient Complexities, Norman Yoffee draws his inspiration from the song “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers, that “great American philosopher” (229).Yoffee writes that the participants in the volume followed Rogers’ famous poker qua life advice,“You’ve got to know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em,” “agreeing with Susan Alt that in order to see in what complex ways prehistoric North Americans acted, interacted, and understood their lives, archaeologists need to give up on ‘complexity’ (as a reifed, essentialized, and identifable social entity)” (229).Yet it seems that the framing of the volume does not fold complexity but rather expands it. Moreover, this expansion is underwritten by the conficting currents that cohabitate within the term.Yoffee’s statement is in some sense exemplary: in order to see complexity, we need to get rid of “complexity,” where the former use is critical, anti-reductive, historical, and situated, while the latter has more scientifc aspirations and is intended to do the work of grand historical comparison.Yet as Alt’s recourse to complexity’s emergence and the shifting framing of the payoffs of complexity in Domination and Resistance suggest, complexity moves between these two vastly different projects.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have highlighted some particular logics and motifs that have underwritten some of the expansive qualities of complexity as both analytic and trope in archaeology.What to make of this? Clifford Geertz (1973) began his famous essay “Thick Description” by evoking Susan Langer’s observation that certain concepts explode onto the scene with great force, seeming to offer a solution to all problems. Geertz paraphrases Langer: “Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built” (3).Time, notes Geertz, subsequently balances expectations; the concept is cut down to more manageable size, extended to those areas where it proves useful, and abandoned where it does not. Geertz was of course talking about “culture,” and his sketch of the concept’s lifecycle sets up a nice story for comparison. It suggests that concepts are eventually kept or discarded based on practical considerations. Reason prevails. But perhaps it is also worthwhile to note the limits of this view. My sense is that the concepts that follow the trajectory Geertz described are probably few and far between (arguably “culture” is not one of them). Others indeed explode onto the scene, then linger, recede a little, get a second wind, branch off, reunite, branch

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again, and so on, where the overall trend is toward expansion and entrenchment. What Geertz’ story perhaps misses, then, is that conceptual matrices are more than just tools whose adequacy or inadequacy eventually tames their trajectory; they are also institutionalized ways of organizing thought and practice that impel us, upon discovering their shortcomings, and through the sheer impossibility of imagining our way to a different confguration of problems and concepts, to tinker, rethink, refne, rather than discard.

Note 1 This chapter draws on material that was previously published in the following article: “Tracing Complexity: Lessons from Archaeology,” American Anthropologist 122(4) (2020). 2 As noted,complexity has played an important role in social scientifc and humanistic thought over the past few decades.The literature is vast. For some starting points, Niklas Luhmann’s work on social systems and Gilles Deleuze’s emphasis on multiplicities and emergence have proven enormously infuential for conceptualizations of complexity (see, e.g., DeLanda 2006; Gershon 2005; Luhmann 2013). For a theoretical overview of the incorporation of complexity theory into the social sciences, see Byrne and Callaghan 2014.

Bibliography Alt, Susan M. 2010.“Considering Complexity: Confounding Categories with Practices.” In Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Precolombian North America, edited by Susan M.Alt. Salt Lake City:The University of Utah Press. Alt, Susan M. 2018. Cahokia’s Complexities: Ceremonies and Politics of the First Mississippian. Tuscaloosa,AL:The University of Alabama Press. Arnold, Jeanne E. 1996.“The Archeology of Complex Hunter-Gatherers.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 3(1): 77–126. Bender, Barbara. 1978.“Gatherer-Hunter to Farmer:A Social Perspective.” World Archaeology 10: 204–22. Blanton, Richard E., Stephen A. Kowalewski, Gary M. Feinman, and Laura M. Finsten. 1981. Ancient Mesoamerica: A Comparison of Change in Three Regions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byrne, David, and Gill Callaghan. 2014. Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences:The State of the Art. New York: Routledge. Chapman, Robert. 2003. Archaeologies of Complexity. New York: Routledge. Chapman, Robert, and Alison Wylie. 2014. Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice. New York: Routledge. Chapman, Robert, and Alison Wylie. 2016. Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Dan-Cohen,Talia. 2017.“Epistemic Artifacts: On the Uses of Complexity in Anthropology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(2): 285–301. DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society:Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum. DeVore, Irven, and Richard B. Lee, eds. 2017 [1968]. Man the Hunter. New York: Routledge. Dissard, Laurent, and Melissa S. Rosenzweig. 2013. “Common Ground: Archaeological Practice and Local Communities in Southeastern Turkey.” Near Eastern Archaeology 76(3): 150–57. El-Haj, Nadia Abu. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Feinman, Gary. 1995. “The Emergence of Inequality: A Focus on Strategies and Processes.” In Foundations of Social Inequality, edited by T. Douglas Price and Gary Feinman, 255–79. New York: Plenum. Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Flanagan, James G. 1989. “Hierarchy in Simple ‘Egalitarian’ Societies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 245–66. Flannery, Kent V. 1968.“Archaeological Systems Theory and Early Mesoamerica.” In Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas, edited by B.J. Meggers, 67–87.Washington:Anthropological Society of Washington. Frachetti, Michael D. 2012. “Multiregional Emergence of Mobile Pastoralism and Nonuniform Institutional Complexity Across Eurasia.” Current Anthropology 53(1): 2–38. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gershon, Ilana. 2005. “Seeing Like a System: Luhmann for Anthropologists.” Anthropological Theory 5: 99–116. Haas, Jonathan. 1984. “Review: Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Complexity.” American Anthropologist 86: 444–46. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges:The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–99. Hastorf, Christine. 1990. “One Path to the Heights: Negotiating Political Inequality in the Sausa of Peru.” In The Evolution of Political Systems, edited by S. Upham, 146–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn,Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kohler, Timothy A. 2011. Complex Systems in Archaeology. SFI Working Paper. Koyama, Shuzo, and David Hurst Thomas, eds. 1981. Affuent Foragers. Osaka: Senri Ethnological Studies 9, National Museum of Ethnology. Lewin, Roger. 1992. Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 2013. Introduction to Systems Theory. Translated by P. Gilgen. Cambridge: Polity Press. McGuire, Randall H. 1983.“Breaking Down Cultural Complexity: Inequality and Heterogeneity.” Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 6: 91–142. McIntosh, Susan Keech. 1999.“Pathways to Complexity:An African Perspective.” In Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa, edited by Susan Keech McIntosh, 1–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meskell, Lynn. 1998. Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. London: Routledge. Miller, Daniel, Michael Rowlands, and Christopher Tilley. 1989.“Introduction.” In Domination and Resistance, edited by Daniel Miller, Michael Rowlands, and Christopher Tilley, 1–26. London: Unwin Hyman Ltd. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt,Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Miyazaki, Hirokazu, and Annelise Riles. 2005. “Failure as an Endpoint.” In Global Assemblages:Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, edited by Stephen J. Collier and Aihwa Ong, 320–30. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Mol, Annemarie, and John Law. 2002. “Complexities: An Introduction.” In Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, edited by John Law and Annemarie Mol. Durham: Duke University Press. Nelson, Ben A. 1995.“Complexity, Hierarchy, and Scale:A Controlled Comparison Between Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and la Quemada, Zacatecas.” American Antiquity 60(4): 597–618.

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Patterson,Thomas C. 2003. Marx’s Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists. New York: Berg. Paynter, Robert. 1989. “The Archaeology of Equality and Inequality.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 369–99. Price, T. Douglas. 1981. “Complexity in ‘Non-Complex’ Societies.” In Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Complexity, edited by S.E. van der Leeuw, 55–99. Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam. Price,T. Douglas, and James Allison Brown, eds. 1985. Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers:The Emergence of Cultural Complexity. Orlando:Academic Press. Redman, Charles L. 2005. “Resilience Theory in Archaeology.” American Anthropologist 107(1): 70–77. Renfrew, Colin. 1972. Approaches to Social Archaeology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rowlands, Michael. 1989.“A Question of Complexity.” In Domination and Resistance, edited by Daniel Miller, Michael Rowlands, and Christopher Tilley, 29–40. London: Unwin Hyman Ltd. Sahlins, Marshall. 1961.“Evolution: Specifc and General.” In Evolution and Culture, edited by Marshall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service.Ann Arbor:The University of Michigan Press. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Service, Elman R. 1971. Cultural Evolutionism:Theory in Practice. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc. Spencer, Herbert. 1881 [1857]. Progress: Its Law and Cause, with Other Disquisitions. New York: J. Fitzgerald. Tainter, Joseph. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tainter, Joseph. 2016. “Why Collapse Is so Diffcult to Understand.” In Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies, edited by Ronald K. Faulseit, 27–39. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. van der Leeuw, Sander E. 1981. “Introduction.” In Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Complexity, edited by Sander E. van der Leeuw, 9–13. Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam. Wengrow, David. 2001. “The Evolution of Simplicity: Aesthetic Labour and Social Change in the Neolithic Near East.” World Archaeology 33(2): 168–88. White, Leslie. 1943. “Energy and the Evolution of Culture.” American Anthropologist 45(3): 335–56. Wise, M. Norton.“Dynamics All the Way Up.” In Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science, edited by Norton M.Wise, 1–22. Durham: Duke University Press. Wurzer, Gabriel, Kerstin Kowarik, and Hans Reschreiter, eds. 2015. Agent-Based Moderling and Simulation in Archaeology. New York: Springer. Wylie, Alison. 2002. Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yoffee, Norman. 2005. Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yoffee, Norman. 2010. “The Unbearable Lightness of Complexity.” In Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Precolombian North America, edited by Susan M.Alt. Salt Lake City:The University of Utah Press.

PART 3

Framing stances

7 JUSTIFICATION John R. Bowen

When we speak of “justifying,” we usually refer to an account of an action that one person gives to another, with reference to a text or idea that is presumed to carry some authority for both of them – tradition, the social good, God. In these cases, justifying is usually public, open for inspection and criticism, and usually crafted with the ideas and interests of the likely audiences in mind.1 Here I consider justifying to be a practice that refers to or mobilizes one or more evaluative principles in specifed settings. These settings can be informal, as when I explain why I was late to lunch, or formal, as when a judge explains why she made the ruling she did.We may try to be consistent across different settings – if he can eat without a napkin, why can’t I? Parents usually have responses at the ready. Throughout our lives, we spend a good deal of time justifying actions, either those of others or our own.We should, then, attend to how we construct these tissues of justifcation in social life. In this chapter, I explore social practices of justifcation as part of how we construct and transform social institutions. I highlight two dimensions: the tensions and sequences of practical life and the methods actors use to draw on multiple evaluative principles. In the empirical section of the chapter, I apply these observations to studying how actors address distinct publics, as a methodological contribution to the broader study of pluralism in public life. Conceptually, I draw on the American pragmatist tradition as seen through the work of John Dewey, and also on the recent French approach of critical pragmatism. The chapter has three parts: a conceptual development of justifcation; an extended case study of this approach to examine how Islamic judges in Indonesia justify decisions; and an examination of two infuential theorizations of pluralism against the background of the frst two sections. Let’s begin with John Dewey. Dewey argued that logic grew out of the social necessity to give justifcations. In an essay from 1924 on “Logical Method and the Law,” Dewey wrote, shockingly, that the mathematician, like the farmer, works with

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available experience, evaluating different possible courses of action to determine which course, in the end, works best. Logical theory develops “without any conscious thought of logic,” but as a set of modifcations introduced along the way, as practitioners of logic (or farming) see that some methods produce “the better type of conclusion, better for subsequent usage” (1924, 19).The habits that are thereby developed guide our practices of farming, mathematizing, or, Dewey’s immediate concern, judicial decision-making. It is only when the actor is challenged with regard to an action, including a judicial one, that another kind of discursive practice arises: justifcation. Practical logic yields up deductive logic only when people are called to account, when they become compelled to defend what they do against some normative background. Dewey continues: It is highly probable that the need of justifying to others conclusions reached and decisions made has been the chief cause of the origin and development of logical operations in the precise sense: of abstraction, generalization, regard for consistency of implications. (1924, 24) But why does justifcation take this abstract form rather than a concrete and immediate one? Because humans have a need for stability of expectations so that they can plan on what consequences their actions will have in the future, and generalization best produces this kind of stability (ibid).Thus we create principles, laws, and rules of thumb. All this was, and perhaps remains, quite controversial.2 But it linked abstract claims to practical needs by way of justifcation. If “pragmatism” is most closely associated with practical life, the study of justifcation provides a window into a key moment in that life.

Practice and justifcation Logics of practice and logics of justifcation herein become distinct objects of study. This contrast continues to underlie sociological thinking thereafter, but with differing orientations toward moments of justifcation. For the sociologist Harold Garfnkel, most of the time in everyday life actors do not seek explicit agreement on what they mean, and, indeed, even to ask for such agreement is to offend a sense of a shared life. Rather, actors converse and share lives by means of “the anticipation that persons will understand, the occasionality of expressions, the specifc vagueness of expressions, the retrospective-prospective sense of a present occurrence, waiting for something later in order to see what was meant before” (1964, 229). This “ethnomethodology,” the sociology of the methods used by a community (the “ethno” here) to conduct their ordinary lives, is concerned less with subsequent moments of justifcation than with moments when these background understandings become explicit topics for dispute. These “special moments,” in the words of

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the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz, occur disruptively when these understandings are violated – perhaps by the sociologist, as in Garfnkel’s famous, and nowadays considered unethical, experiments with the everyday lives of his students (1964). Garfnkel did not assume that people always agree on the norms they should follow; rather, he studies those exceptional moments when actors make explicit normative foundations. Logics of justifcation return to the fore in the analytical framework developed by Pierre Bourdieu in his Kabyle studies, when he distinguished between logics of practice and “offcializing strategies.” On the one hand, practical actions are coordinated by schemas and dispositions that create both external reference points, such as material representations of symbolic systems (houses, calendars), and internal orientations and tendencies, the habitus.When members of a family (often the women) seek to arrange a marriage, for example, they are guided by a whole host of considerations that involve everyday close ties, working relationships, and desires to draw family branches back together (1977, 30–71). On the other hand, in public fora, men (mainly) will highlight and justify those marriages that can be represented as connecting bride and groom through male ties, a “patriparallel cousin marriage.” These “offcializing strategies” misrecognize the practical logics that generated the marriage and do so to reproduce an ideology of the social function of marriage. They offer another example of Dewey’s thesis that when we justify an action, we do so for practical reasons that are not the same as the reasons for the action itself. Bourdieu’s attention to the temporal character of practical logics converged on major preoccupations in anthropology at the time with micro-processes, much more than on sociological concerns with institutions and states. However, the attention to how things unfold in real time (the “structures structuring”) contributed to the development of a French critical pragmatism, most notably in the work of the sociologist Luc Boltanski, Bourdieu’s student, and the economist Laurent Thévenot. If Boltanski (2011) accentuated a focus on the perspectives of actors, he also cast in a completely different light an actor’s secondary efforts at justifcation, contrasting life in the “practical register” to the refexive “metapragmatic register,” when actors refect publicly on their actions. And whereas for Bourdieu actors’ offcializing strategies demonstrate the hold of the objective social structure on everyday consciousness and actions, and thus merit a critique that is also a criticism, for Boltanski the metapragmatic register remains embedded in everyday life but is drawn on and utilized by actors at moments of confict. At these moments actors challenge the legitimacy of the ongoing action and therefore enter into an activity of justifcation. (You can see the parallel with Dewey: people justify when they have to do so.) Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) see justifcation not as an instrument of oppression and misrecognition but as the fullest achievement of the citizen, when he or she attains higher levels of refexivity. From this perspective, justifcation both designates specifc moments in a sequence of acts and indexes a separate register of speaking. Justifcation thus doubly emerges as a key object of study and a useful point of comparison of Dewey’s brand of American pragmatism with French critical pragmatism (see Stark 2009, 1–15).

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We can continue these refections on ways that justifcations emerge in everyday life, and then look for how particular kinds of justifcations become acceptable in in particular settings.What are the mechanisms that “sort” justifcations into the more or less acceptable in a particular place and time? And how do they, where they do, permit actors to justify in different ways to distinct publics? These questions will direct the remainder of this essay. If the concept of justifcation has provided a specifc empirical focus for pragmatist social sciences, as well as a way for some recent sociologists to differentiate themselves from those of the previous generation, in anthropology it has emerged only in a more limited way.The anthropology of law, for example, has drawn more on concepts of narrative (Merry 1994; see also Wertsch and Batiashvili, this volume). Some recent anthropological work on ethics looks to observable acts of accounting for an act, and thus, from the point of view we are developing here, of justifcation. For these writers, in our everyday lives we give accounts of our actions to others when asked to do so, or perhaps to ourselves. These moments of justifcation follow on actions, perhaps a long train of actions, and are therefore ex post facto.They signal a moment of ethical refexivity.3 But of course actions that we or others judge on an ethical plane usually are not immediately refected on in an explicit self-accounting. Explicit justifcation is thus a particular social process, activated by certain circumstances, and thus to be studied as such: as a social practice and not as a window into a soul. And in some settings it requires and activates the organization of segmentable slices of life around distinct evaluative principles, an issue to be developed in what follows.

Institutional constraints and public justifcations Across these differing theoretical perspectives, studying acts of justifcation as social processes keeps in view the critical distinction between the wide range of motives and orientations that direct our actions, on the one hand, and the explicit, often more formal, acceptable reasons for those actions. We also must account for the constraints and conditions under which people are called to justify, as well as for the acceptable range of content of those justifcations. Let me organize thoughts around those issues in terms of two sorts of frameworks for justifcation.The frst has to do with the institutional settings that specify different degrees and directions of acceptability for various justifcations and that organize and facilitate that difference by preserving non-homogenization. The second has to do with the normative or moral frameworks that justifers draw on. Much of my discussion will focus on the diffculties of specifying the relationship between these two kinds of frameworks. I will draw mainly, but not exclusively, on the domain of legal practices. Institutional settings may have rather well-defned features, such as appropriate role-relations, ecologies, and frameworks (see Cefaï, this volume). They also may include specifcations of appropriate procedures and sequences. Consider a law court. A judge provides a highly formalized set of justifcations, for example (in

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Civil Law traditions) as a series of propositions each beginning with “Considering that . . .” or its equivalent.The content of these propositions generally are the least controversial grounds for reaching the judgment whose utterance will conclude the series.This is the logical form of a decision that Dewey saw as characteristic of law but not as a representation of the practical logic of legal decision-making. Of course the actual reasons that led the judge to make this judgment may be quite distinct from these propositions, and they may draw from many different domains of knowledge and emotions. For example, a judge deciding on the future residence of a child in a divorce case will likely draw on a diverse repertoire of evidences, including facts and fgures about the parents’ past behavior, income, relatives, and so forth, along with testimony of local offcials and the child’s own statement of preferences.The judge probably also will have a set of “hunches” (weighted in particular and perhaps changing ways) about the two parents’ relative suitability as parents. In particular settings, these hunches might concern qualities such as education, apparent kindness, a sense of honesty, religious practices, and a good many other things.These elements would be implicitly weighted to create a felt “hunch,” sometimes produced under the offcializing phrase of “in the best interests of the child.” (See Dodier and Barbot, this volume, on legal dispositifs.) Some of the factors shaping the judgment will not be publicly acceptable. Here I use “public” in the sense that John Rawls (2001) introduced to political theory, and that has been central to debates about the range of reasons that can be recognized as consistent with the overlapping consensus of Public Reason. For example, a parent’s degree of religious fervor might weigh for or against him or her in the mind of the judge. But the formal justifcation of the judgment probably will remain silent on those particular reasons as it will on the hunches.The judge will craft the justifcation in such a way that challenges to the judgment would be least likely to be sustained later on. In this example the diverse elements contributing to the judge’s justifcation (and also, plus others, to her decision) feed into a single formal category, that which in some legal traditions is termed “the best interests of the child.” But a judge may also be faced with a diverse array of sources of law: local norms, past court judgments, statutes, and regulations – and possibly even with conficting versions of each of these elements! This diversity of explicitly legitimate references is distinct from the frst diversity we discussed, that of the many kinds of evidence (hunches, religious beliefs, and so on) that may play a role in shaping the judge’s decision but do not have public legitimacy. Public justifcation thus draws on a set of socially-accepted normative resources, with respect to a particular set of hearers, including the speaker or writer’s own internal interlocutors, and then adds new content to those normative resources.To the extent that any spoken or written decision is already crafted with an audience in mind, and hence with the likely response of that hearer as part of the very reasoning that led to the act of speaking, public justifcation often is all that we are able to observe. And we can then refocus the question, as how judges decide on which of several bodies of supporting literature – previous decisions, logical reasoning,

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religious texts, opinions,“common sense,” social science – they will cite in order to have a certain effect with respect to a certain public. All this becomes more pressing when, as Dewey pointed out, justifcation becomes framed in terms of outcomes rather than as a deductive exercise. It is good to be consistent, he said, insofar as people want social life to be predictable. But when circumstances change we have to think in pragmatic rather than deductive fashion, “relative to consequences rather than to antecedents” (italics in orig.) (1924, 26).

Multiple justifcations in Islamic courts If for Dewey, pragmatism was about how judges do and indeed ought to reason when making their decisions in times of change, we can study the pragmatic element more broadly, for both general and specifc reasons. First, if judicial reasoning takes into account the responses of certain publics, then consequentialism is interior to even the most rule-oriented reasoning. Rule-following is itself a good thing, or will be viewed as such, or will lead my decisions to be accepted. Second, to the extent that judges engage in responding to or anticipating reactions from more than one type of public, they will be even more attuned to outcomes. Here is where I turn to the variable relationships of religious norms to legal ones, drawing on feldwork with Islamic court judges in Aceh province, Indonesia. In a vast array of the world’s politico-legal systems, judges, religious scholars, and other normative actors routinely broker across diverse realms of justifcation, including legal traditions, political principles, and religious norms – not to mention under-justifed political pressure.We see these brokering processes when, in a secular state, judges weigh claims for religious exemptions from legal obligations (such as fair employment laws), or when religious leaders weigh claims for political exemptions from religious obligations (such as not using interest-based banking). If these acts of brokering play an important role in the constitution of most modern societies, as I believe they do, then it surely is an important ethnographic project to try and see how it works in some detail, in the acts of judgment themselves. In Indonesia, as in most countries with Islamic legal arrangements, marriage, divorce, and inheritance among Muslims is regulated according to Islam, but an Islam as it exists in the form of statutes or law codes. In Indonesia one major reference is the Compilation of Islamic Law, promulgated in 1991 by then President Suharto. The Compilation consists of a set of law-like rules concerning Islamic family law. In effect, it rendered as positive law one among several possible interpretations of shari’a. The Compilation raised the key question of governance of religion: was an action effective in Islamic terms if it corresponded to current socially accepted Islamic norms, or only if it was carried out in accord with the Compilation? Put another way, were the new rules contained in the Compilation “positive” in the technical legal sense, in that they created laws that did not previously exist, or did they merely render explicit and in law-like form what already was the consensus among judges and other authorities? (This latter theory lay behind British

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“digests” of native laws in India.) The question of precisely how it is that a religious court judge’s proclamations are performative is in the balance.

Brokering between conficting ideas of the performativity of divorce Potential crises emerge when judges and ordinary actors have conficting ideas of the relevant evaluative principle; judges may try to avoid making explicit choices among principles. Take the example of divorce initiated by the husband, termed talaq. In Aceh, most villagers act on the assumption that divorce is performed when the husband pronounces the talaq formula, and that it is thus immediately effective. In this conception, divorce is a private matter. Some rural religious scholars support this view, and their opinions are consequential in such a volatile province as Aceh. But state law stipulates that divorce occurs if and only if the judge explicitly provides the occasion for the husband to pronounce the talaq in the judge’s presence. No judge, no divorce. This shift has broad consequences. Here, as in many other countries with Islambased legal systems, the state governs Islam by reproducing in modern legal form what appears to be the content of older traditions of Islamic jurisprudence. But much is altered in the process. Courts become agents of legal acts that once were prerogatives of ordinary people. But, desirous of keeping the peace, judges may try to keep two incompatible theories of divorce alive during a court proceeding. In January 2011, I sat in on the Banda Aceh court of frst instance. A husband and wife came to get offcial papers to make offcial a divorce they both thought had already occurred.The husband explained to the judge that he already had divorced his wife in the village, and that his family and hers were agreed that he divorce her.The judges were caught unawares at this and the presiding judge, Judge Idris, declared that ‘I would not say that it is not legitimate, but the talaq has no legal force unless the pronouncement is made here at court.’ Speaking in court, Judge Idris then asked them: ‘why not reconcile?’ He was legally required to send the couple for mediation to try and prevent a divorce, even though, as he acknowledged, the couple had divorced according to ‘the living law,’ an English expression the judges use regularly.The couple went to mediation the following day.At the mediation session, which we were allowed to attend, the mediator (a different judge) only talked about the way they should speak to each other. He found himself in a complicated situation, with two notions of the performativity of divorce at work. Not once did he propose that they continue the marriage – ostensibly the entire point of mediation! The mediator was torn about how to speak with such couples, because, as he proclaimed at the mediation:‘We should not try to bring them back together if he already has pronounced the talaq, because according to

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the living law they have divorced, it is completely over. But we can think of reconciliation in another way, that they divorce in a friendly way, especially if there are children.We have to hold mediation, that’s the law, but we do not have to insist that they remain together.’ Formally, Judge Idris had followed the written code by sending the man and woman for mediation, and only then allowing them to return to court and present their case for divorce, which they did, successfully, two weeks later. This is how the court records read. But to the village couple he had explained that he was taking extra steps to make their divorce, which he would not say was invalid, legally valid. Here, the judges sought to avoid confict by proceeding in a manner that was both formally consistent with national law, and could be justifed in those terms, and yet was justifed to the villagers in terms of their understanding of the talaq’s performativity.

Crafting justifcations to appease multiple publics At the appellate level the tension is raised a notch, because judges must broker among competing groups with contrasting ideologies about Islam. In Aceh, as the result of bargaining and pressure during its long war waged between the state and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), new rules permit the province to reconstruct its legal system on the basis of Islamic law (shari’a). But Aceh also long has been sharply divided along political and religious lines and is even more so over what “shari’a” ought to mean. GAM was mainly concerned with resisting Jakarta power, and for a long time the movement’s leaders opposed further extension of shari’a. Conservative scholars (‘ulama) based in Aceh’s rural Islamic boarding schools endorse shari’a in the form taken by the Shaf’i Islamic legal school, and they oppose those sections of the state-enforced Islamic code, the Compilation, that differ from that school. Judges must also issue decisions in line with national law, because their decisions are subject to cassation by the Supreme Court. Islamic judges thus must make judgments and justify them to anti-shari’a politicians, to conservative pro-shari’a teachers, and to their own judicial superiors in Jakarta. Although a number of issues are in dispute, one of the most contentious concerns the relative claims that divorcing husbands and wives can make on property. A series of Supreme Court cases make clear that husbands and wives had equal claims on wealth acquired during a marriage and that upon divorce the husband had the obligations to pay support to his wife while she was in the transitional (iddah) period and to give her a gift (mut’ah) (Bowen 2003, 214–24). It has taken some time for these obligations to be enforced by the courts in Aceh. Most often, men would be willing to pay the rather limited iddah but not the mut’ah, which many feared could be set high. Only in 2007 did the Supreme Court rule that men did have a legal obligation to pay the mut’ah, and that the courts could fx the

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amount. Since then the Aceh appellate court sends cases back to the frst-instance Islamic courts if it has not been paid (Nurdin 2019). What changed? In conversations with us, Judge Jufri explained that appellate judges had sought ways to increase what women got from their husbands, because the judges thought that they now deserved more: The Islamic Court carries out the development of law.Years ago, men were the ones who worked and women were at home, but now the women are out in the market and working, so we have to make sure they get their share of the wealth. So we say that men have to pay them more [than before] at divorce, because the wife sometimes does most of the work, contributing to the household. Increasingly, judges state a preference for reasoning in this way, that wealth should be divided according to the two parties’ relative contributions to the household. Jufri agrees. The judge should look and see if perhaps the wife did contribute more than the man to the household, maybe he just sat in the cafes and she did all the hard work, carrying things on her head and sitting in the market selling all day, and then she should get twice as much as the husband. But some local religious scholars strongly oppose the evaluative principle that work should determine reward, and specifcally the argument that women’s rights to property are related to their relative contribution to the household wealth. Indeed, in late 2008 an unoffcial group of scholars in North Aceh issued a fatwa proposing a different type of principle, that the marital property should be divided 2:1 in favor of the man, based on the principle that inheritance is divided in this ratio between sons and daughters. In these conversations, Jufri recounted that thereafter: Some judges from North Aceh came to the provincial court to say that they did now know what to do, they were thinking that they should follow the local fatwa since it was what local people wanted.We said no, that if people wanted to take their divorces to these scholars and have them divide property, fne, but if the couple or the wife comes to the court, then you have to divide according to the law.We don’t care if people come or not, but if they do, then the judge must follow the law. What Judge Jufri and many other judges took to be “the law” (hukum) was the principle that relative contributions should determine property divisions. However, they do not dare to justify their decisions in terms of relative contributions. Instead, they look in the texts of the Shaf’i legal school that is favored by the religious scholars to try to fnd arguments to buttress their decisions.Although in the Shaf’i

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texts there is no mention of marital property, as Jufri explained:“There is the concept of a portion of the wealth that goes to the wife who works for money, so we can cite that.” Although the rural scholars have not yet publicly complained about this line of reasoning on marital property, the court expects that if a statute (qanun) is passed in line with this use of Shaf’i jurisprudence, it will elicit widespread objections from the religious scholars. Given the recent instability in the province, judges and others try to avoid or defect such confrontations.

Pragmatic reference to a legal school The Aceh Islamic court often looks across the several Islamic legal schools to fnd practical ways to resolve social problems and to justify their solutions to themselves. For example, a good share of the polygamous marriages conducted each year in Aceh are not registered, either because the frst wife does not wish to give her consent to the second marriage, as is required by Indonesian law for the marriage to be offcially recognized, or because the husband simply does not want to be bothered with going to court. In these cases the second wife cannot regularize the marriage, but the court recognizes the social need to recognize the civil status of the children from that marriage. Here again is Judge Jufri, in informal conversations, proposing a solution should this problem arise: ‘Here we draw from the Hanaf legal school, because they alone do not recognize a difference among kinds of children; but we act on the basis of justice, because it is unfair to not give that child the same rights as other children.And if the wife comes to the court and asks for divorce, we could register the marriage in that instant in order to immediately divorce the couple and declare an equal division of the wealth – the two requests have to be together in one request.This has not yet happened, but judges have to make law, so we have to be ready to advise other judges about what to do.’ Note the complex set of reasons and public justifcations employed here. Jufri is motivated to make these judgments by his appreciation of the social consequences of doing otherwise. This is a form of pragmatic reasoning which Islamic scholars and judges often speak of as maslaha, social interest. He then draws on a Hanaf ruling to buttress his reasoning in court discussions – and with me, by the way. But in speaking to Acehnese rural scholars he would instead invoke a completely different justifcation, one based on the Shaf’i principle that “children have rights.” These judges are able to navigate through conficting normative positions and contradictory legal texts (rural schools, the Compilation of Islamic law) by strategically choosing public justifcations on grounds of their consequences, and thereby preserving their capacity to render decisions consistent with their own legal and social convictions (which they generally share with the Supreme Court). Two or more evaluative principles can coexist if the judges are able to successfully

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compartmentalize them, through a combination of silence and evasive action. On an everyday level, as in the divorce case mentioned earlier, this strategy also requires skillful recognition as socially valid (the “living law”) that which is no longer legally valid.

Moral frameworks In the previous examination of public justifcations in Acehnese courts, we have been examining ways in which actors in (and designers of) institutional set-ups consider the appropriate ways to manage conficts among evaluative principles, all the while working to attain the higher-level goal of justice. At times it may be more important to conceal justifcations as well as decisions, or to devise ways to compartmentalize justifcations. In complementary fashion, one may also work from justifcations upwards toward their roles in broader moral frameworks: worlds, spheres, or domains, defned by some basic assumptions or axioms. This would entail a sociology of moral frameworks. I mention here two major such endeavors, Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice (1983) and Boltanski and Thévenot’s On Justifcation (2006), discussed earlier. Although similar, the two projects have quite distinct genealogies. Walzer wrote his work in response to abstract forms of social contract theory, most proximately that of John Rawls, which proposed universal axioms of distributive justice.Walzer (and many others termed “communitarians”) argued that the philosopher must begin with the meanings attached to goods in specifc communities, and with respect to specifc domains of social life.What he called “complex equality” did argue for a thin set of general principles of justice, for example that all humans enjoy equal respect and are of equal worth. However, he argued that when resolving disputes one must look at the community’s values that defne a particular domain. Spheres paid less attention to how members of a community might argue over any one domain-specifc principle (as in the case from Aceh examined previously). For example, members of a specifc community might hold opposed ideas about the best principles to use in distributing of health care – when scarce, should healthcare goods be rationed to everyone, sold to the highest bidder, or apportioned to those with greater need, or whose health and lives brought the greatest beneft to the community?4 Furthermore, even without basic disagreements over principles, if the empirical facts of values in each domain and in each community are roughly suffcient to justify a normative position in favor of such values, then, short of violations of international human rights, it becomes diffcult to imagine how actors can justify a sustained critique of any policy consistent with the community-specifc version of the domain’s principles.5 In Spheres, Walzer aimed to create space for a multiplicity of evaluative principles in an Anglo-American political-theoretical world dominated by John Rawls’s moral monism. By contrast, Boltanski and Thévenot, in On Justifcation, set out to give validity to actors’ moral sensibilities in a sociological world dominated by

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Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that ordinary actors (including other sociologists) systematically misrecognized the ways in which their social situatedness reinforced structures of domination.The project strove to place the actor’s moral competency at the center of sociology. In some respects, it validated the ethnomethodological approach that Bourdieu might have celebrated, but which became increasingly at odds with his more systematizing works. Boltanski and Thévenot also underscore the importance of the moral repertoires on which actors draw and the necessary study of the (Durkheimian) classifcation schemas that structure those repertoires.6 But they also point out that actors might appeal to more than one principle in order to qualify an object and justify an action, and that, in contradistinction with Bourdieu, there is thus no longer a neutral or exterior position from which the sociologist can characterize an action.They continue: in such cases the researcher is obliged, in her description, to adhere as closely as possible to the procedure the actors themselves use in establishing proof in a given situation; this approach entails paying careful attention to the diversity of forms of justifcation. (2006, 12) If On Justifcation is rooted in the study of situations: “How do the things involved in an action serve as proofs?” and thus focused on how actors resolve conficts, the authors also intend to develop a general model based on the “higher common principle” necessary to sustain justifcations (2006, 66). The project suggests both an ethnomethodology – how members of a community arrange their own affairs – and an empirical and pluralist philosophy – what higher-level principles they draw on in order to do so. Underneath the broadly-shared canopy of a common humanity, they sketch out a number of more specifc political orders of worth, or cités (translated, unsatisfyingly, as “polities”). For example, the domestic order roots politics in the family and in personal ties, and, in a non-obvious claim, in hierarchies. In the civic order, legitimate politics requires individuals to abstract themselves from their particular interests and recognize the common good. (That the project is, in this and other respects, tightly linked to and dependent on French intuitions about what is right and proper is not itself theorized.)7 These orders of worth are not organizations or settings; indeed, the authors take the example of businesses, examined through manuals about good business practices, to show how the different orders coexist within a single social setting. The civic order will be drawn on to justify how decisions are made at a frms’ general meeting, for example, but the domestic order will be invoked for how personal business relations are to be cultivated.These social realizations of particular polities in a social setting are called “worlds.” And yet there are analytical diffculties either in grounding the analysis in how actors justify what they do in a single setting, letting the justifcatory chips fall where they may (as in Boltanski and Thevenot), or stipulating that the range of acceptable, and thus theoretically possible legitimate justifcations will be limited by

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the dominant order associated with the setting. For example, although the domestic polity has its legitimate role in a business (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 164–78), it becomes a “monstrous” incongruity when it is inserted too far into the business setting (2006, 225–28). But the perceived incongruity is of a practical sort, not a moral one: it feels awkward, or it fails to resolve a dispute.These incongruities seem to be a far distance from moral conficts, as are the crossing of spheres of justice for Walzer. The authors of On Justifcation contrast members of a frm (properly) exchanging family stories, with a father (monstrously) praising himself about his success at work to his children.This seems to be more a problem of overacting than a test (épreuve) of a moral stance or principle.

Where is the order? On Justifcation thereby points toward what may be a general problem facing sociologies of justifcation. If we begin, in pragmatist fashion, with the specifc practices of justifcation found in a particular institution, such as Achenese law courts or French families, we may fnd that actors’ accounts are highly varied and even mutually contradictory. But if we begin from the top, with an analysis of structures of domination and regulation as well as higher orders of worth, then we risk fnding ourselves incapable of analyzing the justifcatory practices “on the ground.”8 Take the domestic polity.What if our dad who praises himself at the dinner table thinks it highly appropriate to do so, because of his theory of how best to motivate his children? Does his view of where the orders of worth lie now de-monstrous-ize his behavior? If we begin with a defned order of worth, no. But if we begin with actors’ moral accounts, well, yes! And what if judges on a court in Aceh include actors who justify their actions, at least to themselves, by reference to the written law, others who do so on the basis of a sense of domestic politics, and still others who choose to infer decisions directly from Scripture? Do we now have three distinct cités, the civic, the domestic, and the inspirational, on one bench, or even dueling in the head of one judge? And what if this “cité indeterminacy” is, far from a rare occurrence, the order of things? Is the order of things then one of socially-ordered practices of justifcation that should not be compressed into overarching orders and worlds?

L’envoi I will end by arguing for one side of this aporia, for viewing justifcation as a social activity, a practical activity rather than indexing a set of distinct and fxed worlds or domains. If we begin with predefned moral spheres, and then examine the range of legitimate evaluations within each, we would be unable to countenance any of the sort of internally pluralistic lines of inquiry, including that of public justifcation, that characterize any particular institutional setting, from families to boardrooms to law courts. Our brief look at divorce in Aceh showed us just how wide the range is of potential justifcations that may be enunciated by legitimate actors – religious

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specialists, local judges, Supreme Court justices. And if we work from the ground up, we are in less danger of too-quickly reading some of this range out of our account.When we walk into a courtroom, we may think we know what will be the acceptable range of references – perhaps statutes, past decisions,“the best interests of the child” – but we may be surprised.Taking this position allows us to place moral inquiry at the heart of pragmatic inquiry, where the moral value of given practices and objects is to be determined as part of our inquiry.

Notes 1 The limiting case would be the “I” to a “me,” as in Hume, who thought that morality developed as an interiorizing of public commentary. 2 Dewey’s remarks continue to generate controversy, even by scholars generally sympathetic to his approach. For example, Posner (2008) follows Dewey in discussing pragmatist reasoning but makes it a sort of legislating that takes over when judges cannot decide in a straightforward way, rather than an integral part of any act of decision-making, including those that can later be presented as if they simply were based on precedent. 3 See in particular Keane (2016) on this view; others in the anthropology of ethics have different orientations. 4 See the effort by Jon Elster (1992) to study this question as an empirical study of moral principles in practice. 5 This is the weakness of Walzer’s position that has been most convincingly criticized, for example by Okin (1989). 6 A dimension of this work that is perhaps best brought out by way of the essays in Lamont and Thévenot (2000). 7 For example, (Boltanski and Thévenot’ 2006, 251–59) the “critiques addressed from the civic world to the domestic world” have to do with a confusion of private and public life. Public offcials are found to have private ties (business interests, shared Masonic lodges), creating scandals, or public schools, supposedly the vehicle charged with transmitting the “general will” to the child, must detach the child from family bonds (and, not mentioned here, from religious ones, as in the “headscarf affairs”). The public/private boundary is highly charged in Republican France, but it is not at all clear that this analysis can hold together when tried out elsewhere. My own position is that all political theory is local, so this criticism does not particularly weaken Boltanski and Thévenot’s claims. 8 It is in this sense that in his later work Boltanski, at least, may be seen as more semanticist and structuralist than pragmatist as when he writes in a more recent work (2011, 92) of semantics being “the domain par excellence of institutions” (2011, 92); see also Quéré and Terzi (2014).

References Boltanski, Luc. 2011. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation.Translated by Gregory Elliott. Cambridge: Polity Press. First published 2009. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. 2006. On Justifcation: Economies of Worth. Translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. First published 1991. Bowen, John R. 2003. Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia:An Anthropology of Public Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dewey, John. 1924.“Logical Method and the Law.” Cornell Law Review 10: 17. https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol10/iss1/2. Dewey, John. 1939.“Theory of Valuation.” In International Encyclopedia of Unifed Science, vol. II, no. 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Elster, Jon. 1992. Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. James, William. 1907. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lamont, Michèle, and Laurent Thévenot, eds. 2000. Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merry, Sally. 1994. “Narrating Domestic Violence: Producing the ‘Truth’ of Violence in 19th and 20th‐Century Hawaiian Courts.” Law & Social Inquiry 19(4): 967–94. Nurdin, Abidin. 2019. “Mut’ah and Iddah: Post-Divorce Payment Practices in Aceh.” In Women and Property Rights in Indonesian Islamic Contexts, edited by John R. Bowen and Arskal Salim, 107–26. Leiden: Brill. Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books. Posner, Richard A. 2008. How Judges Think. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Quéré, Louis, and Cédric Terzi. 2014. “Did You Say ‘Pragmatic’? Luc Boltanski’s Sociology from a Pragmatist Perspective.” In The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique, edited by Simon Susen and Bryan S.Turner, 91–128. London: Anthem Press. Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness:A Restatement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stark, David. 2009. The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice:A Defence of Pluralism and Equality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

8 NARRATIVE James V. Wertsch and Nutsa Batiashvili

Narrative is frequently included in the analytical repertoire of the social sciences. It appears in discussions by sociologists and anthropologists, as well as psychologists, who have placed it at the center of everything from cultural psychology to psychotherapy. Narrative has also played a key role in the humanities, especially literature and history, and in philosophy it has been discussed since Aristotle. Perhaps the most surprising new item on this list of disciplines is economics, where Robert Shiller (2017, 2019) has called for his discipline to reorient itself by recognizing the importance of “narrative economics.” The widespread use of narrative as an analytic category suggests that it can serve as a natural point of integration in the human sciences, but merely mentioning the term tells us little about its meaning or potential for fostering collaboration. In reality, scholars are often quite unaware of discussions of narrative outside their own discipline, and this does little to encourage collaboration. In what follows we outline an account of narrative that we believe can foster better transnational, transdisciplinary discussions.We develop our proposal in connection with national memory, a topic that touches on a broad range of issues and draws on several disciplines.While helping organize our analysis, we recognize that a focus on national memory also limits it, so at the end of the chapter we turn briefy to a discussion of the broader relevance of narrative in the human sciences. National memory has taken on special urgency with the rise of the “new nationalism.”1 Our claim is not that the study of narrative can answer all the questions being raised, but we see it as providing a means for creating a crossroads for interdisciplinary deliberation, a nexus point where diverse research efforts can contribute to a larger picture. In this sense we take it to provide an illustration of the “entanglements” and “circulations” mentioned by John R. Bowen, Nicolas Dodier, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Anita Hardon in the introduction to this volume.

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For narrative to serve in this capacity, we believe it needs to be elaborated in some key ways, and we do this in terms of three basic claims: (1) Narrative can be productively viewed as a form of semiotic mediation, where narrative tools shape speaking and thinking; (2) Narrative analysis must address not only specifc texts about concrete events, but schematic underlying codes and accompanying mental habits; and (3) Multiple narratives often compete for space in the discursive and mental processes involved in national memory.

Narratives as semiotic mediation Viewing narratives as a form of semiotic mediation encourages interdisciplinary discussion on several fronts. For example, it provides a natural bridge to philosophical traditions critical of “atomistic” (Taylor 1985) views of human agency.This follows from the fact that speaking often relies so heavily on narrative tools that they seem to co-author utterances, expanding the notion of who is doing the speaking or thinking beyond an “unencumbered” individual (Sandel 2009). Viewing narratives as semiotic mediation also fnds parallels with sociological analyses built around an “image of culture as a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and worldviews” (Swidler 1986, 273). In accounts such as Ann Swidler’s, culture is not something that directly infuses individuals with values but instead involves access to the tool kit we use as members of a particular collective.This provides a way to discuss the emergence of groups, including national “mnemonic communities” (Zerubavel 2003) while avoiding the pitfalls of essentialism. A mediational approach to narratives also provides a link to discussions of cultural psychology (Bruner 1990; Cole 1996) and of mind as mediated action (Wertsch 1998), traditions inspired by ideas from L.S.Vygotsky (1981, 1986), a fgure who was, in turn, indebted to Wilhelm von Humboldt (1999) and Ernst Cassirer (1953). A focus on the mediational function of narratives by no means precludes the need to understand their form, which is in fact crucial to determining their function as agents using them interact with events, objects, and other agents. Narrative form has been at the heart of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences concerned with what Paul Ricoeur (1991) calls “emplotment” or Peter Brooks (1984) calls “plotting.” Drawing on Ricoeur, the philosopher of history Louis Mink (1978) built much of his argument about the limits of historical knowledge by delving into how judgments about the past involve ways that narratives grasp together temporally sequenced events into a coherent plot with a sense of an ending. It is this property that makes narratives ideal instruments for arriving at judicial decisions of the sort discussed by Nicolas Dodier and Janine Barbot (this volume). The notion of narrative been usefully elaborated by the philosopher of history Hayden White (1973, 1981) in what he called “explanation by emplotment.” In building his argument, he contrasts narratives with annals and chronicles, where the latter do not rely on elaborated forms of emplotment. For White, the annals form “lacks completely the narrative component, since it consists only of lists of

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events ordered in chronological sequence” (1981, 5), and the chronicle “aspires to narrative, but typically fails to achieve it” because it “does not so much conclude as simply terminate” (1981, 5). Chronicles also have no real “inaugurations; they simply ‘begin’ when the chronicler starts recording events; they can go on indefnitely” (White 1973, 6). In White’s account, the “transformation of chronicle into story” (1973, 5) involves narrative form. It is “effected by the characterization of some events in the chronicle in terms of inaugural motifs, of others in terms of terminating motifs, and of yet others in terms of transitional motifs” (1973, 5). Such claims are derivative of Aristotle’s observation that the plot of a tragedy has a beginning, middle, and end. It is also the key to the “strange logic” of narrative based on what Brooks calls the “anticipation of retrospection” (1984, 23), which involves reading for the plot in a way that reveals the signifcance of events only after their initial telling.The capacity of emplotment to grasp together a temporally ordered set of events on the basis of anticipation of retrospection gives narrative unique affordances that distinguish it from other forms of semiotic mediation such as that involved with deductive logic or abstract categorization. Narratives are such a ubiquitous part of human understanding that it is easy to overlook the power they have in shaping speaking and thinking. Instead of directly determining these processes, they provide more schematic guidance, or grooves along which speaking and thinking occur. In Swidler’s formulation, rather than “enduring psychological proclivities implanted in individuals by their socialization,” culture serves to “facilitate certain patterns of action, making them readily available, while discouraging others” (1986, 283).This facilitation derives from their affordances and plays an important means for imagining communities and their past.

Narrative as surface form and underlying code This brings us to our second claim, namely that in addition to referring to specifc texts about particular events, “narrative” is a term that also applies to schematic, underlying codes and associated mental habits. Such claims about psychological processes can be viewed as having counterparts in the social life of institutions. Some of this volume’s authors (Bowen et al. 2014; Bowen 2007), for example, have proposed an analysis of how particular institutions selectively afford specifc “practical schemas.” Thus, hospitals and public schools facilitate to different degrees the policing of certain forms of dress, or certain ways of speaking.Their approach seeks to develop the social dimensions of what otherwise may be seen as psychological or cultural constructs. With regard to codes of semiotic mediation in mental functioning, Wertsch (2002) has argued that “specifc narratives” include information about concrete places, actors, and actions. Such narratives exist, for example, about the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 and about more circumscribed events like the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. In both cases, numerous texts have been produced about

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the particular actors, locations, and times of events, creating a wealth of competing specifc narratives about the past. A second level of analysis we see as crucial to understanding narratives in semiotic mediation, however, concerns “narrative templates” (Wertsch 2002), which are general, schematic forms of representation that lack the concrete specifcity found at the frst level. From this perspective narrative tools are underlying codes that help distinguish one mnemonic community from another. The notion of a template implies that a story line is used repeatedly by members of a community to emplot multiple specifc events, and this is sometimes refected in the very appellation of events. Consider, for example, the way that the bulk of what is called WWII in the West is emplotted in the Russian mnemonic community as the “Great Patriotic War.”The Great Patriotic War started with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and ended with the German surrender in May 1945, and its title echoes another specifc narrative, namely about the “Patriotic War,” or what in the West is known as the Napoleonic War of 1812. Russian terminology suggests that the two events are instantiations of the same underlying plot line. Parallels between the two events are further evidenced by the fact that “Hitler as a second Napoleon” is an expression that is generally familiar to member of the Russian community. The Russian underlying code at issue here can be outlined as the “Expulsionof-Foreign-Enemies” narrative template (Wertsch 2009), which includes the following elements: 1 2 3 4

An “initial situation” (Propp 1968, 26) in which Russia is peaceful and not interfering with others The initiation of trouble in which a foreign enemy viciously and wantonly attack Russia without provocation Russia almost loses everything in total defeat as it suffers from the enemy’s attempts to destroy it as a civilization Through heroism and exceptionalism, and against all odds, Russia, acting alone, triumphs and succeeds in expelling the foreign enemy (Wertsch 2009, 130–31)

This narrative template provides the basic story line for the Patriotic War as well as the Great Patriotic War, making the specifc narratives for these two events instantiations of a single schematic underlying code. Its application extends well beyond these two events, however. Russians often reel off a list of alien invaders that includes Tatars, Germans, Swedes, Poles,Turks, and Germans again.Their accounts of these episodes refect a pattern of telling the same story with different characters, of employing the same underlying code to speak about multiple specifc events. The use of this narrative template as semiotic mediation also emerges in situations that can be somewhat eye opening to Western observers. For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1978) relied on it to describe how communism as an alien idea and enemy almost destroyed Russian civilization before being expelled after some 70 years of threatening the basic worldview of the nation.

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A hallmark of narrative templates is the generic form of representation that they employ. In principle, it is possible for a narrative template to be so abstract that it would appear to be usable by any number of other national mnemonic communities. What characterizes national narrative templates, however, is that along with their abstracting tendency, they serve to distinguish one national community and its identity project from others. This is a refection of what Jan Assmann (2006) calls “ethnocentric narcissism” or what Roediger et al. (2019) term “national narcissism.” In the case of the Expulsion-of-Foreign-Enemies narrative template, for example, the mention of Russia throughout is a manifestation of this. Even though the plot line might be generic, it is taken by the Russian mnemonic community as a story about them, not some other group. Hence national narrative templates and the mental habits associated with them are not just about the past, they are about the past from the perspective of a group, which suggests their role in supporting national identity.As such, this narrative tool constrains individuals to see the world from a particular bounded perspective, one that tends to preclude the recognition of alternatives. By mastering a single groupbased perspective on past events – one that for most contemporary people is rooted in the structure of a nation-state – individuals tend to close themselves off from other viewpoints, often without ever consciously realizing it. In contrast to narrative templates, which are conceptual abstractions posited by analysts, specifc narratives take the form of overt utterances having an explicit surface form, and this has implications for how they ft into accounts of semiotic mediation. In the terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, specifc narratives have “a sensible form,” one of the requirements for something to qualify as a sign (Parmentier 1985, 26). But for Peirce, a sign always involves a triadic relationship among Sign (or sign vehicle), an Object, and Interpretant:“the object of the sign is that which the expressive form stands for, reproduces, or presents ‘in its true light’” (ibid.), and the interpretant is “a resulting mental or active effect produced by the object’s infuence on the sign vehicle in some interpreter” (Parmentier 1985, 26). In the study of national memory, the object in Peirce’s semiotics is an event or set of events from the past, and the interpretant and interpreter are where mental processes organized around narrative templates and habits come into play. Peirce did not write about habit in connection with his account of the sign, but its role in semiotic mediation was something that Vygotsky and others discussed under the heading of internalization (Wertsch and Stone 1985). The term “internalization” is actually a bit misleading in this regard because the process Vygotsky (1956) and his students such as Aleksei Leont’ev (1981) envisioned was one in which mental functioning is formed rather than some sort of site to which external semiotic practices are somehow be transferred. Further refections on the habits involved in semiotic mediation were provided by Peirce’s fellow Pragmatist William James (1890). He assumed that the motor aspect of habit is central, but under the heading of habit he also addressed social and ethical issues. Namely, he envisioned habit as “the enormous fy-wheel of society” (121), suggesting the powerful inertia that habit can impart to social processes and also how it can impede change. In this

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latter respect James noted that habit is society’s “most precious conservative agent” (121) and can help preserve a social order even when we see aspects of it that are undesirable and in need of change. James’s account by no means amounts to an attempt to reduce issues of social order to the mental habits of individuals, but it does provide a view of mental processes that can be linked to studies in sociology, history, and other disciplines.The discussion by Kuipers (this volume) suggests, for example, that natural ties are to be found in the account of “habitus” by Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and in the notion of “qualifcation” that Kuipers proposes. Habit, habitus, and qualifcation are all constructs that can be used to mediate between institutions and societal processes, on the one hand, and the mental processes of individual, on the other. Claims related to James’s notion of habit have emerged in contemporary cognitive science in discussions of the “new unconscious” (Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh 2005). Rather than being concerned with the repressed drives of a Freudian unconscious, cognitive science in this case focuses on the myriad decisions we make quickly and below the level of awareness in everyday life. In the words of Malcolm Gladwell (2007), these are decisions made in the “blink” of an eye. Or as psychologist Daniel Kahneman (2011) writes, they involve “fast thinking,” a form of mental processing that is unconscious, biased, and confdent in its conclusions. Many researchers following this line of reasoning now assert that the bulk of our thinking occurs at this level. From this perspective, many of our decisions are made so quickly that we do not even know we have made them. Upon meeting individuals for the frst time, for example, we typically form an immediate impression of them without any conscious refection. It is almost as if our body has made a judgment before our mind ever kicks in. Evolutionary psychologists see this as refecting the emergence of thinking over thousands of years that stemmed from the need to make rapid decisions about friend or foe. From this perspective, many life-saving decisions in the distant about whether to run or to fght a threatening animal or human being had to be made in the blink of an eye, and delay could be deadly. Most of the time intuitive leaps of fast thinking yield decisions that are good enough to get by in everyday life, but on some occasions, they lead to unconsidered decisions that are fundamentally wrong. Numerous studies in cognitive psychology have shown how poor we can be at tasks of logical deduction because we follow fast thinking rather than employ logical tools, even when they are readily at hand. The fast thinking that we routinely employ contrasts with what Kahneman calls “slow thinking,” which involves rational, effortful refection and relies on logic, objective evidence, and considering alternative explanations. In addition, slow thinking can “supervise” fast thinking to help it avoid drawing incorrect conclusions. But research suggests that slow thinking is “lazy” and that such supervision is the exception rather than the rule in everyday life. Returning to fast thinking, it tends to rely on selective information that confrms an existing view – something known as “confrmation bias” (Mynatt, Doherty, and Tweney 1977). Rather than making the effort to consider alternative

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evidence and hypotheses, our attention is unconsciously drawn to information consistent with our views, and it downplays, or simply overlooks contradictory evidence. Fast thinking also tends to be confdent about its conclusions – indeed, overly confdent, and this can be problematic, given how biased the evidence often is that supports them. We propose to extend this line of reasoning beyond the usual concerns in cognitive psychology about mental processes of people in general. Specifcally, we propose that it can be used to examine ways that fast thinking mediated by narrative templates characterizes accounts of the past held by members of one or another national community that separates them and sets them in opposition.This approach recognizes the contributions from contemporary cognitive science about fast thinking, confrmation bias, and overconfdent decisions, on the one hand, but it also seeks to incorporate the kinds of insights James provided on how habits as act enormous fywheels of force that differ from one society to another. Taking narrative mediation in general, and narrative templates in particular as a focus of study encourages the inclusion of several spheres of inquiry when approaching issues such as national memory. For example, it can draw on claims of the folklorist Vladimir Propp about the recurring “functions” that provide an abstract underlying code for understanding characters and actions in folktales (1968, 21). In psychology it can be linked with Bartlett’s (1932) concept of “schema,” which is a generalized pattern of unconscious thought and memory that underlies selfunderstanding for people in their day-to-day lives. And in contemporary research in psychology one encounters concepts of “cultural life scripts” that illustrate repertoires of meaningful life choices recognized by many individuals within a group, though the sets of scripts vary from one group to another (Berntsen and Rubin 2004). Related connections with other disciplines can be made through notions such as “doxa” (Bourdieu 1977) or the “anti-anti-essentialist” (Gilroy 1993) stance that recognizes continuity and commonality in groups despite signifcant individual variations among members.

Multiple narratives compete for space in national memory Multiple narratives are often involved in national memory, and in this connection we turn to an illustration involving politically loaded debates in the Republic of Georgia. It is an illustration that demonstrates competing historical trajectories, practices, and institutions that have come to be built into narratives that serve as semiotic mediation. Our focus will be on two main points that have to do with the two-level analysis of the narrative mediation: how specifc narratives shape political polemic and how the narrative template underlying these specifc narratives makes it possible for the mnemonic community to operate with shared interpretive mechanisms. Although the specifc narratives in this case support oppositions between groups as they voice quite polarized points of view and produce multivocal (at times cacophonous) national discourse, they actually share the same underlying template and are instantiations of a single, complex generic form.

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This was in evidence during the short, but brutal war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008, where most Geogians suddenly engaged in the public discourse built around the history of the Georgia’s First Democratic Republic (1918–1921). The political elite of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government began circulating the memory of the 1921 Red Army invasion, noting the role of Georgian Bolsheviks and their role as co-conspirators with the revolutionary leaders in Russia who helped plot the communist takeover of the independent Georgian state. In addition, the memories of the heavy fghting that followed Georgians’ desperate attempt to resist Soviet troops and defend the Georgian capital from the communist takeover in 1921 were dusted off and revamped in discussions of Georgians’ inherent inclination toward heroic struggle for national independence. Certainly, the history of 1921 involves a more complex set of events and exigencies than the narrative plot of the memories circulating in 2008 included. But in the 2008 attempt to make sense of the internal struggles and divisions following the Russian intrusion,“1921” served as an interpretive lens that simplifed reality by distilling complex events into the basic schematic plot easily graspable for almost any Georgian. A similar script underlies several other narratives of Georgian history, including a long list of invasions by Mongols, Seljuks, Ottomans, Persians, or Arabs and the country’s fragmentation into distinct kingdoms and lordships. In all these instances, the efforts of a powerful enemy to infringe upon Georgian lands are followed by counteracting tendencies either to unite and fght heroically against foreign invader or to become internally fragmented in ways that aided foreign forces.When invoked to make sense of the 2008 war, the specifc narrative of 1921 emplotted current reality in a way that assigned the title “traitor” (much like Georgian Bolsheviks in 1921) to anyone who placed any blame on the Georgian government, as opposed to Russia, or promoting the idea of Russian-Georgian friendship. Such emplotment, in turn, offered a clear-cut and indisputable defnition of Russia as an archetypical enemy rather than an ambivalent friend-foe who can and should be engaged in rational, pragmatic discussion. The kind of simplifcation encouraged by such narratives might seem to run counter to notions of complexity as discussed by Talia Dan-Cohen (this volume), but the actual difference is one of discursive realms. The refective processes of slow thinking involved in analyzing complexity in societies are distinct from, but continue to coexist with distinct discourse settings where the simplifcation encouraged by narrative habits is part of what Pascal Boyer (2018) calls “folk sociology.” The simplifcation in such cases is laden with the unfortunate temptations of the “analytical groupism” outlined by Rogers Brubaker, Mara Loveman, and Peter Stamatov, which is the “tendency to treat ethnic groups as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed” (2004, 31). Tendencies of analytical groupism often continue to exert their infuence in the form of automatic fast thinking unless supervised by rational refective analyses of the sort found in archeology and other spheres of scientifc inquiry. Even in such cases, however, they also continue to pop up in political discourse such as that found in Georgia in 2008.

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In ways similar to the Russian narrative template, we posit a dominant memory narrative in Georgia organized as a sequence of events emplotted to provide a schematic representation of the past. It includes: 1

2

3 4

5

An initial situation characterized by a path of normal development in which Georgians strive to achieve national unity that inherently suggests an essentialist vision of the nationhood This normal path is derailed by the intrusion of a culturally alien force aiming not only to annex Georgian territories, but to corrupt the national spirit and dissolve the cultural integrity of the Georgian people Notwithstanding the power and might of the intruders, Georgians resist to preserve cultural sancitities (i.e., religion, language) and retain national identity But the struggle for freedom and self-preservation is thwarted by internal weaknesses, such as the inability to stand united, internal treason, and collaboration with the enemy in the face of enemy’s skillful plotting Georgians free themselves from external domination only under a charismatic and powerful ruler who manages to surmount internal divisions (at times quite violently) and unite the country. In all other instances, though, Georgia does not prevail as a political entity, but is preserved as a culturally and spiritually unadulterated unity (based on Batiashvili 2018, 42–43)

This pattern of emplotment of recurrent historical episodes is suggestive of a particular vision of nationhood and, importantly, of cultural logics (Fischer 2001) that shape an understanding of the political order. Most notable and pervasive to the Georgian political imagination is the vision that allows for nationhood to prevail in a somewhat immutable form even when the nation ceases to function as a political sovereignty. Another important effect of this mythological abstraction is that it enables two contradictory versions of “true Georgianness” to coexist within a single identity construct. The third and fourth elements of the template outlined previously create an essentially inherent dialectic or tension in the nature of Georgianness and its relation to the other. Batiashvili (2018) has argued that this Georgian narrative template has been in the making since at least nineteenth century. While still a part of the Russian Empire, the founding fathers of the colonial nation began discovering and reinventing national history. This was in this colonial enterprise to mold a somewhat amorphous, culturally and socially disjointed Georgian people into the national public, and the political rhetoric in the newly founded press, public correspondence, literature, and poetry began to invoke the historical past as a unifying idiom through which Georgian peoplehood could be conceived. The imagination of the nineteenth century Georgian intellectual nobility often refected a Russian Orientalist paradigm (cf. Layton 1995; Manning 2011; Jersild 2003) in which that nation was two things simultaneously: Christian and, hence, more civilized than Russia’s other colonial subjects and yet always lagging behind the imperial center and Europe in development (both as a political entity and as

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a cultural matter) due to its internal fragmentation or disloyalty of some to the national ideals.The nation’s intellectual leaders saw history as a terrain where examples of both glory and shame, success and failure could be found and evoked these examples, at times in quite abstract and seemingly contradictory ways to push the idea of a national unity. Hence, from the outset of the Georgian national project the political polemic involved in conceiving and addressing “peoplehood” operated in ways that were coupled with the imaginaries about the national past.Through this process, Georgia was invented as a mnemonic community. Apart from this “history” as an abstract feld of symbolic meanings, an entire complex terrain was invented by the educated elite who comprised the colonial aristocracy and nobility.They used references to the past and adopted an abstract notion of national history primarily for the purpose of mediating their political rhetoric. Figments of mnemonic imagination and habit became essential parts of the colonial intelligentsia’s political idiom refected in public debates, the media, and in poetic and prosaic works. The narrative forms that were produced by these efforts implicitly refect a history of inherent cultural heterogeneity and political fragmentation in Georgia. Colonial attempts to imagine the national unity and come up with an abstracted version of historical congruity were naturally entrenched in the irreducible tensions that existed between imperial politics and colonial subjectivities. As such it seems almost logical that Georgian collective memory and identity narratives are built around a form of multivoicedness, or “bivocality” (Batiashvili 2018), involving two polarized but mutually constitutive inclinations of the Georgian people operating simultaneously: on the one hand, to unite and fght heroically, and on the other, to divide, betray one other and be subdued to a powerful enemy. The poetic idiom and prosaic imagery that sustained political rhetoric of the imperial periphery and its colonial elite were later replaced by the academic practices of the Soviet historiography, which produced more crystallized, stabilized narratives of the past. Academic disciplines such as history, archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and folklore were domesticated under Soviet nationality policy (Hirsch 2005).They provided an essential tool kit of national intelligentsias to construct discourses built around ethnocentric narcissism (Shnirelman 2001), even while history was framed in a way to comply with the logics of Marxist dialectics. Following the paradigm of historical dialectics and class struggle, Soviet textbooks narrated Georgia’s past as a series of working people’s struggles against foreign enemies counteracted by the internal frictions among Georgian gentry and nobility or power battles between feudals and kings of different kingdoms and principalities. Hence, the generic form that mediated Soviet period historical narration embodied the same principle “functions” or “motifs” (Propp 1968) of heroism and treason, glory and shame, pride and disgrace, that encoded mnemonic imagination of the nineteenth century intellectuals.At the same time the formalization of education and scientifc knowledge production under the Soviet state created conditions for these motifs to be solidifed into crystallized, structured scripts of ethnocentric narcissism while still allowing for the Marxist agenda.

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This mnemonic imaginary is an essential part of the semiotic mediation that shapes today’s political discussions and efforts to sort through political instabilities in Georgia. As a semiotic means that mediates thinking and speaking, the Georgian memory narrative can function to explain most instances of national polarization and can be deployed by different, opposing parties to interpret the actions of their opponents and justify their own, all the while using the inherent division of Georgians into traitors and national heroes. One example of this is the instance mentioned previously of a 1921 story becoming not only an interpretive tool for making sense of “what Russia did” or what kind of a neighbor Russia is, but an argumentative instrument for mediating one’s point of view, political position, and the moral stance on the right course of action. Thus the 1921 narrative surfaced as another instantiation of the “invasionstruggle-betrayal” narrative template, which was a generic form adopted, elaborated and propagated by Soviet historiography. Soviet history textbooks tried to portray the Red Army invasion of February 1921 as the triumph of the Georgian proletariat, a victory of the local revolutionary forces, rather than in accordance with the standard foreign invasion template. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and perhaps earlier as well, the 1921 story was re-remembered and reimagined in a way to ft the dominant cognitive schema. This is important for understanding the dynamic capacity of narratives to take on a form and meaning of their own without being manufactured by the state. In this account narrative tools function as co-authors along with the speakers using them when interacting with events, objects, and other agents. Furthermore, extensive use of narratives gives rise to mental habits that constrain members of a mnemonic community to see the world from a particular culturally bounded perspective.

Narrative in the analytic repertoire of other research initiatives The goal of our analysis of national memory has been to demonstrate how narrative serves as a useful part of the analytic repertoire for discussing a complex issue in the social sciences and humanities.We have done this in connection with national memory and in the process have touched on how narrative serves as a form of semiotic mediation, how it allows for analysis at both surface and underlying levels, and how it provides a way to examine competing perspectives in social and mental life.We view this as part of a broader effort in the human sciences, and now turn to a broader range of issues by briefy sampling narrative economics, narrative anthropology, and narrative psychology. Shiller (2017, 2019) prefaces his account of narrative economics with the observation that narrative is a construct used much less in his discipline than in nearly all other social sciences, and he goes on to formulate the feld as “the study of the viral spread of popular narratives that affect economic behavior, can improve our ability to anticipate and prepare for economic events” (2019, 3).The basic building block for this new feld is the “economic narrative,” which is “a contagious story that has the potential to change how people make economic decisions, such as the

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decision to hire a worker or to wait for better times” (2019, 3). In his view, these are “an important new element to the usual list of economic factors driving the economy: contagious popular stories the spread through word of mouth, the news media, and social media” (2019, 3). As an example, Shiller notes the Bitcoin story about how “investors have become rich simply by being aware of new things on the cutting edge” (2019, 10). Shiller’s analysis takes what might be called an “external approach” to narratives in that its data consist of the presumed presence of narratives based on key word counts. In this way it contrasts with the sort of narrative analysis we have outlined, which takes the internal structure of narratives and their contextualized use as basic data. Although he does not explicitly view narratives as forms of semiotic mediation, Shiller’s line of reasoning implicitly relies on similar notions. It does not, however, address the levels of narrative analysis or competing narratives we discussed in our account of national memory. In general, Shiller’s proposal amounts to opening up a new subfeld in behavioral economics and the discipline more generally, an approach that is complementary rather than contradictory to what we have proposed using semiotic and ethnographic methods. In contrast to economics, where Shiller’s proposal represents a radical new vision, narrative is a much more familiar construct in anthropology. For example, multiple studies have demonstrated how central narratives are to the socialization of self and identity. Ethnographers of speaking such as Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps (2001) have formulated a general approach for understanding how social discourse and self-understanding take the form of a “living narrative” in everyday storytelling practices, and Peggy Miller et al. (1990) have explored the role of narrative practices in the social construction of self. In another line of research, this time from medical anthropology, Arthur Kleinman (1988) has made major contributions to the understanding of forms of illness in his extensive studies of “illness narratives.” These traditions in anthropology come closer to our account of narrative as semiotic mediation than does Shiller’s analysis in economics, and there are also general parallels to be found when it comes to the issues concerning different levels of analysis and conficting narratives. In many important respects, however, the work of Ochs, Miller, Kleinman, and others in narrative anthropology extend beyond what we cover and complement what we have to say. Psychology also has an extensive track record of narrative analysis.The 1986 volume edited by Theodore Sarbin titled Narrative Psychology is often taken as a starting point in this regard. Sarbin outlined a broad set of claims about how narrative provides the key to understanding the “storied nature of human conduct” and argued for the use of qualitative methods understand a host of issues.The social psychologist Dan McAdams (1993) has placed narrative at the core of his study of identity formation, which focuses on “stories we live by.”And one of the giants of twentieth century psychology, Jerome Bruner (1990, 2002), placed narrative at the center of his account of cultural psychology. Considering Bruner brings us full circle in a sense in that he was deeply infuence by the ideas of Vygotsky about semiotic mediation.The ideas proposed by these scholars have continued to be developed by fgures such as Brian Schiff (2017), who has proposed an “alternative psychology – a

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narrative one to supplant the dominant variable-centered model” (7). Schiff ’s goal is to provide “a clear contrast between the current version of psychology and a new one, a narrative perspective, which places interpretation and meaning-making at the center of our theoretical and analytic deliberations on human beings” (6). The narrative approaches outlined by Sarbin, McAdams, and Bruner for psychology have many parallels with the account we have provided in dealing with national memory. Their claims do not privilege semiotic mediation to the extent we do, but they are consistent with this. They do not take up the issue of surface and underlying levels of narrative analysis, but, again, their ideas are consistent with these, something that perhaps is not surprising, given the important role that schema has played as an analytic construct in psychology.And they do not emphasize competing or contradictory narrative in discursive and mental life, but in many cases they come close to including this as an issue. In sum, the themes we have outlined in a narrative approach to national memory fnd parallels or complementarities in studies of narrative economics, narrative anthropology, and narrative psychology. Our point in noting this is not to suggest that some sort of unifying conceptual orthodoxy should be aspired to.The range of theoretical and methodological initiatives that exist make this unlikely even if we tried. Instead, we see this topic as an ideal site for leveraging the multiple entanglements and circulations envisioned by Bowen, Dodier, Duyvendak, and Hardon in the introduction to this volume.

Note 1 Foreign Affairs cover story, March 2019.

References Assmann, Jan. 2006. “Culture Memories and National Narratives: With Some Relation to the Case of Georgia.” In White Paper Report Prepared for the Georgian Ministry of Education: Based on the Working Meeting ‘Negotiating a New National Narrative in Georgia,’ edited by J. Wertsch and Z. Karumidze. Bellagio, Italy: Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Conference Center,August 1–5, 2005. Bartlett, Frederic C. 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Batiashvili, Nutsa. 2018. The Bivocal Nation: Memory and Identity on the Edge of Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Berntsen, Dorthe, and David C. Rubin. 2004. “Cultural Life Scripts Structure Recall from Autobiographical Memory.” Memory & Cognition 32: 427–44. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowen, John R. 2007. “Anti-Americanism as Schemas and Diacritics Across Indonesia and France.” In Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, edited by Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, 227–50. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bowen, John R., Christophe Bertossi, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Mona Lena Krook, eds. 2014. European States and Their Muslim Citizens:The Impact of Institutions on Perceptions and Boundaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Boyer, Pascal. 2018. Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create. New Haven:Yale University Press. Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brubaker, Rogers, Mara Loveman, and Peter Stamatov. 2004.“Ethnicity as Cognition.” Theory and Society 33: 31–64. Bruner, Jerome S. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bruner, Jereome S. 2002. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Cassirer, Ernst. 1953. Language and Myth. New York: Dover Publications. Cole, Michael. 1996. Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fischer, Edward F. 2001. Cultural Logics & Global Economies: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice.Austin: University of Texas Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2007. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Hassin, Ron R., James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh, eds. 2005. The New Unconscious. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, Francine. 2005. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Jersild, Austin. 2003. Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Toronto: Doubleday. Kleinman, Arthur. 1988. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Illness, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books. Layton, Susan. 1995. Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Leont’ev,Alexei N. 1981.“The Problem of Activity in Psychology.” In The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, edited by J.V.Wertsch, 37–71.Armonk, NY: Sharpe. Manning, Paul. 2011. Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth Century Georgian Imaginaries. Brighton:Academic Studies. McAdams, Dan P. 1993. The Stories We Live by: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. New York: Guilford. Miller, Peggy J., Randolph Potts, Heidi Fung, Lisa Hoogstra, and Judy Mintz. 1990. “Narrative Practices and the Social Construction of Self in Childhood.” American Ethnologist 17(2) (May): 292–311. Mink, Louis. 1978.“Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument.” In The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, edited by R.H. Canary and H. Kozicki, 182–203. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Mynatt, Clifford R., Michael E. Doherty, and Ryan D.Tweney. 1977.“Confrmation Bias in a Simulated Research Environment:An Experimental Study of Scientifc Inference.” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 29(1): 85–95. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Parmentier, Richard J. 1985.“Signs’ Place in Medias Res: Peirce’s Concept of Semiotic Mediation.” In Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives, edited by E. Mertz and R.J. Parmentier, 23–48. Orlando:Academic Press. Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale.Translated by Laurence Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Ricoeur, Paul. 1991.“Life in Quest of Narrative.” In On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, edited by D.Wood, 20–33. London: Routledge. Roediger III, H.L., Magdalena Abel, Sharda Umanath, Ruth A. Shaffer, Beth Fairfeld, Masanobu Takahashi, and James V. Wertsch. 2019. “Competing National Memories of World War II.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116(34) (August 20): 16678–86. Sandel, Michael. 2009. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sarbin,Theodore R. ed. 1986. Narrative Psychology:The Storied Nature of Human Conduct. New York: Praeger. Schiff, Brian. 2017. A New Narrative for Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Shiller, Robert J. 2017. Narrative Economics. NBER Working Paper No. 23075, January. www. nber.org/papers/w23075. Shiller, Robert J. 2019. Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shnirelman, Victor A. 2001. The Value of the Past: Myths, Identity and Politics in Transcaucasia. Senri Ethnological Studies No. 57, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. Solzhenitsyn,Alexander. 1978.“The Exhausted West.” Harvard Magazine 20–26, July–August. Swidler,Ann. 1986.“Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51: 273–86. Taylor, Charles. 1985.“Atomism.” In Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2, edited by C.Taylor, 187–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Von Humboldt,Wilhelm. 1999. ‘On Language’: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Infuence on the Mental Development of the Human Species. Edited by Michael Losonsky,Translated by Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, Lev S. 1956. Izbrannie PsikhologicheskieIissledovaniya [Selected Psychological Research]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Pedagogichiskikh Nauk. Vygotsky, Lev S. 1981.“The Instrumental Method in Psychology.” In The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, edited by J.V.Wertsch, 134–47.Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Vygotsky, Lev S. 1986. Thought and Language. Edited by A. Kozulin. Cambridge: MIT Press. Wertsch, James V. 1998. Mind as Action. New York: Oxford University Press. Wertsch, James V. 2002. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, James V. 2009. “Collective Memory.” In Memory in Mind and Culture, edited by P. Boyer and J.V.Wertsch, 117–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, James V., and C. Addison Stone. 1985. “The Concept of Internalization in Vygotsky’s Account of the Genesis of Higher Mental Functions.” In Culture, Communication, ad Cognition: VygotskianPperspectives, edited by J.V. Wertsch, 162–82. New York: Cambridge University Press. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1981.“The Value of Narrativity in the Presentation of Reality.” In On Narrative, edited by J.T.W. Mitchell, 1–23. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2003. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

9 QUALIFICATION Giselinde Kuipers and Thomas Franssen

Introduction: what is a good something? Every day, we fnd ourselves confronted with many things: people, objects, ideas, plans, places, experiences, situations.1 Regardless of whether these things or situations are new to us, or variations on something that we already know, we have to make up our minds about them: What is this? Is it any good? Should we engage with it, and if so, how? For instance, on meeting a new person at work, we quickly assess that this is a person, and a specifc sort of person: woman or man; young or old; student, secretary, cleaner, visitor, boss, tourist? We also pass judgment: nice, powerful, powerful, dangerous, boring, smart, fun, like me, not like me, etc. In making these judgments, we are trying to assess quality: Is this any good? It is a good or bad person, an interesting or boring woman, a dangerous or harmless boss? Something similar happens with anything we encounter, from consumer goods and academic papers to buildings, media content, foodstuff or weather. It may happen with lighting speed, or it may take time, deliberation or investigation.The process may be individual or done in consultation with others. But in all cases, we ask what something is – and, simultaneously, if it has quality, that is: if it is a good instance of this something. This chapter analyzes this process of assessing whether something is “a good something.”When people encounter something – whether it is new, or a version of something already known – it has to be qualifed: people assess simultaneously what something is, and whether this something has quality. In other words: people are simultaneously classifying: assessing the wider class or category of things and persons it belongs to. And they are evaluating: considering whether something is a good or bad specimen of this class of things.We refer to this dual process of classifcation and evaluation as qualifcation. In doing so, we adopt and expand this rich concept, that emerged in French scholarship but has not gained much traction in Anglophone

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social science yet (cf. Eymand-Duvernay 1986; Dodier 1993; Heinich 2017, 2020; see also Dodier and Barbot this volume). It has enjoyed modest success at the intersection of actor-network theory, valuation studies, and consumer research to refer to a combination of quality assessment (more commonly called valuation) and sense-making, particularly in market contexts (Callon and Muniesa 2005; Musselin and Paradeise 2005; Ariztia 2015; Fuentes and Fuentes 2017; Cochoy and Mallard 2018).We broaden this term to refer to a general process of simultaneous classifying and evaluating. This is a deeply social process: even when it happens individually and quickly, it is shaped by previous interactions and culturally specifc repertoires. Moreover, this process occurs across social contexts, and certainly not exclusively in economic settings. Our adoption of the term qualifcation allows us to do three things at once. First, it allows us to draw attention to a process that is omnipresent in social life, and to conceptualize and analyze this process in productive new ways. As we hope to show here, many social and cultural practices can be studied and explained in productive ways through understanding them as processes of qualifcation.To study these processes, all we need is a simple question that directs our attention to this process of qualifcation:“what is a good something?” Second, adopting the term qualifcation allows us to draw together insights from felds of enquiry that have pursued divergent paths in understanding this process. Though less simply put, the question “What is a good something?” is at the heart of two scholarly felds: (post-)Bourdieusian cultural sociology and science and technology studies, in particular actor-network theory.2 This question is also central in the emerging interdisciplinary feld of valuation studies (Helgesson and Muniesa 2013; Cochoy, Deville, and McFall 2017) that draws on actor-network theory, economic sociology, and to a lesser extent cultural sociology. We use the conceptual lens of qualifcation to bring together cultural sociology, in particular (post)Bourdieusian cultural sociology, and actor-network theory perspectives on quality, classifcation, (e)valuation, and qualifcation. As we will discuss later in this chapter, these felds have common origins. However, these shared roots have been largely forgotten. In a sense, these feld are like two persons standing back-to-back: looking the world from a similar vantage point, unable to see each other. Third, our notion of qualifcation highlights the deeply relational aspects of processes of assessment and judgment (cf. Heinich 2020). Classifying and evaluating are often experienced as individual and personal; and as such are easily relegated to the domain of psychology and cognitive science. Although (post-)actor-network theory and (post-)Bourdieusian cultural sociology have followed different trajectories, they share strong assumptions about social construction and relationality. Both approaches see classifcations as an important constitutive element of social order and social life. Classifcation is not individual information-processing – rather, it is the enactment of sociocultural logics. Moreover, both approaches are committed to the insight that “quality” is a social construct (Dahler-Larsen 2019). While social construction makes quality “real in its consequences,” as the Thomas theorem (Merton 1995) famously has it, both cultural sociologists and actor-network

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scholars stress that this reality is local, limited, and learned.That something is considered “good” – or “bad,” or any other evaluative assessment – is specifc to a time, place, institution, situation, and person (Mol, Moser, and Pols 2015). Finally, both approaches see qualifcations as embedded in social or socio-material relations. This includes, frst, face-to-face relations as they play out in actual interactions and material settings. For instance, qualifcations often include conversations with other people, quests for more information, and retrospective comparisons with other evaluations and conversations. But qualifcations also rely on a social, material, institutional, and technical (infra)structure of felds (Bourdieu 1977, 1984; Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Bartley this volume), cultural repertoires (Lamont 1992; Lamont and Thévenot 2000), markets (Callon, Millo, and Muniesa 2007), classifcation systems (DiMaggio 1987; Bowker and Star 2000), and judgment devices (Karpik 2010; Velthuis this volume). We start by looking at cultural sociology, the sociological subfeld dedicated to studying the role of cultural logics and institutions in shaping social life. Cultural sociologists typically see classifcation as preceding evaluation, and both classifcation and evaluation as enactments of durable structures or institutions (e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Vaisey and Lizardo 2016; Heinich 2020). Because of their focus on social divisions, they are especially interested in qualifcations of typically “cultural” dimensions such as aesthetics and morality (Heinich 1993). However, because of its rather imperialist understanding of culture, cultural sociology has gradually extended its approach to science, economics, politics, and therefore monetary (Mears 2011;Velthuis 2007) epistemological and political qualifcations (e.g., Lamont 2009, 2019). Subsequently we take focus on science and technology studies in which actor-network theory (ANT) – also known by the related term of material semiotics (Law 2008) – emerged. This approach sees qualifcations as (resulting from) interactions in networks (Heuts and Mol 2013). This perspective focused initially on a limited set of empirical domains, primarily in science, technology, and innovation, fanning out in the 1990s (Farias, Blok, and Roberts 2020, xxii).This seemingly more modest agenda has had radical implications, including a forceful critique of widely accepted sociological binaries like structure-agency, micro-macro, natureculture and concepts such as, action, taste, or, indeed, an anthropocentric focus on humans as central to qualifcations. Both approaches – along with American pragmatism (e.g. Dewey 1939) – have had a decisive infuence on the new pragmatic approaches showcased in this book. Both cultural sociologists and actor-network theory scholars have asked, and answered, many versions of the question “what is a good something?” But these similar questions were asked in such different scholarly networks and jargons that the felds have been either unaware of this similarity, or very critical of the others’ strategies.We believe there are good reasons to (re)unite these felds under the heading of qualifcation, or its pragmatic translation “what is a good something.” There is a theoretical reason: despite methodological, epistemological, and even ontological differences, these approaches share common concerns and methods. The concept of qualifcation brings out these commonalities and allows us to ask

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new questions and see new things.There is a practical reason: the notion of qualifcation highlights interesting points of divergence between these feld – different ways of asking and answering “what is a good something.” For us, such points of divergence are productive. They generate new questions, allows to see the same thing simultaneously in different ways. Divergences points to frictions that exist not only in theoretical approaches but also in social life – and that therefore are worthy of further investigation and theoretization. Finally, there is a personal reason. We ourselves have followed the path from (post-)Bourdieusian cultural sociology to actor-network theory, although one of us has ventured much farther along this path. In our experience, this is not a one-way street, but a useful thoroughfare – particularly for the development of pragmatic inquiry.

Cultural sociology: arts, manners, morals, jokes, and the re/production of social life The study of quality as a social construct with real consequences received an important impetus from the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1993; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). Bourdieu argued that seemingly disinterested taste-based evaluations, for instance in music and arts, are shaped by power struggles.These struggles take place within social felds, such as the arts and educational feld, and between felds in society as a whole.What is considered a good something ultimately is the result of who has gained the upper hand in “classifcation struggles.”These struggles result in classifcation systems that simultaneously classify things (“good taste” versus “bad taste,” “innovative paintings” versus “conservative paintings”) and people (“good students” versus “bad students,” “our sort of people” versus “the other sort of people”). As the famous quote in Distinction goes: “Taste classifes, and it classifes the classifer” (Bourdieu 1984, 6). People’s “judgments of taste” follow directly from these classifcation systems. Thus, the actions and interactions of individuals reproduce the social order.This is done through the habitus: internalized, embodied dispositions learned in socialization, leading people to behave, think, and feel according to their social stature. Bourdieu’s concept of quality is rooted in the Durkheim-inspired notion of culture as classifcation system, as it was developed in twentieth century French anthropology and linguistics. Bourdieu’s central innovation was to combine this with a Marxist understanding of social life as driven by struggle. Classifcations are then reenactments of a dynamic social order defned by power differences. In The Rules of Art (1996) for instance, Bourdieu showed how a generational struggle in the mid-nineteenth century Parisian artworld produced a classifcation system that infuences qualifcations of art to the present day. When we ask “what is a good (or bad) artwork,” we are relying on a nineteenth-century distinction between art and non-art.To assess its worth, we have to classify – is this art? – before we are able to appreciate – is it any good? Obviously: if it is non-art, it cannot be any good. Bourdieu’s set of innovations has kept social scientists busy for half a century, and it produced the blueprint for cultural sociology, a feld that has blossomed since the

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1980s. Even today, cultural sociologists typically adhere to important Bourdieusian assumptions. First: classifcations produce evaluations (“judgments of taste” as the subtitle of Distinction has it); these in turn reproduce the sociocultural order. In other words: classifcation comes before evaluation. Second, actions and interactions are, in the end, the result of structural dynamics. In other words: society comes before interaction and agency. On both sides of the Atlantic, cultural sociologists have distanced themselves from sociological micro-approaches. Third, the most sociologically relevant qualifcations are the ones associated with sociocultural distinctions, and therefore the ones that people inherently disagree about: aesthetics, morality, politics (cf. Heinich 1993; Kuipers, Franssen, and Holla 2019; Schwarz 2019). Cultural sociologists are less interested in qualifcations in professionalized domains that draw on claims of expertise, such as scientifc or religious qualifcations. When they do so, they are still most interested in felds with relatively little agreement, such as philosophy or the social sciences (e.g., Bourdieu 2004), or in questions of power and domination.This focus on power and domination became especially evident in a special issue of Minerva, the main journal in science studies, dedicated to Bourdieusian perspectives on science (Albert and Kleinman 2011). As has often been noted, Bourdieu’s contributions have been wide-ranging, but not entirely consistent (Lamont and Lareau 1988).Thus, while Distinction is theoretically about classifcation, empirically it is mostly about evaluation.The book is full of people judging things and people:Which piece of music do they like better? How do they rate this photograph? How do they decorate their homes? Why do they dislike this politician? This “glissando” (Lamont and Lareau 1988) has produced a bifurcation in cultural sociology: some have studied classifcation, others evaluation. Like the classical Gestalt image of the rabbit/duck, the Bourdieusian “glasses” seem to allow people to see one or the other, never both at the same time.

Classifcation Classifcation was taken up mainly by institutional and cognitive sociologists. Institutionalists study how classifcation systems are produced and embedded in social institutions and felds. Cognitivists study how classifcations inform processes of meaning-making, so in fact: how social classifcations are embedded in people’s minds (and possibly bodies). These processes can be seen as complementary (McDonnell 2014; Lizardo 2017): institutional dynamics shape classifcation systems, which are reproduced through individual acts of classifcation (Vaisey 2009; Vaisey and Lizardo 2016). Institutional sociologists analyzed how such classifcation systems, for instance in art, are shaped, how they change over time, or how they vary cross-nationally (DiMaggio 1987; van Rees 1989; Peterson 1997; Janssen,Verboord, and Kuipers 2011; Lena and Peterson 2008; Lena 2012, 2019). Such classifcation systems produce legitimacy: by “consecrating” “good somethings” they allow people to classify some things as better or more worthy of attention than others ( Johnson, Dowd, and Ridgeway 2006; Schmutz 2005). Interestingly, this work resonates strongly with work in science and technology studies,

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for instance the work by Bowker and Star’ (2000) who study actual, rather than theoretical, classifcation systems, such as the International Classifcation of Diseases, and their (political) consequences. However, despite obvious similarities these approaches have led largely separate lives. Cultural sociologists typically stress that what a feld accepts as legitimate “quality” may be quite random. For instance, Mears (2011) shows convincingly, though rather anticlimactically, that the success of a fashion model cannot be linked to any tangible “quality.” Some models make it, others don’t.The point of artistic felds is not what they classify, but that they classify: this drives home the point that many are called but few are chosen. The randomness of classifcation systems is most pronounced in taste-based felds, such as arts or fashion, with their inbuilt uncertainty and lack of unanimity about quality (Bielby and Bielby 1994; Franssen and Kuipers 2013). However, feld theorists in organizational studies have argued that all forms of organization, from big business to social movements, are based on classifcation systems that produce and enable legitimacy (Fligstein and McAdam 2012).This has been shown most convincingly in “reverse” cases, where a lack of ft with classifcation systems hampers legitimacy (van Venrooij and Schmutz 2018). For instance, Zuckerman (1999) has shown that stocks that span various felds typically do worse in stock markets than those that neatly ft categories. Similarly, Hsu (2006) showed that movies spanning various genres perform less well than movies that neatly ft genre categories. Thus, something that is easily classifed is more legitimate, and more easily seen as “a good something,” while unclassifable things are less legitimate, and therefore a “bad something.” This approach allows researchers to analyze variations and shifts in classifcation systems, and to explain how both individual behavior and societal patterns are shaped by these systems. However, the focus on legitimacy narrows down our understanding of evaluation:“a good something” is redefned as “a legitimate something.”This sidesteps central aspects of “quality,” and thus of qualifcation, including an affective component that makes people “feel” quality, and that makes them care about “good somethings,” and that drives their actions. Because of its focus on classifcation as information processing, cognitive sociologists have little to say about the emotional “charge” of classifcation or evaluation (cf.Vaisey 2009). Thus, it is unclear how and to what extent classifcation of something as “legitimate” means that people experience something as aesthetically pleasing, morally just, or the reverse: ugly, bad, evil.As many critics have noted, in (post-)Bourdieusian analysis, it is diffcult to distinguish people experiencing moral or aesthetic quality from people adopting a certain taste, fashion, or viewpoint because it is legitimate or a sign of high status.While strict Bourdieusians would argue that this difference is irrelevant, or a gradual distinction at best, in everyday experience there is a large gap between accepting something as legitimate and experiencing something as “of quality.”

Evaluation The issue of the affective-experiential side of judgment has been addressed by those who have followed the other Bourdieusian path, of evaluation. This

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classifcation/evaluation gap marks a central dividing line in social theory: micro versus macro, inside versus outside, individual versus society (Elias 1978; Collins 1987; Heinich 2020). Classifcation is usually linked to production of culture, whereas evaluation is linked with consumption. Moreover, analyses of classifcation highlight macro-processes and cognitive and institutional factors, whereas studies of evaluation usually start from micro-level, experiential factors, working “upwards” to meso- and macro-levels. The study of evaluation was developed most extensively by sociologists of taste and consumption, who have produced literally thousands of articles showing how people evaluate anything from music to food, tourist attractions to dress. These studies have addressed for instance, the aesthetic or moral criteria people employ when evaluating cultural products, consumption goods, political views, or other people. In doing this, they focus on judgments of taste but also on people’s experiences when evaluating. Generally, these tastes and experiences are investigated in relation to social background, in particular class and cultural capital but also age, gender, ethnicity, and nation (e.g., Peterson and Kern 1996;Van Eijck 2001; KatzGerro 2002; Johnston and Baumann 2007;Warde 2008; Jarness 2015).These studies usually take for granted the classifcations underlying taste judgments. For instance, studies of musical taste often rely on existing genre distinctions, such as jazz, classical, pop, and folk music.While they may formally acknowledge that these classifcations are socially constructed, in practice they tend to assume that these categories are self-evident, and that their respondents’ images of these classifcations are by and large the same for researchers and their research “subjects,” even when these subjects are from different places and stations in life. Michèle Lamont (1992, 2000, 2009) offers a productive further theorization of evaluation. A former student of Bourdieu, she shifts the theoretical focus from classifcation systems to “repertoires of evaluation.”These are more loosely organized cultural schemas or “toolkits” (Swidler 1986) that people draw on to evaluate the worth of people and of things, and to mark “symbolic boundaries.” In Money, Morals and Manners (1992) and The Dignity of Working Men (2000), Lamont used interviews to analyze how upper-middle class and working-class French and Americans evaluate the worth – or lack of it – of others. She shows that people use several repertoires, often not entirely consistent with each other, to produce evaluations in many favors: moral worth, cultural sophistication, economic success, political views. In these studies, she asks people “what is a good person” – and the answers she received allow her to unpack both the notion of person and the manifold meanings of “good” in relation to persons. In her later work, she explored an ever-wider range of repertoires: academic quality (2009), civil worth (2019), and also processes of evaluations leading to stigma and exclusion (Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014). Lamont’s work was developed in conversation with the rise of “pragmatist” sociology in French sociology, which also represents a critique of, and eventual radical rupture with, feld theory (cf. Heinich 2017; Cefaï, this volume and the introduction to this volume). An important landmark in this pragmatist sociology is the “sociology of conventions,” developed by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006),

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which moved away from questions of classifcation and evaluation entirely, focusing instead on justifcation. Starting from a historical review of public debate and contention, Boltanski and Thévenot distinguish six “orders of worth”: comprehensive cultural logics or “conventions” for claiming and understanding worth (in the context of late twentieth-century France, although it seems generalizable to most of contemporary Europe). Importantly, they focus on justifcation: worth is what is claimed and established as people try to fnd common ground with others. Thus, the question is not “what is a good something,” but instead something like “how can we make others agree with us that this is a good something?”Thus, in a move typical of pragmatic analysis, as described also by Bowen (this volume) both evaluation and classifcation are moved from societal structures and internalized repertoires to a situated, practical handling of justifcations and conventions.

Boundaries, processes, and interactions: a post-Bourdieusian turn toward “good somethings” The post-Bourdieusian sociology of evaluation, and its French “cousin” the sociology of conventions, marks a departure from the Bourdieusian paradigm in several ways (Beljean, Chong, and Lamont 2015). First, it offers a more processual approach that encompasses evaluation and classifcation (cf.Acord and DeNora 2008; Rubio and Silva 2013; Schwarz 2013; 2019). Evaluations are prioritized only insofar as they are the better starting point for research. In contrast with classifying, evaluating is “close to the surface” of everyday experience. However, evaluations both rely on, and reproduce, classifcations.This is the central tenet of the “symbolic boundary” approach (Lamont and Molnar 2002; Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014).When people evaluate others, they refer to categories delineated by symbolic boundaries, for instance based on race, gender, class, or education. Thus, classifcation is embedded in evaluation. Classifcation, however, is usually more diffcult to access, theoretically and empirically, and cannot always be easily deduced from evaluations. For instance, similar evaluations of physical “beauty” can be a result of different underlying classifcations (Kuipers 2015). Second, this post-Bourdieusian approach replaces the more static notion of “classifcation systems” and “felds,” which are easily reifed into structures existing outside of people that are “refected” in social behavior (cf. DeNora 2000, 2003), with repertoires of evaluation, boundaries, and orders of worth that are mobilized in interactions. Thus, post-Bourdieusian sociology of culture is more focused on interactions and less on institutions (cf. Kuipers, Franssen, and Holla 2019).Third, post-Bourdieusian cultural sociology follows institutional sociologists (DiMaggio 1987; Lizardo 2017) by moving away from domination and struggle as the main force in creating social order.Thus, although post-Bourdieusians are still alert to clashes and conficts (e.g., Kuipers, Franssen, and Holla 2019), this is supplemented by attention to other moods and motivations, such as the reduction of uncertainty (Franssen and Kuipers 2013), the desire to feel “at home” (Van Dijk 2019; Boccagni and Duyvendak, this volume), or the hope to develop one’s authentic self (Arfni 2019; Schwarz 2019). Thus, the question

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“what is a good something” is cast in a new light. People are not simply enacting a confict-ridden social order. Instead, actors-in-social-action mobilize fexible repertoires to evaluate and classify. In Good Humor, BadTaste (2006), the frst author developed this post-Bourdieusian approach, drawing primarily on Lamont’s work. She highlighted the simultaneity and interconnectedness of evaluation and classifcation in evaluations of humor.The book deals with social differences in sense of humor in the Netherlands and the US, using mostly interviews (conceptualized as joint moments of meaning-making rather than refections of fxed “taste”).The most successful interview question in this project was: can you describe someone you know with a good sense of humor? The answers to this question moved back and forth between classifcation – what is a sense of humor – and evaluation – what is a person with a good sense of humor. Often, the latter blended into the even larger question of: what is a good person? Dutch informants gave three distinct type of answers (Kuipers 2006, 68–97). A small minority said something like: someone who shares my sense of humor, who is “on my wavelength.” Close to half of informants described someone who is “the life of the party,” who “comes in and has a little joke for everyone,” who is “a lot of fun.”The remainder described persons who were witty, sharp, clever, deadpan,“not necessarily a nice person but very funny.” Thus, each group identifed a different quality as central to a good sense of humor: for the frst group humor was about social connection and friendship. For the second group humor was about sociability and emotional exuberance.The latter group was less concerned with the social aspect of humor, and instead located a good sense of humor in individual intellect.These qualifcations are both evaluation and classifcation: the wide, rather illdefned domain of humor or “things that make you laugh” is shrunken to a smaller domain of “good humor,” which is distinguished both from not-humor and other forms of humor. These qualifcations also mark social boundaries.Almost all the persons qualifed as having a good sense of humor were men, suggesting that the category of “good sense of humor” is qualifed as masculine (interestingly, this was less pronounced in the US). Moreover, different groups tended to produce different qualifcations. The humor-as-same-wavelength answer was only given by women. The sociable humorists were preferred by women and men of working class or lower middleclass backgrounds.The witty humorists were preferred by highly-educated, upper middle-class people. Only the latter group usually made a point of contrasting their “good humor” with other kinds of humors, such as joke-telling or raucous laughter – thus producing explicit hierarchical classifcations. Although the book did not speak of qualifcation, we have since come to see this as the preferable term for the process – infuenced by pragmatic sociology and some of the scholarship discussed in what follows. While trying to identify quality in humor, people attempt to come to terms with the general notion of “sense of humor.” Evaluation or classifcation are therefore not separate processes. However, like Lamont, we argue that evaluation is the preferred way to start one’s analysis from a cultural sociology perspective because it is an everyday, inescapable,

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at least partly conscious practice: people cannot help but judge, and this affective experience is easily, and often willingly, shared, and thus embedded in interactions. However, this modifed post-Bourdieusian approach still relies on a correspondence, if not a direct causal relation, between people’s location in social structure and their individual actions. For this reason, post-Bourdieusians (like the frst author) prioritize the qualifcation of matters of taste, morality, or other preferences that are differentiated. Another way of putting this is that cultural sociologists are most interested in felds where failure or disagreement is expected: nobody expects a joke, an artwork, or a song to be liked by everyone. Many people would not even want everyone to agree. However, to fully develop a perspective on qualifcation as the intertwining of classifying and evaluating, we also need to look at qualifcations that are not about social differentiation, variation, and taste. This takes us to (post-)actor-network theory, an approach that has developed more or less simultaneously with (post-) Bourdieusian cultural sociology, with similar interest but hardly any exchange.This approach offers, frst, a theoretical understanding of qualifcation as socio-materially situated, processual, and performative, and, second, a deconstruction of the sociomaterial assemblages through which qualifcation processes take place.The question of qualifcation has led actor-network theory-scholars to scrutinize, among others, the two biggest “truths” contemporary societies have to offer: scientifc truth and economic value.

Actor-network theory: music, science, energy, tomatoes, research problems, and the processes that make them value-able Actor-network theory questions and rejects the analytical binaries on which (cultural) sociology is built: the social and the material (Law and Mol 1995), nature and culture (Latour 1993), structure and agency (Callon 1984; Law and Mol 2008), micro and macro (Callon and Latour 1981).This rejection of binaries is at the heart of this approach. One of its origin stories, written by John Law, describes the roots of actor-network theory as an “empirical post-structuralism . . . scaled-down version of Michel Foucault’s discourses or epistemes” (Law 2008, 145; see also Farias, Blok, and Roberts 2020; Dodier and Barbot this volume). ANT and Bourdieusian sociology sprang from similar theoretical soil: a meeting of anthropological structuralism, Marxism, and mid-twentieth century continental philosophy. But actornetwork theory takes a radically different stance toward the social. Instead of using the social to explain, they want to explain how the social comes to be (Latour 2005; cf. Schinkel 2007) This route brought forth an alternative understanding of qualifcation. Many ANT-inspired studies have researched processes of classifcation, standardization, valuation, and evaluation. But when actor-network theory scholars ask “what is a good something?” they mean: how does a something come to be and how does it come to be (valued as) good – or bad, real, true, or tasty, ugly, useful?

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Where cultural sociology shows how social structures are (re)produced in social practices and preferences, actor-network theory takes the emergence and persistence of these practices and preferences as their object of study.The work of Antoine Hennion, ANT-scholar and cultural sociologist, is of particular interest here as it explicitly engages with Bourdieu’s sociology of taste (Hennion and Grenier 2000; Hennion 2004). Hennion’s analytical move is to shift from taste as a property of an individual, to tasting as an activity or, better, as an effect.The experience of being swept away by music, or drugs for that matter, is an effect that emerges through a particular socio-material assemblage (dispositif, cf Dodier and Barbot this volume). Thus, taste is an achievement at the end of a process in which all kinds of actants (objects, devices, techniques, abilities, and sensibilities) are activated to make “tasting” happen, in which we put our “taste to the test” (Hennion 2007, 98). Thus, the question becomes: what work is involved by all parties involved to achieve the experience of something – for instance music – as a good something? Far from being trivial, the process of creating the right mood for passion, through all the practices and rituals surrounding the act of listening, must be taken seriously. This introduces again the paradoxical theme of listening as an activity, a strange mixture of active and passive. Listening is a precise and highly organized activity, but its aim is not to control something or to achieve a specifc goal: on the contrary, its objective is to bring about a loss of control, an act of surrender. . . . My little actions, my idiosyncrasies, my rituals, even if they are very active, are ‘meta-actions,’ they affect my environment, my mood, but they cannot help me control what music can make me feel. . . .A critical [Bourdieusian] sociology focusing on the condemnation of cultural inequality has accustomed us to dismiss the appropriate description of taste as an active process, producing something specifc, by means of certain collective techniques, certain types of expertise that can be studied and listed. (Hennion 2001, 12–13) It is clear that Hennion takes a radically different stance than Bourdieu, but how did Hennion get to this point? We trace three elements of his argument that help us appreciate the differences between the two traditions, particularly in understanding qualifcation as a socio-material, relational achievement, and therefore a situated process intertwined with other practices.

Networkization of the social The frst important element is the focus on relationality, what we might call the networkization and heterogenization of the social. Actor-network theory-scholars argue that the social is not purely social but rather socio-material and networked. Drawing on an empirical example of a study by Michel Callon of the development of an electric car, John Law and Annemarie Mol argue that “bits and pieces achieve

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signifcance in relation to others: the electric vehicle is a set of relations between electrons, accumulators, fuel cells, laboratories, industrial companies, municipalities, and consumers; it is nothing more” (Law and Mol 1995, 276–77). What we perceive as stable social or material entities are relational effects of socio-material assemblages. They press on, arguing that entities are “constituted in the networks of which they form a part. Objects, entities, actors, processes – all are semiotic effects: network nodes are sets of relations; or they are sets of relations between relations” (Law and Mol 1995, 277). Reality is, in the end, socio-material relations all the way down.An actor is the effect of a network. A second element of (post-)actor-network theory is the fragility of (social) entities, which are always understood a heterogeneous and thus socio-material or socio-technical in nature. Actor-network theory-scholars show how socialtechnical inventions fail to achieve stability (Callon 1980; Latour 1996); how stability, if achieved, is always temporary (De Laet and Mol 2000); and how much maintenance socio-material assemblages require (Denis and Pontille 2014, 2015). The commitment to symmetry between humans and non-humans (Latour 1993, 2005) is related to this point: without non-humans, social entities, would not be able to keep their shape and qualities for very long. But it also goes the other way around: in the absence of dedication, love, and care, techno-tools fall apart (Law 2002; see Mol and Hardon this volume). The frst and second element gave rise to a third important insight: the understanding of action as networked. Famously, Latour (1988) showed how the ability of Louis Pasteur to change history is the effect not of Pasteur the person, but of Pasteur the actor-network, with its ability to reveal, voice, and tame the microbes in the laboratory.This network also included hygienists who elevated Pasteur and his ability to contain the microbes and thus sanitize France. It is a heterogeneous assemblage of Pasteur, laboratory equipment, microbes, hygienists, and so forth that together make Pasteur into an immensely powerful fgure. Just like the electric vehicle, Pasteur, too, was the effect of a network. And this, means that while “Pasteur” is credited with the work of Pasteurization – with protecting France against microbes – the credit should be spread out to a lot more people and other entities. This does not mean that Pasteur was only falsely “qualifed” as powerful but rather that his power originated in Pasteur the actor-network. Actor-network theory’s focus on science and technology was not a coincidence. By tackling knowledge and truth, scholars addressed the social order thought to be most immune to “the social.”They wanted to unpack how scientifc facts, classifcations (Bowker and Star 2000), standards (Timmermans and Epstein 2010), and personas are constructed as “good,” that is: true (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Latour 1988).This endeavor mirrors Bourdieu’s Distinction in terms of aiming for an object of study that was considered to not at all be the domain of the social.A crucial difference being that Latour, Callon, Law, and others were interested in understanding how the truth and stability of facts and technologies comes to be without the aim to “explain” these in terms of a correspondence to social structures. Typical for ANT is that the debate progressed not only by further deconstruction of actors and entities but also by a constant reframing and refning of questions.

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In dealing with topics like food, music, or places such as hospitals and farms, scholars like Mol, Law, and Hennion aim to further complicate Latour’s question about Pasteur: “who acts? Or, who is made to be the actor?” Rather than ask who, their “material semiotic” approach suggests we ask: what occurs, and how? Starting from this question, these scholars developed a new conceptual repertoire, notably around attachment (Hennion 2017; Cochoy, Deville, and McFall 2017) and care (Mol, Moser, and Pols 2015). While these notions move even further beyond sociological notions agency and action, they have a clear connection with our concept of qualifcation. Hennion, as we saw, used “attachment” for the process by which people listen and come to love music. Similarly, care as understood by Mol (2008; Mol and Hardon this volume) captures how people come to engage with people and things through “caring” for them. Both concepts allow for an up-close, in-depth understanding of how entities, situations, or locations, come to be qualifed and experienced as “good” (or not). However, in contrast with sociological evaluations and classifcations,“caring” and “attaching” are networked achievements of various entities. Moreover, this networked achievement is expressed in terms of actions and engagements rather than feelings or cognitions. This casts the question “what is a good something” in a whole new light. Both the “something” and the “good” (or not, or any other quality) come about in the process of getting attached or through the activity of caring. Therefore, the entities being qualifed are not the reason or cause for attaching or caring (e.g., DeNora 2000; Heuts and Mol 2013). Neither is there an external, social explanation for how people qualify. Instead, both the classifcation and the evaluation emerge from, and are actively achieved within, a situated “actor-network.”

Qualifcations need work and do work When actor-network theory branched out in the 1990s it most successfully turned to economics, markets, prices, and economic value (Callon 1998). In market settings qualifcations are often related to establishing monetary value through valuation and related processes such as calculation (Callon and Muniesa 2005), qualculation (Cochoy 2008; Callon and Law 2005), valorization (Vatin 2013), and, more recently, capitalization (Muniesa et al. 2017) and assetization (Birch 2017). All such valuations occur through specifc socio-technical assemblages, described as agencements or market devices (Callon, Millo, and Muniesa 2007;Velthuis this volume). Again, ANT purposefully engages not with “soft” valuations, like morality and aesthetics, but they tackle the “hardest” values: monetary worth, that is, presumably “real” economic value.They ask, for instance: how does marketization happen? (Çalişkan and Callon 2009, 2010) Qualifcations of various kind play a central role in the emergence and continuous functioning of a market. To be able to consume, consumers ask the question “what is a good something” all the time (Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002). In contemporary consumer society, the question “what is a good something?” often presents itself as “is this something worth my money?” Being able to ask (and answer) this question relies on a socio-technical assemblage

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in which persons are positioned, as consumers, to engage in specifc ways of qualifying. Bringing about such an assemblage that allows for qualifcation to take place effectively does not happen naturally or automatically. Qualifcation, in markets and elsewhere, needs work, care, and maintenance. This becomes evident in recent studies on emerging markets related to energy transitions, such as the marketization of wind power in China (Kirkegaard and Çalişkan 2019) low carbon heat networks in the UK (Webb and Hawkey 2017), or energy retroft products, such as solar panels, in the Netherlands (de Wilde 2019, 2020). De Wilde shows that practices in this new market for products such as solar panels rest on the work by what she calls mediators of trust, such as offcial standards or professional expertise. These mediators shape the possibilities and situations that make qualifcation possible and thus ensure that homeowners feel confdent in their attempts to qualify products, and thus to buy them (see also Karpik 2010). However, establishing a new socio-technical assemblage for qualifcation and exchange is diffcult. Homeowners drop out because they are not able to qualify products well, and thus a market does not emerge. By focusing on a case where qualifcation, and thus marketization, fails, this type of study pushes us to ask how the socio-technical assemblages that constitute markets are maintained. It leads to tell “care-infused market tales” (de Wilde 2020), that detail the work that goes into socio-technical assemblages rather than blow the trumpet (but not follow the trail) of innovation (see also Callon 1980; Latour 1996).The question of qualifcation thus leads us to investigate the question of maintenance: what socio-technical assemblages are involved in making qualifcation take place and when, how, and by whom are they kept in place (Denis and Pontille 2014, 2015). Looking back to our examples of listening to music, establishing a scientifc persona, and, just now, establishing markets we learn that qualifcation as a process is entangled in practices of listening, knowing, and commodifying. Moreover, qualifcation relies on socio-material or socio-technical assemblages and qualifcations that never come about in an abstract or general sense.The material semiotics question of “what occurs and how” allows us to understand the situational production of qualities, without implying these are “small” or “local” (e.g., Callon and Latour 1981; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002; Callon and Law 2005) Instead, qualifcations do performative work. When asking questions, or trying to make up one’s mind, or deliberating about “good somethings,” something is made. Thus, qualifcations do not refect socio-material assemblages, but they sustain them. Qualifcations thus both need work and do work: entities are shaped, made, and sustained through qualifcation.

Registers, regimes, assemblages: a post-ANT turn toward stabilization and qualifcation Actor-network theory gradually became interested in cases where more than one type of value – aesthetic, scientifc, economic – is dominant.Where Lamont highlighted

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different “repertoires of evaluation” and pragmatic sociologists focused on “orders of worth,” actor-network theory-scholars theorized registers of valuing or “valuation regimes.” Such registers or regimes operate simultaneously in relation to an entity or situation, thus shaping them in various ways.We focus on two recent examples of studies that focus on a research question very similar to “what is a good something?” Both studies help us articulate how different qualifcations interact, and how foregrounding particular “qualities” or “values” shapes reality, in this case tomatoes and biomedical research topics. Heuts and Mol (2013) ask the question “what is a good tomato?” to study the valuing of tomatoes in practice.They identifed different “registers of valuing,” such as money, naturalness, and how tomatoes can be handled (for instance, if they are easy to transport). Crucially, these registers are often present in the same situation (e.g., when buying a tomato in the supermarket, when growing tomatoes, etc.), and they interrelate not only with practices but with forms of care: growing, cooking, and eating. In these practices, the “good tomato” is actively valued, and thus: shaped. Retelling the tale of the Heinz tomato they write: If such a tomato does not yet exist, it has to be invented.This, then, is what the Heinz company has done – and it has patented the seeds. The relevant experts among our informants seem proud of it:‘A tomato has to have a high viscosity.Therefore, if you squeeze in a Heinz Tomato only a bit of juice will come out. It is very beefy, so that you can make a good, thick ketchup with it. It also has a high sugar content, for the sweeter the tomato itself, the less sweetener you have to add.And it has to be sturdy, too, for you have to be able to transport it.’As tomatoes are not given, good tomatoes are not given either. And in the process of developing them, divergent qualities and requirements may be tinkered with in combination. (Heuts and Mol 2013, 138) In developing a Heinz tomato, particular qualities and requirements are foregrounded (sweet, beefy), that align with “good” ketchup in terms of its liquidity and taste. At the same time other values, such as money, come into play: the Heinz tomato needs to be good in terms of the process of making and selling a ketchup that consumers will consider a “good” ketchup in terms of registers of valuing they employ when shopping such as money, taste, and naturalness. Registers of valuing thus come and go together within specifc, situated, practices. Consider a second example. In a study on biomedical scientists, Rushforth, Franssen, and de Rijcke (2019) asked: what is a good biomedical research topic? They explore how scientists navigate two regimes of worth that order scientifc practices in biomedical research and are often seen as conficting: the regimes of academic excellence and of patient relevance. Principal investigators of biomedical research groups want to secure funding for their research group. For them, whether a research topic is “good” not only depends on whether the researcher fnds it an interesting problem or something that might produce “useful” knowledge, but

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whether others will qualify the research problem as good, so they can accumulate scientifc and economic capital from the study. Regimes of worth in academia are engrained in a wider socio-technical assemblage through which capitalization can take place. The regime of “academic excellence” (Rushforth, Franssen, and de Rijcke 2019), for instance, shapes job application procedures, funding arrangements, and editorial decisions and drives on bibliometric indicators like journal impact factor and the h-index. For principal investigators scientifc inquiry that latches on to, and allows itself to be reconfgured through the lens of academic excellence is the safe choice because it guarantees that research generates economic capital (Fochler 2016).A “good” topic is one that leads to results that will be qualifed as academically innovative or excellent and can be published in the “good” journals, “good” being those with a high journal impact factor. But what if one wants to study rare diseases? For a study on a rare disease to support capital accumulation it has to be made interesting beyond the disease itself. A principal investigator explains: What I also believe is that some of these [rare] diseases are very interesting also intellectually so you can have a huge impact because there is a certain mechanism or something that can help in the end a lot of people and ‘a lot of science.’ (Rushforth, Franssen, and de Rijcke 2019, 218) The quote shows that turning questions about a rare disease into a “good research problem” means: expanding it to help more patients and more scientists, for more academic and clinical “impact.” In the lab two, related, rare diseases were studied, one where there was a steady supply of patient samples, which allows for larger, conceptually more interesting studies, while the second rare disease is so rare the patient samples are limited. Consequently, the principal investigator cannot draw on the academic excellence regime to develop rare disease two into an interesting, and fundable, topic. However, patient organizations are interested.Thus, getting applied clinical research problems funded through such organizations is possible.The principal investigator hopes that, in time, she has assembled a large enough network (of patient organizations, patients, expertise, staff, etc.) that she might be able to buildup large enough samples to answer conceptual and basic research questions based on rare disease two. The studies discussed in this section approach the question “what is a good something” by looking at situations, moments, and processes in which these good somethings are “done” in practice. To qualify a research topic as good is also to shape it to become good in a particular register of value; to qualify a tomato is also to shape the tomato.This means that different qualities or values, different notions of good, bring about different research topics and different tomatoes. Thus, they show the performative effects of qualifcation: qualifcations bring about the social, the bring about a situation, and thus they bring out reality itself.

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These studies also bring to the fore how socio-material assemblages constitute the space or the “infrastructure” in which qualifcation takes place (see also Dodier and Barbot, this volume and Velthuis, this volume). For instance, the studies of regimes of worth in academia push us to consider the extensive material infrastructure that is required to “rank” papers, scholars, and universities or that enables one to capitalize on being “academically excellent.” In this (post)actornetwork approach, the actor-networks, with their many human and non-actants, often emerge as “assemblage” or “infrastructure.”This conceptualization highlights the (relative) durability of such constellations, particularly of non-human actants, also across situations.Thus, the theoretical work this conceptualization does is not unlike the notion of “institution” in sociology: it captures that, and how, things may remain stability across situations, even when none of the same “actants” are around. However, for post-ANT, this stability is a puzzle rather than a given (Rubio 2014). The work on maintenance and care goes even further to highlight the inherent material fragility of such socio-material assemblages (Mol and Hardon, this volume). Thus, while some post-actor-networks theorists attempt to solve the puzzle of stabilization through such notions as “assemblage” or “infrastructure,” others dismiss the notion of stability entirely, arguing that socio-material assemblages of qualifcation always, constantly, require care and maintenance.

Qualifcation and the art of asking good questions, or: what, when, how, for, with, and against whom is a good something? What is a good something? In this chapter, we argue that this is a good research question, or rather: a template for research questions.Although academics typically formulate their questions in more complicated ways, many studies in recent decades have asked versions of “what is a good something”: questions about value, taste, worth, prices, qualities, valuing, valuations, evaluations, classifcations, calculations, and justifcations, on topics ranging from paintings, music, people, jokes, academics, and politics to engines, tomatoes, solar panels, penicillin, and research questions. Because these studies are rooted in different disciplines and research traditions, they are rarely aware of each other. Importing yet another academic term from France, we argue that all these studies focus on a similar process: qualifcation. Qualifcation, for us, is the social process that happens when people, jointly or individually, quickly or over a protracted period of deliberation and consideration, try to asses “what is a good something.” This is a dual process: qualifcation is an entangled, indivisible combination of classifying – what sort of entity is this? – and evaluating – is it a successful example of this category or not? Does it have quality? Is it value-able? As we have shown here, such qualifcations are not without consequences. For cultural sociologists, they are pivotal to the making and remaking of the social order, and all the relations, deliberations, hierarchies, struggles, exclusions, inequalities, power balances, and boundaries that make up social life. For

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(post)actor-network theorists, qualifcation is less about producing relations than about shaping realities. Qualifcation is an achievement of situated networks that shape and reshape entities: human, non-human, situations, locations. Consequently, qualifcations are performative: they make reality.While qualifying “somethings” as having some sort of quality, people and other actants jointly bring about the social and material world – from tomatoes to academic publications. Our focus on qualifcation allows us to do three things at once. First, it directs our attention to an important social process that can be observed across all domains of social life. All entities we encounter – things, people, situations, ideas, relations – need to be qualifed and requalifed: we attempt to establish what it is, if it is any good, and if, and how, to engage with it.We argue that a seemingly simple question: “what is a good something” will steer our gaze to such processes of qualifcation. We borrow this trick of asking a naïve-sounding question to access theoretical processes from actor-network theory. One of the hallmarks of this approach is its use of innocuous-looking questions “who acts?” or “what occurs” to open the way to radical deconstructions of everyday understandings, not only of social life, but of reality itself. Second, looking for this process of qualifcation allows us to ask good research questions.As our survey of empirical work showed, studying “good somethings” and how they occur in various situations has proven a productive avenue for research for almost 40 years now. We believe that our new conceptualization of qualifcation as the situated entanglement of classifcation and evaluation will yield novel insights that go beyond the empirical cases under consideration. In this chapter, it has allowed us to see connections and commonalities between such diverse phenomena as science and art, research topics and humor, tomatoes and solar panels. Rather than a research question itself,“what is a good something” is a template for a research question that allows us to connect and compare similar processes across situations and settings. It allows us to see new things and to see old things in a new light.This, in our view, is what makes a good question to guide research. Finally, our focus on qualifcation allows us to bridge two felds, or more precisely: two theoretical approaches that are strongly associated, though not synonymous with, a specifc feld. Although there are other cultural sociologies, cultural sociology is profoundly infuenced by (post-)Bourdieusian theory; and although there many ways of doing science and technology studies, the feld is strongly shaped by actor-network theory.While we don’t feel that bridging felds is always necessarily a good something, this particular bridging seems to us useful and productive. Both approaches offer different, in our view mostly complementary, ways of looking at qualifcation as practice, process, and performance. Taken together, they strongly resonate with recent developments in pragmatic inquiry. (Post-)Bourdieusian sociology teaches us that it is important to ask for whom and against whom things are “good somethings,” and by whom and how they are (re) produced.Which boundaries are enacted when and where by positioning a person or thing as good or bad? What classifcations systems are upheld by our categorizations? How do evaluations position persons and things vis-à-vis wider societal

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relations? This also focuses our attention on clashes and conficts: who gains, who loses, from these good somethings? This approach gives us analytical categories that allow us to analyze (literally “loosen” or “untie”) qualifcations, as made up of two processes that are practically indivisible but analytically distinct: classifcation and evaluation. From there, cultural sociology gives us other analytical tools to see how such evaluations and classifcations are connected with larger constellations, such as felds, repertoires, classifcation systems, structures of dominations, even nations or world systems. From actor-network theory we learn that asking “what is a good something?” allows us, and demands from us, to be specifc: to ask when, where, and how something is “a good something.” Something is never good in the abstract. Instead, all qualities, and thus all qualifcations, are grounded in relations and situations. Moreover,ANT leads us to seek for the socio-material assemblage through which “a good something” comes to be, including its non-human actants. It leads us to ask, time and time again, how both the “good” and the “something” in the question “a good something” gain their momentary shape in this process.The most precise rendering of the question about qualifcation now would go something like: What, when, how, for whom is a good something in this particular situation? Although these two approaches have often operated separately, or even antagonistically, we fnd the commonalities between these approaches striking.This might be more evident to sociologists than to actor-network theorists.While ANT scholars have worked hard to distinguish itself from cultural or critical sociology (e.g., Hennion and Grenier 2000; Hennion 2004; Schinkel 2007), cultural sociologists have been more preoccupied with distinguishing themselves from other sociologists. The commonality comes from the strong focus on relationality. In both approaches, all qualities are established in the context of relations between people and people, or people and things. (Schinkel 2007; cf. Elias 1978; Emirbayer 1997; Kilminster 2007; Heinich 2020). Thus, notions like quality, but also truth, beauty, art, or indeed reality are the result of (social) relations.This theoretical or ontological stance leads researchers to question “somethings” and the “qualities” attributed or attached to them. Moreover, both approaches share a radical commitment to empiricism. In the relational perspective, constructivism has never lapsed into subjectivism or relativism. Instead, it has produced a refusal to accept absolutist or universalist claims about people, societies, or indeed “the social.” In ANT, this refusal has been most categorical. This is the reason for ANT’s rejection of sociological categories like felds, structure, class, culture, society, and other things that are “larger than life.” The same radically empirical stance also rejects things that are “smaller than life”: notions like classifcation, evaluation, habitus, and other invisible things that purportedly are lodged within people’s minds and bodies. This is where the biggest divergence between the two approaches lie: the view on the status and usefulness of abstract analytical concepts. Moreover, while both approaches are relational, they don’t see relations in the same way. In cultural sociology, what confgures these relations are large-scale entities: institutions, classes, genders, nations, felds. In ANT, scale is a performative effect of a socio-material

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assemblage (Callon and Latour 1981): what confgures entities, situations, and practices is the relations between actants enrolled in them.Therefore, ANT’s analytical strategy is to look situationally at anything, be it a tomato, a market, or modernity itself (Latour 1993).This does not mean that these relations are necessarily small or local: they may extend over large distances in time and space. However, in recent years, advances have been made from both sides. PostBourdieusians increasingly stress situations and negotiations. The turn to institutional theory, and later to pragmatic sociology, with its infusion of American pragmatism, has made cultural sociology less structuralist, less concerned with issues of power and domination. Moreover, (cultural) sociologists have become more attentive to the importance of materiality (e.g., Griswold, Mangione, and McDonnell 2013; Zubrzycki 2017), although they usually insist on a frm analytical divide between human and non-human actors (e.g., Battentier and Kuipers 2020). At the same time, ANT scholars have looked for new conceptualizations to capture the durability of actor-networks, also across larger distances and wider networks, without falling into the trap of inventing non-empirical reifcations.This has led to the adoption of some of the terms we saw here: assemblages, devices, infrastructures, regimes, and registers. Here, we see the felds moving closer: sociologists less comfortable with things larger than life, ANT scholars working toward a vocabulary to analyze “institutionalized” or momentarily “stabilized” actor-networks such as markets. What has made these advancements possible is not the common roots of these approaches. It is the fact that they have a common opponent: methodological individualism. Predictably, actor-network theory has been more radical than cultural sociology. But in both cases, the agenda was not only to “unmask” beauty, art, science, markets, and other truths and realities but also to “unmask” the individual. In the end, relational social theory means an assault on the individual, as a commonsensical notion that still haunts the social sciences, from economics to psychology. Making the question “what is a good something” the starting point of empirical research entails, frst, a negation of the notion of quality, or “good things” as something outside of (social) relations. Second, it entails a negation of the notion of entities, or “somethings” outside of (social) relations. Eventually, this leads to a negation of the notion of individuals outside of the social. Foregrounding the question “what is a good something” as a starting point of social science research takes issue with the notion of the Homo Clausus (Elias 1978). Individuals do not make “good somethings.” Things do not make “good somethings.” But relations make “good somethings.”To evaluate, to classify, to judge, to value, to assess, to listen, to care, or to attach is to develop and sustain relations.

Notes 1 We want to acknowledge the comments, suggestions, and inspiration of the many people who helped formulate our thoughts on this topic: the editors, John R. Bowen, Nicolas Dodier, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Anita Hardon, and all the members of the Transatlantic

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Forum, especially Michele Lamont; Annemarie Mol, Olav Velthuis and the colleagues at the “Qualifcation in Practice” seminars at the University of Amsterdam; the members of the Science and Evaluation Studies Seminar at Leiden University, especially Sarah de Rijcke; Andy Battentier, Henrik Fürst, Anastasiya Halauniova, Nathalie Heinich, Mandy de Wilde; and the students of the University of Amsterdam research master’s course “Culture,Value, Power.” 2 In both felds we are discussing there is a strong relation, at least originally, between a (sub) discipline and a theoretical approach. In this text, we try to conceptually separate this.We refer to the subdisciplines as respectively cultural sociology and science and technology studies (STS, sometimes ANT-based STS).When talking specifcally about the theoretical approach, we speak of Bourdieusian or post-Bourdieusian cultural sociology; and of actornetwork theory or post-actor-network theory. As we will see, both approaches eventually moved beyond the subdisciplines. We also refer to pragmatic sociology or pragmatic inquiry, a theoretical approach that has strong affnities with the approach developed here: it incorporates elements of post-Bourdieusian theory, actor-network theory, and American pragmatism.

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Hsu, Greta. 2006. “Jacks of All Trades and Masters of None: Audiences’ Reactions to Spanning Genres in Feature Film Production.” Administrative Science Quarterly 51(3): 420–50. Janssen, Susanne, Marc Verboord, and Giselinde Kuipers. 2011. “Comparing Cultural Classifcation.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 63: 139–68. Jarness,Vegard. 2015.“Modes of Consumption: From ‘What’ to ‘How’ in Cultural Stratifcation Research.” Poetics 53: 65–79. Johnson, Cathryn, Timothy Dowd, and Cecilia Ridgeway. 2006. “Legitimacy as a Social Process.” Annual Review of Sociology 32: 53–78. Johnston, Josee, and Shyon Baumann. 2007. “Democracy Versus Distinction: A Study of Omnivorousness in Gourmet Food Writing.”American Journal of Sociology 113(1): 165–204. Karpik, Lucien. 2010. Valuing the Unique:The Economics of Singularities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Katz-Gerro, Tally. 2002. “Highbrow Cultural Consumption and Class Distinction in Italy, Israel,West Germany, Sweden, and the United States.” Social Forces 81(1): 207–29. Kilminster, Richard. 2007. Norbert Elias: Post-Philosophical Sociology. London: Routledge. Kirkegaard, Julia, and Koray Çalişkan. 2019.“When Socialists Marketize:The Case of China’s wind Power Market Sector.” Journal of Cultural Economy 12(2): 154–68. Knorr Cetina, Karin, and Urs Bruegger. 2002.“Global Microstructures:The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets.” American Journal of Sociology 107(4): 905–50. Kuipers, Giselinde. 2006. Good Humor, Bad Taste:A Sociology of the Joke. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Kuipers, Giselinde. 2015.“Beauty and Distinction? The Evaluation of Appearance and Cultural Capital in Five European Countries.” Poetics 53(2015): 38–51. Kuipers, Giselinde, Thomas Franssen, and Sylvia Holla. 2019. “Clouded Judgments? Aesthetics, Morality and Everyday Life in Early 21st Century Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22(4): 383–98. Lamont, Michèle. 1992. Money, Morals, and Manners:The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lamont, Michèle. 2000. The Dignity of Working Men. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lamont, Michèle. 2009. How Professors Think. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lamont, Michèle. 2019. “From ‘Having’ to ‘Being’: Self‐Worth and the Current Crisis of American Society.” The British Journal of Sociology 70(3): 660–707. Lamont, Michèle, Stefan Beljean, and Matthew Clair. 2014.“What Is Missing? Cultural Processes and Causal Pathways to Inequality.” Socio-Economic Review 12(3): 573–608. Lamont, Michèle, and Virag Molnar. 2002.“The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28(1): 167–95. Lamont, Michèle, and Annette Lareau. 1988.“Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical Developments.” Sociological Theory 153–68. Lamont, Michèle, and Laurent Thévenot. 2000. Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis, or, the Love of Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steven Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientifc Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Law, John. 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Law, John. 2008. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by B.Turner, 141–58. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 1995. “Notes on Materiality and Sociality.” The Sociological Review 43(2): 274–94. Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 2008. “The Actor-Enacted: Cumbrian Sheep in 2001.” In Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, edited by L. Malafouris and C. Knappett, 57–77. New York: Springer. Lena, Jennifer. 2012. Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lena, Jennifer. 2019. Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lena, Jennifer, and Richard Peterson. 2008.“Classifcation as Culture:Types and Trajectories of Music Genres.” American Sociological Review 73(5): 697–718. Lizardo, Omar. 2017. “Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in Its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes.” American Sociological Review 82(1): 88–115. McDonnell,Terence. 2014.“Drawing Out Culture: Productive Methods to Measure Cognition and Resonance.” Theory and Society 43(3–4): 247–74. Mears, Ashley. 2011. Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model. Berkeley: University of California Press. Merton, Robert. 1995. “The Thomas Theorem and the Matthew Effect.” Social Forces 74: 379–422. Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge. Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols, eds. 2015. Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Bielefeld: Transcript. Muniesa, Fabian, Liliana Doganova, Horacio Ortiz, Álvaro Pina-Stranger, Florence Paterson, Alaric Bourgoin,Véra Ehrenstein, Pierre-Andre Juven, David Pontille, Başak SaraçLesavre, and Guillaume Yon. 2017. Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. Paris: Presses des Mines. Musselin, Christine, and Catherine Paradeise. 2005.“Quality:A Debate.” Sociologie Du Travail 47: e89–e123. Peterson, Richard. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peterson, Richard, and Roger Kern. 1996.“Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61(5): 900–7. Rubio, Fernando Domínguez. 2014 “Preserving the Unpreservable: Docile and Unruly Objects at MoMA.” Theory and Society 43(6): 617–45. Rubio, Fernando Dominguez, and Elizabeth Silva. 2013. “Materials in the Field: ObjectTrajectories and Object-Positions in the Field of Contemporary Art.” Cultural Sociology 7(2): 161–78. Rushforth,Alex,Thomas Franssen, and Sarah de Rijcke. 2019.“Portfolios of Worth: Capitalizing on Basic and Clinical Problems in Biomedical Research Groups.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 44(2): 209–36. Schinkel,Willem. 2007.“Sociological Discourse of the Relational:The Cases of Bourdieu & Latour.” The Sociological Review 55(4): 707–29. Schmutz, Vaughn. 2005. “Retrospective Cultural Consecration in Popular Music: Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums of All Time.” American Behavioral Scientist 48(11): 1510–23. Schwarz, Ori. 2013. “Bending Forward, One Step Backward: On the Sociology of Tasting Techniques.” Cultural Sociology 7(4): 415–30.

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Schwarz, Ori. 2019.“‘Everything Is Designed to Make an Impression’:The Moralisation of Aesthetic Judgement and the Hedonistic Ethic of Authenticity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22(4): 399–415. Swidler,Ann. 1986.“Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 273–86. Timmermans, Stefan, and Steven Epstein. 2010. “A World of Standards but Not a Standard World:Toward a Sociology of Standards and Standardization.” Annual Review of Sociology 36: 69–89. Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justifcation: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6): 1675–715. Vaisey, Stephen, and Omar Lizardo. 2016.“Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change.” Socius 2. https://doi. org/10.1177/2378023116669726. van Dijk, Simone. 2019.“At Home in the Workplace:The Value of Materiality for Immaterial Labor in Amsterdam.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22(4): 468–83. van Eijck, Koen. 2001. “Social Differentiation in Musical Taste Patterns.” Social Forces 79(3): 1163–85. van Rees, Cees. 1989. “The Institutional Foundation of a Critic’s Connoisseurship.” Poetics 18(1–2): 179–98. van Venrooij, Alex, and Vaughn Schmutz. 2018. “Categorical Ambiguity in Cultural Fields: The Effects of Genre Fuzziness in Popular Music.” Poetics 66: 1–18. Vatin, François. 2013.“Valuation as Evaluating and Valorizing.” Valuation Studies 1(1): 31–50. Velthuis, Olav. 2007. Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Warde,Alan. 2008.“Dimensions of a Social Theory of Taste.” Journal of Cultural Economy 1(3): 321–36. Webb, Janette, and David Hawkey. 2017. “On (not) Assembling a Market for Sustainable Energy: Heat Network Infrastructure and British Cities. Journal of Cultural Economy 10(1): 8–20. Zubrzycki, Genevieve, ed. 2017. National Matters: Materiality, Culture, and Nationalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zuckerman, Ezra. 1999. “The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Illegitimacy Discount.” American Journal of Sociology 104(5): 1398–438.

PART 4

Practices

10 DEMONSTRATING Claude Rosental

Social and human scientists have used the term “demonstration” to refer to a wide range of objects and practices until today. Demonstrations have been commonly perceived as proofs and rhetorical devices. They have also often been viewed as pedagogical tools, instruments of mobilization, and theatrical performances. I will argue that this category may be usefully revisited on the basis of empirical inquiries which look at how demonstrations are concretely produced and employed. In other words, I would like to highlight the fact that it is worthwhile further investigating the practical ways of demonstrating and their uses in various social historical spaces. Several empirical studies I have conducted over the last few years indicate that demonstrations play a larger and more crucial set of roles for individuals and groups than those commonly associated with this notion (Rosental 2013). I infer from these investigations that further inquiries might show that demonstrating is an important form of interaction per se, affecting the structuration of social relationships, collective action, as well as the regulation of exchanges on a range of scales. In order to support and illustrate this assumption, I will focus on one particular case and present some of the results of the empirical investigations I applied to it. I will analyze how a group of scientists and engineers working for the US space industry produced and used various forms of demonstration to develop a piece of software in recent years. I will show how they mobilized these demonstrations not only to prove their points or persuade their interlocutors but also to manage their relationships with the latter in various ways. I will explain how demonstrating helped them get in touch and make transactions with others, collect information, and manage their project. Before exploring this case, I will analyze how demonstrations have been approached by various human and social scientists.This will help me underline the

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usefulness of the empirical inquiries I am advocating. But frst, what does the term “demonstration” usually refer to? According to the Oxford dictionary (2015), the term “demonstration” refers to four main types of objects: an act of showing that something exists or is true by giving proof or evidence; an outward show of a feeling or quality – e.g., a physical demonstration of affection; a practical exhibition and explanation of how something works or is performed – a microwave cookery demonstration, for instance; a public meeting or march protesting against something or expressing views on a political issue – e.g., a demonstration against a new tax.1 These defnitions highlight the fact that demonstrations are commonly viewed as corresponding to a set of objects and practices that are well identifable, despite their relative diversity.These objects and practices have often been perceived as taking a number of shapes in a wide range of spaces. Some belong to the area of research and education and include proofs of theorems (Rosental 2008), public experiments, or specifc parts of physics lectures in academic arenas (Shapin 1988), as well as pedagogical tools in schools, museums, and numerous other places such as demonstration farms for example. Some are of an economic nature, e.g., demonstrations of technology (or “demos”)2 run by salespeople in shops, frms, and market-fairs (Clark and Pinch 1995; Pollock and Williams 2007; Sherry 1998), or by engineers and executives in conferences and trade fairs (Coopmans 2011; Rosental 2007; Simakova 2010; Winthereik, Johannsen, and Strand 2008); demos used for product sale or launching, shown on TV or on the Internet (like Steve Jobs’ famous Apple demos, or demos of domestic products on shopping channels); PowerPoint presentations or displays of skills during interviews carried out in companies. Other demonstrations are more related to political dynamics, such as protests, military displays of power, or PowerPoint demonstrations calling for mobilization (e.g., Colin Powell’s 2003 UN demonstration).3 Last but not least, demonstrations are produced in the felds of art (e.g., demos in contemporary art exhibits (Lunenfeld 2000, 13–26) or dance demonstrations in streets), religion (e.g., demonstrations of faith), and law – e.g., pleas in courtrooms (Lynch and Bogen 1996) – as well as in private spheres (e.g., demos of domestic appliances run by friends, relatives, or itinerary salespeople in private homes). If demonstrations thus appear to be many different things, they are not “any” thing. They correspond to peculiar phenomena that may be observed in specifc places. They are produced or run by various types of actors, including scientists, executives, consultants, CEOs, politicians, salespeople, or hackers.These preliminary descriptions will serve as a starting point for my study of demonstrations. Concrete empirical investigations are now needed to further investigate this category and question its scope. As previously suggested, demonstrators have often been considered as producing proofs or attempting to persuade their audience while conducting their demonstrations. Let us consider this frst approach before exploring further.

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From proof and persuasion to tools for political action and theatrical performances Since Antiquity, proof and persuasion, or apodeixis and epideixis, have constituted commonplace categories when considering the nature and effects of demonstrations in general (Von Staden 1994). While these roles often confate, it is not rare that demonstrations conceived by scientists as proofs providing absolute certainty have been denied this status by critics and have been labeled as mere persuasive acts (Schaffer 1994). More generally, it appears that the roles of, and statuses granted to, all kinds of demonstrations have experienced signifcant evolution, variations, combinations, and debates across socio-historical spaces and among social scientists. Depending on circumstances, various scientifc and technological demonstrations have been likened or opposed to objects and practices such as geometric proofs, heuristic instruments, experiments, lectures and rhetorical tools, as well as displays of virtuosity, spectacles, and entertainment (Collins 1988; Hankins and Silverman 1995, 37–71; Schaffer 1983).4 For instance, in an effort to silence dissent over “matters of fact” in seventeenth-century England, Robert Boyle designed sophisticated public experiments based on the use of an air-pump and on testimonies of religious and political elites. Despite the power of Boyle’s apparatus, the roles and status of his demonstrations generated major controversies (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The capacity of a given demonstration to persuade and/or to be considered as a proof has been commonly depicted as depending on its structural and material dimensions to a large extent. Indeed, various types of material devices, as opposed to mere speech or writing, are often mobilized in the designing of demonstrations (Bloomfeld and Vurdubakis 2002; Stark and Paravel 2008; Vargha 2011; Yaneva 2009). As a result, demonstrations do not simply belong to the realm of discourse, and they may not be equated in particular to verbal or written justifcations (Bowen, “Justifcation”),5 or to narratives (Batiashvili and Wertsch,“Narrative”). However, in many cases, it has been shown that demonstrations are polysemous and that the meanings they are attributed depend very much on the audience’s identity, the work of interpretation of the latter, and the ways they are commented and accompanied by demonstrators and third parties (Rosental 2008; Suchman, Trigg, and Blomberg 2002; Werrett 2009). In order to be considered persuasive and/or to play the role of a proof, it appears that demonstrations must abide by a wide range of constraints and, for example, match the varied skills of the audience, tacit practices, and civic epistemologies.6 Other roles of demonstrations have been shown to be more particularly related to different modes of political intervention, democratic participation, collective mobilization, protest, and power. Numerous demonstrations consisting of local protests, technological performances, or arguments framed for the mass media in various formats have been conceived as ways of reinforcing centralized power, serving the goals of interest groups and organizations, or allowing actors, who would otherwise be marginalized, to participate in, and weigh in on, the management

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of public affairs (Barry 2001; Elam, Soneryd, and Sundqvist 2010; Fillieule 1999; Habermas 1989; Marres 2013). To illustrate the frst item, let us think of Mukerji (1997) who showed that Louis XIV used the Gardens of Versailles in seventeenthcentury France as a demonstration of power, consolidating the view of political order as an extension of natural order. Conversely, a study described how many actors used several forms of demonstration to infuence various political decisions in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001 (Girard and Stark 2007). Architects competing for the Ground Zero redesign contract attempted to show that their projects were inspired, relevant, and safe by using PowerPoint presentations and other forms of visual support. At the same time, New York City citizens took part in street demonstrations to pressure government agencies into providing information about the danger of airborne particulate matter kicked up into the air by the attack.And with the aid of technical experts, civic organizations and community groups sought to demonstrate online, with the help of tables and charts, that the Environmental Protection Agency was engaging in a cover-up; their efforts ultimately succeeded in bringing their grievances to the attention of elected offcials.All these demonstrations clearly represented tools for political action. Another approach to demonstrations, and more particularly to live demonstrations, has consisted in perceiving them as theatrical performances playing with fction and reality. In this spirit, the running of certain demos has been perceived as pure illusion or mutually agreed-upon fction (Wagner and Capucciati 1996), as technological dramas that can limit or disable the critical sense of spectators (Lampel 2001), or as “multiply-framed” experiences combining fabrication and reality (Smith 2009). In a way that can be compared to Tarde’s portrayal of society as being composed of a minority of hypnotists followed by masses of sleepwalkers (Tarde 1903), demonstrations of market pitchers have even sometimes been viewed as performances of hypnotists infuencing crowds (Duval 1981). In the framework of certain dramaturgical metaphors, demonstrations have also been perceived as performances with teaching or evidential roles: more precisely, “performances of a task-like activity out of its usual functional context in order to allow someone who is not the performer to obtain a close picture of the doing of the activity” (Goffman 1974, 66–68). When Goffman used this defnition, he had a large set of demonstrations of everyday life in mind, such as demonstrations of vacuum cleaners by sales representatives, or demonstrations of weapons by military men. His interest was in determining how activities could be transcribed in others and how the ideal running-through of an activity was perceived by the audience. Dramaturgical approaches have allowed to highlight many roles played by demonstrations. In particular, they have helped show how audiences of demonstrations often do not preexist “ready-made,” but rather arise in response to performances, and how persuading implies constructing the public (Ezrahi 1990; Hilgartner 2000).They have also helped reveal the ins and outs of different forms of demonstration, including street protests. For instance, adopting a dramaturgical approach

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has helped understand how queer notions of play have affected many social movements, leading to new theatrical forms of protest (Shepard 2009).

Getting in touch, exchanging, and campaigning Demonstrations may also be viewed as playing less celebrated, more varied, and creative roles. I have identifed some of them while conducting several types of inquiries. In particular, I have studied how the European Commission (EC) uses various kinds of demonstrations to manage its Research and Development programs. I have also observed how demonstrations are run in market fairs, high-tech conferences, and street protests in France, as well as how researchers produce and use demos at major universities and research institutions in the United States, including MIT, Stanford University, and research institutes located in the Silicon Valley (Rosental 2007).7 I would like to analyze the roles played by demonstrations in one of the cases I studied. This case is related to the development of a computer program called Orion.8 This piece of software was intended to prepare space missions. It was developed at the turn of the twenty-frst century and involved researchers and engineers working for various research institutions in the United States. The project team had to contact and convince many actors in order to obtain some funding by several organizations, as well as to develop other versions of the piece of software for different purposes. Offering to perform a demo was an important tool for Orion participants to introduce themselves to possible sponsors and try to get an appointment with them. Such performances were also useful to try to win the support of the audience on the spot. Thus, running demos was, frst of all, a mode of presentation of self. The frst contacts between some of the Orion members had been established that way.The two excerpts from messages exchanged by some of the project participants show how demos complement or substitute for other forms of meeting, self-presentation, or work, and how they expand the range of these forms: Sorry you didn’t make the demo. [Its author] isn’t a great explainer, but it was pretty fashy, one with the big screen. Maybe there is some time we could get together? I could go over there or you could come for coffee here. Sorry we couldn’t make [the demonstrator’s presentation].We would like to have you visit us sometime over here. Would you be interested in giving a talk here? These messages highlight the fact that even if it did not produce the same effects as an appointment in an offce or over a cup of coffee, or as a talk during a seminar, a demo was an opportunity to meet and present oneself and one’s work. Demos were an important tool for researchers to meet with other actors, with the prospect of establishing exchange relationships with them. Moreover, they were transactions in

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their own right: In exchange of an appointment, the demonstrators rewarded their host by the exhibition of a device. Running a demonstration was thus not only an outcome or an important step in the participants’ theoretical and technological endeavor. It did not simply consist in validating an approach by showing how a version of a prototype works. It was also a means for discovering and soliciting institutions likely to bring new resources. It was a way to connect with others and generate interest, with a view of building partnerships or obtaining some funding. Such dynamics marked the frst exchanges between the team’s members as much as those with other institutions at a later stage. The project participants thus carried out a major demonstration campaign.They traveled to visit various companies and institutions and to participate in many conferences.They demonstrated the working of their device in various research centers, as well as at university seminars and workshops. The exploratory work was conducted in a systematic way.The aim was to cover a certain number of spaces to create a mass effect in term of circulation of information about the project. Funding decisions could be indeed taken on the basis of indirect representations of the working of a prototype. Spectators of the demos were possible witnesses who could peddle their visions of the project into larger circles than those of the sites where the device was exhibited. The demonstrators were fully aware of this dynamic, as illustrated by this excerpt from a message from one Orion participant to one of his colleagues: I’ll likely be seeing [him] at [the conference]; we’re tentatively planning on taking a machine to give demos. He could probably give a report to his colleagues; thus there might not be as much urgency to give a demo at [his place] right away. This message highlights the reasons why Orion participants were so keen at conducting their demonstrations in various places and at covering a territory as large and relevant as possible.The demonstrators were aware that the effects of the performances were amplifed by their number. But they also managed the economy of their performances while taking into account the fact that testimonies were produced. Information was circulating.A demo conducted in a given location (e.g., at a conference) could thus have an impact in other spaces. In other words, the demonstrative efforts could be capitalized. Project participants could cumulate the interests of their demonstrative investment, as long as their performances went well. During these campaigns, demos were supported by other forms of demonstration and undertakings.These could consist in more standard presentations, resulting in hybrid forms of communication, halfway between a demo and a talk.They could be also supplemented by conversations with managers occurring in offces or in corridors. Arguments could be part of or shape the repertoires of demonstrators. One-page or less summaries of the main lines of the project were also circulating. Some of them were posted on the Internet. In addition to these research clips

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designed to arouse interest among busy managers, research reports were written and communicated within organizations. This demonstrative campaign was not carried out by isolated individuals. On the contrary, it was the result of coordinated action by a group of demonstrators.They generally carried out their demos in complementary spaces, in a concerted manner. Sometimes, demonstrators also made common presentations in order to explain complementary aspects of their project.This approach made it possible to reinforce the demos’ spectacular nature and to answer a wide range of questions, which no member of the team could handle alone. The number, as well as the quality and experience of the demonstrators, could contribute to impress, and the accumulation of expertise strengthened the credibility of the project. Orion demos thus did not constitute isolated demonstrative coups, carried out by disconnected individuals.They were produced by an organized group and carried out in waves, so as to cover a series of relevant spaces and to generate various benefts. In other words, institutions were explored and sometimes conquered thanks to demonstrations of strength.

A tool for data collection, project management, and capitalization strategies This series of public demonstrations also allowed project participants to gradually collect useful data. Demos’ audience members were sometimes encouraged to manipulate the piece of software themselves after the initial presentation. The spectators then became active participants in the demonstrations. They created examples in which they were directly interested. Such data was collected by the demonstrators. The following excerpt from a message sent by one Orion project participant to another illustrates this approach: What we’ve been doing is to frst run through one of the existing [examples] in single step mode, then we show them how to create one with the menus . . . and then we ask them to try entering their own [examples].Thus we now have about a half dozen [examples] from end users in our library. . . . Unfortunately, the most complex one . . . wasn’t saved. A simpler example of [one participant] was saved, as well as the example created by [another participant]. This passage shows that demos did not only consist in exhibiting the piece of software’s effciency. It consisted also in collecting cases that were entered by audience members. This approach allowed demonstrators to show that the program could perform tasks that were well targeted for their interlocutors.This was a strong argument for the latter to get involved and to become active partners in the development of the project. Furthermore, the demonstrators could collect examples that were useful for the design of upcoming demos.Thanks to these new cases, Orion participants had new

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resources to show that the prototype was able to handle “real” problems, and that it required a short training period to be used. Thus, designing “good” demos represented a research activity in its own right. It was based on an iterative approach. It required a systematic assessment of the way previous demos had proceeded. The data collected during the demos – including the dialectical exchanges and the verbal assessment of the program by the audience – were useful tools to guide future research.They helped Orion participants to improve or adjust the piece of software according to the criticisms and interests that were expressed, and thus to facilitate its adoption. This explains why reports on demos were sometimes written, as this message from a project participant to another illustrates it: [We] are writing up a report summarizing the information we gleaned from the demos this past month. It’s not clear it will be done before I leave again on Saturday. The data collected on the modes of appropriation of the program by the test audiences were thus accumulated and capitalized by the demonstrators in view of its development.This phenomenon appears even more clearly in the following excerpts. One of the team members informed his colleagues of his observations of the potential users’ behavior, the conclusions he drew for the evolution of the piece of software, and the experiments/observations that could be continued: The next version will incorporate what we learned from evaluations with potential end users, as well as extensions we have planned all along. What is the diffculty in explaining this style of formalization. . .? When I’ve given talks and demos, it seems to enhance the audience’s understanding. Moreover, it only seems to take someone who is a domain expert about a half hour tutorial to use the system themselves. My experience with end-users reveals 2 kinds of . . . error: ‘deep’ modelling errors . . . and ‘shallow’ . . . errors. . . . Realistic diagrams . . . wouldn’t help very much on the former. . . .This is not too say that something interesting couldn’t be done . . . but ensuring their utility would require more experimentation with end-users. The analysis of the audiences’ reactions guided the development of the program toward a greater ease in its use.The expression “experimentation with end-users” in the last message shows that, as in other innovation projects, users were tested as much as the technology (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003). For the demonstrators, the reactions of the “users” during the demos represented an experimental material in their own right.The outcome of these experiments was both partly unexpected and systematically analyzed.

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This includes the time required by the users to master the working of the program, as illustrated in the penultimate message, and the ways in which users understand how the piece of software works, as the second excerpt highlights. The multifaceted capitalization that stemmed from the participants’ demonstrative campaign could also be observed in a later phase of the project. After a few years, some of the team members came up with the idea of developing an educational version of the program.This version was designed to provide simulations of the dynamics of the planets of the solar system. It was intended to support various educational activities in the classrooms. Demos of the program had been posted on a website.The target audiences included students and teachers from American elementary and high schools. Several pedagogical scenarios and animations were displayed. However, teachers and students were invited to provide their feedback and ideas related to the development of new scripts. Demonstrators proceeded the same way as earlier. They could gather information on the practices of their future “partners” and ideas for the design of novel cases. These ideas could be capitalized to create better demos and new versions of the piece of software. This process could then lead to the simultaneous development of the computer program, pedagogical practices, new relationships, proponents of the piece of software, and even a market for an innovative product. The project participants’ demonstrative campaigns and capitalistic approaches were thus deployed over a long period of time.They had also a protean dimension. To the extent that they regularly adjusted their demonstrations, the team members benefted from the latter for many years. But these researchers-entrepreneurs were not the only ones who capitalized on their demonstrative campaigns in the long-run, while accumulating various forms of credit.Their institutions also benefted from them, as did their managers.These campaigns also contributed to promote them. As a result, the demonstrations produced certainly came to be part of the Mertonian “indirect demonstrations” that help science to develop and maintain its authority and support in society (Merton 1938). Demos also helped determine the very nature of the relationship between science and the public at large. The texture of these relationships was, in part, constituted through demos – not simply through the concepts they popularized but also through the utopia they sometimes conveyed.

Investigating the concrete ways in which demonstrations are produced and used The ways demonstrations were used in the case under scrutiny may be observed in other contexts. For instance, when I studied how the EC mobilized various kinds of demonstrations to manage one of its Research and Development programs several years ago, I noticed that demonstrations channeled through reports or CDs, as well as live demos, were meant to convince political and economic authorities of the

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productivity of the public-funded European research, of the feasibility of different technical approaches, and of the well-founded character of various technical and scientifc claims. Facts, fgures, lists, arguments, success stories, video clips, and onsite demos were mustered to persuade, justify, and deliver proofs (Rosental 2017). But at the same time, these demonstrations – and especially demos – represented tools for a wide variety of transactions. They were used by demonstrators as tests and as instruments to obtain information from/about audiences, observe their reactions, and collect their feedback. They helped demonstrators build and maintain partnerships, coordinate their actions with others or compete with them, manage their projects, co-construct technologies and users (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003; Woolgar 1991), and create markets for their products. Demonstrations were not only performed after scientifc and technological contents were in their fnal form, in order to sell them, like it is the case for cooking utensils demonstrated at the Foire de Paris (Paris Fair) for example. They were used at different stages of the projects to defne their contents in a dialectical way while taking into account the audiences’ reactions. The performance of demos determined scientifc and technological end-products, as well as the very nature of scientifc and technological objects that could be produced. In this case like in the previous one, demos represented unique resources for demonstrators to ft into various social logics.They provided unrivaled communication opportunities in circumstances in which audiences preferred watching images and engaging in social interaction rather than reading texts. They were an opportunity for many types of exchange and a privileged place for the trading of information, advice, funding, and contacts. Additionally, demos worked best when they were part of demonstrative paraphernalia instead of independent objects, and when they were enacted in the framework of collective action instead of isolated, individual coups. My investigations thus suggest that demonstrations go beyond Erving Goffman’s view (1974) of them as “technical redoings.” Indeed, demonstrations do not simply offer a close picture of the doing of an activity for learning or for evidential purposes. Moreover, they do not merely consist in transcribing an activity into another. Demos and other forms of demonstration constitute transactional and cognitive tools, cooperation devices, resources for project management, design and assessment, and observatories for both the audiences and the demonstrators. They help build markets9 and determine the relationships between science, technology, and society. Furthermore, they appear to be an important form of interaction by themselves, affecting the structuration of social relationships on a wide range of scales. Based on these observations, it seems now fruitful to further investigate how demonstrations are concretely produced and used in a very broad range of social historical spaces, and how various actors mobilize them to build alliances, wage battle, exchange goods, and conduct all kinds of experiments. Certainly, there is no reason to assume that demonstrations merely have an instrumental dimension in general. For instance, describing demonstrators who participate to a street protest as people who merely want to achieve specifc goals might be oversimplistic in many cases. What may be also at stake is a process of identity building, and, at the same

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time, demonstrating might have different meanings for the various participants (Fisher, Dow and Ray 2017). But this does not imply that the uses of demonstrations ought not to be investigated. As a matter of fact, demonstrations may be an anthropological moment in contemporary societies as important as another grand anthropological event: wedding. Demonstrations may involve exchanges, tensions, allocations of material and symbolic goods, redistributions of alliances, and dense moments of social life as much as matrimonial ceremonies do. Both these types of events may have a large impact on individuals’ and groups’ fate. Defnitely, and generally speaking, demonstrations should not be considered as all powerful devices. A given demonstration may “fail” in various ways, depending on various circumstances and their audience. But this does not mean that demonstrations have no major impact on the whole on, and within, society. Besides, I do not claim that demonstrating constitutes a homogeneous phenomenon, and that for instance, demos and street protests are the exact same entity. The fact that demonstrations might be of a heterogeneous nature does not imply that they should not be studied from a global perspective. On the contrary, it seems important to study different forms of demonstrations in parallel given that, as in our case, actors may use them concurrently – each employed for specifc goals.Various studies also show that demonstrations of a given type are sometimes confronted with counter-demonstrations of another type (Laurent 2011; Russell, Markusson, and Scott 2012). Substitution and complementary effects, variations, and evolutions of forms of demonstrations ought to be understood. For instance, is it possible to understand why members of NGOs prefer to use demonstrations of scientifc facts than to organize protests in some cases, and why street protests might be opposed to demos in other cases? Constraints on, as well as conditions of possibility for different forms of demonstrations deserve careful and full-fedged historical investigations. Placing demonstrations at the heart of a feld of socio-anthropological investigation that goes beyond science and technology in a narrow sense of the words should allow us to better grasp common features, differences, and links between local practices, as well as migration and mutation processes that affect them. For instance, some investigations I have been conducting indicate that it is fruitful to investigate the similarities between the preparation and performance of high-tech demos in the Silicon Valley and that of street protests in Paris (Rosental 2013). It is also useful to study how actors – including social scientists – draw boundaries between different forms of demonstration, such as demonstrations of technology and other forms of demonstration, all the more so as “technology” may be understood more or less widely. One of the stakes of this global approach is to avoid falling into deconstructionism – suggesting there is no such thing as a demonstration, as the term refers to several objects and practices – or mixing everything up while trying to reduce phenomena to one type of object and practice – e.g., proofs. As demonstrations appear to be routinely consequential across many “domains,” including economic life (e.g., as sales practices or tools for product design and launch), politics (e.g., as instances of collective mobilization or performances

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designed to shape, test, or persuade a large audience), and scientifc and technological research, and as their various roles have been often studied separately whereas some of them deserve further analysis, it is high time to view demonstrations as the core of a fruitful feld of research. Demonstrations are an object of interest not only for social studies of science, economic sociology, and political sociology but also for the social sciences at large.10

Notes 1 Similar defnitions of the term are given in other languages, like French and German, which share the same Latin origin (demonstratio). 2 Although “demo” is an abbreviation of “demonstration,” this word commonly refers to specifc forms of demonstration, especially public demonstrations of technology and street protests. 3 Colin Powell gave a PowerPoint demonstration at the United Nations on February 5, 2003, to persuade the public that the United States should engage war against Iraq. 4 Like various works conducted by historians of science and technology, media studies have aptly highlighted how producing knowledge, persuading, and displaying are often intertwined (Halpern 2015). 5 There is some overlap between the notions of justifcation and demonstration. Indeed, many justifcations require demonstrations, while demonstrations sometimes have a justifcation aim. 6 The term “civic epistemology” refers to “the institutionalized practices by which members of a given society test and deploy knowledge claims used as a basis for making collective choices” (Jasanoff 2005, 255). According to Jasanoff, the types of demonstrations required to support knowledge claims vary in relation to the contexts in which they are performed – for instance, socio-technical experiments in the United States. 7 For other empirical investigations conducted both in France and in the US, see Stavrianakis (“Assemblage”). 8 I use a pseudonym here for anonymity purposes. 9 See also Callon and Muniesa (2007) on this. 10 I thank the editors of this volume and the participants in the “Social Studies of Institutions” Workshop held on September 29–30, 2018 in Saint Louis, MO, USA, for their valuable suggestions and criticisms related to a previous version of this chapter.

References Barry, Andrew. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London: Athlone Press. Bloomfeld, Brian P., and Theo Vurdubakis. 2002. “The Vision Thing: Constructing Technology and the Future in Management Advice.” In Critical Consulting: New Perspectives on the Management Advice Industry, edited by T. Clark and R. Fincham, 115–29. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Callon, Michel, and Fabien Muniesa. 2007. “Economic Experiments and the Construction of Markets.” In Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, edited by D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, and L. Siu, 163–89. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Clark, Colin, and Trevor Pinch. 1995. The Hard Sell:The Language and Lessons of Street-Wise Marketing. London: Harper Collins. Collins, Harry M. 1988. “Public Experiments and Displays of Virtuosity: The Core-Set Revisited.” Social Studies of Science 18(4): 725–48. Coopmans, Catelijne. 2011. “‘Face Value’: New Medical Imaging Software in Commercial View.” Social Studies of Science 41(2): 155–76.

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Duval, Maurice. 1981.“Les Camelots” [The Peddlers]. Ethnologie française 2: 145–70. Elam, Mark, Linda Soneryd, and Göran Sundqvist. 2010.“Demonstrating Safety –Validating New Build:The Enduring Template of Swedish Nuclear Waste Management.” Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences 7(3): 197–210. Ezrahi,Yaron. 1990. The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fillieule, Olivier. 1999.“‘Plus ça change, moins ça change’: Demonstrations in France During the Nineteen-Eighties.” In Acts of Dissent: New Developments in the Study of Protest, edited by D. Rucht, R. Koopmans, and F. Neidhardt, 199–226. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefeld. Fisher, Dana R., Dawn M. Dow, and Rashawn Ray. 2017. “Intersectionality Takes It to the Streets: Mobilizing Across Diverse Interests for the Women’s March.” Science Advances 3(9). Accessed March 7, 2020. http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/eaao1390.full. Girard, Monique, and David Stark. 2007. “Socio-Technologies of Assembly: Sense Making and Demonstration in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan.” In Governance and Information:The Rewiring of Governing and Deliberation in the 21st Century, edited by D. Lazer and V. MayerSchoenberger, 145–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis:An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Halpern, Orit. 2015. Beautiful Data:A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham: Duke University Press. Hankins,Thomas L., and Robert J. Silverman. 1995. Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hilgartner, Stephen. 2000. Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2005. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lampel, Joseph. 2001.“Show-and-Tell: Product Demonstrations and Path Creation of Technological Change.” In Path Dependence and Creation, edited by R.L. Garud and P. Karnoe, 303–28. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Laurent, Brice. 2011. “Technologies of Democracy: Experiments and Demonstrations.” Science and Engineering Ethics 17(4): 649–66. Lunenfeld, Peter. 2000. Snap to Grid:A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lynch, Michael E., and David Bogen. 1996. The Spectacle of History: Speech,Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings. Durham: Duke University Press. Marres, Noortje. 2013.“Why Political Ontology Must Be Experimentalized: On Eco-Show Homes as Devices of Participation.” Social Studies of Science 43(3): 417–43. Merton, Robert K. 1938.“Science and the Social Order.” Philosophy of Science 5(3): 321–37. Mukerji, Chandra. 1997. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oudshoorn, Nelly, and Trevor Pinch, eds. 2003. How Users Matter:The Co-Construction of Users and Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pollock, Neil, and Robin Williams. 2007.“Technology Choice and Its Performance:Towards a Sociology of Software Package Procurement.” Information and Organization 17(3): 131–61. Rosental, Claude. 2007. Les Capitalistes de la science: Enquête sur les démonstrateurs de la Silicon Valley et de la NASA [The Capitalists of Science: Survey of Silicon Valley and NASA Demonstrators]. Paris: CNRS Éditions.

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Rosental, Claude. 2008. Weaving Self-Evidence: A Sociology of Logic. Translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rosental, Claude. 2013. “Toward a Sociology of Public Demonstrations.” Sociological Theory 31(4): 343–65. Rosental, Claude. 2017. “Modes of Exchange: Cultures and Politics of Public Demonstrations.” In Cultures Without Culturalism: The Making of Scientifc Knowledge, edited by K. Chemla and E. Fox Keller, 170–95. Durham: Duke University Press. Russell, Stewart, Nils Markusson, and Vivian Scott. 2012.“What Will CCS Demonstrations Demonstrate?” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 17(6): 651–68. Schaffer, Simon. 1983.“Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century.” History of Science 21(1): 1–43. Schaffer, Simon. 1994.“Machine Philosophy: Demonstration Devices in Georgian Mechanics.” Osiris 9: 157–82. Shapin, Steven. 1988. “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth Century England.” Isis 79(3): 373–404. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shepard, Benjamin. 2009. Queer Political Performance and Protest: Play, Pleasure, and Social Movement. London: Routledge. Sherry, John F. 1998.“Market Pitching and the Ethnography of Speaking.” Advances in Consumer Research 15: 543–47. Simakova, Elena. 2010. “RFID ‘Theatre of the Proof ’: Product Launch and Technology Demonstration as Corporate Practices.” Social Studies of Science 40(4): 549–76. Smith,Wally. 2009. “Theatre of Use: A Frame Analysis of IT Demonstrations.” Social Studies of Science 39(3): 449–80. Stark, David, and Verena Paravel. 2008.“Powerpoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration.” Theory, Culture and Society 25(5): 30–55. Suchman, Lucy, Randall Trigg, and Jeanette Blomberg. 2002. “Working Artefacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype.” British Journal of Sociology 53(2): 163–79. Tarde, Gabriel de. 1903. The Laws of Imitation.Translated by Elsie Clews Parsons. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Vargha, Zsuzsanna. 2011. “From Long-Term Savings to Instant Mortgages: Financial Demonstration and the Role of Interaction in Markets.” Organization 18(2): 215–35. Von Staden, Heinrich. 1994. “Anatomy as Rhetoric: Galen on Dissection and Persuasion.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50: 47–66. Wagner, Annette, and Maria Capucciati. 1996. “Demo or Die: User Interface as Marketing Theatre.” CHI – 96 Electronic Proceedings. Accessed March 7, 2020. dl.acm.org/citation. cfm?doid=238386.238606. Werrett, Simon. 2009.“William Congreve’s Rational Rockets.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 63: 35–56. Winthereik, Brit Ross, Nis Johannsen, and Dixi Louise Strand. 2008. “Making Technology Public: Challenging the Notion of Script Through an E-health Demonstration Video.” Information,Technology and People 21(2): 116–32. Woolgar, Steve. 1991. “Confguring the User: The Case of Usability Trials.” In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power,Technology and Domination, edited by J. Law, 58–99. London: Routledge. Yaneva,Albena. 2009.“The Architectural Presentation:Techniques and Politics.” In Networks of Design, edited by F. Hackney, J. Glynne, and V. Minton, 212–19. Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publisher.

11 CARING Annemarie Mol and Anita Hardon

A fuid concept for adaptable engagements The English word care is both a verb – to care – and a noun – care.The latter tends to be used for social domains, say, parental care, elderly care, or health care. In this chapter, we tell quite a few stories that emerge from the domain of health care, but it is not our aim to describe that domain. Instead, we use what we have learned there to topicalize a particular genre of activity.This is why caring, the gerund form of the verb, features in our title. Caring is an activity, not a terrain. However, a further complication arises, as the verb to care draws together the emotional engagement of being concerned and the practical engagement of contributing to restoring, sustaining, or improving something. Our interest is with the latter. But even when practical, the activity of caring is not neutral: it is meant to culminate in something that counts locally as “good.” However, what is “good” in a particular setting, not just in the opinion of the carer but also from the perspective of the other people, creatures, and environments involved is not always obvious and only rarely unequivocal. Learning about and calibrating between diverse local “goods” is part of the activity of caring. And then, crucially, that people try to care does not mean that they succeed. Rather than providing control, caring efforts are explorative and adaptive. Carers respond to surprises and expect them to occur. This, at least, is where we stand at present with regards to this word. In what follows, we will provide a sketch of how we got here. The genealogy we outline is meant to offer inspiration to scholars who, when researching practices, institutions, assemblages, or situations, wonder whether the term caring might serve their analyses. In the empirical settings in which you work, reader, the term caring may be current, used by some of those involved, or altogether absent. Whatever the situation may be, in mobilizing the term caring as an analytical tool, you are invited to enrich it, and to push and pull it in different directions.That is the idea.We are

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curious where, from here on, our fuid concept of caring will move – shifting earlier insights and transforming itself along the way.

Household words Traditionally, caring has not garnered a lot of attention in academia. In the rivaling theoretical schemes that dominated the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, daily caring activities were deemed to be of secondary importance. For example, in Marxist social theory, the feeding, sleeping, and so on, with which people sustained themselves and each other, were subsumed under the category of reproduction. They required doing, but only the means of production were deserving of scrutiny, as only these were considered to shape social relations and to underly social conficts.The injustices Marxists sought to combat were presumed to emerge from the fact that the ruling classes own of the means of production while workers have to sell their labor on the market. Liberal political theories, in their turn, situated daily caring activities in the private sphere, far removed from the public realm where political concerns were supposed to be democratically debated and resolved. Liberals wanted to stay clear of everybody’s private life and only collectively discuss issues to do with politics. In both cases, feminists shook up these distinctions and called for paying attention to what had too easily been discarded as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. In relation to Marxism, they argued that the labor workers sell to the owners of the means of production is not the only hard work being done. The activities slotted under the term reproduction deserve to be recognized as “labor” in their own right: as domestic labor (Weeks 2011). Moreover, it was to be recognized as a separate, second injustice that women, not men, do most of this work, either in underpaid jobs or for no pay at all. This, after all, makes them either fnancially dependent upon their salaried husbands or forced to work a double shift (Hochschild 2012). In response to liberal political theories, feminists argued that the private sphere is not simply a cozy refuge from the political disputes that mark the public sphere. Instead, what happens in the private sphere, however personal, is political, too. For one, via taxes, housing conditions, childcare provisions (or a lack thereof), and so on, states infuence how private lives are shaped. Second, relations in the private sphere are not just loving but also full of antagonisms – around loyalty, money, lifestyle.They have a politics of their own that includes disputes and may edge into physical violence (Honig 1994). (See also the chapter on making home in this volume). At the same time, the feminist blurring of the distinction between domestic life and the organization of society was made to work the other way around. In this context, the proposition was that politics does not necessarily have to be shaped as a matter of clashing interests, handled in the form of disputes. Instead, the state could take inspiration from the ways in which, in private settings, people relate to others in caring mode (Tronto 2013).1 This work took inspiration from care ethics, a feminist alternative to rule ethics. Rule ethics proclaims that what is good to do in specifc cases can be deduced from general principles.There are however many

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such principles and they do not always align. For example, the principle of the dignity of human life stipulates that one should save another person’s life if at all possible, while the principle of ownership states that stealing is bad. Developmental psychologists told children a story about a man who could only save the life of his wife by stealing medicine.The idea was that their maturity would be revealed by their ability to play the two principles off against each other. However, some children, especially girls, proposed that perhaps the man could talk with the pharmacist about his wife’s situation.This is the origin story of care ethics. It does not operate through weighing the relative value of general principles but by negotiating specifc, situated concerns. Rather than argumentative, it is caring (Gilligan 1977; Tronto 2013). In the earlier debates mentioned here, the term “care” was not particularly prominent, but that does not make these debates less relevant to our present concerns. In care ethics, in its turn, the term “care” implies something positive and that risks hiding crucial questions about what exactly counts as good. All in all, then, genealogical connectivity is not simply a matter of continuous words. There may be connections while terms shift and disconnections may hide behind a stable terminology. Similarities and differences to do with words are also relevant when translations are being made between so-called languages and the theoretical traditions expressed in those languages. It is, for instance, remarkable that Englishlanguage scholarly work on care shows signifcant traces of German discussions of Sorge. When, early in the twentieth century, Heidegger wrote about Sorge he was not at all concerned with domestic labor or other activities (disproportionally taken on board by women) that in English are marked as caring for. Instead, his concern was with being, that is to say with being a human, not seen from the outside, but experienced from within.Wrapped in Sorge,“the human” formed the center of his [sic] own concerns, worry, and distress.This resembles (at least to some extent) the English caring about.2 Heidegger deplored that Sorge was under threat from modern technology, which in his eyes objectifed people and instrumentalized their activities. A romantic longing for Sorge has lingered in academia for a long time: Heidegger was by no means the only scholar to express it. It also resonates in, for instance, Habermas’s work, when he voices a concern that in modern societies the system, with its rules and regulations, squeezes the life world, and erodes its possibilities for person-to-person love and kindness (Habermas 2015[1981]).3 (See also Chapter on making home). The German Sorge has been employed in various ways to express an opposition between alienating and oppressive modern technologies and truly human, dedicated care. This is different for the Dutch term zorgen. While zorgen may sound like Sorge, it has a quite different theoretical genealogy in the social sciences. One of the relevant steps in its trajectory occurred when, in the late 1950s, the sociologist Hilda Verwey-Jonker proposed a Dutch translation for the English term welfare state.At the time, there was a widely shared conviction that in welfare states, the punitive fatherly role of the state was gradually complemented by supportive motherly arrangements. In this context,Verwey-Jonker suggested the term

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verzorgingsstaat – caring state.The term caught on and was widely used in discussions about the caring state’s pros and cons. Those who applauded social security payments emphasized that social life should not be competitive; rather all citizens deserved to share in the collectively earned new wealth. Opponents, by contrast, argued that the caring state unduly pampered people. Various understandings of what fathers and mothers are and should be lingered in the background of neverending discussions about the problems of the caring state.4 A further relevant development in the genealogy of zorgen happened a little over two decades later when another Dutch sociologist, Abram de Swaan, published a collection of essays, De mens is de mens een zorg, a title that might clunkily be translated as: The Human is Another Human’s Object of Care (De Swaan 1982). At a time when many sociologists investigated the economic aspects of human affairs, De Swaan, inspired by Elias, insisted that human life unfolds thanks to practical interdependence among members of a society (Elias 1978). For our collective survival, De Swaan argued, we all depend upon each other’s zorg – care. In a household, the bread-winning husband “takes care” of his wife and children, while the housewife “takes care” of everyone’s eating, drinking, clothing, cleaning, and what not. (This was the Netherlands. In the late 1970s to early 1980s, the percentage of married women working for a salary was, also comparatively, strikingly low.) But zorgen does not just occur within families, the whole of society is constituted by it. Teachers care for the intellectual and moral growth of their pupils. Bakers care for those who eat their bread, and when customers hand over money, this is their way of caring for the bakers. Even the police are caring – police offcers, after all, protect people against each other’s violent streaks and foster safety in public spaces. While calling such activities work foregrounds the efforts invested and questions of fnancial return, calling them care foregrounds interpersonal relations and mutual dependence. The different approaches related above all inform what, today, might be understood as caring. They do not, however, coalesce neatly. Instead, they are in tension with each other. Marxist reproduction – even if it includes domestic labor – is quite different from the liberal private sphere – even if it is recognized that this is shot through with antagonism as well as love.The German Sorge – an allegedly “human” way of being – has little to do with the Dutch zorgen – which is not in confict with technology, but instead makes use of it and reaches out to it. Smoothing out these frictions and tying all the loose ends together into a thick, intricate version of “caring” is not our aim. Instead, we want to acknowledge our ancestors and point out how these diverse trends loom, as sources of inspiration or as caveats, in the background of the investigations that we, together with a wide array of colleagues, conducted in the feld of health care.There, we learned a great deal about the activity of caring that, give or take a few differences, is bound to be relevant to other sites. We hope to illustrate this in the sections that follow, in which each presents a lesson collectively learned.To facilitate writing up these lessons, most of our examples come from research in which we have been closely involved. Hence, what follows is a situated herstory, a trail, not an overview.We do not cover all possible variations

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of caring; other stories might be told. Our open-ended list is not meant to be conclusive, but inspiring.

Caring and working Paradoxically, even in the societal domain of health care, for quite some time, care was not considered particularly important. Instead, pride of place was accorded to cure. Healing interventions were at the center of attention in medical research and hospital practices. The term care was mostly used for activities meant to provide people with basic sustenance (such as feeding and washing), as well as to the palliative care (such as heavy pain killers) provided to patients for whom there were no longer any life-saving treatments available.The care/cure distinction hid the fact that so-called curing interventions, from surgical cuts through to pharmaceutical pills and injections, do not work alone.They may be singled out as crucial, but in practice they depend upon a multitude of co-occurring activities, all too easily discarded as “merely care.” Social scientists who studied health care practices sought to foreground the relevance of the activities locally glossed as caring and to demonstrate that these were crucial to the potential for curing. In this way, the distinction between curing and caring activities gradually blurred. What counts as a “health care intervention” consequently expanded from a singularly physical cut or drug to an extensive social and material arrangement and engagement (Corbin and Strauss 1988; Herzlich and Pierret 1984). Take contraceptive pills as an example. Clinical trials had shown that these worked for women who wanted to avoid pregnancy, while still having penetrative heterosexual encounters. Social scientists pointed out that it is not simply the pills by themselves that work.Yes, the hormones that these tablets contain are relevant, but their effciency is not in the hormones alone. For a start, the women concerned have to do the swallowing – and not just once, but every day, preferably at more or less the same time. Doing this is not as easy as trials to study the pill’s effectiveness made it seem. For it depends on such things as a daily schedule of some regularity and the possibility for the woman in question to safely store her pills or to carry them with her.This makes things diffcult for women who live in small spaces they share with many others, and even more so for women whose mothers-in-law, hoping for more grandchildren, observe all their doings from close by. Diffculties also arise for women who only engage in heterosexual activities irregularly and do not see the point of continuously ingesting “unnatural” hormones. Hence, the working of the pill depends on a lot of work – that is, on the efforts of the woman taking it and on the support, or opposition, she has from her surroundings (Both 2015; Hardon et al. 2019; Hardon 1997). Something similar is the case for antiretroviral drugs. Medical research found that these were effective in keeping the human immunodefciency virus (HIV) in check in the bodies of infected persons. But when these drugs were offered to HIV patients in the Busoga region of Uganda, many of them did not beneft as much as expected. So, what was going on? To answer this question, anthropologists spent

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time with the HIV patients concerned and spoke with them enough to gain a sense of what was relevant in their lives.Thus, it became apparent that the patients were not just offered a pill that kept the HIV virus in check.They were also tasked with following a particular care scenario and it was impossible for most of them to ft this scenario into their lives. Patients were supposed to come to the hospital to pick up their drugs once a month. Waiting times meant that this took hours and many of them could not afford to lose a day’s work.They often lived far away and were too poor to afford the necessary bus fare to travel to the hospital. Hence, the drug failed because the care scenario was inappropriate. In Busoga, at least, and only after some time, the proposal that it was not pills that do or do not work, but the wider practice of which they are a part, was accepted. And indeed, when patients were provided with enough medication to last them three months and their bus fares were reimbursed, health outcomes improved (Hardon et al. 2007; Hardon and Dilger 2011). Interestingly, the scholarly research that studies like these are most closely entangled with does not even contain terms like care or caring. Instead, it reports on technology transfer.When researchers in the budding feld of science and technology studies followed technologies like cars or water pumps, they also concluded that the working of these “things” is not contained within them.The effciency of a piece of technology, they proposed, is instead spread out across a network (Akrich 1992). Take, for example, the cars that marathon runners won and then took to their small villages in Northern Kenya where at the time there were hardly any roads. Once these cars were rolled off from the truck that carried them, they might still function as an icon of success or as a classy tool to carry the dead to their graves. But in order for a car to work as a mode of transport, a lot has to be in place – roads, a supply of gasoline, money to pay for that gasoline, driving skills, mechanics able to maintain a car, spare parts, and so on. In the absence of a sustaining network, cars fail. Or take the water pumps designed to be pumped by large, muscular men, many of which were scattered throughout rural areas across the global South and then left to rust. They simply did not work in villages where fetching water was a chore for children and young women who were too small to handle them (Rathgeber 1996). But if work on technology transfer inspired research into practices to do with caring, the inspiration also traveled in the other way direction. Hence, the term “caring” came to circulate beyond health care and entered settings where it had not previously been readily used. Take the solid-looking Zimbabwe Bush Pump type B. This water pump was designed attentively, carefully, one might say, to provide villagers in rural Zimbabwe with clean water. It was not particularly heavy and, what is more, painted a in beautiful blue, looked attractive. But, like any piece of technology, it only worked if it was provided with care.Why not call it care? In order for the pump to provide clean water, people in the village had to avoid contaminating its source with excrement.They had to install the pump with a concrete slab surrounding it and to maintain a certain distance between the pump and their latrines.They also had to use their own muscular power to pump. If a bolt came loose, they had to tighten it. If the bolt somehow disappeared, villagers might insert a wooden stick in its place. In one way or another, this pump, however shiny, only worked if its

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particular needs were met by its users – who would only consider doing so if, once working, the pump would meet some of their needs (De Laet and Mol 2000). Previously, we saw that in contexts where the term care inherits the baggage of Sorge, technology and care are in opposition to each other. However, in the examples just presented, be they about pills or pumps, technological tools and caring activities intertwine. Jointly, they make it possible to reach local goals such as not getting pregnant, not dying from HIV, and accessing clean water. In these contexts, discarding all modern technologies to make space for Sorge sounds not just romantic, but frivolous (Pols 2012). The caring at stake resonates instead with the pragmatically oriented Dutch zorgen. And while anthropological studies of medical interventions revealed that pills, if they work, only work thanks to well attuned broader care arrangements, the case of the bush pump illustrated that technological tools themselves require care.

Who cares for whom? As caring is performed across networks, it is not always easy to say who or what does the caring and who or what is being cared for.Take contraception once again.When a woman is on the pill, who/what is doing the caring: the doctor prescribing it, the pill itself, the cleverly designed strip that specifes the days of the month to take it, the bathroom cabinet or the purse that holds it, or the user who remembers to take it? That the action is spread out means that the effectiveness of the network does not depend upon the size of any of its nodes.Take the situation of people with atherosclerosis in their leg vessels.A sizeable team equipped with a good operation theater and a lot of surgical tools may open up their stenosis so that the affected leg no longer hurts when the patients walk.This scenario requires some activity by the patients: they have to go to the doctor, articulate their complaints, submit to all kinds of tests, entrust themselves to the operation team, and do their very best to recover. Despite all this activity, the success of the intervention is only granted to the surgical team.This is different with walking therapy.When people whose legs hurt due to atherosclerosis walk a lot, faithfully, twice a day, for months on end, their complaints signifcantly diminish. As it is not easy to sustain such an effort, most people only do so when they get proper support from a professional. Interestingly, one of the social techniques the professionals deploy to encourage patients is to hide their own efforts. In this case, then, the patient gets all the credit:“Wonderful, you have less pain! You can be proud of that. Nobody did this for you. You have done it, all by yourself ” (Mol 2002b). If it is not always straightforward who is the subject of care, neither is it necessarily clear who is its object. In the Philippines, if mothers care for their children who are coughing, they care, at the same time, for their husbands. They provide their children with cough syrup because their husbands feel embarrassed when their child coughs a lot.The husbands are concerned that others will assume their child’s coughing is a symptom of tuberculosis, which is locally stigmatized as a disease of poverty.They are men: they do not want to appear too poor to see to the needs of

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their families (Whyte, van der Geest, and Hardon 2002). We could, if we wanted, draw upon cases like this to interfere with the divide between structure and agency. Again and again, social scientists have asked whether what people do should be understood as resulting from structures that determine it, or as rooted in their own agency. However, in the practices of care alluded to here, action is shared. It is spread out across all those involved in a network or, if you prefer that term, assemblage (see chapter on assemblage). Like subjects and objects of care, everyone and everything involved in a network or an assemblage may compel, facilitate, limit, and hinder all other parties to it. They may also labor, suffer, proft, enjoy, or engage in some of these activities, in different combinations, at the same time. In the process, they help to give shape and substance to each other (Akrich and Pasveer 2000; Moser 2005). This makes it sometimes diffcult, or even outright impossible, to clearly distinguish subjects and objects of care from each other.Take a caring practice far beyond the confnes of health care – bicycle riding. In a city like Amsterdam, there are so many cyclists that avoiding accidents depends upon their continuously and attentively caring for themselves, their bicycles, and everyone and everything else around. Experienced bicycle riders do this almost by stealth. They yield to cyclists coming from the right, avoid potholes, brake when children appear out of nowhere, and slow down when they approach a crossing.They look other cyclists in the eye when approaching them and coordinate their movements. Less adept riders, such as tourists on rental bikes, have less mastery of these caring techniques, which leads to irritation among the locals and unfortunate accidents, as well. Friction is likewise introduced when electric bikes, moving at higher speeds than traditional ones, make it harder to anticipate imminent choreographies. Hence, bicycle riding depends on the propensities of technological tools, from roads and traffc lights through to bicycles, pedals, brakes, and electrical motors. Equally relevant are the particulars of riders, including their skills or lack thereof. Unless all the elements adapt to all the others, caringly, across their potential tensions, accidents occur (Kuipers 2012).

Tinkering The Heideggerian investment in Sorge was informed by a generalized suspicion of all things modern.Technologies were prominent among modern things but so, too, were techniques. Relating to other people in a trained, professional way, informed by scholarly knowledge, was considered an anathema to “true care,” which was supposed to be authentic and heartfelt. Like love, care could neither be learned nor developed. This suspicion of training may help to explain why Heideggerian Sorge was never particularly welcomed in health care (Pols and Moser 2009).There, after all, caring for other people, in their role of patients, was shaped as a professional endeavor. Acquiring the relevant skills depended upon serious training.Take the task of washing a patient who is bedridden. It is obviously germane to go about this task in a kind way, but kindness is not enough to get it done thoroughly, soothingly, and without hurting the patient. Proper and helpful washing depends on professional techniques for washing (Pols 2006; Moser 2010). Engaging

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in a conversation, likewise, can be done with greater or less trained savviness. It helps to nod while another person talks and repeating her words may also signal listening.That such conversational techniques can be acquired does not make using them any less caring – or even less kind. Social science research into conversations between professionals and patients shows that astute use of appropriate conversational techniques makes exchanges of information more effcient while, at the same time, providing more space for patients’ emotional responses (Bensing 1991; Heritage and Maynard 2006).5 Once again, the theoretical lessons point in two directions. For attentive analysis of health care practices not only suggests that caring may involve the use of techniques but also that conventional understandings of techniques deserved to be amended in the light of lessons learned from caring. Thus far, we have alluded to one element of this: practices in health care undermined the Heideggerian contrast between Sorge, as an authentic and affective way of being in the world, and techne, the attempt to acquire an instrumental grasp on the world with the aid of technologies and/or techniques. Now, we take a further step. For there were also different versions of what “acquiring a grasp” – pursuing a techne – might entail. A particularly infuential contrast was proposed in the early 1960s by the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss (1962). Primitive people, or so Lévi-Strauss contended, try to accomplish things by tinkering, by bricolage.They use materials that are available in their surroundings and put these to work as tools in creative, open, and iterative ways.There is no straight line that leads from where they are to what they hope to achieve. Even their goals may transform along the way. Modern technologies, by contrast, are designed to be linear and progress from A to B.They are a means to an end. To allow for such linear progression, the network upon which technological tools depend has to remain invariable. Remember the example of the car: it only works as a transportation device, if it is part of a network that includes such things as level roads, gasoline, and people who know how to drive. Health care appeared to include not only a plurality of similarly linear techniques but also others, which were far less rigid. Their use seemed to be marked by bricolage: it involved a lot of tinkering.Take the diagnosis of anemia.This may be done in a “modern” laboratory mode, by measuring the level of hemoglobin (Hb) in a person’s blood. If the level of Hb is below a certain threshold, the person has anemia.The laboratory techniques upon which Hb measurement depends form a tight network, which includes a Hb measuring device (large or small, but in either case not useful when it is inaccurate), calibration fuids (to test if the device is still accurate, but quickly depleted and diffcult to come by in resource-poor settings), clean needles to prick fngers without transmitting infections (relatively expensive and potentially scarce), and educated nurses or technicians (who may have more urgent tasks to accomplish). A demanding network like this may easily fall apart. So-called clinical diagnostic techniques allow for signifcantly more variation. When diagnosing anemia clinically, one may ask patients about their complaints. But if there is no time for that, or if doctor and patient have no shared language, it is not obligatory. Observation may be enough. Lower an eyelid or examine the

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bedding of a patient’s fngernails: if these give the impression of being too pale, the person has anemia.The threshold is not exact; clinical diagnosis is not straightforward. However, since, time and again, there are opportunities to adapt one’s readings, it is fairly robust.The lesson for now is that health care, in which laboratory and clinical techniques are combined, straddles the bricolage/engineering divide and thus undermines its salience (Mol and Law 1994). What is more, it is not only diagnosis that may be a matter of tinkering but treatment as well. Especially in the case of chronic diseases, where there is no endpoint, no cure, patient trajectories are rarely linear. Take as an example life with type 1 diabetes. Since the pancreases of people with this disease do not produce insulin, their cells cannot absorb the sugars that circulate in their blood – sugar needs insulin to move across cell walls. Once this was established in the 1920s, industrial production of insulin took off. People with type 1 diabetes who can afford it, or whose insurance pays for it, now survive thanks to the insulin that they inject into their bodies from the outside. If that sounds like simple engineering, in practice it involves a lot of bricolage.The quantities of carbohydrates one ingests increase one’s blood sugar – but how fast? Engaging in exercise lowers one’s blood sugar – but to what extent? Emotional turmoil also interferes in blood sugar levels – but in which direction? In practice, linearity is an illusion and the precise doses of insulin to inject, the amounts of foods to eat, the number of walks to go on, and so on, have to be adjusted, again and again, with respect to one another.As attaining previously set goals is all but impossible, the self-care of people with type 1 diabetes is a matter of persistent tinkering.The professionals tasked with providing support had better be attentive, versatile, and adaptive, too (Mol and Law 2004; Mol 2008). What or who to blame for the fact that, in health care, modern technologies do not offer the control expected of them but instead require bricolage? Maybe the problem is with the bodies with chronic diseases, which harbor a great many, not quite predictable “variables.” But maybe it is with the unruly lives of the patients, who, quite like other people, acquire and lose jobs, partners, houses, and friends – and face other trials and tribulations. Or the technologies themselves are to blame, if only because every innovation again requires (often unexpected) adaptations.Take as an example the introduction of miniature blood sugar meters, which allowed patients to measure their own blood sugar levels. If previously measurements could only be performed in a laboratory and infrequently, now, or such was the idea, it would become easier for patients to maintain good glucose levels. However, with the opportunity to measure oneself, the target shifted.The cutoff points for normal and high glucose levels signifcantly lowered (Mol 2000). This illustrates that it is not just bodies and lives that come with surprises but technologies as well.This is likewise the case with non-health care technologies.These, too, are unruly, whimsical, and non-linear. And if in health care we call adaptive ways of working caring, perhaps this term is helpful in other domains, too. It might ft situations in which, while control is out of reach, aiming for improvement is nonetheless worthwhile. These are situations in which modern technologies require adaptable, iterative bricolage, and creative, non-linear tinkering (Latour 1996; Law 2002).6

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Juxtapositions Caring blurs the divide between problem-solving styles that are primitive and developed as it may simultaneously involve high-brow technologies and adaptable tinkering. And then there is another, related divided, that caring straddles: that between traditional and modern resources.Take once again the conundrum of living with HIV (Hardon and Moyer 2014).Thanks to a set of high-tech pills, it has become possible to survive the virus’s onslaughts.The pills, however, cause side effects, including skin rashes. In the early 2000s, anthropological inquiries into HIV care in a rural clinic in Uganda revealed that quite a few of the nurses administering care there had HIV themselves.This motivated them in their work and helped them better understand their patients.The nurses were concerned that the pills they took to keep their HIV in check affected their skin.This was a problem, both because the itching was irritating and because the rashes were visible and risked giving away their HIV-positive status. From their patients, the nurses learned about traditional healers in the area, who were treating their skin reactions with local herbs. The guidelines from the Uganda Ministry of Health stipulated that modern medicine should not be mixed with traditional healing. However, the nurses were curious. They tried the herbs and were pleasantly surprised that they indeed soothed the itching. Hence, caringly, in a tinkering mode, they shifted the guidelines to one side.Together with the traditional healers, they developed a cream containing the relevant herbs.This cream assuaged the troubles of all those involved and also helped the nurses keep their HIV status a secret: no longer did a visible skin disorder give them away (Kyakuwa and Hardon 2012; Hardon and Posel 2012). Caring, then, is not about purity but about improving diffcult situations. Nurses who care deftly combine globally used HIV inhibitors and locally crafted creams made from traditional herbs.The blurring of the boundaries between tradition and modernity also works the other way around.These days, traditional herbs are often packaged and marketed as if they were modern medicines (Hardon et al. 2008).An intriguing example of this is Power Magic, a popular neotraditional product in Indonesia, which emulates herbal leaves formerly used for penis enhancement. In Power Magic, the leaves are replaced by a wet tissue to which a concoction of chemicals has been added. Before having sex, men use this tissue to clean their genitals, which they hope will prevent infection and, at least as importantly, prolong their erections. An anesthetic has been added to the solution in which the tissues are soaked so as to have just that effect.The men who use Power Magic think that being a good partner means delaying ejaculation.The women with whom they have sex reported other preferences – more on that in what follows. For now, our point is this: Power Magic is an imbroglio. It pastes together traditional goals (long-lasting erections), new fears (of infection), modern drugs (anesthetics), and shiny, biomedical-looking packaging (Hardon and Idrus 2015). Health care practices in the global North are eclectic as well. In pain treatment in the Netherlands, patients may receive both painkillers and acupuncture; they may be offered counseling as well as yoga (De Langen 2018).And it is not just tradition

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and modernity that are mixed. Modern medicine itself is, despite rationalist dreams of coherence, an amalgam of different styles, approaches, understandings, and ways of doing things.Take the treatment for atherosclerosis in leg vessels mentioned previously. An operation opens up the clogged artery or grafts a bypass, so that blood can fow again and this increases blood pressure in the afficted person’s extremities. Walking therapy does not cause these changes – but it does alleviate the pain that patients feel when walking.Thus, these two treatments do not affect the same object, do not reach the same target. Nevertheless, they are juxtaposed in clinical settings (Mol 2002a). Or, in another example: advanced cancer treatments juxtapose operations that disrupt anatomical structures and remove a tumor from a person’s body, with radiation therapy that kills tumor cells but leaves them in the body, with chemotherapy that kills cells in the process of dividing, with immunotherapy that works by fortifying a patient’s own immunological defenses (Heldal 2010). Theoretical differences about what cancer “is” are pushed to one side and different approaches are combined in practice. This brings to mind the contrast between the grand theories and pragmatic social science approaches at stake in the present volume. Health care practices are not hooked to principled ways of reasoning but orient themselves on the basis of “what works.” This is something from which pragmatist social scientists might take inspiration. Care ethics is certainly marked by it: the book in which Tronto frst outlined this alternative to rule ethics contains many examples taken from nursing (Tronto 1993).There is, however, a caveat. Pragmatism may indeed be a matter of putting principles on a back burner so as to combine insights and resources that “work.” But what are the criteria for “working?”Take those patients with atherosclerosis in their leg vessels. If an operation “works” to improve the blood fow and to increase the blood pressure in a patient’s ankle (relative to that in their arm), while walking therapy “works” to get people to walk without pain – then which of them “works” best? They work in different ways, help to achieve different goals, against different costs, for different people. Rather than one of them being effective and the other not, they have different effects. This is a problem for the kind of pragmatism that assumes that “working” equals attaining a goal that is obvious and goes without saying.7 In practice, goals are rarely self-evident. It is a part of caring to fgure out along the way what might be good to do and to attune to that. And if there are various “goods” at stake simultaneously, as usually there are, caring involves mediating between these. And if things change, if they go better or worse, new adaptations are needed, again and again (Lettinga and Mol 1999; Struhkamp, Mol, and Swierstra 2009).

What counts as good locally Caring may entail working toward what locally counts as good, but “what locally counts as good” is neither obvious, nor invariable. In the context of health care, this was, at one point, diffcult to articulate. The stakes seemed clear: life had to be defended against death and health was preferable to disease. However, in fnal

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decades of the twentieth century, questions about what is good became highly relevant to health care. For instance, in the context of cancer treatments, nurses started to point out that a few extra days, weeks, or even months are not always benefcial to patients. For if the extra life time comes at the cost of demanding treatments, there is a lot to say for accepting an earlier, quieter, more dignifed death (Klinkenberg et al. 2004). Health, in turn, may well be a great good, but with which parameters of health to reckon? Laboratory parameters may seem best because they are easy to handle, while clinical ones are not numerical and may therefore be deemed to be too vague. But take once again the situation of people with atherosclerosis in their leg. They themselves may be interested frst and foremost in the treatment goal of “no more pain when walking.” However, pain cannot be measured from the outside, only patients themselves have direct access to it.This is why in clinical trials other parameters, such as the blood pressure in the ankle (compared to that in the arm), were given precedence. This means that for quite some time, clinical trials established that walking therapy did not “work.” It only came out as effective in settings where patients’ self-reporting of their pain was suffciently trusted (Mol 2002b). Locally, then, different things may count as good and different goods may suggest different activities. If one of them is prioritized over the others, this may suit all those involved, but it may also give rise to contestation. Hence, engaging in caring does not serve an unequivocal, common good.To think that it does is yet another romantic dream (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Caring practices, like other practices, are rife with tensions.Take electric bicycles: these may well be wonderful for people who have to cover long distances, or whose muscle power has waned, but they make the urban choreography of cycling considerably more diffcult for everyone else. Such tensions are not always readily recognized by all those who share a practice. Some goods all too easily disappear into the background. For instance, in interviews with patients treated for breast cancer, social science researchers found that many of them were truly concerned about the alienation that comes with the loss of all their hair.They told their doctors, but the doctors took no notice. Since the doctors were focused on issues of life and death, they could not quite believe that hair loss was a serious problem for their patients (Pols 2013). And while the men in Indonesia who use Power Magic hope that postponing ejaculation increases their female partners’ pleasure, their partners revealed in interviews that they felt that such prolonged intercourse lasts too long and becomes far too tiring (Hardon and Idrus 2015). Sometimes, different goods are voiced by different people, but people do not always make the difference.8 Circumstances may do so, too. For instance, diagnosing anemia in clinically, by observing eyelids and fngernails, is hard to do if the deviances from the norm are only slight. It is most successful in resource-poor settings where people suffer from severe anemia and where, consequently, the clinical signs are more pronounced. It also helps that overdiagnosis of anemia is no drama: iron pills are cheap and have few side effects. Laboratory diagnosis, by contrast, may be good in that it offers greater precision, but in resource-poor settings, this

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good is easily outweighed by the risk of passing on malaria or HIV through unclean needles (Mol and Law 1994).This indicates that different goods may be tied to different possible courses of action. Likewise, one good may be impeded by another. For instance, if one is a nurse working in Uganda, keeping one’s HIV status a secret is a good in that it helps with being accepted as a professional nurse and avoid stigmatization. At the same time it is a bad, in that it impedes sharing experiences with one’s HIV patients and in this way gain their trust (Kyakuwa and Hardon 2012). Additionally, what stands out as a good tends to change over the course of time. In the 1990s, the Zimbabwean state donated bush pumps with two goals: to provide villages with clean drinking water and to strengthen state power.Two decades later, things had changed.While for villagers clean water was still a good, it was no longer a public concern. It had been privatized and clean water was now on offer via marketable, patented products meant for individual use, such as the LifeStraw® (Redfeld 2016). Investigating what locally counts as good in care practices has intellectual links with another social science conversation: that concerning qualifcation, valuation, or valuing (Kuipers and Franssen, this volume). Researchers in this feld ask how it is that situations or entities come to be classifed as either good or bad as a part of complex social and material practices.The ensuing research has a lot to offer to studies of health care practices, but lessons may also travel in the other direction. For example, the lesson that verbal judgments may be supplemented, or replaced, with silently enacted appreciations (Pols 2005). Or that other one, that instead of passing judgments, active attempts at improvement may count for most (Mol 2006). In the Netherlands, the prioritization of intervening over knowing was strikingly apparent when a treatment for HIV was not yet available. While in many other countries, the task of not spreading HIV was imposed upon those who were infected, in the Netherlands everyone was warned to protect themselves.The virus was taken to be a threat to manage as a collective. Even those who were “at risk” were not advised to get themselves tested. What, after all, was the relevance of knowing one’s HIV status if there was no treatment, nothing one could do? Seeking a diagnosis was only encouraged once HIV inhibitors entered the scene (Duyvendak 1995).9 This indicates that performing good/bad divisions is not quite the same as passing judgment. Instead, good/bad divisions may also be enacted by intervening, by acting against a particular bad and promoting an esteemed good. By caring. This has consequences for researchers interested in valuing. It means that to fnd out “what locally counts as good” asking people about their values, goals, and appreciations may not be the best way to go. Instead, local valuations may as well speak from what people do. It is by taking the pill that women enact their hope to avoid too many pregnancies. It is by crafting a soothing herbal cream that nurses perform an itching skin as obnoxious. It is by taking on board all the effort involved in calibrating doses of insulin, quantities of food eaten, and exercise that people with diabetes show that achieving “a stable blood sugar level” is worthwhile. Similar valuing practices take place beyond health care. It is by being attentive that bicycle riders perform avoiding accidents as important. It is by building long distance roads

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that governments show their reverence of transportation by car. It is by shopping, chopping, and cooking that cooks underscore the marvels of a fne meal. Urban cleaners, whatever their personal preferences, confrm clean as a good as they take rubbish out of bicycle racks and swipe streets. Likewise, it is by writing texts that social scientists celebrate extensive refection and attentive tinkering with words.

To conclude Concepts are meant to be tools.They should not impose themselves on the analyst but serve the analysis. Here, we have taken you through various iterations of the concept caring with which we have worked for decades, fnding it ever more inspiring.Although most of our examples came from research into health care, our concern is not simply with this societal domain. It is rather with caring: a particular way of engaging with self, others, and surroundings that has been fostered within that domain, but is equally relevant elsewhere. Even in settings where so far the term “caring” is rarely used, it may well serve your analysis – give it a try.The version of caring that we offer here, emerging from research in which we happen to have been engaged, is not a focused intervention, performed in a single moment. Instead, it takes a processual shape.This may follow a fairly rigid scenario, or rather be adapted again and again, turning caring into an iterative process of tinkering.The techniques and the knowledges, in the plural, which allow for caring are heterogeneous and, while meant to be transformative, they are also transforming. The activity of caring is not taken on board by isolated individuals but spread out over a wide range of people, tools, and infrastructures. Such caring does not oppose technology but includes it.The technology involved does not offer control but needs to be handled with care – while, in its turn, it is bound to only work as long as it is being cared for. Caring, we suggested, is not rule driven, it is not invested in principles. Instead, it draws on varied resources that may all work, even if in different ways.The diverse bits and pieces that in caring are juxtaposed, do not form a friction-free and harmonious whole.That caring is full of tensions is not an impediment but helps to keep contrasting approaches alive. When diversity is not smothered by uniform standards, a welcome reservoir of alternative possibilities is available when adaptations are required. In this context, foregrounding ways of working that tend to remain hidden is not criticism so much as a contribution. It is its own kind of care, since it constitutes an attempt at improvement. It invites into the situation an adjustment or an alternative, something that might work to foster this or that good. But which good? What is good – here, now? Attempts to put the various goods pertinent to caring practices into words tend to reveal that they diverge. More tensions. Added to that, caring activities are rarely just good. Effects tend to be accompanied with side effects, upsides with downsides. Good results may have tragic edges. But while many problems are chronic and do not go away, one way of living with them is often preferable to another. Added to that, even if improvements do not materialize, it may be worthwhile to keep trying. Again. And again (Dányi 2020). All of which means that the pragmatic celebration of “what works,”

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while preferable to fxed laws and rigid principles, only goes so far. What works for whom, in what way, under what circumstances, in which respect – there is invariably much to detail and explore.This cannot simply be done once and for all, for what is hoped for is not necessarily achieved and what is achieved is likely to include unpleasant surprises.What is, and what is not, good or bad, or both, never achieves stillness. Such is caring. That is to say: this is where we are now with this term. We are curious to see where it may take you, and where you may take it, if you run with this fuid concept, and, by putting it to work in your own research, enrich it.

Notes 1 Tronto, working in the US, suggests that the state would do well to take inspiration from “domestic” kinds of care. However, in the Dutch setting, where the state actually uses caring tropes as a policy instrument, this invites the criticism that the caring state is subtly disciplining (De Wilde and Duyvendak 2016). 2 The particular way in which the English word “care” combines taking care of and caring about is detailed in Fisher and Tronto (1990), among others. By contrast, the French term soin translates caring for but not caring about. French feminists who appreciate the polyvalent English care have thus imported “care,” untranslated, into their otherwise French texts. See Paperman (2013), Brugère (2017). 3 For another striking case of such nostalgia and the concomitant ideas about where caring is located, see also Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy (2011). 4 See also De Swaan (1988). In the 1980s, one of us reconstructed Dutch debates about the verzorgingsstaat and the failings of mothers: there were striking parallels – from concerns in the 1950s about over-caring mothers whose sons remain weaklings and never grow up into adults, through to concerns in the 1970s about mothers who discipline their offspring with hardly visible, but all the more vicious, soft power (Mol 1987). 5 This stretches out into relational techniques that are not quite conversational but that, even if wordless, non-verbal, may be trained and are far from pre-cultural. See Mol, Moser, and Pols (2010). 6 Since technological artifacts designed to allow for bricolage are more adaptable, they manage to reach places that differ from those in which and for which they were developed. See again De Laet and Mol (2000) and also Benouniche, Zwarteveen, and Kuper (2014). 7 There is a marked difference here between the English language tradition of pragmatism that historically emerged in relation to fairly obvious problem/solution pairs and the French language pragmatist sociology that, from its start, grappled with the coexistence of different worlds or economies of worth. See Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), Dodier (1993). 8 There are also diffcult “trade offs” – or rather tragedies – in animal care – where potentially infected individuals are sometimes killed in the hope of thus saving larger herds. See Law 2010. 9 For the French situation, see Dodier (2015).The issue of how health care practices differ between countries, or regions, or modes of insurance, and so on, is an intriguing one in its own right. For a good example of how this may be analyzed, see Pasveer and Akrich (2001).

Literature Abrahamsson, Sebastian, and Endre Dányi. 2019.“Becoming Stronger by Becoming Weaker: The Hunger Strike as a Mode of Doing Politics.” Journal of International Relations and Development 22: 882–98.

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Akrich, Madeleine. 1992. “The De-Scription of Technical Objects.” In Shaping Technology/ Building Society, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law, 215–24. Cambridge: MIT Press. Akrich, Madeleine, and Bernike Pasveer. 2000. “Multiplying Obstetrics:Techniques of Surveillance and Forms of Coordination.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 21: 63–83. Benouniche, Maya, Margreet Zwarteveen, and Marcel Kuper. 2014. “Bricolage as Innovation: Opening the Black Box of Drip Irrigation Systems.” Irrigation and Drainage 63(5): 651–58. Bensing, Jozien. 1991.“Doctor-Patient Communication and the Quality of Care.” Social Science & Medicine 32(11): 1301–10. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. 2006. On Justifcation: Economies of Worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Both, Rosalijn. 2015. “Emergency Contraceptive Use in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Challenging Common Assumptions About Young People’s Contraceptive Practices.” Reproductive Health Matters 23(45): 58–67. Bowden, Peta. 2000. “An ‘Ethic of Care’ in Clinical Settings: Encompassing ‘Feminine’ and ‘Feminist’ Perspectives.” Nursing Philosophy 1(1): 36–49. Brannelly,Tula. 2006.“Negotiating Ethics in Dementia Care:An Analysis of an Ethic of Care in Practice.” Dementia 5(2): 197–212. Brugère, Fabienne. 2017. L’éthique du ‘care’: Que sais-je? [The Ethics of Care:What Do I Know?] Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Corbin, Juliet, and Anselm Strauss. 1988. Unending Work and Care: Managing Chronic Illness at Home. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Dányi, Endre. 2020.“Búskomor Politics: Practicing Critique in the Ruins of Liberal Democracy.” In On Other Terms: Interfering in Social Science English, edited by Annemarie Mol and John Law, 96–108. Sociological Review Monograph. London: Sage Publications. De Laet, Marianne, and Annemarie Mol. 2000.“The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology.” Social Studies of Science 30(1): 225–63. De Langen, Maja. 2018. Interactions with Persistent Pain: Knowing and Enacting the Painful Body. MA thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. De Swaan,Abram. 1982. De mens is de mens een zorg: Opstellen 1971–1981 [One Human Is the Object of Care of Another Human: Essays 1971–1981]. Amsterdam: Meulenhof. De Swaan, Abram. 1988. In Care of the State: Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe and the USA in the Modern Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. De Wilde, Mandy, and Jan Willem Duyvendak. 2016.“Engineering Community Spirit:The Pre-Figurative Politics of Affective Citizenship in Dutch Local Governance.” Citizenship Studies 20(8): 973–93. Dodier, Nicolas. 1993. “Action as a Combination of ‘Common Worlds.’” The Sociological Review 41(3): 556–71. Dodier, Nicolas. 2015. Leçons politiques de l’epidémie de sida [Political Lessons of the AIDS Epidemic]. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Duyvendak, Jan Willem. 1995.“De Hollandse aanpak van een epidemie: Of waarom Act Up! in Nederland niet kon doorbreken” [The Dutch Way of Handling an Epidemic: Or Why Act Up! Could Not Emerge in the Netherlands]. Acta Politica 2: 189–214. Elias, Norbert. 1978. What Is Sociology? New York: Columbia University Press. Fisher, Berenice, and Joan Tronto. 1990. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring.” In Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, edited by Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson, 35–62.Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1977. “In a Different Voice:Women’s Conceptions of Self and of Morality.” Harvard Educational Review 47(4): 481–517. Habermas, Jürgen. 2015 [1981]. The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and Systems, a Critique of Functionalist Reason. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

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Hardon, Anita. 1997.“Women’s Views and Experiences of Hormonal Contraceptives:What We Know and What We Need to Find Out.” In Beyond Acceptability: Users’ Perspectives on Contraception, edited by T.K. Sundari Ravindran, et al., 68–77. London: Reproductive Health Matters for the World Health Organization. Hardon, Anita, Alice Desclaux, Marc Egrot, Emmanuelle Simon, Evelyne Micollier, and Margaret Kyakuwa. 2008. “Alternative Medicines for AIDS in Resource-Poor Settings: Insights from Exploratory Anthropological Studies in Asia and Africa.” Journal Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 4: 16. Hardon,Anita, and Hans-Jörg Dilger. 2011.“Special Issue Introduction: Global AIDS Medicines in East African Health Institutions.” Medical Anthropology 30(2): 136–57. Hardon, Anita, and Nurun Ilmi Idrus. 2015. “Magic Power: Changing Gender Dynamics and Sex-Enhancement Practices Among Youths in Makassar, Indonesia.” Anthropology & Medicine 22(1): 49–63. Hardon, Anita, and Eileen Moyer. 2014. “Editorial. Anthropology of AIDS: Modes of Engagement.” Medical Anthropology 33(4): 255–62. Hardon,Anita, and Deborah Posel. 2012.“Editorial Introduction: Secrecy as Embodied Practice: Beyond the Confessional Imperative.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 14: 1–13. Hardon, Anita, et al. 2007. “Hunger, Waiting Time and Transport Costs: Time to Confront Challenges to ART Adherence in Africa.” AIDS Care 19(5): 658–65. Hardon, Anita, et al. 2019. “Sexual and Reproductive Self Care Among Women and Girls: Insights from Ethnographic Studies.” British Medical Journal 365: L1333. Heldal, Frode. 2010. “Multidisciplinary Collaboration as a Loosely Coupled System: Integrating and Blocking Professional Boundaries with Objects.” Journal of Interprofessional Care 24(1): 19–30. Heritage, John, and Douglas W. Maynard. 2006. “Problems and Prospects in the Study of Physician-Patient Interaction: 30 Years of Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 32: 351–74. Herzlich, Claudine, and Janine Pierret. 1984. Malades d’hier, malades d’aujourd’hui: de la mort collective au devoir de guérison [The Sick of Yesterday, the Sick of Today: From Collective Death to the Obligation to Heal]. Paris: Payot. Hochschild, Arlie. 1989. The Second Shift:Working Families and the Revolution at Home. London: Penguin. Hochschild, Arlie. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Honig, Bonnie. 1994. “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home.” Social Research 61(3): 563–97. Klinkenberg, Marianne, Dick Willems, Bregje Onwuteaka-Philipsen, Dorly Deeg, and Gerrit van der Wal. 2004. “Preferences in End-of-Life Care of Older Persons: After-Death Interviews with Proxy Respondents.” Social Science & Medicine 59(12): 2467–77. Kuipers, Giselinde. 2012.“The Rise and Decline of National Habitus: Dutch Cycling Culture and the Shaping of National Similarity.” European Journal of Social Theory 16(1): 17–35. Kulick, Don, and Jens Rydström. 2015. Loneliness and Its Opposite: Sex, Disability, and the Ethics of Engagement. Durham: Duke University Press. Kyakuwa, Margaret, and Anita Hardon. 2012. “Concealment Tactics Among HIV-Positive Nurses in Uganda.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 14(1): 123–33. Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis, or, the Love of Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Law, John. 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience. Durham: Duke University Press. Law, John. 2010. “Care and Killing: Tensions in Veterinary Practice.” In Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, edited by Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols, 57–72. Berlin:Transcript.

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Law, John, and Solveig Joks. 2018 “Indigeneity, Science, and Difference: Notes on the Politics of How.” Science,Technology, & Human Values 44(3): 424–47. Lettinga, Ant, and Annemarie Mol. 1999. “Clinical Specifcity and the Non-Generalities of Science.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 20(6): 517–35. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind]. Paris: Plon. Mol, Annemarie. 1987.“Eet mama ons op? En andere verhalen over moedertje staat” [Does Mama Gobble Us Up? And Other Stories About Mother State]. Groniek 97: 9–25. Mol, Annemarie. 2000. “What Diagnostic Devices Do:The Case of Blood Sugar Measurement.” Theoretical Medicine Medicine and Bioethics 21: 9–22. Mol, Annemarie. 2002a. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2002b. “Cutting Surgeons,Walking Patients: Some Complexities Involved in Comparing.” In Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, edited by John Law and Annemarie Mol, 218–57. Durham: Duke University Press. Mol,Annemarie. 2006.“Proving or Improving: On Health Care Research as a Form of SelfRefection.” Qualitative Health Research 16(3): 405–14. Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge. Mol,Annemarie, and Marc Berg. 1994.“Principles and Practices of Medicine.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18(2): 247–65. Mol, Annemarie, and John Law. 1994. “Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology.” Social Studies of Science 24(4): 641–71. Mol, Annemarie, and John Law. 2004. “Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies:The Example of Hypoglycaemia.” Body & Society 10(2–3): 43–62. Mol,Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols. 2010.“Care: Putting Practice into Theory.” In Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, edited by Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols, 7–27. Berlin:Transcript. Moser, Ingunn. 2005. “On Becoming Disabled and Articulating Alternatives: The Multiple Modes of Ordering Disability and Their Interferences.” Cultural Studies 19(6): 667–700. Moser, Ingunn. 2010.“Perhaps Tears Should Not Be Counted But Wiped Away? On Quality and Improvement in Dementia Care.” In Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, edited by Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols, 277–300. Berlin: Transcript. Paperman, Patricia. 2013. Care et sentiments [Care and Feelings]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Pasveer, Bernike, and Madeleine Akrich. 2001.“Obstetrical Trajectories.” In Birth by Design: Pregnancy, Maternity Care, and Midwifery in North America and Europe, edited by Raymond DeVries, Sirpa Wrede, Edwin van Teijlingen, and Cecilia Benoit, 229–42. London: Routledge. Pols, Jeannette. 2005. “Enacting Appreciations: Beyond the Patient Perspective.” Health Care Analysis 13(3): 203–21. Pols, Jeannette. 2006.“Washing the Citizen:Washing, Cleanliness and Citizenship in Mental Health Care.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 30(1): 77–104. Pols, Jeannette. 2012. Care at a Distance: On the Closeness of Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Pols, Jeannette. 2013 “Through the Looking Glass: Good Looks and Dignity in Care.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 16(4): 953–66. Pols, Jeannette, and Ingunn Moser. 2009.“Cold Technologies Versus Warm Care? On Affective and Social Relations With and Through Care Technologies.” Alter: European Journal of Disability Research 3(2): 159–78. Porter, Elisabeth J. 2006.“Can Politics Practice Compassion?” Hypatia 21(4): 97–123.

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Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rathgeber, Eva. 1996.“Women, Men, and Water-Resource Management in Africa.” In Water Management in Africa and the Middle East: Challenges and Opportunities, edited by Eglal Rached, Eva Rathgeber, and David Brooks, 49–69. Ottawa: IDRC. Redfeld, Peter. 2016. “Fluid Technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw® and Microworlds of Humanitarian Design.” Social Studies of Science 46(2): 159–83. Rose, Nikolas, and Peter Miller. 2013. Governing the Present:Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2011. Spheres Trilogy: An Investigation of Humanity’s Engagement with Intimate Spaces. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Struhkamp, Rita,Annemarie Mol, and Tsjalling Swierstra. 2009.“Dealing with In/Dependence: Doctoring in Physical Rehabilitation Practice.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 34(1): 55–76. Ticktin, Miriam I. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries:A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press. Tronto, Joan. 2013. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York: New York University Press. Watters, Charles. 2007. “Refugees at Europe’s Borders: The Moral Economy of Care.” Transcultural Psychiatry 44(3): 394–417. Weeks, Kathi. 2011. Feminism, Marxism, Anti-Work Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Whyte, Susan, Sjaak van der Geest, and Anita Hardon. 2002. Social Lives of Medicines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

12 MAKING HOME Paolo Boccagni and Jan Willem Duyvendak

Introduction In both anthropology and sociology, many scholars have dealt with shifting boundaries between the formal and informal, the private and the public, and the domestic and the extra-domestic. And more often than not, they did not deal with these dichotomies just descriptively; they used them in a highly normative way.The obvious starting point here is Sennett’s observation in The Fall of Public Man that “private emotions” have taken over the public domain:“Confusion has arisen between public and intimate life; people are working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning” (1977, 5). But these impersonal meanings – in the eyes of many urban sociologists the cornerstone of civilized urban behavior – tend to disappear in times in which personal meanings take over the public realm. The very ordinary scene of people who speak loud on their mobile phones in any public space, bringing into the common realm more or less intimate aspects of their private lives, is a powerful symbol of this long-standing development. Sennett’s objections against the “tyranny of intimacy” grew out of his concern that the dominance of personal emotions would cause “dead public space.”Yet, whether these private practices do result in the “end” of the public space is an empirical question, which calls for original investigation (Koch and Latham 2013). Many sociologists share Sennett’s position that the blurring of private and public is possibly a negative development. Most of them though, most famously Jürgen Habermas (1981) in Europe and Arlie Hochschild (1979) in the US, do not think that the private is colonizing the public, but rather the other way around: the “system” – the market and/or the state – are penetrating deeper and deeper into people’s private places, their homes. A variety of questions related to the commodifcation of everyday lifestyles and tastes, or to the “intrusion” of public offcers

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(e.g., health and care workers) into domestic environments, can be researched along these lines. In this scenario it is not so much the public that is disappearing but the private, or rather, the distinction between the two. How far the private versus public distinction holds, and in which domains, is a question that can be empirically addressed by investigating what exactly people bring from the private into the public, and the other way around.

A bridge across the private-public divide: home and homing The complex and ambiguous interplay between the private and the public can be helpfully revisited, in our view, through the notions of home and homing. Sociologically, home stands not only for one or more distinctive places but also for a meaningful social relationship being enacted with(in) them, with all of the aggregate consequences in inter-group relations and societally (Dovey 1985; Kusenbach and Paulsen 2013; Lloyd and Vasta 2017). As a place, home is more obviously understood as synonym with, but not fully reducible to, house and dwelling (Coolen and Meesters 2012). Studying home as a private space means de-naturalizing and researching anew the taken for granted backdrop of our everyday lives, as long as we have at least one. In practice, studying the “private side” of home involves at least four distinct domains.The frst has to do with the social and cultural variation in infrastructures and patterns of domesticity. The functional and symbolic ways of differentiating domestic interiors, together with more “objective” indicators (e.g., house tenure, infrastructural quality, overcrowding, etc.), are a mirror of broader societal arrangements. In a nutshell, they display and reproduce class-based, gendered, and racialized inequalities, as well as values, tastes, and lifestyles (Blunt and Dowling 2006). Another research area, at a deeper and more micro-level, involves the study of material culture and the social practices associated with it: how the artefacts people select and use, and the ways they decorate their domestic spaces, embody not only their tastes but also their individual and family alignments, identities, and memories over time (Miller 2001). In the third place, researching home as a private space leads to appreciate the lived experience of the built environment: how certain housing arrangements and conditions are constructed as more or less conducive to “positive” emotions such as privacy, intimacy, or comfort, for different arenas of dwellers (Atkinson and Jacobs 2016). Last, in-depth research can be done on the fne-grained bases of family life and day-to-day social reproduction. Studying domestic routines and cultures is also a way of unveiling the underlying division of care labor along gender and generational lines. In this sense, once again, what happens inside the home mirrors more or less unequal social arrangements on larger scales. It also paves the way for their reproduction (Hochschild 1979). As a social experience, however, home is not fundamentally defned by any particular location. It is rather based on a tentative and emplaced attribution of special emotions to specifc socio-spatial settings. In this optic, as an emplaced set of social

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relations, home need not overlap fully with the dwelling(s) we inhabit. Instead, it can also involve the public sphere, as long as more or less selective and ephemeral “portions” of it are made home-like by particular individuals or social groups, often on a temporary basis and possibly in contentious ways. Whether one refers to the private domain or to the public one, our research suggests that three emplaced emotions are particularly critical to the contextdependent effort of homemaking: feeling secure, as a feeling of material and personal protection, but also as an “ontological” experience of order and continuity in external reality; feeling familiar, what may stem from extended and routinized interaction with a setting (and possibly its inhabitants) over time; and a feeling of control over one’s day-to-day life circumstances and the social environments underlying them. In all of these dimensions, home can be appreciated less as a state of things than, phenomenologically, a tentative achievement – a matter of aspirations and claims. It follows that, as a category of analysis, home designates not only a distinct entity but also a set of practices that are expected to substantiate it over time.We propose to frame this process as homing. Relative to homemaking, this notion emphasizes not only the socio-material practices through which a sense of home is reproduced but also the variable constellations of cognitions, emotions, and moralities that inform them over time, in light of the assets available to individuals and social groups and of the structure of opportunities which they face (Boccagni 2017). Furthermore, the discursive category of “home” is a powerful social representation which crystallizes historically and culturally shaped moral values, including those related to what a good home should mean and what feeling-at-home should be like (Kaika 2004). What is evoked and contested as home in this sense can embrace a multiplicity of scales, ranging from a street to a neighborhood, a nation, and beyond, even through virtual and diasporic spaces. The public discourse of home intersects with deep-rooted representations, along ethno-national, class, or religious lines, regarding to whom public space (or meaningful parts of it) belongs; who is entitled or legitimated to participate in it, for what purposes, in what terms; how far the public domain can be occupied and appropriated, literally or metaphorically. From the most visible side of public rallies and protests to more mundane forms of everyday interaction, majority-minority interactions are often played out along these lines, whether based on immigrant background or other salient markers including age, religion, and sexual orientation. Once home is revisited as a processual and ever-reversible achievement, involving also the public space, the private-public interface can be reframed as a porous and evolving continuum, rather than a dichotomy; indeed, as a matter of “thresholds of domesticity” being negotiated and selectively crossed in everyday life, under different conditions and positions of power (Boccagni and Brighenti 2017). Who can feel more or less at home in the public space, depending on the person’s “ftting” into what is considered to be “acceptable” and “normal,” one’s vulnerability, resources, and opportunities to manifest him- or herself ? This, we argue, makes homemaking in the public a signifcant terrain to explore majority-minority relations as mutual views, needs and expectations that are negotiated vis-à-vis shared

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living environments. The focus of analysis shifts from the abstract and “groupist” terms of identity politics to the terrain of everyday practices, as ways of enacting contextually-oriented views of home. Such practices, however, are not necessarily without conficts. Whereas home in the private is more easily secured – at least for most of us – in terms of the previously-mentioned characteristics of security, familiarity, and control, this is much more of an embattled and unstable endeavor in the public space.

On the circulation and entanglements of home Analyzing the historical evolution of the notion of home and its equivalents across languages, as markers of humans’ need to exert attachment and control over space, would call for a study in itself (Rybczynski 1986; Rykwert 1991; Somerville 1997). Importantly, the genealogy of the home as distinct and autonomous domestic space for the household is way more recent than that of home as such.While the predominance of the home as private dwelling dates back to the last couple of centuries in most Western countries, some form of special association with particularly meaningful and emotionalized settings, domestic or otherwise, is far preexisting to that. It can actually be found all across human cultures (Birdwell-Pheasant and LawrenceZuniga 1999). For sure, the terms that parallel “home” in other languages are culturally specifc. Nonetheless, the underlying social experience has some degree of generalization. Home,Agnes Heller said, is “perhaps the oldest tradition of the homo sapiens, privileging one, or certain, places against all the others.” It is indeed “one of the few constants of the human condition” (Heller 1995, 1–2). Less straightforward, and perhaps more intriguing, is the conceptual diffusion of home as a specifc research topic.This can be appreciated along an interdisciplinary continuum between the “extremes” of environmental psychology and architecture, starting from seminal studies such as Altman and Werner (1985) and Benjamin and Stea (1995). In-between, research on the relevance and implications of home as a concept can be found in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and geography, as much as in planning and urban studies.The same analytical focus is shared across as diverse realms as local welfare, health, and social care, housing, material culture, everyday life, emotions, and belonging.The circulation of home as a social analytics can be appreciated at many levels, well beyond the sheer (and increasing) number of dedicated publications: the infuence of international networks and conferences (ISA’s RC 21 and RC43 being two cases in point), the start-up of largescale dedicated projects (such as Elsevier’s International encyclopedia of housing and home [Smith 2012]), the institutionalization of research units (e.g., Queen Mary’s Centre for Studies of Home) and journals (e.g., Home Cultures).At least in some countries, such as the UK and the Netherlands,“home studies” is almost institutionalized as an interdisciplinary research area in itself. How home has come to be recognized as a major, interdisciplinary, and ultimately contentious research topic is not self-evident. In fact, there is much of a merit in inquiring how home “travels” as a concept, and what accounts for its

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variable infuence in national academic and public debates. As its interdisciplinary diffusion suggests (cf. Blunt and Dowling 2006; Duyvendak 2011, 2017; Boccagni 2017), the success story of home as a concept relies on many factors. It does not have simply to do with the omnipresence of home (or its language equivalents) as a category of practice, with its loose conceptual boundaries (making it suitable for different uses), or with its deeply normative underpinnings. More fundamentally, researching home facilitates an interplay of meaningful contributions from different disciplines on conceptual and empirical issues that cut across their respective domains. Processes of social inclusion (on multiple scale), the working balance between the private and the public, the right and potential to appropriate and control space, the discourses and practices of boundary-making between inside(rs) and outside(rs), or the everyday (domestic) reproduction of identity, belonging and inequality are all cases in point. To be sure, the circulation of home as a category of analysis is far from even or homogeneous. Rather, it has resulted in remarkable forms of segmentation, in at least four respects (cf. Boccagni, Pérez-Murcia, and Belloni 2020). First of all, along disciplinary lines: much more literature on home has so far been produced in social and cultural geography, and to some extent in anthropology, than in sociology. Along national lines, moreover, the literature on home is disproportionately more widespread in Europe, and to a lesser extent in Canada and Australia, than in the US. In the third place, there is a remarkable fragmentation in terms of research scale: micro-accounts based on very local and specifc case studies by far outnumber research with a broader and comparative scope.Another axis of segmentation has to do, more importantly, with the tendency of much literature to reproduce the commonsense distinction between house and home, rather than focusing on their interaction. Generally speaking, the feld of housing and urban studies is not so open to “qualitative,” relational, emotionally, and biographically embedded understandings of home, unless by discarding them as a secondary matter of culture (or of “cultural studies”). There are exceptions, of course, including research on the lived experiences of dwelling spaces, in light of their affordances (Clapham 2011). Another exception comes from the literature on homelessness and severe deprivation, where the question of what home is or should be like is made more conspicuous and crucial by its absence (Kellett and Moore 2003; McCarthy 2018). As remarkable are the entanglements of home, or the context- (and path-) dependencies of the ways of viewing and using it. Even when it is assumed as a category of analysis, home cannot be fully disjointed from its pervasive and highly diverse use as a category of practice, under the infuence of different linguistic, national, or socio-cultural backgrounds. Language, therefore, is the most obvious terrain of entanglement of home. The meaning of this concept in English, and its distinction from house or dwelling, is not fully reproducible in other languages in which research is done, literature is produced, and home as social experience of a special place is negotiated day after day.This may be an issue for comparative research, or even only for transnational dialogue among researchers, whenever different language backgrounds are involved.

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Indeed, the semantic feld created by the ways of using the correspondents of “home” across languages, with the underlying meanings and functions, would make for a research subject in itself. Against this background, the conceptual transition from home to homing aims precisely to enlarge the scope for comparative analysis. The focus should then be less on home as a noun, or a corresponding object, than on a set of practices and interactions associated with it: individuals’ (and groups’) ongoing and contentious negotiation of a sense of security, familiarity, and control toward particular places, in light of the views, emotions, and moralities associated with them. Another major entanglement involves the values associated with home. The predominance of positive or utterly romanticized views of home, in the common sense, makes it complex to critically engage with the potentially negative aspects of home as a real place. Likewise, the institutionalized privacy embedded in the home tends to invisibilize its “dark sides” for different dwellers. In itself, the coexistence of a plurality of values and moralities underpinning the same notion is not an analytical issue, nor is it specifc to home.Yet, the over-prevalence of normatively positive tones obscures a simple and fundamental point: whether a specifc (domestic) environment is constructed as home-like indeed, by whom, and at the expense of whom else, is an empirical question. Having said that, the gamut of values associated with home cannot be reduced to the beliefs and mind frames of specifc individuals. It is rather the product of historically institutionalized views of house, dwelling, and domesticity under a variety of infuences, including those of public policy. Questions such as the relative importance and “deservingness” of home ownership, the visibility and accessibility of the domestic environment from the outside, or the functional and symbolic differentiation within the domestic space can be studied only against the background of national, classed, and gendered genealogies of the idea of home. There is little universal, in this sense, in what a good-enough home should look like. Some more remarks can also be made on the ways of circulation and entanglement of the concept of homing. In this case, the circulation can be traced back from an extended research tradition in biology and natural sciences.This basically regards an innate behavior that leads exemplars of several animal species to go back to their areas of origin at some point in the life course.The same notion has been increasingly adopted, whether analytically or metaphorically, in migration, diasporic, and cultural studies. Common across these fgurative uses is a somewhat unarticulated yearning to return to a past point of reference. In this understanding, “home” is something ascriptive – what lies at the origin and might, should, or by instinct is recovered. Instead, the constructive and open-ended notion of homing which we advance here has to do with the ideal and future-oriented dimension of home. On the other hand, the entanglements of homing have to do with its exclusive use in the Anglophone world but also with substantively different ways of employing this notion in different disciplinary domains, with little or no interaction between them.

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A privileged research feld on the making of home: migration and majority-minority relations Migration, as a social experience, is a good example of a phenomenon than can be better understood in terms of homing. From the side of receiving societies, immigrant settlement tends to enhance, by reaction, the symbolic and even physical boundaries of what used to be home – a widespread psycho-social mechanism with major political implications.What is often at stake is less home as a domestic space than a sense of not feeling at home anymore in the street, district, or even nation by natives because of the settlement of strangers (Duyvendak,Tonkens, and Geschiere 2016). It is also in this way, by reaction to external “pressures” such as those induced by migration, that the notion of home starts to travel to scales other than the dwelling. Cities and nations at large are conceptualized as homes, by extrapolating the supposed characteristics of the private home into the public space. Interestingly, migrants tend to experience a parallel “scaling out” of the boundaries of home vis-à-vis their countries of origin, which tend to be framed as home altogether, particularly among frst-generation newcomers (e.g., Wiles 2008). A specular confation underpins diaspora-reaching appeals, whereby emigration countries fatter emigrants’ nostalgic allegiance to the national home in order to attract their money and human capital investments (Skrbis 2008; Ralph 2009; Boccagni 2014). Majority and minority relations may differ as well regarding processes of identifcation with, and appropriation (even control) of, the public sphere: the ways in which, and the reasons why, public space is constructed as more or less home-like, based on the sense of security, familiarity, and control which emerges from the interactions with it. For all of these dimensions, much phenomenological research on the home (e.g., Lawrence 1897) has shown the relevance of length of stay; there is no reason to underplay the infuence of this factor when it comes to home in the public. Long-settled citizens – who often will consider themselves as “natives” – can be expected to associate more easily a sense of home with the outer environment, or with specifc parts of it – streets, shops, parks, etc. Everything else being equal, they are more likely to feel it as homely indeed (or to recall the past time when it was perceived as such), and to cultivate a sense of “moral ownership” over it (Kasinitz 2013). However, the process of attaching a sense of home to public space, and possibly to its “quasi-public” (Smets and Watt 2013) and “hybriddomestic” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2017) variants, can involve native majorities and immigrant minorities alike. In fact, it is affected by the distribution of several sociodemographic variables, ethnicity and legal status being only two among them. While the appropriation and appropriability of public space have been extensively addressed in the literature on urban diversity (e.g., Berg and Sigona 2013) and ethnic concentration (e.g., Smets and den Uyl 2008), a major point remains: migration-driven heterogeneity makes the home-likeness of outer environments less a natural fact than a potential outcome of distinctive processes of “domestication”

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(Koch and Latham 2013), and possibly of “privatization” (Kumar and Makarova 2008) and “personalization” (Ley and Duyvendak 2017).

From social analytics to pragmatic inquiry: a threefold categorization for the empirical study of home Based on the conceptual overview in the previous sections, we argue that the negotiation of a sense of home in the public, at the roots of majority-minority relations, can be unpacked at three analytical levels. The processes of making home in the public can be analyzed, in the frst place, in light of the commonsensical ways of framing public space as home, whereby some groups or categories are assumed to be “naturally” belonging there, contrary to others; second, in terms of subjective ways of feeling at home there, if and when a space elicits a sense of home to particular individuals or groups, unlike others; third, by looking at the ways of actively claiming public space as home, whenever majority-minority relations are shaped by claims for territoriality, or for some space to be the exclusive home of some, at the expense of others. Each level deserves elaboration in its own right, even though they are closely related (cf. Hochschild 1979).

Framing public space as home Historical and locally sensitive research shows that the processes whereby a public space is framed as the “natural” home of some groups – typically the mainstream ones – come at the expense of others (Duyvendak 2011).The widespread perception of a legitimate ownership of space is what matters here, even when the notion of home is not explicitly used to name it.There is a merit in unveiling the ways in which one space has been assumed as the belonging of a given group or category – in fact, of different ones, possibly conficting with each other, over time. Much of the ways of framing the public domain as home has to do with deep-rooted power and prestige hierarchies along ethno-national, religious, political, or cultural lines. It can be justifed and made effective through indigeneity and autochthony (e.g., Geschiere 2009), the length of residence, the everyday use of space, or the similarity between a particular social group and the features of the space in question. Nonetheless, there is little obvious or automatic in this implicit form of homelike appropriation of the public. Studying its development over time, in a local or national context, helps denaturalize the confation of home with “upwards scales” such as homeland, nation, or state (Walters 2004; Davies 2014). This enables to deconstruct the ways of associating a group with a public place – and on a larger scale, a population with a bounded territory, as highlighted by the critiques of sedentarism (Malkki 1995) and of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and GlickSchiller 2003). Whatever the determinants, any historically-dependent association between a group and a home-like public space is made far more visible, and somehow questioned, by extended contact between the “home-owner” group and outsiders such

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as newcomer immigrants – more strikingly, when the latter’s socio-demographics and lifestyles diverge, or are perceived to diverge, from the mainstream. Under these circumstances, the predominant commonsensical perception of the public-as-home is brought to more explicit awareness and may call for new ways of legitimation or justifcation. Home-in-the-public turns then into a political, potentially contentious question.

Feeling at home in public space People’s ways of making home in the public have also a strong emotional dimension. Attaching a sense of home to some extra-domestic circumstances is a highly selective, emotionalized, and temporally shifting experience. It is often related to particular settings, as well as to meaningful relationships and/or deep-rooted routines to be enacted there. Studying the emotional side of the ways of making home in the public, therefore, entails doing research at a micro-level, with a biographic and/or ethnographic focus, to trace the processes whereby people and social groups feel at home or not in a given setting. Again, this aspect of home-in-the-public involves long-term residents but also newcomers and other minorities, ethnic or otherwise. For immigrant newcomers, most notably, feeling at home in a public space – if only for a while – may be related to the sense of “controlling” it, or of expressing their own habitual lifestyles with some degree of freedom from the external gaze and control; or, still different, to participate in shared activities (related to leisure, food, religion, etc.) which either connect them with the past home experience, or bridge across the boundaries with majority groups. Under different labels, the potential of public space to nourish a sense of home has been addressed in several case studies on the “domestication” of semi-public spaces among immigrant and ethnic minority groups. A case in point lies in the South Los Angeles urban gardens studied by Hondagneu-Sotelo (2017), where Central American families gather to cultivate “home-like” herbs and plants, thus connecting with their past home life through the activities they perform, their relationship with a “natural” environment and their mutual co-presence. Another example is Law’s (2001) study of Hong Kong’s “Central” – a large public space in which Filipino migrants organize informal food markets which recreate a homelike ambience “through sights, sounds, tastes, aromas” (2001, 263). Plenty of similar instances can be found across migration studies (e.g., Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014, on religious “home-like” rituals being performed in public urban spaces).The typically short temporality of this emplaced sense of home in the public makes it no less meaningful or important to the life experience of those involved. Feeling at home in the public, even for immigrants, is not necessarily bound to specifc settings or events.At least in some metropolitan areas, and for some groups (or central fgures inside them), ethnic neighborhoods, markets, streets, and other spaces of proximity do provide a sense of home, typically mediated by co-ethnic sociability (Botticello 2007). On a larger scale, ethnic enclaves engender a similar effect, as long as they are accessible repositories of “signs, symbols, language, food and artifacts”

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that connect immigrants with the past home-life – often hybridizing it with their new life circumstances, as for Vietnamese-Americans in a Californian “Little Saigon” (Mazumdar et al. 2000). Community development strategies often build on the attachment to particular public spaces and on the investment in them, as provisional and non-exclusive homes.This comes also by opposition to domestic spaces in which patriarchal relations, gender segregation, or domestic violence make some – particularly women and youth – “homeless at home” (Wardhaugh 1999). Several studies of second generation and mixed-race youth in London have provided insights along these lines (Back 2007;Ahmet 2013; Butcher and Dickens 2015).

Claiming public space as home Homemaking in the public, moreover, holds a signifcant political dimension.This is related to the ways in which public space is purposefully claimed as home, particularly from the side of long-term, supposedly original inhabitants. The stake, in majority-minority relations, regards the legitimacy and reception of any claim for public home (hence, its effective impact). This has major political implications. Unsurprisingly, politicians get often involved in the struggle for control over space – be that a street, a park, a market, or any public facility: who do they consider as the legitimate users and symbolic “owners” of the space involved? Do they try to balance the various claims, by regulating the place in such a way that various groups can use it at the same time or sequentially? Or do policymakers side with one of the claimant groups, for instance those considered to be more “native,” “indigenous,” or “autochthonous”? How do various political parties position themselves vis-à-vis different minority groups? And what is the meaning of the rise of populist parties in this context, with their very outspoken ideas about “the right to the soil”? The empirical question is then who claims what, why, when, and what accounts for the claims to be more or less socially and politically accepted and effective. In the case of majority populations, these claims are often considered self-evident. It is only when minorities claim access to the same space, that this “naturalization” becomes visible: the allegedly “neutral” space was de facto “colored” by the majority and not neutral at all. This may somewhat change when places host people of many backgrounds, and the original majority becomes a numerical minority (Vertovec 2007).This pluralization, however, is no guarantee that people will get along better or that the struggle for belonging will be more peaceful, as some “superdiversity” authors seem to suggest (e.g.,Wessendorf ’s notion of “commonplace diversity” (2014)). On the contrary, those who consider themselves to be “native” will feel threatened in their position and may cling to populist and nativist positions (Alba and Duyvendak 2017).

Conclusion Appreciating the various extents and ways in which home is in the public, shows that the question is neither whether the public sphere is “homely” or not, nor

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whether it should be “homely” or not. We believe that the broader sociological tradition in which the colonization of the public by the private (as in the work by Richard Sennett) is the dominant theme, is overly normative and not empirically questionable.Whereas that literature often raises very general claims regarding The Fall of Public Man, or the (market) colonization of the public sphere, we argue for more contextual and fne-grained research on the mixed ways in which public space gets characterized by the domestic. This tends to facilitate feeling at home for some, but for sure not for all, and makes “publicness” less a formal, overarching attribute than a matter of degrees and thresholds to be practically negotiated and selectively crossed. Once analytically projected into the public, home retains its sociological signifcance as a shorthand for all attempts at appropriating space for any purpose, symbolic or instrumental, that goes beyond its transitory and functional use. Public space emerges as a highly differentiated, confictive, and fragmented arena, whenever different attempts and claims for appropriating it are in tension with each other. In such an arena, deep emotions such as those related to home cannot just be “pushed in” via top-down public policy; nor expected to be easily and immediately shared by outsiders such as immigrants, or members of different groups.This is one of the reasons why the appropriation of home-like categories for political purposes is as much a widespread process, as a problematic one – at least for an inclusive political agenda. Home is a fundamentally ambiguous and exclusionary notion. Its consequences as an emotionalized resource for contentious politics are likely to be equally ambiguous. As long as home carries a “positive” subtext of security, familiarity, and control, this is still and only to its insiders. Whatever stands for home is the marker of an insider/outsider divide – hence, home-like to some, but not to most. It follows that home-related claims in the public have different consequences, depending not only on the power balances between the relevant parties but also in light of how extensive and permeable the symbolic walls of a public home actually are. While ethnic-driven diversity is a major source of pluralization of the public space (although the latter was never really homogeneous in the frst place), it also rearticulates the meaning of publicness in still another sense: as a matter of limited overlapping between different, asynchronous ways of appropriating it. The critical question for social cohesion turns out to be not only how far – if at all – people feel at home in the public space, or in selected parts of it. More radically, the question is how far people can simultaneously feel at home within the same spatial arrangements in the public sphere.The actual fragmentation of ways of feeling at home in the public suggests the intermittency and indeed fragility of this emotional experience, as long as it is emplaced at all. However, it also points to a major challenge for social cohesion policy on a local scale. More ethnographic research on the temporalities of homemaking in urban spaces is then as important as the study of the underlying spatialities, to fnd out how light, fexible, and inclusive versions of home-in-the public can be negotiated within majority-minority relations.

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In this research, particularly in analyzing the discourses of framing and claiming home, the work of French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2006) is of great use. Applying their approach in terms of “worlds of justifcation,” it can be argued – see all empirical developments described previously – that there has been a rise in the use of the “domestic world” in public affairs.This becomes crystal clear when looking at the popularity of “home” outside of the home: claiming and framing “home” is justifed in terms of the “domestic world” at the expense of the “civic world.” The cognitive frame of justifcations goes hand in glove with the emotional experience of “feeling home,” following Arlie Hochschild’s idea (1979) that people (want to) feel what they think they have to feel and have the right to feel. A lot of our world today can be understood when we grasp why and when people think they have the right to feel at home.

Acknowledgements The research carried out for this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 678456).

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PART 5

Postface

13 MAKING SENSE OF REALITY TOGETHER Interdisciplinary “Ways of Seeing” Michèle Lamont

Pragmatic Inquiry brings together a remarkably creative transcontinental and interdisciplinary group of researchers who met on a regular basis over four years to explore together novel analytical tools to make sense and account for social reality. It will give the reader a renewed sense of possibilities for capturing social complexity. Each chapter zooms in on a different conceptual device that aims to illuminate relatively unexplored aspects of reality.The authors draw on the work of infuential scholars – for instance, Foucault’s notion of dispositif – but they go beyond them by digging in greater depth, extending and transposing such concepts to new objects. What is gained from the collaboration is also new “ways of seeing,” as authors elaborate novel lenses that capture realities that would not be visible otherwise. For instance, the concept of assemblage (discussed in the chapter by Stavrianakis) captures sets of relationships that “enable.”The concept of qualifcation (in the chapter by Kuipers and Franssen) brings together several lines of inquiry to signifcantly broaden our understanding of valuation. Other papers explore some of the most central and polymorphous analytical tools in contemporary sociology and anthropology, concepts such as feld (Bartley), institution (Cefaï), and narratives (Wertsch and Batiashvili), that rival with “culture,” “structure,” and “agency” as conceptual catchalls. The authors force us to refect on the implicit background assumptions adopted by social scientists who have used such notions.Their chapters disentangle much telegraphic work by parceling out the roles played by shared meanings in solidifying or enabling stable patterns of social relations. Language or meaningmaking play a central role in such background conditions, as illustrated for instance in the piece by Boccagni and Duyvendak on the notion of making home. This is particularly evident when one considers the demarcation of symbolic boundaries separating what is inside and out. Sociologists and anthropologists will put this book to different uses, given the disciplinary conversations against which each group will read the various chapters.

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Consumers of contemporary social science can observe how exceedingly rare it is that books engage both audiences at once.That the contributors have taken up this challenge is, in itself, a remarkable feat. It is made possible by the fact that the volume brings together European scholars who work in institutions where these disciplines fnd themselves in the same administrative unit: at the Centre d’études des mouvements sociaux (CEMS) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. On the American side, the contributors are all affliated with Washington University in St. Louis, which did not have a department of sociology until recently (this department was closed in the nineties).This institutional peculiarity certainly encouraged anthropologists to engage with sociology in order to expose students to disciplinary expertise that no other department was covering. These three institutions have hosted a shared doctoral training program for several years, which facilitated conversation across disciplinary boundaries among the contributors to this volume. This intellectual cosmopolitanism is also evident in the work of each of the four editors – two anthropologists and two sociologists who stand out not only because of their original substantive work but also by their interdisciplinary breadth and transatlantic orientation. This postface highlights the contribution of the volume to the study of cultural processes, which I have written about in a 2014 Socioeconomic Review article titled “What is Missing? Causal Pathways to Inequality” (co-authored with Stefan Beljean and Matthew Clair).This chapter focuses on routine and taken-for-granted unfolding processes by which intersubjective meaning-making takes shapes – processes such as identifcation and rationalization, as well as subtypes such as racialization and stigmatization (for identifcation), and evaluation and standardization (for rationalization) – to this list, one could also add commensuration, domination, modernization, and other processes where symbolic dimensions play a central role. Just as is the case for most of the chapters in this volume, this chapter concerns conditions of possibility that contribute to the structuration of reality and that enable various types of interaction – for instance, as is the case for the concept of dispositif (see Dodier and Barbot’s chapter) whereby a preexisting structure of symbolic and social relationships are necessary conditions for specifc outcomes (here, the mobilization of victims joining forces in legal trials). Both this volume and our paper have the potential to contribute to a growing conversation around “meaningful mechanism models” and related concepts in American sociology.1 But the connections and parallels have yet to be drawn.This is for future research agendas. In what follows I refect on some of the strong points of the collaboration, which are captured under the headings of theorizing, pragmatism, interdisciplinarity, and technology and materiality.

Theorizing Diane Vaughan defnes analogical theorizing, as “a method that compares similar events or activities across different social settings, leads to more refned and

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generalizable theoretical explanations.”2 In the sociological tradition, this type of theorizing has often involved the production of analytical devices, notions such as “frame,”“structural hole,” or “neighborhood effect.” In chapters included here, the notions that are in the limelight include concepts such as demonstration (Rosental), market device (Velthuis), and complexity (Dan-Cohen), which are now the objects of growing attention across social science disciplines. The theorizing featured here emerges from, and is appreciated by, both the French and the American intellectual traditions, and (to a lesser extent) the Dutch tradition of analysis of cultural processes associated with Norbert Elias. Contributors include French scholars who have been deeply infuenced by American tradition (e.g., Daniel Cefaï who has studied Chicago School scholarship for decades, as well as the pragmatism of Dewey, and is associated with the French school of pragmatism). We also have American-trained scholars who draw on the French tradition (e.g., Stavrianakis who studied with the anthropologist Paul Rabinow and uses the notion of assemblage, drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze). Such authors are in conversation, but at a distance, with transnational references, for example by mobilizing concepts borrowed from both French pragmatism (see the chapter by Bowen on justifcation) and Bourdieusian sociology. For his part, Bartley tackles, in detail, the uses of the concept of feld in French sociology and in American (and transnational) neo-institutionalism. Thus, one of the contributions of this book is to reduce ambiguity and conceptual confusion in the multifarious usages of such concepts across the two national intellectual traditions. Some of this is pretty complicated. For instance, Stavrianakis describes an assemblage as “semiotic and bio-technical-political conditions that are background conditions for the existence of something.” Thus, he regards such assemblages as a precondition in the analysis of causality. Also, assemblage is related to the notion of “enablement,” defned as conditions of possibility. It also refers to the “entanglement of relationships” that are coordinated in order for something to take place – for instance the existence of supply chains of capitalism is essential for the circulation of goods. Special attention is paid to what holds the system together. In this descriptive explanatory approach (if explanation is indeed the objective), relations of causality are implicitly approached as conditions of possibility, or as process of structuration of contexts that can give birth to new phenomena This tack is quite antithetical to the standard approach that focuses on “dependent variables” and “independent variables” (or explanans and explanandum), which structures much of American sociology and is at the center of canonical approaches to teaching methods across the social sciences.Although some will think that such an approach to causality lacks in precision and empirical specifcity and is incompatible with falsifcation, there are several reasons why it warrants attention. One of them is a growing call for explanatory and methodological pluralism3 and an increasing concern with “process tracing,” which has been at the center of historical sociology as well as approaches to causality adopted by historical institutionalists in political science.4 What remains to be accomplished is to draw connections between these broader conversations and approaches to explanation adopted in the volume’s chapters

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(but note that several of these tend to be more descriptive than explanatory).The volume could facilitate progress in such a direction and foster more ecumenical approaches to social and cultural explanations across the social sciences. An overly narrow epistemology makes us blind to the paths not taken and encourages us to operate in cumulative literatures that evolve in linear fashion. Bridging traditions may help us identify and move beyond theoretical blind spots and avoid repetitive obsessions with specifc lines of scholarship, down rabbit holes which have rapidly declining payoffs.

Pragmatism What brings these contributors together is also an appreciation for pragmatism, inspired by its European or American variants.The authors are all concerned with various forms of practices and how people make sense of their action together. In the European context, authors emerge from the current post-Bourdieu moment, inspired by ethnomethodology, constructionism, phenomenology, and symbolic interactionism. While the American pragmatists have been more concerned by habits and practice,5 under the infuence of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, French pragmatists have aimed to enrich our understanding of how people frame their action in interaction and produce public justifcation.6 They bring to light a plurality of frames mobilized by actors, which frames are typically in tension with one another. These social scientists bridge moral and political inquiry with the study of everyday life and meaning-making.7 In the US, the infuence of John Dewey is manifest, not only in sociology but also in anthropology.8 The infuence of pragmatism operates through an anthropology of practice which came to replace the focus on culture in post-Geertzian anthropology.9 Here, pragmatism focuses on how people solve practical problems, with a relatively loose commitment to meta-theoretical frameworks, and with a focus on distinctive problems, such as that of “suffering,” which have not captured contemporary sociological imagination.10

Interdisciplinarity As stated previously, another remarkable characteristic of this volume is that it brings together sociologists and anthropologists, a rare occurrence in the contemporary American social sciences landscape where these two disciplines often appear to be set on strongly contrasted paths. Anthropology’s postcolonial guilt led this discipline to focus on questions of power to a greater extent than is the case in sociology.Thus, anthropologists paid attention to post-Foucauldian scholars, such as Giorgio Agamben, who have had little infuence on sociology.11 Also, anthropology has been engaged in internal political debates connected to postcolonialism, which have not affected sociology to the same extent.This latter discipline, which is more multi-method in orientation, has had its own dramas around qualitative methodologies, while a growing number of sociologists working in other subfelds eagerly

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embrace more positivist epistemologies (around experimentation, causal inference, and other topics that may preoccupy economists and political scientists more than anthropologists). Again, one of the virtues of the present volume is to bring these two disciplines together by focusing on their strong points of convergence, and by mobilizing analytical devices to capture social and cultural processes.That the various contributors have different complementary strengths adds immensely to the project and is a condition for its success.

Technology and materiality Some of the chapters are deeply infuenced by the material turn in science and technology studies. It is the case for the chapter on demonstration by Rosental, the chapter on caring by Mol and Hardon, and the chapter on making home by Boccagni and Duyvendak. In the last case, the creation of boundaries around security, inclusion, and familiarity are essential to the cultural process of generating a feeling of “being at home,” which requires rejecting or erecting protection against what is viewed as threatening. In the case of demonstration, techniques and materiality are essential complementary elements in the cultural and social processes of the construction of reality, and they can produce legitimacy (e.g., through street demonstrations) as a secondary effect. Thus, unintended consequences are central to how authors think about causality and explanation. Process-tracing requires identifying such looping effects.A comprehensive approach to explanation will require theorizing how such feedback loops converge with more direct path-dependent processes.

Conclusion To restate, one of the main contributions of this collective volume is to bring together authors concerned with developing our understanding of the conditions that enable the production and diffusion of meaning – for instance, processes such as “caring” and “making home” – that suggest actions toward others that are impregnated with meaning, and that require coordination and qualifcation to result in shared understanding. My hope is that this volume will be read broadly and will contribute to strengthening theoretical conversations across our disciplines. Because this is a particularly talented team of contributors dotted with remarkable theoretical acumen, again, readers will emerge from reading this volume enriched by its many insights – especially if they put the various chapters in conversation with one another. Considered together, the essays raise broader crucial questions about the purpose of theorizing at a time when many want to remove from our modes of disciplinary inquiry the need to think seriously about how questions are formulated – to narrow down and “purify” how our disciplines approach the social world. This volume should close, once and for all, the question of whether such a reductionism is fruitful, as it certainly demonstrates that a little openness to adventure and

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exchange can go a long way in illuminating crucial aspects of reality that tend to remain unseen and understudied.

Notes 1 Knight, Carly, and Isaac Reed. 2019. “Meaning and Modularity: The Multivalence of ‘Mechanisms’ in Sociological Explanations,” Sociological Theory 37(30): 234–56; Morton, Matthew. 2014.“Mechanisms and Meaning Structures,” Sociological Theory 32(2): 162–87. 2 Vaughan, Diane. 2004. “Theorizing Disaster: Analogy, Historical Ethnography, and the Challenger Accident,” Ethnography 5(3): 313–45, 313. 3 Lamont, Michèle, and Ann Swidler. 2014.“Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing,” Qualitative Sociology 37(2): 153–71; Godfrey-Smith, Peter. “Causal Pluralism.” In Oxford Handbook of Causation, edited by H. Beebee, C. Hitchcock, and P. Menzies, 326–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Rohlfng, Ingo. 2012. Case Studies and Casual Inference:An Integrative Framework. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 4 Hirschman, Daniel, and Isaac Arial Reed. 2014.“Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology,” Sociological Theory 32(4): 259–82; Collier, David. 2011.“Understanding Process-Tracing,” PS: Political Science and Politics 44(4): 823–30. 5 Tavory, Iddo, and Stefan Timmermans. 2013. “A Pragmatist Approach to Causality in Ethnography,” American Journal of Sociology 119(3): 682–714; Gross, Neil, 2009.“A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms,” American Sociological Review 74(3): 358–79. 6 Lemieux, C. 2014.“The Moral Idealism of Ordinary People as a Sociological Challenge: Refections on the French Reception of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s On Justifcation,” in The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique,’ edited by S. Susen and B.Turner, 153–70. New York:Anthem Press. 7 Stavo-Debauge, Joan, and Laurent Thévenot. 2015. “Sociologie pragmatique,” in Dictionnaire de la sociologie, edited by Christophe Le Digol. Paris: Encyclopedia Universalis. www.allbrary.fr/ebooks/269904-dictionnaire-de-la-sociologie; Frère, Bruno, and Daniel Jater. 2018. “French Sociological Pragmatism: Inheritor and Innovator in the American Pragmatic Sociological and Phenomenological Tradition,” Journal of Classical Sociology 19(2): 138–60; Barthes,Yannick, Damien De Blic, Jean-Philippe Heurtin, Eric Lagneau, Cyril Lemieux, Domnique Linhardt, Cedric Moreau de Bellaing, Catherine Remy, and Danny Trom, 2014.“Sociologie Pragmatique: Model d’emploi,” Politix 103. 8 See for instance www.asatheory.org/current-newsletter-online/new-directions-inpragmatism. 9 Ortner, Sherry. 1984.“Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(1): 126–66. 10 Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 447–62. 11 Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

INDEX

Abbott,A. 35, 49 Abécédaire 69 Aceh Islamic court see Islamic courts, multiple justifcations in actor-network theory (ANT) 55, 81, 83–4, 85, 89, 145, 146, 152–3, 163n2; asking good questions and 161–2; networkization of the social and 153–5; qualifcations need work and do work and 155–6; registers, regimes, assemblages of 156–9 adaptable engagements 185–6 Adler, M. 82 Agamben, G. 84, 224–5 agencement 68–9, 82; market devices and 84, 85, 87; see also assemblage Akrich, M. 55 Alt, S. 106–7 alternative psychology 139–40 Althusser, L. 102 Altman, I. 208 analytical groupism 135 Ancient Complexities 106, 107 Annual Review of Anthropology 102 Ansell, C. 40 Anthropos Today: Refections on Modern Equipment 73 anti-anti-essentialist notions 134 anticipation of retrospection 130 Anti-Oedipus 71 aporia 125 Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Complexity 99

Aristotle 128, 130 Arnold, F. 100 Artaud, A. 72 assemblage(s) 69–70, 76–8, 221, 223; agencement and 68–9; apparatuses and 72–3; comparing collective assemblages of enunciation in the diagnosis of neurodegenerative disease and 75–6; desire to seize desire and 76; events, forms, and 72–4; from global assemblages to inquiry in 74–5; Kafka and 70–2; qualifcation and 154, 159 Assmann, J. 132 atomism 129 autonomization 20 autopoietic process 45 Barbot, J. 9, 71, 86, 87, 129 Bartlett, F. C. 134 Bartley,T. 1, 3, 8 Batiashvili, N. 4, 11, 136 Beljean, S. 222 Bender, B. 105 Benjamin, D. 208 Benson, R. 21 Beuscart, J.-S. 87 bivocality 137 Blumenberg, H. 72 Blumer, H. 35 Boas, F. 8, 97 Boccagni, P. 2, 12, 221, 225 Boltanski, L. 4, 6, 9, 11, 55, 114, 224; On Justifcation 123–5; model of polities by

228 Index

60; on pragmatics of justice 57–8; on sociology of conventions 149–50 Bourdieu, P. 4, 6, 11, 77, 102; on capital 80; on logics of practice 114; on moral frameworks 124; on quality 146–7; on ritual 17; on social felds 19–21; on sociology of taste 153 Bowen, J. R. 6, 10, 86, 128 Bowker, G. 148 Boyer, P. 135 bricolage 194 Brooks, P. 129, 130 Brubaker, R. 21, 135 Bruner, J. 139–40 Burgess, E.W. 35, 36–7 Cahokia’s Complexities 107 calculative agencies 83 Callon, M. 11, 55, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 153 capital 20 Capitalism and Freedom 81–2 capitalization strategies through demonstrating 177–9 Capps, L. 139 care ethics 196 caring 12, 199–200, 225; as fuid concept for adaptable engagements 185–6; as household word 186–9; juxtapositions of 195–6; subjects and objects of 191–2; tinkering and 192–4; and what counts as good locally 196–9; working and 189–91 Cassirer, E. 129 Castle,The 71 Cefaï, D. 8, 11, 18, 223 Chapman, R. 101 Charle, C. 20 Chicago school of sociology 8, 18, 35–6, 43–4, 49; on institutionalization 37–8; on social institutions 46 Childe,V. G. 97 Chomsky, N. 70 circulations 5–7, 210; social felds 19–25 civil rights organizations 27 Clair, M. 222 classifcation 147–8 Cochoy, F. 85 Cohen, A. 28 Collapse of Complex Societies,The 100–1 collective behavior 37–8 collective intelligence 44–6 collective memory 137 Collier, S. 74–5 communitarianism 123 Complexities 94

complexity 94–7, 107–8, 135, 223; critiques of 101–5; democratizing 106–7; evolution of 97–9; expanding 99–101 “Complexity in Non-Complex Societies” 99 complex objects 9–10 complex societies 98 confrmation bias 133–4 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 27 constellations of institutions 47–8 Countrywide Financial 26–7 creative experience 40 crescive and enacted institutions 37–8 critical pragmatism 113 culturalism 25 cultural life scripts 134 cultural logics 136 cultural matrices 41–2 cultural sociology 146–52 Dan-Cohen,T. 2, 10, 135 Darwin, C. 3 data collection through demonstrating 177–9 Deleuze, G. 9, 69–71, 75, 76–7, 84, 223 democratizing of complexity 106–7 demonstrating 11, 171–2, 223, 225; getting in touch, exchanging, and campaigning through 175–7; investigating concrete ways of producing and using 179–82; from proof and persuasion to tools for political action and theatrical performances 173–5; as tool for data collection, project management, and capitalization strategies 177–9 de Rijcke, S. 157–8 Derrida, J. 1, 6 Descartes, R. 72 desire 69–70; to seize desire 76 de Swaan,A. 188 deus ex machina 88 Devore, I. 99 Dewey, J. 3, 7–10, 35, 45, 224; on institutional clusters 48; on justifcation 113–14, 117, 118; on public 48; on specifc capacity and specifc environment 46–7; on valuation 62 De Wilde 156 Dezalay,Y. 23, 28 Dignity of Working Men,The 149 Dilthey, W. 3 DiMaggio, P. 7, 11, 21 disempowerment 46–7 dispositif de marché 83

Index

dispositifs 6, 9, 55–6, 65, 71, 84, 221, 222; designed to transform beings 61; Foucauldian 56–7; material-semiotic approaches to 57; pragmatics of justice and 57–8; processual approach to 61–2; question of purposes and 58–60; as stipulated series of sequences 60–2; temporal extension of 61; three approaches to 56–8; translation of 66n2; valuation work around 62–5 Distinction 146–7, 154 divergences and parallels, feld 24–5 Djelic, M.-L. 27–8 Dodier, N. 9, 70, 71, 85, 86, 87, 128, 129 Do Economists Make Markets 83 domestic labor 186, 188 Domination and Resistance 101–2, 107 Douglas, M. 11 doxa 134 dramaturgical approaches 174–5 Dubois,V. 20 Duffy, M. M. 23 Durkheim, E. 1, 11 Duyvendak, J.W. 2, 12, 128, 221, 225 ecological arrangements 39 ecology of capabilities 46 ecology of institutions see institutions ecology of the dispositifs 64–5 Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices 83 economic metaphor 40 economics, narrative 128 Economy & Society 83 Elias, N. 1, 6, 223 embedded organizations 39–40 Emirbayer, M. 38 emplotment of experiences, actions and situations 40–1, 129 empowerment 46–7 ends-means dialectics 44 engagement regimes 58–60 engineering metaphor 40 entanglements 5–7; of home 208–10 ethics, care 196 ethnocentric narcissism 132, 137 ethnomethodology 114 evaluation 148–50, 157 Evans, R. 24 evolutionism 97–8 “Evolution of Simplicity,The” 105 “Evolution: Specifc and General” 97 experience, knowledge through 3 experiential felds, institutions as 41–2

229

experimental psychology 3 explanation by emplotment 129–30 Fall of Public Man,The 205, 215 FannieMae 26–7 Ferguson, P. 23 feld frames 23 felds 8, 17–19, 221, 223; Bourdieusian social 19–21; divergences and parallels 24–5; as explanandum 22–3; as explanans 23–4; fow of feld theory and 20–1; institutions as experiential 41–2; integrating and globalizing feld theories and 25–9; organizational 18, 21–4; of racial politics 26–7; strategic action 19, 26–7; structures of 20–1; transnational 21, 27–9 feld theory 17, 148, 149; fow of 20–1; integrating and globalizing 25–9 Fligstein, N. 19, 25–8 Foire de Paris 180 folk sociology 135 Folkways 37 Follett, M. P. 40 formal structure of institutions 42–4 Foucault, M. 3, 6, 9, 72, 102, 152; approach to dispositifs 56–7, 84, 88; on complex objects 71; concept of apparatus and 73; market devices and 84, 86–87 Fourcade, M. 89 framing stances 10–11 Franssen,T. 11, 157–8 FreddieMac 26–7 Freeman, J. 49 Free to Choose 82 Freidson, E. 44 French DNA:Trouble in Purgatory 73, 74 French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment 72–3 Freud, S. 1 Friedman, M. 81–2 Friedman, R. 82 Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FTD) 75–6 functional differentiation 38 functional sectors, institutions in 47–8 Garfnkel, H. 7, 114, 115 Garth, B. G. 23, 28 Geertz, C. 107–8 genomics 73 Georgian-Russian relations 135–8 Gestalt theories 17 Giddens, A. 12–13n1 Gladwell, M. 133

230 Index

Glick, C. E. 47 Global Assemblages 74–5 global ethnography 47 Go, J. 28 Goffman, E. 7, 180 Good Humor, Bad Taste 151 Gramsci, A. 102 grand theory 1, 12–13n1, 60 Guattari, F. 9, 69–71, 75, 76–7, 223 Gudmand-Høyer, M. 88 Haas, J. 99, 100 Habermas, J. 3, 205 habits, mental 132–4 habitus 4, 17, 114, 133 Hannan, M. 49 Haraway, D. 95 Hardon,A. 2, 5, 12, 128, 225 Hawley, A. 49 health care work see caring Hegel, G.W. F. 3 Heidegger, M. 187 Heller, A. 208 Hennion,A. 153, 155 heterogeneity 70–2, 74 Heuts, F. 157 History of Sexuality 71 Hochschild, A. 205 home and homing 225; as bridge across private-public divide 206–8; circulation and entanglements of 208–10; claiming public space at 214; and feeling at home in public space 213–14; framing public space as 212–13; as place 206; privileged research feld on making of 211–12; as social experience 206–7; as social representation 207–8; sociological analysis of 214–16 Hopewell, K. 28 Hsu, G. 148 Hughes, E. C. 35, 37, 38, 43, 48 human ecology 39, 41 Human Nature and Conduct 47 hunter-gatherers, complex 99–100 Husserl, E. 72 illness narratives 139 immutable mobiles 9–10 individuality 46 informal structure of institutions 42–4 inquiry 3, 4, 77 institutional constraints and public justifcations 116–18 institutional isomorphism 22, 23

institutionalization process 45 institutional life-cycles 36 institutions 7, 221; crescive and enacted 37–8; empowerment and disempowerment in 46–7; as experiential felds and cultural matrices 41–2; formal and informal structure of 42–4; in functional sectors, social worlds, and public arenas 47–8; as grounded in environments, permeated with stories 39–41; loose meanings of 37–8; natural history of 36–7; social 36–7; state 44–6; see also neo-institutionalism interactions 7 interdisciplinarity 224–5 interpretive analytics 72 Islamic courts, multiple justifcations in 118–23; brokering between conficting ideas of the performativity of divorce and 119–20; crafted to appease multiple publics 120–2; pragmatic reference to legal school in 122–3 James,W. 3, 35, 132–4 Janowitz, M. 49 journalistic feld 21 justifcation(s) 7–8, 9, 10–11, 113–14, 125–6, 223; institutional constraints and public 116–18; in Islamic courts 118–23; moral frameworks of 123–5; order and 125; practice and 114–18 Kafka, F. 70–2 Kahneman, D. 11 Kant, I. 3 Karpik, L. 82–3, 86 Kay, T. 24 Kleinman, A. 139 knowledge through experience 3 Kuipers, G. 11, 21, 23 Lacan, J. 1 Lamont, M. 7, 149, 156–7 Langer, S. 107 Latour, B. 9, 11, 55, 154 Law, J. 9, 55, 94, 106, 152, 153–4, 213 Laws of the Market,The 83–4 Lebaron, F. 20 Lee, R. B. 99 legitimacy 147–8 Leont’ev, A. 132 Lévi-Strauss, C. 68–9, 193, 223 Lewin, K. 17 life world 187

Index

Lind,A. W. 47 living narrative 139 “Logical Method and the Law” 113–14 logic of exposition: complex objects and 9–10; framing stances and 10–11; institutions and 8–12; practices and 11–12 Loveman, M. 135 MacKenzie, D. 85 macro-structuralism 25 mainstreaming market devices 85–6 majority-minority relations 211–12 making home 12 Mannheim, K. 17 Man the Hunter 99 market devices 3, 9, 10, 223; critical refections on 86–9; introduction to 80–1; mainstreaming 85–6; short history on use of 81–4 Market Devices 83 Martin, J. L. 17 Marxism 1, 25, 41, 97, 105, 137 master discourse 104 materiality 225 material-semiotic approaches to dispositifs 57 matrices, cultural 41–2 McAdams, D. 19, 25–8, 139, 140 Mcfall, L. 89 McGuire, R. 105 McKenzie, R. 35, 49 Mead, G. H. 3, 7, 8, 35, 39, 77 meaning 3–4; created through justifcation 7–8; as events of speech and action 74 meaning-making 40 Mears, A. 148 Méon, J.-M. 20 Merton, R. 11 micro-interactionism 25 migration 211–12 Miller, D. 101–3 Miller, P. 139 Millo,Y. 83, 84 mimetric isomorphism 22 Mink, L. 129 Mische, A. 38 mnemonic communities 129, 132 Mol,A. 2, 5, 11, 12, 94, 106, 153–4, 155, 157, 225 Money, Morals and Manners 149 moral frameworks 116, 123–5 morphodynamics of social and political life 48

231

Mukerji, C. 174 Muniesa, F. 83, 84 NAACP 27 narcisssism, national/ethnocentric 132, 137 narrative economics 128 Narrative Psychology 139 narrative(s) 11, 41, 128–9, 221; in analytic repertoire of other research initiatives 138–40; competition of multiple, for space in national memory 134–8; illness 139; living 139; as semiotic mediation 129–30; specifc 130–1; as surface form and underlying code 130–8 narrative templates 131–2 national memory 128; multiple narratives competing for space in 134–8 national narcissism 132 natural history of institutions 36–7 Nelson, B. 106–7 neo-institutionalism 18, 21–4 networkization of the social 153–5 new nationalism 128 New Public Management 20 new unconscious 133 Nixon, R. 27 normative structure of valuation 63–5 Ochs, E. 139 offcializing strategies 114 Ong, A. 74–5 On Justifcation 123–5 order of worth 150, 157 organizational felds 18; neo-institutionalist 21–4 organizations: embedded 39–40; natural history of 36–7; see also institutions Pagels, H. 95 Park, R. E. 8, 35–7, 39, 41, 43, 77; on institutional clusters 48; on public 48 Parnet, C. 70 Pasteur, L. 154 Peerbaye, A. 87 Peirce, C. S. 3, 4, 6, 7, 132 performativity of divorce 119–20 philosophy 3 plotting 129 pluralism 113 “Population Ecology of Organizations, The” 49 Powell,W. 7, 21 practical schemas 7 practice and justifcation 114–18

232 Index

practices 11–12 practice theory 5–6, 17 pragmatic inquiry 225–6; circulations and entanglements in 5–7; interactions, institutions, and justifcations in 7–8; interdisciplinarity and 224–5; logic of exposition in 8–12; multidisciplinary applications of 221–2; pragmatist traditions and 2–5; shift towards 1; technology and materiality and 225; theorizing in 222–4; transdisciplinary research and 1–2 pragmatic sociology 77 pragmatics of justice 57–8 pragmatism 8, 17, 77, 126n2, 132, 149; John Dewey and 113–14, 224; on social institutions 46; traditions of 2–5 Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers 99–100 preserving non-homogenization 116 Price,T. D. 99–100, 101 private sphere 126n7, 186, 188, 205–6 problem-identifcation 44 problem-solving 44 processes of qualifcation 144 “Progress: Its Law and Cause” 97 Prohibition 38 project management through demonstrating 177–9 proof and persuasion 173–5 Propp,V. 134 Public and Its Problems 45 public arenas, institutions in 47–8 public/private boundary 126n7, 205–6; home and homing as bridge across 206–8 public reason 44–6, 117 publics 9, 120–2 public sphere 126n7, 186, 205–6; claimed as home 214; feeling at home in 213–14; framed as home 212–13 Putnam, H. 3 qualifcation 11, 221; actor-network theory and 152–9; art of asking good questions and 159–62; boundaries, processes, and interactions in 150–2; classifcation 147–8; cultural sociology and 146–52; evaluation 148–50; introduction to 143– 6; needing work and doing work 155–6; networkization of the social and 153–5; processes of 144; registers, regimes, assemblages in 156–9 questions, art of asking good 159–62

Rabinow, P. 71, 72–4, 77, 223 racial politics 26–7 radical contextualization 103 Raffnsøe, S. 88 Rawls, J. 117, 123 reason, public 44–6 Redfeld, R. 41 religious movements 37 repertoires 7; of evaluation 149, 157 Ricoeur, P. 11, 69, 72, 129 Roediger III, H. L. 132 Rogers, K. 107 Rosental, C. 6, 11, 225 Rowlands, M. 101–5 rule-following 118 Rushforth, A. 157–8 Russia: mnemonic community of 132; narrative template of 131–2; relations with Georgia 135–8 Saakashvili, M. 135 Sahlin-Andersson, K. 27–8 Sahlins, M. 74, 97–8 Sapiro, G. 20 Sarbin,T. 139, 140 schema 134 Schiff, B. 139–40 Schütz, A. 115 science and technology studies (STS) 163n2 semiotic mediation 4, 132, 138; narrative as 129–30 Sennett, R. 205, 215 sense-making 40 September 11, 2001, attacks 174 Shideler, E. H. 38 Shiller, R. 128, 138–9 “Situated Knowledges” 95 Smith, C. M. 23 social contract theory 123 social Darwinism 39 social felds 19–21 social institutions 36–7 social movements, sects starting as 37 social studies of fnance paradigm 85 Social Theory Today 12–13n1 social worlds, institutions in 47–8 Socioeconomic Review 222 socio-technical networks 57, 58 Solzhenitsyn, A. 131 Sorge 187, 192–3 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) 27 Spencer, H. 97

Index

Spheres of Justice 123–5 Stamatov, P. 135 Star, S. L. 148 state institutions 44–6 Stavrianakis,A. 9, 70 Stea, D. 208 Steinmetz, G. 21 Steward, J. 97 stipulated series of sequences, dispositif as 60–2 strategic action felds 19, 26–7 structuralism 1 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 27 Sumner,W. G. 37 surface form, narrative as 130–8 Swidler,A. 129, 130 System of Professions 35 Tainter, J. 100–1 technical redoings 180 technology transfer 190–1, 225 temporal extension of dispositifs 61 Tessier, L. 70, 75 Thaning, M. S. 88 theorizing 222–4 Thévenot, L. 4, 9, 11, 55, 114, 224; dispositifs 57–8; On Justifcation 123–5; on sociology of conventions 149–50 “Thick Description” 107 Thomas,W. I. 8, 35, 39, 47–8 Thousand Plateaus, A 71 Tilley, C. 101–3 tinkering 192–4 transdisciplinary research 1–2 transnational felds 21, 27–9

233

transnational transplantations 48 Tronto, J. 196 truth 3 underlying code, narrative as 130–8 Urban League 27 valuation 55, 221; around dispositifs 62–3; normative structure of 63–5 valuing 157 Valuing the Unique, the Economics of Singularities 82, 86 Vaughn, D. 222–3 Velthuis, O. 3, 9, 10 Verwey-Jonker, H. 187–8 von Humboldt,W. 129 Vygotsky, L. 11, 129, 132, 139 Walzer, M. 9, 11, 123–5 Weber, M. 1 Wengrow, D. 105 Werner, C. 208 Wertsch, J.V. 4, 11, 130 “What is Missing? Causal Pathways to Inequality” 222 White, H. 129–30 White, L. 97 Women Christian Temperance Union 38 World Archaeological Congress 102 Yoffee, N. 98, 107 Zald, M. 49 Znaniecki, F. 47–8 zorgen 187–8 Zuckerman, E. 148