Reading :: On Justification

On Justification: Economies of Worth
By Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot

This book was published in French in 1991 and in English in 2006. Here, a sociologist (Boltanski) and an economist (Thevenot) examine the question: What frameworks do people use to understand the social world? Where do these frameworks conflict, and when they do, how do these conflicts manifest (p.9)? And they approach it with an interestingly rhetorical tool: How do people justify things (p.9)? That is, when someone addresses a dispute, what arguments do they use, and what assumed frameworks—specifically, political philosophies—do those arguments rest upon (p.13)? What sense of injustice do people feel when forms of justification impinge on inapplicable situations? What problems arise when arguments are based on "illegitimate" (i.e., incompatible) values (p.15)?

To borrow a metaphor from Vygotsky, the authors propose to go fishing. The phenomenon in question—the frameworks on which people draw—is not directly observable. But the justifications they provide allow us to identify the contours of these frameworks. Importantly, these frameworks are not attached to collectives (e.g., discourse communities) but to situations (p.16). People confront uncertainty by using objects to establish orders, and they consolidate objects by attaching them to these orders (p.17). The approach allows us to examine these objects and orders, and it also allows us to understand organizations as composite assemblages from different worlds, ones that can tolerate situations of different natures and that can deploy a plurality of mechanisms from different worlds (p.18). By examining a bilevel construction between people and generality (pp.18-19), the authors examine how the two relate. As the authors succinctly tell us, the book's "primary aim is to build a framework within which a single set of theoretical instruments and methods can be used to analyze the critical operations that people carry out when they want to show their disagreement without resorting to violence, and the ways they construct, display, and conclude more or less lasting agreements" (p.25).

This setup is exciting. The project opens up a way for us to talk about heterogenous logics in organizations, something that is also discussed in places such as Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013), Heckscher & Adler's The Firm as a Collaborative Community (2006), and my own book All Edge (2015). Beyond these books, my reading of this book suggests a methodology for getting at these logics through carefully structured empirical work. At this point in the book, I expected some clever fine-grained empirical research, perhaps along the lines of psychological experiments or focus groups in which participants encountered a carefully constructed (and conflicted) scenario that would prompt different and contrasting justifications. Or, perhaps, some closely structured fieldwork.

Alas, although the authors hint at that sort of work, they mainly stay at the theoretical level. When they look at specific cases, these are mainly through Boltanski's close reading of management books (the same approach he took elsewhere)—an approach that I think is inadequate for understanding the relationship between individual justifications and larger frameworks, especially since management books are not the product of a single author but rather a collaboration among authors, editors, editorial boards, marketers, distributors and others.

The authors also reduce the frameworks—perhaps a priori, though that is not clear to me—by identifying political orders and characterizing them through the earliest proponents to have presented the polity in systematic form (p.71). Thus we get a "critical matrix" (Ch.8, although, alas, not presented as a matrix but rather in blocks of text) consisting of the following worlds:

• inspired
• domestic
• fame
• civic
• market
• industrial (p.237)

Obviously members of a society must be able to navigate situations from different worlds; for instance, artists (inspired) must be able to stand in line like anyone else (industrial) (p.216). And obviously people who argue from different premises can compromise (i.e., agree to suspend a clash between worlds without recourse to a one-world test; p.277). Such compromises are always composites, and therefore can always unravel via a recourse to a one-world test; but they can solidify with objects composed of elements from different worlds, making them more resistant to critiques (p.278; you can see the relationship with actor-network theory, on which the authors draw). 

But, the authors argue, when multiple worlds are in play, the critique is inconsistent (p.282). I wondered: is this inconsistency perhaps because their a priori framework is so confining? Compare it to, say, Bakhtin, who takes a much more open approach to different logics and worlds. 

Nevertheless, the authors have my thanks for explicitly tying their project to rhetoric (p.73) and for deeply thinking through the issues inherent in justifications across different frameworks/views/political orders. Their work is more fine-grained than I've been able to represent here, and I expect that I'll return to this book again as I think about these issues.