ABSTRACT
Romuald Normand
How would you introduce your orientation in “pragmatic sociology”?
Laurent ThévenotThe orientation of the so-called French “Pragmatic Sociology” that I will present here (Hansen 2023), while indicating some contributions it can provide to the field of education, has from its origin paid attention to the shaping of the world into forms both material and symbolic. What human beings get hold of in their environment is thus “vested” by these forms that give it the consistency of human reality. The adopted perspective is that of uncertain and trying coordination with others, the world and oneself, which “investments of form” contribute towards securing. Invested forms generate power because of their capacity to put in communication singular situations and to ensure coordination.
The distinctions between coordination modes renews the approach of organizations (Brandl et al. 2014) as well as the dynamics of conflicting political communities and composite personal identities. Sharing the approaches of STS, ANT and governmentality studies in their focus on the non-human environment and their questioning of non-predetermined human agency, this sociology departs from them by differentiating the kinds of good that human beings pursue in their engagements with a form-invested world, and by distinguishing their ways of constructing commonality and the composite common good of a political community in conflict.
Romuald NormandHow is the notion of “Investments in forms [IF]” important in your work and how can it link with education?
Laurent ThévenotBased on the analysis of the conventions of “social coding”, the concept of “investment in form” [IF] is defined by the costly sacrifice of present coordination potentialities to ensure future returns in terms of economies in the cognitive and practical coordination of actions (Thévenot 1984, 2016). Three main characters distinguish various types of invested forms according to: 1) the durability or time extent – from a short-lived pattern up to a perennial custom; 2) the area of validity or space extent – from a locally attached house rule up to an international right; and 3) the material consolidation – from a mainly mental criterion up to a solid template.
Such forms (measuring units, benchmarks, standards) are “the scaffolding of the European space for education”; “they shape the present and determine the future” (Lawn 2011, p.270). The forms that undergird measurements and evaluation require considerable resources to develop and displacing them can be very costly as shown by Radhika Gorur (2014) in the case of both ISCED (International Standard Classification of Education) and ISEI (International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status). Investments in the forms of indicators play a key role in school infrastructures (Bartl 2022). The digital platforms that are so relevant in today’s education extend the large-scale material infrastructure of investments in roads, rails and wires, and build “thinking infrastructures” conceived as “investments in forms [as] concepts, classifications, categorizations, commensurations, and evaluations [which] organize thinking and thought and direct action across multiple settings and multiple temporal scales [and] render visible, knowable and thinkable” (Bowker et al. 2019, p. 1). Digital education platforms “are increasingly investing in new unique and dedicated digital educational forms” and attempting “to make these newly emerging forms as solid and as durable as possible [with] specific norms, values, ideologies, instructional models, ideas about learning, and good pedagogy inscribed in their architectural, intermediary and organizational design” (Decuypere et al. 2021, p. 6).
Romuald NormandIn what way does ‘investments in forms’ add to notions such as “dispositifs” or “assemblages”? How does it compare to classical views of power?
Laurent ThévenotIFs are not only sources of power but of value as well. Similar characteristics make the connection between various invested forms easier and produce more coherent dispositifs or assemblages. This coherence generates the idea of an encompassing value. IFs involved in the configuration of occupations led to the identification of three coherent worlds which reveal three ways of making the occupation worthy (Thévenot 1984, 2016). Instead of referring to abstract values, IF analysis anchors the evaluation on the coherence between forms which invest concrete world. It is thus more realistic than social constructivism.
Because of their coordinative power, invested forms inevitably generate hierarchies according to whether they produce more or less commonality. Such hierarchies come into tension with the principle of common humanity carried by many religious, moral and politically democratic traditions. Some of these common forms of evaluation of “worth” maintain an ordinary sense of justice on which justifications and criticisms are based (Boltanski Thévenot 1987, 2006 [1991], 2022). This sense of justice and injustice must contain the previous tension by providing evidence that each order of worth is supported by a conception of the common good so that it benefits all, an assertion that gives rise to contestation and reality testing. The evaluation among “worlds” tried and tested from differentiated reality tests has opened a step towards a view on a plural non-relativistic reality which has seen important developments in terms of ontological politics and plural ontologies (Law 2002; Mol 1999).
Orders of worth are not generated by political philosophers’ abstract constructions that only attempt to demonstrate their contribution to the common good. The environmental genesis of these political constructions stems from the generalization of a beneficial mode of relating to an appropriately formatted environment – as market goods, technical implements, signs which support common visibility, informational devices, etc. – which generates asymmetries of capacities and questions the justification of these power asymmetries (Thévenot 2001b).
By acknowledging the pluralism of conceptions of the common goods and of their respective reality tests, this approach analyzes the critical tensions and compromises that result from this plurality, departing from STS and ANT. In the absence of a pluralist differentiation of goods and reality tests, the unequal difficulties of association or assemblage are not anticipated in these theories, nor are the critical tensions and oppressions that result from them. Bruno Latour, though, came late to a pluralism with his investigation of “modes of existence” (Latour 2018 [2012]).
Romuald NormandWhat are the “regimes of engagement” that you specify in your theory? Is it a new way to consider “agency” or the “self”?
Laurent ThévenotEducational research that is closest to our approach is concerned with what policies and measures do to human beings and their surrounding worlds, without being limited to the knowledge transmitted by the curricula. These approaches do not proceed from human subjects preconceived in terms of their individual autonomy or their social origin embedded in a habitus. John Dewey’s pragmatism, inspired by the living, posited a human agent constituted in an adaptive relationship to the environment. However, his formulation of this adaptation in terms of a means-ends relationship limits the variety of formats of human agency. Thomas Popkewitz points out that “planning” “agency” founds progressivism by demanding the “control of the future” which, together with the scientific method, are two features of the “modern self” promoted by Dewey (Popkewitz 2005, p. 22). Popkewitz refers to Foucault to undertake a “history of the present” of education (Popkewitz 2012) from the “fabrication of human kinds” through the “shaping and fashioning of human ‘agency’” (Popkewitz 2012, p. 12). “Fabrication is not a social construction but responds to things of the world and is also part of its materiality” (ibid., p. 1). This “modern self” is “an agent of change” able to “embody such a notion of a planned life in the sequence of regulated time” (Popkewitz 2005, p. 16).
This agency fits into the engagement in a plan, one of the regimes of engagement (Thévenot 2001a, 2006). Each regime is a mode of coordination with oneself oriented towards a personal good which is used to evaluate people and things in situations. The engagement is guaranteed by a certain mode of dependence on the surrounding reality that is grasped and tested in the appropriate format. In the regime of engaging in a plan, coordination with oneself is oriented towards the personal good of projecting oneself into the future for a certain achievement, and is guaranteed by reality in a functional format. This agency is assumed in the intentional, autonomous individual.
The engagement in a plan is presupposed by the notion of script and the design of artifacts up to the so-called “user friendly” one. Yet, it is not sufficient to capture the variety of relationships that humans have with their environment, as shown by the observation of the uses of educational platforms (Gorur and Dey 2020). The regime of familiarity sustains the personal good of being at ease. It is assured by the dependency to a localized and personalized environment, and maintained by past engrained processes of habituating and inhabiting. In contrast to the engagement in a plan in which the individual subject is detached from objects in a functional format, in the regime of familiarity things are not even objects and neither are they functional, but closely intertwined with the person, constituting a kind of “attached personality” (Thévenot 2001a).
Building on the work of Nicolas Auray (2011), the regime of exploration is oriented towards the personal good of excitement in the discovery of the new. It is assured by the dependency of curiosity to an environment set up for strangeness. It is neither future- nor past-oriented as the two previous regimes, but focused on the present. Contemporary capitalistic production and consumption deeply rely on this basic personal engagement, through techniques of communication that contribute to contemporary education. Persons who are engaged in the regime of engagement by resonance (Brahy 2014; Centemeri and Renou 2014; Thévenot 2020) are caught up by the call of an environment that resonates within them and find echo and amplification in their body more than their discourse. This personal engagement lays below aggrandizement into the common worth of inspiration, or into commonality through common-places. The sensitive impression on the body left by the environment in presence contributes to an atmosphere or ambiance (Breviglieri 2014) that arouses consonance with other beings, human or not, in the same concert.
The environmental decentering that this sociology of engagements implies has contributed to research on environmental movements (Centemeri 2022) and also on urban studies (Blok 2023) and education (Normand 2023), fields in which the material equipment of the formatted environment weighs heavily on the configuration of agency. The conception of engagements makes contribution to both theory of action and theory of personal identity. First, the dynamics of the engagement – which the term “regime” emphasizes – brings light on the tension between two contrasting facets of any engagement. The first posture, “closing one’s eyes”, is the quietude of blind confidence in the invested form – the reference mark – to which one sticks from the letter of public conventions when one engages in justification to idiosyncratic routine cues when one engages in familiarity. The second posture, “opening the eyes”, is the inquietude created by doubt when opening up to the other possibilities of coordination that rigid adherence to the invested form sacrifices (Thévenot 2011). The differentiation of engagements also allows a fresh look at the self or personal identity, seeing it as the composite result of multiple overlapping personal regimes of engagement. In spite of its attention to the making of the person by practices of the self, the Foucauldian approach does not make it possible to seize this plurality of the modes of constitution of the person, the confrontation of which produces tensions and oppressions.
Romuald NormandHow do you combine these engagements with your theory on the sense of justice and orders of worth?
Laurent ThévenotPersonal engagements are not enough to address the basic political problem of how to build commonality in the plural, and assuage the tensions generated by conflicting personal expressions of the good. For this purpose, we have to identify grammars of commonality which differentiate ways of voicing concern and difference (Thévenot 2014, 2015a). These grammars specify two basic operations. Communicating involves the transformation of personal concerns into a format that allows the expression of commonality and difference through proper mediation. Composing points to a mode of mitigating and integrating differences to make up the community good.
According to the first grammar of plural orders of worth, communicating demands the transformation of concern into the justification format, and the mediation by entities that qualify for a conception of the common good. Composing commonality demands that the person does not confine to her engagement in a unique order of worth but considers a plurality of them through the mitigation of compromises between qualifications.
Engaging in a plan provides little means to voice concerns and build commonality. The liberal grammar of plural interests builds on the agency supported by this engagement but demands additional transformation to access a public format of commonality and difference. Communicating is achieved through the format of individual choice (also termed preference or interest) that is mediated by common knowledge options which are publicly identifiable plans. Composing is carried out by bargaining or negotiating choices or interests through the mediation of options to choose from. The liberal grammar thus restrains persons from connecting their concerns to the worth of a common good as well as from communicating deeply personal concerns based on familiar, exploration or resonance engagements (Thévenot 2014, 2015a; Centemeri 2015).
The grammar of personal attachments to common-places does not require the same detachment that public spaces demand from personal attachments, as seen in the two previous grammars, nor the discursive character associated with arguing in a public sphere, both usually assumed in “public problems”. Making communicable personal attachments close to familiar intimacy demands a transformation that is lighter than in the two previous grammars to. It requires that persons go through the mediation of common-places that they intimately invest (Thévenot 2014). Communicating is a highly emotional process because of this short-circuit between intimacy and the common-place. Emotional arousal signals successful communication and the opposite, failure, results form the common-place being reduced to a superficial and emotionless cliché. I thus hyphenate the term common-place to underline this contrast to cliché. Expressing differences and integrating them in the composition of the good of the community is made possible by the room of maneuver that mediating common-places make it possible, in contrast to either qualified worthy entities or public options. Differences come first from the variable geometry of common-places. Emotionally invested places, quotes from literature, songs or films, or verbal expressions can be limited to communication within tiny communities or extend to wide ones such as homeland. Second, the highly personal investment of what makes the “place” common can strongly differ from one person to another. Third, composing a difference is made possible by diversely associating or assembling common-places.
These three identified grammars already make it possible to overcome some important biases of the normative foundations of western social and political sciences and their universal claims, such as the binary opposition of “public” and “private”. The emancipatory program of modernity, which the social sciences inherited and still stick to, resulted from a restricted conception of Enlightenment that left in the shadow the last grammar, abandoning it to conservative or reactionary deformations. Blindness to certain oppressions is the result. Cultural and political sociology has to enlarge its analysis of attesting, protesting and contesting, to gain a more comprehensive view of ways to express concern and to differ.
Romuald NormandHow does your theory help to understand politics and moral in education? I mean, concepts such as authority, democracy, common goods, etc…
Laurent ThévenotFor sociology of education, it is relevant to approach politics as we do through ways of crafting a plural common from the most basic level of cohabiting the same space (Thévenot 2015a, 2017). By contributing to such a cohabitation, the classroom and the school establishment are sites for political and moral education about living together in a plural community, where disputes and criticisms have their place despite the asymmetries between students and teachers. In addition to teachers’ judgments (Derouet 1992), the observation must add the judgments made by pupils, particularly about school injustices, which bring light on how children become morally equipped (Haugseth and Smeplass 2023; Thévenot 2002). The analytical framework allows the study to go beyond the most public forms of expression and to extend to close personal engagements on the part of teachers, students and parents.
The Portuguese research group CesNova has been conducting such extensive investigations. For the past twenty years, it has brought together around José Resende several generations of researchers training and cooperating in an innovative critical political and moral sociology (Resende and Viera 2009; Resende and Cotovio Martins 2015; Resende et al. 2018b). As an example, a scenario-based survey, quantitative as well as qualitative, interviewed students from a variety of schools and a diversity of social and ethnic backgrounds about the possible behaviors of a teacher who engages with a student exhibiting eating disorders (Resende, Gouveia, and Beirante 2016). One possible course of action involves the teacher disclosing the disorder in public. This gesture of protective authority can be justified from the perspective of the domestic worth as a common good, but it can also be denounced as patronizing, from the point of view of another good. Some students take this line of criticism, reproaching the teacher for abusively exposing, in an engagement of public justification, the bodily intimacy engaged in the familiar, at the risk of humiliation. Criticism is most pronounced among female students and increases with the social level. On the basis of such tensions, which are not usually exposed to public criticism, the authors reconsider the ubiquitous theme of student “incivility”.
Romuald NormandWhat is your reading on human capital investment and theory, which are very influential in education?
Laurent ThévenotIn contrast to previous surveys and analyses, a great proportion of educational research follows the European education policy orientation and the model of individual investment in human capital extended into lifelong learning. Directly based on standard economic theory, British education policies have moved in this direction, aiming to turn higher education into a quasi-market. As a consequence, I shall mention the way students’ lives are shaped by the format of student loans which replaced grants. Students become engaged in debts that are meant to transform educational costs into productive investment. The formation of their selves is framed through conventional forms that qualify for the two orders of worth of market competition and industrial efficiency (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). Students are thus “responsibilized” and “incentivized” to choose their sector orientation from its financial return. The expected return on engaged costs is calculated on the basis of the salary corresponding to the degree obtained. Kristina Gruzdeva (2022) used quantitative surveys supplemented by focus groups to find out whether students acted in accordance with the right calculations of human capital investments return. She found that the answer was no: students – and boys even more than girls – overestimate the salaries expected from their training. They do not even always understand the motto that should guide their calculation, “value for money”, that is explicitly promoted by educational policies. Without sticking to the single “value” of education that this motto supports, students mention other benefits of higher education. Beyond the strategic career plans, they value the exploration through experience that is magnified in public through the worth of inspiration.
Since the human capital investment model is based on a theory that claims to be scientific – economics – one would expect the empirical test that refutes it to lead to its revision. However, in this case, the answer is that it is reality that needs to be revised. Considerable investments in forms have led to the formation and use of a new competence named “financial literacy”. Just as literacy originally means the ability to read and write, a prerequisite for the acquisition of other skills, the competence of “financial literacy” is foundational since it governs the choice of what is to be learned.
Romuald NormandCould you give an idea of what your analysis of the plurality of valued engagements brings on the debated issue of the value of higher education?
Laurent ThévenotWe can address the diverse and discordant conceptions of the value of higher education from student debt, which we saw earlier narrowly formatted for the individual calculation of investment in human capital. This debt is part of a broader and more explicitly political question about what the student owes to the community. Thus formulated, it opens a comparative perspective on the value placed on higher education, informed by an analysis of the plurality of engagements and their respective goods.
At two similar jubilee ceremonies, in France and the United States, that celebrated the seniority of the most prestigious institutions of higher education, I heard the president of each of the two nations, descending from the sky in a helicopter, present views on the same question: What is the worth of education at the highest level?
Celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique in March 1994, President Mitterrand listed alumni of various orders of worth, in the sense of their ability to contribute to the common good: “scientists like Henri Poincaré,” “military men like Joffre and Foch, but I will also mention Captain Dreyfus,” “great industrial men like André Citroën,” and great “commis de l’État” [French designation of high civil service]. He added that the students who enjoyed “exceptional working and study conditions”, which allow for what is called their ‘excellence’, “are indebted to the Nation and to all their fellow citizens. It is throughout their lives that they will gradually repay this debt through each of their efforts and professional choices, be it the choice of where to practice one’s talents as a researcher, or where to invest and create jobs as a corporate manager” (Mitterrand 1994).
This issue of the debt should be compared with the British policy mentioned above. There, individual indebtedness was also justified by reference to the common good. The shift from state grants (the civic worth of solidarity in welfare state policies) to student-funded loans was justified by the introduction of the market worth: as the main beneficiaries of higher education, university students had to contribute to the costs of their degree (Gruzdeva 2022). When Mitterrand lists the various “worthy” graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique, from the scientist to the businessman or the senior civil servant, and enjoins the students to repay their debt to the nation, he is stating that unequal worth must be compensated by a common good. As a matter of fact, studying at the Ecole Polytechnique is not only free of charge, but students also receive a salary for their engagement as cadets. If they do not work for the State for ten years after completing Ecole Polytechnique, they must normally reimburse a amount of about 40,000€.
In June 1996, President Clinton came to publicly celebrate Princeton University’s 250th anniversary. In his speech, unlike Mitterrand, the calculation of individual investment in human capital features prominently, along with the integral of the lifelong return on investment: “Two years of college means a 20 percent increase in annual earnings. People who finish 2 years of college earn a quarter of a million dollars more than their high school counterparts over a lifetime” (Clinton 1996). 1 However, in opposition to the market worth motto of British education policies – “value for money” – Clinton repeats three times: “this is about more than money”. Introducing the common good of the community – “This is not just for those individuals, this is for America” – Clinton outlines a solidarity-driven program of civic worth with tax credit measures designed to “make 14 years of education the standard for every American.” He urges students not only to “go your own way” in the sense of a secession that always carries the threat of civil war, but to work for “our common purpose”: “You could go your own way in a society that, after all, seems so often to be coming apart instead of coming together. You will, of course, have the ability to succeed in the global economy, even if you have to secede from those Americans trapped in the old economy. But you should not walk away from our common purpose.” The discourse then shifts to a personal good: “To be fully alive”. This saying commonly used by self-development psychology resonates with the religious background of the phrase crafted in the 2nd century Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses: “Gloria Dei est vivens homo”. Far from idea of self-fulfillment, the “living man” referred to the life of Christ himself. Clinton concludes with a further move away from the civic common good: “And if we do that, those of you who have this brilliant education, who have been gifted by God with great minds and strong bodies and hearts, you will do very well, and you will be very happy.”
Mitterrand’s concluded with the debt students owe to the nation and to their fellow citizens to whom they are accountable for their unequal benefits. By contrast, Clinton ended with another scene of accountability, in which each individual would do his or her “accounts” in the evening of life (“in our final hours”).
Romuald NormandFrom your perspective, how can pragmatic sociology renew the critique of neo-liberalism in education?
Laurent ThévenotThe sociology presented here renews the critique of the forms of measurement and evaluation that have gained an unprecedented place in the governments of communities and personalities (Thévenot 2019), particularly in education. Departing from normative critical sociologies (Hansen 2016), or moralistic ones such as the sociologies of education in search of “redemption” (Ball 2020), this sociology highlights the role of investment in material forms – including platforms – in the coordination of conducts, while acknowledging the room of maneuver (Gorur and Dey 2020) in their engagement. The plural formats of investment support different types of agency, capacity or power, as well as different modes of commonality and difference. Moreover, our approach differs by giving an account of the kinds of good and evaluation founded on personal engagements with form-given reality. It brings to light the pressures and oppressions that a format imposes on other formats. The distinction of the grammars composing, by transformation of these engagements, a common good in the plural highlights the sacrifices that these transformations imply.
In his survey of British schools on the introduction of Total Quality Management, School Development Planning and Inspections from the Office for Standards in Education, Stephen Ball recognized the paradox already pointed out by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition : “increasing precision in the specification, collection and collation of indicators of performance requires greater and greater time which must be diverted away from the activities the indicators are supposed to represent” (Ball 1997). The British teachers’ complaint spread out, as expressed twenty years later by Portuguese teachers exposing the same paradox when complaining about their time spent in filling forms (Resende, Gouveia and Beirante 2018a). Engagement in plan oppresses the familiar and exploratory engagements that are so important to a pedagogical relationship getting close to students and being concerned with their own familiarity with the world, while also opening to their exploration of strangeness and novelty. Engaging the format of the individual plan also prevents the engagement in common good orders of worth that sustain the political disputes sought in democracy. This differentiated analysis leads to an expanded critique by showing how the forms invested in dispositifs, institutions and modes of governing mold, enable and constrain certain goods over others.
Government by standards and objectives today replaces or supports state policies, in European education in particular (Normand 2016). They take a reduced consideration of the various kinds of good that people seek, and of their respective engagements which are further restricted to the objective face of indicators and measurements (Thévenot 2009). Engagement in a plan and its reduction to the objective are predominant, at the expense of the various kinds of personal good engaged in closeness as well as the specifications of the common good. However, the scope of the standards and certifications has expanded considerably. While focusing only on measurable properties of products and services, certification claims to qualify them as if they incorporated common goods or fundamental rights such as safety, health, environmental protection, sustainability, solidarity, equity, human dignity, etc. (Thévenot 2015b, 2022). The resulting political metamorphosis consists in transforming the public political debate on fundamental goods into individual choices of options – often market options – that are supposed, by certification, to ensure in themselves these fundamental goods. Market worth and the liberal grammar are thus expanded by the assertion that multiple fundamental goods are guaranteed by the certifiable properties of the options chosen. This change puts political weight on the upstream step of standard-setting procedures which, in response to criticism, are now often based on the liberal grammar and its multistakeholder extension, stakeholders replacing individuals as predetermined legitimate categories (Cheyns and Thévenot 2019). Marc Breviglieri analyzed the contemporary certified or guaranteed city (Breviglieri 2018) in which the liberal order is upheld through a controlled form of “diversity” and which change actors’ voices and personal attachments into opinions and choices (Pattaroni and Baitsch 2015).
In a growing range of areas, including education, the contemporary project of certifying the world offers the promise of security in our relationships to the world and to others. Because of its liberal foundation, this project is presented as expanding the scope of individuals’ free choice and responsibility. Rather than denouncing the arbitrariness of the conventional forms and their domination, critique needs more adjusted tools to highlight the structural tensions between the constitutive forms of human personalities and communities, and the dynamics of their engagement including the doubt, from intimate trouble to public dispute, about what the reassuring forms sacrifice.
