The Making of a Paradigm: Exploring the Potential of the Economy of Convention and Pragmatic Sociology of Critique

Abstract

THE organization of ideas into schools that form around the work of a particular individual or group-often in opposition to another (earlier) school-and are centred within a cosmopolitan-based institution from which their influence then spreads, is a familiar feature of the academic business particularly, although not exclusively, within the humanities and social sciences. Contemporary French social thought contains two notable examples: actor-network theory (ANT), which emerged out of the work of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon at the Ecole des Mines, Paris (see Chapters 5 and 6, this volume), and the 'economy of convention' approach that congealed around the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris. Together, these two interrelated strands form the new French 'pragmatic sociology: The term 'pragmatic' here is a reference to the late nineteenth-/early twentiethcentury American pragmatism of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead. Like their American precursors, the new French pragmatic sociology focuses on the way actors interpret and practically engage with the world. Language, understood as the basic social institution, is conceived here both as the medium of interaction and as a tool that allows actors to constitute and constantly (re-) negotiate reality.