From the social movement viewpoint, the social economy phenomenon has been considered as a kind of development process of a sector composed of various actors who share common identities and values and are faced to external environments such as market and the state. However, this approach often taken by classical social movement theories has a risk of assigning specific and fixed attributes to actors and environments without examining the process of qualifying or disqualifying them with these attributes. As a consequence, it can lead us, in haste, to suppose social economy actors as protagonists based on normatively correct positions. Instead of the traditional division between actor and environment (or structure), which presupposes certain fixed attributes of each element, French pragmatic sociologies have proposed to focus on situations as research object, in which different actors equipped with reflexive and critical competences participate in the process of qualifying the given situation. One of these French pragmatic sociologies, the sociology on critique developed by Boltanski and Thévenot particularly focuses on the situations where people are engaged in disputes on justice or critique (Boltanski, 2011 ; Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991). As an analytical tool for understanding this kind of situation, they have developed the concept of “grammar” which modelizes various logics of critique used by actors as symbolic and cultural resources. Not only as discourse but also as practical and normative guide for appropriate behavior in a given situation, the grammar can be formulated with very abstract forms such as “cités” which correspond to certain political philosophies (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991) or with more flexible forms based on various intellectual sources corresponding to specific situations (Corcuff, 2001 ; Trom, 2001 ; Frère, 2009). With the grammar of critique mobilized by actors in social economy phenomenon, we could expect to identify which kinds of normative bases they claim for justifying social economy initiatives as a movement contributing to change the world.
In order to elaborate the grammar of critique in the social economy phenomenon, we analyze two kinds of documents. First one is academic works which have contributed to conceptualization of social economy since its appearance in the mid 1970s. The other is different forms of contents recommended by field actors in two countries (France and South Korea) as their reference for reminding what social economy means to them. Based on these documents, in order to reformulate various arguments into several grammars of critique, we identify diagnostic framing (victim, accuser, persecutor, judge) (Boltanski, 2011) and prognostic framing in the arguments. By analyzing national subsets of documents, we try to identify differences between locally adapted forms of grammars in France and South Korea (Lamont and Thévenot, 2000).
[References]
Boltanski, Luc. 2011. L’Amour et la Justice comme compétences : Trois essais de sociologie de l’action. Paris: Gallimard.
Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent, 1991, De la justification : les économies de la grandeur, Paris : Gallimard
Corcuff, Philippe. 2001. “Usage sociologique de ressources phénoménologiques : un programme de recherche au carrefour de la sociologie et de la philosophie”. pp. 105 26 in (eds.) Benoist, Jocelyn and Karsenti, Bruno, Phénoménologie et sociologie, Paris: PUF - Presses Universitaires de France.
Frère, Bruno, 2009, Le nouvel esprit solidaire, Paris : Desclée de Brouwer
Lamont, Michèle and Thévenot, Laurent, 2000, Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press
Trom, Danny. 2001. “Grammaire de la mobilisation et vocabulaires de motifs”. pp. 99 134 in (eds.) Cefaï, Daniel et Trom, Danny, Les formes de l’action collective. Mobilisations dans les arènes publiques, Raisons pratiques 12, Paris: Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales.
