The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society

ON JUSTIFICATION : BOLTANSKI AND THÉVENOT, ARTS MANAGEMENT AND ARTS ORGANIZATIONS

In the late 1980s, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot organized a special issue on “economies of grandeur” in the journal Cahiers du centre d’étude de l'emploi (Boltanski and Thévenot 1987). This publication highlighted the coexistence of different regimes of normativity in the world of work and the logics of recognition and construction of legitimacy, which sometimes evolve in parallel and sometimes intersect, revealing clashes between values. This paper anticipated the publication a few years later of De la justification: les économies de la grandeur in 1991. A major work in European social sciences, the text was translated into English several years later by Princeton University Press in 2005 under the title On Justification: Economies of Worth. Prior to this translation, the duo also disseminated their conceptual framework in English in a publication in the European Journal of Social Theory, helping to make this approach accessible to a new audience (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999). Often described as pragmatic sociology, this research program applied to a number of different fields, including the arts (Boltanski and Thévenot 2000; Blokker 2011; Kleppe 2018 Bérubé and Demers 2019; Bérubé and Gauthier 2025).

This theoretical framework approaches society through different configurations that the authors characterize as “worlds” or “cities”, with their own norms, value scales, and representations of greatness and social success. The originality of this approach lies precisely in the fact that the social dimension addressed in On Justification is articulated on a social order that is shaped by forces of integration (the functioning of worlds) and forces that fragments the social into a multiplicity of worlds. This book presents a typology of worlds and a society divided by normative orders: the civic world, the inspired world, the domestic world, the world of opinion, the commercial world, the industrial world, and the world of projects. In addition to providing us with ideas about the configuration of values that unfold across different social worlds, the authors also invite us to use their typology to address conflicts. How are clashes of values between different normative systems resolved? What agreements and balances can be established? These are the typical questions that stemming from their theoretical framework and its mobilization in different researchers.

For this special issue of the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society (JAMLS), we welcome manuscripts that draw on the thinking of Boltanski and Thévenot, and that mobilize their concepts to study arts management, arts organizations, and cultural policy development. We also welcome theoretical work that offers critical reflection on the place of these ideas in our field. Without limiting ourselves to these, here are a few possible avenues for reflection.

First, would Boltanski and Thévenot's approach allow us to reinterpret major conflicts in the field of arts management and cultural policy? Conflicts in the workplace, conflicts over artistic creativity, conflicts over social representations of the arts and culture, can this approach help us reinterpret how we approach these conflicts? Does the proposed model allow us to gain a more accurate understanding of the culture wars of the 1980s, or those that have taken shape in the public sphere in recent years? Is it possible, based on this framework, to imagine the subtlety of the social worlds that come into conflict and to imagine ways out of the crisis? Can this approach stimulate action research or cultural co-construction initiatives that can create “agreements” and overcome certain conflicts?

Next, we invite authors to consider the intersections between the justification of other systems of thought mobilized by researchers in arts management. Can Boltanski and Thévenot's thinking find resonance with English or American pragmatist traditions? Furthermore, how has the thinking developed in On Justification evolved in the authors' subsequent works? In arts management, Boltanski and Chiapello's Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999) [translated in 2018 as The New Spirit of Capitalism] opens a dialogue between the arts and the various normative systems highlighted in previous works. What can the field of arts management learn from both the findings and the methods deployed in this latest work?

Finally, we also wish to welcome works that mobilize the theoretical framework, and that draw on the ideas and work of Boltanski and Thévenot. We wish to examine the originality of this thinking, but also its limitations, through various field studies focusing on artistic organizations, arts management, and cultural policy.

References

Bérubé, J., & Demers, C. (2019). Creative organizations: when management fosters creative work. Creative Industries Journal, 12(3), 314-340.

Bérubé, J., & Gauthier, J. B. (2025). Economies of Worth: A Critical and Reflexive Perspective on EDI in the Cultural Sector. Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy/Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement und Kulturpolitik: Vol. 10, Issue 2: Resiliency in the Cultural Sector, 2, 13-31.

Blokker, P. (2011). Pragmatic sociology: Theoretical evolvement and empirical application. European Journal of Social Theory, 14(3), 251-261.

Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2000). The reality of moral expectations: A sociology of situated judgement. Philosophical Explorations, 3(3), 208-231.

Boltanski, L., and L. Thévenot (eds.) (1987). Les économies de la grandeur. Cahiers du centre d’étude de l’emploi. Vol. 31. Paris : Presses universitaires de France.

Boltanski, L. and L. Thévenot. (1991). De la justification : les économies de la grandeur. Paris : Gallimard.

Boltanski, L. and E. Chiapello. (1999). Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Paris : Gallimard.

Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1999). The sociology of critical capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359-377.

Boltanski, L. and L. Thévenot (2005). On Justification : Economies of Worth. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press.

Kleppe, B. (2018). Managing Autonomy: Analyzing Arts Management and Artistic Autonomy through the Theory of Justification. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 48(3), 191–205.