history [...] The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein" (Foucault, 2001, p. 1571).

The “network society”, investigated and outlined as an emerging social order by Manuel Castells, is the most meaningful expression of spatialization. The network is indeed a geometric figure, the abstract space of a collection of points with its own mathematical laws, which is characterized, Castells maintains, “by the preeminence of social morphology over social action” (Castells, 1996, p. 469). Thus, in my investigation of the semantic changes in “inequality” I will now look at space, spatialization and space-based governance instruments, shifting the focus from words to symbolic artefacts of a spatial nature. My aim is to explore what meanings these artefacts confer on inequality. The analytical background I shall use as a basis comes from research on urban policies, territorial governance, and the transformations that are affecting European cities, mainly.

Cities, which are obviously the preferred environment for space-based policy instruments (first and foremost those based on architecture and urban planning) appear to be affected by two opposing and simultaneous spatial drives. On the one hand, as Françoise Choay argued in her studies of history and anthropology in architecture (Choay, 2006, p. 10), spatialization driven by globalization constitutes an expansive drive that acts upon the extension of the city and produces urban sprawl and thus its disarticulation (and its replacement with the *urbain*). On the other hand, the opposite move towards concentration, which insists on circumscribing the local—the neighbourhoods, typically, in order to control them or increase their value—equally tends to fuel separation, segmentation and disarticulation in a different form.

It is this latter shift that is of interest here. It has its origins in and is fuelled by the issue of “urban (in)security”, whose vocabulary of motives was provided by the “fear of the Other”. This issue reached Italy (from the Anglo-Saxon world) during the 1990s, establishing itself in public discourse. It marked the beginning of the intense season of policies for urban security, which since then have become a major lever of governance in cities, not only in Italy, and are constantly updated (today also due to the terrorism alert). It has also been noted that in this
way problems and solutions are reframed, with attention being shifted from the “social” issue of security, an issue to do with welfare, to its “civil” significance, an issue to do with law and order, and from social protection to police protection.¹⁷ In this frame, whether it is a matter of managing a deprived urban area, of fighting “degradation” by means of “urban décor”¹⁸ interventions, or of preventing social disorder and criminal behaviour by means of surveillance devices, all these policies operate through space-management and space-based instruments. Security is above all territorial, being translated into “securitized territories”. And, in its turn, the territory, its borders and identity are increasingly marked by the question of security as the crux of the relationship between citizens and institutions. In the governance of the city (and not only) “territory” becomes a keyword which, whilst giving recognition to the everyday life contexts of people and to local communities, transfers on them the semantic density that the term has accumulated in reference to state sovereignty and its inner security issue.¹⁹ It is in the territory that governance operates by means of area-based instruments, borders, partitions, “quadrillage” (grids), and so forth, and thus it is there that clues are to be found to the processes of spatialization, which also affect inequality.

In fact, there is much talk of “territorialization”, particularly following in Foucault’s footsteps and revealing how powerful it is in the digital and globalized world, just when the virtual is being freed from any spatial bond (see for instance Paul Hirst, 2005, part 3). Anyway, territory and territorialization have become a common yardstick for all policies on social matters—including welfare (Bifulco, 2014), in line with the emphasis placed on the “local” by European policies and programmes. And it is above all in relation to places and spaces, areas, zones, districts, and the like, that policy issues are defined. Even the people’s status as citizens—and possibly citizenship itself as a status—is now more directly anchored in their own (local) territory, so that the model of citizen is now provided by the “inhabitant” active in his or her own neighbourhood, as was noted in France by Cathérine Neveu (2011) and Jacques Donzelot (2009).

Territory and territorialization contain the promise of a governance that is closer to the citizens, the promise of a privileged arena for enhancing political participation and democracy. There are experiences and some evidence that give credit to this promise,²⁰ but these are far from questioning the “territory’s” prevalent semantic frame I have just
outlined, its intrinsic link to the theme of security and the spatial sepa-
ration it activates. All in all, on observing forms of territorial governance
globally, it can clearly be seen that they tend to produce “exclusion” or
“expulsion” (Hirst, 2005; Sassen, 2006, respectively), by making wide
use of borders and separations. And we are well aware, with reference
to the local scale of governance, that relating people to a given terri-
tory may equally be a source of stigma and denied citizenship, as, in the
case of France, the young *banlieusards* perfectly know.²¹ In our cities²²
the signs by which the territory is marked, consisting of borders and
separations, may be slight, yet the well-known phenomena of “relega-
tion”, “urban segregation”, and the like are important signals and allow
us to glimpse drives towards a spatial concentration of homogeneous
populations in distinct urban areas. In many of the world’s big cities actu-
ally, these trends are much stronger, and give rise to spatial concretions
of the polarization between privileged and deprived urban populations,
such as gated residential communities or luxury areas, on the one hand,
and “difficult areas” or slums, on the other. In these forms of spatial
inscription of unequal populations significant traces of a “spatialization”
of inequality may be detected (Bricocoli & De Leonardis, 2015). Of the
space-based technologies employed by territorial governance, many bear
the same marks: barriers, enclosures, sensors, checkpoints, (also private)
armed police, off-limits areas, fences, walls and, yes, moats. Open spaces,
such as public green areas, should also be included in this list when they
are designed to create a buffer zone that protects a middle-class residential
area from the disorder of the city, and so should the “by-pass roads” that
make it possible to skip areas of urban misery, ignore them, and live sepa-
rate lives. These dynamics of division that slice the city into segments tend
to eliminate places, opportunities and reasons for meeting and exchange,
and for conflict between unequal populations.

The binary logic of separation finds its most drastic expression in
the “walls” that have started to proliferate everywhere, especially as the
preferred solution to the threat posed by migratory flows in our global-
ized and hyper-connected world. The barrier between Mexico and US is
the most famous and the longest, and the Israeli “Wall” separating Pales-
tinian people is considered a prototype (Weizman, 2007). In Europe, too,
migrants are kept outside its boundaries, as we have had to recognize,
and—at its Southern boundary—the armed Mediterranean Sea is now
performing a similar function, paradoxically. Starting from Wendy Brown
(2009) who first gave an account of the phenomenon, the literature has
emphasized several features of this device.²³ Although it is adopted as a quick and easy tool of governance, a ready-made solution, its effectiveness has already proved to be highly dubious. Such barriers perform more of a “theatrical function” (Brown, 2009, p. 122), and what they stage is, in fact, separation. Whilst the walls of total institutions (such as asylums or prisons) which have been familiar in our modern landscape for so long, segregate people for taking charge of, and treating—re-educating, punishing, etc.—them, these new walls produce a separation only, by enacting a spatial division on a territory into two abstract spaces, without any people being taken into charge whatsoever. Through and around these “walls of separation”, the powers exercised and the operations performed are directed towards impeding, driving away, rejecting, turning back, establishing a distance, avoiding encounters and denying recognition.²⁴

Walls set up a powerful choreography for global inequality. Through spatialization, inequality no longer designates a bond between unequal people, but rather a distance that suspends or denies any relationship between them. “Inequality translates into distance”: it is appropriate to recall here what Richard Sennett (2006) argues when discussing how the chain of command changes in the “new capitalism”, and observing the enormity of the distances between top managers and workers in the globalized company. “There is nothing like a relationship between a Thai shoe-sticker and a Milanese fashionista; they transact, [...] rather than relate” (Sennett, 2006, p. 55). The translation of inequality into distance, says Sennett, goes hand in hand with the “divorce between command and accountability” (Sennett, 2006, p. 57). To this power, being expressed in a denied bond, and therefore de-responsibilized, corresponds the form of subjection that Sennett himself had described as “the bond of autonomy” (Sennett, 1980). This form of domination consists in the denial of any bond whatsoever with the dominated, resulting in both cognitive ignorance and moral indifference to him/her.

## NUMBERS: MEASURING INEQUALITY

What “distance” is—that is the length of a line between two points—may be known and recognized by measuring it. Here we finally focus on the role played by numbers, intended as a language, in the reconfiguration of inequality. As I stressed at the beginning of my discussion, this is the language by which inequality is mostly represented nowadays. In
the meantime, however, somewhere along the analytical path followed up to now, the innocence of an objective, neutral description of the phenomenon attached to its measurement has evaporated. We have traced the spread of quantification that goes along with changes in the lexicon of welfare and the grip of the quantitative format on the basic cognitive tools for defining issues and governing them. The measurements of inequality now appear to be involved in a more general reframing, in which inequality is being translated into distance. In which numbers, like words, acquire relevance and demand to be observed for what is made with them, i.e. their performative potential in fabricating a reality. They are “an engine, not a camera” (MacKenzie, 2006), to take up a meaningful image summing up a crucial interpretative key in studies on quantification.²⁵ And it is in this perspective that we shall proceed to investigate the role of numbers in resignifying inequality, and observe how their virtues are exploited.

Numbers provide the synthesis of a plurality of components, factors and aspects of inequality. Thanks to their parsimony, and the economizing function numbers perform in describing (and assessing), it is simply by means of a few well-constructed figures that the quantitative format provides a precise account of the magnitude of a phenomenon. At the same time, thanks to the related standardization, many qualifications may be translated into figures. And the issue may be split and multiplied into a plurality of inequalities referring to the widest possible variety of assets—inequality in income, wealth, education, health, access to the internet, etc.—and placing one next to another in a linear sequence, from life expectancy at birth to the freedom to choose how one dies.

Nonetheless, we first have to consider that within this multiplicity the same cognitive format is reproduced, made up of quantification, measurements, comparisons, ratings and rankings. As far as inequality is concerned, figures tell us a great deal about variations, distances and unevenness between different positions, but very little about power relations between them. Numbers enact a binary logic, as we have already seen, and are directed to making (horizontal) comparisons rather than talking about (vertical) conflicts. More importantly, it should be considered that the economizing function of numbers is primarily performed on words, qualifications and arguments.²⁶ And we must ask ourselves what effects this parsimony has on the density of the semantic repertoires that noun “inequality” has accumulated and sedimented, and on its inner contentious meaning. Quantitative data save on qualification and
argument, on plural interpretations and representations, on voices and conflicts over vocabulary.

The quantification that establishes what is to be considered relevant knowledge with regard to inequality guides a process of abstraction which—in the same way as space acts on place—“sucks out” plurality, contingency and subjectivity, impoverishing the symbolic repertoire for expressing modes and reasons in talking about inequality. The figures on inequality—so precise and well-founded on the authority of science—efficiently carry out their task of conferring objectivity, the “mechanical objectivity” grounded on calculus and expressed in a “matter-of-fact” format. And of course these are very important results. Nonetheless, when objectivation is exerted on the issue of inequality it comes with high costs. The great variety of other forms of knowledge about inequality is absorbed or replaced by numbers and ends up being neutralized. Costs are high in terms of the naturalization of the inequality issue, with the risk that “an ontological naturalness or essentialism [...] takes up residence in our understandings and explanations” concerning this issue (Brown, 2006, p. 15). As far as it is framed by measurements, inequality also becomes exposed to the effects of their performative potential I have just recalled, when these are taken as a metric for rating operations and assessing performances. This is an aspect that deserves investigation, remembering the research on rankings and the reactivity (or feedback) they produce in the field they measure and order, and more in general the way these types of quantitative instruments function in the “governance by numbers”.²⁷ Indeed, with figures on inequality, their descriptive function may end up being replaced by, or incorporate performance indicators. This is plain to see especially in the area of statistics, comparisons and rankings between countries, as when inequality figures are included in the set of indicators used to evaluate the performances of a country targeted for aid programmes.

In Ousmane Sidibé's contribution on the subject in this volume, the country is Mali, and the indicators to be improved concern inequality in education. The example shows that, under the pressure of ranking (and the incentives correlated to it) an enormous effort is made to raise the rates of education, attaining a numerical objective which, however, obfuscates substantial quality issues of education itself. This is a case in point for the “governance by numbers” where one can see how the inequality issue is being treated within a management by objectives system, formatted by the latter's instrumentation and dynamics, and how widespread practices
are for “pushing up the numbers”, even by cheating.²⁸ The outcome in terms of a real reduction of educational inequality is, to say the least, dubious. In any case, the issue of inequality, as it is incorporated into the set of global governance control tools to produce “adjustments” and “alignments”, undergoes distortion. Not only is its meaning set as a problem of disparity, a quantitative gap, a distance between positions aligned along a distribution curve, hence losing its relational grounds, its reference to power relations, but it may also happen that inequality itself, as expressed by numbers, becomes a tool for control, discipline and subjection.

The lesson I draw from this case concerns another aspect of the more general reconfiguration of inequality. This paradoxical twist in the meaning of inequality has been made possible by its reshaping and treatment as a matter for management, in accordance with the managerial style of dealing with problems. More precisely, inequality appears to fall within the category of problems that are there to be “managed” instead of being “solved”, which Sheldon Wolin identifies as a salient trait of the “managed democracy” (and its “domestication”, Wolin, 2008).

However, we also know that numbers may well provide people with strong arguments against power. In the case of inequality figures, too, numbers give phenomena visibility, a visibility grounded on scientific evidence. Inequality, being expressed in the measurement of distances, looks like a “matter-of-fact” issue, and it is in this format that it acquires visibility. It is thanks to this visibility they confer on situations being measured, that quantitative data, their construction and use have often been, and still are, crucial matters at stake in claims for recognition, in political struggles, and in the making of “collectives”.²⁹ Can we say that the same thing is happening today with the figures on inequality?

In a way, yes, it does seem that here, too, figures provide arguments for denouncing disparity and representing a collective, particularly around the polarization they make visible: typically, the “our 99%” against the richest “1%”, is a main argument of the “Occupy” movement. The quantitative framework does help denounce an imbalance of power that has grown to the limits of disproportion, giving rise to public protest and collective action. Nonetheless, this power imbalance that numbers highlight appears, in its very disproportion, to be simplified to the extreme, and void of qualification. That 99% remains an aggregate as vast as it is indeterminate, corresponding to, following Robert Castel’s (2003) metaphor, a “collection of individuals” sharing a statistical position only, rather than
a “collective” of political subjectivities. Whilst attention is focused on the disproportion, the question of what connects the two poles remains obscured. Here again, the issue of inequality is represented more in the form of a gap than of a bond. And as far as domination is concerned, it appears to be a matter of unbalanced quantities. Even when polarization is critically traced back to the new capitalism—as done by Piketty in “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (Piketty, 2014)—the tendency is to forget Marx’s famous warning on how easy it is to pass off capital “as a thing” rather than as the “social relationship” it really is.

## CONCLUSIONS: THE DREAM OF AN INDIFFERENT POWER

As scholars of semiotics well know, and as Koselleck’s *Begriffsgeschichte* (2007) also teaches us, the meaning of a word has a history that can only be investigated in relation to other words. Inequality is no exception, as it immediately recalls a dense constellation of words and related meanings.³⁰ Of this constellation, the portion analysed here, however limited in time and place, has provided several leads to explore how the meaning of the word “inequality” has been changing—in a nutshell, it is being translated into “distance”—and what role has been played by quantification, or more precisely by the language of numbers. During this investigation the latter, as a *langage du rapport à la realité*, has come into play together with the language of words and that of spatial artefacts. And I have shown how these languages contribute to reconfiguring inequality as a distance “from”, instead of a tie “between”.

As far as it is framed as a question of distances and measurements, inequality is captured in a quantitative format. Within this format the vertical configuration, which anchored inequality to burning issues of power, politics, and institutions, is being obfuscated, and inequality appears in the normalized format of a quantitative variance flattening out along a horizontal line. It is established by a comparison between linear positions and intended merely as a matter of plus or minus, more or less, yes or no, according to a binary code. Even though figures can be multiplied, cross-compared and updated in real time, the picture remains flattened out on a one single level. Figures only relate to other figures, whilst the third term that links them tends to disappear. We might say that, because it is only acknowledged as relative, and not as relational, inequality has lost its absolute—that is, its societal and political—dimension (much like Sen’s “absolute poverty”). It is worth noting
that similar flattening effects of quantification come to light in the making of the “new calculable global world” that Laurent Thévenot discusses in his contribution to this volume, by analysing certification standard setting concerning palm oil. His account, from the perspective of the “smallholders”—farmers and rural communities—involved in the “participative” procedure, vividly shows how in this latter the arguments are both formatted for making things calculable and expressed in a horizontal arena that conceals the (rather obvious) “power imbalance between parties”. Any third term between these parties is lacking, aside from the so-called “third parties”, whose impartiality appears highly dubious. In that case, too, Thévenot argues, domination bonds get obscured by the “juxtaposition of ‘stakes’ in a horizontal dialogue around the round table”.³¹

In any case, those flattening effects are the mark left by quantification on the semantic field of inequality. However, we should also reverse our view and look at what mark is left on quantification by its involvement in this field and in the more general resignification process affecting inequality. As we have seen, from the vantage point of the inequality issue, quantification is being highlighted in relation to ruling powers, especially those powers that are expressed, since Hobbes, in naming, as well as, obviously enough, in counting. “Depoliticization” may be a first interpretative key when considering that, in quantifying inequality we have seen a power engaged in fabricating a reality without seeming to do so. Of course, as I have already recalled, quantification can also keep political struggle alive, both when it is a matter of constructing data and when these data coagulate political arenas and subjectivities. But the case of inequality bears a quite different mark, as we have seen, which suggests placing quantification amongst the drivers of the depoliticization of political choices characterizing, according to Wendy Brown (2006, 2015) the neoliberal discourse.

Indeed, the issue of inequality, which has for a long time been the crux of political struggles and compromises on the social order, appears to be caught in the grip of the “discourse of depoliticization” as intended (see Brown, 2006, ch. 1) as a discourse that “eschews power and history in the representation of its subject” (Brown, 2006, p. 15),³² emptying it of political significance. In the end, inequality is transformed, as we have seen, into a problem to be “managed”, a terrain on which to apply a managerial logic. “Inequality becomes normal, even normative” (Brown, 2015, p. 38). According to this interpretation, numbers are involved in
depoliticization since they provide a language for the economic metric which is at the core of the neoliberal spirit, and for generalizing it within “spheres and activities heretofore governed by other tables of values” (Brown, 2015, p. 21). By providing the “dissimulation of the normative work they do” (Brown, 2015, p. 135), numbers contribute to vanquishing “the already anemic homo politicus”, being replaced by “homo oeconomicus” (Brown, 2015, ch. 3).³³

Our focus on the inequality issue confirms that the quantitative format can be extremely efficient in eschewing power matters in the issues it shapes. But what kind of power operates through the dissimulation provided by numbers in the case in point? As we have already seen the translation of inequality into distance corresponds to a power being exercised through that distance: not only in the sense of “governing at-a-distance”—something we already know numbers may contribute to—but rather in the sense of “keeping at a distance”. Numbers provide dissimulation to a power that denies any form of bond with its own object/subject. A domination, I argued or rather conjectured, being enacted through an indifference which takes the form of both ignorance on the cognitive side, and irresponsibility on the moral side.³⁴ The issue is now how the language of numbers reframing inequality is involved in corroborating this indifference.

We already know how much the neoliberal “bureaucratization” (Hibou, 2012) exploits the performative role of quantitative data in renovating and enhancing the archetypal indifference of the bureaucratic command.³⁵ As Supiot (2015) shows, the automatisms of the governance by numbers replicate in digital form the long-lasting mechanistic utopia of the *homo automata*, freed from any subjectivity. But the crux of the matter lies in the very virtues of numbers, as we have seen them at work configuring inequality as distance. We have seen how the science-based operations for sparing on words and qualifications, and for “mathematization” (Ogien, 2013) transfigure inequality into an abstract picture. The abstraction that the language of numbers is able to achieve results in a rarefied reality. The latter appears, at the same time, in the spotlight of scientific evidence, and cleared from any other form of knowledge and language, of view and experience, and even of data. It is precisely thanks to the capacity of numbers for abstraction, and thus to the abstract and rarefied picture of inequality they provide, that the inner contentious meaning of inequality, as a power issue, is being sucked out, and may be ignored by the powerful. The “skilled ignorance” grounded on the
quantified inequality goes hand in hand with the moral innocence that the reference to destiny or chance (like in a gambling game) in its turn authorizes.

To sum up, the powerful machinery of numerical abstraction trans-
figuring inequality would seem to support the dream of a power that
dominates by pretending to be both cognitively and morally indif-
ferent. But there is a disproportion, here, disturbing the dream. This
is the disproportion between the rarefied picture of inequality that
numbers achieve—objective, precise, and complete as it claims to be—
and the density of the silenced social knowledge on inequality, the related
immense sufferings, and the anger growing around it. This dispropor-
tion reveals that this dream is just a dream. And when the abstract reality
of the quantified inequality grows to the point of irreality, the dream of
indifference appears coupled with obtuseness.

NOTES

1. See Carlo Ginzburg (1986) on the history of S. Paul's precept "noli altum sapere, sed time".

2. Carlo Ginzburg (1998, p. 180) shows the political implications of Perspective in the Dedication of Machiavelli's Il Principle. As for Hobbes, the focus is on the Leviathan's frontispiece in both Gamboni's and Schaffer's contributions in Latour and Weibel (2005, pp. 162–202).

3. Fleck (1983 [1935]). But I am especially referring to the re-elaboration by Mary Douglas in the framework of her cognitive approach to institutions (Douglas, 1986, 1996).

4. Here, I examined the arguments and justifications put forward in welfare policy arenas, especially those in normative texts, deeds and administrative acts.

5. The word “labour”, too, was (and still is) under a process of redefinition subverting its historically sedimented meaning (Salais 2007).

6. It is worth recalling here the “eclipse” of the elite issue from social theory and discourse that Mike Savage and Karel Williams (2008) show to be an effect of, amongst other factors, the quantitative turn of sociological research on stratification and inequality from the mid-1970s onwards. As national sample surveys were unable to highlight the small group at the top, “elites thereby flipped from view” (Savage & Williams, 2008, p. 3). And at the same time, inequality was defined “not as a set of social relations, but as a graduated hierarchy” (Savage & Williams, 2008, p. 5).

7. It is worth pointing out here that a dual semantic matrix of the noun “evidence” converges on poverty, i.e. not only a scientific frame, but also
a legal one, where it is the police who provides the evidence constituting the information on which legal judgement is based. The combination is evoked by the images of the “war on poverty” in the USA, drawn for example from the classic “Regulating the Poor” by Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven (1971). I recall the image of the social worker, popu- larly known as “social police”, who visits the home of the single mother applying for benefits in order to check that she is not hiding a husband under the bed. A different perspective on the legal frame was developed by Carlo Ginzburg, recalling Peirce, to illustrate his historiographic approach (Ginzburg, 1986, pp. 159–193).

8. These two qualifications imply two different semantics of poverty, as well as two different grammars of justice. I refer to only a few aspects of this difference here.

9. “Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, partici- pate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or are at least widely encouraged or approved, in the soci- eties to which they belong. Their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns and activities” (Townsend, 1979, p. 31). The European Commission’s definition, adopted in 1984, is similar in tone: “The poor shall be taken to mean persons, families and groups of persons whose resources (material, cultural and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the Member State in which they live” (EEC, 1985).

10. In the meantime, the vocabulary of needs has been reinforced and they have become candidates for the role of “absolutes” in the place of capabilities (Doyal & Gough, 1991).

11. The comparative element is, indeed, part and parcel of the relative concept of poverty, according to which it is only possible to judge whether or not someone is in poverty in relation to other people.

12. As for this crucial question in Sen's capability approach, see Salais, in this volume. See also Salais (2009) and De Leonardis et al. (2012).

13. I am quoting David Schmidtz, a representative of neoliberal discourse on welfare (Schmidz & Goodin, 1998). It is worth noting that something similar to a “bookkeeping justice” seems to underpin the social credit card system instituted in China today, that Tom Lam analyses in this volume. He shows it to be a crucial government’s technology to “economize soci- ety” and establish a “credit fundamentalism” in pursuing the official dream of a “harmonic society”.

14. As for architecture just consider the inner political substance of Vitruvius’ and Alberti’s “ars edificandi”. On geography see the political history of the cartographic reason so wonderfully summarized in Brotton (2012).
15. Gieryn refers, amongst others, to De Certeau: in this case “place” translates the French term “lieu”. See also Gregory and Urry (1985).

16. A “spatial- or topological - turn” has also involved social sciences since the 1980s.

17. Following Robert Castel (2003) who points out how this frame-of civil more than social security-benefits from, and in turn feeds, the ghost of “les nouvelles classes dangereuses”.

18. In Italian, the corresponding term “decoro” maintains a double meaning, as it refers to both (aesthetical) decoration and (moral) dignity.

19. Whose genealogy Foucault has reconstructed in his lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Foucault, 2004). See also Sassen (2006).

20. Also in the light of some case studies I carried out myself (see Bricocoli et al., 2008).

21. Donzelot (2006). On the related ethnicization of social conflict see Castel (2009).

22. The reference is to Europe, as I said. More generally, it should be remembered how different the history of cities in the US is, marked as it was at its very beginnings by “racial” issues and connected dynamics of spatial compartmentalization that are constantly being renewed.

23. See Brown (2009) in her study on today's “porous” states' sovereignty. See also De Leonardis (2013) and the research literature discussed there.

24. According to Saskia Sassen (2014), it is “expulsion” rather than “inequality” that better corresponds to the “predatory” capitalism, which she now sees emerging. “Repulsion” instead is, according to Serge Paugham's recent research with colleagues (Paugham et al., 2017), the common attitude towards the poor amongst the urban élites in Paris, Sao Paulo and Delhi. The aesthetics of these barriers is eloquent testimony to this. Their sheer crudeness transmits brutality, and the hubris of an act of mere force: Consider by contrast how beautiful the Otto Wagner Steinhof Spital in Vienna is. See also Christopher Payne's rich repertoire of the American asylums (Payne, 2009).

25. The image has been taken up by Espeland and Sauder (2016) to study rankings and their social effects, especially in terms of “reverse engineering”. On the performative role of quantitative data in general see the concept of “rétroaction” (feedback), regarding statistics (Desrosières, 2011), that of “reactivity”, regarding commensuration and ranking (Espeland & Sauder, 2007; but see also Espeland & Stevens, 2008), whilst on performance indicators see the Salais' image of the inverted pyramid, in this volume.

26. On the economizing function, see Guter-Sandu and Mennicken's very rich discussion in this volume, where quantification gets involved in “economizing the social” in three different ways: curtailing, marketizing and financializing. However, I am looking at this a bit differently. As far as
"to economize" may be also intended as the reframing process of "the social" according to (mainstream) economic thinking, also that "parsimony" the latter predicates and the numbers perform so well, is to be taken into account. It's about cognitive economy as well. The two classical essays by Sen (1977) and Hirschman (1985) still represent a relevant background for this question.

27. Here I am quoting the title of Alain Supiot's Lectures at the Collège de France, 2012–2013 (Supiot, 2015), in which he shows how quantification gives rise to a new normativity in which the rule of law is being dismantled and the law itself reduced to an instrument of—he argues—"total market" laws.

28. On similar cases in Africa see also Boris Samuel (2016). On the "government by objectives" see Thévenot (2015).

29. As we know from historical studies especially on labour statistics (notably by Robert Salais) as well as from research on statactivism (Bruno et al., 2014). An example for statactivism, which also is relevant here as it concerns measuring poverty, can be drawn from Appadurai's account on the mobilization of the inhabitants of the slums in Mumbai (now in Appadurai, 2013). When the city government, prompted by this mobilization, wanted to do a statistical survey on their living conditions, they claimed the statistical tools as their own by undertaking the survey themselves and deciding how to measure these conditions. However, see Boris Samuel, in this volume, on some of the limits of statactivism.

30. It would certainly have been appropriate to explore the opposite notion of "equality", as it also was subjected to dynamics of resignification, along with the changes in the words of welfare discussed in the first section of this chapter. One could note that, on the one hand, the noun "equality" was used less and less, or was treated as an equivalent of "homologation" (versus "difference") so that it acquired a negative meaning; and that, on the other hand, the semantic field of equality was breaking up into a plurality of synonyms or substitutes. One of these words is "parity" (parità, parité), which I mention here, because it seems to provide a fertile terrain for studying quantification. "Parity" demands that things be placed on the same level, as peers, it implies a comparative approach, and is correlated to measurements, rankings etc. (as typically the gender parity index). All in all, there is some contiguity to be seen here, with the flattening out we observed in the reconfiguration of inequality as distance. The opposite of parity is "disparity".

31. Quite obviously, this convergence does not imply that flattening effects, occurring in such different contexts, are intrinsic to quantification, which on the contrary can well be a road for voices to travel up vertically (and "en généralité"). Rather, the two opposite moves in which quantification is involved may help to clarify the difference between the two modes
of quantification—“statistics” or “governance-driven quantification”—that Robert Salais has identified in his contribution to this volume (see also Salais, 2010).

32. “Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce and contour it” (Brown, 2006, p. 15).

33. Perhaps, in order to clear the ground of any impression of ideological criticism, it should be remembered that this line of interpretation has a history. In this respect, it is sufficient to recall certain astute observations made by Werner Sombart (2006 [1906]) during his trip in the US. The account of this trip (dating back to 1905) revolves around the question: “Why is there no socialism in the US?” Sombart identifies one of the answers in the American “passion” for figures, or more precisely in the general recourse to quantitative metrics in assessing people and objects. Thus “bigness” has an absolute prevalence in evaluating and appreciating “greatness”. Sombart also argues that it is money that, in the end, constitutes the term of reference for these metrics, more precisely money “in the specific capitalist form” (versus Simmel). In the framework of justification theory, see also its comparative-cultural developments in Lamont and Thévenot (2000) on the relative salience of the market as a principle of evaluation in the American (versus French) polity. Similarly, see also Supiot’s (2015) research on the historical-cultural matrix of quantification associated to the rise of the “total market”.

34. If one follows Richard Sennett 2006, this indifference, seen as a way of exercising domination, and the divorce between command and responsibility it rests upon, may be considered as a salient feature of the culture of the new capitalism. However, this indifference also recalls to me other, disparate, images. First, we might search for the origins of this orientation in “the revolt of the elites” (and “the betrayal of democracy”, Lasch, 1995) or in that sort of “class struggle from the top down” that Luciano Gallino (2012) has identified in the dynamics of Italian capitalism since the late 1970s. Second, from the perspective of recognition (starting out from Honneth) indifference towards the “other” may correspond to a lack of recognition, to an identity not imposed–by the “naming” power–but rather denied (De Leonardis, 2013). Third, this indifference of the ruling powers seems complementary to the subjection standing from the threat of, or the condemnation to “uselessness”, that is the condition of potential or actual “surnuméraire” in the book-keeping of working, and of living as well, to pertinently quote Robert Castel (2009) once again. Fourth, this indifference of power also looks contiguous with today’s cynicism grounded on (both cognitive and moral) relativist positions (Sloterdijk, 2013).

35. Since Webers’s “sine ira et studio” disposition corresponding to the bureaucrat’s “honour” (see Herzfeld, 1992).
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# The Politics of Evidence
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# Homo Statisticus: A History of France's General Public Statistical Infrastructure on Population Since 1950

Thomas Amossé

Over the past few decades, views of quantification have changed. Largely seen as accompanying social progress and economic growth during France's post-war boom (1945–1975), quantification is now associated with new forms of domination. There have undoubtedly been differences in the tone, more or less critical, of social-historical work on quantification developed in France and elsewhere, ranging from the more political to the more cognitive (see e.g. Desrosières, 2008, vol. 2, ch. 1). Denunciations of the tools of quantification as reflections of the negative effects of neoliberalism¹ are yet also relatively widespread on an international level, as attested to in practice and by the diverse settings analysed in the contributions of this volume.

How are we to understand this shift? Certainly this is in part a result of differences (semantic, syntactic and pragmatic) in the quantification tools

T. Amossé (✉)

Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), Paris, France

e-mail: thomas.amosse@lecnam.net
emblematic of each period. In France, socio-professional categories—which contributed to making the 1960s and 1970s a golden age in the fight against inequalities (see e.g. Desrosières, 1987 [1977]; Desrosières & Thévenot, 1988; Amossé, 2013)—have little to do with the more recently developed management indicators. Their use likewise varies, as the former was related to knowledge and administration of the national socio-economic situation by the State and by social democratic authorities such as the General Planning Commissioner, while the latter aspire to the self-transformation of micro-economic behaviours (private and public). That said, this evolution is not solely due to a shift in subject-matter, viewing angle, or focal length in perspectives on quantification.

As we shall see, a retrospective examination of the forms taken by the same ‘tool’ over the course of time—focusing here on changes in the public statistical infrastructure on population—highlights its profound transformation, which attests to a crisis of totalization (Dodier, 1996) as well as a neoliberal inflection (Desrosières, 2014). Moreover, we herein talk of ‘statistical infrastructure’ rather than ‘survey’, despite the latter being more common in French and other languages. This choice aims to distinguish the generic subject-matter of our analysis—the statistical infrastructure—from the different forms it takes on over time (the first of which being the ‘representative household survey’). Additionally, this term refers to the utilization of administrative registers made up of households or individuals for statistical purposes. We further clarify that company surveys, which focus primarily on accounting and financial data, are excluded.

The statistical survey, a classic tool of quantification, has not disappeared in an era of indicators and benchmarking (Bruno & Didier, 2013). Yet, as much in its themes and technical characteristics as in the questions it poses and categories it retains, it is today much different than in the immediate post-war period. Herein lies the aim of this chapter, to describe in detail its evolution, which we summarize in three models that progressively overlap one another: the ‘representative household survey’, the ‘biographical investigation’, and the ‘matched panel’. These models articulate, each in a specific way, social science theories, statistical methodologies, and public action conceptions. They summarize a way of seeing and showing the world, of building and acting upon it. From these models emerge three types of *being*² that the different statistical infrastructures address—*homo statisticus*³ they contribute to defining—herein called *subject, person, and individual* in reference to the three pillars set out in Alain Supiot’s (2007 [2005]) *Homo juridicus*.
These *beings* are, of course, only made of paper or bytes, but they exist: simultaneously as a more or less explicit ideal within the minds of statisticians designing the statistical infrastructure, as a support (abstract but also linguistic) in the interaction between interviewer and interviewee,⁴ and as a (more or less visible) unit of analysis in the results. They can be the object of identification or appropriation processes; these *beings* provide a basis for scholarly and ordinary categorizations, reflections of a statistical normativity that, even if weak under the law, is nevertheless very real. Placed under the auspices of the State according to the continental tradition that symbolizes the etymology of the word *Statistik*, this statistical normativity is particularly strong in France, having since its origin been administration-driven (Desrosières, 1998 [1993]).

In what follows, we aim to document the evolution of the relation between the French State and its statistical citizens, in their multiple and successive forms. What can a history of large-scale statistical infrastructure on the general population, of the *beings* that they pre-construct and to whom they are directed, teach us about ways of knowing and governing the economy and society? In addressing this question, we endeavour to go beyond the individualization thesis characteristic of contemporary times. The analysis accordingly shows the diversification of statistical *beings*; the proposed trinity—*subject*, *person*, and *individual*—underlines the non-univocality of the changes at work. It also invites reflection on the tensions that accompany the advent of neoliberalism, from emancipation opportunities to renewal of oppression, without mystification of a past that can be the only bearer of social and economic progress or, on the contrary, synonymous with archaism. Far from any instrumental determinism, this study⁵ aspires not only to retain plurality but also the elasticity of quantification forms, of their conceptual base as much as their technical implementation; of their practical uses as much as their political implications. It builds on recent work on the social history of quantification, a subject widely reflected upon within this volume's contributions.

Our three models should not be thought of in purely temporal terms by which the modern is compared to the old. These are 'ideal type' constructions whose characteristics we never find in a 'pure state' in the statistical infrastructure actually carried out. Rather we find various forms of hybridization. If there is a temporal trend, the latter corresponds to a progressive diversification, and not to a replacement of one model for another. Each has passed through, in its own specific way, different methodological changes: the emergence of the individual as observation
unit replacing the household; the micro-computerization of collection modes and statistical analyses; the introduction of a longitudinal component in the design. In what follows, we present the three models in detail before turning to a discussion of the resultant forms of *homo statisticus*.

## THE REPRESENTATIVE HOUSEHOLD SURVEY

The first classic type of statistical infrastructure examined here has its origins in France in the 1950s. It was imported from the United States by public statisticians working at the INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques, the French National Institute for Statistics) in the immediate post-war period, who had spent time across the Atlantic training in the latest methodological innovations.⁶ Among other tools, they brought back the random sample survey (then used in the area of employment). This technique gave way to the adoption of the now standard notion of statistical representativeness, providing the necessary conditions for the description of the national population as a whole, as opposed to the hitherto targeting of specific subpopulations (Desrosières, 2008, vol. 2, ch. 8, p. 194). This period was characterized by the strong belief in the scientificity of a ‘new statistical language’ for economic matters (Desrosières, 2008, vol. 2, ch. 3), which coincided with the desire to depict a post-war society in full reconstruction. Numerous surveys were at the time created, forming a first point of departure for repeated studies still active today. Described as ‘structural’, these surveys dealt with general themes that both organized administrative action and reported on French daily life: employment (1950), housing (1955), family budgets (1956), health (1960), training and employment skills (1963), time-use (1966). The ‘programme of priority surveys on standards of living’, adopted in 1965 under the Fifth Plan, reflects the accordance of this type of survey with the knowledge and management of social and economic life objectives pursued at the time by the General Planning Commissioner.

The questionnaires of these surveys are usually short and in paper format.⁷ They have only a few filters (technical indications that determine whether to ask one or a set of questions) and the general principle is to use the same questions for the entire population, with identical formulations and response options for all respondents. They follow the model of a social identity card resembling, for example, the census report which de
facto defines the principal socio-demographic characteristics of the popu-
lation. There is thus only space for the ‘major variables’,⁸ or those of
an administrative nature, approved by public statistics and assumed to
be unanimously and uniformly understood. These variables generally go
hand in hand with legal categories or are derived from institutions, such
as civil status registers for sex and age, nationality and country of birth
for geographic origin, diploma or nationally certified trainings for level
of education, administrative subdivisions (departments, regions) for place
of residence or work, contractual terms for professional situation (type of
contract, working time). As suggested by Michel Gollac (1997), the law
saves on construction costs, as there is a shared belief that the categories
that refer to the law are solid.

Due to high production costs (up until the introduction of micro-
computing)—the survey samples are smaller in size and their analysis
constrained by limited automated processing capacities—the results often
take the form of tables or charts, with few intersecting variables: on one
side there are indicators on employment, housing, health, etc., and on
the other side those corresponding to socio-demographic characteristics
(sex, age cohort, nationality, region of residence, etc.). Their purpose is
to provide ‘photographs’, thematic snapshots of society, so as to gain an
understanding of its organization and functioning. The periodic reissue
of the surveys provides insight into macro-social dynamics. The results
are produced according to schemas of a structural-functionalist inspira-
tion that govern the elaboration of the surveys. It is in this manner that
the demographic, social or economic behaviour of the population and its
households are studied: the economy and social matters primarily being
the domain of the ‘head’ (a man)⁹; the domestic and familial reserved for
women, their spouses.¹⁰

Public statistics considers the household to be the central unit of anal-
ysis. Indeed, this is the title given, for almost twenty-five years, to the
section primarily responsible for designing statistical infrastructure on
population at INSEE: the Population and Household Department (from
1966 to 1989). The notion of household separates the interior (private)
from the exterior (public) according to a strict gender division of roles.
In addition to accommodating a male-dominated vision of the world, this
concept also reflects a holistic vision of society and the economy. By law,
men and women long had clearly assigned roles within the household.
Women could not work without their husband's permission until 1965 in
France, and divorce by mutual consent was not introduced until 1975.¹¹
In this context, the statistical household is seen as a full-fledged economic actor in terms of income, consumption, savings, or economic expectations. As such, according to the monthly business survey (still in place today), households have opinions, independent of the men and women, parents or children, who compose them.

The statistical nomenclature of socio-professional categories occupies a special place in this survey model. Its success was total during the three decades following their creation in the early 1950s (Desrosières & Thévenot, 1988). Broken down at the level of head of household or father, these categories are systematically used in statistical tables, evincing class inequalities or those of social origin.¹² This ‘major variable’ is emblematic of the back and forth between public statistics (and its surveys) and the socio-economic administration in France at the time: on the one hand, statistical nomenclature draws on social categories, occupational subdivisions which, backed by the law, are in place within companies and administrations; on the other hand, it is used directly by social actors, whether under the General Planning Commissioner or, to mention just one example, the indexation of the minimum wage which gives rise to national negotiations between labour unions and employers’ organizations.

The scope of these surveys is usually households in ordinary accommodations in metropolitan France, which compose the statistical heart of society, an echo of the electoral body. The non-zero probability of selection of households that organize the sampling procedures can, in fact, be thought of as the equivalent of a statistical right to vote. Furthermore, the methods of analysis used are essentially summation techniques, much like the adding up of votes in an election. The notion of representativeness is central here, its statistical meaning lending political acceptance to the term. If, in addition, we consider the particular role played by the law and institutions, this survey model certainly seems emblematic of the representative democracy of intermediary bodies characteristic of France from the 1950s to the 1980s. Indeed, the General Planning Commissioner constituted one of the primary transmission channels in organizing government and social partner participation in the elaboration of medium-term policies based, specifically, on predictions from statistical surveys.

This political-administrative tone is found in the term ‘survey’ itself. While it has certainly been used in a generic sense since the post-war
period within the French statistical community, it also refers, originally, to the search for information within a judicial framework, then by further extension the systematic collection of testimonies or documentation aimed at clarifying an issue or dispute.¹³ These different definitions share the implicit meaning of an ‘unveiling’; of obtaining private, sometimes secret or hidden, information. The word also recalls the asymmetry of the survey context, which has long been reinforced by the sociological profile of INSEE interviewers (former gendarmes and military personnel) (see Dussert, 1996). This asymmetry is, moreover, particularly significant in that it distinguishes between ordinary households and public agents. The statistical survey, notably that which follows this first model, is marked by the State’s seal: official notification letters often accompanied by an obligation to respond, the professional card of the interviewer knocking on the door bearing the colours of the flag—such elements give off an air of an administrative questioning.

This survey model was for many years the only one that existed. Then progressively, starting in the late 1970s and particularly in the 1980s, two other models were developed. That said, this initial form has not disappeared, but rather continues to exist, giving way to hybridization between original and emergent models with the micro-computerization and the integration of longitudinal questionings (see ‘matched panels’ below). Today they are essentially annual surveys by wave (on the labour force, housing, etc.) which, as a continuation of their antecedents from the 1950s and 1960s, compose the ‘back bone’ of the INSEE statistical infrastructure.¹⁴ There have, however, been two notable developments. First, they are increasingly governed by European regulations, for the purposes of updating social descriptions at the continental level in the form of reporting indicators or national barometers relying on several ‘core variables’. While similar to the ‘major variables’ mentioned above, the latter differs in not always referring to institutional categories, in the absence of common institutions at the European level.¹⁵ Second, they aim to more fully cover the entire population, surveying segments of the population usually labelled as “outside the scope” such as the homeless, those in institutions (prisons, health or social establishments) or by geographical extension of existent statistical infrastructure (such as for the overseas departments).
THE BIOGRAPHICAL INVESTIGATION

The second type of statistical infrastructure on population examined here has its origins at INSEE during a time of reflection and critique of the social sciences in France starting in the mid-1970s with, for example, the shift towards Pierre Bourdieu's critical sociology, affirmation of the work of Michel Foucault, and the start of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's pragmatic sociology. A two-fold movement of diversification thus began to shape large scale public statistical infrastructure. First, in terms of the variables used, with less primacy given to institutional categories in the questionnaires, and more openness towards the social sciences, whereby theoretical advances and methodological observations of ordinary practices provided new ways of questioning the world. Secondly and more broadly, the themes of such infrastructure diversified, going well beyond the economic behaviours of households and the socio-demographic characteristics of their members.¹⁶

The ‘biographical investigation’ questionnaires stand out for their length and evident distancing from examinations of a more administrative nature. They follow a linear path much like the biographical interviews of interpretive sociology,¹⁷ and frequently employ retrospective questions and timelines to reconstruct respondents’ trajectories. To this regard, two practical protocols were developed. The timelines can, on the one hand, rely on paper chronologies allowing respondents to mark their own points of reference (a birth, a move, a promotion, etc.) and in this way reconstruct different parallel accounts (i.e. familial, residential, professional, etc.). On the other hand, or simultaneously, the timelines can be assessed using resources offered by computerization, allowing to gradually unfold stories in function of past events. Thanks to filters and the configuration of successive questions, the survey fits the life of the respondent like a glove. In this model, the survey situation targets the unit of time and of place in order to ensure the coherence of responses, which rely on memory recall, sensitivity, and the perception of contexts, and thus depend on the interaction between interviewer and interviewee.

The objective of ‘biographical investigations’ is less about consistency with official categories (specific to the ‘representative household surveys’) or the pureness of ‘matched panels’ (see below) than the sincerity and coherence of the responses provided. This statistical infrastructure model has contributed to the development of new questions relative to emotional experiences, whether they be physical or mental, using a
subjective (perception or opinion; feeling or emotion) or more objective (ordinary situations, practical experiences) approach. In this way, violence, suffering or hardship, physical ailments or bodily nuisances, satisfaction or happiness, freedom, etc., become 'statisticable' notions. Simultaneously, information on the temporal context or local environment is collected, on different levels or according to different timeframes, often fixed by the respondents themselves. Multiple 'nested' descriptive circles can thus be identified: from the closest members who compose the 'living unit' or 'relations' (terms which invite moving beyond the alleged unicity of the 'household') to the furthest, such as the social class or geographical area to which one feels belonging.

Examples of statistical infrastructure within this model, which share some or all of its features, are as diverse in their themes as in the government departments or administrative bodies that produce them. They were originally carried out mostly by INED (the French Institute for Demographic Studies), where in the 1980s demographers began implementing statistical modelling for the analysis of biographies (Courgeau & Lelièvre, 1989),¹⁸ and then a decade later, multilevel or contextual analyses (Baccaini & Courgeau, 1997).¹⁹ Such statistical infrastructures have, however, also subsequently been used by a number of other public institutions. Two particularly stand out for their attention to biographical nature, to perceptions of past situations, and importance given to the contexts in which personal trajectories unfold. The first, the *Health and Career Path* survey (2006 and 2010; Santé et itinéraire professionnel) asks respondents to reconstruct their entire professional careers while also indicating major health events, with the objective of understanding how health and work influence one another over time. The second, the *Life History—Construction of Identities* survey (2003; Histoire de vie—construction des identités) combines a complete retrospective timeline (residence, family, employment, economic well-being) with questions aimed at understanding the articulation of the latter with different facets of personal identity (e.g. family, work, friends, hobbies, health, origins, etc.). As explained in the survey's guideline note, the idea is to account for the multiple processes of identifying individuals with places, groups, histories, values: "the individual bears multiple identities" whose "main dimensions must be explored" (see Héran, 1998). These two statistical infrastructures both leave a great deal of freedom to the respondents in how they mark their biographical itineraries and give more room to their subjectivity.
More than one method has been developed to use data collected in this way. Duration models, chronograms and, more generally, life course analysis methods all aim to understand procedural logics, successive choices, bifurcations, potential disruptions or protections of a given trajectory.²⁰ In a different way, exploratory factorial analyses can both show structural oppositions within the population and the coherence of answers for each respondent. Results can lead to a first, inductive, modelling of areas previously little explored and where a full understanding has not been reached in the absence of structuring ‘major variables’.²¹ More generally, “biographical investigations” seem to be consistent with the desire to reconcile the holism and individualism we find in the “new sociologies” described by Philippe Corcuff (2007 [1995]).²² In two different registers and disciplines, the methods derived from Amartya Sen’s capability approach in economics and the multilevel analyses used in demography (Baccaini & Courgeau, 1997) have been adopted in efforts to understand the effect of situated interactions and local contexts.²³

These approaches all have in common the fact that statistical representativeness is not the primary concern. Certainly the statistical infrastructure relies on a random sampling procedure and the subsequent analyses often use weights based on the latter, but this use is secondary in that it is the processes, the consistencies or oppositions, that are of particular interest. Echoing the sociological interview principle, the methods share a reasoning ‘by row’ at least as much as ‘by column’; in the sense that they first follow the logic of the respondents, not that of the variables. This sort of thinking is present from the very conception of the questionnaires—the queries are formulated using verbatim accounts from sociological studies—and of their computerization (filters linked to previous responses, which act like reminders during an interview). The term ‘investigation’ used here recalls the exploratory dimension of this statistical infrastructure: simultaneously as a study of ‘rows’ (that is to say, an attempt to reconstruct, for each person, their complex biographical history, their subjectivity, their social inscription) and taken as a whole, in many ways following an exploratory research approach.

## THE MATCHED PANELS

The third form of statistical infrastructure responds to a micro-causalist agenda, which differs both from grand narratives which collective entities deploy as historical causes, or biographical narrations where causality
is presented in a singular way. The statistical infrastructure that follows
this logic was made possible by unprecedented advances in information
processing, and maintains a close relationship with micro-econometrics.
Long dominated by macro-structural approaches, they were developed
along with individual computerization in the 1990s before becoming
dominant in the next decade. Like the 'biographical investigation', this
statistical infrastructure uses a large number of variables. However, in
contrast, their collection of information does not necessarily suppose a
specific unit of place and of time. While the information gathered can
certainly draw on questions asked by an interviewer during a single inter-
view, the latter is just as likely to derive from subsequent interviews
(possibly with different interviewers and respondents for the same panel
unit) or from matching with external data of diverse origins. In fact, the
origin or the situated consistency of the collected information is not of
all that much importance. What counts is their quality, thought of as
intrinsic, and the ability of the statistical infrastructure to amass pertinent
variables for each respondent so as to be able to saturate the explanatory
models with the phenomena under analysis.

When the classic format of the face-to-face interview is used, this form
of statistical infrastructure relies on a complex questionnaire including
numerous case disjunctions, where computerization plays a crucial role.
Multiple filters and parameter settings allow to adjust the questioning
and adapt the formulations so as to obtain, for each respondent, the best
measure of the targeted variables. Computerized questionnaires are not
modelled on either the social identity card of the 'representative house-
hold survey', or the carefully tailored 'biographical investigation'. They
are foremost routines, computer programmes, difficult to grasp in their
entirety. Indeed, the initial structuring requires a paper format trans-
lation, necessary in order to give analysts a clear understanding. The
current *Labour Force Survey (Enquête Emploi)* questionnaire provides a
good example: its paper version is more than 80 pages long (compared
to the simple DIN-A3 sheet in its original form); its reading, broken up
by numerous filters and parameter settings, underlines the complex task
of trying to construct a linear, narrative version. It is, more broadly, an
intricate set of documents (technical notes, training guide, survey lexicon
or glossary, etc.) necessary for using the 'data'. These questionnaires,
fragmented and complex, in reality, blend into the object they target,
i.e. panel individuals; direct questioning is one way (among others) of
obtaining information deemed pertinent. The collected variables rarely,
or secondarily, refer to practical experience or to institutional categories, but rather ideally and in principle, to observed facts²⁴ in accordance with theoretical categories which, besides, derive more from the natural sciences than the social sciences. They are ideally continuous, being categorical only when imposed by constraints (conditioning of reality or resulting from data collection arrangements). It is about ‘good variables’ (to use a common econometric expression), and not ‘ordinary variables’ or ‘major variables’ which are both too dependent on the administrative, spatial or temporal context. Education, for example, is thus ideally measured by number of years of study, and not by diplomas obtained (for which recognition by the State can vary over time) or the level of education reported (susceptible to perception bias). The aim of establishing causalities, scientifically demonstrated and ideally universal in scope, necessitates discarding variables that do not relate to any theory or may be endogenous. The term ‘data’ is preferred to ‘responses’; the constructed and declarative nature of the information must be neutralized in the analysis, following an objectivist plan that aims to get rid of limits associated with the subjectivity of the respondents or with conventions linked to institutions in the development of variables.

This type of statistical infrastructure is also characterized by a specific way of viewing time. Like the ‘biographical investigations’, longitudinal information is of central importance. In contrast, however, here such information is collected prospectively through data collection or matching of information repeated over time. Retrospective examinations are seen as tainted by bias, echoing the work of Karl Popper in the immediate post-war period, later analysed in detail and criticized by Luc Boltanski (2012), whereby history, the past, memory, are all seen as obstacles to the establishment of scientific truth, which should be timeless. If time plays a role, it is only as a source of variation and turned towards the future; it allows to identify causalities between actual and subsequent events. It is not about understanding historical processes—viewed as impossible to grasp other than as partial constructions (loss of respondents from one examination to another) or biased reconstructions (memory). It is a question of having repeated measures, of independent observations over time of the same panel units, so as to establish statistical links between various changes that have affected them over the period under analysis. At INSEE, a shift in orientation towards prospective panel data occurred in the mid-2000s (Chaleix & Lollivier, 2004), in part explaining our use of the term
'matched panels' to describe this model. The adjective 'matched' emphasizes the matching used to collect various information on the individuals panelled.

Examples of such statistical infrastructure, today numerous, are most often prospective panels. They tend to dominate public statistics and have contributed to transforming 'representative household surveys', leading to a hybridization of the two models. This is the case, for example, with regard to the *Labour Force Survey (Enquête Emploi)*, whose longitudinal dimension was significantly reinforced in 2003, when it came to rely on a 'continual'²⁵ statistical infrastructure. Whereas once it was (in its original form) emblematic of our first survey model, two important characteristics now attest to its hybridization. First, its original objective (establishment of the unemployment rate) has shifted from a reporting logic-made possible by the assumed strength of institutions themselves to give meaning to a direct question on labour status, notably unemployment, to a factual logic where only the combination of specific criteria referring to the past week (or reference period) determines unemployed status under the International Labour Office definition (Goux, 2003). Second, the increase in the number of interview waves has allowed for the development of panel analyses.

The *European Community Household Panel* (1994–2001) and its successor, the *Survey on Income and Living Conditions* (2006) provide additional examples of hybridizations. In addition, the Permanent Demographic Sample (*Echantillon démographique permanent*; census subsamples matched with civil status, electoral participation or, since 2011, social-fiscal data) and the *Dads* panel are older examples, which have recently been enhanced and whose exploitation has been strengthened.

Classic themes are addressed in this form of statistical infrastructure (e.g. housing, education, employment, health, etc.). They refer to areas of public action, but in a renewed form compared to the 'representative household survey' model. The emphasis is placed on individual change, its determinants and consequences, rather than on understanding broad macro-structural dynamics in an effort, for example, to organize national planning and accounting. In the shift towards micro-statistics, global management of the economy and society is no longer the central concern, as it was during the time of the planners, but rather scientific expertise, a priori neutral and independent, allowing to evaluate the capacity of public policies to change, within a given domain, individual behaviour. In this regard, incentive theory, sometimes implicitly, plays a determinant
role. The political dimension of this form of statistical infrastructure is thus naturalized: their design integrates political objectives in advance, in the definition of eligible populations and target variables. Certain forms of this statistical infrastructure are particularly inventive in their efforts to evaluate public policies, such as the *Panel on State-aided contracts (Panel des contrats aidés)* carried out in 2008 and 2014 by the Ministry responsible for labour and employment. In this case, the policies were evaluated using a quasi-experimental model directly imported from the natural sciences (notably medical research).

While specific, this 'matched panel' sub-model (described here as 'quasi-experimental'), is no less important from a symbolic point of view. The INSEE report on longitudinal data (Chaleix & Lollivier, 2004) in fact accords a central place to the latter: panels must be "targeted at specific populations (that is chosen in reference to the evaluation process of a given social policy, which usually means that collection begins before the introduction of the policy in question, so as to be able to observe change over time)", "coupled with information from administrative registers (to limit survey time and assure greater reliability of certain information)" and follow a "sampling plan that includes a control group" (Chaleix & Lollivier, 2004, p. 22).

In 'matched panels', the notion of representativeness is secondary. The descriptive results are usually but a first step, which aims to verify that there is no bias in the structure of the sample excluding an identifiable segment (according to observable characteristics) of the population of interest. Indeed, for panels, maintaining the initial representativeness of the samples is particularly challenging due to attrition. Although dynamic weighting can be developed, helping to guarantee representativeness over time, most studies restrict their analyses to cylindrical samples (i.e. to individuals who responded in all the waves of the panel) and don't use weights. These methodological options highlight the tension between survey specialists and econometricians,²⁶ and more broadly between the aims of representatively describing populations and estimating factors associated with a specific situation or behaviour. The methods used, most often micro-econometric, neither need nor take into account the representative structure of the samples analysed, as if the 'data' were exhaustive.²⁷ It is the size of the sample, or the repetition of observations (within a population and/or over time) and the (large) number and ('good') quality of variables that are determinant in demonstrating the 'purified' causalities of composition effects or selection processes.
Econometric modelling generally identifies one or more response vari-
ables—a behaviour or a situation that should evolve or improve in the
population, such as educational attainment, participation in the labour
market, etc.—and a large variety of explanatory variables. Among the
latter, an analytical distinction is made between so-called variables ‘of
interest’ and ‘control’ variables. The former, which correspond to poten-
tial public action levers (financial or in-kind support, for example),
dominate the reflection while the latter delineate as precisely as possible
the socio-economic profile, geographical or professional environmental,
etc., of the respondents. Ideally, as mentioned above, control variables
should be exogenous (that is, not depend on either the response vari-
ables or the variables of interest). They can thus either be an assumed
stable property of the respondents (e.g. sex, date of birth, age at end of
initial study, etc.) or a characteristic of their environment that they have
not chosen.²⁸ The number and the precision of these control variables
condition the degree of purity of the statistical associations between the
response variables and the variables of interest. They define what econo-
metricians call observable heterogeneity and are not generally described in
published results. They are only occasionally used in analyses of subpop-
ulations (e.g. women or men, those with low levels of education, etc.)
aimed at evaluating the differential effectiveness of the policies studied.

Establishing causality relies on even more demanding and sophisti-
cated methods than those leading to controlled correlations. Without
going into the technical details of the three main methods employed
(instrumental and panel econometrics, experimental matching), we can
emphasize that all use the temporal and contextual richness of individual
data to eliminate any source of endogeneity (reverse causality, omitted
variable, etc.) and to ensure perfect control of individual heterogeneity
(observable *and* unobservable²⁹). Such types of statistical infrastructure
differ from the previous two presented above, as much in their objec-
tives as in their formats and analytical methods. Undoubtedly, these
models lean on different social science disciplines and the influence of
the latter on French public statistics over the last seventy years. But they
are not limited to this influence, in the sense that methods circulate and
spread from one discipline to another, and the ‘models’ that compose the
three types of statistical infrastructure identified here take on, in fact, a
normative dimension as they are implemented by public statisticians.
HOMO STATISTICUS: THREE TYPES OF BEING
CONSTRUCTED BY THE STATISTICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The description of the three models provides several initial characteristics of the *beings* to which the different statistical infrastructures refer. In what follows, we summarize their features using the same terminology as that employed by Alain Supiot to describe the three pillars of his *homo juridicus* (Supiot, 2007 [2005]), with which the three forms of *homo statisticus* share a surprisingly similar kinship.

We have chosen to call the *being* defined in and by ‘representative household surveys’, *subject*. This *subject* has a more pronounced political dimension than the *beings* of the other two models. Its tone is administrative, as we have seen, with its official socio-demographic characteristics, the institutional variables defining its identity. From the outset, the characteristics of the *subject* refer to the collective beings with which it is assumed to identify (at a minimum during the survey), according to the process described by Nicolas Dodier (1996) of temporarily accepting assimilation to the pragmatic condition of statistical identity. This identity is borne by the ‘major variables’ of ‘representative household surveys’: the *subject* is the representative, among others, of collective beings; it is a member of a class, a category, or a group. Its singularity is not, in a sense, detachable from its properties, which are familial and sexed status within the household (‘head’ then ‘reference person’, or spouse, a child, etc.), age group (e.g. youth³⁰), social group (e.g. managers or blue-collar workers, farmers, etc.), nationality, or geographical unit of resident (region or department).

*Subjects* are thus only indirectly represented, by their categories of belonging: institutions such as the family, school, company, or administration, and more broadly the State (as source and guarantor of the law) primarily determine the categories that express, as much to society as to themselves, the surveyed *beings*. It is not, however, solely the range of collective belongings that public statistics uses to characterize its *subject*, but also economic behaviour, and social roles expected of the *subject*. This assignment is particularly clear with regard to the role of women, about whom statisticians ask: how should they assist in the reconstruction of post-war France, by having children (according to a fertility logic whose military inspiration has shifted to a production aspiration) or by providing a source of additional labour-power (Amossé & de Peretti, 2011)? More broadly, analyses of sex and age groups, migratory status or social group,
region of residence, are difficult to separate from a planning vision that poses, or rather imposes, behaviours based on a rationale of matching social characteristics to expected socio-economic conditions. According to sex, age, social class, etc. public statistics see, but also and above all, foresee average, or probable, conditions for its *subjects*, in terms of school, work, family, etc.; the training-employment matrices initially developed under the General Planning Commissioner providing a good example.

By their categories of belonging, the *subjects* are integrated into a *holistic* representation of the economy and of society, as cogs in a mechanism. These *beings* are only active *subjects* to the extent that they accept their assigned role of contributing to the collective future. They are actors and acted upon, subjects of and subjected by public statistics, much like the two facets (active and passive) of the notion of 'subject' that Alain Supiot stresses in *homo juridicus* (Supiot, 2007 [2005], p. 17). In descriptions of the tables and graphs that result from these surveys, it is the collective beings that are the subjects of sentences.³¹ In this way, they take on a certain realness, becoming common nouns ('women', 'youth', 'managers', etc.), that circulate both in public administration services, in scientific publications and events, in meetings between social partners, and even in ordinary situations. This is a vision of the world made up of *subjects* that are inseparable from their institutional social properties borne by the first survey model.

The parallel between electoral representation and statistical representativeness, central to this type of survey, illustrates in another way the political dimension of these *subjects*. With their non-zero probability of selection, according to the random sampling procedure, they are part of a 'statisticable' population, analogous to the electorate. Linking of the surveyed *being* to the whole is thus achieved in a similar way to the mode of voting, by aggregation-summation or, technically, with the use of survey weights. The *subject* is not only represented by collective entities, but also compared to the whole, to French society. From this point of view, recent change in the 'representative household survey' is not insignificant. Whether in terms of shifts due to processes of European harmonization or extension to margins previously considered 'outside the scope', this statistical infrastructure introduces two new types of *subjects*: French *peri-subjects* and European *proto-subjects*, which join in statistically defining the economy and society without, however, having a political representation that is, as of yet, anything more than marginal or nascent.
Even if sub-models (retrospective, subjective, situated) can be identified within 'biographical investigations', the corresponding statistical infrastructure draw on *homme statistici* with similar characteristics, what we call here *persons*. As highlighted above, such statistical infrastructure shares a certain kinship with sociology's semi-structured interviews in that the *beings* to whom they are addressed are attempts to statistically capture the singularity of personal situations. They are constructed as the questionnaire proceeds: the questions follow a biographical trajectory, and sometimes adapt to the latter. The numerous open-ended questions take into account, in an exploratory fashion, the subjectivity of the respondents, allowing for the expression of opinions or assessments. The co-construction of these *beings* and of the questionnaires underline a critical difference, symbolically, from the *subjects* of the 'representative household surveys'. Indeed, the statistical infrastructure of this second model grants greater freedom to the *beings* it addresses; these beings are not entirely pre-constructed as can be the case for *subjects* (who must accept that their singularity is limited to institutional categories) or *individuale* (whose characteristics must respond to the requisites of scientific theories, as we will see below).

It is neither the 'major' nor the 'good' variables that define the *person*, but the near as possible accounting of their experiences, their practices, their feelings, their wishes. This form of statistical infrastructure seeks, in fact, to reveal the various facets of an identity, possibly plural, constructed over time; the multiple interactions that *persons* have with their loved ones or their environment, their resources and their capacity to take action and plan for the future. The biographical investigation is in itself an experience, during which the *person* surrenders, body and soul, to the interviewer, much like the notion of 'person' described by Alain Supiot.³² Some, such as the statistical infrastructure underlying the investigation on *Violence Against Women* (2000; *violences envers les femmes*), have more-over raised practical and legal issues for public statistics, in their necessary consideration of the emotional burden and moral commitments faced by interviewees and interviewers.

The practical, sometimes intimate, identity of *persons* considered is thus revealed during the administering of the questionnaire, and the tone of the interviews often remains present in the production and reception of the results: to the personal implication of the respondents corresponds an empathetic recall of statisticians as readers. The process of identification, as described by Dodier (1996), here calls upon the experience,
sometimes symbolic, of a common humanity (and not the sentiment of collective belonging as for the *subjects*). From one end of the statistical chain to the other, attention is paid to the body and emotions, to interactions and confrontations with other people, to biographical bifurcations and disruptions. Although there is no one analytical framework used in this type of statistical infrastructure, the capability approach developed by economist-philosopher Amartya Sen (which, for example, has inspired recent forms of statistical infrastructure on educational pathways) corresponds quite closely to the notion of *person*. It describes *beings* who are a priori capable of desiring, of expressing themselves, of making themselves understood, of learning, and of working (when they have good quality jobs), and finally of finding a harmonious balance between work and family (Bonvin & Farvaque, 2007).³³ More broadly, this logic is consistent with political subjectification processes linked to struggles for social rights.

We use the word *individual* for the *beings* corresponding to the 'matched panels'. This *being* can be seen primarily as a way of identifying causalities between two groups of variables (response and of interest, to use econometric terminology). The corresponding statistical infrastructure is thus not really focused on *individuals* per se, either in and of themselves (as *persons*) or as members of the collective entities to which they belong (as *subjects*). From a literal point of view, the term recalls a basic unit that cannot be divided. Certainly, the composite nature of the statistical definition of these *beings*, resulting from an assembling of matched data, brings to mind Arjun Appadurai's (2016) concept of the "dividual" in reference to actors in the finance sector who, like the derivatives they manipulate, are socially divided. Reference might also be made to the algorithmic beings of big data, made up of multiple data marks and imprints (Rouvroy & Berns, 2013). That said, the resemblance is closest to the *individual* described by Alain Supiot in *Homo juridicus* (Supiot, 2007 [2005], p. 13): the individual is at once identical and unique, invisible and stable (it is the "basic accounting unit *par excellence*"); in its irreducible unicity ("unknowable essence and containing its own end"), a free being ("substantial ego[s] that freely forge social links rather than being fashioned by them").

The *individuals* in this third statistical infrastructure model have these qualities. They are characterized by stable and immutable properties, which neither determine nor are determined externally. These beings are
different from *subjects* in that they are not a priori integrated into collective entities. They don't have interactions, connections that they build over the course of time and that contribute in turn to their construction, like *persons*. Analytical methods for 'matched panels' are most often based on so-called 'i.i.d.' hypotheses, meaning that the statistical observations, or the individuals at a given moment in time, are independent and identically distributed. With regard to principles, and beyond specific modelling, dependence is not possible either between *individuals* or between their successive states over time. These *beings* are, in this way, alone and without history. They have neither depth nor belonging. They are a support for statistical identification, this essential heterogeneity on which the models rest, but which they ultimately aim to make disappear. Similar to the creation of data files for the use of heterogeneous information, their characteristics are removable: they are statistical tools (controls), not the objects of analysis, in the absence of a descriptive plan followed by exploitations using 'matched panels'.

An aggregation of situations, individual states or behaviours, results from these statistical models. The statistical *individuals* of the 'matched panels' are not strictly speaking the individuals of standard economics. Although they share numerous traits, their definition is empirical and not theoretical; it is not necessarily assumed that they are driven only by their preferences or utility. There is not, in any event, explicit place for either communities, classes, groups established by belonging, or for local context, familiar environment, close circles. Like atoms without connections to one another, *individuals* cross time and space. Their trajectories are certainly influenced by their environment, which only acts, however, as an external element and is not, a priori, modified in turn. Moreover, this influence does not fundamentally change *individuals*. Time is made up of events, of shocks, that have consequences but don't contribute to building a history, either personal or collective.

As basic *beings* of this type of statistical infrastructure, *individuals* have something almost fictional about them. They are both syntactically central-symbolizing and, especially, allowing the micro-statistical shift that characterizes the analyses—and semantically absent, upstream and downstream of data collection. They are necessary, but must also be overcome: they are seen as obstacles, as reflected by the notion of 'unobservable heterogeneity' and the clear need for the results to be reflected by the notion 'purified'. The polysemy of the term 'identify' characterizes well this present-absent dynamic. It is not about the interviewees, interviewers,
researchers, or readers being able to identify with the *individuals* who are produced by these statistical infrastructures (like with *subjects* or with *persons*, but in different ways). Rather it is about being able, thanks to them but also by making them disappear, to statistically identify equations, i.e. to assess statistical associations between variables that should be able to be separated from the observations on which they rely. *Individuals* are supports and not the objects of identification. This sacrifice of diversity is undoubtedly characteristic of statistical methods of analysis more generally, which aim to establish results that are valid beyond single cases. However, a non-trivial observation is that identification resources do exist in the first two statistical infrastructure models, whether in the institutional manner of *subjects* of collective entities to which they belong, or in empathy with *persons* "having declared that...", "suffering from...", "hoping that..." (to take several examples of phrases used in the 'biographical investigations'). These resources disappear for *individuals* who, as we have seen, can be represented as mosaics that, before being assembled, were composed of heterogeneous, fragmented pieces. In analyses produced using this last statistical infrastructure, phrases most often directly link two types of variables: the first, those of interest, reflecting (eventually as consequence) the fact of having benefited from a public policy; the second measuring the evolution of a situation, of a state on a market (housing, education, employment, etc.).

## CONCLUSION

Over a period of about seventy years, the French public statistical infrastructure on the general population has diversified. Today, three models co-exist: 'biographical investigations', and the 'matched panels', which were successively added to the original 'representative household surveys'. These models have different specificities, not only in terms of their formats but also their theoretical frameworks, objectives, methods of analysis, and visions of public action. They imply three different types of *beings* who represent three variations of humanity (here in its statistical version) in as many 'ideal types': the *subject*, the *person*, and the *individual*. The last few decades have seen a blossoming of these last two *beings*, who previously were as if restrained by the sole logic of the *subject* in the 'representative household surveys'.

The originality of these two typologies (of statistical infrastructure and of *beings*) is relative. There are echoes of divisions already highlighted
and analysed, within the social sciences and its sub-disciplines. Indeed, the *subjects* of the ‘representative household surveys’ (and the collective entities that represent them) are primarily found in the structural analysis of populations, macroeconomics, structural sociology, and social history of grand narratives. The *persons* of the ‘biographical investigations’ have instead followed the reorientations of demography (interaction between events, diversity of populations, link to context), sociology (biographical shift, ‘new’ sociologies, etc.) and history (critical shift and microhistory). The *individuals* of the ‘matched panels’ are analysed by micro-econometricians, neoclassical economists or rational choice sociologists, with ties to experimental psychology or contract law. Another limit of the proposed typology is that, one might argue, only certain statistical infrastructures possess all the characteristics used to describe the models. Yet, the strength of these proposals is their empirical basis, the way that they precisely aggregate a large number of traits that result in a ternary interplay of oppositions. Following the intuitions of French pioneering work on the social history of statistics, the analysis of quantitative tools seems particularly instructive for organizing the plurality of ways of seeing reality. That said, the transformation of statistical *beings*—the tensions, conflicts, hegemonic drive of notions associated with *subjects*, *persons* and *individuals*—does not solely correspond to the evolution of social theories in France. There is every reason to think that the elements discussed here have a more general scope, and are relevant to the “politics of statistics” (Desrosières, 1998 [1993]).

What can we conclude, politically, from this diversification of statistical infrastructure and statistical *beings*? First, that the emergence of *individuals*, who occupy both a central and evanescent place in their statistical infrastructure, echoes critiques often formed against neoliberalism, where incentivized *individuals* would be deemed free, but without much power, whereas the *subjects* of a Keynesian planner, admittedly acted upon, were socially protected and retained their capacity for collective action thanks to institutions (Castel & Haroche, 2001). Our third model is no less political, nor any less related to the State than the first. The role of the State is, however, profoundly transformed, in that it aims to establish market instruments entailing feedback loops on individual behaviours, much like the corresponding form of government (neoliberal ‘city’) described by Alain Desrosières (2014) or the absent State proposed by Robert Salais (2015). The *personal* logic complicates this description, and cannot only be understood as a parenthesis between
*subjects* and *individuals*. This logic nuances the ‘individualization’ movement broadly employed (in the social sciences as well as in public debate) to describe contemporary change, but whose ambivalence can be sensed. The real ability to act belongs to *persons*, the only *beings* to which the statistical infrastructure accords a value per se. This evolution leaves somewhat open, however, the question of their collective aggregation, or the political forms with which they may be associated.

**Acknowledgements** This text has been translated from French to English by Maya Judd.

## NOTES

1. Given their complexity and range of accepted meanings, both ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘quantification’ could clearly be further discussed, something that is not possible here due to space constraints.

2. The use of italics for the generic term *being* and its various forms (*subject*, *person*, *individual*) based on the history of statistical infrastructure, aims to avoid any confusion relative to their general or academic meanings, which vary according to social science disciplines, time-period, and country.

3. Here we take up Jean-Claude Passeron’s (1999) expression, in contrast to the *homo singularis* “which can only be recounted on the deathbed of an individual or collective story” (Passeron, 1999, p. 18). We will later see that one of the beings—*person*—in some ways resembles this *homo singularis*.

4. We broadly use the terms ‘interviewer’ and ‘interviewee’ here to describe those involved in the collection of information for the various types of inquiries, whether this consists of a ‘survey’, an ‘investigation’, or a ‘panel’.

5. The analysis uses a variety of material including documentation from more than thirty components of the French statistical infrastructure, as well as different archives of the public statistics system, notably those of INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques, the French National Institute for Statistics) collected over the course of the past fifteen years.

6. This experience is recounted, for example, by Raymond Lévy-Bruhl (INSEE, 1977, p. 561).

7. The questionnaire for the first Labour Force Survey, conducted in 1950, provides an example, being composed of just one double-sided DIN-A3 sheet.
8. As observed by Affichard, the first Labour Force Survey allows “experimentation of questions from which a classification of the population into ‘major variables’ (employed, unemployed, non-active) is produced” (Affichard, 1987 [1983], p. 90).

9. The tables indicate, for example, housing situation, level of income, and consumption patterns based on the characteristics of the ‘head of the household’ (his age group, employment status, socio-professional category).

10. From 1954 to 1970, the post-censal surveys on family history were only, for example, addressed to married women (Locoh et al., 2003).

11. Note, however, that shortly after the French Revolution of 1789, divorce by mutual consent was legalized for a relatively brief period of time (1792–1803).

12. See, for example, the co-authored book published under the collective name Darras (1966), containing the work of INSEE sociologists and statisticians, including that of Pierre Bourdieu and Claude Gruson.

13. See the entry, ‘survey’, in Alain Rey (1998), *Dictionnaire historique de la langue française*, Le Robert, vol. 1, p. 1246.

14. According to the medium-term programme objectives of INSEE from 2006 to 2010.

15. The limited number of these variables is less due to technological constraints (as in the past), than to difficulties related to the political harmonization of national categorizations.

16. This is the case, for example, in the area of educational orientation. In a presentation of surveys on these themes, Joëlle Affichard and Michel-Henri Gensbittel (1987) contrast so-called “diagnostic”, subjective, or opinion variables, with those of the “State” (Affichard & Gensbittel, 1987, p. 186).

17. The expression “biographical turn” (Chamberlayne et al., 2000) has been used to describe the widespread adoption of comprehensive biographical interviews in sociology in the 1980s and 1990s.

18. The adoption of this approach means no longer using as the unit of analysis an event (marriage, birth, death), examined separately and which is assumed to be the result of homogeneous behaviours within a group (e.g. a social or age group), but instead the “individual biography, considered a complex process” (Courgeau & Lelièvre, 1989, p. 2).

19. Although models of this type were proposed in the 1960s, they were not truly implemented until the 1980s, due to a lack of data (Baccaini & Courgeau, 1997, p. 833).

20. These methods are linked to various analytical frameworks, including the demography of biographies (Courgeau & Lelièvre, 1996), the economy of transitional labour markets, or in a transversal fashion, the analysis of bifurcations or disruptions (Bessin et al., 2010).
21. See, for example, Baudelot and Gollac (2003) on the links between well-being and work and, from a different perspective, that of Amossé and Chardon (2006) on the construction of identities.

22. Removed from quantitative methods, they are not, however, directly implicated in the elaboration of such statistical infrastructure.

23. Multilevel modelling can also be used in a “matched panels” perspective, our final statistical infrastructure model presented here.

24. The difference between described experience and observed fact is important. 'Matched panels' aim, with precise guidelines and formulations (notably in terms of the period of reference concerning an event), to avoid any 'hazy responses', in contrast to the narrative logic employed by 'biographical investigations', where it is expected that the experience will be related as a whole, necessarily subjective to some extent. From the 'biographical investigation' perspective there is no evidence, objectivity, naturalness of facts, but rather the construction of a set of information relevant for describing the experience, feelings and actions of respondents (echoing the 'informational base' theorized by Amartya Sen).

25. The survey comprises, in reality, six waves of quarterly questioning. The longitudinal dimension of the Labour Force survey is old, with a renewal method of the annual sample in thirds which was followed continuously from 1968 to 2002 (Goux, 2003). That said, this design is not in line with longitudinal analysis objectives, and has moreover rarely been used from this perspective.

26. We can highlight two opposing groups of methodological statisticians at INSEE. The battle between them was symbolically lost by the data production specialists, notably of surveys, who in the mid-1990s had to relocate to the laboratory newly associated with ENSAI (training school in Rennes for second rank managers of INSEE, the 'attachés'), while the specialists of data analysis, mostly econometricians, stayed in Paris in the laboratory associated with ENSAE (one of France's top schools in economics and statistics and in the training of first rank managers of INSEE, the 'administrateurs').

27. Often overlooked, the possibility of generalizing 'all things being equal' results on non-representative data remains debatable.

28. The strictest models exclude, at least as exogenous, all variables that could be the result of respondents' past decisions (e.g. region of residence, characteristics of their work organization, etc.).

29. This notion of unobservable heterogeneity aggregates all the non-observed characteristics of the respondents.

30. Laurent Thévenot's (1979) analysis of the lack of clarity concerning this category shows how it had been thought of until then.

31. See Desrosières (2008, vol. 1, ch. 9) for an initial analysis of the evolution of the syntax used in the presentation of statistical results.
32. In their legal version, *persons* are beings endowed with a personality ("generic concept in which body and soul are held together") and histori-cized, bearers of logic of progress ("the revelation of the human spirit to itself", "history [having] a prophetic dimension") (Supiot, 2007 [2005], p. 21).

33. There is, from this point of view, a tension between two facets of the person; between the passive nature associated with the description of that which they experience, their ‘suffering’, and a more active dimen-sion linked with their autonomy, with the notion of ‘achievement’, as in the work, for example, of Amartya Sen.

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# A New Calculable Global World in the Making: Governing Through Transnational Certification Standards

Laurent Thévenot

## INTRODUCTION: THE EVOLVING POLITICS OF CALCULABLE WORLDS

The politics of quantification rests on preliminary processes of transforming the world to make it quantifiable, by form-giving, formatting, in-forming, codifying and equivalence-making on the basis of a variety of conventions. This chapter concentrates on such transformations that make the world calculable. It first presents the analytical tools of our research agenda on the politics of statistics and quantification. They are used here to characterize the processes of transformation involved in the globalization of a new mode of governing that operates, away from states, through voluntary certification standards made up of measurable objectives. Initiated as a form of communication along the supply chain of major agro-industry products, it enlarged and gained public legitimacy through

L. Thévenot (✉)

École Des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

e-mail: laurent.thevenot@ehess.fr
the implementation of multi-stakeholder governance, while extending the plurality of normative issues it covers, from agricultural good practices to environmental and labour standards, or social accountability. By contrast to other modes of governing, this normative pluralism is entirely encapsulated in the measurable characterization of the product—palm oil in the case we investigated—which is certified to conform with the “sustainability standard” of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). All regulations of human actors’ behaviours are deposited externally in the material product that circulates between them, and its certification. Certification implies a formal statement which is not legal but issued from an accredited third party body. It gives written assurance that the product or service is in conformity with the standard; the certificate being a form of communication between seller and buyer, while the label is a form of communication with the end consumer. While accountants or auditors certify accounting numbers, this third party body certifies product attributes that consumers cannot evaluate even when they use them. It codifies the process of production, its environmental impact and labour conditions—what economists named “credence” attributes of the product. Such governance is not only based on the objectivity of numbers but on a wider expectancy: that the material world of products, with which and through which human beings interact, would turn into a set of objective options, and their certification would guarantee the individuals who choose them that fundamental values or goods are satisfied.

Our analysis deals with the arts of calculating that are at the core of this contemporary mode of governing by certification standards. Calculating has two connected significances in this art: counting to govern with numbers, but also counting on an environment that is designed to be more reliable and offer possibilities to calculate on it. The linkage between counting and counting on is encapsulated in the term “calculable” with its double meaning of quantifiable and dependable. The first points to measurement while the second introduces a broader idea of guarantee and, therefore, an evaluation.¹ In the first sense, the British approach to Foucault’s “governmentality” and “the administering of lives” (Mennicken & Miller, 2014) that Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller initiated in the nineties focused early on “governing by numbers” (Rose, 1991) and the invention of “calculating selves”, “calculable spaces” and “calculative practices” (Miller, 1992, 2001). It was developed from accounting practices into a major and productive research agenda on
modes of governing economic, social and personal life (Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose & Miller, 2010).

Another earlier main research agenda on the politics of numbers orig-
inated from the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic
Studies (INSEE) at the end of the seventies, and initially dealt with a
different domain of practices producing numbers: state statistics. After
the pioneering work by Alain Desrosières on the history of socio-
occupational categories (Desrosières, 1987 [1977], 1987 [1983]; see also
Desrosières & Thévenot, 1988), the historical perspective was reinforced
by a symposium in which INSEE brought together historians working on
quantitative series and statisticians who were urged to take a reflective and
historical look at the surveys they were responsible for (Affichard, 1987
[1977], 1987 [1983]). From the very start, history was a major focus of
this research agenda, as shown by the early book co-written by Robert
Salais on the social categorization of unemployment (Salais et al., 1986),
or the author's research on the genealogy of surveys and social categories
that measure social inheritance since Francis Galton's eugenics (Thévenot,
1987 [1983]).

While Desrosières related the history of statistics to the forma-
tion of states and their characteristics (Desrosières, 1998 [1993]),² I
brought together the chain of operations involved in the transforma-
tion of personal answers into quantified statistics, and the comparable
chain of transformative operations induced by representing and voicing
personal concern in the proper format for politics. I early concep-
tualized the elementary process that makes this possible through the
notion of “investment in form”. An investment in form “produces equiv-
alence” and “social coding”, the term “code” covering “the set of
conventions which govern ‘regulated’ communications between people”
(Thévenot, 1983, 1984). On the conceptual basis offered by these “con-
ventional forms of equivalence”, the research agenda on the “politics
of statistics” (Thévenot, 1990) investigated the various segments of the
statistical production chain—survey and data collection, classification,
codification and the processing of information—to identify fundamental
correspondences between “statistical equivalence forms” and the “polit-
ical constructions of the bond between members of the same polity”
(Thévenot, 1987 [1983]).³ It extended to policy implementation and
evaluation, as well as social, economic and political theories involved in
this evaluation (Thévenot, 1983, 2011a, 2016).⁴ The initial programme
on governing through statistics was expanded to non-state modes of
governing through standards and objectives (Thévenot, 1997, 2009, 2015a, 2019b).

The British and French currents lacked opportunities for dialogue.⁵ The present book offers such an opportunity, thanks to the interactions facilitated by its co-editors Andrea Mennicken and Robert Salais, and meetings with Peter Miller who provides his views in an afterword, as well as Wendy Espeland.

Far from the politics of state statistics, the transnational—or even a-national—worldwide extension of private voluntary standards has led to a mode of “governing through standards” (Thévenot, 1997, 2009; Ponte et al., 2011; Ponte & Cheyns, 2013) that is intended to make the world not only reliable and countable but even *certifiable* (Thévenot, 2015a). What does it imply in terms of its politics, since this mode of governing has been refurbished in response to criticisms which pointed to the lack of legitimacy that current standard-setting procedures undergo? Several years of a collective research programme I have taken part in focused on investigating the practices of this new calculable world.⁶ Observing governing through a certification standard in action has demanded close fieldwork to follow the most vulnerable actors, from their daily life in remote rural areas to “open spaces” of public roundtables, or private confidential negotiations. Proper analytical tools were needed to grasp the wide variety of actors’ practices, knowledge, evaluations and voices when they strive to express their concern and criticize.⁷ After the next section, which sets out our research programme in more detail, the second part of this chapter examines the normative and regulatory basis of governing through certification standards, which is intended to ensure political legitimacy while taking distance from state legal and political systems. Which alternative to the rule of law does governing through certification standards offer? While the second part deals with the production of regulations, the third one tackles their enforcement. What are the functional equivalents for the judicial system in putting the standard implementation to a critical test? How do actors—particularly those who are most vulnerable—cope with the proper requirement of a certifiable world: Transforming all their concern, from the most personal to the most collectively political, into the format of measurable objectives that the standard enforces?
FROM STATE STATISTICS TO GOVERNMENT THROUGH
STANDARDS: A RESEARCH PROGRAMME ON THE POLITICS
OF CONVENTIONAL FORMS AND ENGAGEMENTS

Belonging to the “Disobedient Generation” of the “Sixties” (Sica & Turner, 2005), I shared the Marxist critical stance which prompted the reversal of the hierarchical superiority of abstract and formal knowledge in favour of practice. It propped up the significance of practical know-how along the chain of actors which produce statistical data. Following knowl-edgeable pollsters and coders who were usually downplayed and treated as low-skilled white-collar workers, I turned to the workplace of the statis-tical chain, and investigated it as an industrial production line. This line creates in-formation not by assembling parts but mostly by trans-forming, changing the format of entities. Manufacturing transforms a personal-ized matter—currently collected from oral interviews—and shapes it into a standardized public form: the formal format of codified and quanti-fied items. In the case of social statistics, this trans-formation aims at trans-muting “In Person” into “In Common”, one of the most intense experiences and learning of the Sixties politicization. The Marxist tension between theoretical and practical knowledge was at stake, but also the exploration of the “Two Bodies” in which every human being invests (Thévenot, 2005) and not only kings and rulers (Kantorowicz, 1997 [1957]). One body is “invested” with a form which ensures communi-cation in the sense of making common and endowing with coordination power. The other formless corporeal, living and mortal body puts into question such conventional “invested forms”.

*Social Coding and Investments in Conventional Forms: The Prerequisites for the Politics of Quantification*

Each practical step of the transformative chain that creates data was investigated: interviewing respondents at home, filling in questionnaires, coding answers within social classifications (Thévenot, 1981a). The transversal operation of giving form—or formatting—led to conceptu-alize “social coding” (Thévenot, 1983) which initially focused on the formatting of occupations.⁸ “Investment in form” was conceived as the establishment of a conventional form of equivalence such as classification, criterion, code, standard, routine, rule of thumb, house rule, instruction, custom, regulation, right, trademark, model, template, mould (Thévenot,
1984). Certification standards are among those invested forms, and most of the items of the previous list of invested forms were found in our field-work on standard-setting and implementation. Three main criteria were initially set out to distinguish various types of invested forms: (1) the lifespan or extent in time—from a short-lived model, up to a perennial custom; (2) the area of validity or extent in space—from a personally and locally attached rule of thumb or house rule, up to international rights; (3) the objectivity or material consolidation—from an ideal mental criterion, up to a solid template.⁹ Investing in forms consists of the costly sacrifice of present coordination potentialities to ensure future returns in terms of economies in the cognitive and practical processes of coordinating actions. Formatting into a formal form is a step prior to any quantification, and a basic procedure in making the world calculable. Power relations ensue from invested forms, such as “the power relations between [agents who use very general forms and] agents who make use of more specific forms”, this last power being disqualified by Taylorism when formal definitions of tasks phased out rules of thumbs built up by practiced workers (Thévenot, 1984), as did Toyotism later (Charles, 2016).

Our “practice turn” (Schatzki et al., 2001; Thévenot, 2001b) was not initially influenced by American pragmatism. In addition to what I said of the Marxist reassessment of practice, and the legacy of Bourdieu’s *Outline of a Theory of Practice* (1976 [1972]), our pragmatic or pragmatist view on invested forms was influenced by research on work and organization, more precisely on the problematic of “coordinating” action.¹⁰ This unusual term in the social and political sciences was taken in the sense of an uncertain process rather than its achievement in order. Such a perspective benefited from the cooperation with François Eymard-Duvernay who elaborated further the economists’ notion of “specific investment” to contrast personalized and non-transferable long-term relationships based on codified relationships that can be maintained at a distance (Eymard-Duvernay, 1986). This collaboration was subsequently extended within the founding group of the so-called Economy of Conventions of Convention Theory.¹¹
*Placing Value on Invested Forms: The Plurality of Orders of Worth Involved in Justifications and Criticisms Referring to the Common Good*

The definition of invested forms did not explicitly refer to evaluation. Yet, the above-mentioned criteria used to characterize them sustain distinct modes of evaluation (Thévenot, 1984). An early empirical research on the invested forms which respondents and coders used to identify occupations showed three core ways of making one's occupation worthy: the legal qualification or office one fills in (*état*), the art to which one is devoting oneself (*profession*), the traditional trade (* métier *) that one learns by doing (Thévenot, 1981b, 1983, 2016). This first insight into the relation between invested forms and worth—the three kinds of worthiness of occupation roughly correspond to the later identified *civic*, *industrial* and *domestic* “orders of worth”—was then fully developed through the intense collaboration and co-authorship with Luc Boltanski, which led to the new analytical step of “worth” analysis (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1987, 2006 [1991]).

Boltanski had earlier written on classifications (Boltanski, 1970) and co-authored with Bourdieu a seminal article on classification struggles as a continuation of class struggles (Bourdieu & Boltanski, 1975), giving a classist critical twist to the Durkheim-Mauss legacy on social classifications (Durkheim & Mauss, 2009 [1903]). He had later advanced a more thorough analysis of the representation process in the case of *Cadres* (Boltanski, 1987 [1982]). In our collaboration, we first designed a series of experimental games to investigate the non-expert's modes of classifying occupations and “finding one's way in social space” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1983).12 They brought to light the strong connection between bringing occupations together (“*rapprochement*”) in social categories and placing value on them.

Taking part in public debate requires that participants transform their personal concerns—or possibly sacrifice some of them that cannot bear the transformation—to invest in conventional forms and reach a higher level of generality (“*Montée en généralité*”). In the next step of the collaboration with Boltanski, we identified the grammar of *Orders of worth* as the model of the sense of justice that human beings rely on, when they justify and criticize. We initially identified six repertoires of evaluation that correspond to this model, each order of worth seeking legitimacy by claiming to contribute to a distinct conception of common
good (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1987, 2006 [1991]). According to this model, considerable aggrandizement of personal concern is needed to demonstrate that one's voice is relevant for the common good. Individual interest does not qualify. Since different orders of worth refer to different constructions of the common good, their confrontation publicizes *difference*—in the sense of *differing* in a dispute—which culminates in severe critical clashes. Each order offers the footing to “denounce” the conception of the common good that another order claims. Unequal commonality entails hierarchical ranking of states of worth. We initially avoided the all-purpose vocabulary of “power”, to be more precise about *qualifications* that contribute to both empowerment and domination. Yet, orders of worth relate directly to inequality of power since a higher state of worth provides a higher capacity for coordinating others’ actions. Claims of legitimacy strengthen this form of power. Our analysis thus continued Weber’s differentiation of orders of legitimate domination.¹³

In addition to distinguishing a plurality of modes of evaluation involved in the justifications and criticisms that aim at public legitimacy, the model of orders of worth differentiates the ways evaluative judgments about worthiness are put to the *test*. The pragmatist realism of the “reality test” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006 [1991]) involves items of the material environment, on the condition they *qualify* for the tested order of worth, and may thus be taken into account in the judgement and be granted evidentiary value. Because of the two previous features, this model differs from Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) which does not make it possible to contrast modes of relations between beings—human or not—on the basis of their mode of qualification and thus valuation. With regard to its use by Foucault, the concept of *dispositif* can be made more precise and broken into component parts. The qualification of each of them for an order of worth *disposes* human beings to engage in justification according to this kind of worth. The pragmatist realism that the “reality test” and “qualification” carry contributed to the development of the notion of “quality conventions” that makes more precise the analysis of organizations and markets. Previous research by Eymard-Duvernay on “models of the firm” in diverse industrial sectors (Eymard-Duvernay, 1986, 1989) was refined by differentiating, inside the same organization, a multiplicity of modes of coordination framed by these various “quality conventions” used in the valuation of persons, things and their relations (Eymard-Duvernay, 2002; Storper & Salais, 1997; Thévenot, 2001a).
*The Worth of Standards*

Standards are valuable for the *industrial* worth of technical efficiency when they primarily contribute to the compatibility of methods and tools of production. This worth remains dominant in the palm oil standard intended to spread a uniform agricultural model that is oriented towards industrial efficiency. Since our pragmatist approach relates valuation to coordination, the temporal orientation of each order of worth impacts on the mode of coordination it governs. *Industrial* worth sustains a forward-looking orientation that is fully reflected in the idea of technical investment, since equipment and methods fabricate the future by providing predictability.¹⁴ In addition, this worth is conducive to quantification, which is currently involved in the reality test for this order of worth.

The standardization of market goods and services also enhances their *market* worth. Companies that engage in the standard-setting process seek a competitive advantage.¹⁵ The two conventions of *industrial* and *market* worth—and their worlds of objects—differ significantly in the spatiality (Cartesian space/free circulation space) and temporality (future/present orientation) they sustain in coordination. These differences stir up critical tensions which are internal to the economy and weigh on standard-setting: fixing for the future the standardized characteristics of products opposes the *market* worth orientation towards an ever-changing present.¹⁶

The worth of *renown*, or fame, is also significant for standards. It does not rely on prices but on signs of recognition in public opinion. It strongly motivates the commitment of entrepreneurs in standardization procedures when combined with *market* worth in “compromises” such as branding and marketing (Richey & Ponte, 2011). A campaign triggered by Greenpeace in 2010 proposed a devastating parody of a Kit-Kat chocolate bar advertisement, in which a bar was stuffed by the bleeding finger of an orang-utan. Within a few weeks, Nestlé accepted to negotiate with the NGO because the firm was deeply concerned by the drastic consequences of this campaign on the brand image. Like market worth, the worth of renown in opinion orients towards the present and its “trends”. This worth is made measurable and quantifiable through opinion polls.

By contrast, *domestic* worth emphasizes traditions and customs, and sustains a temporal orientation anchored in the past. The traditional arts and crafts qualify for this worth and have occupied an important place
in the history of quality standards, from the very beginning when they
were promoted by corporations. Still very present in today's food certifi-
cations (Boisard & Letablier, 1989; Busch, 2011; Cheyns & Ponte, 2018;
Diaz-Bone, 2011; Ponte, 2016; Star, 1991), this worth is most often in
a critical position in standards of the RSPO type, because of the weight
placed on *industrial* worth. This critical position is still weakened by the
fact that *domestic* worth is hard to measure and quantify, except through
“compromise” variables that combine *domestic* with *industrial* worth.

The reality test of the worth of *inspiration* brings evidence of rupture
and revelation, in a temporal orientation on the present and a spatial
presence evoking epiphany. Insofar as *industrial* standardization tends
to fix things for the future, it generates critical tension with the worth
of *inspiration*. Yet, “innovation” processes that create new products and
services supposed to reach a compromise that strikes a balance between
the conflicting requirements of *inspiration*, *market* and *industrial* orders
of worth. This worth of *inspiration* derives from a genealogy of valuations
of religious deeds and spiritual engagements. In our investigation, this
*inspiration* worth was involved in forest peoples’ denunciation of palm
oil standardized plantations practices that ignore sacred places.

*Standard-Setting in Search of Legitimacy: The Grammars of Commonality in the Plural*

Although orders of worth do play a significant role in some RSPO
actors’ statements, criticisms or activities, the standard itself, its setting
and enforcement processes, thwart actors’ attempts to engage in public
critiques and justification of large scale. The reason is the following:
In response to criticisms pointing to the lack of legitimacy of private,
voluntary standards-setting procedures, the RSPO type of transnational
standard is built on the “multi-stakeholder governance model”, or
“multi-stakeholder initiative” (MSI). To understand how MSI governance
conflicts with the model of orders of worth, another analytical step is
needed: the model of orders of worth has to be situated in a broader anal-
ysis of the ways in which actors take part in disputes that claim legitimacy
for the whole community.

*Grammars* of practice which support *pluralist constructions of common-
ality and difference* can be characterized by basic operations: *communi-
cating*—in its original meaning of making an issue common; *differing*—
in the sense of disagreeing; and *composing*—in both the ancient sense of
settling a dispute and the wider current meaning of calming (Thévenot, 2014, 2015b). These grammars diverge in the transformation they demand of personal concern into a common format that allows people to agree and disagree. The format of difference channels discrepancies between voices. In addition to evidencing the uses of orders of worth in the United States and France, a comparative research programme (Lamont & Thévenot, 2000; Thévenot & Lamont, 2000) contributed to the identification of the grammar that underlies multi-stakeholder initiatives.

Because of its link to the long and diverse liberal political tradition, I named it *liberal grammar*. As rightly argued by Veikko Eranti (2018), it could be named “grammar of interests”. I originally avoided the term “interest” because of its naturalization in the social and political sciences, when it is viewed as an inner force guiding individuals. In the *liberal grammar*, it specifies the format to differ and agree in public. Instead of the large transformation of personal or local concerns into common good issues, and the resulting harsh confrontation when rival conceptions of the common good clash, the transformation of personal concerns into individual choices is lesser, and the confrontation less critical.

Yet, the *liberal* interested individual is also in a state of being formatted for the public. Any personal concern has to be converted into the format of a choice—designated as “preference”, or “stake”, or “interest”—which an autonomous individual makes between options that should be in a form accessible to all other individuals who constitute the *liberal* public. This format of *opting individuals* cannot express most intimate attachments. Too deeply personal, intimate or emotional concerns are not appropriate for liberal communication (Centemeri, 2015; Stavo-Debauge, 2012). In the grammar of plural orders of worth, differing is strongly critical, resulting from the denunciation of an order of worth in the name of another (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1987, 2006 [1991]), while in this *liberal* grammar differences are less dramatically expressed, because they are presented as individual interests. Criticism is only allowed at a lesser degree and the integration of differences is achieved by “negotiation” and “bargaining” between “stakeholders”. Yet, the burden of the transformation weighs on human beings to fit this *liberal* format, and may oppress them as well. This analysis rectifies the current idea that *liberal* politics are “horizontal” as opposed to the vertical hierarchy of *orders of worth*.¹⁷ All grammars of commonality are inherently hierarchical because of the gradient they maintain between more and less common formats. The
coordinative power of those who engage in the most common format—being able to articulate their concern as choices for common knowledge options, in the *liberal* grammar—entails de facto domination over those who do not and depend on the previous ones.

This distinction of grammars helps to clarify the quantification and evaluation methods used by governing. Fifty years of using the same statistical survey to evaluate social, educational and employment policies showed the dependence on these grammars of: policies, methods of their quantitative evaluations (socio-occupational categories, mobility tables, correspondence analysis, econometrics) and even underlying social and economic theories (reproduction, de-skilling of work, human capital) (Monso & Thévenot, 2010; Thévenot, 2011a). *Civic* and *industrial* orders of worth support the first welfare-social state policies, quantification methods and social theories, whereas *market* order of worth and the *liberal* grammar are backing the more recent policies, quantified evaluations and theories.¹⁸ This dependence is also visible in Emmanuel Didier’s contribution to this volume, which examines the relation to quantification that various American sociology currents have. Interactionism and, more broadly, the trends that constitute the “Qualitative sociology” pole influenced by American pragmatism presuppose a *liberal* grammar of opting autonomous individuals, a grammar that also underlies their sociological criticism of the paternalistic welfare state and its categorical statistical treatment of social groups.

*Committed to Objects: Valuable Regimes of Engagements with the World Affected by Standardization*

Unlike other modes of governing, the one that maintains a calculable world by certification standards intervenes in the surrounding material objects to regulate the relations between human beings. Our analysis has thus to leave discursive public arenas and scrutinize the variety of valued human relations to material objects, whether they are public or not. The concept of *engagement* was crafted to capture such valued relations with the environment, each of them consolidating and empowering the self through a certain mode of coordination with oneself that is secured by this relation (Thévenot, 2006, 2007, 2013, 2019c). This self, or *personality*, has a dynamical identity resulting from the integration of a plurality of modes of engagement.

Each mode of *engaging with* the world rests on a distinct mode of in-formation, if we extend this notion to highly personal knowledge
and pay attention to the personal indices or landmarks that give convenient form and disposition to a familiarized background. *Engaging in familiarity* is valuable because of the personal ease it generates, due to familiarization with this environment. This intimate relationship to habituated and inhabited places supports a primordial trust in oneself and is deeply affected by changes in the environment. The industrial agriculture development system that the RSPO standard promotes through “good practices” breaks with the personal relationships of using and inhabiting the land that each member of rural communities has with his or her environment. Highly idiosyncratic, *engaging in familiarity* does not easily lend itself to the commonality and communication.¹⁹ It meets the greatest difficulties to find a place in governing by standards which favours, as we shall see, a completely different regime of *engaging in plan*, or project. More than an instrumental relationship to the world, this engagement aims at the good of being able to project oneself into the future through individual plans, provided that surroundings are seized in a functional format.

Dynamical *regimes of engagement* go through trying moments which provide the opportunity to test landmarks and update them. Engagements are thus polarized by two stances, and the process of certification collapses the distinction between the two in favour of the first. The first stance of static quietude sticks to the fixed form that serves as a marker of the engagement and is tested in the trying moment. It corresponds to the *letter* of the convention or the institutional act when *engaging in public justification*.²⁰ The second stance of moving inquietude brings the awareness of the sacrifices that this fixed form entails, when the situatedness of the engagement opens up to other possibilities of coordination.

## DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF A NEW CALCULABLE WORLD GOVERNED BY CERTIFICATION STANDARDS: WHICH SUBSTITUTE FOR THE RULE OF LAW IN THE PRODUCTION OF REGULATIONS?

Standards came to constitute a calculable global world through two types of extension of their original technical purpose. Their scope expanded, in terms of the variety of values they take into account. Standard-setting and enforcement procedures enlarged, in search of democratic legitimacy.
*Made in Standard: All the Good that Money Can Buy*

Standards were originally thought to make technical tools, methods and products more compatible, and to provide economies of scale according to the technical efficiency of *industrial* worth. Quality standards expanded their scope along *market* worth. They developed to bear the burden of the common knowledge identity of market goods that market competition requires against moral hazards, and they backed the market diversification of these goods and services (Busch, 2011; Bowker & Star, 2000; Eymard-Duvernay, 1986, 1989, 2002; Lampland & Star, 2009; Salais & Storper, 1993; Storper & Salais, 1997; Timmermans & Epstein, 2010). As mentioned before, economists use the category of “credence” goods and services when the quality cannot be identified by “search” or “experience”—referring to repair services—and may generate fraud (Darby & Karni, 1973). This category of “credence” good is currently used for the kind of certification that we now consider, such as Fair Trade. Gaëlle Balineau and Ivan Dufeu (2010) rightly contested this categorization, observing that these kinds of goods do not suffer from information asymmetry in the production process, but from another source of uncertainty because the goods’ “attributes are seen as means to reach another goal” (Balineau & Dufeu, 2010, p. 335).

This “other goal” actually introduces a most dramatic change in the role of standards. Standards came to carry the responsibility for the satisfaction of basic rights or conceptions of the common good, through certified and measurable properties attributed to goods or services. In democracy, such values are taken into account by legislative bodies of government in the process of making laws. Political public arenas are dedicated to critical debate on this process, with justifications referring to the plurality of these basic rights or conceptions of the common good. The new kind of “standardizing liberalism” (“libéralisme normalisateur”) (Thévenot, 1997) and mode of “governing by standards” (Thévenot, 2009, 2015a) arise when such evaluative and normative principles are reduced to measurable characteristics of goods and services, and when individual consumers’ choices on the market place replace political debates. This reduction (see Fig. 7.1) can be illustrated on three normative principles: social justice and collective solidarity to struggle against inequalities; environmental concern; tradition and customs. Each of the three corresponds to a separate order of worth (*civic*, *green*, *domestic*)
The critical plurality of debated conceptions of the common good
turned into the certified qualities of market goods

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 7.1** From debated conceptions of the common good to certified qualities of market goods</figcaption></figure>

which is involved in public justifications and criticisms that claim legiti-
macy by referring to various conceptions of the common good (see the
left side of Fig. 7.1). Each of these normative principles is formalized and
formatted in laws (labour, environmental, customary) and legal rights. In
the reduction to certification standards, each is transformed into measur-
able characteristics of products and services, such as Fair Trade, Organic,
Protected Geographic Indication (see the right side of Fig. 7.1).

Multi-Stakeholder Certification: A Liberal Public in Which Opting
Individuals Are Formatted as Stakeholders and Options
as Measurable Objectives

With the expansion of their scope and the range of values they take into
account, standards of a new generation had to strengthen their standard-
setting and enforcement procedures that were previously criticized for
their lack of transparency and legitimacy. This was the case for a series of
transnational standards that claim to certify sustainability, independently
of the political authority of states, and were built on main value-chains of
the agro-environmental business: RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) in 2003, today 1000 members; RTRS (Roundtable on Responsible Soy) in 2005; Bonsucro (Better Sugarcane initiative) in 2006; BCI (Better Cotton Initiative) in 2006; RSB (Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels) in 2008. RSPO began with an agreement that WWF obtained from Unilever in order to be more efficient and faster than states and international legal systems in coping with deforestation. In response to criticisms, these certification standards are ruled by *multi-stakeholder* governing bodies (“roundtables”) based on the *liberal* grammar introduced above.²¹ In this multi-stakeholder variant of the *liberal* grammar, individuals-in-public are given an additional qualification within a closed list of “stakeholders” corresponding to different interests or preferences for options, with an equal voting right in the general assembly: (1) Oil Palm Growers, (2) Palm Oil Processors and/or Traders, (3) Consumer Goods Manufacturers, (4) Retailers, (5) Banks and Investors, (6) Environmental/Nature Conservation NGOs, and (7) Social/Developmental NGOs.

Standardization alters the *liberal* grammar in that options are to be formatted as elementary *plans* to be engaged in, with the projected output of measurable objectives listed as “indicators” and additional “guidance”.²² Even when they are not quantified, they require codification and formality.²³ In spite of this dominance of the *engaging in a plan*, the RSPO standard progressively included references to conceptions of the good or rights—in terms of “principles of criteria”—that do not fit this format because they overflow the limits of small narrow *plans*. In the 2013 change, four new “criteria” were added, which point to hot issues to be governed: “C1.3 – ethical conduct (Growers and millers commit to ethical conduct in all business operations and transactions)” with the guidance: “A prohibition of all forms of corruption, bribery and fraudulent use of funds and resources”; “C6.12 – forced and trafficked labour”; “C6.13 – respecting human rights”; “C7.8 – minimizing GHG emission from new plantings”.

There are six headings of “principles and criteria” under which indicators and guidance are grouped. The first, “Commitment to transparency”, concerns information and documentation, including “a written policy committing to a code of ethical conduct and integrity” (indicator 1.3.1) and “a prohibition of all forms of corruption and bribery” (guidance). The second, “Compliance with applicable laws and regulations”, states that “2.1. There is compliance with all applicable local, national and ratified international laws and regulations” with extension to other rights:
"2.2. The right to use the land is demonstrated, and is not legitimately contested by local people who can demonstrate that they have legal, customary or user rights". The use of the land is also considered in: "2.3. Use of the land for oil palm does not diminish the legal, customary or user rights of other users without their free, prior and informed consent", with indicator 2.3.1 stipulating the objective of "participatory mapping involving affected parties (including neighbouring communities where applicable, and relevant authorities)", and indicator 2.3.2 stipulating the objective of "copies of negotiated agreements detailing the process of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC)".²⁴ Each of the last four headings of "principle and criteria" relates to distinct orders of worth that they reduce to objective indicators. The third is *market*-oriented towards economic and financial viability, the fourth is prescribing a certain *industrial* organization of work, the fifth ("Environmental responsibility and conservation of natural resources and biodiversity") raises environmental issues and the sixth ("Responsible consideration of employees and of individuals and communities affected by growers and millers") addresses *civic* labour rights while extending to "community values" and "cultural and religious values" in the guidance.

*Participative Technologies and Procedures to Deliberate Over Regulations*

The general assembly of members meets annually in a *"convention"* which votes resolutions and changes of the standard. The quest for democratic legitimacy does not rest only on vote but also on direct voices of the constituency through arrangements and procedures that were designed to allow a wide participation in the deliberation over the standard.

Beyond the limitations of voices through exclusion, the concept of a "participation format", developed by Audrey Richard-Ferroudji (Richard-Ferroudji & Barreteau, 2012) in accordance with that of *engagement*, helps to clarify the conditions to take part, and the resulting "burden" that bears on participants as demonstrated by Julien Charles in various domains, from management to politics (Charles, 2012, 2016). In the RSPO general assembly, the requirement to be "pragmatic", "practical", "realistic" and "effective" urges participants to formulate their voice as *engagement in a plan*, and express themselves in public in the format of individual choice between optional plans. This is congruent with *communicating*—making issues common—in accordance with the
*liberal* grammar. It explicitly opposes the “absolute or the ideal” of *engaging in public justificatory orders of worth* backed by conceptions of the common good. Prescriptions make explicit the required *liberal* public civility: “understand the stakes” (options) and express your own (“I want that!”), “be not shy”, “proactive”, “intervene”, “make the first move”, “take the floor” (Cheyns, 2011).

The large number of participants gathered for the few days of the convention led the organizers of roundtables to provide participatory technologies issued from management. By bringing participants physically closer, the small size of groups is intended to allow more accurate perceptual attention to others. In the 2006 roundtable, the device called “world café” was introduced. It was designed in the end of the 1990s to have participants “spontaneously” formed into “small, intimate table conversations” about shared issues, recording outputs on papers (initially “tablecloths”) and periodically switching tables so that ideas might circulate and connect (Brown, 2002; Brown et al., 2005). In the RSPO version, the short-term temporality (twenty minutes) of each session bringing together six unknown people evoked “speed-dating” techniques. This brevity, the circulation from one table to another and the absence of a theme displayed on each table, raised among participants a sense of an arbitrary and poorly significant exchange.

To overcome these shortcomings, another facilitation technique was introduced in the 2013 roundtable, the “open space technology” (OST). Also issued from management and conceived by Harrison Owen in the 1980s, OST was worked out to foster “self-organization” (Owen, 2008). Its device meets the requirements of a *liberal* public of individuals expressing themselves through their choice for options made public. Each individual “convener” takes the responsibility of naming and posting in public an issue for a possible breakout session. Other participants have to choose among the posted themes as options offered to all. A playful staging is intended to turn the implementation into an exciting game. The initiator takes a placard and writes a slogan or objective to gather a discussion group (see Fig. 7.2a, b). Discussions in small groups last for one hour, each taking place in parallel sessions during two days. The output of the conversation is to be written on a flipchart as a list of objectives which will then be collected and transcribed on printed charts. When posted on the walls of the assembly hall, they make possible, in the next step, to produce some proposals to be voted in the plenary meeting.
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 7.2 a, b Photographs of Open Space Technology (OST) in action (Source: Photographs by Laurent Thévenot)</figcaption></figure>
In addition to the *liberal* matrix, explicit mentions to *market* coordination are given. The “open space” is presented as a “marketplace” where participants “shop” for information and ideas (Owen, 2008). Displaying their respective placards, conveners “sell” their respective slogan-objectives on the competitive “market” of discussion groups. Individuals are urged to “freely” circulate between groups according to the one “law” of OST, the “law of two feet”. It urges participants to leave the ongoing conversation of a group of discussion for another, “given both their right and responsibility to maximize their own learning and contribution” when they “lose interest” in a breakout session. Owen affirms that this is the correct civility: moving on is “the polite thing to do”. It would be quite rude according to another grammar of commonality more hospitable to attachments and generous hospitality (Thévenot, 2014).

These breakout sessions constitute small-scale and short-lived meetings that do not have the validity of the general assembly and may raise doubt about their legitimacy. Therefore, OST provides “principles” which ensure the validity of the constitution, timing and production of these small groups. The RSPO Open Space kick-off PowerPoint recalls Owen’s (2008) four principles that assert the legitimacy of these contingent groups:

*Whatever happens IS the only thing that could have happened*

*Whenever it starts IS the right time*

*Whoever comes IS the right people*

*When it's over IT IS over*

In the PowerPoint presentation, four other norms introduce additional requisites for communicating in the open space. Most of them specify the conveners’ dispositions that are required by the *liberal* public. Norm 4—“[speak your] *voice*, share your opinions and reasons. Do it clearly and briefly”—makes explicit the right mode of *communicating* in the format of one’s individual “opinion”, stipulating the clarity and brevity already pointed to in the above-mentioned requirement to be “pragmatic”. It involves to *engage in a plan*, with a short-term and clear-cut objective. Norm 3—“*respect* [all]”—specifies the disposition of tolerance towards *differing voices*. Mentions to “views” or “styles” (“regardless of whether their views or style are similar to ours”) sustain the multicultural extension of the *liberal* grammar.
Norms 1 and 2 complement the *liberal* matrix. Norm 1 (“*listen*”) does not only prescribe the kind of attention to another individual’s opinion that the *liberal* grammar requires. It also recommends to “be genuinely curious about their perspective”, which points to a distinct regime of *engaging in exploration* (Auray, 2011) aiming at the good of surprising novelty.²⁵ It echoes another rule of the open space: “Be ready to get surprises”. Norm 2 (“*suspend [judgement]*”) does not only plead for respect to other individuals’ opinions but for avoidance of criticism: “Suspend our agreement or disagreement”.

*A-liberal Conceptions of Communication and Their Managerial Reductions*

If we look into the genealogy of these open space management technologies, we find they were initially designed to go beyond—or below—the *liberal* public space and overcome its limitations, as suggested by the explicit references to “café” style conversations, “backstage”, “behind the scene” and “hallway chats”. David Bohm, the author of the most influential *On dialogue* (Bohm, 1996) that Open Space Technology draws upon, was concerned by constructions of commonality and difference that significantly depart from the liberal political tradition.

While obtaining his PhD in the theoretical physics group directed by Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California at Berkeley, his engagement in communist organizations prevented him from being integrated in the Los Alamos project, despite Oppenheimer's proposal. When he was an assistant professor at Princeton University, he was called upon by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949. He invoked the Fifth amendment right to refuse to testify and give evidence against his colleagues. Princeton suspended him and he left the United States for Brazil and later United Kingdom, as a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of London. In addition to the collective spirit, or more precisely the *civic* worth of solidarity that oriented his youth political engagement, his physicist's activity has been a second source of insights into the limitations of the autonomy attributed to entities and even subjects. Pointing to the “fragmentation” that thought processes—and not only theoretical modelling—bring to the perception of the world, he considered that dialogue should shed light on the limitations due to this fragmentation. His contention that “the representation of thought enters the presentation of perception” (Bohm, 1996, p. 57)
is not only Kantian but meets Ernst Cassirer's neo-Kantian turn based on Einstein's space-time modelling. A third source of his insights issued from his collaboration on human cognition with Stanford neuroscientist Karl Pribram, the psychological philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and the London psychiatrist and practitioner of Group Analysis Patrick de Maré.

All these resources supported Bohm's conception of dialogue which distances itself from the *liberal* composition of differences through “negotiation”:

> A great deal of what nowadays is typically considered to be dialogue tends to focus on negotiation [...] People are generally not ready to go into the deeper issues when they first have what they consider to be a dialogue. They negotiate, and that's about as far as they get. Negotiation is trading off, adjusting to each other and saying, 'Okay, I see your point. I see that that is important to you. Let's find a way that would satisfy both of us. I will give in a little on this, and you give in a little on that. And then we will work something out.' (Bohm, 1996, p. 18)

His criticism of negotiation extends to the format of “problem” which occupies a central place in Dewey’s pragmatism. He even criticizes the exposition of individual opinion—the mode of taking part in the liberal public—the “pressure [...] to get in there quickly and get your point of view across, particularly if you are one of the ‘talkers’. Even if you’re not, you have that pressure” (Bohm, 1996, p. 30). Bohm digs into the ground of the *liberal* grammar and illuminates the limitations of *engaging in a plan*: “Now, I’m going to propose that in a dialogue we are not going to have any agenda, we are not going to try to accomplish any useful thing” (Bohm, 1996, p. 17). He refers to what Michael Polanyi has called tacit and personal knowledge (Bohm, 1996, p. 52) pointing to the format we rely on when *engaging in familiarity*.

In spite of these various sources which diverge so strongly from the construction of a *liberal* public of individuals choosing among options, these divergences were blunted in the managerial usages of Bohm's original conception of dialogue and the resulting RSPO Open Space Technology and participatory dialogue mechanisms.
*Experiencing Participative Technologies in Practice: “Open Space”*
*and Dialogue Dispositions Put to the Test of “Smallholders”*
*Engaging in Them*

All RSPO participants are not equally prepared for the objective-oriented participation format that “Open Space” demands. Managers and international NGO members are well versed in the required techniques and procedures. They demonstrate a skilful utilization of the small group talks, using them strategically as a first move in a sequence of plans expected to extend eventually the objectives listed by the standard in the prescribed format of “criteria, indicators or guidance”. We observed a group on labour issues that a member of Oxfam stood ready to offer on the “market” of the open space. He planned that the output of this first strategic step would be the creation of a “working group” that was designed to propose to the vote of the general assembly the revision of the standard and the introduction of new criteria about labour rights. This was an example of a step by step—*plan* by *plan*—process calculated to obtain substantial changes of the standard and introduce links with human rights, once formatted as criteria, indicators and guidance.

From now on, we shall concentrate on RSPO governing devices and procedures as they are practically put to the test by the most vulnerable actors of the palm oil value chain. Since our approach offers a dual analysis based on either *personality* or *community*, we followed both entities: a *personality* of “smallholder” (Arifin) and a “local *community***” the territory of which was severely impacted by industrial plantations (Karang Mendapo). Via a series of surveys (Cheyns, 2011, 2014; Cheyns & Thévenot, 2019a; Silva-Castañeda, 2012; Thévenot, 2018), we were able to observe how such a *personality* and *community* took part in RSPO governing devices and coped with the formats that make this world calculable. They were backed up by a variety of NGOs that we could also observe at different levels of their action.

Reacting to the 2009 plenary “smallholder session” in which presentations were only made by certification companies and agencies while smallholders themselves did not play a part, Arifin took advantage of the “Questions and Answers” session to speak publicly in the general assembly. Introducing the recently created farmers’ union “Indonesian Oil Palm Farmers Union” [*Serikat Petani Kelapa Sawit: SPKS*] and promoting the representation of family farmers in RSPO, he emphasized the “inequitable” mechanism used to fix palm bunch prices and the
sharing of the value along the chain. As observed by Cheyns, he spoke quietly at first, then his voice became louder and its pitch higher, his movements animated and he often pointed to the dais with the papers in his hand (Cheyns, 2014). As a result, the President asked to “avoid statements” and to provide “shorter questions and comments”. A manager of the Indo Oil company commented to a NGO Sawit Watch official: “Why is it that my ‘young fruit’ makes a noise like that?” The manager referred to a hierarchy within the *Batak* ethnic group to which Arifin and himself belonged. Arifin used the opportunity of a later public meeting to denounce this “young fruit” (i.e. “child”) paternalist *domestic* qualification the manager attributed to him. He underlined that he was not taking part in the roundtable as a young *Batak*, but as a representative of the farmers’ union, SPKS. He thus claimed for a *civic* qualification (Cheyns, 2014) instead of the *domestic* one that the manager tried to impose.

Commenting on his intervention in an interview by Cheyns, Arifin said that he was angry and felt oppressed because when smallholders “want to fight, they go to jail” while businessmen in RSPO “are the ones who apply this pressure on the ground”. Other members of the SPKS family farmers’ union actually found his tone “still too soft” because “what is important is to be honest” and Arifin contrasted his full engagement with presentations by a lot of people who “don’t speak from the heart” (Cheyns, 2014). Arifin’s engagements overflowed in two ways the format of the limited *plan* confused with an objective. He engaged in *public criticism and justification* (in the *civic* denunciation of structural inequalities along the value chain, and promotion of union representation) and also in the *familiarity* of the small farmers’ daily life which is severely impacted by industrial “good practices” of farming. Yet, this expansion of the participation formats was harshly criticized and Arifin called to order.

During the 2013 roundtable introducing the Open Space Technology and the marketplace of breakout sessions, Arifin first looked upset by this format (see Fig. 7.3a, left-hand). However, unlike other “smallholders” who were discouraged or eventually disappeared at the moment of welcoming newcomers, he overcame a long moment of embarrassment and hesitation and finally got involved. He lifted up a placard written in Indonesian and English: “Smallholder and replanting. Who to support?” [sic] (see Fig. 7.3b, right-hand). His theme assembled participants who were exclusively smallholders. It produced conclusions presented in Indonesian on a flipchart.
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>

Fig. 7.3 a, b Photographs of Arifin, firstly embarrassed and hesitant in front of the Open Space Technology, then animating his “open space” group (Source Photographs by Laurent Thévenot)

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>

Fig. 7.4 a, b, c Photographs of Arifin, at ease during a conversation at the cafeteria (Source Photographs by Laurent Thévenot)

Off the roundtable, the author had a conversation with Arifin in the cafeteria. He was quite at ease, expressing himself in a *familiar* engagement with lively gestures and facial expressions (see Figs. 7.4a, b, and c). He
came back to his experience of the Open Space, complaining that:

[...] on the replanting of palm trees for smallholders who want to remain independent, a major issue for sustainability, because they are numerous, is that there were no representatives of consumers, buyers, major companies or banks. [...] They rather do brand imaging. [...] In Open Space, industry players seem to be passive and wait for conclusions. (Conversation of Cheyns and Thévenot with Arifin, Medan, November 2013, translation by Dani Pradana)

He noted that “NGOs are the ones who open the topic and participate. Industry players don’t”. Arifin voiced his discontent because of the gap between RSPO discussions and his field experience:

Initially participants feel satisfied because they expressed their problems, but then they become unsatisfied because they do not see implementation. [...] RSPO is supposed to be a place where various individual interests are combined in a common interest. But once the mutual agreement has been reached, its implementation goes back to individual interest and I am fed up with this situation. It’s a waste of time and energy to reach this agreement when it is not implemented. (Conversation of Cheyns and Thévenot with Arifin, Medan, November 2013, translation by Dani Pradana)

To remedy this, Arifin continued, one should “make sure that each topic discussed in these forums reach the executive board. [...] There should be rules to ensure parties enforce mutual agreements”. Arifin emphasizes that the costly operation of composing the common interest from individual interests, in a mutual agreement between differing voices, is defeated on the ground.

Another reason for the gap between the discussions framed by the various technologies of participation and the achievements on the ground is that, unlike many actors involved in the formulation of the standard, “parties which have to implement them are common people who don’t know much about the procedures of RSPO. [...] They don’t know how P&C [‘Principles and Criteria’ of the standard] came to be; the farmers, workers, businessmen, fields actors who have to implement them” (ibid.). We thus observe that this in-depth criticism of the government by certification standards, informed by Arifin’s experience as a small planter, although easily deployed in the *familiar* format of the conversation at
the cafeteria, was disallowed by the general assembly because of the mandatory participative format *in a plan*.

*Some Lessons Learnt on the “Participative” and “Legislative”*
*Legitimacy of Governing by Certification Standard*

In this second part, we considered the principles and effective implemen-
tation of the substitute for the legislative function that governing through
certification standards offers. Among the various modes of normativity
that matter for members of RSPO to express their differing voices, the
objective of a calculable world results in drastic selection to fit the stan-
dard. Indicators that make it measurable, and the format of *engaging in
a plan* which is a prerequisite for the reduction to indicators, heavily
constrain the organization of the dialogue and deliberation preparing
decisions on the standard. In spite of the explicit domination of the
format of the plan, formulated in the imperative of being “pragmatic”,
some participants go beyond this constraint. They articulate conflicting
conceptions of the common good that raise political and economic justi-
fications and criticisms, or air personal suffering because of the violation
of their familiar environment. Even if they are regularly called to order,
these strongly critical participants, issued from local concerned communi-
ties and relayed by NGOs, actively contribute to changes in the standard
content and procedures. However, are the standard and procedures
enforced?

A-TESTING, PRO-TESTING AND CON-TESTING:
SUBSTITUTES FOR THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM IN PUTTING
THE STANDARD ENFORCEMENT TO A CRITICAL TEST

In this mode of governing, how are deeds put to a critical test? What
are the substitutes for the judicial bodies of a legal system? When
criticizing the enforcement of regulations, how do concerned people
(1) provide evidence issued from their knowledge and information (A-
testing); (2) express objection (Pro-testing); (3) communicate differing
views in dispute and conflict (Con-testing)?
## Audit Procedures

The participatory setting framed by the “Open Space” operates de facto as an inquiry device since participants use it to *attest* evidence collected in their experience, in support of their argumentations and claims. However, the de jure process of inquiry is the expert auditing integrated in this government. Silva-Castañeda investigated the practical work of four out of the six audit firms that have certified RSPO companies operating in Indonesia (Silva-Castañeda, 2012). In her investigation, she cared to “create a climate of familiarity, taking a walk with villagers in their forest to be sensitive to their familiar engagement with the environment” (Silva-Castañeda, 2012). By contrast, the process of “rendering auditable”—by virtue of designing measurable procedures and performance—is a test of “the quality of internal [...] systems, rather than the quality of the product or service itself as specified in standards” (Power, 1997, p. 84).

Indicators listed in the RSPO standard are codified records of information requests, safety plans, emergency procedures, calendars, monitoring systems, and “companies must develop management systems that will enable them to demonstrate their compliance with the standard” (Silva-Castañeda, 2012). Because auditors regard the document as the ultimate form of evidence, “a lack of ‘evidence’ – in other words of *documents* – on the side of local communities stands in contrast to the companies’ documentary arsenal” (Silva-Castañeda, 2012).

In one of the breakout sessions of the open space that we observed, smallholders and non-smallholders met on the topic of audit. Rather unexpectedly, two auditors joined the group and engaged in criticizing the debated limitations of their work. The self-critical awareness of the auditors allowed an outstanding critical exchange about this core device in the control of the standard enforcement. Because auditors belong to the main inspection body of this mode of governing, their taking part in the critical public debate creates tensions with their official function.

## RSPO “Dispute Settlement Facility”

The “RSPO Dispute Settlement Facility” is intended to fulfil some of the jurisdictional functions. Without covering all the aspects of the pre-trial investigation of a case, registering a complaint is part of the critical inquiry we are interested in, in which smallholders are involved. Following our methodological grid, we shall consider the three main operations which
compose the chain of transformation between the kind of wrong which the plaintiff suffers and the formal complaint which is duly registered. While *at-testing* begins with attending and points towards providing evidence, *pro-testing* addresses the critical statement to an interlocutor, a step towards the larger public needed in *con-testing*, which is constrained by the strong requirement of togetherness and based on the invested forms needed for a common format. In our fieldwork with Cheyns, we strived to follow the formulation of the complaint from a village in Indonesia close to Jambi, Batu Ampar, up to the RSPO settlement devices.

*Contest: Formatting the Complaint in the Right Form for the Public*

The needed transformation of the wrong in an official complaint is not a specific feature of this mode of governing. A legal case in court would also require to select “facts” and format them so that they would be taken into account in the procedure. Yet, the plaintiff’s frustration, which often results from the formatting, turns out to be particularly severe in RSPO dispute settlement procedures, since complaints have to be strictly formulated in terms of the principles, criteria, indicators and guidelines of the standard. Just as they prepare communities to take the floor at roundtable public sessions—through role-playing exercises among other techniques (Cheyns, 2014)—various NGOs give them a hand in learning and carrying out the transformations of their harm into a standard complaint. It is worth noting that a range of distinct NGOs build up a chain that parallels the needed transformations to turn local knowledge into proper public information formats. Some Indonesian NGOs develop local and close links with smallholders, as Sawit Watch—also a member of the RSPO Executive Board—or Wahli. They help “growing a common cause in proximity” by “accommodating attachments” and emotions within convivial preparatory meetings with farmers and community representatives (Cheyns, 2014). Other international NGOs, such as Oxfam, play their major role within RSPO official bodies, moving forward new rights in the standard. Some of them, such as the Forest Peoples Programme, are able to navigate between the different levels and related *engagements*, from *familiarity* to *public justification* with reference to the common good, because they combine the scientific knowledge and methodology issued from anthropological scholarship and the skilled practice of international organizations (Colchester, 2002; Colchester & Chao, 2013; Cheyns & Thévenot, 2019b).
A first complaint was send to the RSPO DSF (Dispute Settlement Facility) by the village or Batu Ampar and written in Indonesian. Without formal template, it mixed a DSF category ("Effort taken to resolve the issues") with other ones. Gun, a local member of the Indonesian NGO Sawit Watch, helped villagers to write this first version. A second version still written in Indonesian was framed within the DSF Form, after the first complaint had been rejected because of its inappropriate format. The chronological narrative which was so significant for the history of the community was taken out. In addition to "Efforts have been taken to resolve the issues", the other two DSF categories, "Nature of Complaints" and "Supporting Evidence", were filled in. Nauli, who created the local branch of the Indonesian NGO Wahli (Wahli Jambi), gave a helping hand. Already an activist in college, he later organized demonstrations in labour regional unions. As a lawyer, he dealt with cases related to activism, students, labour cases and community cases. We observed this double training in activism and law among other interme-diaries who have to compromise between different worlds. Nauli critically comments:

> A lot of fuss about “sustainability”, catchy phrase. No concern for local communities. No conflict resolution model. Commitment on paper, not in actual practices. Weak involvements of local communities. (Nauli interviewed by Cheyns in Jambi, 6 November 2014)

This second attempt still did not suit the needed format of the DSF complaint. Karlo, who is a less local member of the Sawit Watch NGO, rewrote in English a third version of the complaint. In the “Nature of complaints” category, he transformed the former list which mentioned under the heading “Land dispute” the items: “management system, partnership system, land grabbing”. In the new list of grievances, he strictly connected each item to the numbered principle or criteria which were viewed as violated. Under the heading “Land dispute related to violation of the Principles 2.2 and 2.3”, he wrote:

> The right to use the land is demonstrated, and is not legitimately contested by local people who can demonstrate that they have legal, customary or user rights [2.2]; [...] Use of the land for oil palm does not diminish the legal customary or user rights of other users without their free, prior and informed consent [2.3].
In these successive versions, we see the progressive trans-formation of evidence, from formats that fit smallholders’ experienced troubles faced in their engagements, to formats that rigorously stick to the objectives phrased in the headings of the standard.

### Attest: Land Appropriation and Appropriate Evidence

The extension of industrial plantations damages a range of farmers’ *engagements* with the land and the surrounding nature. Smallholders face great difficulty in bringing into the dispute the acceptable evidence of these damages and rights infringements. The reason is that RSPO Government depends on the formalization of modes of engagement to the land which stay remote from the various relations maintained and valued by villagers. *Liberal* property right is only one among many modes of appropriating land (Silva-Castañeda, 2015) and nature that make them proper to one’s use or habitat, and maintain the kinds of dependency that cosmologies or mythologies convey (Breviglieri & Landoulsi, 2016). These modes, which suffer from the radical change provoked by industrial plantations, procedures and normative frameworks, are weakly taken into account by the standard.

The need for exclusive property and associated rights demands mapping and boundaries, between neighbouring communities in particular. A document—in Indonesian—produced by the Batu Ampar village community and distributed at the 2012 roundtable to document the “Case profile” with the questioned company describes the relationship to the land as follows:

> The methods used by the villagers in cultivating their farms and orchards still follow old methods of wise and traditional management, although some have adopted relatively modern tools and framing techniques. Communal work traditions (*gotong royong*) are still practiced on planting and harvest times for agricultural produce, including thanksgiving ceremonies and family parties/celebrations.

In 1916, the community moved across the river to its present location, the document states in this respect:

> [...] the boundaries of Batu Ampar customary territories were delineated in a customary *tembo*, an oral customary *seloko* (poem) which began to be recorded in a written form during the 1940–60s. The written record made in 1985 still forms the guidelines for the current boundaries of the Batu Ampar village.
<table><caption>**Table 7.1** The local familiar and customary format of evidence</caption><thead><tr><td>Tunggul Bungo Besar</td><td>Pemayang Tembesu</td><td>Tebat Patah</td><td>Pematang Belubang</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>A tree stump with a large flower growing on it/the stump of a large flower</td><td>A dry islet in the swamp with a tembesu tree on it</td><td>A broken/kinked dam or pond</td><td>A small island/embankment with a break of mole</td></tr></tbody></table>

Landmarks are based on such customary, local and even personal formats of evidence (see Table 7.1).

We observed in the field the “trans-formatting” chain artfully designed to overcome this handicap via proper devices. Currently engaging in *familiarity* with the natural environment, some villagers—not even the chief—had the familiar knowledge needed to identify local markers of territories, such as plant species or trees—when they were not already destroyed by new industrial plantations. The instrument of global positioning system (GPS) made possible the transformation of these markers into geographic coordinates (see Figs. 7.5a, b). This chain of inquiry translated local and situated formats of information, such as *familiar* landmarks, into formal proofs that would be accepted as publicly *justifiable* “evidence” for the standard. The villager’s chief (the woman on the right in the photograph of Fig. 7.5b) was helped by an NGO member with a GPS who calculated “the coordinate points based on the Tembo names obtained from the Batu Ampar village, as well as the agreement between the Batu Ampar and the Karang Mendapo”.²⁶

*Protest: Direct “Private” Interaction*

A result of the mapping efforts that Batu Ampar villagers strongly struggled for was a decision [SK] by the local governing authority—the head of district [*Bupati*]—settling the debated boundary between their village (*Batu Ampar*) and the adjacent one (*Karang Mendapu*). It grounded their claim that their rights were infringed because of the faulty map that the company drew in 2001. This new piece of formal evidence was expected to be pivotal in their fight for their rights. In the DSF category “Efforts have been taken to resolve the issues” that was already filled in the first version of the complaint, they recorded three points in the last version: (1) Boundary checking into the field by District and Village Government; (2) Boundary determination by *Bupati* with the issuance
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 7.5** The transformation of familiar-customary landmarks (a) into quantifiable space markers; (b) recorded by the NGO technician (left) and the village chief (right) (*Source* Photographs by Laurent Thévenot)</figcaption></figure>

of the decision on the administrate border village; and (3) Asking the company for implementing the decision letter.

The head of the village, Yanti, came from her village to the RSPO annual meeting in Medan. Away from the public arenas, roundtable annual meetings offer the opportunity of “side events” that allow a direct confidential exchange between stakeholders for private negotiation. We managed to attend such a closed meeting between: a director of GAR (Golden Agri-Resources) headquartered in Singapore; the main palm oil company of one of the largest Indonesian conglomerates Sinar Mars²⁷; which owns the local subsidiary company KDA in Jambi; the director of this subsidiary company KDA; the village chief Yanti; Karlo from NGO Sawit Watch; Nauli from NGO Wahli local branch in Jambi; Agun, a mediator from the consultant firm TFT (Tropical Forest Trust) who was paid by GAR. Local participants spoke Indonesian while a translator whispered the English translation to the GAR director who did not understand Indonesian. The photographs show the full roundtable (Fig. 7.6a); the GAR director with his assistant listening to the translation in English (Fig. 7.6b); Karlo with the camera recording the meeting (Fig. 7.6c);