Voicing concern and difference: from public spaces to common-places

This paper aims to clarify some of the contributions that so-called ‘pragmatic sociology’ [sociologie pragmatique] might make to political and cultural sociology. The appellation is commonly used to encompass a research current that has contributed to the revival of the French social sciences for nearly 40 years, in sociology, anthropology, political science but also institutional economics and economic sociology – specifically ‘Economie des conventions’: convention theory – and law, and that has lately reached an international audience. I shall concentrate here on the line of research that originated in the foundational model of conflicting orders of worth that Luc Boltanski and I developed and which I expanded into a sociology of engagements.