Justification, Evaluation and Critique in the Study of Organizations

From a sociological perspective, it is generally assumed that actors in society will engage in collective action in order to meet their individual needs and interests. As initially argued by Bourdieu, but also by institutional theorists (Scott, 1995 ; Zucker, 1987), much of this engagement will be tacit and taken for granted. Although scholars stemming from a critical perspective highlight the hegemony of these explanations of coordinated action (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002 ; Willmott, 1993), they say little about the capacity of ordinary actors to mobilize their critical competencies in order to resist such hegemony.
If one works from the premise that organizational actors dispose of critical competencies, how do they mobilize these in practice and what implications does this mobilization have on our understanding of coordination and organizational processes more broadly ? This is one of the central questions posed by Boltanski and Thévenot when they embarked on the writing of On Justification (1991, 2006), considered by some to be the most important sociological treatise in post-Bourdieu French sociology (Baert & Carreira da Silva, 2010, p.
43). The articles in this volume explore how mobilizing Boltanski and Thévenot's economies of worth framework, and its associated concepts of justification, evaluation, and critique, help address questions regarding the premises and dynamics of coordinated action, both within and across organizations, and by so doing help advance our understanding of organizational processes more generally.