Meaning & Measurement Mini-Conference

Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas— UC Berkeley fourcade@uclink.berkeley.edu I am a comparative sociologist working at the crossroads between culture, knowledge and economic sociology. My interest in questions of meaning and measurement grew recently after I started working on a new comparative research project about the valuation of ecological damage in two large scale oil spills in France and the United States. In those cases, different valuation methods, compounded with the differential legitimacy of economics (and market-based tools more generally) in France and the US led to very different levels of monetary compensation for the victims of the oil spills. Whether ecological damage was recognized or not, and how high it was valued, depended partly on whether the measurement tools developed by (mainly) natural scientists and economists were available, and whether they were socially legitimate. This topic --the (cultural) meaning of economic measurement tools-- is, fundamentally, in line with my earlier comparative work on the development of economics as a discipline and profession in the United States, Great Britain and France. This work has pushed me to reflect on the cultural assumptions that shape the way in which people in different countries institutionalize (or not) certain cognitive categories, which are themselves linked to distinct professional activities and intellectual schemes.