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The main purpose of this essay is to reflect on the nature of justification. To this end, the analysis draws on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur ¹ [On Justification: Economies of Worth ² ]. More specifically, the article aims to examine the extent to which Boltanski and Thévenot’s conceptual framework, widely known as ‘the sociology of critical capacity’, ³ permits us to demonstrate that processes of justification ⁴ are vital to the symbolically mediated construction – that is, to both the conceptual and the empirical organization ⁵ – of social life. In order to prove the validity of this contention, the inquiry explores the meaning of ‘justification’ in relation to the following dimensions: (1) existence, (2) ethics, (3) justice, (4) perspective, (5) presuppositions, (6) agreement, (7) common worlds, (8) critique, (9) practice and (10) justification itself. By way of conclusion, the article maintains that processes of justification constitute an essential ingredient of human reality.

In addition to serving a hegemonic function, system-justifying ideologies serve the palliative function of enabling people to feel better about inequality. We summarize three studies supporting this proposition. In the first study, an arbitrary hierarchy was created using the “Star Power” simulation. Results reveal that system justification is associated with increased positive affect, satisfaction, and decreased negative affect, guilt, and frustration. Two additional studies demonstrate that the dampening effect of system justification on support for the redistribution of resources is mediated by reduced moral outrage but not guilt or negative affect. Implications for social change and social justice are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of attribute frames and justifications on capital budgeting decisions and to examine whether the requirement to provide justification for a capital budgeting decision moderates the effect of attribute frames.

One-hundred and eleven participants made a capital budgeting decision in an experimental case that manipulated the frame of the financial evidence provided and the requirement to provide a justification.

Results suggest that both attribute frames and justifications affect capital budgeting decisions but the requirement to provide justifications did not moderate the effect of attribute frames.

This study contributes to the capital budgeting literature by identifying two factors that may bias judgments. This study also contributes to the framing literature by examining one potential method of moderating framing effects – requiring justification for decisions.

The justification of punishment is an age-old debate which continues unresolved. In late twentieth century several attempts were made to reconcile the two opposing justifications: retributivism and consequentialism. But these attempts focused narrowly on merely one manifestation of punishment, i.e.: criminal punishment carried out by the state. To the extent that these mixed justifications are successful, they relate to only one (undoubtedly important) manifestation of punishment. But clearly punishment can occur in many different institutional contexts, and the institutions in each context vary dramatically in complexity and relevance. I recommend analyzing punishment in its manifold manifestations.

Post-Enlightenment liberalism faces a paradox: The liberal principle of legitimacy demands states justify their constitutional order in terms citizens can accept, but there is no uncontroversial comprehensive conception of justice on which to form the requisite consensus. Rawls resolves the paradox by embracing a pragmatism that abandons the concept of truth in the political forum to secure consensus and legitimacy. Philosophers have challenged the idea of justice without truth as incoherent, and social critics have attacked it as naïve. This chapter defends Rawls’s pragmatism against such critics and argues that the future of liberal constitutionalism may depend on its success.

A centuries-long history of theory and research shows that every authority system tries to cultivate a belief in its legitimacy. This paper focuses on the legitimation of regimes – social relationships and the rules that govern them. We use existing theory and research to identify a basic legitimation assumption that includes four conditions necessary to establish legitimacy. We also identify four corollaries of the assumption and use our own published and unpublished laboratory research to show (1) how successful experimental procedures satisfy the assumption’s conditions, and (2) how the failure of experimental procedures to establish legitimacy violate the assumption and its corollaries.

This volume presents state-of-the-art research and thinking on the analysis of justification, evaluation and critique in organizations, as inspired by the foundational ideas of French Pragmatist Sociology’s economies of worth (EW) framework. In this introduction, we begin by underlining the EW framework’s importance in sociology and social theory more generally and discuss its relative neglect within organizational theory, at least until now. We then present an overview of the framework’s intellectual roots, and for those who are new to this particular theoretical domain, offer a brief introduction to the theory’s main concepts and core assumptions. This we follow with an overview of the contributions included in this volume. We conclude by highlighting the EW framework’s important yet largely untapped potential for advancing our understanding of organizations more broadly. Collectively, the contributions in this volume help demonstrate the potential of the EW framework to (1) advance current understanding of organizational processes by unpacking justification dynamics at the individual level of analysis, (2) refresh critical perspectives in organization theory by providing them with pragmatic foundations, (3) expand and develop the study of valuation and evaluation in organizations by reconsidering the notion of worth, and finally (4) push the boundaries of the framework itself by questioning and fine tuning some of its core assumptions. Taken as a whole, this volume not only carves a path for a deeper embedding of the EW approach into contemporary thinking about organizations, it also invites readers to refine and expand it by confronting it with a wider range of diverse empirical contexts of interest to organizational scholars.

Purpose – In this chapter, we seek to resolve the conflicting implications that emerge from status quo theories of justice, on the one hand, and theories of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice on the other. Specifically, status quo theories depict individuals as resistant to perceptions of injustice in their social environments, whereas theories of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice depict individuals as quite sensitive to the justice that characterizes outcomes and treatment.

Methodology/approach – We build on previous research on the justice judgment process to consider ways in which the findings from these two research streams can be integrated.

Findings – We suggest that the two overarching streams of research have identified and empirically explored two distinct modes of justice evaluation: a system justification mode and a system critique mode.

Originality/value of chapter – We develop a model of the justice judgment process that specifies the circumstances under which each of the two modes is likely to operate.

How is moral legitimacy established in pluralist contexts where multiple moral frameworks co-exist and compete? Situations of moral multiplexity complicate not only whether an organization or practice is legitimate but also which criteria should be used to establish moral legitimacy. We argue that moral legitimacy can be thought of as the property of a dynamic dialogical process in which relations between moral schemes are constantly (re-)negotiated through dynamic exchange with audiences. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ framework, we propose a process model of how three types of truces may be negotiated: transcendence, compromise, antagonism. While each can create moral legitimacy in pluralistic contexts, legitimacy is not a binary variable but varying in degrees of scope and certainty.

In this article, we make the point that managerial domination as described by pragmatic sociology is an appropriate notion to make sense of complex forms of domination in contemporary organizations. Based on Lemieux’s work on ‘grammars’, we complement approaches of complex domination put forward by pragmatic sociologists such as Boltanski and Thévenot. We illustrate these ideas by means of an ethnographic study of the financial intermediation industry. Our analysis sketches out an alternative conceptualization of power in such environments, and by so doing, helps us delineate the features that characterize complex financial domination. We conclude by arguing that this type of domination is the result of specific contradictions inherent to the grammars of financial intermediation.