Gender and Convention Theory

Economics and sociology of conventions (EC/SC), also known as convention theory, offers a theo-retical framework centered on orders of worth and justifications. While EC/SC has been applied across various fields and empirical phenomena, it was rarely used to analyze gender until the early 2000s. This chapter introduces EC/SC as a valuable perspective for examining gender issues and outlines three manners of discussing gender within the framework: (1) Luc Boltanski contributed early on to the analysis of gender-sensitive topics, even if his reflections on gender and gender ine-qualities have been criticized by feminists. (2) In the early 2000s, French scholars independently developed, as a first manner, gender and family conventions. The lines of inquiry were consolidated and advanced by Olivier Thévenon. Nearly a decade later, Lisa Knoll proposed a second approach, which remains closer to Boltanski and Thévenot’s “orders of worth”. (3) In parallel to the theoreti-cal developments, various scholars have applied EC/SC, mainly “orders of worth”, to gender issues in the fields of education and training, labor and employment, entrepreneurship, family, sports, and public space.