Engagements with participation: Pragmatic perspectives, two decades on

This special issue gathers contributions that explore various dimensions of participation through the lens of pragmatic sociology.From the early 2000s, scholars across the social sciences started to refer to ‘a participatory turn’ (Polletta, 2016). This ‘turn’ referred to the growing emphasis on institutional arrangements and governance frameworks that sought to include citizens more directly in political decision-making. It entailed new practices—‘democratic innovations’ (Smith, 2009)—which it was hoped would integrate citizens’ views into policy processes and enhance accountability among elected officials and public institutions across policy fields (Bherer et al., 2016). Beyond institutional arrangements and new practices, the participatory turn also entailed a discursive shift that placed participation as the self-evident objective and the key to resolving a myriad of social ills. As sociologists Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza put it in 2016, ‘participation has now achieved the status of something unquestionably good and infinitely malleable’.Where has this turn taken us? Was it a sharp U-turn or more of a stylistic swivel of the steering wheel? Has the participatory turn fulfilled its transformative potential—or has it been domesticated by the very institutional logics it sought to challenge? How do actors navigate, negotiate, and sometimes contest the values and formats embedded in participatory arrangements? And how can pragmatist sociology help us understand participation not as a fixed ideal but as a situated and morally charged practice?This special issue addresses these questions from a Nordic perspective. Its contributions originate from the Nordic Network of New Social Pragmatism, which has gathered Nordic sociologists working on and with pragmatist concepts since 2021. Over seminars and meetings in Helsinki, Trondheim, and Copenhagen, sociologists from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden came together to discuss their work under the (broad) umbrella of French pragmatist sociology.The Nordic countries, often seen as democratic frontrunners, have institutionalised a variety of participatory mechanisms. Participatory budgeting (e.g. OmaStadi in Helsinki), citizen councils and youth councils (as found across Denmark and Norway), neighbourhood assemblies, public consultations, digital consultation platforms (such as Better Reykjavik or Ung.no), and collaborative planning processes are now familiar components of their participatory repertoire. These practices vary widely in scope, institutional anchoring, and democratic ambition, and beneath the uniform rhetoric, participation remains an ambiguous and contested concept.The multiple and often contradictory aspirations of participation demand a conceptual lens that can account for such plurality. This is where French pragmatic sociology, particularly the sociology of engagements developed by Laurent Thévenot (2007, 2011, 2014, 2015) offers a productive vocabulary. Rather than viewing participation as a singular democratic ideal, this approach enables us to attend to the situated ways in which actors engage, coordinate, and justify their actions. It reveals how participatory practices are shaped by diverse regimes of engagement and competing grammars of commonality, which do not always align.Participation entails navigating a plurality of actors and knowledge formats, requiring not only practical coordination but also the moral and political work of justifying why and how diverse concerns are brought together. French pragmatic sociology insists that such coordination is not neutral. While participation is commonly valued as inherently democratic, the ways in which participation is organised and evaluated often depend on diverging material arrangements and forms of valuation (Marres, 2012). Pragmatic sociology is specifically attuned to various modes of (e)valuation and practical coordination, and the analysis is directed to the critical operations in which actors themselves engage (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999). In fact, Irwin and others (2013) emphasise that critique should not be considered a flaw of participatory arrangements but regarded as one of their key components.Pragmatic sociological approaches have the potential to move past rigid definitions of the role and value of participation for democracy, directing attention to the forms of coordination and associated forms of good that actors themselves mobilise in different situational arrangements. Previous pragmatic analyses of participation (see, e.g. Centemeri, 2017; Cheyns, 2014; Eranti, 2017; Luhtakallio, 2012; Meilvang et al., 2018; Meriluoto, 2018; Meriluoto & Kuokkanen, 2022) have emphasised the plurality of participatory formats and analysed the plurality of ways in which participation is enacted, justified, and contested in practice. This special issue builds on these analyses but also takes up a conceptual challenge: how to make sense of participation in democracy without a normative and evaluative gaze? Can we scrutinise its plural value and effects without a scale or evaluative grid (e.g. Arnstein, 1969; Fung, 2006) through which to score its ‘democratic value’?The five articles in this issue address participation not as a singular event or policy tool but as a socially embedded and situated endeavour, negotiated within the ‘dispositions of the situation’ (Thévenot, 2011). The contributions demonstrate how engagements are structured by the presence of multiple, and at times conflicting, regimes—whether in interaction rituals, artistic collaboration, or institutional scripts. Together, they offer insight into what makes participation possible, where it falters, and how it can be reimagined beyond prescriptive models.Collectively, the articles in this issue contribute to a rethinking of participation as a moral, affective, and materially embedded practice. Rather than viewing participatory arrangements as either emancipatory ideals or managerial tools, their contributions allow us to examine the everyday labour of composing the common and the frictions this entails.In the first article, Eeva Luhtakallio, Veikko Eranti, and Anders Blok propose a research agenda they call new social pragmatism, which brings together French pragmatic sociology (justification and engagements), American pragmatism, cultural sociology, and interactionism. They sketch two ‘exchange zones’ where Thévenot's grammars and investments in form intersect with interactionist concepts such as disruption, affordances, and situational webs. Drawing on empirical cases from Finland, the article examines how commonality is composed in practice. Rather than treating participation as a fixed procedural ideal, they treat it as situated action through which personal troubles are transformed into public issues.The second article, by Iddo Tavory and Anders Vassenden, revisits a core but underdefined concept in pragmatic sociology: the situation. Drawing on the interactionist legacies of Erving Goffman and the early Chicago School, the authors argue that the centrality of the ‘disposition of the situation’ in the work of Thévenot and Boltanski would benefit from closer engagement with interactional theory. By introducing concepts such as ‘forms in motion’ and ‘interaction rituals’, they demonstrate how attention to the structuring of situations can advance both the empirical study of participation and theoretical understandings of social coordination.In their article, Ylva Lorentzon, Rebecca Brinch, and Anna Lund investigate participatory practices in professional theatre for children and young audiences in Sweden. Based on ethnographic research, the authors identify three distinct participatory ‘plans’: expert consultation, future orientation, and artistic collaboration. Through the lens of the sociology of engagements, the article highlights both the potential of and the obstacles to creating commonality in intergenerational settings. It calls into question the political and social viability of participatory ideals when actors operate within mismatched frames of engagement.Georg Boldt's contribution, ‘Home is Where the Heart Is,’ investigates institutional youth participation through an ethnographic study of a Finnish youth council. Drawing on Thévenot's regimes of engagement and the notion of domestic forms of worth, Boldt shows how participation is structured by a regime of familiarity that rewards those who conform to an internal, family-like group style. While some young people experience political empowerment and skill development through adapting to this culture, others disengage—either strategically or due to misalignment with the normative expectations of ‘good youth citizenship’. The article highlights how participatory initiatives, even when well-intentioned, can reproduce exclusionary dynamics when informal cultures and moral grammars limit what kinds of engagements are recognised as legitimate.Finally, Daniel Nordstrand Frantzen explores how citizens engage within formal participation procedures in Danish wind farm planning. Drawing on French pragmatic sociology, the article analyses public hearings as sites of testing where citizens activate distinct modes of critique to gain recognition and influence outcomes. Frantzen identifies three types of tests: persuasion, potentiality, and de-legitimation. Rather than turning away in opposition, citizens navigate these institutionalised formats to articulate legitimate concerns, revealing both the openings and closures afforded by proceduralised participation.These contributions reflect the special issue's broader ambition: to reframe participation as a plural and contested practice—shaped by situated engagements, forms of coordination, and the ongoing work of composing the common. Read together, the contributions in this special issue advance a pragmatist agenda for the study of participation—one that resists static definitions and instead attends to the dynamics of justification, attachment, and coordination across diverse settings. They show how participation is shaped not only by institutional design or normative ideals but also by the contingent, often ambivalent, work of forging commonality amid plural values, identities, and temporalities.Our ambition is that this issue will contribute to a growing strand of cultural and pragmatic sociology that seeks to re-politicise the study of participation by foregrounding critique, pluralism, and situated action.