Pierre-André Juven

Associated researcher


  • Presentation



Pierre-André Juven olds a PhD in socioeconomics of innovation form the École des Mines de Paris. He conducted his thesis research at the CSI under the supervision of Vololona Rabeharisoa, and had his viva on October 7, 2014. Over the past four years his research activities focused mainly on the completion of this doctoral thesis. In his PhD dissertation he studies the genesis, the uses and the alterations of several instruments of public action in hospital administration: information system, calculation of costs by hospital stay, instruments of budgetary adjustment and system of pricing. Based on an approach that combines political sociology of the instruments of governance and sociology of technology and innovation, these devices are studied in the multiple sites where they are used: Ministry of Health, technical agency, research centers in management, expert authorities, hospital federations, patients’ associations and public hospital. The thesis shows how these instruments have transformed the hospital into a management and finance being. The activity-based pricing, called T2A, holds a central place in these transformations and is analyzed as an instrument of qualcul, the aim of which is to quantify and qualify the patients, the hospital stays, the diseases, and even the public hospital itself. The thesis demonstrates how this qualculation process has generated metrological controversies in the course of which some actors use the devices to redo the qualculs, these controversies involving a relatively new form of critical work.

Today, Pierre-André’s research is about the processes of capitalisation and financialization of health. His investigations of the public policies dealing with cancer control aim at studying how public money is allocated and instrumented with regard to the gouvernementality that is specific to each mode of financing. In parallel, he carries out a research on how the use of financing instruments implements the fallibility of public structures. The aim is to analyze the whole set of processes leading to crisis situations and potential bankruptcy, not in terms of a logical and natural consequence of “mismanagement”, but rather as the result of a controversial transformation of the instruments of management and of the methods used for the calculation of the value and the functioning of these public services. The strength of the fallibility regime is that even if bankruptcy remains an assumption, the very existence of this probability, supported by instruments that make it tangible, profoundly alters the order of the legitimate solutions and practices of the public institutions

Pierre-André Juven taught sociology of controversies at the École des Mines de Paris. As a Research and Lecturer Assistant (ATER), he also taught full time political science at the University Paris-Dauphine and at the Auvergne University.