Three studies on measuring corporate sustainability performance: disciplinary power and legitimization.

Summary The objective of this thesis is to study, from a sociological point of view, the new practice of measuring the performance of companies in terms of sustainable development. This emerging practice constitutes a social space where various games of power, confrontation and resistance of many actors involved in the field of sustainable development are articulated. The first article assumes that the analysis of the discourse, socially constructed and constituted, surrounding the measures produced and disseminated (often highly mediatized), plays a fundamental role in understanding the said practice. In particular, the discourse transmitted by the organizations measuring the socio-environmental performance of companies, both in their websites and in their public documents, promotes an ideology of numbers that underlies the exercise of a certain disciplinary power over the companies evaluated. Despite all the ambiguities and methodological uncertainties associated with the practice of socio-environmental measurement, measurement organizations strive to develop and transmit a discourse, relatively reductive, to legitimize their claim of expertise in the field. The second article of this thesis reports on the legitimization strategies deployed by the measurement agencies and their disciplinary effects on the companies evaluated and the stakeholders. It is, in fact, about the disciplinary and normalizing power of the ideology of numbers that can induce certain self-disciplinary effects in the field of sustainable development in general. Such self-discipline can also be observed in the academic world when the organizations' gatekeepers put pressure on researchers to refrain from publishing their research. Taking the form of a methodological study, the third article of the thesis seeks to provoke a reflection on the constraints that the power of organizational gatekeepers, especially when it takes the form of threats of legal action, can pose on the independence and freedom of researchers and the universities to which they belong.