Governing the Market Through Prices: The State and Controls on the Price of Medicines in France

This article brings together two streams of research which have had important developments over the past years without coming together around a single empirical object. The first of these streams has developed in economic sociology around questions of valuation and pricing (Aspers and Beckert, 2011; Hegelsson and Muniesa, 2013; Vatin, 2013). If the majority of these works are more interested in processes of qualification than in processes of pricing, this gap tends to be filled by studies that are primarily focused on the formation, the circulation and the social uses of prices (Beckert, 2011; Chauvin, 2011 and previous issue). However, as Beckert (2011) emphasizes, these works have often neglected the role of institutions in general, and of the State in particular, in the determination of prices. The second stream of research has developed in the policy analysis around "government instruments" (Hood, 1983; Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004) used by the State to govern different social spheres, and in particular the market (Hall, 1986; Dobbin, 1994 ; Jullien and Smith, 2008). These works have often emphasized the use of the tax system and public expenditure (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004; Bézès and Siné, 2011) as classic government instruments, but on the other hand they have given little attention to control of prices by the State (...)