The Vertical Horizontal approach

The name Vertical Horizontal states what I try to hold together in all my studies.

The vertical stands for the conceptual and analytical frameworks I have built over time. They make actors, actor systems, the non-humans involved in them, and the dynamics of the whole intelligible.

The horizontal stands for the priority I give to observation and attentive listening over any concept or analytical grid. This priority comes from my ethnographic training and from an empirical, situated philosophy. I never apply a framework to a situation I have not first genuinely encountered.

Without the vertical, analysis stays on the surface of the problems as the actors themselves frame them. Without the horizontal, it crushes them under concepts or models that do not always fit.

Vertical has a second meaning, which runs through my advisory work. It means taking a position: a diagnosis, an evaluation, or an argued stance, when the analysis allows it and my values require it.

1. The vertical

1.1 Individual actors

An actor is not a strategic calculator, or only partly so. Actors have intentions and strategies, and they make trade-offs. They are also shaped by what they do not control. That includes an unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense, values and horizons of meaning that guide action far beyond utility, and their own way of thinking. It also includes material, institutional and sometimes neurodevelopmental constraints that define the real space of their choices.

Actors are also capable of creativity and of fine adjustment to situations. They are capable, too, of non-action: withdrawal, patience, attention and availability are not the absence of action but another way of acting.

To make this depth intelligible, I deliberately use several frameworks that sit in tension with one another:

  • classical socio-anthropological frameworks;
  • pragmatic sociology;
  • interactionism and ethnomethodology;
  • cognitive ergonomics of work situations and the clinic of activity;
  • narrative practice;
  • acceptance and commitment therapy;
  • attention to neurodevelopmental profiles.

This plurality is not cosmetic eclecticism. It is the condition for not flattening an actor into a model that simplifies them in advance.

1.2 Actor systems

An actor system is neither a pure mechanism of competing interests nor the pure product of a fixed institutional framework. It is a dynamic configuration. Collective actors take part in it: public institutions, agencies, professional organisations, companies, supply chains, NGOs, media, learned societies and funders. They pursue strategies, form alliances, clash, wield power, sometimes wage economic, political or cognitive wars, produce norms and mobilise symbolic resources.

I draw on several bodies of work to make these configurations intelligible:

  • the sociology of organisations;
  • the sociology of innovation and science;
  • the pragmatic sociology of justification;
  • a critical political sociology attentive to cronyism and power asymmetries;
  • social and symbolic anthropology for long-term institutions, filiation, ritual and classification.

1.3 Controversies and conflicts

I map controversies, disagreements and conflicts without ranking them arbitrarily. They almost always have “scientific” and “social” dimensions at once. The incommensurabilities between actors are often more revealing than surface consensus or disagreement: how each defines the problem, and how their epistemic perspectives diverge.

Here I combine two kinds of tools. The first are epistemological: bias analysis in scientific work, methodological review, and understanding of expertise instruments. The second are socio-political readings: information warfare, cronyism, influence.

1.4 Non-humans

Techniques, knowledge, norms, non-human living beings, documents and places are not mere backdrops or constraints on human action. They are themselves “actants” that count, that transform configurations, that resist or enable. I work with an open repertoire:

  • technologies, devices and infrastructures, from farm machinery to digital platforms and AI tools;
  • knowledge, whether scientific, professional or lay;
  • norms, standards and indicators;
  • living beings: soils, microorganisms, plants, animals and ecosystems, including the human body in its non-conscious biological dimensions;
  • documents with an efficacy of their own;
  • places and territories as active configurations.

This approach belongs to the lineage of the sociology of innovation and of the philosophy and anthropology of nature.

1.5 The dynamic dimension

Actors, systems and non-humans are never fixed. They have trajectories, turning points and nested timescales: short-term strategy, medium-term institutional change, long-term anthropological and symbolic time. A purely synchronic analysis misses what is changing, and what changes is often what matters most.

I therefore reconstruct histories: how an institution formed, how a controversy took shape, how a practice spread or was marginalised. I pay attention to co-evolution, since indicators and norms change what they claim to measure. I also watch for critical moments when a configuration tips and something new appears.

Two further dynamics matter. The first concerns scale. Depending on the moment in a process, what weighs most may be an individual’s biography, collective power relations, or the materiality of devices and environments. The second goes further: problems themselves shift. What is considered relevant in a situation changes over time, and that shift is an object of analysis in its own right.

2. The horizontal

The horizontal is neither an add-on to the vertical nor a preliminary step to be shortened. It is what makes the vertical possible and sound. It involves three distinct but inseparable moments: before, during and after.

2.1 Before: observation and listening

Before any interpretation, I try to be present to what is happening. That means being physically there when possible, and always attending to what is said, done and avoided. Observation is not raw data collection to be processed later. It is a work of discernment that requires suspending ready-made categories.

Listening works the same way. An interview is not a disguised questionnaire. I let people unfold their point of view, their way of framing a problem, their contradictions and their silences. What seems to wander or contradict itself is often the most valuable material.

2.2 During: the encounter as an event

Observing and listening are not enough if one stays entirely outside. I seek to genuinely meet people, which means accepting to be affected by what they say and who they are. This is not professional sentimentality. It is the condition for something unexpected to emerge in the inquiry, something that my initial hypotheses cannot absorb.

This is also why I keep my work clearly apart from extractive approaches. The person I meet is never a mere source. They are a co-producer of the knowledge, even when they do not know it.

2.3 After: checking with the actors

Whenever possible, I return to the people I met and submit my provisional readings to them. Does this make sense to you? Am I missing something important? Am I forcing a point you would reject?

The aim is not to obtain approval. I may maintain a reading someone rejects, provided I take public responsibility for it and make the disagreement explicit. But this return separates what withstands the encounter with those concerned from what collapses as soon as it is shown to them.

This is the practical ethics of the craft: not drawing conclusions behind people’s backs. The same requirement applies to the collectives and institutions concerned by my analyses.

3. Diagnosis, evaluation, position

The approach is not only descriptive. Under certain conditions it can become performative. In advisory work on actors and systems, I can move to diagnosis and evaluation. On some controversies, I can take a stance on specific points. These gestures extend the horizontal rather than contradict it: they take responsibility for a judgement formed through encounter, grounded in analysis, informed by my values, and open to discussion.

3.1 Diagnosis and evaluation

In advisory work, the client has a brief. It may be to evaluate a programme, understand a scheme in order to redirect it, support a transformation, or identify levers for action. I take the brief seriously and do not substitute my own.

Listening, however, also applies to the client. It means helping them clarify what they are really looking for and reframe the problem when the initial formulation is too narrow or too broad, without moving the centre of gravity of the brief. Much of this happens upstream, in tender responses and scoping meetings. A well-framed brief is worth more than a brief executed to the letter.

3.2 Taking a position in certain controversies

My default stance on controversies is to map them and restore everyone’s arguments. Some controversies, however, are not ordinary. Cognitive warfare may be intense. Political and influence dimensions may be massively disproportionate. Some of the expertise mobilised may prove, on examination, to be very weak: systemic methodological bias, undisclosed conflicts of interest, questionable measurement instruments. In those cases I may choose to take a position on specific points.

I do so on the basis of the analysis, and also of my values: some things I do not consider negotiable, and intellectual honesty requires saying so. This remains rare. It always comes with the same transparency: saying where I speak from, what I rely on, and accepting to be challenged on substance.

Scroll to Top