Moral Standards: Underpinning or (re)constructing Social Order ? The Case of Fraud in a French Collective Transportation Service

The paper advances a certain view on the relationship between moral standards and social order. Referring to the case of fraud in bus public transportation systems, it first reviews research works attending the issue (of fraud and more generally of deviance) with a moral insight. The review reveals major similarities between works from different fields, in the way they look at moral standards and social order together. It is then suggested another view, where moral standards are not necessarily a matrix for a stable social order, but rather tools for a social regulation. This thesis' utility is illustrated by the analyse of a control and reporting interaction. Starting from this interactional and instrumental questioning of moral standards, the conclusion opens up the reflection to the “meso” scale of social order and suggests an organizational study of the making of social order through moral standards.