40

This article studies the production and qualification of professional misconduct focusing on digital management tools used on French farms. The growing environmental regulations surrounding agricultural practices have encouraged the commercial development of software management tools that are supposed to help farmers with their bureaucratic tasks and accountability. Through a qualitative survey and at the crossroads of sociology of bureaucratic work, sociology of agriculture and sociology of digital tools, we show that while this digitization of administrative traceability is supposed to reduce errors and mistakes, it also allows new practices which allow farmers to circumvent public regulation. These practices highlight a continuum of practices from errors to frauds, in which the digital tools produce a new type of fraud that has become (paradoxically) compliant with regulations. Finally, the article proposes an analysis of these accountability practices in relation to the professional identity of the farmers surveyed, in order to show the organizational dimension of these circumvention processes. As these practices are commonly acknowledged out of the farm-level, this article puts into question the political implications of the uneven adoption of these tools and their regulatory capacity among farmers.