This article examines individuals’ lay understandings of moral responsibilities between adult kin members. Moral sentiments and practical judgments are important in shaping kinship responsibilities. The article discusses how judgments on requests of support can be reflexive and critical, taking into account many factors, including merit, social proximity, a history of personal encounters, overlapping commitments, and moral identity in the family. In so doing, we argue that moral responsibilities are contextual and relational. We also analyze how class, gender, and capabilities affect (...) how individuals imagine, expect and discuss care responsibilities. We also offer a critique of social capital theory of families, suggesting that their versions of morality are instrumental, alienated, and restrictive. Although Bourdieu’s concept of habitus overlaps with our proposed moral sentiments approach, the former does not adequately address moral concerns, commitments, and evaluations. The article aims to contribute to a better understanding of everyday morality by drawing upon different literatures in sociology, moral philosophy, postcommunism, and development studies. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the AHRC Cultural Value Project and the ensuing legacy work. It suggests that this work has resulted in the re-positioning of the field of inquiry into cultural value by shifting attention away from policy constructs and towards lived experiences; away from measuring the outcomes of cultural participation and towards understanding the process of engagement. The challenge still remaining is to develop an empirically grounded pragmatist account of cultural value as a form of practice—a situated interface of agents, (...) actions and structures taking place in an institutionalised and materially circumscribed environment. Reconceiving cultural value in these terms will have profound methodological implications, not least the challenge of finding methodologies appropriate to its analysis within the realm of historically and geographically variable relations and structures. It is however a challenge worth taking. The proposed shift, it is suggested, will provide a way of addressing some long-standing ‘problems’ arising in relation to cultural value: the separation of conditions and consciousness; the overemphasis on the cognitive at the cost of the bodily; the separation between ‘the best and the brightest’ and the ‘everyday’ conceptions of culture. The proposed approach may also drive the refinement of flat(ter)-ontology methodologies which neither succumb to methodological individualism nor overemphasise methodological structuralism. (shrink)

Meritocracy claims to reward the meritorious with more resources, thereby achieving social efficiency and justice in a level playground. This article argues that the rise of meritocracy in a society is the institutional consequence of adopting progressive humanism, an ideal-type worldview that advocates the harmonious co-realization of individual achievement and social contribution. However, meritocracy is a self-defeating illusion because, even in a level playground, it only rewards conspicuous and wasteful display of ‘merit’ rather than genuine contributions to society. Similar to (...) the promise of an afterlife to Catholicism, the illusion of meritocracy constitutes an indispensable theodicy to progressive humanism. For societies holding such worldviews, meritocracy is a necessary illusion that cannot be dispelled by institutional reforms or political movements. (shrink)

In France, Fair Trade arrived on the scene in the late twentieth century, and since then has passed through several experimental phases before becoming an enduring "realistic" economic alternative. To understand the transformation, this article defines Fair Trade as a social construct issues and tensions of which change depending on the point of entry. By conducting a secondary analysis of several data sets from varied sources, including documentary material, interviews, and observations, the authors trace the history of Fair Trade in (...) France, define its introduction as a system, describe its institutionalization, and contribute to a greater understanding of how its ideals have changed and become more professional over time. The analyses reveal that the term "Fair Trade" has become ambiguous, spanning divergent and conflicting ideas and projects, including opening and closing conventional market systems and alter-globaliza-tion and anti-globalization. (shrink)

Online food retail has the potential to broaden access to systems of food provision which promote social and environmental quality attributes. This possibility is explored using data from a survey of 365 consumers who purchased food either via internet retailers of local and organic food, or via farmers’ markets, in Vancouver, Canada and Melbourne, Australia. Survey results are analyzed using principal component and regression techniques and interpreted via the theoretical framework of conventions theory. Key findings show that while online retailers (...) of local organic food are not currently attracting more resource constrained consumers, they do appeal to a similar, although broader, array of quality conventions. This research provides new insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with increasing consumer access to alternative food networks, as well as adding to the small number of quantitative studies in the conventions theory literature. (shrink)

Although existing scholarship offers critical insights into the working mechanisms of project-based research funding, little is known about the actual practice of writing grant proposals. Our study seeks to add a longitudinal dimension to the ongoing debate on the implications of competitive research funding by focusing on the incremental adjustment of the funder/fundee relationship around a common discursive practice that consists in describing and evaluating research projects: How has the perception of what constitutes a legitimate funding claim changed over time (...) and why? By investigating the normative framework enacted in the justification strategies of applicants, we shed light on the historical coevolution of the increasing competition for project funding, the epistemic culture of applicants, and grant writing rhetoric. To do this, we mobilize a comprehensive data set consisting of archival data from Europe’s oldest and largest funding agency, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, as well as a corpus of 80 successful grant proposals written between 1975 and 2005. We find that the 1990s mark an important normative consolidation of what we consider to be a legitimate funding claim: Ensuring the success of the project and the project’s results becomes a major concern in applicant rhetoric. This time period coincides with a substantive rise in the level of competition for project funding. Yet, even though justification strategies might seem to address the same issues in grant proposals across the disciplines under investigation, the normative framework to which applicants refer differs according to the applicant’s epistemic culture. (shrink)

Shirking, the act of avoiding the demands of one’s job, is generally seen as unethical. Drawing on empirical evidence from the sociology of work, I develop a normative conception of shirking as a form of worker resistance against illegitimate managerial power. In doing so, I present a new approach to the political theory of the firm, which is more adversarial and agent-centered than available alternatives. It is more adversarial as it recognizes the political value of counterproductive and disruptive behavior in (...) capitalist firms. It is more agent-centered because it theorizes the firm from the perspective of workers, asking what pro tanto reasons they have to shirk. I show that shirking under the structural domination of capitalism has diagnostic, agential, and epistemic values. The paper contributes to the wider methodological ambition to tailor political theorizing to the positionality of social actors, by shifting attention from the institutional design of the firm to the methods of worker resistance. (shrink)

This article develops a research position that allows cultural sociologists to compare morality across sociohistorical cases. In order to do so, the article suggests focusing analytic attention on actions that fulfill the following criteria: (a) actions that define the actor as a certain kind of socially recognized person, both within and across fields; (b) actions that actors experience—or that they expect others to perceive—as defining the actor both intersituationally and to a greater extent than other available definitions of self; and (...) (c) actions to which actors either have themselves, or expect others to have, a predictable emotional reaction. Such a position avoids both a realist moral sociology and descriptive-relativism, and provides sociologists with criteria for comparing moral action in different cases while staying attuned to social and historical specificity. (shrink)

In this study, we aim to investigate how multinational corporations (MNCs) balance ethical pressures from both the home and host countries. Drawing on theories from institutional theory, international business, and business ethics, we build a theoretical framework to explain the ethical behavior of MNCs. We apply the institutional logic concept to examine how MNCs with established logics and principles that have grown in the home country respond to local ethical expectations in the host country. We differentiate the core values from (...) the peripheral components of a MNCs institutional logic and propose that a MNC will pursue distinctive ethical strategies under different scenarios and choose the "right" configuration of core values and peripheral components that align with institutional environment in host countries. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we can no longer afford to ignore technology’s so-called ‘soft’ impacts, as this type of impact is becoming increasingly prominent in affluent societies where people have sufficient resources to pursue self-realization and where technologies are becoming more and more ‘intimate’ as they pervade our life world. These soft impacts come with their own type of normative challenges. The first challenge is to acknowledge the mutual shaping of technology and morality that causes soft impacts to (...) be fundamentally morally ambiguous. The second challenge is to anticipate soft impacts, which requires a rich and thick description of our morally laden current practices in the light of plausible technomoral change provoked by emerging technologies. The third and last challenge is to avoid both relativism and foundationalism, by opting for an open and learning attitude vis à vis the ways new and emerging technologies put our current morals into question. (shrink)

Over the past decade, genetically modified organisms have come to be viewed as problematic in Japan, as evidenced by a large number of newspaper articles covering questions ranging from the unknown ecological impact of GMOs to uncertainty about food safety, and by the fact that a number of consumers’ groups have organized activities including demonstrations at the experiment stations and the submission of petitions to the government. Against this backdrop, this article attempts to understand the changing interpretation of the perceived (...) rational social order in the context of the Japanese GMO controversies. Drawing on the French Theory of Conventions, the article will shed light on the conventions that serve as templates enabling actors to interpret what it means to introduce GMOs and what constitutes a rational decision concerning GMOs. The article will argue that rationality is best viewed as an emergent and interpretive process involving interpretation and negotiation by and among actors, and that conventions which may be taken for granted are nevertheless unstable and mutable. (shrink)

Public health is currently evolving, expanding, and reinforcing itself as a governance project in which health authorities’ concerns meet and blend with epidemiology and civil engineering. Rarely, however, are those concerns found worthy of examination, at least not to account for the multiplying involvements of public health, its ability to find political life in things, and its many translations. The shape of public health is dictated as much by its matters of concern as it is by biopolitical and brute matters (...) of fact. This article presents a genealogy of public health in Victorian England between 1834 and 1848 in order to glimpse the matters of concern around which it stabilized. The political medicine that preceded public health holds the clue in its assertion of life as a form of worth, as prominent a criterion for the assessment of sociomaterial arrangements as profitability or efficiency. This article describes public health as an ensemble presence, a unique gathering, in which political will follows medical diagnosis, and life is worth at least as much as money. (shrink)

The role of governments in business and society research has remained underexplored, and recent studies have called for further investigations of mechanisms of government intervention. In response to this call, this article studies how nation branding communication can govern businesses toward sustainability by providing qualifications for sustainable business, legitimizing these qualifications, and attaching national aspirations to business conduct that meets these qualifications. A comparative exploratory analysis of the nation branding materials of Denmark and Finland shows that while the two nations (...) qualify business sustainability in similar ways, differences exist in the legitimization of business sustainability and the national aspirations attached to sustainable business conduct. Both countries emphasize principles of efficiency and renewability in their sustainability qualifications. However, while Finland clearly seeks to attract firms to the local business environment to increase exports and improve the local economy, Denmark ascribes more heterogeneous value to sustainable business. (shrink)

In the Netherlands, as in many other nations, the government has proposed the use of a contact-tracing app as a means of helping to contain the spread of the corona virus. The discussion about the use of such an app has mostly been framed in terms of a tradeoff between privacy and public health. This research statement presents an analysis of the Dutch public debate on Corona-apps by using the framework of Orders of Worth by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991). It (...) argues that this framework can help us to move beyond the dichotomy of privacy vs. public health by recognizing a plurality of conceptions of the common good in the debate about contact-tracing apps. This statement presents six orders of worth present in the Dutch debate:civic, domestic, vitality, market, industrialandproject,and argues that the identification of which common goods are at stake will contribute to discussions about the use of this technology from a standpoint with a richer ethical perspective. (shrink)

Although CSR scholarship has highlighted how tensions in CSR implementation are negotiated, little is known about its normative and moral dimension at a micro-level. Drawing upon the economies of worth framework, we explore how spirituality influences the negotiation of CSR tensions at an individual level, and what types of justification work they engage in when experiencing tensions. Our analysis of semi-structured interview data from individuals who described themselves as Buddhist and were in charge of CSR implementations for their organizations shows (...) that spirituality influences how they compromise among competing moral values by identifying two forms of justification work: compartmentalizing work and contextualizing work, which help spiritual practitioners minimize moral dissonance. (shrink)

Over the last decade, scholars across the wide spectrum of the discipline of sociology have started to reengage with questions on morality and moral phenomena. The continued wave of research in this field, which has come to be known as the new sociology of morality, is a lively research program that has several common grounds with scholarship in the field of business ethics. The aim of this thematic symposium is to open constructive dialogues between these two areas of study. In (...) this introductory essay, we briefly present the project of the new sociology of morality and discuss its relevance for business ethics. We also review the contributions to this thematic symposium and identify four specific domains where future research can contribute to fruitful dialogues between the two fields. (shrink)

The datafication and digitalization of health and medicine has engendered a proliferation of new collaborations between public health institutions and data corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. Critical perspectives on these new partnerships tend to frame them as an instance of market transgressions by tech giants into the sphere of health and medicine, in line with a “hostile worlds” doctrine that upholds that the borders between market and non-market spheres should be carefully policed. This article seeks to outline the (...) limitations of this common framing for critically understanding the phenomenon of the Googlization of health. In particular, the mobilization of a diversity of non-market value statements in the justification work carried out by actors involved in the Googlization of health indicates the co-presence of additional worlds or spheres in this context, which are not captured by the market vs. non-market dichotomy. It then advances an alternative framework, based on a multiple-sphere ontology that draws on Boltanski and Thevenot’s orders of worth and Michael Walzer’s theory of justice, which I call a normative pragmatics of justice. This framework addresses both the normative deficit in Boltanski and Thevenot’s work and provides an important emphasis on the empirical workings of justice. Finally, I discuss why this framework is better equipped to identify and to address the many risks raised by the Googlization of health and possibly other dimensions of the digitalization and datafication of society. (shrink)

How are data science systems made to work? It may seem that whether a system works is a function of its technical design, but it is also accomplished through ongoing forms of discretionary work by many actors. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with a corporate data science team, we describe how actors involved in a corporate project negotiated what work the system should do, how it should work, and how to assess whether it works. These negotiations laid the (...) foundation for how, why, and to what extent the system ultimately worked. We describe three main findings. First, how already-existing technologies are essential reference points to determine how and whether systems work. Second, how the situated resolution of development challenges continually reshapes the understanding of how and whether systems work. Third, how business goals, and especially their negotiated balance with data science imperatives, affect a system’s working. We conclude with takeaways for critical data studies, orienting researchers to focus on the organizational and cultural aspects of data science, the third-party platforms underlying data science systems, and ways to engage with practitioners’ imagination of how systems can and should work. (shrink)

This article approaches work talk, a neglected but vital object of sociological inquiry, as a possible key to unlocking the mystery of the contemporary work ethic as it appears among male professionals living and working in the United States and Western Europe. This analytical task is carried out through a close examination of the contrasting rhetorics, scripts, and vocabularies anchoring French, Norwegian, and American forms of hard work talk. This comparative exercise capitalizes on material from over one hundred in-depth interviews (...) with comparable French, Norwegian, and American male business professionals working in finance, law, consulting, engineering and other professional fields. Scrutinizing the scripts that members of these three groups use to address their motives for working hard in demanding jobs, this article maps a legitimation divide between the American respondents and their French and Norwegian counterparts. The hard work commentaries of the French and Norwegian respondents feature script repertoires that focus exclusively on the stimulating and enriching character of their work activities. By contrast, the commentaries of the American respondents incorporate overachievement scripts addressing both the extrinsic rewards of work and the personality traits that make hard work a natural expression of personality. These hard work commentaries invoke career success and moneymaking as inducements to hard work. But they also invoke personality traits such as drive and the innate aversion to leisure. This transatlantic divide reflects the greater cultural resonance of self-realization in the two European contexts and the fact that the French and Norwegians have embraced a more Maslowian approach to working life. As I argue in the article’s conclusion, these transatlantic differences in script repertoires can be viewed as the product of the societally specific cultural configurations at work in the three countries. Such cultural configurations define what it means—in terms of status and authenticity—to work hard in a remunerative and rewarding job. (shrink)

Boltanski and Thévenot constructed in their seminal work On Justification the Orders of Worth framework as a research program for further empirical and theoretical development. This article suggests two methodological additions to extend the analytical capacities of the OW framework: The Socialism OW and the analytical adequacy axiom. The polito-philosophical Socialism OW, which acknowledges ' welfare' as its mode of evaluation and the higher principle of 'solidarity' as its test, is rooted in the political philosophy of Rosanvallon. In addition to (...) the systematic justification of the canonical text, this article also offers a tabular presentation for the construction of a new OW in relation to the axioms. In the article, first, the existing OW are put under scrutiny discussing the test category of solidarity, which was added and creates an analytic overload for the Civic OW. Second, analyzing the case of the German binary statutory health system, comprising of a private and a public healthcare, the capacities of the existing OW are discussed to identify a blank spot in the OW framework for empirical analysis. Accordingly, the descriptive analysis of the German binary health system is less about how the system is justified, and much more about understanding how given OW operate within it as coordinative devices. This systematic analysis of a situation of agreements, especially of investments in forms, amends the OW use for empirical analysis of critique and justification in a situation. (shrink)

A major problem with the emerging sociological literature on cosmopolitanism is that it has not adequately theorized mechanisms that mediate the presumed causal relationship between globalization and the development of cosmopolitan orientations. To solve this problem, I draw on Bruno Latour's actor- network theory to theorize the development of three key elements of cosmopolitanism: cultural omnivorousness, ethnic tolerance, and cosmopolitics. ANT illuminates how humans and nonhumans of multiple nationalities develop attachments with one another to create network structures that sustain cosmopolitanism. (...) ANT also helps the sociology of cosmopolitanism become more reflexive and critical of its implicit normative claims. (shrink)

A growing number of multi-stakeholder initiatives seek to improve labor and environmental standards through third-party certification. Fairtrade, one of the most popular third-party certifications in the agro-food sector, is currently expanding its operations from its traditional base in commodities like coffee produced by peasant cooperatives to products like flowers produced by hired labor enterprises. My analysis reveals how Fairtrade’s engagement in the hired labor sector is shaped by the tensions between traditional market and industrial conventions, rooted in price competition, bureaucratic (...) efficiency, product standardization and certification and alternative domestic and civic conventions, rooted in trust, personal ties, and concerns for societal wide benefits. At the global level, these tensions shape Fairtrade’s global standard setting as reflected in Fairtrade’s recently revised labor standards. At the local level, these tensions shape the varied impacts of certification on the ground as revealed through a case study of certified flower production in Ecuador. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relations between art and everyday life in the city from the vantage points of urban aesthetics and sociology, where the “city” refers as well to a normative world. The aim is to show how art/artistic life contributed to the normative change and new urban lifestyles. First, I focus on Baudelaire’s theory of beauty and life in modern metropolis or the city as “poetic object” and dandyism as an art of the self, seen as a crucial normative (...) change: the emergence of new norms of excellence and art of living, such as creativity and self-fashioning. Second, I discuss a recent yet related normative change, described by Boltanski and Chiapello as a passage to the “project-oriented city”, seen as a new way of working and living that fuses cultures of creativity and uncertainty. Third, I tackle the “creative city” hailed by Florida, where the creative lifestyle of “creative people” is the new mainstream setting the norms for society: individuality, diversity and openness, but also impermanent relationships and loose ties. I will argue that extending the hyper-mobile and flexible creative lifestyle from the extraordinary figure of the artist to ordinary people, as everyday urban life, triggers both benefits and risks. (shrink)

This article explores the elective affinities between Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the sociology of critical capacities. It argues that these two research programmes can be understood as symmetrical twins. We show the extent to which the exchange between Bruno Latour and Luc Boltanski has influenced their respective theoretical developments. Three strong encounters between the twin research programmes may be distinguished. The first encounter concerns explanations for social change. The second encounter focuses on the status of objects and their relationship to (...) places. The third encounter is about the concept of critique. Drawing on their long-term mutual readings, we gain insight into how pleas for symmetrical analysis raised in response to Bourdieu’s theory of fields have evolved within both ANT and the sociology of critical capacity. We conclude by relating the development of the respective research programmes to the issue of disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

Born in the 17th century, journal peer review is an extremely diverse technology, constantly torn between two often incompatible goals: the validation of manuscripts conceived as a collective industrial-like reproducible process performed to assert scientific statements, and the dissemination of articles considered as a means to spur scientific discussion, raising controversies, and civically challenging a state of knowledge. Such a situation is particularly conducive to clarifying the processes of valuation and evaluation in journal peer review. In this article, such processes (...) are considered as specific tests in order to emphasize the uncertain properties of pre-tests manuscripts. On the one hand, evaluation tests are examined at the core of the validation of manuscripts, such as defining the coordination of judging instances or controlling the modalities of inter-knowledge between reviewers and authors. They are also studied regarding the dissemination of articles, notably through the contemporary conception of a continuing evaluation test termed “post publication peer review”. On the other hand, valuation tests are both part of the validation of manuscripts, such as the weighting of different judgments of the same manuscript and the tensions that these hierarchies cause, and of the dissemination of articles, such as attention metrics recording the uses of articles. The conclusion sketches out how the articulation of these different tests has recently empowered readers as a new key judging instance for dissemination and for validation, potentially transforming the definition of peers, and thus the whole process of journal peer review. (shrink)

Dignity is a fundamental concept, but its meaning is not clear. This paper attempts to clarify the term by analysing and reconnecting two meanings of dignity: humanitas and dignitas. Humanitas refers to citizen values that protect individuals as equal to one another. Dignitas refers to aesthetic values embedded in genres of sociality that relate to differences between people. The paper explores these values by way of an empirical ethical analysis of practices of washing psychiatric patients in nursing care. Nurses legitimate (...) the washing of reluctant patients with reference to dignity. The analysis shows the intertwinement of humanitas and dignitas that gives dignity its fundamental meaning. (shrink)

This paper articulates dignity as relational engagement in concrete care situations. Dignity is often understood as an abstract principle that represents inherent worth of all human beings. In actual care practices, this principle has to be substantiated in order to gain meaning and inform care activities. We describe three exemplary substantiations of the principle of dignity in care: as a state or characteristic of a situation; as a way to differentiate between socio-cultural positions; or as personal meaning. We continue our (...) analysis by presenting cases on dignity in care related to us in focus groups with medical professionals. Our empirical ethical lens is in this paper is to analyse, not the meaning of dignity, but the way in which it emerges in practices where it is pursued, within relationships between people, technologies, places, regulations, and the values cherished by or embedded in them. We show that professional caregivers recognize in the dignity of the person they care for their own dignity; giving up on the one implies no less than giving up on the other. This ‘mirrored experience’ of dignity expresses itself in professional’s engagement with the situation. The value of this engagement, we argue, lies not primarily in realizing the particular content of the values at stake. We point to the importance of engagement itself, even if the values engaged with cannot be realized to the full, and even if competing versions of dignity are at stake simultaneously. In this way the caregivers provide us with interesting examples of moral actorship in situations of conflicting values. (shrink)

Many models of (un)ethical decision making assume that people decide rationally and are in principle able to evaluate their decisions from a moral point of view. However, people might behave unethically without being aware of it. They are ethically blind. Adopting a sensemaking approach, we argue that ethical blindness results from a complex interplay between individual sensemaking activities and context factors.

This article draws on ethnographic data from a field leading university licensing office to document and explain a key step in the process of institutionalization, the abstraction of standardized rules and procedures from idiosyncratic efforts to collectively resolve pressing problems. I present and analyze cases where solutions to complicated quandaries become abstract bits of professional knowledge and demonstrate that in some circumstances institutionalized practices can contribute to the flexibility of expert reasoning and decision-making. In this setting, expertise is rationalized in (...) response to institutional tensions between academic and business approaches to deal making and professional tensions between relational and legal approaches to negotiation. Abstraction and formalization contribute both to the convergence and stability of routines and to their improvisational use in professional work. Close attention to these processes in a strategic research setting sheds new light on an interesting tension in sociological theories of the professions while contributing to the development of a micro-level, social constructivist institutional theory. (shrink)

We consider the prospect of a trans-Atlantic alliance for a social theory of critical pragmatism, seeking the specific value that French critical pragmatism can offer American pragmatists, and vice versa. We proceed through a discussion of the ontological and metho- dological keys to French critical pragmatism: the architecture of justification, the treatment of conflict in public disputes, the dynamics of argumentation, and the play of acts defined analytically as ‘test’ and ‘compromise’. At each level, we compare this approach to Deweyan (...) pragmatism. (shrink)

The rise of private standards, including those involving multi-stakeholder processes, raises questions about whose interests are served and the kind of power that is exerted to maintain these interests. This paper critically examines the battle for ideas—the way competing factions assert their own narratives about value chain relations, the role of standards and related multi-stakeholder processes. Drawing on empirical research on the horticulture and floriculture value chains linking Kenya and the United Kingdom, the analysis explores the framing of sustainability issues, (...) especially around labor issues and good agricultural practice, and the choice of response with respect to private standards and multi-stakeholder initiatives since the late 1990s. We identify four competing narratives currently in play: a dominant global sourcing narrative, a pragmatic development narrative, a broader development narrative and a narrative we term potentially transformative. This last narrative is currently emerging through the unpacking of narratives in relation to the framing of sustainability problems and solutions, and in terms of legislative, executive and judicial governance. The paper contributes to emerging understanding of power in value chains, moving beyond material power to a consideration of how ideational power is exerted and resisted. (shrink)

In this paper it is demonstrated how the understanding of resilience is enhanced and shaped when using the concepts of oikos and life-modes. Instead of applying a rather problematic welfare capitalism model, which partially provides a negative social reproduction and production, it is suggested to apply a household/family model. The household/family model outlines that positive social reproduction and production, including real and productive values, potentially creates an essential bond between viable household, family, work, socialisation, and network based communities, resulting in (...) socially, economically, mentally, and ecologically sustainable survival of families and livelihoods over generations. Furthermore, it is stressed that serious fallacies will occur if resilience is solely understood and explained in terms of individual resources and characteristics. Nonetheless, it is recognised that non-cognitive traits such as persistence are important. Offspring is more strongly socialised and positioned in intact and viable families by transmitting and practicing a set of long-term reproduction and production strategies, which compared to upper strata are less common in the lower and middle strata. Thus, resilience is unequal. (shrink)

Digital technologies have made access to and profit from scientific publications hotly contested issues. Debates over open access (OA), however, rarely extend from questions of distribution to questions of how OA is transforming the politics of academic knowledge production. This article argues that the movement towards OA rests on a relatively stable moral episteme that positions different actors involved in the economy of OA (authors, publishers, the general public), and most importantly, knowledge itself. The analysis disentangles the ontological and moral (...) side of these claims, showing how OA changes the meaning of knowledge from a good in the economic, to good in the moral sense. This means OA can be theorized as the moral economy of digital knowledge production. Ultimately, using Boltanski and Thévenot’s work on justification, the article reflects on how this moral economy frames the political subjectivity of actors and institutions involved in academic knowledge production. (shrink)

Automated technologies populating today’s online world rely on social expectations about how “smart” they appear to be. Algorithmic processing, as well as bias and missteps in the course of their development, all come to shape a cultural realm that in turn determines what they come to be about. It is our contention that a robust analytical frame could be derived from culturally driven Science and Technology Studies while focusing on Callon’s concept of translation. Excitement and apprehensions must find a specific (...) language to move past a state of latency. Translations are thus contextual and highly performative, transforming justifications into legitimate claims, translators into discursive entrepreneurs, and power relations into new forms of governance and governmentality. In this piece, we discuss three cases in which artificial intelligence was deciphered to the public: the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, held as a prime example of how stakeholders manage to establish the terms of the debate on ethical artificial intelligence while avoiding substantive commitment; Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 congressional hearing, where he construed machine learning as the solution to the many problems the platform might encounter; and the normative renegotiations surrounding the gradual introduction of “killer robots” in military engagements. Of interest are not only the rational arguments put forward, but also the rhetorical maneuvers deployed. Through the examination of the ramifications of these translations, we intend to show how they are constructed in face of and in relation to forms of criticisms, thus revealing the highly cybernetic deployment of artificial intelligence technologies. (shrink)

Context is a pivotal concept for social scientists in their attempt to weave singularities or universals to moral codes and political orders. However, in this, social scientists might be neglecting the ways in which individuals or groups who are excluded from the collective production of knowledge want to politicize their concerns also by claiming their uniqueness and singularity. In this article, drawing on the public controversy about access to dementia drugs on the U.K. National Health Service and on the work (...) of pioneering sociologist Helen McGill Hughes on “human interest stories,” the author argues that the “politics of singularities” can be articulated in two related ways within technical controversies. First, it expresses the unraveling of sociotechnical ties caused by institutional failure to take concerns into account. Second, it expresses the concrete uniqueness of persons caught by standardized, “universal” and impersonal implements and/or policies. Both these effects are underpinned by resourcing to allegorical expression, a literary form that while fostering political imagination in technological democracies might weaken Science and Technology Studies' ambitions to influence decision making. (shrink)

Serial reciprocity exists when people reciprocate for what they have received--for example, from a parent, a friend, a mentor, a stranger, a previous generation --by providing something to a third party, regardless of whether a return is also given to, or makes its way back to, the original giver. To understand serial reciprocity as reciprocity, this article delineates the general features of the serial type of reciprocity and outlines two general situations in which serial reciprocity provides a viable option --the (...) only or the most appropriate option --for reciprocal return. It also argues for a more fundamental rethinking of reciprocity in general. A more cognitive and cultural perspective on reciprocity is proposed that focuses on the meaning of exchanges and treats reciprocity as a socially constructed element of a culturally available repertoire. This can better account for the existing serial type of reciprocity. The article concludes with suggestions for empirical research. (shrink)

In recent years, the sharing economy has attracted considerable attention, both scholarly and popular, relating to its capacity to enforce or undermine extant economic conventions. However, the process through which technological developments can effectively have this outcome of altering extant conventions on what is morally acceptable or desirable is still unclear. In this paper, we draw on the work of Boltanski and Thévenot and the notion of agencement to investigate the moral and performative dimension of controversies related to the SE. (...) The research stems from a qualitative case-based study of the controversy following Uber’s implementation in Montréal’s taxi market. We contribute to the literature on the SE through an empirical study of the moral debates entailed in the unfolding in situ of a SE device. We also add to the literature using the ‘Orders of Worth’ framework by showing how a compromise is solidified. We find that beyond discursive strategies, it is the concrete recomposition of laws, conventions, devices, persons, etc. that harmonised different definitions of the common good. Finally, we contribute to the literature on the relationship between technology, ethics, and social change by capturing the specific values that legitimise Uber, and by following their unfolding throughout a controversy. (shrink)

This paper aims to define and set the goals of what it calls a ‘Critical Hermeneutics of Populism’. Starting with the diagnosis of the ascent of rightwing populism being directly tied with the democratic legitimation deficit and the social problems caused by neoliberal policies, it assesses populist phenomena through the lens of hermeneutics. It argues that populism is not an entirely irrational phenomenon and that in spite of some common features of its intrinsic logic, substantive differences exist between left (or (...) progressive) political proposals and their rightwing, exclusionary counterparts. The paper claims that only an assessment of the discourses, values, and practices put forward by each political proposal that can be dubbed ‘populist’ will reveal its perils and promises, and help distinguish which types of populism are lethal to liberal democracy, and which can actually help to deepen it. Finally, it argues that given the interpretative and potentially transformative features of Hermeneutics, a Critical Hermeneutics of populism might be the approach providing us with the best tools to operate such distinctions. (shrink)

The paper investigates how field experimentation of genetically modified crops became central to the French controversy on genetically modified organisms in recent years. Initially constructed in the 1980s as a cognitive endeavor to be preserved from lay interference, field trials of genetically modified crops were reconceived as “an intrusion in the social space,” which had to be negotiated with actors from that space. In order to analyze this transformation, the authors suggest that it is necessary to develop an interpretive framework (...) that combines theoretical perspectives from science and technology studies and the sociology of social problems, and emphasizes the importance of the way in which actors compete in a heterogeneous public space, to put forward alternative framings of problems. The authors present a detailed analysis of the interactions and conflicts between actors in diverse social arenas in order to better understand the dynamics of this sociotechnical controversy. (shrink)

In this article, we use content and cluster analysis on a global sample of 200 social entrepreneurial organizations to develop a typology of social entrepreneuring models. This typology is based on four possible forms of capital that can be leveraged: social, economic, human, and political. Furthermore, our findings reveal that these four social entrepreneuring models are associated with distinct logics of justification that may explain different ways of organizing across organizations. This study contributes to understanding social entrepreneurship as a field (...) of practice and it describes avenues for theorizing about the different organizational approaches adopted by social entrepreneurs. (shrink)

Based on interviews with climate-change activists and NGO workers in Finland and Malawi, this article reconsiders the ways in which the coordination of identity projects and action is approached in social movement scholarship. Rather than beginning with personal and collective identities, we take our cue from recent work by Laurent Thévenot and trace actors’ forms of engagement—the various ways actors produce commonality. As we show, doing so in vastly different social contexts allows us to see permutations in such forms afforded (...) by participation in a transnational social movement and to identify patterns of collective action that we would otherwise be apt to miss. Finnish activists narrated their activities by way of engaging in the forms of the common good driving the climate movement, but coordinated various situations also through engagement in familiarity, comfort, and ease. Malawian activists and NGO employees also spoke of the common good the movements worked to achieve, but principally created common ground by engaging in shared individual choices and projects, which were jointly consecrated by fellow NGO participants. Ultimately, we argue that tracing forms of engagement enables more in-depth understanding of what is at stake when people act together in social movement organizations: moving away from collective and personal identity to patterns of engagement allows a vantage point into the processes through which commonality is created and generates new hypotheses regarding the coordination of action in social movement organizations. (shrink)

Progressing beyond the given has been a key modern tendency. Yet modern societies are currently facing the problem of how to put limits on progress, expansion, and growth, live within them, and preserve (rather than transcend) the present. Drawing on economic sociology scholarship on valuation and morality in economic life, this article develops and applies the term economization to analyze the enactment of limits on progress. The question of end-of-life care—when to stop medical efforts to prolong life, postpone death, and (...) advance the scientific frontier—serves as an illustrative empirical case that sheds light on limit-setting in general. My analysis of this case combines historical, ethnographic, and in-depth interview data on US palliative care clinicians, who specialize in making life-and-death decisions in acute care hospitals. (shrink)

An empirically sensitive formulation of the norms of transformative criticism must recognize that even public and shared standards of evaluation can be implemented in ways that unintentionally perpetuate and reproduce forms of social bias that are epistemically detrimental. Helen Longino’s theory can explain and redress such social bias by treating peer evaluations as hypotheses based on data and by requiring a kind of perspectival diversity that bears, not on the content of the community’s knowledge claims, but on the beliefs and (...) norms of the culture of the knowledge community itself. To illustrate how socializing cognition can bias evaluations, we focus on peer-review practices, with some discussion of peer-review practices in philosophy. Data include responses to surveys by editors from general philosophy journals, as well as analyses of reviews and editorial decisions for the 2007 Cognitive Science Society Conference. (shrink)

During the past decades, research on ethical, legal, and social aspects of biobanks suggested and analysed various ethically and socially justifiable frameworks for collecting, storing, and distributing human biological material and bioinformation. In this article, we identify three patterns of argument that differ in terms of shared core assumptions and similar conceptual as well as normative orientations. These discursive 'orders', which are related to specific macropolitical contexts, have significantly shaped contexts for biobank policymaking. The first order was characterised by high (...) expectations of genomics and biobanking. Second order discourse partly took over the problems located in the first order, but reintroduced them into a justificatory framework that identified biobanks as public goods per se. The third order of ELSA expertise maintained a supportive attitude towards biobanking. However, regulation based on deductive reasoning became progressively complemented by ideals of participatory mechanisms and different methodologies of studying public perceptions. We conclude that this emphasis on learning processes and deliberation helps biobank communities to develop new concepts, methods and insights that will prove helpful in order to adapt to essentially undetermined futures of transnational innovation societies. (shrink)