Herman Dooyeweerd ( 1985 ) argued that among the modalities making up the fabric of reality a specifically economic one is to be found. The aim of the present paper is to discuss the texture of such a modality and how it both differentiates and intertwines with others. For an updated brief, albeit cogent and analytically lucid presentation of the Law Framework ontology, see Clouser ( 2009 ). Dooyeweerd’s view entails that the proper object of economics is irreducible to (...) that of other disciplines, but a non-reductionist view of the object of economics presupposes that the nuclear meaning of that discipline has been clearly delimited: this is required in order to determine its nature and separate identity as a scientific discipline. By ‘the nuclear meaning of a discipline’ I understand a pre-theoretical delimitation of its field of research, such as that of the field of physics, characterized by the laws governing force and energy. Within one and the same field there may be many theories, theories competing to explain the same phenomena, or dealing with phenomena so different that it is nearly impossible to trace conceptual connections among them. This last situation calls for a unified-field theory. In the second section of this paper I will attempt to defend a rather commonly accepted definition of the field of economics that sees this discipline as a science of choice. In the third I will show how the analytical conception it involves can be naturally complemented with a classificatory one. According to a classificatory conception, the aggregated social-level phenomena, patterns and regularities economic theories usually deal with, are economic in that sense, even though they are not prima facie cases of individual behavior, or are unintended consequences of aggregated individual choices. In the fourth I will discuss the meaning of the most general, supra-arbitrary economic laws—the modal laws of economics. In the final section I will offer a non-reductionist view of economics that nevertheless takes into account its intertwining with other spheres. (shrink)

The idea that our economic institutions should be designed meritocratically is back as a hot topic in western academic circles. At the same time political meritocracy is once again a subject of philosophical discussion, with some Western philosophers embracing epistocracy and Confucianism being revived among Eastern philosophers. This survey has the ambition, first, of putting differing strands of this literature into dialogue with each other: the economic with the political, and the Western with the Eastern. Second, we seek (...) here to impose order on the debates over meritocracy by carefully separating out the four steps that must be traversed on the journey to a meritocratic conclusion. Third we want to promote a more productive debate moving forward by cleanly pulling apart three kinds of purported merit base. (shrink)

This article makes a contribution to debates in recognition theory by expanding the taxonomy of (mis-)recognition in the economic sphere. It argues that doing justice to the variety of ways in which recognition is engaged in economic relationships requires: (1) taking into consideration not just the recognition principle of esteem, but also (various aspects of) need and respect; (2) distinguishing a productive from a consumptive dimension with regards to each principle of recognition (need, esteem and respect); and (...) (3) identifying the specific economic relationship at stake (e.g. between consumers and producers, or between employers and employees). In this way, we can account for the diversity of demands for recognition made in the economic sphere, explain what underpins them, and bring structure into these diverse phenomena. What is more, this expanded taxonomy is a useful tool for social pathology theorists, who should appreciate the full range of variants of misrecognition when diagnosing pathologies of misrecognition in the economic sphere. (shrink)

In the article, the problem of formation of innovation potential of the labor motivation of employees of the social production economic sphere, determining their innovative activity is studied. The importance of positive work motivation of employees increases dramatically in terms of the Fourth industrial revolution. It is connected with the formation in the social production sphere of the sixth technological structure and innovative economy of the 21st century. The author justifies the problem decision of innovative potential formation (...) of labor motivation on the basis of complex application of the principles of the study of social philosophy, sociology, social anthropology and social psychology. The principles of system analysis based on the dialectics of the objective and subjective sides of social activity in the system of social production are applied as well. According to the author opinion, work motivation is a system of dialectically interrelated internal and external motives of human activities that forms the personal conscious program of action, which should lead to the satisfaction of vital needs. In accordance with the hierarchy of needs by A. Maslow, the need for self-actualization is crucial in the system of needs of the socialized individual. In the process of realization of this need, the formation of innovative potential of motivational activity takes place and transformation of the comprehending human homo sapiens into producing human - homo faber. Studying the formation process of labor motivation of socialized individuals in the main historical stages of development of social production: Antiquity, the middle ages, and industrial civilization, the author concludes that the origins of the innovative component of motivation are in Ancient Greece. It is the characteristic only of the free labor of free people aimed at maximum realization of their natural potential in their activities in order to achieve success not only for themselves, but also for the good and prosperity of their cities-policies. However, innovation potential of labor motivation of socialized individuals became fully realized only at the stage of post-industrial development of the technogenic civilization. With the beginning of the Fourth industrial revolution, when science becomes a direct productive force, the demand for innovators that together form the human capital of the innovation economy dramatically increases. Social value of this capital is determined by the innovative component of labor motivation of employees of all spheres of social production. The priority in the formation of motivation should belong to the state and implemented through the combined efforts of government, business and civil society on the basis of balance of rights and obligations of all actors of the labor market. (shrink)

Spheres of Global Justice analyzes six of the most important and controversial spheres of global justice, each concerning a specific global social good. These spheres are democratic participation, migrations, cultural minorities, economic justice, social justice, and intergenerational justice. Together they constitute two constellations dealt with, in this collection of essays by leading scholars, in two different volumes: Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy and Fair Distribution. These essays illustrate each of the spheres, delving into their differences, commonalities, collisions and interconnections. (...) Unlike many writings on global justice, Spheres of Global Justice does not content itself with describing the painful and advantageous effects of the globalization process as being inches per secondo facto a global injustice or a just global order. Rather, this multidisciplinary collection of essays, from a pluralist inspiration, combines empirical analysis with theoretical approaches and ethical principles, paying close attention to two aspects of the effects of the globalization process. These aspects are the causal relationships that lead to such effects and the kinds of obligations, or of normative relationships between global rights and correlative duties, that applies to each specific individual case. This volume illustrates how diverse global obligations are, and how they can be, grounded in diverse relationships (identity, ability to provide help, causal responsibility, past injustices, protection of agency and promotion of independence, et cetera). These essays also demonstrate that an ethical global approach has not only international or transnational, but also domestic, local and interpersonal dimensions. (shrink)

This contribution draws attention to the circulation of materialities and persons as a central feature in the constitution of experimental cultures. The protein and ribosome research at the Max Planck Society (MPG)—with a main focus on the research conducted by Brigitte Wittmann‐Liebold at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics—serves as an example to highlight some of the central conditions that determined the material circulation in molecular biology: the very organizational framework of gender and economics. In doing so, this contribution (...) argues for a historical narrative that stresses the conditions facilitating the circulation of technologies, materials, and personnel. Histories of this kind contribute to an integrated view of the scientific, technological, social, political, economic, and cultural specificities of experimental cultures. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 355-372, September 2022.

The future of labour appears as one of the crucial themes of the sociological and economic reflections. Sociologists and economists proclaim a shrinking scope of labour and, consequently, a certain elitism of jobs. In their opinion, professional work will be a privilege for those who are more skilled and better educated, and those who are able to face the challenges of the rapid technological progress. This will be causing an unknown future of the reality of both common unemployment and (...) enforced idleness, and, consequently, a deep social transformation. Questions related to human labour from the very beginning are an important field of involvement for the ecumenical movement. Theologians and churchmen of different Christian confessions, while striving for unity, put the stress on the common reflection and activity in order to counteract poverty and unemployment. An example is a biblical economics developed in the ecumenical movement, an attempt to apply both some specific biblical economic ideas and biblical general model of economic relations to the contemporary economic systems, to make them more just and more ecological. This article presents the most important elements of the biblical economics and considers their relevance for the sphere of human labour in the perspective of the oncoming crisis. Research methods encompass analysis of the presentations developed within the World Council of Churches as well as some sociological diagnosis concerning professional and wage work. (shrink)

The article gives a definition of the technical and economic potential of the application of the deforming broaching process. Research of the consequences of introducing deforming broaching into technological processes at manufacturing enterprises is carried out on the basis of application of system resource and matrix approach. On the basis of the performed researches, a methodological basis for the economic evaluation of the results of applying deforming broaching on the pro-duction has been developed. The article has improved the (...) well-known scientific and methodological foundations for the determination of technical and economic results of the application of deforming broaching due to the complex identifica-tion of production-organizational decisions - in technical and forms of evaluation in economic spheres. The developed approach gives an opportunity to more accu-rately assess the economic effect of introducing deforming broaching on the min-ing, metallurgical and machine building industries. It can be used to assess the economic effect of introducing other process parts processing. (shrink)

Economics has long been the ‘dismal science’. The crisis in classical political economy at the end of the nineteenth century produced radically differing intellectual responses: Marx’s reconstitution of value theory on the basis of his dialectical method, the marginalists’ development of subjective value theory, and the historical school’s advocacy of inductive and historical reasoning. It is against this background that economics was established as a discrete academic discipline, consciously modelling itself on maths and physics and developing its focus on theorising (...) exchange. This entailed extraordinary reductionism, with humans regarded as rational, self-interested actors, and class, society, history and ‘the social’ being excised from economic analysis. On the basis of this narrowing of its concerns, particularly from the 1980s onwards, economics has sought to expand its sphere of influence through a form of imperialism which seeks to apply mainstream economic approaches to other social sciences and sees economics as ‘the universal grammar of social science’. The implications of this shift are discussed in Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis’s two volumes, where they analyse the fate of the social, the political and the historical in economic thought, and assess the future for an inter-disciplinary critique of economic reason. (shrink)

This article revisits the "harmony doctrine" school of economics and its distinctive understanding of how ethics and economics intersect. Harmony doctrine thinkers staked out a “natural” understanding of economic phenomena that in many ways fused the classical political economy of Adam Smith with the earlier French Physiocratic School. Their metaphysically grounded interpretation was largely eclipsed by the developments of utilitarian and marginalist schools by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet harmony doctrine thinking adhered to a distinct understanding of (...) how ethical processes and outcomes play out within the economic sphere that has to date gone under examined by business ethicists. This paper outlines three characteristics of harmony doctrine views: the belief in curative forces empowered to "heal" the economic order, a dichotomous interpretation of the economic realm that distinguishes the “natural” from the “artificial,” and an overarching belief in a harmonious social order actualized by cooperative interdependencies within economic enterprises. Despite falling into obscurity in the economic discipline, all these ideas found new life in intellectual currents of organizational and political thought at the turn of the twentieth century. After surveying these historical developments, this article concludes by demonstrating how harmony doctrine thinking helpfully illuminates persisting metaphysical dimensions of contemporary business ethics. (shrink)

The contemporary proliferation of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” seems to render obsolete the notion of a public sphere in the singular. In my article, I would like to argue against this view: Following Jürgen Habermas, “the public sphere” can be understood as the concomitant horizon of communicative action, while the latter permeates society as a whole. On the basis of this socio-philosophical approach, the omnipresent tendencies toward fragmentation appear as reactive attempts to ward off this socially established (...) and context-transcending context of discussion. Habermas himself, however, has never adopted this perspective. Instead, he interprets the various symptoms of the decline of the public sphere—including its fragmentation—as the result of a “colonization of the lifeworld” by economic, bureaucratic, and technological system logics. However, on the basis of the concept of “systematically distorted communication,” which was still crucial for Habermas’s early work, it is possible to reconstruct how the lifeworld context of communicative action, out of which the public sphere emerges, is not only corroded and cut through from the outside by system logics but also exhibits its own dialectic of the refusal of discourse and the overcoming of this refusal. The fragmentation of the public sphere that we are confronted with today can be theoretically interpreted and politically addressed as a precarious standstill of this dialectic. (shrink)

As is well understood, the values inherent in the dominant neoclassical economic paradigm are self- interest and optimisation. These are the values that guide individuals and policymakers in advanced capitalist economies in their economic decision making. As a consequence, the economics discipline, arguably, is insufficiently oriented to helping people and organisations make wise choices, choices about what is really and truly in people's best interests. In other words, there is strong reason to believe that economics has a wisdom (...) deficit. This paper draws on great philosophers such as Aristotle to explain what wisdom is and why, although economics is concerned with the normative aspect of decision making, economics has too infrequently been used to help people or their societies make wise decisions. This paper is also concerned with how a society's economic decision-making processes can be improved in order that these processes incorporate a much greater dose of wisdom. One relevant question here is: can we learn with the help of philosophers, psychologists and organisation researchers how to make economic decisions that apply the practical wisdom that Aristotle advocated? This paper's overall purpose is first to point the way toward greater decision-making wisdom, and second to propose one method for improving the wisdom of important economic-related decision making. Hopefully, this paper will serve to put the issue of decision-making wisdom higher on the agenda of economists and, as a consequence, lead to wiser decisions in the economic sphere, thereby reducing the wisdom deficit. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the essence of economic security in the Internet environment, to identify and analyze statistical data on this issue. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time a comparison with foreign practice is made. As a result, some places that require improvement in this area are identified, the essence and understanding of new terms are revealed, and the principle of neural networks is explained. This work (...) is devoted to the problem of the spread of economic crime associated with the use of new technologies. In view of the development of the innovative sphere, the emergence of new technologies, there are also new threats to economic security. The article examines the history of cybercrime in the economic sphere, the basic principles of economic security from the side of new technologies, and provides current statistics on economic crimes from the point of view of the loss of information security by economic entities. Recommendations for reducing the level of economic crime in the information environment are formulated. (shrink)

L'économie solidaire est dépendante de la sphère publique au sens d'espace de communication. Il est en effet nécessaire d'avoir des échanges démocratiques dans ce type de relation sociale, car la solidarité implique que soient pris en compte tous les points de vue, et en particulier celui des populations démunies avec leur participation. L'économie libérale est le contraire : seul le point de vue de la rentabilité à travers la « main invisible du marché » est pris en compte et pas (...) les autres. En conséquences, l'économie solidaire implique que l'espace public s'étende du politique à l'économique.The civil solidarity-based economy depends on the public sphere for its role as a sphere of communication. Democratic exchanges are necessary in this type of social relation because solidarity implies that all viewpoints should be heard particularly those of disadvantaged population groups. The liberal economy is the opposite of this as only the “profitability” viewpoint and the “invisible hand of market forces” are taken into account and all others ignored. Consequently, the civil and solidarity-based economy means that the public sphere is extended from the political to the economic sphere. (shrink)

Attempts to reach an understanding of how to live a Christian life in the contemporary context have never been more necessary. This is the aim of the International Symposium: Beyond Secular Faith, an annual conference held in Granada, Spain. This volume represents the fruits of over seven years of scholarship. The title Beyond Secular Faith suggests we are interested in (re)discovering and reflectively elaborating ways to overcome the limits imposed by the dominant contemporary culture. We are convinced that only a (...) faith liberated from the conceptual restrictions and reductions (put forward by secular philosophy and theology) and centered radically on Christ can flourish in the dimension that is proper to faith; that is, in all spheres of human life. Featuring contributions from internationally recognized philosophers and theologians such as Tracey Rowland, Jarosław Jagiello, Rocco Buttiglione, Alison Milbank, Massimo Borghesi, John Milbank, and others, we will explore a diversity of questions from this common perspective: the light of revelation illuminates how Christians should live in the modern world, leading to a new beginning. (shrink)

Economic environmental valuation remains a much debated and contested issue. Concerns have been voiced that it is unable to capture the manifold immaterial values of ecosystems due to conceptual and methodological issues. Thus, additional value categories (social values) as well as novel valuation approaches like deliberative (monetary) valuation are areas of growing interest, yet the theoretical foundations are rather weak. Against this background, this article aims to develop a consistent conceptual framework for making sense of social values in (...) class='Hi'>economic environmental valuation. Based on a holistic view of society and individuals, the role of institutions, the social environment, culture and transcendental values is emphasised. To synthesise diverging concepts of value into an economic concept and to account for the multidimensionality of social values, the framework consists of three spheres: social, natural and contextual. The novel framework demonstrates that social values may be integrated into a preference-based utility framework when denoting a holistic understanding of social preferences and human embeddedness in nature and society. (shrink)

Abstract Today’s scholarship and policymaking on business and human rights (BHR) urges businesses to better understand their human rights responsibilities and remedy them, when and if abuses do occur. Despite the public discourse about businesses and human rights, the state—as the main duty bearer in international human rights law—plays a fundamental role as the protector and enforcer of human rights obligations. Yet, the existing literature overlooks state involvement as perpetrators of abuse in the corporate context. We develop the term _economic (...) complicity_ to shed light on the state’s role in directly or indirectly abusing human rights within a corporation’s sphere of influence, such as police violence toward nonviolent protesters or granting environmental licenses without adhering to legally required community consultations. We ask: What contributes to the state’s engagement in economic complicity in corporate human rights abuses? We assess hypotheses emergent from the democratic change and development studies literatures with a unique database that includes economic complicity data from Latin America, the Corporations and Human Rights Database (CHRD). This research has important theoretical implications for the business ethics and BHR literatures, as understanding economic complicity highlights the need for business actors to avoid shirking their moral responsibilities to not only ‘do no harm’ but also to protect human rights when they are threatened by the state. (shrink)

It is no longer a revelation that companies have some responsibility to uphold human rights. However, delineating the boundaries of the relationship between business and human rights is more vexed. What is it that we are asking corporations to assume responsibility for and how far does that responsibility extend? This article focuses on the extent to which economic, social and cultural rights fall within a corporation's sphere of responsibility. It then analyses how corporations may be held accountable for (...) violations of such rights. Specifically, the article considers the use of soft law as a protective mechanism; it also details how victims of harmful corporate behaviour are using litigation (pursuant to ATCA and common law domestic causes of action) to seek redress and recognition of the harms they have directly or indirectly experienced. The article concludes with an analysis of Professor Ruggie's (the United Nations Special Representative on the issue of transnational corporations and human rights) 2008 and 2009 Reports in which it is suggested that a respect-based framework must be interpreted as imposing proactive requirements on companies to prevent the infringement of human rights. Future efforts must also be directed towards the recognition of a specialised complementary corporate responsibility to protect human rights. (shrink)

First published in 2005, Economics and Social Interaction is a fresh attempt to overcome the traditional inability of economics to deal with interpersonal phenomena that occur within the sphere of markets and productive organizations. It makes use of traditional economic concepts for understanding interpersonal events, while venturing beyond those concepts to give a better account of personalised interactions. In contrast to other books, Economics and Social Interaction offers the reader a rigorous effort at extending economic analysis to (...) a difficult field in a consistent manner, sensitive to insights from other behavioural and social sciences. This collection represents an important contribution to a growing research agenda in the social sciences. (shrink)

In tort law, including Lithuanian tort law, damage usually is divided into two types: pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage. The concept of non-pecuniary damage has recently become a focus of attention of Lithuanian legal researchers. However, it has to be noted that the issues related to the concept of pecuniary damage remain scarcely analysed. As a result, the unique type of pecuniary damage, i.e. the damage of purely economic character, has received no attention whatsoever in Lithuanian tort law. It is (...) usually believed that the defence of the values of purely material character fall into the sphere of contractual law, while tort law is not concerned with the protection of these values. However, in the course of the development of social relations it has become apparent that in the present-day society personal financial losses have become equally important to the cases of actual damage to a person or a property. On the other hand, the fear to overextend the limits of tort law and, thus, limit the persons’ freedom to act, coupled with the different nature of the values protected by tort law provide grounds for the position that relatively abstract financial interests and absolute values or relative personal values should be protected in different ways. Referring to the doctrine and practice of foreign countries as well as the results of the analysis of Lithuanian positive law and court practices, in this article we aim at giving an answer to the question of where and how the ambit of protection under the tort law in the cases of damage of purely economic character should be defined. (shrink)

This anthology provides an in-depth analysis and discusses the issues surrounding nudging and its use in legislation, regulation, and policy making more generally. The 17 essays in this anthology provide startling insights into the multifaceted debate surrounding the use of nudges in European Law and Economics. Nudging is a tool aimed at altering people's behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any option or significantly changing economic incentives. It can be used to help people make better decisions to influence (...) human behaviour without forcing them because they can opt out. Its use has sparked lively debates in academia as well as in the public sphere. This book explores who decides which behaviour is desired. It looks at whether or not the state has sufficient information for debiasing, and if there are clear-cut boundaries between paternalism, manipulation and indoctrination. The first part of this anthology discusses the foundations of nudging theory and the problems associated, as well as outlining possible solutions to the problems raised. The second part is devoted to the wide scope of applications of nudges from contract law, tax law and health claim regulations, among others. This volume is a result of the flourishing annual Law and Economics Conference held at the law faculty of the University of Lucerne. The conferences have been instrumental in establishing a strong and ever-growing Law and Economics movement in Europe, providing unique insights in the challenges faced by Law and Economics when applied in European legal traditions. (shrink)

The Encyclical-Letter Caritas in Ventate by Pope Benedict XVI suggests to advance towards a new conceptualization of the tenuous relationship between economics and ethics, proposing a "new humanistic synthesis" Where social encyclicals have traditionally justified policy proposals by natural law and theological reasoning alone, Caritas in Ventate gives great relevance to economic arguments. The encyclical defines the framework for a new business ethics which appreciates allocative and distributive efficiency, and thus both markets and institutions as improving the human condition, (...) but locates their source and reason outside the economic sphere. It places a clear accent on the ontological connectedness of the economic and ethical dimensions of human action. It is the proper ordering of means towards the end of integral human development that allows mankind to leave a vicious circle of consumerism and enter a virtuous circle that applies the creativity fostered by markets. This vision implies a new model of business management that integrates considerations of vocation, purpose, and values at a theological level. (shrink)

In this article, I propose four considerations that might frame a history of economic consciousness from the pre-modern oikonomia to the modern economy. Before the economy dominated attention in the public sphere, economic consciousness was pre-discursive. Only once economic concerns were being dealt with, discursive practices were possible. Thus economic practices, for most parts of human history, have been considered a condition rather than a locus of culture. As soon as economic affairs enter the (...) discursive sphere, they cause problems of trust and nourish a culture of suspicion. This is manifest specifically in the pre-eminence of ad-hominem arguments. Modern economic knowledge results from a set of strategies that avoid, rather than deal with, this mistrust. This is apparent from the tendency of economic knowledge to be formal. The notion of the economy as an anonymous social structure emerges from this intellectual avoidance. The problem of the ideology of economic knowledge is less that of hidden interests but that economists cannot assume social responsibility without losing their face as scientists and indeed reinforce the culture of mistrust inherent in modern economic discourse. (shrink)

In recent years, the long-standing questions of why, how, and which farm families continue farming in the face of ongoing changes have increasingly been studied through the resilience lens. While this body of work is providing updated and novel insights, two limitations, a focus on macro-level challenges faced by the farm operation and a mismatch between the scale of challenges and resilience measures, likely limit our understanding of the factors at play. We use the example of medical economic vulnerability, (...) a micro-level challenge traditionally confined to the household sphere of the agri-family system, as a way to call attention to these limitations. Focusing on United States farm households, we assess: To what extent are they experiencing medical economic vulnerability when using objective and subjective outcome measures? Which demographic and farm characteristics are associated with experiencing medical economic vulnerability? What is the association between institutional arrangements and medical economic vulnerability? Our analysis of over 900 surveys coupled with a conceptual framework merging complementary insights from three bodies of literature revealed seemingly large differences in the prevalence of medical economic vulnerability across the objective and subjective measures with the subjective measure indicating a general sentiment of medical economic vulnerability in a majority of respondents. Conversely, limited variations were noted in who experiences medical vulnerability on the basis of demographic and farm characteristics, with stronger associations being connected to the households’ health insurance arrangements. We conclude with three implications of our findings for the farm resilience literature. (shrink)

It is, I think, interesting to compare the views of E. F. Schumacher and J. M. Keynes on the ethical aspects of economics – both the economic systems of which they were a part and economics as a subject. Both agreed that economics (as commonly understood and taught) applied to only a limited sphere of life. They agreed about the role of profits, the market and the love of money. And they both believed that there was much more (...) to life than getting and spending. For Keynes, economic activity was the means to bring society to a position where the good life could be enjoyed. Schumacher was even more ambitious: he thought economic activity should be made part of the good life. (shrink)

The Buddha's teachings give us more than just ethical guidelines for a virtuous life. His teachings offer a grand insight into the nature of reality. Given the twofold meaning of the term Dhamma , it follows that an economics inspired by the Dhamma would be both attuned to the grand sphere of causes and conditions and, at the same time, guided by the specific ethical teachings based on natural reality. In other words, Buddhist economists would not only consider the (...) ethical values of economic activity, but also strive to understand reality and direct economic activity to be in harmony with "the way things are.". (shrink)

This paper examines the debate over the relationship between the public sphere and communication, which has become a focus of attention after the publication of Jürgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of Public Sphere in English in 1989, following the two volumes of his The Theory of Communicative Action in 1984 and 1987. Although the historical account of the public sphere has also received a good deal of attention, I deal mainly with the normative dimension of Habermas's theory as (...) it led to a rethinking and reassessment of public broadcasting, to the end of restructuring it as a site where 'citizens act as a public'. That is to say, a site where people assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions on matters of general interest without constraint in an age of deregulated communications. Several scholars have provided us with maps for re-organizing the media of communications in this respect, but they have failed to analyze the 'information' which feeds the 'informed citizen'. This paper addresses not only what information means today—whether it is a digit, a signal, or content—but also how it is produced within daily routine practices and how the nature of the means of its dissemination influences its character. Another serious aspect of those assessments, including that of Habermas, is the global character of communications today. Habermas is well aware of the mismatch between the global market and the absence of its corollary in politics. Yet his silence in the economics of information, even as he acknowledges the digitalization of communications and 'a world public sphere', also calls for a critical account of the relations between 'information', democratic politics and the question of scale. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

This article explores the question of how to understand social media following the Habermasian theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere. We argue for a return to political-economic fundamentals as the basis for analysing the public sphere and seek to establish a characteristic connection between digital-behavioural control and singularised audiences in the context of proprietary markets. In the digital constellation, it is less a matter of immobilising the citizen as a consumer but rather of their (...) political activation – albeit in conditions under which commercial interests have primacy: privatisation without privatism. (shrink)

The quest for a decent political order in many societies is imperative today because of the heterogeneous nature of our social existence and the complexity of our ever increasing socio-economic and political experiences. Since the public sphere is a domain of freedom exemplified by dialogical engagements, the outcome of such encounter must involve the intelligible thoughts of all discussants with the sole aim of dealing with the concerns and commanding the commitment of all to the decisions reached. In (...) this study, it is argued that Deweyan democracy as an alternative theory of rational inquiry is relevant for engaging the present sordid condition of many Africans democratic practice and policy outcomes. As a rational procedure, it is averred that John Dewey’s emphasis on epistemic properties of democratic discourse makes the proceduralist account of democracy superfluous and exposes the weakness of the content of democratic discourse in political actions and decisions. The study also contend that given the consensual state of Dewey’s epistemic thought, Jürgen Habermas theory rather than expanding the space of epistemic democracy stifled it because of his insistence on the force of a better argument in the resolution of conflicting concerns of dialoguers. The study therefore, argues for Dewey’s democracy as an alternative mode of political order since it does not undermine the views of the citizens but gives room for the activation a certain set of attitude that can challenge prevailing opinions and accepts the views that do not embrace conventional wisdom—a procedure that is necessary for the growth and development of our democratic space. (shrink)

The main claim of the study is that technocratic public administration based on knowledge as a key element of power, significantly affects the idea of what is objective and what is objectivity. I explore how scientific objectivity as part of a scientific ethos has been evolving on the example of economic knowledge. A key institutional feature of economic knowledge is that it includes in fact two relatively autonomous epistemic cultures: academic one, connected to the production of knowledge in (...) academia and expert-administrative one developing in public and corporate governance systems. The peculiarity of knowledge demanded and functioning in public administration is instrumentality (a possibility to be transformed into technology) and an exeptional focus on quantification. As a result ‘governing by number’ becomes a key social technology and at the same time numbers seem to embody objectivity. I show that economic knowledge in public administration involves an inevitable and deepening ontological gap with ‘objective reality’. The state needs not true but effective knowledge: the task of administrating does not presuppose a realistic representation of the administrated object, but rather seeks to simplify it, to plan it, or even to construct. Thus, unlike scientific knowledge, the objectivity of knowledge in administrative practices has almost nothing to do with the object (in sense of truthfulness, representation). Meanwhile, ongoing need for academic economic knowledge to be used into the state administration and its further development in a fundamentally alien sphere leads to a significant deformation of scientific ethos, which is a crucial regulatory element in the scientific knowledge production. Erosion affects both aspects of objectivity as an ontological principle and as an ‘epistemic virtue’. Against this background, objectivity as an ‘epistemic virtue’ has been transformed into the ‘technique of distancing’ and the principle of technical impersonality, which imply eventually the replacement of the ‘knowledge self’ by a technical system. (shrink)

In recent years, economic life has become increasingly politicized: now, every company has a ‘philosophy’, promising its customers some ethical surplus in return for buying their products; consumers shop for change; workers engage in individualized forms of employee activism such as whistleblowing; and governments contribute to the re-configuration of the economic sphere as a site of political contestation by reminding corporate and private economic actors of their duty to ‘do their bit’. The Politics of Economic (...) Life addresses this trend by exploring the ways in which practices of consumption, work, production, and entrepreneurship are imbued with political strategy and ideology, and assesses the potentials and perils of the politicization of economic activity for democracy in the 21st century. (shrink)

This dissertation offers a historically sensitive, analytical account of the usage of economic reasoning in the emergence of the contemporary concept of justice. Using the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Rawls as textual foci, the dissertation examines the way the practice of economic exchange has been understood as the site of asymmetric power relations and the way social inquiry into the economic sphere has been used to expose and criticize forms of (...) domination. The model of political economy that I uncover is quintessentially moral, rooted in social practices, and geared towards the unmasking of hidden forms of power relations. (shrink)

The explanation of everything by economic causes alone is never exhaustive in any sense whatsoever, in any sphere of cultural phenomena, not even in the economic sphere itself. Max Weber, “Objectivity”in Social Science and Social Policy (1904).

From a socio-theoretical and media-theoretical perspective, this article analyses exemplary practices and structural characteristics of contemporary digital political campaigning to illustrate a transformation of the public sphere through the platform economy. The article first examines Cambridge Analytica and reconstructs its operational procedure, which, far from involving exceptionally new digital campaign practices, turns out to be quite standard. It then evaluates the role of Facebook as an enabling ‘affective infrastructure’, technologically orchestrating processes of political opinion-formation. Of special concern are various (...) tactics of ‘feedback propaganda’ and algorithmic-based user engagement that reflect, at a more theoretical level, the merging of surveillance-capitalist commercialization with a cybernetic logic of communication. The article proposes that this techno-economic dynamic reflects a continuation of the structural transformation of the public sphere. What Jürgen Habermas had analysed in terms of an economic fabrication of the public sphere in the 1960s is now advancing in a more radical form, and on a more programmatic basis, through the algorithmic architecture of social media. As the authors argue, this process will eventually lead to a new form of ‘infrastructural power’. (shrink)

The development of mankind and its concrete manifestations in technical, economic or other spheres is always determined by contradictions, uncertainty and the emergence of non-standard circumstances. At the beginning of the third millennium the world is characterized by acceleration of economic dynamics and complication of the mega environment, which requires mastering the realities of the present and the future. Exactly this problem that necessitates the definition of the Concept and priorities of the direction of socio-economic policy in (...) Ukraine and conducting further research in the field of developing the application framework for their implementation. Definition and development of the paradigm of socio-economic development of Ukraine in the XXI century will create an opportunity to reveal socio-economic and human potential. (shrink)

Human life in contemporary society is extremely complex and there are various external factors that directly affect the realization in the individual ends. In this work I analyze the effects of the global market economy, manifested by a mode of production and distribution of goods and services in the form of a global network of economic relations, which involve people, transnational corporations and political and social institutions in moral sphere of people, affecting their choices and the realization of (...) these choices. Individual freedom can be understand as a freedom to realize our choices in the environment of a global economic market, but it is still problematic in the sense that the choices of goods and services available in this market do not reflect individual choices, but a set of preferences standardized according to the market itself. In this paper I will reflect about the individual freedom in economic globalization pointing from the debate between Pettit and Berlin that social freedom advocated by Republican Petit can be satisfactory for a start. (shrink)

This thought-provoking book discusses the concept of progress in economics and investigates whether any advance has been made in its different spheres of research. The authors look back at the history, successes and failures of their respective fields and thoroughly examine the notion of progress from an epistemological and methodological perspective. The idea of progress is particularly significant as the authors regard it as an essentially contested concept which can be defined in many ways – theoretically or empirically; locally or (...) globally; or as encouraging or impeding the existence of other research traditions. The authors discuss the idea that for progress to make any sense there must be an accumulation of knowledge built up over time rather than the replacement of ideas by each successive generation. Accordingly, they are not concerned with estimating the price of progress, reminiscing in the past, or assessing what has been lost. Instead they apply the complex mechanisms and machinery of the discipline to sub-fields such as normative economics, monetary economics, trade and location theory, Austrian economics and classical economics to critically assess whether progress has been made in these areas of research. -/- Bringing together authoritative and wide-ranging contributions by leading scholars, this book will challenge and engage those interested in philosophy, economic methodology and the history of economic thought. It will also appeal to economists in general who are interested in the advancement of their profession. (shrink)

This work presents a thorough examination of librarianship and the social and economic contexts in which the profession and its institutions operate.

Countering claims of its impossibility, this paper argues for economic theology as an intelligible figure of contemporary political rationality and organization, and a distinctive analytical strategy in relation to forms of liberal and neoliberal governmentality and the contemporary management of social life. As an analytical strategy, it has two arms: an institutional one, drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work on the pastorate; and a conceptual one, following from Giorgio Agamben on oikonomia, order and providence. Economic theology was the arcana (...) of 20th-century debates on both political theology and governmentality and a condition for their emergence. It formed the horizon of Carl Schmitt’s intervention of a political theology in response to Max Weber, and, as the pastorate, it was for Foucault the historical background of the emergence of the liberal arts of government. While appearing as a new paradigm, it thus has a measure of priority over our more established ones. Furthermore, to the extent that economic theology comes to occupy the place of political rationality in contemporary liberal-democratic societies, the political becomes less a rational public sphere and more a form of public liturgy. (shrink)

Effectiveness of implementation of any educational innovations can not be complete without considering their cost, expense, return and so on. In the modern pedagogical discourse issue concerning those processes is covered by the concept of economic of education. As for the economic aspects of education informatization it mainly refers to the introduction of efficiency in the educational sphere of computer technology, information and multimedia technologies, software and more. In the article the substantive examination review of forming and (...) development of economy of education in a globalizing world is proposed. (shrink)

The efficiency argument for profit maximization says that corporations and their managers should maximize profits because this is the course of action that will lead to an ‘economically efficient’ or ‘welfare maximizing’ outcome. In this paper, I argue that the fundamental problem with this argument is not that markets in the real world are less than perfect, but rather that the argument does not properly acknowledge the personal sphere. Morality allows each of us a sphere in which we (...) are free to pursue our personal interests, even if these are not optimal from the social point of view. But the efficiency argument does not come to terms with this feature of social life. (shrink)

The debate over the existence of a “public sphere” in China’s Late Qing/Early Republican era began nearly three decades ago, but it has yet to generate a special socio-cultural review on the “Confucian social imaginary” of the Chinese people. The article builds on existing “economic-political approach” and “idea-communication approach” to argue decisive factors hindering the development of a Habermasian “public sphere.” These includes (1) people’s traditional-collectivist lifestyle, (2) lack of understanding of “universal equality,” (3) conservative self-positioning during (...) social transition, (4) regionalist attitude toward outsiders, (5) lack of access to Enlightenment ideas, (6) disregard for parliamentary systems, and (7) ignorance of the rule of law. (shrink)

Insurance claims fraud receives increasing attention in the insurance industry, in academic studies and in public policy spheres. Claims fraud is variously viewed as an economic-contractual problem, a moral-psychological problem, a moral-sociological problem or a criminal problem. This article discusses these theoretical perspectives on insurance claims fraud and reviews the empirical evidence on its nature and prevalence. Most research concludes that opportunistic soft fraud is more prevalent than planned criminal fraud, and that consumer ethics, attitudes and psychology are important (...) aspects of the insurance fraud problem. On the contrary, much of the policy focus on reducing fraud has been directed toward detecting and criminalizing fraud. In light of existing research, care must be taken in applying these approaches to address soft fraud. Greater focus on the social and psychological dimensions of insurance claims fraud may increase the success of soft fraud prevention and decrease the likelihood that the focus on fraud will impair insurance relationships. Improving such prevention efforts requires a better understanding of the various dimensions of fraud, the determinants of fraud behaviors and the relationship between fraud behavior and the institutional setting. (shrink)

Christian economic theology is distinguished from Christian social ethics by its methodological reflection on the emergence, formation, and proper boundaries of the economic sphere, as well as transcendental reflection on the conditions of possibility of economic science. In practice, this often amounts to anxiety about the authority of Christianity in the economic sphere, as well as about the extent to which Christianity can be held responsible for the system of impersonal economic domination known (...) as capitalism. This review essay draws upon three recent works on or about Christian economic theology, and argues that this genre's anxiety about Christian authority manifests in the ways that it draws temporal boundaries between ancient, medieval, and modern economies. Ultimately, its ambivalence about economy itself is traceable to Aristotle's understanding of money as containing two natures, one defined by quality (use value) and the other by quantity (exchange value). Christianity here becomes a cipher for quality. (shrink)

The article reveals the essential features and conditions of the long-term process of development of competitive innovation economy - knowledge economy on the example of Ukraine, where the dialogue of late postmodernism and early post-industrialism create special regional conditions. The article characterizes education as not just a form of social consciousness and practice, but as a social and cultural engine and simultaneously marker of civilization development level; considers higher education system from the point of view of society request to form (...) specialists of high qualification level and as a result powerful factor of regional economic growth; offers the directions of Ukraine higher education reforming, which still has signs of late postmodernism. The authors of this article have proved that the synergy of the economic and educational-scientific spheres is capable of changing the global laws of society's existence and returning the course of history to a truly humanistic, technological and divinely attentive course. The development of innovative activities, the introduction of new technologies, which in the long term to overcome the negative trends, primarily related to the need for structural reform of the educational sector in Ukraine and other regions, which are attractors of world change. In particular, cardinal changes require higher education as the most important resource potential that determines the direction of sustainable economic development. (shrink)

I here distinguish dissensual from consensual corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the grounds that the former is more concerned to organize (or portray) corporate-civil society disagreement than it is corporate-civil society agreement. In doing so, I first conceive of consensual CSR, and identify a positive and negative view thereof. Second, I conceive of dissensual CSR, and suggest that it can be actualized through the construction of dissent enabling, rather than consent-oriented, public spheres. Following this, I describe four actor-centred institutional theories—i.e. (...) a sociological, ethical, transformative and economic perspective, respectively—and suggest that an economic perspective is generally well suited to explaining CSR activities at the organizational level. Accordingly, I then use the economic perspective to analyse a dissent enabling public sphere that Shell has constructed, and within which Greenpeace participated. In particular, I explain Shell’s employment of dissensual CSR in terms of their core business interests; and identify some potential implications thereof for Shell, Greenpeace, and society more generally. In concluding, I highlight a number of ways in which the present paper can inform future research on business and society interactions. (shrink)

The paper presents, in the synthetic way, the issue of the rationality of the tax system and taxation principles in relation to the clearly visible fiscal crisis in the 21st century caused by, among others, COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis which is theoretical (descriptive, comparative) was carried out by using tools indicated in the area of New Institutional Economics (NIE). Attention was devoted primarily to the importance of specific institutional arrangements, broadly understood as the “rules of the game” applicable in the (...) political and economic spheres, and related to the problems of public finances. Research has shown that the appropriate design of tax rules may contribute, to some extent, to limiting the fiscal crisis. Tax policy, and even more broadly, fiscal policy, may determine the formula in which the economic achievements regarding compliance with tax principles and fiscal rules can be implemented. What is primarily important is the legal framework (one of the most important formal institutions) within which state policy in the field of public finances should be implemented. (shrink)

The conception of man as an economic animal is implied by the view that economic production is the determining “factor” or “sphere” of man or society. Against this conception can be put another, that of man as praxis. This takes account of man as a creative being, capable of realizing his freedom through his own activity. In this article the theory of the determining role of the “economic factor”, and the theory of factors in general have (...) been examined. The economic interpretation of history, a variant of the theory of factors, has been acknowledged as partly true for the self-alienated man and society, but the theory of factors in any variant has been found inadequate as a general theory of man, or society. The possibility of freedom cannot be reduced to the fact that the determining roles played by “factors”, vary, or to the hope that the economic “factor” can be subordinated to a “better” one. Man's freedom consists in his resolving the conflict of “factors”, and in realizing himself as an integral creative being, no longer split into independent and mutually opposed spheres. (shrink)