A Critical Evaluation of the Commodification Thesis

2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Market Exchange ◽  
Capitalist Production ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Advanced Economies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Structural Shifts

A recurring theme across the social sciences is that non-capitalist production is disappearing albeit slowly and unevenly, and is being replaced by a commodified economy in which goods and services are produced by capitalist firms for a profit under conditions of market exchange. In this paper, however, I evaluate critically this commodification thesis. Even in the heartland of commoditisation – the advanced economies. Large economic spaces are identified where alternative economic relations and motives prevail. Rather than view them as leftovers of pre-capitalist formations, this paper argues that they are the result of both the contradictions inherent in the structural shifts associated with the pursuit of commodification as well as the existence of ‘cultures of resistance’, As such, they are viewed as ‘spaces of hope’ which highlight the demonstrable construction and practice of alternative social relations and logic's of work outside profit-motivated market-oriented exchange.

A Critical Evaluation of the Commodification Thesis

2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Market Exchange ◽  
Capitalist Production ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Advanced Economies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Structural Shifts

A recurring theme across the social sciences is that non-capitalist production is disappearing, albeit slowly and unevenly, and is being replaced by a commodified economy in which goods and services are produced by capitalist firms for a profit under conditions of market exchange. In this paper, however, I evaluate critically this commodification thesis. Even in the heartland of commoditisation – the advanced economies – large economic spaces are identified where alternative economic relations and motives prevail. Rather than view them as leftovers of pre-capitalist formations, this paper argues that they are the result of both the contradictions inherent in the structural shifts associated with the pursuit of commodification as well as the existence of ‘cultures of resistance’. As such, they are viewed as ‘spaces of hope’ which highlight the demonstrable construction and practice of alternative social relations and logic's of work outside profit-motivated market-orientated exchange.

scholarly journals PROCLAMATIONS AS A SOURCE OF HETMANATE’S CITY LAW OF THE SECOND HALF OF XVII – XVIII CENTURIES

2019 ◽  
pp. 7-13
Author(s):  
O. Y. Vovk
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Municipal Government ◽  
City Government ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right

The article contains a historical and legal analysis of proclamations as a cumulative source of Hetmanate’s city law of the second half of 17th – 18th centuries, and their characteristic by origin and purpose. It was established that Hetmanate (a state official name was – Zaporizhian Host) was under the rule of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during this period with all the lands and cities, and then as a part of the Russian monarchy. It is studied that in the field of municipal government, public relations in Ukrainian cities were governed by the norms of urban law, including the provisions of local proclamations (locations) of the autonomous government ofHetmanate, which should be divided into separate specific groups. The most significant of them were those that confirmed the granting of the right to self-government of the Magdeburg sample to Ukrainian cities. The proclamations of Ukrainian hetmans of a defensive, prohibited or protective nature, which were granted to the cities of Hetmanate since the reign of B. Khmelnytskyi and including K. Rozumovskyi, protected the rights of urban communities from abuse bythe local administration and representatives of other classes. The cities were given the right to leave a significant part of the income to the city government bodies and burghers by Hetman permitting proclamations. The electoral proclamations of hetmans to certain individuals controlled the order of elections in cities and prevented abuse duringtheir conduct. The regulation proclamations, issued to the cities by hetmans and colonels, clarified the social and economic power ofmagistrates or town halls and established the economic relations of the urban inhabitants. A separate group of local proclamations consisted of those relating to the proper economic activity of urban craft workshops anddefended the social rights of burghers-artisans. It is proved that the norms of proclamations of all groups provided legal regulationof social relations in the sphere of municipal government of Left-Bank Ukraine primarily till the first city reform in Ukrainian citiesconducted by Russian Empire and the introduction of the Charter to Cities of 1785.

Sociality, Spirituality, and Meaning Making: Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study

2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Cacioppo ◽  
Louise C. Hawkley ◽  
Edith M. Rickett ◽  
Christopher M. Masi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health Aging

Scientific theories in the natural sciences posit invisible forces operating with measurable effects on physical bodies, but the scientific study of invisible forces acting on human bodies has made limited progress. The topics of sociality, spirituality, and meaning making are cases in point. The authors discuss some of the possible reasons for this as well as contemporary developments in the social sciences and neurosciences that may make such study possible and productive.

‘Payments for Ecosystem Services’ and Property: The Expansion of Exclusionary Land Management Practices in Costa Rica

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Brett Sylvester Matulis
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Land Management ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Payments For Ecosystem Services ◽  
Private Ownership ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ownership Rights

The practice of making “payments for ecosystem services” (PES) is about the formation of new social relations between land managers and the human beneficiaries of functioning ecological systems. More specifically, it is about establishing economic relations that (theoretically) transfer financial resources from “users” of services to “producers” who institute prescribed land management practices. Interpreted as a form of “neoliberal conservation”, this approach to environmental governance can be seen as a driving force in the commodification, marketization, and financialization of nature. Hinging on “clearly defined and enforced” property rights, it can also be seen as a factor in the expansion of individualized private ownership. Troubled by this renewed prospect of privatization, critical scholars have done well to challenge the new enclosures of land and resources. But what about when PES operates in areas where private ownership rights are robust and widespread? Are we to believe that the tendency towards privatization poses no threat because those areas are already “lost” to private ownership? This paper considers how the social relationships that constitute property are shifting under the prescribed management practices of PES. I present evidence from Costa Rica's national PES program to suggest that, even on lands that are ostensibly already privately owned, these new practices are resulting in an expansion of exclusionary management. The objective is to demonstrate some of the reasons why financialized approaches to conservation are a problem in “already neoliberal” economies and to offer some conceptual tools for challenging the uncritical assumption that PES is harmless in areas where private ownership is already well established.

scholarly journals Notes from a field: A qualitative exploration of human-animal relations in a volunteer shepherding project

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Adams ◽  
James Ormrod ◽  
Sarah Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Animal Interaction ◽  
Qualitative Exploration

There is a burgeoning interest in human–animal relations across the social sciences and humanities, accompanied by an acceptance that nonhuman animals are active participants in countless social relations, worthy of serious and considered empirical exploration. This article, the first of its kind as far as the authors are aware, reports on an ongoing qualitative exploration of an example of contemporary human–animal interaction on the fringes of a British city: volunteer shepherding (‘lookering’). Participants are part of a conservation grazing scheme, a growing phenomenon in recent years that relies on increasingly popular volunteer programmes. The primary volunteer role in such schemes is to spend time outdoors checking the welfare of livestock. The first section of the article summarises developments in more-than-human and multispecies research methodologies, and how the challenges of exploring the non- and more-than-human in particular are being addressed. In the second section, we frame our own approach to a human–animal relation against this emerging literature and detail the practicalities of the methods we used. The third section details some of our findings specifically in terms of what was derived from the peculiarities of our method. A final discussion offers a reflection on some of the methodological and ethical implications of our research, in terms of the question of who benefits and how from this specific instance of human–animal relations, and for the development of methods attuned to human–animal and multispecies relations more generally.

scholarly journals ATMOSPHERE IN WORKPLACE MIRROR OF SOCIETY

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Kristína Králiková ◽  
◽  
Jozef Králik ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Management Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Management Functions

The current atmosphere ruling in the society,the quality of created and contemporary relations among people are in principle simultaneously relatively faitfully projected into the relations inside the family, into the collective. Its approximate reflection is present, therefore, in the living working collective. Deformed social relations are deforming, what is clear, also the environment of economic relations. The atmosphere in the working place is immediately influencing the movement of social relations, from the atmosphere unreeled from the state of the society.However, the most dangerous for the society and its existence is the creation of such a situation and the social atmosphere that are directly determined and channeled by non legal and unrightful practices of concret individuals and groups which are typical for the so called social underworld.It is unavoidably necessary also to proceed to the revision of documents concerning the attained education in the interest of the optimal run of the state and its economics that are shoved by managers in all grades and levels of the state and its public administration management. Such a procedure in the private sector should be activated in the facultative base. It would be necessary to eliminate and to remove - on the basis of the exactly achieve results - from management processes and influence such persons that are not shoving the achieved declared education by the trustworthy way. It will be also necessary to analyze their justification and ways of their selection into the management functions together with the determination of the concrete personal responsibility for the contingent unstandard way in the selection process. After the moral and material social damages counting up it will be inevitably necessary to require the compensation from persons and institutions that caused the mentioned damagers.Means accumulated in such a way will be able to use for the development of public estates.

The Social Psychology of Property: Looking Beyond Market Exchange

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 367-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Nadler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Market Exchange ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Individual

Our social norms and moral values shape our beliefs about the propriety of different types of market exchanges. This review considers social and moral influences on beliefs about property and the consequences of these beliefs for the legal regulation of property. The focus is mainly on empirical evidence from social psychology, with additions from related areas like cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and other social sciences. After briefly reviewing empirical findings on perceptions of property at the level of the individual person, I examine how social relationships shape perceptions about ownership and exchange of property, as well as the boundaries of the broad category of property. Finally, I explore one important type of socially embedded property—the home—and how social psychological conceptions of property as embedded in social relationships have clashed with the development of the legal doctrine of eminent domain.

scholarly journals ‘I like to go out to be energised by different people’: an exploratory analysis of mobility and wellbeing in later life

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 758-781 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRIEDERIKE ZIEGLER ◽  
TIM SCHWANEN
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Older People ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Later Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

ABSTRACTThis paper adds to the growing number of studies about mobility and wellbeing in later life. It proposes a broader understanding of mobility than movement through physical space. Drawing on the ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences, we conceptualise mobility as the overcoming of any type of distance between a here and a there, which can be situated in physical, electronic, social, psychological or other kinds of space. Using qualitative data from 128 older people in County Durham, England, we suggest that mobility and wellbeing influence each other in many different ways. Our analysis extends previous research in various ways. First, it shows that mobility of the self – a mental disposition of openness and willingness to connect with the world – is a crucial driver of the relation between mobility and wellbeing. Second, while loss of mobility as physical movement can and often does affect older people's sense of wellbeing adversely, this is not necessarily so; other mobilities can at least to some extent compensate for the loss of mobility in physical space. Finally, wellbeing is also enhanced through mobility as movement in physical space because the latter enables independence or subjectively experienced autonomy, as well as inter-dependence in the sense of relatively equal and reciprocal social relations with other people.

Scientific Method in Social Studies

Philosophy ◽  
1945 ◽  
Vol 20 (75) ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
A. D. Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Short Answer ◽  
The Social

There is a short answer to the question, whether scientific method can be applied to the study of the social relations of men, or, whether social sciences are possible; it is that these sciences exist and are in fact among the most ancient. Their success has perhaps been less startling than that of the physical sciences and they have perhaps been pursued with less enthusiasm. But there are reasons for this inherent in the nature of the social sciences, as I shall try to show.

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