scholarly journals Moral economies of consumption

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Multilevel Perspective ◽  
Post Purchase

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to bring together debates about enduring normative concerns surrounding the morality of consumption with more recent concerns about the ways specific moralities are constituted in and through markets. The second aim is to develop the concept of ‘moral economy’ and call for an approach to its study, attentive to how moralities of consumption develop through interactions between instituted systems of provision, forms of state regulation, customs within communities and the everyday reflections of consumers about the things that matter to them. As consumers are increasingly asked to factor environmental and fair labour concerns into their purchase and post-purchase habits, there is a real need to understand how moralities of consumption are both formatted through institutional frameworks and shaped everyday by actors from within. After developing a framework for the study of moral economies, this article explores in depth the experiences of one couple in relation to the cessation of a cardboard recycling collection in Shropshire (England) to show why a multilevel perspective is needed to appreciate the place of morality within the market.

scholarly journals Fairtrade, place and moral economy: Between abstract ethical discourse and the moral experience of Northern Cape farmers

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 572-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl McEwan ◽  
Alex Hughes ◽  
David Bek
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Agricultural Cooperative ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Northern Cape ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Universal Codes ◽  
Moral Discourses

This paper explores the significance of the relationships and disjunctures between the global moral discourses of Fairtrade that are articulated through ethics of fairness in supply chains and the everyday moral experiences, discourses and practices of producers that shape moral economies in specific localities. Due to increased governance through universal codes, standards and certification, Fairtrade risks becoming an abstract ethical and regulatory tool, disconnected from the moral economies of those poor farmers it is intended to benefit. In response, the paper makes a case for a deeper understanding of the moral economies of farmers involved in Fairtrade networks and the ways in which these emerge out of moral experiences that are deeply embedded in local social and cultural relations. Through a case study of Eksteenskuil Agricultural Cooperative in South Africa’s Northern Cape, it seeks to demonstrate the importance of understanding the moral experiences of producers to better consider what is at stake for them, focusing on notions of cooperation, fairness and the ‘good farmer’, perceptions of community, and concerns with survival and self-sufficiency. The paper concludes that working in culturally-sensitive ways with producer communities and understanding how their local moral worlds are structured is vital in bridging the gap between abstract ethical discourses and the place-based moral experiences of producers, and to ensuring the effectiveness of Fairtrade initiatives.

Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitra Kofti
Keyword(s):  
Employment Status ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Conveyor Belt ◽  
Flexible Production ◽  
Flexible Work ◽  
Production Site ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Moral Frameworks

In this article I discuss some of the theoretical implications of adopting moral economy as an approach to analysing new forms of flexible production and work. Despite a growing interest in the anthropology of precarity and work, the linkages between political and moral economies have been relatively neglected. By discussing E.P. Thompson’s approach to moral economy as well as ways moral economy has been discussed in anthropology, the article argues it is a timely and encompassing approach for the study of flexible work and precarity, as well as compliance and resistance to inequality. A nexus of diverse moral frameworks of value converge at the production site and back home, contributing to the reproduction of precarity and capital under flexible forms of accumulation. The article suggests that moral economy may offer an encompassing approach to studying individual ideas and practices and their relation with collective moral frameworks and confinements and to exploring change and change potential. It draws from an ethnography based on long-term fieldwork in a privatized factory in Bulgaria, in the context of radical economic transformations and privatization projects. It scrutinizes solidarities, tensions and inequalities developed around the conveyor belt, with a particular focus on gender and employment status inequalities and their intertwinement with managerial and household practices.

Transnational moral economies: The value of monetary and social remittances in transnational families

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 760-777 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia D Solari
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
State Building ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Migrant Children ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Social Remittances ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Building Project

Although migration scholars have called for studying both ends of migration, few studies have empirically done so. In this article the author analyzes ethnographic data conducted with migrant careworkers in Italy, many undocumented, and their non-migrant children in Ukraine to uncover the meanings they assign to monetary and also social remittances defined as the transfer of ideas, behaviors, and values between sending and receiving countries. The author argues that migrants and non-migrant children within transnational families produce a transnational moral economy or a set of social norms based on a shared migration discourse – in this case, either poverty or European aspirations – which governs economic and social practices in both sending and receiving sites. The author found that these contrasting transnational moral economies resulted in the production of ‘Soviet’ versus ‘capitalist’ subjectivities with consequences for migrant practices of integration in Italy, consumption practices for migrants and their non-migrant children, and for Ukraine’s nation-state building project.

scholarly journals The Moral Economy of Thrift: The Production of the Indebted Self in the Reality Series Getting out of Debt and Life or Debt

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 485-500
Author(s):  
Silke Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Tv Show

In this article, the intersection of the economic and social dimensions of thrift is analysed under the special condition of debt. The debt context serves as a focal glass exposing agents, their social practices and strategies of accumulation capitals with regard to appropriate spending. In order to capture the many layers of thrift, the concept of moral economies is applied. This concept tries to reconcile two seemingly divergent dimensions of human behaviour which can be described as individualistic, calculating and serving a self-interest (economy) on the one hand and community-oriented and benefitting a common good (morality) on the other hand. Starting out with an overview over studies on moral economies in historical and social science since the early 1970s, I will explain the heuristic use of the concept for the case of debts research and apply it to representations of thrift as visualised and popularised in the reality TV shows Raus aus den Schulden (Getting Out of Debt) and Life or Debt. Here, the images of homes are clues for the cultural productions of appropriateness on TV: What are suitable ways of living when in debt? What are adequate scenes of dwelling and narratives of dealing with debts and which normative structures regulate those stories, the perception of the self and potential social exclusion? By examining the TV show as a strong voice in the debt discourse, thrift turns out to be a cornerstone in the internal and external regimes of governing debt in the micropolitics of TV.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 158-164
Author(s):  
Marie Muschalek
Keyword(s):  
Southern Africa ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Community Or ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Everyday

This concluding chapter offers some reflections on the nature of everyday violence in colonial Africa. Coming from multiple cultural groups, the African and German men of the Landespolizei shared a host of moral codes that can best be subsumed under the heading of honor. This study reveals significant similarities between policemen from Europe and those from Southern Africa. Out of the Landespolizei's distinctive racial and social composition unfolded a dynamic that made the police decidedly efficacious. Instead of a grand narrative of quantified violence, the chapter draws out the lives of people getting by, living with violence in the everyday. It tries to uncover how the dynamics of violence were inscribed into a moral economy of the accepted and normal. The chapter concludes that violence is not necessarily antithetical to community or social order. Indeed, it can be constructive. The daily brutality of modern colonialism was a horrific injustice. But it was also a way of life with its own rules and regularities.

scholarly journals Between Product and Cuisine: The Moral Economies of Food among Young Chinese People in Japan

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-399
Author(s):  
Jamie Coates
Keyword(s):  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Political Relationship ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Security Concerns

Trade and consumption of food in the Sino-Japanese context connects the two countries’ tense political relationship to the everyday lives of its citizens. Previous research has shown how food-related incidents have imbued Sino-Japanese relations with political and moral discourse that connects security concerns to everyday fears. This article explores how young Chinese people in Japan navigate multiple moral economies related to food. Through analysis of “products” ( chanpin/shipin) and “cuisine” ( cai/liaoli), this article shows the differing meanings of Chinese moral economies of food from the perspective of young Chinese people living in Japan. In the Sino-Japanese context, products embody more metonymic and nationalised values associated with modernity, whereas the metaphoric possibilities of cuisine afford young Chinese people to negotiate dominant moral economies of food in Japan. Using this example, I argue that greater semiotic attention needs to be paid to the multiple meanings of food and its moral economies.

scholarly journals ‘People are willing to fight to the end’. Romanticising the ‘moral’ in moral economies of irrigation

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-217
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Development Policy ◽  
Rural Economy ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Irrigation Development ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Emic Perspective ◽  
Moral Discourses

This article is about the continued salience of a particular understanding of moral economy in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the fact that a significant body of anthropological theory argues against simplified binaries of market and moral economies, such binaries persist. These either romanticise or vilify moral economies and exist in both policy and academic contexts. Thus, moral economies are said to drive corruption or shape anti-market cultural stances. Meanwhile, a romantic fantasy of a non-capitalist rural economy oriented by morality rather than economic rationality continues to animate areas of development policy and to direct funding. My argument is not with the concept of moral economy itself, but with how it is marshalled in support of both romantic and sometimes negatively essentialised conceptions of people and places. The article sets out the case for the persistence of these ideas, focusing on their application to irrigation development and the problems with this. I then use an example from southern Malawi to illustrate how moral ideas of fairness and reciprocity interplay with processes of differentiation in access to (and exclusion from) land and labour and influence how people manage scarce resources. Whilst there are moral discourses and a mutual embeddedness of the moral and economic, these reflect a range of ethically informed positions which are influenced by social position and power. However, this emic perspective is largely absent from the more romanticised models. I conclude by reflecting on the politics of their persistence.

Moral economies of exclusion: politics of fear through antagonistic anonymity

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Søren Mosgaard Andreasen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Extreme Right ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Politics Of Fear

This article examines the discourse-technical means through which illiberal political logics are legitimised in constructions of xenophobic populism by a ‘prominent’ Norwegian extreme-right organisation, Human Rights Service (HRS). I argue that recent HRS publications featuring six secretly shot photos of Muslims in the Norwegian public sphere engender a moral economy of exclusion in which Muslims consistently are produced as an anonymous yet ubiquitously present threat to liberal democratic and human rights values. Within this framework, micro-humiliating performances against the ‘Muslim other’ are constituted and encouraged as a necessary, morally justified defence of democratic virtues to ensure the existence of a vulnerable majority self. I claim that the HRS circulation of constructions of faceless, yet easily recognisable, categories of designated ‘enemy others’ as a threat to the liberal democratic ethos can ultimately be understood as a hegemonic intervention to push anti-Muslim illiberalism from the fringes towards the dominant cultural outlook. <disp-quote>He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. <attrib>(<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="CIT0034">Nietzsche, 1989[1886]</xref>: 157)</attrib></disp-quote>

scholarly journals Imagined, Real and Moral Economies

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
The Real ◽  
Moral Economies

This article explores three different inflections of the idea of economy: imagined, real and moral. Each offers a distinctive way of thinking about economies and each raises the possibility of providing critical purchase on the formations of ’actually existing capitalisms’. The article begins from the idea of imagined economies given the proliferation of such imaginaries, not least in the wake of the fi-nancial crisis. In political, public and policy discourse, economies have become the focus of intense fantasy and projection. The resulting imaginaries underpin a range of economic, public and social policies. Importantly, they articulate a foundational distinction between economic and other sorts of policy. The idea of imag-ined economies opens the space for a certain type of critical engagement with contemporary political economy. In a rather different way, ideas of the ’real economy’ have also been the site of critical work - distinguishing between ’real’ relations and practices involved in the production of material objects (and value) in the contrast with virtual, digital, financialised economies. This article treats the ‘real economy’ as one further instance of an imagined economy. Like the concept of the ’real economy’, E.P. Thompson’s exploration of a ’moral economy’ also offers a standpoint from which critical analysis of the current economic, political and social disintegrations might be constructed. Thompson’s articulation of a moment in which collective understandings of economies as fields of moral relationships and obligations dramatises the contemporary de-socialization of economies, even if it may be harder to imagine twentieth and twenty first century capitalisms as moral economies that the current crisis has disrupted. Again, the article treats ’moral economies’ as another form of imagined economy, in part to make visible the shifting and contested character of what counts as ’economic’.

“In this Increasing Commercial Emporium”

2020 ◽  
pp. 198-268
Author(s):  
Nancy Christie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
French Canadians ◽  
Internal Circulation ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Illicit Trade ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Manufactured Goods

From the perspective of governing elites on both sides of the Atlantic, the expanding world of goods was seen as a civilizing and assimilative process, but using an analysis of litigation this chapter shows that while enticing French Canadians into the marketplace did integrate them into global networks of trade and credit, they nevertheless sought to don British dress and purchase British manufactured goods to articulate and enhance their own identities. Not only does this chapter shift the historical gaze from production to consumption, but it greatly expands the term merchants beyond those large overseas merchants who have been well studied, to incorporate the vital world of licit and illicit trade by shopkeepers, artisans, women, and peasants, to draw attention to the importance to the internal circulation of goods. My exploration of the regulatory apparatus of government as well as the everyday understanding of goods, credit, and debt shows, however, that the eighteenth century was not a pivot to modernity; rather, conceptions of the marketplace remained tied to an older moral economy outlook.

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