scholarly journals The Political Economy of Economic Conservatism in India: From Moral Economy to Pro-business Nationalism

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-247
Author(s):  
Adnan Naseemullah
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Agricultural Transformation ◽  
National Wealth ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Issue Space

Economic conservatism in India today is associated with the BJP’s embrace of markets and competition. This article argues that conservatism within the nationalist movement was founded on rejecting both the market and the planned economy, embracing instead ‘moral economy’ principles of economic life guided by social norms, and development founded on small-scale craft production. After independence, conservative nationalists, while acknowledging the need to enhance state power through industrial growth, protected the moral economies of craft-based and agrarian production. But as the Congress party fractured, farmers’ movements asserted interests in market-based agricultural transformation and liberalization shifted the issue space of economic debate, new pro-business conservatives presented a new vision based on enhancing national wealth and strength through capitalist enterprise.

Moral Economy Redux: Social Protests in Turkey After the 2001 Economic Crisis

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurtuluş Gemici
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Ground Level ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Social Protests ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Production Relations ◽  
The Government

This article examines social protests following the collapse of an IMF-backed anti-inflation program in Turkey by people who lacked the associational bases to voice their political claims. Based on the pattern of protests following a similar economic crisis, one would expect protests by organized labor against the government. Yet it was largely shopkeepers and artisans who took to the streets in response to the 2001 crisis. I argue that the Turkish shopkeepers' ground-level understandings of economic processes—their moral economy—were at the origins of these protests. Furthermore, I demonstrate that organized labor's failure to mobilize resulted from the decline of associational capacity and strength of trade unions. The investigation of the Turkish shopkeeper protests shows that where capitalist production relations and a market economy threaten institutions of livelihood, moral economies can be the determining factor of a particular group's mobilization to contest rules and relations governing economic life.

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.

Economic Elites’ Attitudes Toward Meritocracy in Chile: A Moral Economy Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (9) ◽  
pp. 1219-1241
Author(s):  
Jorge Atria ◽  
Juan Castillo ◽  
Luis Maldonado ◽  
Simón Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
National Development ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
High Turnover ◽  
Redistributive Policies ◽  
Economic Elite ◽  
Distribution Of Resources ◽  
Economic Elites ◽  
High Level

We analyze economic elites’ perceptions and beliefs about meritocracy from a moral economy perspective. A moral economy perspective considers how norms and beliefs structure socioeconomic practices through the constitution and expression of what is considered acceptable, proper, and legitimate. Our study explores how economic elites make sense of the roles of talent and effort in the distribution of resources and how they reconcile the idea of meritocracy within a rigid social order. The site of our study is Chile, a country with fluid mobility between low and middle classes, but with high and persistent disparities and strong barriers to elite positions. We conducted 44 semistructured interviews with shareholders, board members, and high-level executives of large or high-turnover companies in three major Chilean cities. We find that the economic elite strongly support meritocracy but explain access to top positions based on talent rather than effort. The economic elite define talent in terms of business and leadership skills. They attribute upward mobility in the private sector to meritocratic practice. At the same time, they view the public sector as the epitome of nonmeritocratic practices, incompetence, and inefficiency. They profess empathy with the poor, but they reject redistributive policies. The economic elite believe in the primacy of competition in economic life and the necessity of continual economic growth, and thus, they understand meritocracy as both the means to survive in a market economy and a responsible approach to lead national development.

Roman Seas

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Leidwanger
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Landscape Studies ◽  
Single Well ◽  
Multiple Structures ◽  
Archaeological Analysis

This book offers an archaeological analysis of maritime economy and connectivity in the Roman east. That seafaring was fundamental to prosperity under Rome is beyond doubt, but a tendency to view the grandest long-distance movements among major cities against a background noise of small-scale, short-haul activity has tended to flatten the finer and varied contours of maritime interaction and coastal life into a featureless blue Mediterranean. Drawing together maritime landscape studies and network analysis, this work takes a bottom-up view of the diverse socioeconomic conditions and seafaring logistics that generated multiple structures and scales of interaction. The material record of shipwrecks and ports along a vital corridor from the southeast Aegean across the northeast Mediterranean provides a case study of regional exchange and communication based on routine sails between simple coastal facilities. Rather than a single well-integrated and persistent Mediterranean network, multiple discrete and evolving regional and interregional systems emerge. This analysis sheds light on the cadence of economic life along the coast, the development of market institutions, and the regional continuities that underpinned integration—despite certain interregional disintegration—into Late Antiquity. Through this model of seaborne interaction, the study advances a new approach to the synthesis of shipwreck and other maritime archaeological and historical economic data, as well as a path through the stark dichotomies that inform most paradigms of Roman connectivity and trade.

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.

scholarly journals Between Conflicting Systems

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Matthew Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Economic Life ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Business As Usual

‘Business as usual’ in contemporary Albania takes place between different and conflicting systems of meaning and value. Drawing from ethnographic material collected in Tirana, Albania, this article examines the complexities of social and economic life in a city where distinct moral economies routinely clash with the capitalist principle of profit. Starting from the ethnographic impulse to learn how two local booksellers made sense of the contradictory systems of meaning operating in their everyday lives, the analysis shows how a grinding of discordant value systems produced the more general paradox of an ‘ordinary tragedy’.

A depletion of ammonia and water by storms in the deep atmosphere of Jupiter

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristan Guillot ◽  
David J Stevenson ◽  
Scott J Bolton ◽  
Cheng Li ◽  
Sushil K Atreya ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Liquid Phase ◽  
Giant Planet ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Ammonia Vapor ◽  
Equatorial Zone ◽  
Water Ice ◽  
Deep Interior ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Temperature Liquid ◽  
Strong Depletion

<p>Microwave observations by the Juno spacecraft have shown that, contrary to expectations, the concentration of ammonia is still variable down to pressures of tens of bars in Jupiter. While mid-latitudes show a strong depletion, the equatorial zone of Jupiter has an abundance of ammonia that is high and nearly uniform with depth. In parallel, Juno determined that the Equatorial Zone is peculiar for its absence of lightning, which is otherwise prevalent most everywhere else on the planet. We show that a model accounting for the presence of small-scale convection and water storms originating in Jupiter’s deep atmosphere accounts for the observations. At mid-latitudes, where thunderstorms powered by water condensation are present, ice particles may be lofted high in the atmosphere, in particular into a region located at pressures between 1.1 and 1.5 bar and temperatures between 173K and 188K, where ammonia vapor can dissolve into water ice to form a low-temperature liquid phase containing about 1/3 ammonia and 2/3 water. We estimate that, following the process creating hailstorms on Earth, this liquid phase enhances the growth of hail-like particles that we call ‘mushballs’. Their growth and fall over many scale heights can effectively deplete ammonia, and consequently, water to great depths in Jupiter’s atmosphere. In the Equatorial Zone, the absence of thunderstorms shows that this process is not occurring, implying that small-scale convection can maintain a near homogeneity of this region. We predict that water, which sinks along with ammonia, should also be depleted down to pressures of tens of bars. Except during storms, Jupiter's deep atmosphere should be stabilized by the mean molecular weight gradient created by the increase in abundance of ammonia and water with depth.  This new vision of the mechanisms at play, which are both deep and latitude-dependent, has consequences for our understanding of Jupiter’s deep interior and of giant-planet atmospheres in general.</p>

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