The Intimate Uncertainties of Kidney Care

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-84
Author(s):  
Ciara Kierans
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
American Experience ◽  
European Healthcare ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Transplant Medicine ◽  
Healthcare Rationing ◽  
Uk National Health Service ◽  
The Uk ◽  
New Strategies

Today the social and material situations of sick bodies are increasingly and intimately bound up with the variable moral economies of national healthcare systems in uncertain and contrastive ways. I approach these ‘intimate uncertainties’ comparatively and methodologically by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on transplant medicine in Mexico in order to interrogate European healthcare, specifically the UK. The UK National Health Service is an exemplary site of moral economy, one that the Mexican case appears to stand in stark contrast to. However, as I show, the uncertainties we see at work in Mexico enable us to seek them out in the UK too, particularly those generated at the nexus of the state, failing organs and new strategies for healthcare rationing. The article traces the gendered and socioeconomic inequalities, which follow from these shifts, while offering a critique of analyses that take the European and North American experience as methodologically foundational.

Socio-Technical Systems and Knowledge Representation

2009 ◽  
pp. 558-574
Author(s):  
Ivan Launders
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Technology ◽  
Technical System ◽  
System Architectures ◽  
High Dependency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Technical Systems ◽  
Uk National Health Service ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact ◽  
System Knowledge

The UK National Health Service (NHS) provides the opportunity to undertake local socio-technical system design to help staff maximize the opportunities of using mobile technology whilst minimizing the impact of change to existing patient systems. A real-world example from a local NHS socio-technical system is considered, that contains a collection of mobile clinicians and technology which provides home care to patients. The success of the Mobile NHS service has a high dependency upon the social aspects of the solution and draws upon a combination of people, resources, technology and economic events. This chapter considers multiagent system architectures, to model social complexity, and capture system knowledge, and then outlines a prototyping technique as a means of implementing and testing the design model. It concludes that the practice of implementing a prototype ontology provides a valuable step in clarifying meaning and understanding of concepts at the outset.

scholarly journals Moral economies of the welfare state: A qualitative comparative study

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Taylor-Gooby ◽  
Bjørn Hvinden ◽  
Steffen Mau ◽  
Benjamin Leruth ◽  
Mi Ah Schoyen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Investment Policies ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Welfare State

This paper uses innovative democratic forums carried out in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom to examine people’s ideas about welfare-state priorities and future prospects. We use a moral economy framework in the context of regime differences and the move towards neo-liberalism across Europe. Broadly speaking, attitudes reflect regime differences, with distinctive emphasis on reciprocity and the value of work in Germany, inclusion and equality in Norway, and individual responsibility and the work-ethic in the UK. Neo-liberal market-centred ideas appear to have made little headway in regard to popular attitudes, except in the already liberal-leaning UK. There is also a striking assumption by UK participants that welfare is threatened externally by immigrants who take jobs from established workers and internally by the work-shy who undermine the work-ethic. A key role of the welfare state is repressive rather than enabling: to protect against threats to well-being rather than provide benefits for citizens. UK participants also anticipate major decline in state provision. In all three countries there is strong support for continuing and expanding social investment policies, but for different reasons: to enable contribution in Germany, to promote equality and mobility in Norway, and to facilitate self-responsibility in the UK.

scholarly journals The Myths and Moral Economies of Digital ID and Mobile Money in India and Myanmar

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 215
Author(s):  
Janaki Srinivasan ◽  
Elisa Oreglia
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Identification System ◽  
Mobile Money ◽  
End Of History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
The End Of History

The diffusion of major new technologies in society is often accompanied by a set of myths that tell us how these technologies will change, clearly for the better, the social and economic fabric of a community. Digital technologies are associated with myths such as the death of distance and of mediators, the end of history and of politics (Brown and Duguid 2000; Mosco 2004). We build on Mosco’s idea of myth as a force shaping discourses around the introduction of new technologies in the context of the deployment of digital artifacts such as digital ID systems and mobile money platforms in the Global South (Mosco 2004). Using the examples of the Unique Identification system (Aadhaar) in India and mobile money in Myanmar, we show how these myths persist long after technologies are in common use. We also examine how, in practice, the use of these technologies seldom aligns with the mythology surrounding them, and it is, instead the moral economy of the communities where they are deployed that mediates their use (Thompson 1971). We argue that local histories of state-making and the larger political economy of technology design can help explain the persistence of the mythology around digital technologies despite the disconnect between myths and reality.

scholarly journals ‘Our Own Poor’: Transnational charity, development gifts, and the politics of suffering in Sylhet and the UK

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATY GARDNER
Keyword(s):  
Community Engagement ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Multinational Company ◽  
Gas Field ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Large Gas Field ◽  
The Uk

AbstractBased on fieldwork in Bibiyana, northeast Bangladesh, this article compares the transnational charity offered to known individuals by migrant, UK-based families with the philanthropic efforts of the multinational company Chevron, which operate a large gas field in the neighbourhood. Applying Fassin's notion of the ‘politics of suffering’ to both types of exchange, the article argues that the two types of giving are underlain by incommensurate moral economies. While in instances of transnational charity, social inequality and the compassion felt towards the suffering of known people, or ‘our own poor’, underscore the exchanges, in the philanthropic efforts of ‘community engagement’ the inequality of giver and receiver is repressed and the exchange is animated by a moral economy. The latter is rooted in Christianity, in which compassion guides actions towards the suffering of unknown, anonymous strangers.

Children as Victims

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Fassin
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Social ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the politics of childhood in the context of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It employs the concept of “moral economy” to address the ways in which the tragedy of orphanhood became crystallized as a notion; the constellation of moral sentiments within which it has become entangled; the political debates in which orphanhood has been deployed and transformed; and the interventions that have relied on it as an orienting principle. It proposes to consider moral economies as “the production, distribution, circulation, and utilization of moral sentiments, emotions and values, norms and obligations in the social space.” Understood in this way, moral economy is constructed around social issues, such as immigration, violence, poverty—and childhood—in particular historical contexts. The chapter explores the interface between the global circulation and utilization of moral sentiments with regard to children, and their local production and distribution, as part of a larger project of a moral history of the present focused on “humanitarian reason.” The politics of childhood is particularly relevant to our understanding of humanitarianism—its aspirations and its contradictions.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Thin Economics, Thick Moralising

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-43
Author(s):  
Roland Boer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
Single Parents ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
The Uk

Locality, family, moral economy, virtuous elites, common popular customs – these are the buzzwords of what has come to be known as red toryism, which seeks to breath life into the conservative project in the UK. It valorises the local over the global, family over its discontents (gays, single parents, promiscuity), virtue over cynicism, common custom over bland commercial labels; in short, a return to the progressive, communal values of conservatism. The name most usually associated with red toryism – also known as communitarian civic conservatism – is Phillip Blond. Our brief in this paper is not a treatment of the whole red tory doctrine, but a critical examination of its economic policies and how they relate to theology, via morality.

Spaces of Consumption in American Literary Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 391-410
Author(s):  
Gary Totten
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter discusses how consumer culture affects the depiction and meaning of the natural world in the work of American realist writers. These writers illuminate the relationship between natural environments and the social expectations of consumer culture and reveal how such expectations transform natural space into what Henri Lefebvre terms “social space” implicated in the processes and power dynamics of production and consumption. The representation of nature as social space in realist works demonstrates the range of consequences such space holds for characters. Such space can both empower and oppress individuals, and rejecting or embracing it can deepen moral resolve, prompt a crisis of self, or result in one’s death. Characters’ attempts to escape social space and consumer culture also provide readers with new strategies for coping with their effects.

scholarly journals Privatizing the Commons: Protest and the Moral Economy of National Resources in Jordan

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (S29) ◽  
pp. 113-137
Author(s):  
Matthew Lacouture
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
Food Riots ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Phosphate Mines

AbstractThis article interrogates the social impact of one aspect of structural adjustment in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: privatization. In the mid-2000s, King Abdullah II privatized Jordan's minerals industry as part of the regime's accelerated neoliberal project. While many of these privatizations elicited responses ranging from general approval to ambivalence, the opaque and seemingly corrupt sale of the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company (JPMC) in 2006 was understood differently, as an illegitimate appropriation of Jordan's national resources and, by extension, an abrogation of the state's (re-) distributive obligations. Based on interviews with activists, I argue that a diverse cross-section of social movement constituencies – spanning labour and non-labour movements (and factions within and across those movements) – perceived such illegitimate privatizations as a moral violation, which, in turn, informed transgressive activist practices and discourses targeting the neoliberal state. This moral violation shaped the rise and interaction of labour and non-labour social movements in Jordan's “Arab uprisings”, peaking in 2011–2013. While Jordan's uprisings were largely demobilized after 2013, protests in 2018 and 2019 demonstrate the continued relevance of this discourse. In this way, the 2011–2013 wave of protests – and their current reverberations – differ qualitatively from Jordan's earlier wave of “food riots” in 1989 (and throughout the 1990s), which I characterize as primarily restorative in nature.

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