Pastoral Criticism, Structural Collaboration: The Role of Ecclesial Power Structures in Modernization and Economic Individualization

This article analyzes the complex processes of modernization and individualization, as well as how the church has structurally fostered individualization despite its public criticism. First, the article demonstrates how modernization and individualization have gradually restructured human self-understanding into an economic image of humanity: the human person as homo oeconomicus. Second, this article examines the church's relation to modernity, and specifically its critiques of liberalism and economic individualism. However, the church has often generated the conditions and structures for individualization, and by extension the processes of acceleration and economization of the life-world that it criticizes. Three areas in intra-ecclesial discourse that foster individualization are examined: the interiorization of faith, ecclesial centralization and clerical bureaucracy, and the promotion of corporatism and digital immediacy. The article concludes by examining recent papal efforts at structural reform and the degree to which they address previously entrenched problems and point toward a renewed, non-economic anthropology.

Economic Individualism and Job Engagement: Examining the Roles of Work Motivation and Growth Need Strength

Economic individualism—involving a belief that the individual should be in control of his/her own economic decisions and an increased emphasis on competition and achievement—is becoming more prominent in several areas of the world, but little is known about the implications of this characteristic for employee attitudes and behavior. Our study investigated the impact of economic individualism on job engagement. More specifically, the research developed and examined a model involving work motivation as a mediator and growth need strength as a moderator. Employees (N = 235, 58.3% male, 33.6% 20–29 years old, 53.2% with a bachelor’s degree) from several companies in South Korea completed survey measures of economic individualism, job engagement, work motivation, and growth need strength. Findings supported work motivation as a mediator and indicated that the indirect effect through work motivation was significant at high levels of growth need strength although not at low levels. These findings provide new insights regarding the individual-level engagement implications of economic individualism and when and why these implications hold, as prior research on economic individualism has focused on the organizational and societal levels.

Unequal values: equality and race in state of the union addresses, 1960–2018

We analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consensual and primary values of equal opportunity and political equality. References to racial inequality have been few and far between since the height of the civil rights era. By contrast, another primary value in the American political tradition—economic individualism are a major focus in these SOTUs. We trace the scant presence of equality talk in these speeches to the ambiguous scope of egalitarian goals and principles and their close tie-in with race in America. We rely on automated text analysis and systematic hand-coding of these speeches to identify broad thematic emphases as well as on close reading to interpret the patterns that these techniques reveal.

The Writing of Daily Life

This chapter argues that the growing importance of financial documentation in early modernity shaped the form and content of vernacular writing. Focusing on the diary, it traces links between journals and accounts from early Renaissance Florence through seventeenth-century England, showing how notebook culture spread in response to financial pressures. Ultimately, the extension of monetary relations in early capitalist England gave men and women new reasons to record apparently trivial details of their daily lives, which now appeared in lists of expenses, debts, and accounts. The chapter thus contributes to debates about English economic individualism and the origins of realist prose; in addition, it shows how practical documents served as a vector for transmitting financial imperatives to literary history.

The Politics of Wider Share Ownership

The question of whether ordinary people should own stocks and shares has a long political trajectory in Britain. When the idea of creating a property-owning democracy of small shareholders took shape in the interwar period, there was still a consensus among Britain’s political elites that ordinary people should stay away from the stock market. By the end of the century, however, politicians welcomed the fact that there were more private shareholders in Britain than trade union members. In the post-war decades, wider share ownership had some supporters in all major parties, but no government took legislative action because schemes were difficult to reconcile with the mixed economy. Eventually, the economic hardship of the 1970s brought a noticeable shift in attitudes towards mass participation in the stock market. Conservative politicians, journalists, and businessmen of the increasingly influential New Right advocated a return to economic individualism that was motivated by a perceived decline of allegedly middle-class, bourgeois, or ‘Victorian’ values. This ‘declinism’ shaped Thatcherite plans in opposition for a new tax code that would encourage direct involvement with capitalist enterprise. Throughout the decades, however, policymakers and advocates of wider share ownership realized that stock market investment not only lent itself to an exercise in bourgeois values of thrift and deferred gratification, but could also foster speculation and gambling. The line between prudent saving, beneficial investment, and speculative risk-taking always proved difficult to draw and crossing it demanded careful communication.

WE READ TODAY: THE PHENOMENON OF THE INTEGRATED SOCIAL BEING IN V. ZENKOVSKY’S SOFIOLOGY

The publication proposes a set of theoretical and methodological approaches to the formation of a single philosophical and religious construction: "God – man – spirituality + freedom of will – active integrity of the individual – a holistic social system – a holistic philosophical and religious system", thus analyzing the emergence of a holistic personality, as the basis for the formation of a holistic social system, V. Zenkovsky's sophiology combines the process of functioning of two systemic projects – social and divine, it includes the realization of the relationship between God and a man on the basis of spirituality and freedom of will. It should be noted that from the point of view of the chronology of V. Zenkovsky's formation of the socio-economic project of arrangement of the social existence of European civilization, it is carried out in the period of economic decline and economic chaos of postwar Europe of the early twentieth century. Until recently, the implementation of such an approach was perceived as a social utopia, but to understand the need for such a way of unification, the global catastrophe of World War II had to take place. Similarly, the Ukraine’s desire to join the European family six years ago could be considered as the utopia, so we can state the praxeological aspect of the philosopher’s prognostic ideas regarding the formation of a holistic social system. The unique project's possibilities of a single V.Zenkivsky's "economic orchestra" as a free cooperation of European nations on the harmonization principles of economic interests, personal origins and economic individualism are analyzed in the article. The attention is paid to the new holistic form foundation of economic life, which is close to the type of family sociality on the basis of initiative and creativity freedom. Conducting such an orchestra continues to be one of the main problems of the current complex of relations in the European Union, ranging from specific amounts of aid to less affluent EU member states to the Brexit situation in the United Kingdom.

Brave Minds and Hard Hands

This chapter focuses upon a small but significant subgenre of dramatic work produced in the 1590s: a set of plays, including 2 Henry VI and Jack Straw, that represented plebeian rebellion and its causes. Sketching the period’s harrowing conditions for the poor, it brings to these plays the evidence of archives concerning contemporary politics and protest. With rich historical contextualization, it traces in these dramas the sustained protests of poorer commoners, against hunger, social contempt from the elite, and the fate of infinite physical drudgery. It demonstrates the period accuracy of both Shakespeare’s language of plebeian protest, and his presentation of contemporary artisans as a dangerous class, as it tracks the widespread animus against the gentry, the indictment of ruthless economic individualism, the egalitarian thematic, and the late-century nostalgia for life before the Reformation.