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- Convenors:
-
Stefan Leins
(University of Konstanz)
Chelsie Yount (University of Leiden)
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- Discussant:
-
Caitlin Zaloom
(New York University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 0G/024
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to reconsider the relationship between morality and economy in contemporary capitalism. Examining how crises transform economic moralities and their future-oriented narratives, we explore how these processes impact global inequalities.
Long Abstract:
If seminal works on "moral economy" defined the concept in opposition to the (a/immoral) market economy, more recent anthropological research has focused on the ways moral orders shape all forms of economic practice. Examinations of moral logics that underpin even the most neoliberal capitalist systems have revealed economic moralities to be multiple and contested, debated in unfolding interaction in businesses and families alike. Embedded in value-laden stories, discussions, pledges, and reports are claims about how resources "ought" to be used and distributed, and how they might circulate. Economic moralities move money. Their prescriptive terms make claims on future economic relations, shaping how social actors evaluate potential economic futures, whether in household planning, financial investments, or supply chain management.
For this panel, we invite papers that empirically deal with the economy/morality-nexus, asking how practices of speculation are carried out in moral-economic terms. We particularly look for contributions that focus on the ways that moments of crisis transform economic moralities and their future-oriented narratives, considering how these processes impact inequalities and the redistribution of wealth. Beyond that, we invite papers that address questions of how moral values are applied, ignored, negotiated, and transformed in economic settings more broadly. Our aim is to use these contributions to reconsider the relationship between morality and economy in the context of current financialized capitalism, to consider how social actors draw on moral values in efforts to shape economic futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Can citizenship be sold? How is selling it morally legitimised? This paper looks into Cypriot society’s reckoning with selling their passport, between a nationhood-charged lexicon moralising citizenship and a (more popular) crisis-laden discourse emptying citizenship out of any ethical content.
Paper long abstract:
Offshoring morality: Russian elites, Cypriot passports, and a banking crisis
Can citizenship be sold? Was there not supposed to be an inalienable moral underbelly to it? Or is claiming an ethical underpinning in one’s relation to the state a mythos of modernity? The conflation of a morality-charged positionality and economic transaction is palpable in the contemporary surge in citizenship by investment programmes. Through such programmes, rich people can literally walk into a political community by buying the passport of the country in which they invest.
This paper looks into one society’s reckoning with selling their passport to foreigners (specifically, rich Russians). This reckoning oscillates between a nationhood-charged lexicon moralising citizenship and a (more popular) crisis-laden discourse absolving society of a moral responsibility towards their own passport. I do this in the context of the small EU country of Cyprus, a post-colonial, post-conflict, and post-crisis society, where I pursued fieldwork in 2019, one year before its successful citizenship by investment programme was terminated, amidst a global scandal (and six years after its banking system collapsed).
I argue that golden passports are the continuation of offshoring by other means. Presenting an ethnographic portraiture of those enabling Russians to acquire the Cypriot passport, as well as how the Russophone community takes shape locally in Cyprus, the paper shows how it is ideas and historical practices of offshoring that can morally legitimise the practice of selling citizenship.
Paper short abstract:
Finding oil has been described by US hydrocarbon financiers and ‘oil men’ alike as “the greatest” pursuit of value. In this paper, I explore how they ethically and financially value energy by drawing on ethnographic field research that I have conducted in Houston, Texas, since late-2018.
Paper long abstract:
Finding oil has been described by US hydrocarbon financiers and ‘oil men’ alike as “the greatest” pursuit of value. As both a future-oriented financial desire and moral ambition, finding oil is revered as the fulcrum on which the industry (and some say the world) turns. The moral value of oil exploration and production (E&P) involves a tangle of entrepreneurial prowess and ‘wildcatter’ settler-frontier notions of ‘making something from nothing’. The financial value it generates, meanwhile, is the source of dynastic family fortunes and corporate wealth that exemplify capitalistic success that aspiring oil men yearn for and financiers hope to claim a piece of. In this paper, I explore how US oil and gas financiers and independent ‘oil men’ ethically and financially value energy. I explore what they judge to be right and good, how they craft imaginaries of the future, and how notions of value and values come to bear on their evaluations. I argue that these two sets of inter-dependent interlocutors are moral agents who apply ethical frameworks to evaluate what energy projects, companies and futures should be materialised. To do this, I draw on ethnographic field research that I have conducted in Houston, Texas, since late-2018. At a time when oil prices are surging and breathing new life into E&P activities as concerns about anthropogenic climate change are greater than ever, the moral evaluations of these interlocutors are as important to understand now as they have ever been.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores petroleum licensing and regulation in the UK as (anti-)speculative technique, resting on an attempted, but compromised, moral and affective realignment between corporations and state in the context of contemporary concerns about climate emergency and national energy security.
Paper long abstract:
Petroleum licenses have widely come to be seen as the fulcrum of petro-capitalist relations in the context of climate emergency. While some petroleum producers in the Global North have declared a moratorium on exploration licensing, and others intend to cease issuing new licences altogether, fresh concerns about national energy security have boosted the UK government’s consistent support for oil and gas exploration. This paper examines how licensing and, more broadly, regulation seek to shape the flow of capital and hydrocarbons in an increasingly volatile environment. Specifically, it focuses on the UK oil and gas regulator's (recently renamed the North Sea Transition Authority) awkward ambition to reconcile its long-standing goal to "maximise economic recovery” with the government’s Net Zero strategy and on current efforts to design a so-called climate compatibility checkpoint for future licensing rounds. It highlights that, in addition to translating a liberal form of property and providing territorial exemptions, licensing and regulation set out duties and obligations and encourage a highly moderated form of “stewardship”. They circumscribe an emergent set of (anti-)speculative techniques which, we argue, rest on an attempted, but compromised, moral and affective realignment between corporations and the state. In doing so, they not simply reflect changing techno-scientific and commercial understandings of the North Sea’s geological prospects and potential. Rather, they seek to anticipate, and arbitrate between, contested expert knowledges, modelling and forecasts and societal requirements in order to shape energy (and economic) futures.
Paper short abstract:
Venture Capitalists invest in technology startups and shape our economic future. Only recently have they started to embrace impact investing and ESG integration. In this paper we focus on European health tech VCs' impact and American VCs' diversity narratives and ask: are the ethics really changing?
Paper long abstract:
Venture Capital Investors (VCs) invest money from asset owners - state funds, pension funds, endowments and foundations - into young (technology) companies. The VC industry has not only seen a drastic influx of capital over the last ten years due to the macro-economic circumstances of a low interest rate environment, it has also filtered and financed among others 8 of the biggest 10 companies, from Appel and Microsoft to Facebook and Google. The future-making power of VCs is indisputable - and has so far mostly been focused on a single, profit bottom line.
Lagging behind compared to public market and later-stage buyout investors, VCs have only recently started to embrace both impact investing and ESG (environment, social, governance) integration into their investment considerations. Pushed further by the impact of Covid-19 and ever-increasing climate disasters, more money has gone into healthcare VC as well as ESG integration efforts. Based on (mostly digital) ethnography and several hundred interviews with (European and American) impact- and ESG-focused VCs, we compare the moralised narratives VCs have been embracing with changes in action and practice. We use two case studies (drawing on observations around diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) integration in the US and health tech investors in the UK and Europe) to illuminate ethical change - and scrutinise the often diverging narrative/practice nexus.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates ‘morality’ as ethnographic category in economics. Based on ethnography of elite economics education, it traces how the ‘moral’ circulates amongst economists and refracts in governance of financial capitalism, to ask what is at stake in anthropological analyses of ‘morality’.
Paper long abstract:
This paper interrogates how ‘morality’ is conceived ethnographically within neoclassical economics. Based on 18 months’ ethnography of undergraduate economics education at an elite university in Western Europe in 2016-17, it tracks the ‘moral’ as an ethnographic category that circulates and coalesces amongst economists. While often treated as an amoral discipline by practitioners and critics alike, neoclassical economics has a repressed repertoire of ‘morality’ that both implicitly inflects and is explicitly inscribed in economic models. Yet, its uses remain ambiguous, partial and even contradictory, operating through an oscillation of the term as located both internal and external to the discipline. These categories are deployed by economists particularly at moments of financial crisis, and have formatted both financial governance and austerity policies. The uneven contours of its application in economists’ projects of governance generate divergent regimes of constraint and abundance that serve to stratify workers and extenuate inequalities in labour regimes of contemporary financial capitalism, including being refracted in the working lives of undergraduate economics alumni in financial industries. By treating the ‘moral’ as an ethnographic category, this paper examines what is produced in the spaces between conceptions of ‘morality’ in anthropology and economics, to ask what is at stake in emerging anthropological analyses of ‘morality’ in financialised capitalism.