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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:
How do activists from social movements engage with financial actors and markets? Drawing on the notion of the “shareholder activist” in finance, I examine the work of activists more broadly to change corporate strategies and what this means for social movements in an era of financialization.
Paper long abstract:
“If finance is everywhere,” an activist explained, “it can be acted upon from anywhere.” This paper is about how activists from various social movements have engaged with financial actors and markets. The climate crisis, in particular, has shaped a large network of actors who have pushed corporations and funds to enact change relating to fossil fuels and climate emissions through divestment and investment strategies. Drawing on the traditional notion of the “shareholder activist” in finance—actors who hold substantial parts of a company’s shares to enact change from within—I ethnographically examine the work of activists more broadly to change shareholder strategies and what this means for social movements in an era of financialization.
This paper looks at the case of Rio Tinto, the Anglo-Australian mining giant in two instances of shareholder activism. First, the successful efforts of an activist group in tabling and passing a resolution on emissions at an Annual General Meeting. Second, the ousting of the senior management with pressure from leading shareholders following the destruction of a sacred Aboriginal site in the expansion of its mines. Through these two cases, I argue that we can expand the notion of “shareholder value” beyond that of financial value, to ethical and moral values. Such moves, however, raise the question of whether we now see the financialization of activism, and the entrenching of financialized values within social movements themselves.
Paper short abstract:
The article looks at commercial gestational surrogacy through the prism of moral economy. Based on ethnography in Tbilisi, Georgia, the paper analyzes the complex entanglement of situated ethics, moral framing, and stigma.
Paper long abstract:
The article looks at commercial gestational surrogacy through the prism of moral economy. The moral economy views economic action as an affordance for socially acceptable and ethical behavior (Keane). The study is based on a two-year-long ethnography of commercial surrogacy in Tbilisi, Georgia. Georgia is one of the most popular destinations for commercial surrogacy.
The moral framing of surrogacy is often centered on the idea of dual kindness: First, surrogacy is a virtue because it gives happiness to a childless couple. And second, surrogacy is a virtue for a surrogate who cannot support her children without this economic activity. In this discourse, two functions of a "good woman" are combined: giving care and giving birth.
Despite this framing, commercial surrogacy in Georgia remains a strong stigma. This stigma leads to risky behaviors that often upend the underlying ethics of moral framing. How come that despite moral framing, surrogacy remains so stigmatizing? The paper analyzes how the time of the pandemic with travel restrictions became an affordance for moral behavior revealing the complex entanglement of situated ethics (Ong).
Paper short abstract:
This paper elaborates on the relationship between physical and exchange-based commodity traders. It argues that physical commodity traders use a moral framework to depict their practices as based on logistical work and expertise, while deprecating exchange trading as speculative and problematic.
Paper long abstract:
Global supply chains are increasingly controlled by transnationally acting commodity traders. These traders organize deliveries of commodities (such as metals, oil, or agricultural products) and – as market intermediaries – they are often denounced as speculators with no link to the materiality of the traded goods. However, their activities cannot be reduced to the exploitation of price movements, as they are similarly involved in logistical operations. Their services range from transport to warehousing, shipping, certification, and surveillance. Still, physical commodity traders depend upon exchange places such as the London Metals Exchange that set reference prices to commodities and offer mechanisms to hedge their operations. This creates an ambivalent relationship between physical commodity traders and exchange-based traders. In this paper, I aim to show that physical commodity traders use a moral framework to depict their practices as being based on logistical work and expertise, while deprecating exchange trading as speculative and thus problematic. In doing so, I depict how a deeply moral discourse on what it means to be a good trader shapes the practices of commodity trading. To analyze the moral categories traders use to talk about different trading practices is important, because it debunks this particular field of economic activities as being critically governed by economic moralities. Instead of simply pursuing maximum financial outcomes, questions about good and bad trading become central to the production of the trading self and help traders to navigate in a complex market surrounding.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how intimate obligations and desire for “independence” forge positive attachments to cyclical indebtedness among the agriculturalist-turned-miner community in Soma and attends to the emergent affective structures through a re-definition of the moral notion of “self-sufficiency”.
Paper long abstract:
Almost all young coal-miners in Soma are indebted with a specific type of loan titled “credit for need,” introduced in the late 2000s as a part of the national financial-inclusion project. As a result of low-interest rates and easy procedures, this local type of consumer credit has been the main tool for expanding this policy to working-class-masses in Turkey. “Credit for need” was institutionalized with an unusual emphasis on familial values and the nuclear family as a node of economic self-sustenance, which exclusively target the “male breadwinners”. These discourses of self-help often take the shape of a developmental story among this miner community, and that is how indebtedness engenders new modalities of “masculine care”.
This paper will highlight the affective propositions embodied in popular national discourses that accompanied the financial-inclusion journey of Turkey and how they have further contributed to the process of making of a miner town full of indebted families, which was a prominent agricultural town only two decades ago, located in the fertile West-Aegean region of Turkey. I explore how ‘nuclear family ideal’ as a normative rescaling of the proper forms of collectivity and responsibility, particularly the intimacy and the limits of economic solidarity, forges ambivalent and often positive affective attachments to wagework in underground mines and dependency on bank loans among Soma’s miners. Therefore, I attend to the ways in which such gender norms provide new interfaces for mobilizing affects as a productive force through moral reinterpretations of “need” and “self-sustenance”, and masculine attachments to "independence".
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to problematize economic moralities and future-oriented narratives in impact investing. Through a case study from Ghana, I will show how such investments produce ambiguous formations that contribute to reproducing global inequalities but are also contested by actors at their margins.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to shed light on the economy/morality nexus in socio-technical formations engendered by social and impact investments in Sub-Saharan Africa. It will do so by looking at the case of a social enterprise, Sust-Agric Africa (SAA), which proposes to alleviate poverty in rural Ghana through sustainable agriculture. As a social enterprise, SAA operates with capital provided by a variety of investors, including impact investment funds and individuals committed to bridging the gap between values and value by pairing financial returns with social and environmental outcomes. Framing its activities in terms of a win-win solution, the company aims to increase smallholder farmers’ income by offering them bundles of inputs and training on credit, and a secure market for their crops.
I will argue that, underpinned by narratives of environmental and social crises, the socio-technical formation surrounding SAA’s activities produces circuits where capital movements are engendered and determined by dominant and prescriptive economic moralities that claim to contribute towards realising a better future. On the one hand, I maintain that the power of such narratives resides precisely in their appeal to (supposedly) shared ethical horizons, and that they contribute to the reproduction of existing global inequalities and wealth distribution.
On the other hand, I will illustrate how, when translated into practice, such narratives result in socio-technical formations that produce uncertain results and are challenged by actors whose practices and worldviews open spaces for questioning them (with their underlying assumptions) and their moral claims.