Paper short abstract:

This paper builds on ethnographic research in a South African informal settlement to explore the meanings of refusing work in a context of mass unemployment as a moral and political act. In particular, it focuses on young men’s definitions of work and perceptions and attitudes towards work.

Paper long abstract:

Urban youth in South Africa's informal settlements reject or express dissatisfaction and resentment towards precarious and low-paying work, even in a context of mass unemployment. The refusal to do certain jobs or forms of work is closely tied to widely shared disdain towards foreign immigrants who are seen to take 'any job' earning beneath the already-low wages of many workers in South Africa. While justified with the language of post-apartheid democracy and citizenship, this act of defiance reflects a much longer history of urban youth rejecting low-paid work.

This paper builds on ethnographic research in a South African informal settlement to explore the meanings of refusal as a moral and political act. In particular, it focuses on young men's definitions of work and perceptions and attitudes towards work. The rejection of waged work I argue depends on one's social obligations and social position within the informal settlement, which determines access to relative protections and alternative sources of income. By taking seriously the moral dimension and political subjectivity of unemployed youth this paper recognises the inseparability of people's search for viable livelihoods from the production of social relationships, identities and configurations of meaning.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the practices and discourses of building professionals in urban Ethiopia. It shows how professional ethics and development-oriented entrepreneurship have provided building professionals with a moral leverage, while enabling them to disengage from addressing social inequalities.

Paper long abstract:

Notions of professional ethics, corporate responsibility and the rule of law have gained currency in shaping business practices among professional elites in urban Africa. Equity, legality, inclusive growth and quality service provision have entered the jargon of urban Africa's corporate and government institutions. This increasing emphasis on morality and ethics in business, however, has not necessarily resulted in a wider concern with questioning social inequalities and political authoritarianism. One might act morally and yet being complicit with the reproduction of inequalities and political authoritarianism. This paper examines the practices and discourses of building professionals, such as architects, urban planners and contractors, in a booming African metropolis, Addis Ababa. It shows how the increasing relevance of professional ethics, development-oriented business practices and quality management have provided building professionals with a moral leverage, while, however, enabling them to be disengaged from addressing social inequalities and political authoritarianism. For building professionals, inequalities are structural and inevitable and, by default, are no one's responsibility.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a case study in Burkina Faso, this paper proposes to use the concept of moral economy to describe popular collective action against industrial mines. It helps to reveal that these struggles contest indeed the legitimacy of resources led-development and express a specific sense of social justice.

Paper long abstract:

Contentious politics related to extractive activities are mushrooming all over Western Africa. These disputes are taking different forms (meetings, demonstration, violence, lobbying, collective action) and involve a large scope of actors: inhabitants from "local communities", artisanal miners, multinational companies, trade unions and public authorities at both the national and local levels.

A steady observation of political and social life of Burkina Faso these last ten years has shown the increasing occurrence of confrontation between "populations" and "multinational companies", inducing most of the times violent and direct actions, that some commentators would like to see as "riots".

This double dimension of popular and violent contention leads to revisiting the concept of "moral economy" proposed by Thomson. This article, based on a case study in Burkina Faso, supports that the concept of moral economy applied in actual mining contention helps to reveal that these people protest not only because of a diminution of their resources (land, gold..) but essentially to contest the legitimacy of the extractive processes. It is a way to underline that the extractive led development strategy supports by the State and the international institutions are not so well accepted locally because they endanger a rural traditional way of life and does not match whit the local sense of social justice.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines attitudes and beliefs of petty traders during the height of Equatorial Guineas’ oil-boom. It addresses the ‘moral economy’ as a concept through which to understand how Guineans articulate moral values and obligations with material provisioning and accumulation (Narotzky 2015).

Paper long abstract:

The growth of the Guinean economy due to the extraction of off-shore oil resulted in staggering inequalities. Despite the optimistic macro-indicators, ordinary petty traders complained that the country was experiencing 'an economic crisis just like the one Europeans and Americans were suffering'. They explained the crisis not out of a decrease in populations' consumption capacity resulting in a lack of demand for their wares, but rather out of an unprecedented increase of access to commodities by the elite, which by-passed petty traders. They accused the privileged of economic wrongdoing, but their argument differed from that found in the West (cf. Carrier 2014, Narotzky 2016). The wrongdoing was not about corruption or profiteering, nor did they argue that 'good money' could only be the result of work, as Nigerians had argued during their earlier Oil-Boom (Barber 1982). What Guineans asserted as economic wrongdoing was rooted in a way of understanding legitimate wealth as a process of rent management rather than a process of surplus value extraction. What was considered morally challenging, was the take-over of certain activities by an elite that had access to plenty other strategies of rent seeking.

This economic crisis was thus a moral crisis. The paper addresses the notions of economic wrongdoing and that of crisis on the basis of my ethnographic data. I will explore how the understanding of these notions draw on a moral economy that underlies the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea (Appel 2012).

Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to explore the urban condition of youth street groups (or gangs) in Mekelle (Ethiopia). Their street moral economy - manipulated by other social actors - becomes a new risk of marginalization, as I will show through evidences collected during an ethnographic fieldwork.

Paper long abstract:

In Mekelle, the capital city of Tigray (Northern Ethiopia), youth gangs - or "street youth organizations" (Brotherton and Barrios 2004) - navigate a horizon of meanings based on urban and local vision of power (hayalnet) and prestige. These gangs are involved in a declared process of "conversion", which manipulates forms of solidarity and moral street economy. The ruling party translates a both collectivistic and neoliberal vision of development into a "marketization of poverty" (Schwittay 2011), to provide generic opportunities for poors (not materially substantial), awareness and entrepreneurial skills that should make them emerge from a state of poverty, leading the message that only by becoming entrepreneurs, one can change his life and the society as a whole. The development device for the "conversion" of young urban 'troublemakers' is the youth economic cooperativism. Street groups are "re-organized" through a complicated 'burocratizing path' and a para-governmental employment formalization, fielded to expand consensus and control on the "street", ambiguous space of possible (or supposed) dangerous alliances among marginalized young people and political opponents (Di Nunzio 2014b). Street groups, now "converted" in youth economic cooperatives, suffer a split between what is materially at stake for their lives and the rhetoric of good governance, which does not coincide with the attainment of a desirable social mobility and that 're-marginalizes' them. 'Reorganized young people' are placed into the arena of small entrepreneurs, provided that they accept new and close bonds of dependency on local policy makers and abandon all forms of street moral economy.