The Politics of Value in French Funeral Arrangements

This paper draws upon the history of the funeral market over two centuries to examine three major devices which have played a central role in the funeral economy, both in terms of defining the nature of the ‘goods’ and their attendant value but also in regulating the relations between the Pompes Funèbres and the other institutional actors involved. It highlights the ways in which these devices provide a ‘politics of value’ performing the articulation between the formatting of economic value and the pursuit of political concerns. First, observing the constitutional phase of the private industry, it examines the ‘system of the classes’ as a central device of managing dissonance between conflicting interests. Then, a historical jump leads us to half way through the twentieth century to the market infrastructure formed by the management of ‘care for the deceased’. As a third point, the exponential development of death insurance in recent years appears as an expression of rationalization of funeral arrangement. The analysis of the market devices will highlight an essential property, that is, the incorporation of a ‘calculation formula’ which set up both the profit sharing and the handling of moral and political issues.     

The moral economy of face: marketized gift and depoliticized solidarity in South Korea’s fair trade

ABSTRACT

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.     

‘This could be our reality in the next five to ten years’: a blogpost platform as an expectation generation device on the future of insurance markets

William James (1919) characterises hypotheses as either live or dead. A hypothesis is live when it is taken into account as a ‘real possibility’. We follow James’ suggestion to not attribute intrinsic properties to hypotheses, but rather investigate how they came into being and look at the effects they generate. Expectations of digital technologies are a topic of vivid debate in the insurance industry. Before these expectations can become ‘live’, they have, in the first place, to be generated by market devices. We investigate how the reinsurance blogpost platform Open Minds functions as an ‘expectation generation device’ on the future of insurance markets. Combining Beckert’s work on the role of fictional expectations with the pragmatist turn in sociology of markets, we propose to study ‘expectation generation devices’, provoking expectations on economic markets. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate the explicit fictional character of the Open Minds contributions, and analyse how a contained space of openness is generated to provoke expectations. We demonstrate how Open Minds can become live through circulation to other expectation generation sites in the insurance industry and beyond. We conclude by reflecting on the importance of expectation generation devices as a particular type of market devices.     

《汉书》关于刘贺帝位被废原因的真实性考察

通过重读《汉书》,对比刘贺先王后帝的表现和其他不守丧礼的结果,可知他在奔丧和典丧过程中所表现的诸多违礼行为,正是他一贯不修个人品行、不好治国之道的体现。而且惩治"不孝无礼"乃是先王们的惯有做法,故而《汉书》的相关记载真实可靠,对此海昏侯墓存在诸多与之相合的信息,亦为其证。至于随葬的儒家经典,反映的只是当时尊孔崇儒的社会风气。刘贺帝位的被废,就是在于他"荒淫迷惑,失帝王礼谊,乱汉制度",而不是霍光因私废公,更不是班固刻意丑化,由此可观丧礼对于西汉社会的重要性。     

Governmental Conditions for the Economization of Uncertainty

The central place occupied by actuarial calculation in insurance is usually understood as resulting from the process of bringing the laws of large numbers to bear on archival data in terms of an ‘insurance imaginary’. However, little attention is paid to the political and broader governmental conditions upon which actuarialism rests. Analysis of fire insurance in Australia indicates that despite urgings from other branches of insurance, the industry did not go down this ‘scientific’ track until well into the twentieth century. Instead, it relied on detailed individual inspection by insurance agents and a process of ‘cumulative dangerousness’ – adding up the multiple hazards discovered in each case and using this as a guide to setting premiums. The result was slow, expensive and cumbersome. But the industry was forced to adopt this approach because the built environment in Australian cities was so underregulated that nothing could be taken for granted. Only when adequately designed and enforced government regulations began to appear after the mid-1920s could fire insurance adopt actuarial techniques for economising uncertainty.     

From shanzhai chic to Gangnam style: seven practices of cultural-economic mediation in China and Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency.     

BIRDS OF THE INTERNET

Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birder's handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public.     

Between business and morality: cultural politics in independent bookshops in China

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how cultural businesses may facilitate contentious political activity in authoritarian contexts. Existing research in Western liberal democracies has shown the widespread political activism of actors in the cultural and creative industries. Whether such activism exists in authoritarian society, how it may differ in character and form, and what implications this will have for our understanding of relations between business, politics, and culture in authoritarian countries remain to be addressed. Drawing on data collected from 55 ‘independent bookshops’ in China, I illustrate how these organisations perform ‘cultural politics,’ a type of political participation in which actors employ mainly symbolic means to express social and political concerns. The organisations’ economic relations and conditions facilitate their efforts to create spaces in which contentious questions can be raised, sensitive topics explored, and alternative ideas expressed, despite the Chinese state’s political regulation of the cultural sphere. The finding of the economic embeddedness of cultural politics sheds new light on our understanding of the political economy of cultural businesses in contemporary China.     

Nation branding in contemporary Taiwan: a grassroots perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper, based on textual analysis and interviews, offers a complementary perspective of scholarly studies of nation branding which focus on the state and corporate elites involved in such undertakings. It places grassroots initiatives in branding Taiwan through tourist souvenirs and other video and graphic materials against the larger background of cultural policies and official branding campaigns, and shows grassroots actors’ complex entanglement with official institutions, policies and discourses despite declared scepticism towards the latter and a low degree of direct collaboration. It compares official and grassroots messages and argues that the latter are more coherent; capture a local specificity and encourage a tourist gaze centred around the ‘human touch’ theme; distance themselves from China, the significant ‘other’ of Taiwanese nationalism; and markedly highlight an epistemological and representational strategy based on individual, sensorial experience, which may constitute a response to biased and untrustworthy state national narratives of the martial law era.     

Mapping the intermediate: lived technologies of money and value

ABSTRACT

As financial transactions are increasingly digitized, old and new kinds of intermediaries are only expanding in importance. Intermediaries, mediators and brokers sit at critical junctures and operate between diverse financial arenas and pathways. We argue that mapping the intermediate entails identifying how different kinds of actors—human and non-human, objects and interfaces, institutions and practices—delimit or reify but also stitch together and overcome spatial and temporal differences in people's financial lives, while taking on varying burdens of risk. Mapping the intermediate is both an empirical and methodological exercise. Empirically, it requires following the agents and traders, brokers and material objects that facilitate transactions and add, extract, or re-work different kinds of value. Methodologically, intermediaries and the intermediate are not only the objects of analysis but act as analytical tools in their own right, making the process and politics of transactions visible and tangible. Attending to the intermediate in our inquiries around money, currency and new digital financial technologies, thereby, offers new directions for grounding finance in politics and history and better connecting micro and macro and local and global economic processes.     

Valuation struggles over pricing – determining the worth of wind power

Public policies such as feed-in tariffs have been widely introduced to stimulate the development of renewable energies, and sustain a decarbonisation of the electricity sector. Proponents argue that these governance instruments safeguard public goods such as the climate – yet they are accused of creating political markets, and political prices, here understood as market distortion. This paper studies the ‘politics’ of pricing by following the adoption of the first feed-in tariff in France. Pricing as a way of achieving non-economic ends, such as climate mitigation, brings the values of several public goods into play, all the while prompting a translation of these values into a single price. Following the struggles over the pricing of wind power in the early 2000s, the study illustrates that rather than a pollution of the market sphere by that of politics, a politics of pricing can be observed in four distinct struggles: namely the framing of the public interest; valuation as the articulation of the future; the possible agencies of governance; and role of valuation methods and calculations.     

The Making of a ‘Good Deal’

Economic rationality and reciprocal help are values that are often posed as contradictory within exchanges. However, there are instances when these values work in tandem, such as when justifying informal purchases of work, svart arbete, in contemporary Sweden. Svart arbete are omnipresent exchanges in Swedish society, and there are many reasons for performing them. On the one hand, a good deal is part of everyday social life when people help each other. On the other hand, a good deal also reinforces views that economic rationalities are values that do not exclusively adhere to formal markets. This article focuses on the values that construct the ‘good deal’ when getting your car fixed informally. These overlapping and somewhat contradictory values in theory, but commonplace in practice, illustrate how notions of reciprocity and economic calculations interweave and are difficult to entangle one from the other. The ‘good deal’ thus concerns how illegal, yet licit purchases of services are made acceptable when posing them as cheap and simple transactions that simultaneously invoke a realm of closer relations.     

Metafictive Geography

Abstract

The imagining of space has been an important topic in recent geographical studies. Especially in the geographical study of literature, ‘literary geography’, the manner of contesting the frames of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ has aroused more and more attention during recent years. Metafiction, consciousness of a text’s own imaginativeness and the discourses behind it, has not yet been explicitly discussed in the field of literary geography, although some tangential approaches have been applied. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss how the metafictive reading of literature functions as an alternative way of approaching the imagining of space, offering an original ‘methodological’ viewpoint for perceiving space, culture and society. The specific focus is on how space becomes metafictive through literary ‘means’ such as divergent narrative and textual strategies, exceptional typographies and ironic writing. At the same time the paper considers how the metafictive continuum between the frames of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ may function as a tool for delving more deeply into the discursiveness of the human imagination.     

Peer lending and the subsumption of the informal

The informal financial practices of financially ‘excluded’ groups in the United States are being enrolled in a regulatory project to make new markets and produce financially self-sufficient subjects on the edges of the financial system. Drawing on mixed-methods qualitative research working with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, this paper explores how informal rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) are being repurposed and formalized to make the risks of financially excluded groups legible, tractable and priceable for ‘mainstream’ financial service providers. In so doing, the paper explores how the credit score orders practices and relations that are ‘outside’ of the ‘financial mainstream’. While others have documented how the efforts of NGOs to marketize and commodify the social networks and cultural practices of the poor result in forms of dispossession, this is not what my research finds. Instead, I show how formalized ROSCAs are redistributing calculative agency, and enabling financially underserved groups to exert strategic control over the calculation of their credit scores.     

Moral barriers between work/life balance policy and practice in academia

ABSTRACT

Despite the proliferation of work/life balance policies in Australian universities, academic staff continue to report experiences of time pressure, anxiety, and over-work. This paper contributes to the research of academic time and career planning by exploring how early career academics engage with work/life balance policies, utilising a critical reading of Richard Sennett’s work on the corrosion of character in late capitalist economies. We find that policy engagement is tied into academics’ professional identities and perceptions of ‘good’ conduct. Drawing on interviews from a sample of 25 Australian early career academics, we argue that the failure of early career academics to use formal work/life balance policies is partially explained by the presence of workplace cultures that reward demonstrations of commitment to work roles. The use of work/life balance policies hence carries a moral cost, which participants report reflects on their character. This paper contributes to an understanding of how work/life balance policies are enacted at the level of department and individual, and argues that future research projects would benefit from attending to the construction of worker ideals within workplace cultures.     

The paradoxes of creativity in Guangzhou,China’s wholesale market for fast fashion

ABSTRACT

In Guangzhou’s fast fashion sector, creativity operates as practices in boundary-making, which emerge in spaces within the blurred boundaries that delineate original and copy production. Using the Xi Fang Hang market as a case study, I demonstrate how the quick turnover of fast fashion commodities compels different groups of market participants to claim contesting definitions and practices of creativity. While building managers and wealthy entrepreneurs mobilise techniques of rent extraction and claim originality as rightful sources of creativity, less established migrant entrepreneurs use design copying as a tool for market survival. With limited resources and formal education in fashion and merchandising, migrants claim success in delivering the right styles and trends at the right time and in keeping their businesses afloat. Together, these competing practices constitute what I call ‘paradoxes of creativity’, dynamics that highlight creativity as a fluid cultural category that is always subject to tensions and contestations.     

Anxiety and Aporia: Or,What, for Lacan,Makes Deconstruction Reassuring?

While originally Lacan seconds Heidegger's contention that ‘anxiety has no object’, in the early 1960s, he dismisses his own earlier position as a childish reassurance and argues, to the contrary, that ‘anxiety is not without an object’. With particular attention to his use of the double negative, ‘not without’, this essay examines this turning point in Lacan's thinking in order to explain the opposition between his psychoanalytic critical theory and Derrida's deconstruction. The arguments that Lacan brings to bear on his work of the 1950s closely approximate those that Derrida levels against Heidegger in the formulation of his own concept of ‘the aporia of the impossible’. Indeed, as commentators often emphasise, the formal logic of Lacan's later thinking is strictly isomorphic with Derrida's philosophy; and their respective concepts of anxiety and aporia are frequently misconstrued, accordingly, as simply identical. However, insofar as Lacan discerns a content in this formal negativity, contesting the idealism of his earlier theory and reasserting the materialist objectivity of the Freudian ‘lost object,’ as intractably Real, the two do not coincide. On the contrary, Lacan's repudiation of Heidegger's concept of anxiety extends equally to Derrida's aporia, as if, for Derrida, Heidegger's existential phenomenology were not reassuring enough.     

Calculating the blue economy: producing trust in numbers with business tools and reflexive objectivity

ABSTRACT

The ‘blue economy’ has in recent years become a leading concept for envisioning what may come after the fossil-based era. In efforts at calculating the potential economic value of the ocean, policy-oriented documents seek to unite diverse actors around common goals. Through the calculation of numbers, large-scale and long-term policy visions are being crystallized. But how do such numbers come into being in practice? This article interrogates this question with an example from the Norwegian context: the established policy goal of a so-called ‘five-fold increase’ in marine value creation in the year 2050. While powerful numbers are commonly expected to be produced through the procedures of ‘mechanical objectivity’ that involve strict quantification and scientific methods, our analysis shows a rather different route towards a powerful number: By loosely combining tools developed for business management, the number is calculated by, first, openly combining qualitative and narrative operations into the calculation and then, next, decoupling qualitative uncertainties from the quantified potential. The result is a calculative process that takes the form of what we suggest to call ‘reflexive objectivity’ and a policy-oriented number that encourages risk-taking and action over restraint and precaution.     

Mitigating South Africa’s HIV Epidemic: The Interplay of Social Entrepreneurship and the Innovation System

With the struggle against apartheid achieved, South Africa faced the new struggle of overcoming the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This paper examines the response of government, the innovation system and civil society in rising to the challenge. The response included a fatal denialism concerning the etiology of AIDS, a fatalism that constitutes political market failure. This political market failure was counteracted through the emergence of social entrepreneurship in the form of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) that mobilized civil society and like-minded health practitioners and researchers within the innovation system. Dependency Theory coupled with a Quadruple Helix model of the innovation system offer possible explanations of this complex human tragedy and the way that government was compelled to embark on a massive program of providing anti-retroviral therapy that has now significantly improved life expectancy. The paper provides socio-economic context, appraisal of the innovation system, and a sketch of how the Quadruple Helix took form. Of special importance is the independence of South Africa’s ‘Republic of Science.’ Independent courts were critical in allowing TAC to obtain remedy against government, Big Pharma, and AIDS dissident scientists. It is argued that its Republic of Science met its obligation of objectivity by shifting emphasis to the cause of AIDS research in the face of official denialism. In effect, the system of innovation and social entrepreneurs are shown to have acted in concert in constituting a Quadruple Helix.     

LIVE Baccarat calculations: Macau machine gambling and the production of the post-socialist subject

ABSTRACT

Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, and the subsequent liberalization of the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly, Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming. Today Macau attracts more than 30 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. This article analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was created by a Hong Kong biopharmaceutical company, and designed to appeal to Chinese gamblers in Macau. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation, including calqulation, hedging, arbitrage, and portfolio management. LIVE Baccarat is a biopolitical apparatus of subjection of a post-socialist Chinese homo economicus, a form of ‘human capital’ which Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self.’ This subject not only plays a remunerative role in Macau’s gaming industry, but conforms to China’s macroeconomic goals to engender ‘quality’ citizens equipped to support a domestic consumer market which may supplant the unsustainable production-for-export regime that drove the country’s initial post-reform development.