Sentient commodities and productive paradoxes: the ambiguous nature of human–livestock relations in Northeast Scotland

The Curry Report (Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food, Farming and Food: A Sustainable Future (Curry Report), Cabinet Office, London, 2002) recently recommended that farmers ‘reconnect’ with their consumers, their markets and the food chain. In terms of livestock production this process of reconnection may not be so straightforward, firstly, because of the productive paradoxes upon which livestock production is built, and secondly, because the nature of people's relationships with livestock is complex, ambiguous and dynamic. This paper uses ethnographic data to illustrate sociologically the paradoxical nature of commercial and hobby livestock production in the context of Northeast Scotland. Producers of livestock have contradictory productive roles: as empathetic carers and economic producers of ‘sentient commodities’. The attitudes, feelings and behaviours of those working with livestock cannot be isolated from the position of both humans and animals in the division of labour (breeding, storing and finishing) and the socio-economic context in which commercial and hobby livestock production occurs. For example, those working with breeding animals tend to express varying degrees of emotional attachment whilst those preparing livestock for slaughter express varying degrees of emotional detachment. Any animal, however, that deviates from the routine process of production can stand out from the herd, become individually recognised, have more meaning to the worker, and thus become more than ‘just an animal’. I will also draw on the work of Merton (Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays, The Free Press, New York, 1976), Digard (Relationships between humans and domesticated animals, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 19(3) (1994) 231) and Kopytoff (The cultural biography of things: commoditisation as process, In: A. Appadurai (Ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 64–91) to provide an emerging framework to understand the variable characteristics of people's relationships with their animals, and to account for and capture their contradictory and unstable elements.     

‘Workaholics’ and ‘whingeing women’: Theorising intimacy and emotion work — the last frontier of gender inequality?

In a variety of discourses and empirical studies it has been argued that compared with women, men show more reluctance to express intimate emotion in heterosexual couple relationships. Our paper attempts to theorise this gender asymmetry in intimate emotional behaviour as a sort of ‘emotional power’, within the wider context of continuing gender inequalities of resources and power in society. To the extent that men's role as breadwinner becomes their central life interest (they become ‘workaholics’), women are left with emotional responsibility for the private sphere, including the performance of the ‘emotion work’ necessary to maintain the couple relationship itself. Increasingly women's dissatisfaction in relationships (which men dismiss as unjustified ‘whingeing’) stems mainly from this unequal division. Yet many women still collude with male power by living the family ‘myth’ and ‘playing the couple game’; they perform emotion work on themselves to convince themselves that they are ‘ever so happy really’, thereby helping to reproduce their own false consciousness. This suggests that gender asymmetry in relation to intimacy and emotion work may be the last and most obstinate manifestation and frontier of gender inequality.     

Wives' Relative Wages,Husbands' Paid Work Hours,and Wives' Labor‐Force Exit

Economic theories predict that women are more likely to exit the labor force if their partners' earnings are higher and if their own wage rate is lower. In this article, I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 2,254) and discrete‐time event‐history analysis to show that wives' relative wages are more predictive of their exit than are their own or their husbands' absolute wages. In addition, I show that women married to men who work more than 45 hours per week are more likely to exit the labor force than are wives whose husbands' work approximately 40 hours per week. My findings highlight the need to examine how women's partners affect women's labor‐force participation.     

Connecting Practical Doings to Cultural Meanings: Exploring the Work of Moral Mediators in Human Service Organizations

This study illuminates the work of moral mediators, which I define as organizational actors who work to strategically monitor, maintain, and manage the moral identity of others. My layered, organizational, narrative analysis of the mentoring organization Big Brothers Big Sisters draws on two types of data: client stories featured on the national website and ten in‐depth interviews with case managers at a local agency. My analysis demonstrates how case managers employ an emotional labor technique of drama dilution, or work done to add ambiguity to public storytelling in ways that leave more space for variations of deservingness, success, and morality. This article emphasizes the paradoxical nature of public organizational narratives and highlights the need for continued exploration of day‐to‐day work in conjunction with organizational structure and cultural values and beliefs.     

Transnational Traders: El Salvador's Women Couriers in Historical Perspective

An estimated one‐third to one‐half of Salvadorans who carry remittances and goods between El Salvador and the United States are women. Scholars studying these viajeras argue that their work simultaneously represents a break from traditional gender relations confining women to the home and an extension of gender traits that favor women in developing social ties. Although social ties are crucial to the courier trade, this argument ignores antecedents to viajeras' work in El Salvador and suggests that transnationalism pushes women into realms of labor and physical mobility that have been gendered masculine. Using ethnographic methods, I examine the relationship between women's historical work in El Salvador and their current work as viajeras, as well the relationship between viajeras' experiences and those of women transnational traders in other parts of the world. My findings contribute to a small but growing body of research suggesting that instead of merely being excluded from or manipulated by global processes, many women in the Global South have expanded the realm of their activities to help shape variable forms of global capitalism. Studying how they do so sheds light on local mechanisms for combating gender inequality and promoting development.     

Sideline and Lifeline: The Cultural Economy of Maple Syrup Production1

Abstract Why do people engage in economically minor resource production activities? This field study of Vermont and Quebec maple syrup producers and their households and enterprises examines the diversion of motivations and concerns m contemporary maple syrup production. Farmers, former farmers, and non-farmers all produce maple syrup. The concept of embeddedness provides a framework for understanding how producers understand their involvement with maple syrup, by highlighting the social and cultural context of economic action. An embeddedness perspective emphasizes how other work activities, household relations, the surrounding community, and the resource environment shape the possibilities for and understandings of minor resource production activities. Maple syrup generally only supplemented the household income of the 76 producers interviewed. Producers articulated a cultural economy of syrup production centered on its contribution to overall livelihood, cultural identity, and lifestyle. Reasons included managing risks, making seasonal use of land and labor resources, developing a retirement income, demonstrating a rural, agrarian identity, and strengthening family and community ties. Implications for policy include the place of minor resource production activities in securing rural livelihoods and providing cultural anchors in rural regions experiencing demographic and economic change.     

Becoming a Parent and Relationship Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Dyadic Perspective

This study investigated the extent to which women's and men's relationship satisfaction within couples is similarly or differently affected by becoming a parent and the extent to which changes in work hours and hours spent on household labor affect a person's own and his or her spouse's relationship satisfaction across the transition to parenthood. The authors conducted longitudinal dyadic analyses, based on 12 waves of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS). They selected 689 couples who remained together during the period of observation and who were employed, childless, and living with their partner (of which 28% married) at the first moment of observation. The results revealed that relationship satisfaction of both members in a couple changed in tandem. Although work hours and household labor had some effect on people's own and their spouse's relationship satisfaction, these factors did not account for the U‐shaped relationship satisfaction pattern associated with the transition to parenthood.     

The Production of Distinctions: Class,Gender, and Taste Work in the Lifestyle Management Industry

Drawing on participant observation and interviews, this paper analyzes the paid labor of lifestyle production. In particular, I look at jobs in the lifestyle management industry that involve making consumption-related aesthetic choices with and for clients. This is taste work, and workers are taste brokers, who mediate between clients and markets, between clients and other people, and between clients and their own desires. Taste brokers shape not only clients’ consumption decisions but also their class performances and dispositions. I argue that taste brokers also reproduce legitimate social differences in three ways: by fostering distinctions between “good” and “bad” taste; by reinforcing the association between particular tastes and particular class positions; and by casting women as both better at and responsible for making aesthetic decisions.     

TRANSITION OF INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE,TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING,AND MATHEMATICS STUDENTS TO THE U.S. LABOR MARKET: THE ROLE OF VISA POLICY

I analyze how visa policies affect international students' transition to the U.S. labor market. The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program permits international students to work via a student visa for a limited period after graduation before obtaining a work visa—an uncertain process due to the binding visa cap. I find that the extension in the length of OPT terms for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) increases their likelihood of initially staying in the United States and using OPT. This result suggests that uncertainties about obtaining work visas hinder international STEM students' participation in the U.S. labor market. (JEL J61, K37, I23).     

Uncompensated emotional labor,racial battle fatigue,and (in)civility in digital spaces

Emotional labor was originally theorized by Arlie Hochschild in the context of domestic labor. Since her early theorization, popular culture and social scientists have adopted the term to refer to emotion work that is exhibited in a manner of financially compensated social settings. Emotional labor refers to the process by which individuals are expected to conform to a set of societal guidelines, ensuring that their emotions conform to that performance. As the use of social media grows, emotional labor plays an increasing role in the lives of people of color—across media platforms. We frame the ever‐present negotiation involved in racialized interactions online as a type of uncompensated emotional labor that results in racial battle fatigue. Next, we position emotional labor as an intrinsic part of the experience for social media users of color because digital media is by default a White, racialized space. Lastly, we argue that current research on civility does not account for the emotional labor of people of color. We offer an original view of uncompensated emotional labor that is inclusive of cross‐platform, racialized emotional labor that can result in racial battle fatigue.     

Stjepan Metrović and Michel Maffesoli's 'implosive' defence of the Durkheimian tradition: theoretical convergences around Baudrillard's thesis on the 'end' of the social

This paper critically examines Metrovi? and Maffesoli's attempt to understand postmodernity through Émile Durkheim's nonrational link between society, religion and morality. Metrovi? (1991, 1997) and Maffesoli's (1996) work draws upon this emotional element when attempting to refute Baudrillard's (1983) cognitively focused, if implicit, critique of the Durkheimian tradition. Despite their best intentions, Metrovi? and Maffesoli still fail to exploit the partialities of Baudrillard's critique to the full. While both have some appreciation of the link between emotion and religion as found in Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) they, nevertheless, fall short of grasping its full conceptual importance. This leads them to an implicit acceptance of Baudrillard's thesis on the ‘end’ of the social. This pitfall could have been avoided if Metrovi? and Maffesoli had built their respective analyses of the postmodern condition on a closer reading of The Elementary Forms. Reading this text alongside those other insights on emotion and social life as contained within Durkheim and Mauss's Primitive Classification (1903) and Talcott Parsons's subsequent writings on the sociological problem of religion, would have helped to distance the work of Metrovi? and Maffesoli from that of Baudrillard, and allowed them to offer a stronger and more comprehensive defence of the said tradition.     

Gendered Divisions of Fertility Work: Socioeconomic Predictors of Female Versus Male Sterilization

Domestic labor researchers have examined a multitude of duties disproportionately performed by women, yet the responsibility associated with navigating a couple's fertility—fertility work—has been overlooked. Using data from the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth (N = 1,415), the author examined how racial and socioeconomic factors affect the division of contraceptive fertility work among married and cohabiting women who rely on either their partners' vasectomies or their own sterilizations. Drawing theoretical connections between fertility work and housework, resource‐ and gender‐based perspectives were used to assess whether women's or their partners' characteristics are stronger predictors of sterilization type, and whether women's absolute or relative education level has a greater impact. Findings suggest that White and socioeconomically privileged women are more likely to have vasectomized partners than disadvantaged women. Male partners' characteristics were more closely associated with sterilization type than women's characteristics, lending greater support for the gender‐based hypotheses.     

Consequences of Partner Incarceration for Women's Employment

Research has documented the limited opportunities men have to earn income while in prison and the barriers to securing employment and decent wages upon release. However, little research has considered the relationship between men's incarceration and the employment of the women in their lives. Economic theory suggests that family members of incarcerated individuals may attempt to smooth income fluctuation resulting from incarceration by increasing their labor supply. This study used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,780) to investigate how men's incarceration is associated with the number of hours their female partners work as well as variation in this association. Results showed that, on average, women's hours of work were not significantly impacted by the incarceration of their partners. However, there was a positive relationship between partner incarceration and employment among more advantaged groups of women (e.g., married women, White women).     

ACCOUNTING FOR COMPLEMENTARY SKILL SETS: EVALUATING INDIVIDUAL MARGINAL VALUE TO A TEAM IN THE NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

Identifying an individual worker's contribution to firm production can be difficult in a team setting where spillovers in labor productivity exist among team members. This paper studies a model of labor productivity where workers have heterogeneous abilities, and can differently affect the productivity of their fellow teammates. Applying the model to the setting of the National Basketball Association (NBA), I can identify the marginal value that a basketball player brings to a particular team lineup, both through his own individual contributions and his complementary contribution to teammates' productivity. Estimates from the model imply that teammates have a significant impact on individual player productivity, and that taking into account spillovers across teammates is important to assessing both overall team productivity and an individual player's contribution to team productivity. I then evaluate whether player complementarities are valued in the NBA labor market in terms of higher salaries, and find that they are undervalued, and that players are instead paid mainly for their individual offensive production. This creates an asymmetry between player incentives and the team objective. To assess the size of this inefficiency, the top trading cycle algorithm of Shapley and Scarf (1974) is used to identify a Pareto optimal matching between players and teams, that accounts for the complementarities between heterogeneous players' skill sets. (JEL J30, L25, L83, M51)     

The Symbiotic Ideology: Stewardship,Husbandry, and Dominion in Beef Production

Social studies of agriculture tend to overlook the micro and symbolic interactions that structure relationships among agriculturalists, the environment, and animals raised as commodities. In this study, I use ethnographic methods and in‐depth interviews with conventional beef producers to understand their perceptions of the environment and the nonhuman animals they raise. Central themes in this setting are the ethics of stewardship and husbandry. I seek to understand how these values are constructed and used interactionally. I argue that stewardship and husbandry help describe a process of co‐constitution that binds together ranchers, cattle, and the natural environment. The analysis engages actor‐network theory by emphasizing nonhuman activeness and draws from symbolic interaction and cultural sociology to show how people interpret the actions of nonhumans. The findings show that ranchers frame their relationships with cattle and the environment as symbiotic and work to understand the interests of the nonhuman as complementary to production. I introduce the term symbiotic ideology to show the way this approach mystifies power dynamics embedded in the ethic of dominion.     

WELFARE IMPACT OF A BAN ON CHILD LABOR

This article presents a new rationale for imposing restrictions on child labor. In a standard overlapping generation model where parental altruism results in transfers that children allocate to consumption and education, the Nash‐Cournot equilibrium results in suboptimal levels of parental transfers and does not maximize the average level of utility of currently living agents. A ban on child labor decreases children's income and generates an increase in parental transfers bringing their levels closer to the optimum, raising children's welfare as well as average welfare in the short run and in the long run. Moreover, the inability to work allows children to allocate more time to education, and it leads to an increase in human capital. Besides, to increase transfers, parents decrease savings and hence physical capital accumulation. When prices are flexible, these effects diminish the positive welfare impact of the ban on child labor. (JEL D91, E21)     

THE CREDIT‐CHANNEL TRANSMISSION MECHANISM AND THE NONLINEAR GROWTH AND WELFARE EFFECTS OF INFLATION AND TAXES

With the credit‐channel effect driven by the central bank's open market operations, this paper's model easily gives rise to the nonlinear inflation‐growth nexus, which is evidenced by a number of cross‐country empirical studies. The threshold level of the inflation rate is found to be lower when tax rates are higher. The presence of the credit‐channel effect also provides the rationale for setting positive (and smaller than 1) tax rates on consumption, labor income, and capital income. The optimal tax rates rise as the inflation target declines. Under a fiscal policy rule where labor and capital income taxes move proportionally to each other, the optimal capital income tax rate could be higher than the optimal labor income tax rate. Under a sufficiently large central bank balance sheet, the credit‐channel effect will be so weak that inflation and all kinds of taxes are growth and welfare repressing. This provides a rationale for central banks that have implemented quantitative easing policies to shrink their balance sheets. (JEL E58, E62, O42)     

Unionization in the American Newsroom, 1930 to 1960

This study of the material benefits brought to American news workers from the 1930s through the 1960s builds on previous work by media labor‐studies scholars such as Bonnie Brennen, Daniel Leab, Phillip Glende and Sam Kuczun, among others, who have examined the history of the American Newspaper Guild (ANG) in great detail. Their work has focused on legal and policy developments under the Roosevelt administration and in U.S. labor law. My study, as part of a larger project, looks at some of the ground‐level impacts of unionization. It does so examining Editor & Publisher, The Quill and The Guild Reporter, among other publications, and references to the material benefits in pay, time off, work‐life balance, health insurance, job security and other, practical and positive ancillary effects brought by the uneven unionization of the newsroom. The arrival of white‐collar unions for new workers was not a panacea to their problems. But it did help them in their collective quest in the United States during the interwar and then post‐World War Two‐eras for better working conditions and a firmer sense of their professionalized identity.     

‘Anger is Why We're All Here’: Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization

The emotions involved in social activism are central factors in the recruitment to, motivation for, and sustainability of social movements. But this perspective on the role of emotions within social movements contrasts with studies of emotions within mainstream organizations where employees are called on to manage their own emotions and those of others. Thus, while much social movement research focuses on how activists actively cultivate emotional expression, these ideas rarely intersect with the organizational research that examines how a diminished quality of working life may result from the need for employees to modify, suppress or emphasize emotions. Using in-depth interviews with activists at Amnesty International, this article bridges this theoretical divide by examining emotional labour and emotional regulation among paid activists in a professional social movement organization. I explore the ways in which employees struggle with the emotional component of their work and the implications of these emotions for the quality of their working life, the stability of such organizations and the maintenance of social movements.     

The Treadmill of Production and the Positional Economy of Consumption

The theory of the treadmill of production highlights how the constant search for economic growth leads to advanced economies being stuck on a “treadmill,” where their well‐being is not improved by economic growth, yet the impacts of this pursuit of growth causes massive, unsustainable environmental damages. In interrogating the specific driving force that keeps the irrational system of the treadmill so powerfully in place, the theory of the treadmill of production focuses on how those who control the production process, corporations, are the primary agents driving the treadmill, while also highlighting how the state and workers generally continue to provide support for the treadmill's continued reproduction. In thinking about ways to begin to unwind the treadmill, there is a clear need to explore why workers, who are also consumers and citizens, continue to support (reluctantly or not) the treadmill of production. Through an analysis of the positional economy of consumption, this paper identifies key stakes that individual consumers have in expanding their income and consumption levels through the treadmill of production, despite the widespread inefficacy of the treadmill to increase aggregate satisfaction levels. This theory of the positional economy of consumption identifies the structural forces that lock individuals into increasing their income and levels of “defensive consumption” merely to maintain their existing levels of social practices and the well‐being generated from them, thus further supporting the reproduction of the treadmill of production. La théorie de l'‘engrenage de la production’ (‘treadmill of production’) démontre en quoi la recherche constante de croissance économique enferme les économies avancées dans un ‘engrenage’, où leur bien‐être n'est pas amélioré par la croissance économique, mais où les impacts de la poursuite de la croissance se traduisent par des dommages environnementaux massifs et irréparables. En analysant les forces spécifiques qui préservent ce système avec autant de pouvoir, cette théorie insiste sur l'importance de ceux qui contrôlent le processus de production (les corporations) en tant que principaux agents appuyant cet ‘engrenage’, tout en soulignant comment, d'une manière générale, l'Etat et les travailleurs persistent à soutenir sa perpétuation. En pensant aux manières d'arrêter cet ‘engranage’, il y a un besoin évident d'étudier pourquoi les travailleurs, qui sont aussi consommateurs et citoyens, persistent à soutenir (à contrec?ur ou pas) cet ‘engrenage’ de la production. Grâce à une analyse de l'économie positionnelle de la consommation, cet article identifie les principaux intérêts qu'ont les consommateurs individuels à augmenter leurs revenus et leurs niveaux de consommation au sein de cet engrenage de la production, en dépit de son inefficacité générale à améliorer les niveaux de satisfactions agrégés. Cette théorie de l'économie positionnelle de la consommation identifie les forces structurelles qui enferment les individus dans une recherche d'augmentation de leurs revenus et de leurs niveaux de ‘consommation défensive’, seulement pour maintenir leurs niveaux actuels de pratiques sociales et le bien‐être qui en découle, contribuant ainsi à reproduire l'engrenage de la production.