Commodities in action: measuring embeddedness and imposing values

Recent approaches in political economy look at the effects of technology and social values on economic action. Combining these approaches with those of economic anthropologists, this article poses that the way the economy is instituted can be understood by looking at reasons actors have for participating in actor‐networks of production, distribution and consumption. Using the author's research on American recycling, this article first shows that much of the‘making’or instituting of the economy happens outside the market, through political machinations, contracts and standards. Second, it suggests that these relationships impose value upon goods differently than do market relations. The details of the recycling‘chain’show the ways actors shape the network and demonstrate that the social values that add‘economic value’to goods are not uniform, but are highly contextual. Starting from Mark Granovetter's notion of 'social embeddedness', the article explains that the measure of social embeddedness is not as important as the values imposed upon other actors through social structure in the economy. It calls for a close observation of economic action in the locales within which production takes place to understand better the‘actions‐at‐a‐distance’where the politics of technology, social movements and power create the empirical, instituted economy.     

ACHIEVING EMOTIONS IN COLLECTIVE ACTION: EMOTIONAL PROCESSES AND MOVEMENT MOBILIZATION IN THE 1989 CHINESE STUDENT MOVEMENT

This article outlines an emotional achievement perspective for the study of emotions in social movements. Following Denzin's work on emotions, I consider emotions as self-feelings that are situated, interactional, and temporal in nature. The concept of emotions as achievement complements Hochschild's emotion management perspective. While management focuses on control, achievement emphasizes articulation and creativity. I argue that, although individuals may be compelled to suppress feelings in the organizational context, different social contexts and practices make it possible for individuals to pursue emotional fulfillment and self-realization. In social movements, the process of emotional achievement among participants unfolds as a process of mobilization. An analysis of the emotional dynamics of the 1989 Chinese student movement shows that emotions were inextricably intertwined with identities and action and that the emotional dynamics generated in this process significantly contributed to movement mobilization. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical contributions of the emotional achievement perspective.     

Imagined futures: fictional expectations in the economy

Starting from the assumption that decision situations in economic contexts are characterized by fundamental uncertainty, this article argues that the decision-making of intentionally rational actors is anchored in fictions. “Fictionality” in economic action is the inhabitation in the mind of an imagined future state of the world and the beliefs in causal mechanisms leading to this future state. Actors are motivated in their actions by the imagined future and organize their activities based on these mental representations. Since these representations are not confined to empirical reality, fictional expectations are also a source of creativity in the economy. Fictionality opens up a way to an understanding of the microfoundations of the dynamics of the economy. The article develops the notion of fictional expectations. It discusses the role of fictional expectations for the dynamics of the economy and addresses the question of how fictional expectations motivate action. The last part relates the notion of fiction to calculation and social macrostructures, especially institutions and cultural frames. The conclusion hints at the research program developing from the concept of fictional expectations.     

Ecological embeddedness: An interrogation and refinement of the concept within the context of alternative food networks in the UK

Among their many ‘alternative’ characteristics, food networks that seek to reconfigure the relationship between producers and consumers are understood as having the potential to be beneficial for the rural environment and landscape. One of the ways in which this characteristic has been conceptualised is through the notion of ‘ecological embeddedness’. Although the roots of this concept lie in economic sociology, where the social embeddedness of economic relations has been the focus of interest, agro-food researchers have extended its meaning to suggest that alternative or ‘quality’ food production can also be seen as increasingly embedded in ‘natural’ or ecological processes. However, this paper argues that until now the notion of ecological embeddedness has lacked conceptual clarity. As such, the aim is to interrogate and refine the concept of embeddedness, specifically as it pertains to ecologies within the context of food production on-farm. Ecological embeddedness, it is argued, must encompass more than just recognition of the general influence of the natural environment on economic activity. Specifically, it must reflect a change in the relations between economic actors and the natural environment that produces a benefit to both. The paper also establishes how the concept of ecological embeddedness might be operationalised in research practice as a means of exploring the ecological dimensions of alternative food networks. An illustration of this empirical application is provided. The paper concludes by asserting the value of ecological embeddedness as a concept, in spite of the observed limitations of embeddedness in other contexts and the challenges that are associated with its ecological application.     

Conflicted emotions following trust-based interaction

We observed reports of conflicted (concurrent positive and negative) emotions activated after interactions in the Trust game. Our analyses reveal that activation of 20 emotional states following trust-based interaction is better explained by predictions derived from a multi-dimensional Recalibrational perspective than by predictions derived from two-dimensional Valence and Arousal perspectives. The Recalibrational perspective proposes that emotions are activated according to their functional features – for example, emotions help people achieve short or long-sighted goals by up or down-regulating behavioral propensities, whereas Valence and Arousal perspectives consider simpler hedonic dimensions lacking functional specificity. The Recalibrational perspective is also distinguished from the Valence and Arousal perspectives in that it predicts the possibility of conflicted emotions. We discuss the theoretical implications of having conflicted goals and the economic implications of having conflicted emotions.     

Transnational youth transitions: becoming adults between Vancouver and Hong Kong

In the context of the academic interest shown in the enduring transnationalism of contemporary migrants and in the modes of transitions to adulthood in different global settings, in this article we examine the transnational lives of adolescents moving between Vancouver (Canada) and Hong Kong. While there is a lot of literature on the parents' political and economic calculations, there is very little on how adolescents in these situations articulate their geographical sensibilities. We draw on three periods of fieldwork undertaken in 2002, 2008 and 2010 during which we employed a transnational methodology to interview young people in Vancouver and Hong Kong. We argue that becoming an adult involves a process in which, in their discussions about the geographical and emotional distance between themselves and their families, young people articulate their own complex emotions towards specific places in their transnational social field. Their families sporadically interrupt the adolescents' otherwise independent lives with fragmented modes of supervision. By examining the complex intentions and emotions behind circular migration from the perspective of transnational youth in a community of split families, we advance the discussion on transnational geographies, particularly of the family in the context of a flexible global economy.     

Reinstituting the Economic Process: (Re)embedding the Economy in Society and Nature

Polanyi argued that the project of creating a fully self-regulating market was utopian, in the sense of impossible. However, movement towards this utopia, the ever greater but never completed process of disembedding the economy from both society and nature, creates growing dislocations and tensions which call forth a counter movement. This double movement may be thought of as successive changes in the way in which the economic process is instituted. The focus of the paper is on the meaning of embeddedness, the ways in which the economy was reinstituted during the Great Transformation and the subsequent counter movements, and alternative approaches to further reinstituting the economy in ways that disembed it further or (re)embed it more firmly in society and nature. It is argued that prior to the creation of the capitalist market the economy was organically embedded in society and nature. However, the creation of separate economic institutions, the institution of the economic process as a distinct system with its own laws of motion, severed these organic links and the economy came to dominate both society and nature. Here, however, the symmetry between society and nature ends. Society has the capacity for conscious, purposeful action; nature does not. For the economy to be reinstituted in ways that create a sustainable organic relationship with nature, it must first be reinstituted in ways that bring it under social control.     

The managed heart revisited: health and social control1

In this paper I investigate emotional labour in the field of nursing. I show how new ideologies of health promotion have become attached to the prior agenda and already-embedded relationships which structure health provision. Beginning with an outline of health promotion principles and policies the paper goes on to trace how the radical dimensions of health promotion philosophies are subverted in practice by discussing data from a research project into nursing roles in health promotion. I present the data to show how nursing's focus on relationships and relationship skills create divisions of knowledge and information between ‘expert’ discourses located in the institutions of health provision and the everyday agenda of the populations using their services. In the final section of the paper I argue that a focus on the deployment of emotion work in specific social and institutional contexts provides a perspective on emotions as resources that are consciously drawn upon by actors in order to achieve socio-cultural and wider political ends.     

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND LOCALLY INITIATED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE NONMETROPOLITAN UNITED STATES

A community embeddedness perspective hypothesizes that nonmetropolitan localities high on entrepreneurial social infrastructure (ESI) are more successful at implementing economic development projects than those lacking ESI. ESI is a format for converting social capital into organizational forms that facilitate collective action. Logistic regression revealed that localities with projects were more likely to have an unbiased newspaper, multiple contributions by financial institutions to community projects, and more external linkages, Project communities place more emphasis on citizen involvement through civic organizations than through local government. Community-based patterns of interactions and organization are associated with successful collective economic development action.     

The Manipulation: Socio-economic decision making

We analyze one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma decisions made by participants of the high-stakes TV game show The Manipulation, and document the influence of social life factors on economic decisions, alongside the participants’ rational considerations. In particular, we employ a social psychology approach to provide a new perspective on the determinants of financial assistance. Our insights from the TV game are corroborated by a controlled laboratory experiment. We find that helping and sharing behavior in strategic situations is explained by Attribution Theory (AT) and beliefs about expected cooperativeness. Specifically, participants’ decisions are influenced by perceived controllability of opponents’ conditions (an attributional characteristic influencing perception of responsibility and related emotions) and social-relations-based beliefs regarding the opponents’ expected cooperativeness.     

Creative precarity? Young fashion designers as entrepreneurs in Russia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the careers of young fashion designers as entrepreneurs in Russia. It discusses entrepreneurial experiences and labour practices of fashion designers in the context of precarity: that is, the structural conditions characterized by a lack of social, economic and emotional security caused by a shift of responsibilities for the labour market from the state to the citizens. The article takes the perspective of designers’ agency and answers the question of how young fashion entrepreneurs deal with such structural conditions using state support, community support, organizational practices and emotional management. The article also focuses on creative labour in the broader context of the circumstances of a creative class in an authoritarian state. We argue that in today’s Russia, the discourse on the creative class is perhaps more important than the discourse on precarity, since belonging to the creative class is a source of political identity for fashion designers. The issue of precarity, then, can become a further basis for solidarity and political action. The research draws from 21 in-depth interviews with fashion designers and experts conducted in the cities of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk between 2015 and 2016.     

Abstimmungsprobleme in Dienstleistungsbeziehungen

In interactive service work customers necessarily take part in the service process as co-producers. Consequently, both the customers and the service workers are confronted with problems which can be conceived as social dilemmas. This article shows how these problems arise and how they can be solved. We analyze qualitative data on interactive service work using a rational action approach. The analysis shows that actors find themselves in dilemmatic situations, which would not allow them to achieve the optimal outcome of co-operation, if they would act according to the premises of the theory of rational action. On the other hand it is the interactive nature of co-production itself which not only generates social dilemmas but provides also for the means to resolve them: the mutual monitoring of the actions carried out by service worker and customer supplies them with informations about their willingness to co-operate. This may form the basis to overcome the social dilemmas inherent in service interaction.     

The Use of Body Movements and Gestures as Cues to Emotions in Younger and Older Adults

Eighty-two younger and older adults participated in a two-part study of the decoding of emotion through body movements and gestures. In the first part, younger and older adults identified emotions depicted in brief videotaped displays of young adult actors portraying emotional situations. In each display, the actors were silent and their faces were electronically blurred in order to isolate the body cues to emotion. Although both groups made accurate emotion identifications well above chance levels, older adults made more overall errors, and this was especially true for negative emotions. Moreover, their errors were more likely to reflect the misidentification of emotional displays as neutral in content. In the second part, younger and older adults rated the videotaped displays using scales reflecting several movement dimensions (e.g., form, tempo, force, and movement). The ratings of both age groups were in high agreement and provided reliable information about particular body cues to emotion. The errors made by older adults were linked to reactions to exaggerated or ambiguous body cues.     

Towards the strategies of modern societies: systems and social processes

While several sociological theories have traditionally dealt with rational action by human actors, little attention has been devoted to the possibilities for rational steering of the entire subsystems of functionally differentiated modern societies in the context of their increasing complexity. Although rational intentional action is clearly limited at the macro-level by the complexity emphasized by Luhmann's social systems theory, strategies are required to approach the normative ideal of active society as defined by Etzioni. Understanding the strategic processes requires micro–macro and agency–structure connections. A possible solution to understanding strategy as a social process in this respect is found in the adaptation of the three-level – individuality, reality and totality – approach of Sztompka's theory of social becoming.     

Social Capital and Communities of Place1

Abstract This paper develops a framework for examining the questions: Does social capital make a difference for well being in communities of place? How might rural sociologists utilize social capital to further well being in communities? The author reviews social capital literature, contrasting rational choice and embeddedness perspectives. Opting for a marriage between embeddedness and conflict theory, he introduces entrepreneurial social infrastructure (ESI) as an alternative to social capital. ESI adds to social capital the notions of equality, inclusion, and agency. Research results are presented which support the embeddedness approach: community-level action (the community field) is not simply an aggregation of individual or organizational actions within the community; social capital and ESI contribute jointly and independently to community action. Examining economic development as a form of collective action, the author concludes?the following: a) ESI contributes to economic development, and b) inclusiveness (internal solidarity) is more closely related to community self-development while industrial recruitment is better predicted by strong external ties.     

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.     

The Relationship between Economics and Sociology: The Contribution of Economic Sociology,Setting out from the Problem of Embeddedness

This essay aims to analyse the most recent acquisitions in economic sociology, setting out from the problem of embeddedness. Firstly, the contribution offered by Mark Granovetter shall be illustrated, demonstrating how the interpretation proposed by this scholar is concentrated on a structural–relational perspective that tends to trace the explanation of economic phenomena to a theory of social networks. In order to enrich and integrate this approach, the contribution offered by the new-institutionalist perspective in contemporary economic sociology will be emphasised, which has focused on the social construction of economic institutions. This current has underlined, on the one hand, the cognitive dimension of embeddedness, related to the way in which the uniformities structured by mental processes limit economic reasoning, and, on the other, the cultural dimension of embeddedness, concerning the role of collectively shared representations in the formation of economic goals. It will be concluded by illustrating the acquisitions of some theoretical perspectives linked to the polanyian tradition that have developed a ‘plural’ conception of economy, founded on the emphasis of socio-regulative principles, such as those of exchange, redistribution and reciprocity, which, in becoming hybrid, give shape to variable and historically anchored economic worlds. The concept of embeddedness roots historically and transmits a vision of economic processes as inseparable from non-economic institutions.     

Ärger in Organisationen — eine strukturationstheoretische Perspektive

Anger between colleagues is part of the daily life in organisations. Conflicts do not only imply very intense emotions, but annoyed actors also tend to strongly personalise them: Often, the blame is attributed to others. Typical consequences of these emotional distortions, which lead to anger, are continuous conflicts, health problems and a lower working efficiency. This article pleads to take more into consideration the structure of organisations in order to avoid these problems. By referring to the structuring theory (Giddens) which takes into account different structural components (Signification, legitimation and power) a general perspective of anger episodes can be developed. Organisational structures produce anger and anger reproduces organisational structures.Based on this assumption, several approaches point out the application of a more developed structuring theory of anger interactions in organisations.     

Walking an Emotional Tightrope: Managing Emotions in a Women's Prison

Until recently, the emotional experiences of women in prison have been overlooked by symbolic interactionists and social scientists. Similarly, research relevant to the sociology of emotions has not been explored in the social context of a correctional institution for women. The purpose of this study is to investigate emotional experiences from the unique perspective of incarcerated women. This research examines how women in prison perceive and manage their emotional lives while confined and asks whether their chosen strategies have an impact on their interactions and thus affect the institutional environment. Data were collected through in‐depth interviews with thirty‐five women incarcerated in a correctional institution located in the midwestern United States. Using a semistructured interview schedule, respondents were asked about a range of topics, one of which involved their emotional lives while incarcerated. Findings indicate these women define their emotional experiences as being simultaneously provocative and constrained. Respondents suggest that their emotional resources are individually, contextually, and culturally grounded. They discuss employing various strategies to manage their emotional lives while incarcerated, including diversions, spiritual pursuits, blocking exercises, self‐reflection, and humor. The majority of the techniques employed to control emotions are intrapersonal. Respondents describe personal efforts designed to manage their emotional experiences rather than share their feelings with others.     

Vom Experiment zur Praxis: Wie moralische Argumente wirtschaftliche Selbstinteressen beeinflussen

How do moral arguments influence economic self-interests? Behavioral economists try to answer this question using experiments, but their central results have not yet been tested in real economic life. A research project therefore reconstructed how moral arguments influenced economic self-interests in case studies of discussions about relocation. The results indicate that an orientation towards morality, as in the dictator- ultimatum- and collective goods game, also seems to influence how interests are defined and pursued in real economic life. Instead of maximizing economic self-interest, actors behave reciprocally. Results of behavioral experiments as well as the observation of case studies of economic behavior therefore hint towards economic actors that are influenced by reciprocity and social roles. This allows for a more precise understanding of economic behavior in many situations. Testing this in experiments of behavioral economics is in turn advocated based on the results of this article.