Gifts,commodities, and social relations: A Maussian view of exchange

Sociologists have drawn on anthropological studies of gift exchange systems to help develop models of exchange in social life. This paper presents a reconsideration of the relatively neglected Maussian view of gift and commodity exchange, drawing on both Mauss'sThe Gift and recent work by anthropologists who have extended his ideas. The Maussian model illustrates the partiality of some sociological models of exchange by showing that people, objects, and social relations form a whole that is created and recreated in different ways when people transact with each other in gift and commodity relations. The paper concludes with an illustration of the utility of Mauss's model, showing how it can extend recent sociological discussions of the social meaning of objects.     

The Exchange of Aesthetics: Women's Work and ‘The Gift’

Drawing on empirical research data on the work of flight attendants, this paper will explore Marcel Mauss's theory of ‘gift’ exchange relations, with particular reference to his concern with the ‘exchange of aesthetics’ (Mauss 1954), as an analytical model which may contribute to our understanding of ‘women's work’ in contemporary Western societies, of which, we shall argue, the work of female flight attendants is a notable example. It will begin by locating the authors' analytical and theoretical concerns with ‘women's work’ within the context of recent empirical research. It will then go on to outline briefly a Maussian model of exchange relations and to identify the potential utility of this analytical model for the study of women's work. This paper then goes on to offer an analytical account of empirical research into the work of flight attendants and to analyse the ways in which airline service provision constitutes a critical case study of women's work, certain elements of which involve a form of ‘gift’ exchange relations which operate, not as an alternative to, but inside — and in the interests of — commodity exchange relations. Finally, in the light of recent feminist work, this paper will conclude by suggesting the wider implications of this analytical model for the study of gender and work.     

Rational exchange and trust: Business relationships in a fishing community

This paper assesses the hypothesis that in markets where information is lacking concerning the price and the quality of a commodity and the commodity is variable in its supply, sellers will tend to form long‐term, stable relationships with buyers. Data from a coastal Alabama community are used to test the nature of exchange relations between commercial shrimp fishers and the dealers to whom they sell. It is further hypothesized that the social aspects of these exchanges will better predict stable relationships than will economic aspects. The evidence presented supports the stated hypotheses. Finally, the relevance of this research for social theory is discussed.     

NETWORKING CAPITALISM: Network Construction and Control Effects In Direct Selling

Drawing on a qualitative study of direct selling in Taiwan, this article examines the process of network construction and its control effects over distributors. I found that weak ties, rather than strong ties, constitute major networks for distributors to expand their business. In order to consolidate trust within weak ties, distributors develop two major strategies: personalizing sales and familiarizing sponsorship. They are engaged in a multilevel performance of emotional labor in facing the audience of customers and fellow distributors. Social networks not only function as a facilitator of economic exchange but also become a meáns of labor control that permeates both public and private lives of distributors.     

Household Production and Symptoms of Stress in Post-Soviet Russian Villages1

Abstract This paper examines the impact of human capital (the number of working age household members), social capital (social exchange helping networks and community integration), technological capital (use of mechanical agricultural tools), and village of residence on stratification of Russian peasant households in the post-Soviet era. Findings from a 1995 survey of households in three Russian villages show that the number of working age adults in the household has the strongest influence on household agricultural production. Social capital and technological capital also are associated with differences in the amount of sales obtained from household production. One village, which is located in an oblast (province) which has a program to assist peasant households had substantially higher agricultural production than did the other two villages which are located in oblasti without such programs. The number of working age adults in the household, social exchange networks, and community attachment are negatively associated with symptoms of stress, while higher village levels of production are associated with higher average levels of symptoms of stress in the village. The implications of the findings for the future of Russian agriculture and Russian rural village life are discussed.     

Metabolism and colonization. Modes of production and the physical exchange between societies and nature

Written by a sociologist and a biologist, this paper attempts an interdisciplinary approach to describing the basic exchange relations between human societies and their natural environments. One type of exchange relation is termed ‘metabolism’ and related to the biological metabolism member organisms of societies require. A historical overview (part 1) demonstrates this exchange relation in terms of mass throughput per inhabitant to have grown in the course of human cultural evolution—without necessarily increasing the quality of life of those concerned—to the twentyfold it now amounts to in industrial societies (as is demonstrated empirically for Austria in part 3). A strategy of ‘contraction of physical metabolism’ (reduction of physical growth irrespective of ‘economic’ growth) of industrial societies is proposed as a strategic means of survival and possible ways to this goal are discussed quantitatively. The other exchange relation termed ‘colonization’ refers to treatments of natural environments that purposively change some components to render better exploitability (for the purpose of social metabolism), while still relying upon their basic self‐regenerating qualities. It is sketched how colonization strategies developed historically, and it is demonstrated empirically that industrial societies now use about 50% of the available plant biomass (the energetic basis of all animal life) upon their territories for human purposes (part 4). Part 5 classifies different ‘paradigms’ for judging the ‘harmfulness’ of social interventions into the environment and outlines the logic of an information system that would enable society to generate an awareness of its own interventions into nature. On the whole the paper presents a theoretical as well as an empirical attempt to view societies as physical systems (among other physical systems on this planet) and confront sociology with the paradigmatic task to analyze the social regulation of these physical processes.     

Gambling,Exchange Systems,and Moralities

History and ethnography show us that, across societies of the past and present, gambling varies considerably with respect to its organization, social meanings, and how it is regarded in moral terms. This paper presents a basic scheme for analyzing the relationship between gambling and society. A theoretical starting point is that reciprocity is fundamental to social and economic systems. An anthropological theory of exchange systems makes a broad distinction between a structural dimension (generalized versus balanced reciprocity) and a normative dimension (from voluntary to involuntary). A model of four basic forms of reciprocity, each having a characteristic exchange mode and morality, can thus be constructed. Gambling is here understood as an exchange system embedded in the reciprocal orders of society and having a necessary relationship to these; it can take on the characteristics of such an order or it can be regarded as conflicting with it. Much of the variation in the form and morality of gambling therefore emerges as systematic and explainable by a theory of forms of reciprocal exchange.     

The Gatekeeper

Gatekeepers control access to benefits that they do not own. When granted access, their clients incur obligations that take the form of fees owed to the gatekeeper. This paper examines a variety of forms that gatekeeping has historically taken, looking closely at the network positions that gatekeepers have occupied. Not previously resolved is what determines the size of the client's obligation. The theory presented here predicts 1) the size of that obligation from the value to the client of the access sought. It also predicts that 2) to benefit, gatekeepers must monopolize their positions, or, failing monopolization, 3) must organize to form a shared monopoly. In exchange networks, gatekeeping takes the form of "ordering," a new structural power condition. Resistance equations generate exact quantitative values for hypotheses expressing the three predictions above. Experimental tests in the well-understood context of exchange networks offer strong support for the hypotheses.     

Alliances Across Ideologies: Networking with NGOs in a Tourism Dispute in Northern Bali

This paper explores how local actors form alliances and join networks with (inter-)national NGOs working on religious, political and environmental issues in a dispute over tourism development in northern Bali. All of these actors construct a particular concept of landscape which serves their respective goals to contest or defend the planned large-scale tourism projects. Three of these conceptual framings are identified as playing a major role in the conflict: (1) a spiritual Hindu-Balinese perspective mobilised by tourism protesters and NGOs; in alliance with (2) views on landscape based on sustainability and conservation powerfully represented by international NGOs; clashing with (3) a material and economic view of landscape by international investors, who consider land primarily as a commodity generating economic value. These three contrasting views and resulting networks provide an instrument of moral and political pressure for the contending parties in this conflict over natural resources and tourism development.     

EXPLAINING COMMUNICATION DISPLACEMENT AND LARGE-SCALE SOCIAL CHANGE IN CORE NETWORKS

Decline in the size and diversity of American's core networks has been tied to the displacement of face-to-face interaction and to lower societal well-being. Comparing core networks in the United States, Norway, and Ukraine, we reject the conclusions that frequent in-person contact predicts individual well-being and that large/diverse networks predict broader societal well-being. Individuals of lower socioeconomic status (SES) and societies with lower levels of overall prosperity have higher rates of in-person contact. Internet use is associated with higher in-person contact for the socioeconomically advantaged but lower rates of in-person contact for the disadvantaged. In-person and ICT-based contact is generally associated with maintaining a larger network, but in societies of lower well-being frequent interaction impedes the ability to maintain a large network. In contrast to the positive relationship between individual SES and network size, societal prosperity has a negative relationship to network size. Findings are discussed in relation to social support, democratic engagement, and the digital divide.     

Visions of power: ideology and practice in the American garage sale

In this article, we examine ideological statements reflected in, and to a small extent created by, people's participation in garage sales.¹ Although the article touches upon the economics of garage sales, its focus is on ideology, about how people understand what they are doing when they buy and sell, and how this relates to their more general perception of the social world and their position in it. The way people discuss their participation in garage sales tells a great deal about how they understand their worlds: patterns of work and consumption, claims (especially by women and the aged) that their daily activities have more dignity than is normally afforded them within society, a felt need for moral and practical networks. The expression of ‘oppositional culture’in the statements garage sale participants make to describe their lives is certainly underdeveloped. It is not free of the dominant ideology, cannot be the basis of class-conscious political practice and in present form poses little danger to any social institution (except perhaps department stores). Still it does contain, in shadowy form, seminal statements in contradiction to what is generally regarded as the dominant ideology. We will call these emerging elements ‘prefigurative cultural formations’, as in vague form they connote emergent social values. Further, we will argue that these prefigurative cultural formations are grouped into discrete ideological claims that we call ‘Visions of Power, each of which speaks to the empowerment of subordinate groups. We will discuss four specific Visions of Power: reclaiming control of one's work, creating a sense of social justice, beating the system, and feeling oneself a part of a nurturing community. Before attempting to demonstrate the utility of these concepts in understanding forms of belief reflected in garage sales and other informal economic activities, we will briefly explore our approach to ideology, and will attempt to situate it within the contemporary debate on the nature of ideology.     

Pornography in small places and other spaces

This article investigates pornographic web-based media at a time when commercial pornography has flooded the Internet and pockets of sex activism are budding alongside the porn boom. Pornography moving freely across borders is foremost a capitalist vision, but the web’s sexual potency is equally defined by web users and artists who visit and maintain peer-to-peer networks for producing and sharing sexually explicit materials. Revisiting Foucault’s notion of space as ‘heterotopia’, networked sexual communication and pornography are shown to permeate physical places and other spaces. Web users cultivate attachments to everyday places and spaces other than the ones they routinely inhabit. Networked sexual agency materializes desire far beyond the confines of community rituals and commodity industries. Besides the fact that porn industries expand their markets and diversify products, sex communities emerge alongside these markets and play a vital role in negotiating sexuality. The article shows how the Internets decentralized mechanisms of power and communication, including debating societies and playgrounds, have entered the realm of online porn and sexuality. Developing a theoretical notion of space as other spaces, the article unfolds the sexual web as exuberant, dispersed in bodies and cultures, yet forcefully regulated by global corporations and nation-state governments.     

The “Hamburger Connection” as Ecologically Unequal Exchange: A Cross‐National Investigation of Beef Exports and Deforestation in Less‐Developed Countries

This study explores Norman Myers's concept of the “hamburger connection” as a form of ecologically unequal exchange, where more‐developed nations are able to transfer the environmental costs of beef consumption to less‐developed nations. I used ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to test whether deforestation in less‐developed nations is associated with the vertical flow of beef exports to more‐developed nations. An interaction term also examines whether this relationship is more pronounced in Latin American nations, as posited by Myers. The sample includes all nondesert, less‐developed nations for which there are available data across all indicators (N= 48). Overall, the results confirm the tested hypotheses. The findings also provide unique contextual support for ecologically unequal exchange theory by demonstrating that unequal trade relationships can operate at the level of a single commodity type.     

Environmental certification of forests: The evolution of environmental governance in a commodity network

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) influence social and environmental aspects of commodity production through certification schemes like organic and forest certification. As these become mainstream, however, they are often compromised by the interests of more powerful agents. Utilizing the concept of governance in global commodity networks, this article examines the mainstreaming of forest certification. By working with retailers, forest certification expanded rapidly. The retailer focus, however, limits the spread of forest certification among medium-sized, small, and community forest management operations. It also raises questions of fairness because it imposes costs on forest managers without providing compensation through higher prices. NGOs now implement programs to make Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification more accessible and more useful to forest managers, but these do not resolve the imbalance of power between the big retailers demanding certification and the small forest managers who must absorb increased costs. The dominance of big retailers in commodity networks provides an attractive route to rapidly mainstream certification schemes, but it also limits their reach and compromises their equity.     

PRICE-QUANTITY ADJUSTMENTS IN A MACRO-DISEQUILIBRIUM MODEL

This paper studies the dynamic properties of a simple macro-economic model where exchange takes place outside equilibrium. It introduces an explicit treatment of the way the economic agents form sales expectations over time and specifies price and wages adjustments. This allows an analysis of the price-quantity dynamics of an ongoing Neo-Keynesian economy. The global stability properties of the full employment equilibrium are established although Keynesian results characterize the short run. Unemployment equilibria can only occur when extreme cases of pessimistic expectations are considered.     

Theories of network exchange: Anomalies,desirable properties,and critical networks

The present study evaluates four well-known theories of exchange in networks. In previous research these theories’ predictions were compared for a small set of networks using experimental data. We compared their predictions for all 12,112 networks up to size 8. By comparing these predictions we (i) identified anomalies in theories of network exchange, (ii) investigated to what extent the theories satisfy basic principles of exchange, (iii) identified ‘critical’ networks for which predictions are very different. We conclude that exchange in networks is not yet well understood.     

'We are Irish Everywhere': Irish Immigrant Networks in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia

In the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, showed a strong interest in the affairs of Ireland and its residents. Although a distinct minority in these 'southern' cities, they formed networks through societies, clubs, militias and Irish nationalist organisations to encourage social activities and ethnic connections among their fellow countrymen and those friendly towards Irish interests. These groups provided opportunities for upwardly-mobile immigrants to improve their social status in America, while retaining their 'Irishness'. Charity towards new migrants was thus an important element in retaining ethnicity. Irish Protestants initially dominated these networks, but increasingly, as the century progressed, Irish and Irish-American Catholics came to prominence. Nonetheless, interdenominational networks remained strong. Class and sectarian divisions within the Irish communities of these two cities were not as deep or rigid as they were in some other Irish-American communities. Overall this study highlights the great importance of immigrant networks in assuring Irish integration into host societies.     

Track three diplomacy and human rights in Southeast Asia: the Asia Pacific Coalition for East Timor

Transnational networks of non‐government organizations are increasingly becoming a fixture in international relations, particularly their contribution to traditional notions of diplomacy and its objectives. Less noticed, however, is the involvement of transnational NGO networks in alternative channels for diplomatic exchange, which have been referred to as ‘track three diplomacy’. Described as a form of civil society that transcends borders and nationalities, track three networks and activities involve NGO networks that are movement based, and concerned primarily with raising public consciousness over issues. While their direct influence on formal processes of foreign policy‐making has been limited, they have contributed to expanding both the scope of debate in international relations and the breadth of participation in those debates. Track three networks provide a forum for those communities marginalized by an international system that gives primacy of place to states and their officially‐declared concerns. Their impact is limited, however, by their lack of institutionalization and their reluctance to cooperate with government agencies – an issue that goes towards both their effectiveness and their identity in the long‐term.     

Themes on circulation in the third world

"This article focuses upon circulation, or reciprocal flows of people, with specific reference to Third World societies." Aspects considered include attempts to standardize terminology and to formulate typologies of population movement; the development of explanatory models of circulation and modernization, social networks, family welfare, and capitalism; and "the transfer of methods and concepts to societies and populations different from those from which they initially evolved and in which they were first tested."     

The stability of exchange networks

Economic and sociological exchange theories predict divisions of exchange benefits given an assumed fixed network of exchange relations. Since network structure has been found to have a large impact on actors’ payoffs, actors have strong incentives for network change. We answer the question what happens to both the network structure and actor payoffs when myopic actors change their links in order to maximize their payoffs. We investigate the networks that are stable, the networks that are efficient or egalitarian with varying tie costs, and the occurrence of social dilemmas. Only few networks are stable over a wide range of tie costs, and all of them can be divided into two types: efficient networks consisting of only dyads and at most one isolate, and Pareto efficient and egalitarian cycles with an odd number of actors. Social dilemmas are observed in even-sized networks at low tie costs.