The Social Marketability of Self: Toward a New Theory of Social Deviance

Abstract

Deviance theory has problems in accounting for. (a) the form deviance takes within and between social groups, and (b) why individuals continue or discontinue deviant careers and responses. This paper deals with these problems by providing a new conceptualization of social deviance. Essentially, the theory is a combination of two ideas. First, we can all be thought of as social commodities; our commodity value (marketability) is based on the qualities we possess that others desire. Second, we all desire certain identities (ideas of who we are or would like to be) validated by others through their actions. Deviance is viewed as a response to strains involving this marketability-identity nexus that is in a continuous process of change.     

Consumption and digital commodities in the everyday

The category of the everyday has designated in social theory the remainder, what is left over after the important regions of politics and production. This left consumption in the under-theorized domain of the everyday. Since Veblen – and more recently Baudrillard and de Certeau – consumption has been reconfigured as significant in its own right, as a complex, articulated area related directly to culture. Liberal thinkers have also claimed consumer activity as central to society, as the domain where the individual is realized. This paper will review these positions and attempt to develop an understanding of consumption in daily life in relation to digital cultural objects. It will also argue that these mediated commodities, in the practices of appropriation connected with them, configure subjects in ways that are difficult to reconcile with existing structures of domination.     

HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION

The 2006 Canada census is used, along with a well‐known model of household production, to estimate the value of household commodities produced by gay, lesbian, and heterosexual couples. The results show some intriguing differences and similarities. Unlike heterosexuals, gay and lesbian couples respond differently to changes in the cost of time. However, all couples are characterized by the importance of market goods over time and the importance of human capital in the market over the home, with respect to household production. Hence, although there are differences in the sexual division of labor between households of different sexual orientations, the value of household commodities is mostly driven by differences in the amount of market goods used in the home. Market goods are determined by income, and differences in income within a couple‐type swamp differences in income across couple‐types, and as a result there is no statistical difference in the value of household commodities produced across the three sexual orientations. (JEL D13)     

A CHOICE THEORETIC MODEL OF THE OPTIMAL USE AND ISSUANCE OF TRADE CREDIT

This paper develops an extended inventory theoretic model for the purpose of analyzing the optimal use and issuance of trade credit. One significant result is that the incentives payments costs associated with commodity transactions and from the existence of positive per unit cost associated with storing commodities. A further important result is that the cost charged by the firm in return for its issuance of credit consists in firm earning asset holdings, and a risk premium reflecting the possibility of default on the part of the household.     

ON THE RELATIVE EFFICIENCY OF CASH TRANSFERS AND SUBSIDIES

This paper considers the relative efficiency of cash grants and subsidies when society's goal is to raise the welfare of a household. When the head of the household makes all consumption decisions, a principal-agent problem is created: the head acts as the agent of the government in allocating the transferred resources. Subsidies to commodities with particular characteristics may be a more efficient way to guarantee that benefits are shared within the household. Though related to the old notion of paternalism, this theory leads to more specific predictions regarding the kinds of commodities that can be efficiently subsidized.     

Objective interpersonal comparisons of utility

 This paper examines the problem of distilling conflicting interpersonal comparisons into a single set of interpersonal comparisons. The mapping that achieves this has a richer co-domain than all social choice problems (and a richer domain than most social choice problems). The set of mappings satisfying a mild set of restrictions is very small. If interpersonal comparisons embody ratio-scale comparability then the mapping is Cobb–Douglas in form; if interpersonal comparisons embody no more than level and difference comparability then the mapping must be dictatorial and it is impossible to combine different interpersonal comparisons. Received: 16 February 1995/Accepted: 13 October 1995     

Commodity Agriculture,Civic Agriculture and the Future of U.S. Farming*

Abstract Commodity agriculture and civic agriculture represent two distinct types of farming found in the U.S. today. Commodity agriculture is grounded on the belief that the primary objectives of farming should be to produce as much food/fiber as possible for the least cost. It is driven by the twin goals of productivity and efficiency. Civic agriculture, on the other hand, represents the rebirth of a more locally oriented agriculture and food system. Using data from the 1992 and 1997 Censuses of Agriculture and other secondary data sets, we examine factors and conditions associated with the presence and growth of both types of agriculture. Our findings show that civic agriculture is associated with particular commodities and with specific social, economic and demographic characteristics of localities. Commodity agriculture, on the other hand, is more sensitive to the classic economic factors of production, namely, land, labor, and capital.     

Local Identity, Cultural Commodities, and Development in Rural Japan: The Potential as Viewed by Cultural Producers and Local Residents

Abstract:  This paper considers the development potential of rural and highly peripheral areas of Japan, focusing on local factors of development, together with local identity and cultural commodities, as these are incorporated into what has been called the culture economy. Based on a survey of informed local residents and another of local cultural commodities producers, the paper alludes to what constitutes a culture economy for rural settings and identifies several key aspects related to the process of such a cultural commodities-based approach to development. While confirming the importance of identity and cultural commodities in the local development profile of rural settings, the paper sets the groundwork for further research concerning the complex process for how such development can be achieved. The main themes identified for further research include both the nature and role of residents' solidarity together with the combinative nature of government support and local entrepreneurship in the local culture economy on the one hand, and the character of the advertising and media representation by which cultural commodities are created and maintained on the other.     

Standardization as a Means for Globalizing a Commodity: The Case of Rapeseed in China*

Abstract Not all commodities are things, nor are all things available in society commodities. Then, what are commodities? Using the case of rapeseed and its products in China, this paper examines the role of grades and standards (G&S) in simultaneously determining the life of things as commodities and the position of humans as market participants. In the first section, we summarize our conceptual understandings of commodities. Next, the paper examines tests and trials to which rapeseed in China were subjected by the mid 1990s. We then discuss how G&S represent political processes among commodity chain actors for creating, legitimizing and maintaining the social relations between things and people. Lastly, we discuss our conclusion that the analysis of tests and trials helps us understand the process of commodification as simultaneous transformations of humans and things in a commodity chain while reorganizing linkages among these actors.     

A characterization of the uniform rule with several commodities and agents

We consider a problem of allocating infinitely divisible commodities among a group of agents. More specifically, there are several commodities to be allocated and agents have continuous, strictly convex, and separable preferences. We establish that a rule satisfies strategy-proofness, unanimity, weak symmetry, and nonbossiness if and only if it is the uniform rule. This result extends to the class of continuous, strictly convex, and multidimensional single-peaked preferences.     

Reconciling commodities and personal relations in industrial society

Conclusions I began this article with Colin Campbell's lament about the productionist bias in sociology and the related point that most sociologists concerned with consumption have ignored private meanings and small-scale structures in favor of public meanings and large-scale structures. This article calls attention to and builds on an emerging alternative approach to what happens after production, using an understanding of the social nature of objects that springs from Marcel Mauss's distinction between gifts and commodities.Mauss's model directs attention to the conflict in industrial societies between the two realms of commodity exchange and gift exchange, which I have cast as the conflict between the world of work and the world of family, and as the contrast between commodities and possessions. Thus, the model directs attention to the fact that objects are not simply transformed in production and displayed in consumption. However important these facts may be for understanding objects and society, they do not exhaust the important ways that people experience, use, and think about the objects that surround them. In particular, Mauss's model throws into relief the problematic nature of the objects that surround us and that we use in our social relations. And in doing so it directs attention to the ways that people try to reconstruct and redefine those objects by transforming them into personal possessions. This transformation makes objects acquired as commodities suitable for gift transactions, and hence suitable for the key task of recreating social relationships and social identities, the task of creating, not merely defining, who we are and how we are related to each other.Although the Maussian model addresses many of the links between people in the worlds of work and the home, and many of the ways that objects are part of these links, I am concerned here primarily with the ways that people can appropriate commodities in the process of purchase: shopping. This concern with shopping points out the social significance of retail trade, which I take to include advertising and shopping. This is not simply a passive conduit between production and consumption. Instead, it is an important point at which objects begin to leave the realm of work, commodities, and commodity relations and enter the realm of home, possessions, and gift relations. Shopping is an ubiquitous activity in industrial society and one that is highly significant culturally: we spend vast amounts of time, energy, money, and attention on it. Doubtless part of the reason for this is utilitarian, for we need to buy to live, but it would be foolish to reduce the significance of shopping to some combination of the need of individuals to acquire in order to survive and the need of companies to generate demand in order to profit. Thus, retail trade needs to be seen as well as a set of relations and transactions between seller and buyer that define and are defined by the objects and services involved, their history, and their future. My focus on purchasing food in supermarkets has the advantage of throwing into relief the problem of appropriation, because of the impersonality of object and social relations in large, self-service supermarkets. However, the very extremity of this example can create a false impression. As I noted, in other forms of shopping the social relations between buyer and seller, like the social identity of objects, can be more personal. This personality can be real, as when buyer and seller know each other or where the object is hand-made or even unique. Alternatively, it can be more purely symbolic, as when the selling company touts itself or its employees as friendly and caring or where the manufacturer advertises the personal nature of its commodities. In some cases, indeed, the manufacturing or trading company can present itself in such a way that the company itself becomes the person with whom the purchaser transacts. In addition, because of the focus on the appropriation of commodities in purchasing, I have touched only briefly on production and the world of work more generally. As does life at home, so life at work involves the transaction of objects and labor. Relations at work, then, will shape and be shaped by the nature of what is transacted. Co-workers who transact things that are more clearly stamped with their own identity, as among service workers and craft producers, will likely have more personal relations with fellow workers than will those who transact things that are themselves relatively impersonal, as in assembly-line production. This variability in the objects and relations at work suggests that people will have diverse understandings of work, and hence of manufactured objects more generally, which will affect the need they feel to appropriate commodities. In all, though, the point of this article is simple. People use objects to create and recreate personal social identities and relationships, and in industrial capitalist societies these objects are likely to be produced and purchased as commodities and understood as manufactures in Miller's sense. Our experience with and understanding of the production and sale of objects will affect the way we use them in transactions that create and recreate social identity and relationship, and will affect our understanding of the social identities and relationships that are created and recreated. Thus, the objects that people use in social relationships mediate between realms of economy and society, between the public realms where those objects are produced and distributed, and the private realms where those objects are transacted as part of social reproduction. The fact of this mediation and its effects on people's understanding of objects and social relations deserve careful attention.

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Market overreach: The student as customer

This paper explores the market model's influence in redefining the relationship between teachers and students within the college and university. Viewing the student as a customer rather than as a “worker” or “apprentice” is argued to have created several problems. The case is made that with market forces leading to the substitution of purchased commodities for “production for self,” the role of the student in actively participating in the learning process is threatened. Several trends, including grade inflation, shortened contact hours, and the redefinition of study time are offered as evidence that the non-salable components of higher education are declining in importance.     

Coalitional economies with public projects

We prove that the welfare theorems hold in the framework of coalitional exchange economies with public projects, both in case of pure exchange and in the presence of production. The space of agents is assumed to be non-atomic (single traders are negligible) and infinitely many commodities are allowed to be present on the market.     

物联网在特殊高低端物品物流服务中的应用

我国目前的物流服务水平整体偏低,对于一些易燃、易爆、易腐以及一些货值较高的商品的物流服务中存在着更多问题。由于不同种类的商品其物流服务活动有显著的差异,尤其是一些带有特殊性的商品,所以本文首先将这些产品进行高端、低端种类的划分,然后把物联网的技术引入这些高低端商品的物流服务活动中,分别构建基于物联网的高低端商品物流服务系统,并且通过此系统来加强对高低端商品的物流服务过程的全面控制、全面监控,有效保证产品的质量和避免事故的发生,从而实现高效、高质的物流服务。     

Standards and the Form of Agreement 2002 Presidential Address Western Economic Association

Contract stipulations tend to be subject to commodity standards. Standards make it clearer what transactors have agreed upon. They also bring stipulations from different contracts under a common denominator. The lower the cost of measuring an attribute and the wider the range of its application, the higher the likelihood that the attribute will become subject to new standards. New standards are predicted to increase the role of contracts in agreements and to reduce that of long-term relations; to lower the prices of the commodities that use the standards; to increase the rate of theft of these commodities; and, by making it clearer what it is that parties exchange, to reduce the level of vertical integration. Finally, new standards propel markets toward perfect competition.     

EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF CONSUMER DEMAND BEHAVIOR USING LABORATORY ANIMALS*

Using laboratory animals as subjects, two series of experimental studies of consumer demand behavior are reported. The experiments show that laboratory animals will change consumption patterns in response to changes in the budget set, consuming more of the lower priced commodities and less of the higher priced commodities. Large rotations in the budget line for essential commodities resulted in severe disruption of consumer behavior. The experiments demonstrate the feasibility of using non-human subjects in laboratory studies of economic behavior.     

Metropolitan Proximity and U.S. Agricultural Productivity, 1978–1997*

Abstract Metropolitan encroachment into surrounding countrysides has had noticeable consequences on American agriculture. This research examines gross farm sales in five categories of crops and five categories of livestock and poultry by county proximity to metropolitan areas. A seven‐category classification of counties was derived from the 1983 and 1993 Economic Research Service/Beale rural‐urban codes and used in the analysis. Our findings showed a significant metropolitan influence on agricultural sales of crop and livestock commodities, particularly those commodities that can be intensively produced on few numbers of acres. Some of this influence is attributed to the rapid growth of the urban areas during the past quarter century. Our results challenge widely‐held traditional perceptions about the spatial organization of agricultural production in the United States.     

Consumption,time and the environment

This paper combines a time-allocation approach with a model of economic dynamics, based on the accumulation of human capital, and constrained by the environment. Consumption is modelled as an activity, combining time and commodities, and embedded in the environment. An economic interpretation for a structural shortage of time in consumption activities is suggested. It is also shown, that the environmental embeddedness of consumption can contribute to restoring more balanced proportions of time and commodities in consumption. In a dynamic setting the paper also discusses the effects of discounting on consumption, the use of time and the environment. It is found that, within a certain range of the rate of discount, a ‘discounting trap’ may arise, significantly depressing the level of environmental quality in the long-run equilibrium.     

RELATIVE PRICE LINEARITY AND JRC EQUILIBRIUM

A theoretical explanation is given which resolves the relative price nonlinearity problem in household production models where the attributes are market produced. It is shown that in a Lancasterian framework with markets of a modified Chamberlin type kinked demand curves can be derived which, together with large scale economies, lead to a market equilibrium where all goods are just relevant commodities (JRC) and the characteristics frontier is linear (LCF). A simultaneous testing procedure is proposed to estimate the objective structure among inputs.     

'Traveling Barbies' and rolling blackouts Images of mobility in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding

Abstract

This article proposes to read Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding through a critical framework provided by transnational anthropology. Such a framework suggests that approaches celebrating transnational mobility must be balanced against nationally specific forms of constraint. It is argued that Monsoon Wedding bears out precisely such a balance. Nair's film suggests that the mobility of human lives may not be quite as unfettered as that of cultural commodities. Moreover, the filmic narrative insists on a differentiation within the Indian diasporic community. Similarly, some theorists of transnationalism have cautioned that the concept of a 'diasporic community' may serve to obfuscate class distinctions. At the same time, Nair's film is read in conjunction with theories of commodity circulation. Through the image of the 'traveling Barbie', this article explores the ways in which US cultural commodities may be indigenized, while also suggesting that Indians at 'home' may hardly benefit from such indigenization. Rather, Non-Resident Indians may travel from the US to India to buy a token of their own 'Americanness' in Delhi.