The moral economy of grades and standards
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that grades and standards are part of the moral economy of the modern world, and that they both set norms for behavior and standardize (create uniformity).
About: This article is published in Journal of Rural Studies.The article was published on 2000-07-01. It has received 313 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Generally Accepted Auditing Standards & Standardization.
Citations
More filters
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the very expectation of disintermediation in the soybean supply chain is misleading, since lack of information and multiple intermediaries are seen as major obstacles preventing farmers from obtaining a higher price for their produce.
Abstract: Price information provision and disintermediation have often been considered means to empower farmers, since lack of information and multiple intermediaries are seen as major obstacles preventing farmers from obtaining a higher price for their produce. Using the example of soybean in Malwa, central India, which is a cash crop that links farmers to global consumers, this article argues that the very expectation of disintermediation in the soybean supply chain is misleading. India's position in these global networks puts farmers and intermediaries in Malwa in the position of price receivers: they are unable to influence the global price of soybean or manipulate its local price in any way. In this context, providing price information has negligible impact on the final price obtained by farmers. The potential for empowerment has to be understood more broadly, by mapping out the ways in which power is exercised by various actors in the marketplace — one of which is the determination of the quality of a farmer's crop. This article maps such possibilities by examining how norms regarding quality in soybean are created and enforced, and how they are influenced by broader logics that go beyond the soybean marketplace itself.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine how competing scale-making projects emerge in different layers of the Cuban tourism economy and how tourists and Cubans interact along contested chains of production and distribution of cigars, and therefore become entangled in bundles of ideas, discourses, practices and materialities.
Abstract: Taking scale as an object of analysis (Tsing 2000), this article examines how competing scale-making projects emerge in different layers of the Cuban tourism economy. I consider how tourists and Cubans interact along contested chains of production and distribution of cigars, and therefore become entangled in bundles of ideas, discourses, practices and materialities. These constitute different scaling propositions on which tourists and Cubans converge or diverge, and which inform the success of encounters within the tourism economy. Highlighted is the importance of understanding how scaling propositions are enacted and negotiated within tourism. I conclude that the realm of tourism is a particularly fruitful platform to investigate how competing scale-making projects and notions of scale are played out in the contemporary world.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a critical social science analysis of environmental accounting is presented to help specify how, when, and in what ways strengthening accounting capacity advances hybrid governance, and two major frictions are identified: Conventions for determining technical consensus and rules for determining levels of transaction costs.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors track the forms and practices of remuneration that structure production in the Indian construction industry and argue that these forms encode two quite different imaginations of work and the appropriate relations between employers and workers.
Abstract: ABSTRACT:The article tracks the forms and practices of remuneration that structure production in the Indian construction industry. As in other areas, construction in India is characterized by the widespread use of contract labor. Self-described \"modern\" construction sites, like the one I focus on in this article, present production as being governed by strict piece-rate contracts. Yet, as the article demonstrates, actual processes of production on the site were remunerated in multiple ways. While the main contracting company on the site was remunerated on a strict piece-rate basis, workers were almost always remunerated by a day wage. The vast majority of these workers were brought to the site under sub-contractors linked to them through networks of kinship, caste, and village residence, which enable long-term relations of credit and debt. The article argues that these forms of remuneration encode two quite different imaginations of work and the appropriate relations between employers and workers; what I call moral economies of remuneration. The forms of reciprocity that structure workers' remuneration imply long-term, if asymmetrical, obligations between doers and givers of work. The piece-rate envisions the employment relation as a finite market transaction. By attending to the tensions that arise within the production process, the article demonstrates that this is a not a tension between \"modern\" contract and \"traditional\" patronage. Rather, production was dependent on an imperfect translation between these two moral economies of remuneration. In the fraught negotiations on the site around the form of work's remuneration, sub-contractors, workers, and supervisors attempted to shift, maintain, and perhaps gain from this complex structure of production.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an ethnographic case study of the Icelandic fisheries is presented to show how the organisation of markets for fishing resources transforms rural economies and how new markets and property rights transform rural economies.
Abstract: How do new markets and property rights transform rural economies? Based on an ethnographic case study of the Icelandic fisheries, this article shows how the organisation of markets for fishing righ ...
9 citations
References
More filters
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present La Volonté de Savoir, the methodological introduction of a projected five-volume history of sexuality, which seems to have a special fascination for Foucault: the gradual emergence of medicine as an institution, the birth of political economy, demography and linguistics as human sciences, the invention of incarceration and confinement for the control of the "other" in society (the mad, the libertine, the criminal) and that special violence that lurks beneath the power to control discourse.
Abstract: This writer who has warned us of the “ideological” function of both the oeuvre and the author as unquestioned forms of discursive organization has gone quite far in constituting for both these “fictitious unities” the name (with all the problems of such a designation) Michel Foucault. One text under review, La Volonté de Savoir, is the methodological introduction of a projected five-volume history of sexuality. It will apparently circle back over that material which seems to have a special fascination for Foucault: the gradual emergence of medicine as an institution, the birth of political economy, demography and linguistics as “human sciences,” the invention of incarceration and confinement for the control of the “other” in society (the mad, the libertine, the criminal) and that special violence that lurks beneath the power to control discourse.
15,794 citations
"The moral economy of grades and sta..." refers background in this paper
...As Foucault (1977) has suggested, some, perhaps most, of these relations of power are benign....
[...]
Book•
01 Jan 1991
TL;DR: This article argued that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology, which allowed the formidable expansion of the Western empires.
Abstract: What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.
8,858 citations
"The moral economy of grades and sta..." refers background in this paper
...On the one hand, the social studies of science has been much in#uenced through the Actor Network Theory developed by Latour (1987, 1993) and Callon (Callon, 1991; Callon and Latour, 1992; Callon et al., 1986) among others (e.g., Law, 1994)....
[...]
Book•
01 Jan 1987
TL;DR: In this article, the quandary of the fact-builder is explored in the context of science and technology in a laboratory setting, and the model of diffusion versus translation is discussed.
Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction Opening Pandora's Black Box PART I FROM WEARER TO STRONGER RHETORIC Chapter I Literature Part A: Controversies Part B: When controversies flare up the literature becomes technical Part C: Writing texts that withstand the assaults of a hostile environment Conclusion: Numbers, more numbers Chapter 2 Laboratories Part A: From texts to things: A showdown Part B: Building up counter-laboratories Part C: Appealing (to) nature PART II FROM WEAR POINTS TO STRONGHOLDS Chapter 3 Machines Introduction: The quandary of the fact-builder Part A: Translating interests Part B: Keeping the interested groups in line Part C: The model of diffusion versus the model of translation Chapter 4 Insiders Out Part A: Interesting others in the laboratories Part B: Counting allies and resources PART III FROM SHORT TO LONGER NETWORKS Chapter 5 Tribunals of Reason Part A: The trials of rationality Part B: Sociologics Part C: Who needs hard facts? Chapter 6 Centres of calculation Prologue: The domestication of the savage mind Part A: Action at a distance Part B: Centres of calculation Part C: Metrologies Appendix 1
8,173 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1962
TL;DR: In the classic bestseller, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman presents his view of the proper role of competitive capitalism as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the classic bestseller, Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman presents his view of the proper role of competitive capitalism--the organization of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market--as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. Beginning with a discussion of principles of a liberal society, Friedman applies them to such constantly pressing problems as monetary policy, discrimination, education, income distribution, welfare, and poverty. "Milton Friedman is one of the nation's outstanding economists, distinguished for remarkable analytical powers and technical virtuosity. He is unfailingly enlightening, independent, courageous, penetrating, and above all, stimulating."-Henry Hazlitt, Newsweek "It is a rare professor who greatly alters the thinking of his professional colleagues. It's an even rarer one who helps transform the world. Friedman has done both."-Stephen Chapman, Chicago Tribune
7,026 citations
6,926 citations
"The moral economy of grades and sta..." refers background in this paper
...On the one hand, the social studies of science has been much in#uenced through the Actor Network Theory developed by Latour (1987, 1993) and Callon (Callon, 1991; Callon and Latour, 1992; Callon et al., 1986) among others (e.g., Law, 1994)....
[...]
...…of Edmund Stone: Mathematical Instruments are the means by which those noble sciences, geometry and philosophy, are render'd 8As both Rouse (1987) and Latour (1987) have noted, the illusion of universality is constructed by a set of speci"c events and actions that are always local in character....
[...]