In March 1980, the oil-platform Alexander L. Kielland capsized in the North Sea resulting in the death of 123 workers. The Norwegian inquiry into the disaster was closed to the public and the survi...

Straipsnyje svarstomos prancūzų sociologo Pierreʼo Bourdieu meno sociologijos idėjos, parankios tyrinėti sovietmečio literatūros laukui. Glaustai pristatomi ir aptariami pagrindiniai literatūros lauko funkcionavimą apibrėžiantys konceptai ir jų vartosena, formuluojami šios metodologijos probleminiai aspektai, trumpai apžvelgiama Bourdieu darbų kritinė recepcija užsienyje ir jų taikymas Lietuvoje.

This article offers to unravel lines of both continuity and change in Bourdieu's repeated return to the topic of the gift throughout his intellectual career. While this periodical revisiting of the gift may seem at first like mere repetition, a closer reading reveals three successive and cumulative phases in his gift theory, each adding a new layer of analytical and normative inflections. Emerging from these three phases is a trajectory marked by systematic theoretical consolidation but also growing dilemmas and inner (...) tensions, even to the point of self-contradiction: starting from a critical debunking of the disinterested gift as sincere but obfuscating fiction, it culminates with a positive, prescriptive valorization of disinterestedness as something which needs be cultivated in our very own times. Challenging his vision, as it were, ' from within, "these inner tensions and developments amount to an intriguing, inverted case of Bourdieu's own idea of "double truth, "all the more significant since it pertains to a topic that he defined as playing a paradigmatic function in his general theoretical approach. (shrink)

The popularity of Thomas Piketty’s research on wealth inequality has drawn attention to a curious question: why was widening wealth inequality largely neglected by mainstream economists in recent decades? To explore and explain that neglect, I draw on the writing of the early neoclassical economist John Bates Clark, who introduced the notion of the marginal productivity of income distribution at the end of the nineteenth century. I then turn to Piketty’s Capital in order to analyze the salience of marginal productivity (...) theories of income today. I suggest that most of the criticism and praise for Piketty’s research is focused on data that are accessible and measurable, obscuring attention to questions over whether current methods for measuring economic capital are defensible or not. My overarching aim is to explore how “absent” data in economics as a whole help to reinforce blind spots within mainstream economic theory. (shrink)