This paper seeks to clarify and strengthen the ways that cultural economy is used as an analytical tool and methodological approach to studying agro-food systems. The theoretical concept of cultural economy has received much attention in economic and cultural geography over the past decade. However, use of the term remains arguably vague and ambiguous. This paper argues that cultural economy is most constructive when regarded as a new epistemological approach to society and the economy. A focus on the ways that (...) food is known as “quality” represents the material and symbolic practices that contribute to a new way of thinking about the economy. This point is illustrated in a case study of japonica rice grown in northeast China. A unique combination of social, economic, political, historical, and geographical factors come together in this region to produce rice that is generally identified within China today as “quality” rice. Situating northeast japonica rice in a greater context of a “politics of quality” in Chinese society, this case emphasizes the value of cultural economy to understand agro-food systems. (shrink)

This article focuses upon the disagreement between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth about how to characterize the relation between social suffering and recognition struggles. For Honneth, social and political conflicts have their source in the "moral" wounds that arise from the myriad ways in which the basic human need for recognition is disregarded in unequal societies. Fraser criticizes Honneth for the uncritical subjectivism of his account of social suffering that reduces social oppression to psychic harm. Fraser therefore redefines misrecognition not (...) as a psychological injury but as "status subordination" understood as institutionalized patterns of discrimination and value inequality. My central argument is that while Fraser's critique of Honneth's subjectivist construal of recognition is largely justified, she falls into a counterveiling objectivism that prevents her from developing some of the central insights of her own paradigm. Her "non-identarian" rendering of recognition leads her to abandon an experiential or interpretative perspective that is associated with the idea of identity and, as a result, she cannot explain certain crucial aspects of political agency. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus is used to indicate a way beyond the naturalization of the cluster of emotions associated with social suffering that seems to be the inevitable consequence of Honneth's "ontology" of recognition. At the same time, the experiential emphasis of habitus mitigates the objectivism of Fraser's dualist paradigm showing how some of its central insights can be taken further through a materialist redefinition of identity and agency. (shrink)

El arte, la literatura o el patrimonio –la Cultura– son afectados de manera específica por la actividad empresarial. Se propone que, más allá del mecenazgo y el patrocinio, la Responsabilidad Cultural Empresarial –rce– abarca las distintas acciones que las empresas realizan para responder a las demandas culturales de sus grupos de interés y a los impactos generados en la Cultura. El artículo aborda la justificación normativa de la rce defendiendo, por una parte, que las empresas pueden alterar la vida cultural (...) de la sociedad no solo escogiendo la Cultura como su actividad de negocio sino también mediante sus acciones de Responsabilidad Social Empresarial. Por otra parte, se argumenta que las empresas tienen responsabilidades específicas en la promoción y protección de los bienes culturales dado su carácter público o cuasi público, y dado el rol social y político de las propias empresas.Arts, literature or heritage –Culture– are influenced by business activities in a specific way. It is argued that the Corporate Cultural Responsibility –CCE– goes beyond patronage and sponsorship comprising the variety of business initiatives to meet the cultural demands of the company stakeholders and to address its impacts on Culture. The paper addresses the normative justification of CCE defending, on the one hand, that firms may alter the cultural life of a community not only through its business operations but also through actions of Corporate Social Responsibility. On the other hand, it is argued that companies have specific responsibilities regarding the promotion and protection of cultural goods since these goods are public or quasi-public goods, and because of the social and political role of companies. (shrink)