A distinctive feature of modern capitalist societies is the tendency of the market to take over the production, maintenance, and distribution of goods that were previously produced, maintained, and distributed by nonmarket means. Yet, there is a wide range of disagreement regarding the proper extent of the market in providing many goods. Labor has been treated as a commodity since the advent of capitalism, but not without significant and continuing challenges to this arrangement. Other goods whose production for and distribution (...) on the market are currently the subject of dispute include sexual intercourse, human blood, and human body parts such as kidneys. How can we determine which goods are properly subjects of market transactions and which are not? The purpose of this article is to propose a theory of what makes economic goods differ from other kinds of goods, which can help to answer this question. (shrink)

Alternative currencies are means of payment that circulate alongside—as an alternative or complement to—official currencies. While these currencies have existed for a long time, both society and academia have shown a renewed interest in their potential to decentralize the governance of monetary affairs and to bring people and organizations together in more ethical or sustainable ways. This article is a review of the ethical and philosophical implications of these alternative monetary projects. We first discuss various classifications of these currencies before (...) analyzing the ethical challenges linked to the way they tackle social and environmental issues. We also examine the incentive-based and coercive mechanisms used by these currencies from an ethical perspective and debate the promises and perils of monetary decentralization and democracy. We conclude by identifying an agenda for future research. (shrink)

Društvo zasnovano na znanju je ekspertno društvo koje za svoje funkcioniranje koristi računarsku tehnologiju, znanje dizajniranja sistema za rješavanje problema organiziranjem struktura sektora društvene ontologije po uzoru na formalizirane sisteme koji se grade iz relacionih blokova podataka i algoritama ili ustanovljenih procedura komponiranja ovih blokova. Prihvatanje ovih metoda upravljanja društvom je osnova društvenog inženjeringa, a tehnokratska kompetentnost kojom se označava sposobnost pojedinaca i grupa da dizajniraju funkcije društva zasnovanog na znanju upravljanja postala je ideologija modernih društava. U cijeloj Evropi, a (...) prije svega u znanstvenim i obrazovnim institucijama, u toku je formiranje ekspertnih timova, mreža odličnosti ili kompetentnosti, integriranih projekata i resusra itd. iz čijeg se angažmana trebaju dobiti formalizirani obrazci donošenja odluka i rješenja u upravljanju društvom. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Freedom’s Right, Axel Honneth articulates the social freedom of friendship with reference to its institutionalised norms. These action norms, however, are not specific to friendship; they apply to modern intimacy per se. Such non-specificity cannot adequately account for the experience of social freedom in friendship. Addressing this issue, I evaluate friendship as a form of recognition and identify a generative recognition deficit functional to its relational autonomy. Then, taking Honneth’s institutional approach to friendship as a point of departure, I (...) ascertain an institutional deficit that both sustains friendship’s autonomy and constrains the generalisability of its social freedom by way of institutional connectivity to heterosexuality. I suggest that only a differentiating approach to friendship that fathoms its extraordinary position among interpersonal relationships can yield new insights. That done, friendship can in turn provide a prism through which to assess the conceptual approach... (shrink)

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show (...) how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life. (shrink)

This article introduces the idea of ‘dependence subtexts’ to explain how the stories that we encounter in property theory and public rhetoric function to make some actors appear ‘independent’, and thus capable of acquiring property in their own right, while making other actors appear ‘dependent’ and thus incapable of acquiring property. The argument develops the idea of ‘dependence subtexts’ out of the work of legal scholar Carol Rose and political theorist Carole Pateman, before using it as a tool for contrasting (...) the canonical property stories of John Locke and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. We argue that the link between property and dependence provides a useful starting point for understanding issues of economic justice that share a common political problem: how do we choose to govern the relation between dependence and independence through the institution of property? (shrink)

This special issue introduces the study of financial technologies and finance to the field of philosophy of technology, bringing together two different fields that have not traditionally been in dialogue. The included articles are: Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain, by Martin Zeilinger; Fundamentals of Algorithmic Markets: Liquidity, Contingency, and the Incomputability of Exchange, by Laura Lotti; ‘Crises of Modernity’ Discourses and the Rise of Financial Technologies in a Contested Mechanized World, by Marinus Ossewaarde; Two (...) Technical Images: Blockchain and High-Frequency Trading, by Diego Viana; and The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies, by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh. (shrink)

Mutual feedback between human-made environments and facets of thought throughout history has yielded two myths: the Garden and the Citadel. Both myths correspond to Jung’s feminine and masculine collective subconscious, as well as to Nietzsche’s premise of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art. Nietzsche’s premise suggests, furthermore, that the feminine myth of the Garden is time-bound whereas the masculine myth of the Citadel, or the Ideal City, constitutes a spatial deportment. Throughout history the two myths have continually molded the built (...) environment and thought, but the myth of the Ideal City – from Plato to Descartes to modernity – came to dominate city-form and ensuing aspects of contemplation. This relationship seems to have shifted during the twentieth century. Intellectual dispositions have begun to be largely nurtured by an incongruous city-form emerging from the gap between the incessant promise for an automated, well-functioning city, on the one hand, and looming alienation, coupled with the factual, malfunctioning city, on the other hand. Urban decay, a persisting and time-bound urban event that is a byproduct of this configuration, suggests the ascent of the Garden myth in post-modern city-form. (shrink)

This article applies some conceptual tools from semiotics to better understand the disastrous impacts of the world economy on global ecology. It traces the accelerating production of material disorder and waste to the logic of the money sign, as economic production processes simultaneously increase exchange-values and entropy. The exchange of indexical and iconic signs is essential to the dynamics of ecological systems and the proliferation of biological diversity. The human species has added a third kind of sign, the symbol, and (...) more recently a fourth: all-purpose money. Money does not refer to any referent either through contiguity, similarity, or convention. It is an empty sign, capable of assuming any significance that its owner attributes to it. The article argues that the concept of symbolic reference should be restricted to cultural and linguistic phenomena. Money qualifies as a new species of sign based on its exceedingly open mode of reference. It does not refer to any object by social convention but owes its specific properties precisely to the absence of such conventions. The logic of money pivots on decontextualisation: it presupposes and encourages the detachment of exchange values, people, and concepts from the particular and the local. Selective advantage is no longer primarily about calibration within local contexts, but increasingly a matter of transcending or emancipating oneself from the specific. This drift toward decontextualisation reverses the evolution of complexity and diversity throughout the planetary biosphere. (shrink)

Parsons’ sick role concept has become problematic in the face of the increased significance of chronic illnesses and the growing emphasis on lifestylecentred health promotion. Both developments de-limit the medical system so that it extends into the world of health, fundamentally changing the doctor-patient relationship. But as the sick role is firmly based on the reciprocities of a resiliently capitalist achievement society it still informs normative expectations in the field of health and illness. The precarious social position of chronic patients (...) between being governed by and being consumers of medicine, I will argue, can only be adequately understood if one involves, as Parsons did, the moral economy surrounding health and illness. (shrink)

This special issue introduces the study of financial technologies and finance to the field of philosophy of technology, bringing together two different fields that have not traditionally been in dialogue. The included articles are: Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain, by Martin Zeilinger; Fundamentals of Algorithmic Markets: Liquidity, Contingency, and the Incomputability of Exchange, by Laura Lotti; ‘Crises of Modernity’ Discourses and the Rise of Financial Technologies in a Contested Mechanized World, by Marinus Ossewaarde; Two (...) Technical Images: Blockchain and High-Frequency Trading, by Diego Viana; and The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies, by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh. (shrink)

This paper challenges the notion that Bitcoin is ‘trust-free’ money by highlighting the social practices, organizational structures and utopian ambitions that sustain it. At the paper's heart is the paradox that if Bitcoin succeeds in its own terms as an ideology, it will fail in practical terms as a form of money. The main reason for this is that the new currency is premised on the idea of money as a ‘thing’ that must be abstracted from social life in order (...) for it to be protected from manipulation by bank intermediaries and political authorities. The image is of a fully mechanized currency that operates over and above social life. In practice, however, the currency has generated a thriving community around its political ideals, relies on a high degree of social organization in order to be produced, has a discernible social structure, and is characterized by asymmetries of wealth and power that are not dissimilar from the mainstream financial system. Unwittingly, then, Bitcoin serves as a powerful demonstration of the relational character of money. (shrink)

In this review article, I survey books by three authors, each of which address the issues of debt and personal indebtedness. The authors are: Greta Krippner; David Graeber; and Maurizio Lazzarato. They argue, and I agree, that whilst money is broadly beneficial, its use in a capitalist context increases personal indebtedness, subjugates the individual, and reduces freedom. I briefly outline their positions, each of which make important contributions. However – contrary to Krippner’s lack of normative commitment, Graeber’s suggestion that we (...) need to forgive the debt and start again, or Lazzarato’s suggestion that we should to stop paying back debt and refuse to work – I suggest that we need to return to socialist principles, based on the premise that capitalism is no alternative. (shrink)

In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such (...) efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression. (shrink)

Our article addresses the question how to assess and measure the value or price of knowledge, and probes the issue from a variety of social scientific and practical perspectives. Against the background of a sociological concept of knowledge, economic, political, social, and juridical perspectives that may lead to a price of knowledge are discussed. We observe that knowledge is seen to play an ever greater role within as well as across economies and politics; that its embodiment makes it difficult to (...) divorce it from its carriers; and that knowledge is deeply entrenched in questions of social relations and stratification. As such, it is cannot be captured in a straightforward manner, especially given the persistent stand-off between its individual, economic, and public relevancies and benefits. A simple arithmetic of the price of knowledge fails. (shrink)

Nas sociedades antigas, o tempo era percecionado de forma cíclica, mítica, sem duração, em que se arranca o homem, tal como descreve Mircea Eliade (1969), em Le mythe de l’éternel retour, do seu tempo individual cronológico, histórico, projetando-o, pelo menos simbolicamente, em um grande tempo que não se pode mensurar porque não é constituído por uma duração. Nas sociedades modernas, o conceito de tempo passou a assumir outras conotações, ao ser entendido como sucessão e continuidade, desenhado de forma mais objetiva (...) e científica, veiculado sempre à liberdade da pessoa. Nas sociedades contemporâneas, marcadas por uma crescente complexidade, o tempo tornou-se um problema a, em parte, devido à instabilidade do futuro, que não permite qualquer tipo de previsão dos processos sociais e organizativos o que conduz, não só a um grande desconhecimento do próprio futuro, como a uma instabilidade do próprio presente. (shrink)

The essay discusses the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel’s theorizing about the individual. Whereas it is typically within the context of the modern metropolis and the mature money economy that Simmel’s ideas have been discussed in the secondary literature, I render those ideas in another light by addressing the ontological and existential issues crucial to his conception of the individual. In Simmel, the individual is divided between the “what” and the “who,” between the qualities which make one something individual and (...) one’s non-repeatable and finite existence which makes one someone singular. I argue that whereas the first dimension can be understood sociologically, in terms of social relations, the latter is not accessible to sociology as such, but must be treated philosophically. Therefore, if we wish to address this duality that lies at the heart of individuality, a “philosophical turn” for sociology is called for. (shrink)

According to Xenophon, the hetaira "gratified" her patron as a philos, participating in an aristocratic network of gift exchange , while the pornê, as her name signified, trafficked in sex as a commodity. Recent writers on Greek prostitution have acknowledged that hetaira vs. pornê may be as much a discursive opposition as a real difference in status, but still, very little attention has been paid to the period of the "invention" of this binary. Hetaira meaning "courtesan" first occurs in Herodotus (...) and does not exist in Homer: hence, the conceptual category of the hetaira is an invention of the archaic period. What needs generated the constitution of this category? And what conceptual "work" was the opposition hetaira-pornê doing in Greek culture in the period of its inception? This paper addresses these questions through a reading of fragments of archaic lyric-predominantly those of Anakreon-as well as consideration of Attic vase painting. I suggest that the hetaira-pornê opposition participates in the overarching tension between the aristocratic symposium and the public sphere in archaic Greece. Oswyn Murray has suggested that the symposium constitutes itself as a kind of anti-city with its own rules and conventions. Part of the discursive exclusion of the public sphere is the complete suppression of the city's monetarized economy from the domain of the aristocratic symposium, and it is this impulse to mystify economic relations for sex that generates the category of the hetaira within a framework of gift exchange. But if the motives for this discursive invention are economic, they are also political: the hetaira affirms and embodies the circulation of charis within a privileged elite, while the pornê figures the debased and promiscuous exchanges of the agora. (shrink)

The paper surveys selected alternative conceptions of rationality in contemporary and (especially) traditional economics and sociology. While the status of rationality as one of the master concepts, subjects and objectives of social science and philosophy has been further promoted in contemporary economics and sociology, questions often arise among economists and sociologists themselves as to its meaning or definition. As an attempt to help address this issue, the paper selects and examines a (limited) number of pertinent definitions and conceptions of rationality (...) from both economic and sociological theory. By virtue of its coverage of economics and sociology, this study is thoroughly interdisciplinary and contributes toward filling in a void in the current literature in which such studies are relatively rare. (shrink)

We develop a new understanding of the historical horizon of event ontology. Within the general area of the philosophy of nature, event ontology is a still emerging field of investigation in search for the ultimate materialist ontology of the world. While event ontology itself will not be explicated in full mathematical details here, our focus is on its conceptual interrelation with the dominant current of Idealism in Western thought approached by us as a problem in the history of ideas. Our (...) presentation is designed to be accessible to a wider audience. We especially highlight the deep connection between event ontology and postmodernism in general, and the post-war French philosophers Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari in particular, who are viewed as main sources for current and future programs of abstract materialism. (shrink)

After the initial formulation of the concept of reification in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (HCC, 1923), a series of confusing uses of it within critical theory have contributed to blurring its contours. In his pre-Marxist work, while analyzing the social rationalization process, Lukács located the modern form of mediation between subject and object and connected it with certain effects on the level of human consciousness and behavior. This very scheme is repeated and refined in HCC. In the Reification (...) essay, Lukács uses the neo-Kantian concept of the “form of objectivity” to grasp the central constitutive form of all kinds of objects in bourgeois society. He interprets Marx’s commodity form as the “archetype” of all capitalist objectivity, which consists in converting qualitative contents into quantitative categories. Thus, the formal/calculative rationality of exchange penetrates all kinds of objectification in modern society. In Lukács’s view, only in its modern, universalized form does rational objectification bring about the phenomenon of reification, i.e. the de-historicization and political neutralization of the social relations that constitute the social system and the dominant forms of consciousness. This systemic, cultural, and political understanding of reification can prove to be fruitful in the context of contemporary discussions on democratic transformative praxis. (shrink)

This article examines how distrust drives exchange. We propose a theoretical framework integrating the literature of trust into cultural sociology and use a case of patients giving hongbao (red envelopes containing money) to doctors in China to examine how distrust drives different forms of unofficial exchange. Based on more than two years’ ethnography, we found that hongbao exchanges between Chinese patients and doctors were, ironically, bred by the public’s generalized distrust in doctors’ moral ethics. In the absence of institutional assurance, (...) Chinese patients drew on the cultural logic of particularism and its associated cultural repertoire to induce fidelity from their physicians. They mobilized interpersonal networks to function as assurance and presented hongbao as a return of favor to the doctors. This form of exchange is gifting-oriented. Alternatively, if there were no interpersonal networks to rely on, they proactively offered hongbao to doctors at arm’s length in an attempt to personalize the relationship to seek assurance and abate their anxieties. This form of exchange is bribery-oriented. Both forms of exchange co-existed when there was one-way generalized distrust manifested from patients to doctors. When doctors also developed generalized distrust in patients, arm’s length exchanges declined, leaving embedded exchanges as the dominant form. Our study asserts the central role of culture in constituting exchange behaviors and the importance of institutions in shaping the form of exchange. It contributes to the midrange theory of trust, generating a number of hypotheses for future research on the relationships among culture, institutions, distrust, assurance, and illicit exchange. (shrink)

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that operates as an independent currency. This paper is a philosophical investigation of the ontological constitution of Bitcoin. Using Slavoj Žižek’s ontological triad of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, the paper distinguishes between three ideal typical theories of money: commodity theory, fiat theory, and credit theory. The constitution of Bitcoin is analysed by comparing the currency to each of these ideal types. It is argued that Bitcoin is commodity money without gold, (...) fiat money without a state, and credit money without debt. In conclusion, it is suggested that Bitcoin poses an ideological challenge to conventional forms of money in so far as it not only provokes sedimented beliefs about money but also exposes the forms of exploitation, risk and even violence inherent in the existing system of state authorized credit money. (shrink)

This article presents two separate but closely related studies. We used a first sample to investigate the relationships among individuals’ reports of their income and their subjective well-being, and their approval of unethical behavior in 27 countries and a second sample to investigate the relationship between corruption in 55 countries and their populace’s aggregated feelings of subjective well-being (happiness). Analysis of data from 27,762 working professionals showed that, although reported feelings of subjective well-being were negatively related to their approval of (...) unethical behaviors, income was positively related to their approval of unethical behaviors. In addition, the effects for feelings of subjective well-being were particularly strong for high-income people. Analyses also showed that, after controlling for economic development and other country-level factors, corruption was negatively related to a country’s feelings of happiness. These findings suggest that feelings of subjective well-being may lead to more ethical, less corrupt behavior and that the tolerance of unethical, corrupt behavior may lead to less collective happiness and subjective well-being. (shrink)

This article extends both Viviana Zelizer's discussion of the social meaning of money and Charles Smith's proposal that pricing is a definitional practice to the under-theorized realm of the social meanings generated in the pricing system. Individuals are attributed with calculating or not calculating whether an object or service is "worth" its price, but these attributions differ according to the individual's social location as being near to or far from a societal reference point rather than by the inherent qualities of (...) the object or service purchased. Prices offer seemingly objective proof of the individual's "logic of appropriateness"--in other words, people like that pay prices such as those. This article sketches a preliminary but nonexhaustive typology of the social characterizations of individuals within the pricing system; these ideal types--the fool, the faithful, the frugal, and the frivolous--and their components offer a systematic approach to understanding prices as embedded in and constituents of social meaning systems. (shrink)

German sociologist Alfred Vierkandt is hardly remembered today. This may seem surprising. Several prominent sociologists from the German-speaking countries contributed to the Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (1931), which Vierkandt edited and published. However, Vierkandt did not interact with any of them significantly, and this publication brought no recognition of the importance of his sociological oeuvre in Germany, the United States, or elsewhere. His key notion of the social group found no acknowledgment among other contemporary or later sociologists, even though several of (...) them used this notion and discussed social groups in their own writings. Moreover, those who paid close attention to his writings, like Abel and Hochstim, evaluated them quite critically. Both before and after World War II, Vierkandt remained a solitary and relatively unknown author. (shrink)

Artikelns utgångspunkt är att dagens biomedicinska samhälle ger upphov till frågor om teknikens möjligheter och risker. Avstamp tas i Ulrich Becks diskussion om att dessa motpoler föder en reflexiv modernitet. Ambitionen är att undersöka hur detta reflexiva tillstånd försiggår på ett individuellt plan, närmare bestämt inom en yrkesgrupp som bedriver omdebatterad biomedicinsk forskning. Den empiriska ingången är diskussioner om etik som författaren har haft med forskare från Lund Stem Cell Center. Forskarnas funderingar präglas av komplexitet och motsägelsefullhet. Å ena sidan (...) förekommer ifrågasättande av den egna forskningen, å andra sidan en pragmatisk inställning som innebär att den laboratoriestyrda verksamheten blir riktgivande. Artikeln visar hur reflexioner om etik får ringa betydelse för hur biomedicinsk kunskap produceras – snarare blir de redskap för forskarna att göra yrkesverksamheten kulturellt hanterlig. Artikeln betonar samtidigt att på sikt får reflexiva etiska samtal betydelse för forskningens praxis. (shrink)

Neste artigo faz-se uma descrição do Sistema Global de Posicionamento e dos dispositivos de navegação de uso rodoviário que o constituem, enquanto artefatos, com vista a uma leitura semiótica destes últimos em articulação com a sistematicidade. De uma semiótica tradicional dos objetos passa-se a uma que se centra na sua materialidade, a partir da qual é possível detecar sentidos performativos na tecnologia. Esta abordagem permite uma compreensão mais detalhada do caráter global das tecnologias móveis em articulação com a sua individualização. (...) A tese que se defende é a de que é possível dar conta do que é próprio da materialidade deste fenómeno, explorando, a par dos elementos tradicionalmente simbólicos, aspectos não redutíveis a estes. Não obstante, destaca-se como o material e o simbólico permanecem numa relação que permite identificar mais claramente a complexidade dos sistemas e artefatos técnicos, bem como os elementos que, neste domínio, estabelecem uma interação entre produção e consumo. Deste modo, chega-se a uma semiótica material que permite uma interpretação mais fiel do que é específico da componente funcional da tecnologia, em particular de um sistema e artefatos que se instalam cada vez mais no quotidiano, evitando a redução a uma valoração utilitária. This paper makes a depiction of the Global Positioning System and the navigation devices that are part of it, as artifacts. It aims to develop a semiotic reading of these artifacts in articulation with systematicity. From a traditional semiotics of objects, it goes to a material one, in which it is possible to find performative trends on technology. This approach is an opportunity to understand in a detailed way the global character of mobile technologies in articulation with individualization. The thesis held here is that this is a better way to handle with the specificities of materiality, exploring, besides the traditionally symbolic elements, aspects not reducible to the latter. Nevertheless, both the material and the symbolic layers are in permanent relation. The observation of this helps to understand systems and artifacts' complexity, as well as some of the elements that are involved in the interactions between production and consumption. By doing this, the paper tries to achieve a material semiotics frame that allows an interpretation more faithful to the specificities of the functional aspects of technology, particularly those that are part of a system and artifacts so present in daily life, avoiding a reduction to a utilitarian valuation. (shrink)

The concept of the national is often perceived, both in public and academic discourse as the central obstacle for the realization of cosmopolitan orientations. Consequently, debates about the nation tend to revolve around its persistence or its demise. We depart from this either-or perspective by investigating the formation of the ‘cosmopolitan nation’ as a facet of world risk society. Modern collectivities are increasingly preoccupied with debating, preventing and managing risks. However, unlike earlier manifestations of risk characterized by daring actions or (...) predictability models, global risks can no longer be calculated or forecast. Accordingly, more influence accrues to the perception of risk, largely constructed by media representations. Cosmopolitanized risk collectivities are engendered through the anticipation of endangered futures which are, for the most part, communicated through an increasingly global media scape. While global media events produce shared exposure, risk conceptions retain distinctive political-cultural features as their respective meanings are prefigured by path-dependent pasts. Nevertheless, the promulgation of risk societies, we argue, results in a reimagination of nationhood which takes place in the context of: global norms (e.g. human rights); globalized markets; transnational migrations; global generations and their embeddedness in civil society movements; and the local interpenetration of world religions to name but a few of the global backdrops shaping new associational intersections. We develop our argument in four interrelated steps. Contrary to essentialized notions of nationalism or universal versions of cosmopolitanism, we address the cosmopolitan reconfiguration of nationhood by differentiating between presumptions of thick belonging and the actual proliferation of cosmopolitan affiliations. In a second step we overcome the territorial fixation of the social sciences by shifting our attention to temporal dimensions, with a particular focus on competing conceptions of the future. In a third step we demonstrate how these cosmopolitan transformations of nationhood are taking place in the context of a world risk society regime that marshals a set of cosmopolitan imperatives situating the global other in our midst. In a fourth step we illustrate these developments by exploring how the mediatization of risk, and concomitant notions of the future, contribute to the reimagination of cosmopolitan risk collectivities. (shrink)

This article explores the notion of ‘perfect’ money that Simmel introduces in The Philosophy of Money. Its aim is twofold: first, to connect this idea to his more general arguments about the nature of society and the ambivalence of modernity, and, second, to assess its relevance for contemporary debates about the future of money, especially following the global financial crisis. I argue that Simmel’s concept of perfect money can be understood as utopian in two senses, conceptual and ethical, that correspond (...) to the two interpretations he develops, in Soziologie, of the idea of a perfect society. This sheds light on an aspect of Simmel’s writings that has attracted relatively little attention, namely his views on the relationship between money and socialism. Characterizing this relationship as a ‘formal affinity’, his remarks resonate with a long tradition of thought on monetary utopias that aim not for the abolition of money but its radical transformation as a means of improving society. This tradition is coming to the fore once again today, as the financial crisis has given new impetus to constructing forms of money – for example, LETS, Time Dollars, mutual credit, peer-to-peer lending and digital currencies such as Bitcoin – that provide viable alternatives to big banks. Understood in conjunction with his account of the ‘tragedy’ of individualism in modernity, such resonances demonstrate the enduring relevance of Simmel’s work to the empirical and theoretical investigation of money. (shrink)

In this paper I first aim to identify, from a perspective mindful of both analytic and Continental traditions, the central normative issues at stake in the various debates concerning commodification in law. Although there now exists a wealth of thoughtful literature in this area, I often find myself disoriented within the webs of moral criteria used to analyze the increasingly ubiquitous practice of converting legal goods into monetary values. I therefore attempt to distinguish and organize these often conflated conceptual distinctions (...) across several registers of moral analysis. Second, I formulate what I consider the most illuminating questions regarding the criteria used to evaluate commodification in law. Critiques of commodification in law face what I call problems of ideology, intractability, and hyperbole, and identifying these issues helps to explain the momentum of the law and economics movement. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the sociological notion ‘individualization’ contains the most heterogeneous phenomena, the article develops an interpretation of the fate of individualization in Western capitalism today. After having differentiated three different meanings of that notion with the help of Georg Simmel, the position is defended that the claims to individual self-realization, which have rapidly multiplied in the Western societies of thirty or forty years ago, have become so much a feature of the institutionalized expectations inherent in social reproduction that (...) the particular goals of such claims are lost and they are transmuted into a support of the system’s legitimacy. The result of this paradoxical reversal, where the processes which once promised an increase of qualitative freedom are henceforth altered into an ideology of de-institutionalization, is the emergence in individuals of a number of symptoms of inner emptiness, of feeling oneself to be superfluous, and of absence of purpose. (shrink)

This article focuses on two different styles of profanation in Spinoza and Badiou. Notwithstanding the significant differences between them, their shared desire for profanation testifies to an interesting convergence. I deal with this convergence in divergence as a case of disjunctive synthesis through a comparison of the different understandings of religion in Spinoza and Badiou’s truth procedures. It is commonly held that Spinoza operates with three understandings of religion. But I argue that Spinoza’s thought opens up the space for a (...) fourth understanding of ‘religion’. Then I discuss the formal similarity between Spinoza’s four religions and Badiou’s four truth procedures. I illustrate this discussion through two diagrams. I claim that Badiou’s truth procedures could be perceived as the Spinozist diagram’s re-entry into itself. (shrink)

Much of Arnold Hauser’s work on the social history of art and the philosophy of art history is informed by a concern for the cognitive dimension of art. The present paper offers a reconstruction of this aspect of Hauser’s project and identifies areas of overlap with the sociology of knowledge—where the latter is to be understood as both a separate discipline and a going intellectual concern. Following a discussion of Hauser’s personal and intellectual background, as well as of the shifting (...) political and academic setting of his work, the paper addresses one of Hauser’s central questions, viz. how best to square a thoroughgoing commitment to the social nature of art with the reality of successive artistic styles, given that the latter seem to be characterizable on purely formal grounds. This is followed by a discussion of Hauser’s conflicted views on the relation between art, science, and technology. This injects a tension into Hauser’s work, due to his initial reluctance to explain just how the aesthetic and the cognitive realms relate. The final part of the paper, through a closer examination of the analogies and disanalogies that Hauser sees between art history and the history of science, attempts to give a positive answer—“on Hauser’s behalf”, as it were—to the question of whether art may be credited with a specific cognitive dimension of its own, and if so, what its contribution to our cognitive enterprise may consist in. (shrink)

There is an impressive literature on organizational capacities that enable specific types of performance, but no work has been done on whether such capabilities extend to an organizational capacity for trustworthiness (CFT). This paper introduces the notion of a capacity for trustworthiness (CFT) defined as the collective capability of the organization to produce positive signals of trustworthiness to stakeholders. The antecedents to the CFT are bundles of organization routines that enable the firm to manifest trustworthiness and balance attending to both (...) financial and relational goals. The consequences of a high CFT are outcomes and behaviors that are congruent with pivotal stakeholder expectations and are, therefore, trust inducing. A process model is offered that outlines how an organization’s routines and CFT change in response to feedback and pressure and increase or decrease stakeholders’ trust. Implications for the management of stakeholder relations, trust repair, and the management of organizational systems are reviewed. (shrink)

Georg Simmel has long been appreciated as a major theorist of the arts in society, as well as of aesthetic phenomena in general in social life. Yet Simmel’s essays in the area have remained dispersed for many years across the disparate parts of his corpus and have not been easy to survey in their full thematic cohesion and interconnection. This symposium article reflects on Austin Harrington’s comprehensive anthology of these writings in English, published in 2020, which assembles virtually all the (...) relevant titles – many of them appearing in English for the first time. Among the central topics of discussion are Simmel’s fluid style of theorizing, his thinking about representation, reality and modernity in art, his relationships to philosophers and artistic personalities, and his legacy for the present. (shrink)

Quantification, in the form of accountability measures, organizational rankings, and personal metrics, plays an increasingly prominent role in modern society. While past research tends to depict quantification primarily as either an external intervention or a tool that can be employed by organizations, we propose that conceptualizing quantification as a logic provides a more complete understanding of its influence and the profound transformations it can generate. Drawing on a 14-month ethnographic study of Korean higher education and 100 in-depth interviews with key (...) actors in this field, this study demonstrates four pathways through which the logic of quantification is embedded into organizations. Specifically, we show how this new logic reshaped organizational structure, practices, power, and culture—changes that in turn buttress and reproduce the logic. Theoretically, this study provides a new perspective on the deep institutionalization of quantification: why quantification is often intractable and “de-quantification” so rare. In addition, this work contributes to the organizational literature on institutional logics by demonstrating how prevailing logics build defenses to resist challengers and thus maintain their influence. Most generally, we consider how the self-reinforcing nature of this logic contributes to the intensification of rationalization in contemporary society. (shrink)

This review explores the present fashion for aesthetics in contemporary sociology. It evaluates the claims that society is undergoing a deep-seated process of aestheticization, and that sociology is experiencing an aestheticization of its epistemological concerns. The aestheticization literature is divided as follows: (1) the re-reading of classical sociological theory through the aesthetic dimension of modernity; (2) the claim that postmodern society involves an `aestheticization of everyday life'; and (3) those sociological theories which stress that contemporary society is more and more (...) like a work of art in its form. The argument is made that the discovery of aesthetics as a way of problematizing sociological reasoning is to some extent rediscovery, returning to various Kantian precepts: the disinterestedness characteristic of aesthetic experiences; the antinomy between the individual and the social aspects of taste; and the work of art as an organism predicated on an inner teleology. (shrink)

The ethical governance of the global Internet is an accelerating global phenomenon. A key paradox of the global Internet is that it allows individual and collective decision making to co-exist with each other. Open source software (OSS) communities are a globally accelerating phenomenon. OSS refers to groups of programs that allow the free use of the software and further the code sharing to the general and corporate users of the software. The combination of private provision and public knowledge and software, (...) and the seeming paradox of economic versus social motivations have stimulated a wide debate between researchers and policymakers. In this article, we analyze OSS communities from the viewpoint of "intrinsic motivation," knowledge creation, and collective Internet governance. We believe that the growth of global OSS has fundamental implications for business ethics and the governance of the global Internet in the twenty-first century. (shrink)