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1.
ABSTRACT

A central trope of the information society is that of ‘information flows.’ The implicit assumption underlying such a vision involves the removal of gatekeepers and intermediaries who are perceived to impede such flows. Drawing from field research on information circulation, trade, and money in rural markets in Myanmar and India, we show why intermediaries persist alongside information and communication technologies (ICTs) in trade and financial transactions in the ‘Information Age.’ We examine the range of roles, (human and non-human) actors, and material practices that are involved in conducting financial transactions, and we show the importance of historical legacies and politics in explaining why both cash and financial intermediaries persist in the digital age. Focusing on the different value that human and non-human intermediaries bring to financial encounters helps explain what characteristics make each resilient or replaceable in a time of change. By situating intermediaries and mediations in the social relations within which they operate, we bring back the role of power and politics – an element that is often missing in accounts focused on the unmediated and ‘free’ circulation of information using ICTs – in explaining processes of mediation and circulation.  相似文献   

2.
ABSTRACT

Previous studies have overlooked how intermediaries and their digital cultural capital enhance the relationship between brand values and consumer identities; their specific uses of digital technologies; and how those uses are displayed in activities where intermediaries create consumer experiences. This paper thus explores the role that cultural intermediaries (music bloggers and an advertising agency) and their digital cultural capital play in making and communicating a branded music event. Briefly, intermediaries used a set of digital technologies (social media, guest lists, blogs, and websites) to create and orchestrate an authentic and exclusive experience between brands and consumers. We draw on empirical material from interviews and ethnographic work conducted in Santiago, Chile. Our study identifies digital technologies used by cultural intermediaries in communicating branded music events, including as: promotional tools; advertising campaign efficacy evaluation mechanisms; and relational objects that connect advertising agencies, music bloggers, brands, and consumers. By exploring the tensions and conflicts that arise among bloggers and advertising executives, we shed light on the uses and exchanges of digital cultural capital for commercial purposes, resulting from the connections between intermediaries that come from different fields of cultural production.  相似文献   

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5.
ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, microinsurance has taken off in South Africa. The strength of this market is fuelled almost exclusively by funeral insurance, unsurprising considering the immense cultural value South Africans place on funerals. Moreover, insurance companies have achieved scale by working through brokers who are embedded within community-based institutions like burial societies and funeral parlours. The incursion of ‘insurance culture’ into this sphere has thus resulted in an ecosystem in which formal and informal institutions are in fluid states of tension and cooperation. Mediators sustain this ecosystem and enable the extension of microinsurance into low-income communities. I employ Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘translation’ in my analysis of three types of mediators: insurance agents, funeral parlour operators, and burial society administrators. The paper, which is based on fieldwork I conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, focuses on these actors’ specific techniques of translation, i.e. the different strategies/practices used to reconcile the disparate rationalities and institutions of the formal insurance system with those of the informal risk management sphere. An analysis attuned to the various social identities and positions embodied by these brokers reveals the dislocations, ambiguities, conflicts, and opportunities generated by the expansion of microinsurance markets into the low-income terrain.  相似文献   

6.
ABSTRACT

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.  相似文献   

7.
ABSTRACT

Since the global financial crisis of 2008 the issue of corporate tax avoidance has gained considerable political salience and public attention. This article explores the frameworks of meaning available for citizen-consumers to evaluate and form views on corporate tax behaviour. Building on research on the spatiality of taxation, I argue that brands and their spatial associations afford significant resources for making sense of the taxpaying responsibilities of multinational enterprises. Through the identification and analysis of three different forms of geographical entanglement – national origination, imbrication in the public domain, and territorialization of economic activity – I draw out the responsibilities that are inferred by these spatial associations. I propose that brands’ geographical entanglements tend to support a particular ‘logic of onshoring’, or common sense explanation concerning where corporations ought to pay tax, and I discuss the implications that the dominance of this logic may hold for the global politics of taxation. In drawing attention to the relationship between geographies of brands and geographies of taxation, the article furthers critical understanding of the role of space and place in everyday taxation imaginaries, and proposes an agenda for future research.  相似文献   

8.
We survey more than twenty studies estimating rates of return of investments in single art objects and whole collections and evaluate the various approaches to art price movements taken so far. The majority of the estimates find lower returns for investments in art objects than for investments in financial assets. However, most existing analyses are restricted to auction data and neglect transactions cost and taxation. They partly focus on mechanistic calculations and disregard the distinguishing institutional and behavioral characteristics of art markets. We look into the possibilities to capture and empirically estimate psychic returns from owning art.  相似文献   

9.
ABSTRACT

What is the role of imagination in the constitution of finance capitalism? How do the fictions, myths, and (ir)rationalities of finance shape society's ability to imagine the future in the face of mounting political instability? Well over a decade since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, today's financialised economies are still marred by stagnation and uncertainty. Against this backdrop, the increasingly speculative nature of economic forecasting, and the accelerated trading of promises of all sorts (from algorithmic and derivative markets to contemporary electoral politics) put the role of imagination centre stage. This special issue contends that, contrary to conventional wisdom, imagining the future is not necessarily equal to ‘fantasising' or to ‘irrational exuberance' or the ‘animal spirits'. Rather, it points to something much more fundamental: the power of finance to produce new social and political morphologies under conditions of radical uncertainty. The articles of the special issue confront these issues by mapping out a novel field of investigation into different, unique types of imagination undergirding finance capitalism in the years since its most recent crisis: from the future-making practices of mineral exploration and agricultural derivative markets, to the imagined futures of financial education programmes, the financialisation of creative work, and the role of future-oriented legitimacy in today’s populist politics.  相似文献   

10.
Abstract

This essay considers Levinas' face-to-face ethical relation together with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of ‘becoming animal’ as a response to the radical dehumanisation involved in biopolitics. Framing his analysis in terms of an archaic law banning wrongdoers as wolves, Giorgio Agamben shows that biopolitics strips humans of subjectivity and exposes them to political power. Levinas' answer to radical dehumanisation is an ethical humanism of the other, but his ethical program is barred from politics. Moreover, he writes that in his own experience of dehumanisation, the only ethical being he encountered was Bobby, the camp dog. It seems biopolitics calls for an ethical politics that we might possess as bare life, outside of the autonomous, individualising conditions of the humanist subject. To this aim, I apply Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming animal as a devise to transport Levinas' ethics of alterity to the political realm.  相似文献   

11.
ABSTRACT

Austerity in the twenty-first century is different, compared both with the past, and across locations. This analysis explores the different role played by households in policies designed to maintain financial market liquidity in the context of aspirations of state deficit reduction. While in Europe there is austerity as popularly depicted, in the United States, where mortgage-backed securities have become central to monetary policy, the agenda is to keep households meeting their debt obligations. These differences are explained in terms of different conceptions of monetary policy and evolving conceptions of money itself. The evidence portends a changing role for households and their financial payments in anchoring the money system.  相似文献   

12.
Abstract

One of the under-studied effects of global migration has been an increase in transnational marriages. This phenomenon has greatly impacted Taiwan as women from Southeast Asian nations and Mainland China, through professional marriage brokers or personal contacts, enter into marriages with Taiwanese men. How well these women adapt to Taiwan's culture and learn its local languages is studied through the lens of two theories of intercultural communication: Kim's theory of cross-cultural adaptation and Kramer's theory of cultural fusion. Based upon in-depth interviews with 28 women, results show some support for both theories. However, the postulates of cultural fusion demonstrate a better fit: Learning is an additive process; long-term association with co-ethnics appears to correlate with greater satisfaction and adaptation; and women's negotiated identities follow a range of outcomes.  相似文献   

13.
ABSTRACT

With the rise of the shadow banking system, a new form of state–market hybridity has emerged, challenging existing monetary approaches to financial stability. A stable financial system today has essentially come to depend on a stable shadow banking system. Central banks are in the process of adapting to this new development. To secure the logic of laissez-faire market liberalism, the sovereign must resort to unprecedented measures and radically intervene in the financial markets. This new form of state–market hybridity forces central banks to provide ample reserves, to act as a dealer of last resort, and to give shadow banking actors access to their balance sheets. Such policies, however, produce new contradictions and fragilities. Based on Foucault's concepts of sovereignty and security, this paper argues that in today's world, the rationality of the laissez-faire security dispositif has become flanked by the rationality of sovereignty to a much greater extent than previously. Without losing its dominant status, the security dispositif is currently adapting so as to operate in crisis mode based on a post-laissez-faire rationality. The repo crisis of 2019 has demonstrated that central banks are still in the process of searching for ways to handle this new constellation.  相似文献   

14.
Abstract

Although much work dedicated to clarifying the link between learning and change has made a sincere effort to show how change can be a part of the learning process of every individual's life, the progressive functionalist approach to understanding this link in developmental psychology has created a blind spot when it comes to a consideration of the possibilities of sudden change. Developmental approaches to understanding change are also evident in macro‐level politics, and they have increasingly become part of other spheres of social life such as education where the individualized inculcation of skills has come to define the progressive mantra of learning and telos of schooling.

Instead of remaining within the confines of liberal progressivism or functionalism that advance a notion of transformation in gradual, piecemeal, and developmental terms, change needs to be re‐conceptualised to account for the ways that learning can be a momentous, sudden, and sometimes violent event. To this end this article discusses temporal, sensory, and perceptual change through use of the concept of ‘Augenblick’ – a German term connoting a fleeting moment of time normally associated with a form of sight. Focusing on the theories of education inherent in the work of Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin this article demonstrates how micro‐ and macro‐ forms of expressions of the Augenblick occurring at not only the individual, but also the social level in the context of revolutionary politics force us to rethink the ways that the dominance of liberal conceptions of learning prefigure the horizon of the possibility of change.  相似文献   

15.
Based on a unique dataset of artists that are active in the German market for folk music—the third largest music genre in terms of popularity and sales—I study what factors determine the artists’ success. Following Rosen (Am Econ Rev 71(5):845–858, 1981), I test if differences in artistic performance have a direct effect on financial rewards as regards physical and digital record sales (“direct superstar effect”). Following Adler (Handbook on the economics of art and culture. Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1985), I also study sales effects of a media presence of artists (“classical superstar effect”). Controlling for various contingency factors (e.g., record labels’ support, artists’ socio-demographics), I deal with an economic issue of general interest: Does it pay more to develop your skills in your core business to perfection or to maintain the current level of skills and invest in self-marketing; and do these effects apply to all folk artists alike? Rather contrary to studies on pop and rock genres, I find that higher ability increases artists’ revenues disproportionately, but simultaneously, openly competing for the recognition of one’s talent holds substantial economic risk. I also observe a positive effect of various types of media presence on financial rewards. However, these income determinants have different impacts on sales in physical versus in digital markets, and their effects vary across the success distribution from low- to top-selling artists as well.  相似文献   

16.
ABSTRACT

This article investigates how cultural businesses may facilitate contentious political activity in authoritarian contexts. Existing research in Western liberal democracies has shown the widespread political activism of actors in the cultural and creative industries. Whether such activism exists in authoritarian society, how it may differ in character and form, and what implications this will have for our understanding of relations between business, politics, and culture in authoritarian countries remain to be addressed. Drawing on data collected from 55 ‘independent bookshops’ in China, I illustrate how these organisations perform ‘cultural politics,’ a type of political participation in which actors employ mainly symbolic means to express social and political concerns. The organisations’ economic relations and conditions facilitate their efforts to create spaces in which contentious questions can be raised, sensitive topics explored, and alternative ideas expressed, despite the Chinese state’s political regulation of the cultural sphere. The finding of the economic embeddedness of cultural politics sheds new light on our understanding of the political economy of cultural businesses in contemporary China.  相似文献   

17.
Crystallization modifiers can significantly affect the capillary passage of dilute and concentrated solutions of sodium chloride and sodium sulfate through columns of limestone. In the absence of modifiers, sodium chloride passage through Monks Park limestone gave predominantly subflorescence with mild edge erosion while sodium sulfate mainly effloresced and severely damaged the stone column. With Texas Creme limestone, a stone of moderately higher porosity, essentially only efflorescence occurred with either salt and there was little or no stone damage. Uniquely, alkali ferrocyanides were found to impact significantly on the interaction of these solutions as they moved through the limestone. The addition of 0.10–1.00% of K4Fe(CN)6 to sodium chloride in Monks Park limestone experiments increased the flow rate of solutions through the stone, resulting in efflorescence in place of subflorescence, and yielded a massive formation of extended dendritic filaments without damaging the stone. This protection by additive was extended to sodium sulfate solutions, but only at lower salt concentrations. Results comparable to the effect of adding K4Fe(CN)6 to concentrated sodium chloride Monks Park limestone experiments were obtained with saturated sodium sulfate solutions without additives by conducting the experiments in a draft-free, high humidity environment—suggesting a potentially useful strategy for the conservation of fragile, salt-laden objects. These results are explained by factors causing evaporation of solution to occur either below or at the surface of the stone, and by the effect of modifiers on the crystal habit of the salts forming during evaporation in this region.  相似文献   

18.
This paper delineates how stockbrokers in Mumbai negotiate (contest, reconcile and appropriate) global finance. In recent years, the social studies of finance have grown profoundly, enhancing our understanding of finance across disciplinary boundaries. However, the way in which global finance is practised by local stockbrokers in non-western financial markets has received minor attention. Even though the Mumbai financial market is comparatively small, it is an instructive case due to a transition of financial practices over the previous two decades. Despite these rapid changes, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), the oldest exchange in India, and its ‘traditional’ brokers remain active and relatively influential. Drawing on present-day experiences as well as historical recollections of BSE stockbrokers, this article shows that global finance is not an unambiguous or predictable force, but instead negotiated and thus actively shaped by local stockbrokers.  相似文献   

19.
Money is an ‘instrument of collective memory’ before it is a means of exchange, a unit of account or a store of value. Money's status as a memory technology is particularly significant in light of the role that information and communication technologies now play in economic transactions. Many of the new channels and infrastructures for payments, such as magnetic cards, mobile phones, the wired Internet, social media platforms, and RFID technologies, record detailed transactional data alongside a range of other identifying data. We now have extremely detailed records of the many ways that money circulates, is transferred and is spent. This paper concerns this previously latent transactional data and how it is currently recorded, monetised, and used to inform action. What has been recorded in and about money at different moments in time and how are these categories breaking down? Who has access to and ownership over this collectively produced record and how is it driving new data practices and business models based on the monetisation and application of monetary records? And how might re-engaging with money's mnemonic status help to foreground a politics and ethics of transactional data?  相似文献   

20.
ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, this paper examines the market work performed by real estate agents in a residential market. The research explores how agents are engaged in market work to sell themselves, the market and the products in order to sell houses. Agents first invest in the clients by self-presentation techniques (likeability, availability, appearance, taste). They also work to bring the clients in line with the market by making them accept the market and its hierarchies; and finally, they enable clients to conform with the market, by relying on prices as signals and taste hierarchies. They act as market devices contributing to market valuation as they are engaged in making residential choices emerge, balancing the cold reality of the market with warm relationships to foster clients' engagement in transactions.  相似文献   

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