The Contested Moralities of Markets

Simone Schiller-Merkens, Philip Balsiger, Simone Schiller-Merkens, Philip Balsiger

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787691216
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Moral struggles in and around markets abound in contemporary societies where marketshave become the dominant form of economic coordination. The present volumeadvances our current understanding of markets by highlighting the sources, processes and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets. It traces thecreation, reproduction and change of underlying moral orders and reveals therole of status and power differentials, alliances and political strategies aswell as the general cultural, social and political contexts in which thestruggles unfold. The contributions to this volume reflect the 'moral turn' thatcan currently be observed in organization studies and economic sociology, andconnect to recent developments in the sociology of morality.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

MORAL STRUGGLES IN AND AROUND MARKETS

Philip Balsiger and Simone Schiller-Merkens

ABSTRACT

Moral struggles in and around markets abound in contemporary societies where markets have become the dominant form of economic coordination. Reviewing research on morality and markets across disciplinary boundaries, this introductory essay suggests that a moral turn can currently be observed in scholarship, and draws a direct connection to recent developments in the sociology of morality. The authors introduce the chapters in the present volume “The Contested Moralities of Markets.” In doing so, the authors distinguish three types of moral struggles in and around markets: struggles around morally contested markets where the exchange of certain goods on markets is contested; struggles within organizations that are related to an organization’s embeddedness in complex institutional environments with competing logics and orders of worth; and moral struggles in markets where moral justifications are mobilized by a variety of field members who act as moral entrepreneurs in their striving for moralizing the economy. Finally, the authors highlight three properties of moral struggles in contemporary markets: They (1) arise over different objects, (2) constitute political struggles, and (3) are related to two broader social processes: market moralization and market expansion. The introduction concludes by discussing some of the theoretical approaches that allow particular insights into struggles over morality in markets. Collectively, the contributions in this volume advance our current understanding of the contested moralities of markets by highlighting the sources, processes, and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets, both through tracing the creation, reproduction, and change of underlying moral orders and through reflecting the status and power differentials, alliances, and political strategies as well as the general cultural, social, and political contexts in which the struggles unfold.

Keywords: Moral struggle; market; political contestation; sociology of morality; organization studies; economic sociology

MARKETS AND MORALITY

One cannot think about markets without touching upon questions of morality. Should cannabis be legally exchanged on markets? Should elderly care be organized by public authorities or left to the invisible hand of market exchange? Is it fair to allow anyone with a car and a driver’s license to compete with licensed taxi drivers simply by signing up on a digital platform? Should animal husbandry in the meat industry be regulated or should meat be affordable for anyone at low prices? What is a fair price for coffee? Such questions point at the appropriateness of markets for the exchange of specific goods, at valuation in markets, at the legitimacy of certain market practices, and at the formal and informal rules guiding market exchange. To answer them presupposes thinking about what is good or bad, right or wrong, legitimate or illegitimate in a market arena. It often involves heated debates in which actors struggle over what is considered moral in a certain market context, and contest each other’s underlying values, beliefs, and worldviews.

Moral struggles in and around markets are omnipresent in contemporary capitalist societies in which markets have become the dominant form of economic coordination, and in which marketization, or the expansion of market mechanisms and ideologies to ever more spheres of social life, is ongoing (Aspers, 2011; Beckert, 2009; Slater & Tonkiss, 2001). Yet these struggles are not new. The relationship between markets and morality has been discussed for centuries, culminating in the broader question of whether markets are generally good or bad for societies. As presented by Hirschman (1992), rival views of market society differ radically in their interpretation of the moral consequences of markets (see also Fourcade & Healy, 2007). For the majority of economists, markets are the most efficient form of organizing the economy and are praised for their moral benefits (e.g., Friedman, 1962). Although generally associated with the pursuit of self-interest, markets are considered as nourishing moral behavior such as honesty, trustworthiness, collaboration, and even altruism. This in turn is said to have a positive effect on society as a whole: “Societies with higher levels of trustworthiness have faster rates of economic growth, and have happier citizens” (Zak, 2011, p. 230). In short, many economists suggest that markets turn private vices into public virtues.

Many critical social thinkers seriously question this “doux commerce” thesis and take the opposite view. Classical theorists – most prominently Marx and Polanyi – have criticized markets for their detrimental effects on individuals and society. They hold markets responsible for the destruction of the social fabric of societies and for environmental degradation. At the level of individuals, markets “morally fail” (Skidelsky & Skidelsky, 2015) by encouraging greed and insatiability. The increasing pervasiveness of market values across all spheres of society, encouraged by neoliberal reforms and marketization processes, are said to contaminate and effectively destroy moral values such as solidarity, equality or professional ethics (Brown, 2015; Sandel, 2012; Skidelsky & Skidelsky, 2015).

What these opposing views have in common is that they position morals and markets as belonging to separate spheres and see one either profiting from or destroying the other (Stehr, Henning, & Weiler, 2006; Zelizer, 2011). However, not all social scientists share the idea that markets lie outside the realm of morals. Economic sociologists and anthropologists in particular see markets as being deeply intertwined with moral values, and argue that every “market exchange (is) saturated with moral meaning” (Fourcade & Healy, 2007, p. 300). Markets are morally embedded, and morals are both a condition to and an outcome of ongoing social practices in the market. We build on this perspective and argue that moral considerations are a central source of contestation and struggle in and around the marketplace. Actors involved in moral struggles do not share a common view on what is moral in a certain context and diverge in the moral judgments they make; they dispose of different kinds and amounts of power resources, and rely on the mobilization of various allies from the political arena and beyond to impose their worldviews. And arguably, three recent historical changes make contestation around morality in the market arena a defining feature of our times: first, the rise and triumph of the neoliberal “free market” ideology; second, technological innovation and the rise new market infrastructures in the form of “disruptive” digital platforms (Srnicek, 2017); and third, the fast pace of globalization. As Polanyi’s (1985) famous double movement thesis reminds us, such troubling developments may provoke counter-reactions and instigate processes of moral contestation and conflict in societies.

This volume builds on the perspective of markets as sites of moral conflicts in which actors committed to different values, norms, beliefs and interests, and equipped with various kinds of resources struggle to enact and sustain divergent moral orders (Farrell, 2015; Fligstein, 1996; Fourcade & Healy, 2007). It aims at providing deeper insights into the sources, processes, and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets. It takes a closer look at how the underlying moral orders of markets are created, sustained, and changed. It points at the political nature of these struggles as they reflect status and power differentials, alliances, and political strategies, as well as at the general cultural, social, and political contexts in which they play out. Such a focus on processes of moral contention is a powerful heuristic strategy to uncover the multiple moral dimensions of markets.

The contributions to this collection have their origins in a workshop on moral struggles in and around markets that we organized in 2016. It gathered scholars from a variety of disciplines of the social sciences (anthropology, economic sociology, organization studies), all of them sharing an interest in studying the moral dimensions of markets. In the following, we briefly and selectively review how questions of morality and markets have already been studied in the aforementioned disciplines. Reviewing the literature, we argue that a “moral turn” can currently be observed in the study of markets – not in the sense of an increased normative orientation of scholarship but of a growing attention to analyzing markets as morally embedded spheres. We relate this emerging theme to the renewal of the sociology of morality (Hitlin & Vaisey, 2010b, 2013), and argue that the chapters in this volume allow deeper insights into understanding how morality plays out “in the wild” (Hitlin & Vaisey, 2010a). The introduction then identifies three different types of moral struggles in markets, and describes the various chapters in the volume that exemplify these types. We conclude by highlighting and discussing three general properties of contentious processes in markets, and pointing out the kinds of theoretical approaches that allow particular insights into struggles over morality in markets.

RESEARCH ON MORALITY IN AND AROUND MARKETS

Authors from a variety of disciplines have studied questions regarding the morality of markets.¹ In the following, we briefly review the main threads through which organization studies, economic sociology, and economic anthropology have addressed these questions.

Organization Studies

It is fair to say that organization studies are currently witnessing a “moral turn” in the study of organizations. While not always explicitly referring to such notions as morals, morality, or moralization, an increasing part of scholarship reflects a deep concern for morally laden issues such as social injustice, inequality, poverty, and climate change, to name but a few. Yet concern for moral issues is not new to organization studies. It has long been central to critical management studies (Adler, Forbes, & Willmott, 2007; Alvesson & Willmott, 1992; Grey & Willmott, 2005) whose “common core is deep skepticism regarding the moral defensibility and the social and ecological sustainability of prevailing conceptions and forms of management and organization” (Adler et al., 2007, p. 119). Out of all the theoretical perspectives reviewed here, this is the one with the most explicit normative orientation. Research in this field has uncovered persistent moral failures in contemporary business practices (e.g., Banerjee, 2008; Crane, 2013), oftentimes countering conventional wisdom in organization practice and research, such as when describing the harmful consequences of the elimination of child labor in soccer ball production for members of the affected communities (Khan, Munir, & Willmott, 2007), or when challenging the role of NGOs as moral agents (Bartley, 2018). However, critical management scholars do not consider particular organizations or managers as culprits for what they see as “de-moralized state” of the economy. They rather argue that the main obstacle toward a more moral economy is the destructiveness of the broader structures in which organizations are embedded – including capitalism, patriarchy, and neo-colonialism. Without an encompassing change of these broader societal structures, they do not see how moral values can gain a superior role in governing organizations.

While critical management studies were among the first to seriously question the moral impact of organizations, nowadays a growing number of scholars criticize the long-term research canon of organization and management studies that has avoided seriously touching upon questions related to morality. However, in the light of the urgent problems of the twenty-first century including climate change, rising social inequality, persistent poverty, migration, food and water scarcity, and the exploitation of developing countries, organization scholars increasingly advocate research that addresses these “grand challenges” (Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015; Suddaby, Bruton, & Walsh, 2018). To tackle these challenges, scholars have in particular studied and discussed alternative forms of organizing such as socia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Empirical Studies
• Part III. Conclusion
• Index