The Moral Economy Of Labor

This concerns the dignity and the degradation of labour. Work has great power to undermine or to foster happiness. Bernard feels the moral dimension of labour has been neglected in political theory and practice and he aims to restore productive labour to its place in moral and political debate.

The idea of a moral economy has been explored and assessed in numerous disciplines. The anthropological studies in this volume provide a new perspective to this idea by showing how the relations of workers, employees and employers, and of firms, families and households are interwoven with local notions of moralities. From concepts of individual autonomy, kinship obligations, to ways of expressing mutuality or creativity, moral values exert an unrealized influence, and these often produce more consent than resistance or outrage.

How can the simple choice of a men’s suit be a moral statement and a political act? When the suit is made of free-labor wool rather than slave-grown cotton. In Moral Commerce, Julie L. Holcomb traces the genealogy of the boycott of slave labor from its seventeenth-century Quaker origins through its late nineteenth-century decline. In their failures and in their successes, in their resilience and their persistence, antislavery consumers help us understand the possibilities and the limitations of moral commerce. Quaker antislavery rhetoric began with protests against the slave trade before expanding to include boycotts of the use and products of slave labor. For more than one hundred years, British and American abolitionists highlighted consumers’ complicity in sustaining slavery. The boycott of slave labor was the first consumer movement to transcend the boundaries of nation, gender, and race in an effort by reformers to change the conditions of production. The movement attracted a broad cross-section of abolitionists: conservative and radical, Quaker and non-Quaker, male and female, white and black. The men and women who boycotted slave labor created diverse, biracial networks that worked to reorganize the transatlantic economy on an ethical basis. Even when they acted locally, supporters embraced a global vision, mobilizing the boycott as a powerful force that could transform the marketplace. For supporters of the boycott, the abolition of slavery was a step toward a broader goal of a just and humane economy. The boycott failed to overcome the power structures that kept slave labor in place; nonetheless, the movement’s historic successes and failures have important implications for modern consumers.

Activation policies which promote and enforce labour market participation continue to proliferate in Europe and constitute the reform blueprint from centre-left to centre-right, as well as for most international organizations. Through an in-depth study of four major reforms in Denmark and France, this book maps how co-existing ideas are mobilised to justify, criticise and reach activation compromises and how their morality sediments into the instruments governing the unemployed. By rethinking the role of ideas and morality in policy changes, this book illustrates how the moral economy of activation leads to a permanent behaviourist testing of the unemployed in public debate as well as in local jobcentres.

A new society is being born out of technological and social change. How will it work? Will it solve our problems?

Is there a moral economy of capitalism? The term "moral economy" was coined in pre-capitalist times and does not refer to economy as we know it today. It was only in the nineteenth century that economy came to mean the production and circulation of goods and services. At the same time, the term started to be used in an explicitly critical tone: references to moral economy were normally critical of modern forms of economy, which were purportedly lacking in morals. In our times, too, the morality of capitalism is often the topic of debate and controversy. "Moral Economies" engages in these debates. Using historical case studies from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries the book discusses the degree to which economic actions and decisions were permeated with moral, good-vs-bad classifications. Moreover it shows how strongly antiquity's concept of "embedded" economy is still powerful in modernity. The model for this was often the private household, in which moral, social, and economic behavior patterns were intertwined. The do-it-yourself movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was still oriented towards this model, thereby criticizing capitalism on moral grounds.

Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends.