The Priority of Relation for Creation: A primer in the logic of three

An exploration of the metaphysics of relation as a unifying motif in modern physics. What happens when Ideal observers begin to observe their own observing

De-westernizing creative labour studies: The informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective

Creative labour studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’ and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male. This article outlines the contours of a de-Westernizing project in creative labour studies while introducing a special journal issue that examines the lived dynamics of creative work outside the West. The article advocates an ‘ex-centric perspective’ on creative work. An ex-centric perspective does not merely aim at multiplying non-West empirical case studies. Rather, it aims at destabilizing, decentring and provincializing the taken-for-grantedness of some entrenched notions in creative labour studies such as informality and precarity. An ex-centric perspective, we contend, offers a potential challenge to many of the claims about creative work that have taken on the status of general truths and universal principles in spite of them being generated from limited empirical evidence gleaned from research sites situated almost exclusively in the creative hubs of Euro-America

What Are Kinship Terminologies, and Why Do We Care? A Computational Approach to Analyzing Symbolic Domains

Kinship is a fundamental feature and basis of human societies. We describe a set of computational tools and services, the Kinship Algebra Modeler, and the logic that underlies these. These were developed to improve how we understand both the fundamental facts of kinship, and how people use kinship as a resource in their lives. Mathematical formalism applied to cultural concepts is more than an exercise in model building, as it provides a way to represent and explore logical consistency and implications. The logic underlying kinship is explored here through the kin term computations made by users of a terminology when computing the kinship relation one person has to another by referring to a third person for whom each has a kin term relationship. Kinship Algebra Modeler provides a set of tools, services and an architecture to explore kinship terminologies and their properties in an accessible manner

Trust, Reciprocity and Institutional Design: Lessons from Behavioural Economics

Trust and reciprocity are the bond of society (Locke), but economic agents are both self-interested and intrinsically untrustworthy. These assumptions impair severely economists' accounts of social relationships. The paper examines strategies to escape this paradox by enlarging our conception of rationality: the assumptions of self-interest and consequentialism are critically discussed as well as relational behavioural principles (e.g. trust and reciprocity). The implications of this enlarged kind of rationality are particularly important for agency theory. The paper analyses, within this framework, the working of two different kinds of incentive mechanisms, namely intra-personal and interpersonal, and discusses experimental results that emphasise the empirical relevance of the latter. Besides providing a more descriptively adequate picture of agency, such mechanisms have important normative implications. In this respect some of the conditions that affect the process of accumulation and erosion of trust and social capital are explored. The tension between rules and trust turns out to be not inescapable, though it calls for a changing in the designing logic of institutions and contracts. I shall discuss what are the changes needed in order to implement a trust-enhancing activity of institutional design.Incentives; reciprocity; trust; crowding-out; institutional design

Economy of LIfe: Charismatic Dynamics and the Spirit of Gift

The dominant mode of globalization has mostly reinforced the disembedding of states and markets from the social practices and civic virtues of civil society writ large. In this process, abstract economic values linked to instrumental reason and procedural fairness have supplanted civic virtues of courage, reasonableness and substantive justice. As such, the global ‘market-state’ reflects the centralization of power and the concentration of wealth that is undermining democratic politics and genuinely competitive economies. However, the growing economic interdependence around the world also offers new opportunities for reciprocity, mutuality and fraternity among communities and nations. To promote an ethos of responsible and virtuous action, what is required is the full breadth of political and economic reason. Christian social teaching offers conceptual and practical resources that are indispensable to the search for broader notions of rationality. Among these resources are non-instrumental conceptions of justice and the common good in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and cognate traditions in Anglicanism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Closely connected to this is the idea of ‘civil economy’. As Pope Benedict XVI has suggested in his encyclical Caritas in veritate, ‘civil economy’ embeds state-guaranteed rights and market contracts in the social bonds and civic virtues that bind together the intermediary institutions of civil society. In this manner, it binds the ‘logic of contract’ to the ‘logic of gratuitous gift exchange’. The spirit of gift exchange translates into concrete practices of reciprocal trust and mutual assistance that underpin virtues such as reciprocal fraternity and the pursuit of the universal common good in which all can share. As such, ‘civil economy’ reconnects activities that are primarily for state-administrative or economic-commercial purposes to practices that pursue social purposes

A Relational Event Approach to Modeling Behavioral Dynamics

This chapter provides an introduction to the analysis of relational event data (i.e., actions, interactions, or other events involving multiple actors that occur over time) within the R/statnet platform. We begin by reviewing the basics of relational event modeling, with an emphasis on models with piecewise constant hazards. We then discuss estimation for dyadic and more general relational event models using the relevent package, with an emphasis on hands-on applications of the methods and interpretation of results. Statnet is a collection of packages for the R statistical computing system that supports the representation, manipulation, visualization, modeling, simulation, and analysis of relational data. Statnet packages are contributed by a team of volunteer developers, and are made freely available under the GNU Public License. These packages are written for the R statistical computing environment, and can be used with any computing platform that supports R (including Windows, Linux, and Mac).

Organ Entrepreneurs

The supply of human organs for transplantation might seem an unlikely place to begin thinking about entrepreneurship. After all, there is no production market for human organs and, with the surprising exception of Iran, legal rules around the world make the sale of human organs for transplantation a criminal offense. Yet entrepreneurs have been present throughout the history of organ transplantation — a history of the active exploration, innovation, and management of a potentially very controversial exchange at the seemingly clear boundaries that separate giving from selling, life from death, and right from wrong. This article explores the role of entrepreneurial activity in the organ transplantation industry, with the goal of showing how the specific case helps us understand the more general phenomenon of innovation in the shadow of the law, and the role of reciprocity and gift exchange in that process. We begin with a more general point about the connection between structures of exchange and their social legitimacy, illustrating it with a familiar current case from the (conventionally entrepreneurial) world of the “sharing economy”. We then describe three innovations in the world of organ transplantation, discussing the legitimation problems faced by innovators in each case, and the strategies they have drawn on. First, Kidney Paired Donation (KPD), one of the first entrepreneurial attempts to bridge the gap between kidney supply and demand, allows patients with willing, but biologically incompatible donors, to “swap” with a similarly situated pair. Second, Non-simultaneous, Extended Altruistic Donor chains (or “NEAD” chains), removed the simultaneity constraint imposed by KPD, allowing more flexibility and a greater number of transplants, but also inserting the possibility of strategic behavior by donor-recipient pairs. Finally, we consider the most recent innovation, Advanced Donation, in which a donor donates a kidney before her paired recipient has been matched to a specific donor or scheduled for surgery, creating new challenges and risks