Are Organic Consumers Healthier than Others?

Recent research results indicate that organic consumers have a healthier diet than other consumers. This suggests that there might be a positive relationship between organic consumption and a healthy lifestyle. One aim of an ongoing research project is to analyse whether consumers with a high organic consumption have a higher interest in nutrition and a healthy living than other consumers. In order to test whether such a causal relationship exists, purchase data from Danish households are combined with information on these households’ perception of organic food and their health concerns

Economic Discourse and the European Integration of Financial Infrastructures and Financial Markets

European integration of financial markets appears to repeatedly encounter specific kinds of problems about the substance and limits of the notion of “the market” undergoing integration, and about the status and role of money, market infrastructures, and government within it. Moreover, these problems and the controversies around them parallel classical discussions in economic theory such as that between conceptions of the market as a frictionless space and as a process of competition. A “competitive conception of the market” is identified as producing these parallel problems and controversies in European market integration and economic theory because it implies a contradictory “integration of fragmentation.” These themes and parallels can be specifically identified in a recent major project to integrate financial market infrastructures: a pan-European settlement platform – “Target2-Securities (T2S)” – to overcome existing fragmentation between the systems that perform the actual delivery of money and securities from financial transactions. Moreover, a close analysis of T2S answers a question that existing sociological and political economy approaches to European integration – focusing primarily on the interests and ideas of powerful players – struggle with: why T2S will become de facto a monopoly for the European Central Bank when early on in the integration process EU institutions emphasized an industry-led integration. Foucault’s notion of “discursive formation” is employed to conceptualize these arguments.[Discours économique et intégration des marchés et des infrastructures financiers européens] L’intégration européenne des marchés financiers semble se heurter de manière répétée à un certain type de problèmes concernant la substance et les limites conceptuelles de ce « marché » en cours d’intégration, ainsi que le statut et le rôle qu’y revêtent l’argent, les infrastructures et la gouvernance publique. Ces problèmes et les controverses qu’ils soulèvent présentent un parallélisme avec des débats classiques de théorie économique tels que celui qui oppose les conceptions du marché comme espace sans frottements et comme processus de concurrence. Ce parallélisme de problèmes et de controverses observé entre intégration du marché européen et théorie économique est attribué ici à une « conception concurrentielle du marché » car celle-ci implique l’idée contradictoire d’une « intégration de la fragmentation ». Nous nous sommes plus particulièrement attaché à repérer ces thèmes et ces parallèles dans un grand projet récent d’intégration des infrastructures de marché financier : la plateforme paneuropéenne de règlement-livraison de titres Target2-Securities (ou T2S), censée surmonter la fragmentation des systèmes qui réalisent les transferts d’argent et de titres lors de transactions financières. L’analyse minutieuse de ce projet permet en outre d’avancer une réponse à une énigme que les approches habituelles de l’intégration européenne en sociologie et en économie politique (political economy) – principalement centrées sur les intérêts et idées des acteurs les plus puissants – sont bien en peine d’éclaircir : à savoir la raison pour laquelle T2S sera de facto un monopole de la Banque centrale européenne, alors que les institutions européennes privilégient depuis le début l’intégration par les acteurs privés. La notion foucaldienne de « formation discursive » est mise à contribution pour conceptualiser ces thèses.1 Introduction 2 Studying discourse 3 Material and analytical strategy 4 Target2-Securities Who creates central bank money? The technical controversy over “Delivery versus Payment” Things are not what they seem: The legal controversy over the Legal Assessment In the market or outside the market? The economic controversy over cost recovery Ferrari on a bumpy road: The political controversy over harmonization 5 The limits of existing approaches 6 Economic discourse and European integration The four controversies revisited 7 Conclusion: On the competitive conception of the market Appendix: Interviews Reference

German political and economic ideology in the twentieth century and its theological problems:The Lutheran genealogy of ordoliberalism

Ordoliberalism is widely considered to be the dominant ideology of the German political elite today and consequently responsible at least in part for its hard ‘austerity’ line during the recent Eurozone crisis. This article presents a genealogy of the main concerns, concepts and problems around which early German ordoliberalism was formed and structured as a political and economic ideology. Early ordoliberalism is shown to be rooted in an interwar Germanophone Lutheran Evangelical tradition of anti-humanist ‘political ethics’. Its specific conceptions of the market, the state, the individual, freedom and duty were developed on a Lutheran Evangelical basis. Analytically, the article considers ideological influences of theology on political and economic theory not so much in terms of consensus and ideational overlap, but rather in terms of shared concerns, concepts and problems across different positions