Ordinal Citizenship

The expansion of social citizenship in the 20th century mitigated the brute effects of economic inequality in people's lives. The new rights also created new social divisions, however, separating citizens according to their ability to do well through them. In the 21st century the conceptual matrix of citizenship has developed further, powered by new technologies that have promised new freedoms and opportunities in every aspect of people's lives. As the scope of economic and social incorporation has broadened, the possibilities for classifying, sorting, slotting, and scaling people have also grown and diversified. Echoing the earlier rise of the meritocracy, this new matrix produces its own winners and losers, partly recycling old inequalities, and partly creating new ones. Demands for self‐care and individual fitness pile up, eroding the universal and solidaristic basis upon which the expansion of citizenship historically thrived. In its place stands what I call “ordinal citizenship,” a form of social inclusion that thrives on social measurement, differentiation, and hierarchy

Field Theory And Second Renormalization Group For Multifractals In Percolation

The field-theory for multifractals in percolation is reformulated in such a way that multifractal exponents clearly appear as eigenvalues of a second renormalization group. The first renormalization group describes geometrical properties of percolation clusters, while the second-one describes electrical properties, including noise cumulants. In this context, multifractal exponents are associated with symmetry-breaking fields in replica space. This provides an explanation for their observability. It is suggested that multifractal exponents are ''dominant'' instead of ''relevant'' since there exists an arbitrary scale factor which can change their sign from positive to negative without changing the Physics of the problem.Comment: RevTex, 10 page

A Maussian Bargain: Accumulation by Gift in the Digital Economy

The harvesting of data about people, organizations, and things and their transformation into a form of capital is often described as a process of “accumulation by dispossession,” a pervasive loss of rights buttressed by predatory practices and legal violence. Yet this argument does not square well with the fact that enrollment into digital systems is often experienced (and presented by companies) as a much more benign process: signing up for a “free” service, responding to a “friend’s” invitation, or being encouraged to “share” content. In this paper, we focus on the centrality of gifting and reciprocity to the business model and cultural imagination of digital capitalism. Relying on historical narratives and in-depth interviews with the designers and critics of digital systems, we explain the cultural genesis of these “give-to-get” relationships and analyze the socio-technical channels that structure them in practice. We suggest that the economic relation that develops as a result of a digital gift offering not only masks the structural asymmetry between giver and gifted but also permits the creation of the new commodity of personal data, obfuscates its true value, and naturalizes its private appropriation. We call this unique regime “accumulation by gift.”Introduction Markets from gifts "Information wants to be free" The Maussian bargain Research design Engineering reciprocal obligations Conclusion: From gift to market? Funding ORCID IDs Acknowledgements Notes Reference

From Social Control to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth Century America

This article draws on historical material to examine the co-evolution of economic science and business education over the course of the twentieth century, showing that fields evolve not only through internal struggles but also through struggles taking place in adjacent fields. More specifically, we argue that the scientific strategies of business schools played an essential—if largely invisible and poorly understood—role in major transformations in the organization and substantive direction of social-scientific knowledge, and specifically economic knowledge, in twentieth century America. We use the Wharton School as an illustration of the earliest trends and dilemmas (ca. 1900–1930), when business schools found themselves caught between their business connections and their striving for moral legitimacy in higher education. Next, we look at the creation of the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration after World War II. This episode illustrates the increasingly successful claims of social scientists, backed by philanthropic foundations, on business education and the growing appeal of “scientific” approaches to decision-making and management. Finally, we argue that the rise of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago from the 1960s onwards (and its closely related cousin at the University of Rochester) marks the decisive ascendancy of economics, and particularly financial economics, in business education over the other behavioral disciplines. We document the key role of these institutions in diffusing “Chicago-style” economic approaches—offering support for deregulatory policies and popularizing narrowly financial understandings of the firm—that sociologists have described as characteristic of the modern neo liberal regime

Romeo Pepoli. Patrimonio e potere a Bologna fra Comune e Signoria

Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true as well: deep moral-political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the four papers gathered here propose four different perspectives on the play of moral judgments in the economy, and call for broader and more systematic scholarly engagement with this issue. Focusing on executive compensation, bank bailouts, and the sovereign debt crisis, the symposium builds on a roundtable discussion held at the opening of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) in Paris on November 29, 2012.Introduction Marion Fourcade and Cornelia Woll High wages in the financial crisis Philippe Steiner The morality of rescuing banks Cornelia Woll The construction of a moral duty for the Greek people to repay their national debt Wolfgang Streeck The economy as morality play, and implications for the Eurozone crisis Marion Fourcad

Combined electrochemical and biological treatment for pesticide degradation - Application to phosmet

International audienceThe aim of this study was to determine the feasibility of coupling an electrochemical process with a biological treatment in order to degrade phosmet, an organophosphorous pesticide. The absence of biodegradability of phosmet by Pseudomonas fluorescens and activated sludge was verified in our operational conditions. So, a conventional biological treatment is not appropriate for phosmet polluted effluents. Electrochemical behavior of phosmet was studied by cyclic voltammetry and the feasibility of an electrochemical pretreatment was thus demonstrated. Preliminary results with activated sludge showed a diminution of 26% for COD (chemical oxygen demand) measured when the electrolyzed solution was used as the sole carbon and nitrogen sources. When glucose and ammonium were added as supplementary carbon and nitrogen sources, the COD diminution reached 34% after 79 h of culture. This study demonstrates the feasibility of an electrochemical pre-treatment prior to biotreatment