Virtual money, practices and moral orders in Second Life

Virtual monies present a limit case in debates about money's moral and political entanglements between sociologists, anthropologists, and economists. Digitized virtual monies seem ephemeral, almost ideal typical examples of money as a pure medium of exchange. This paper begins with the premise that virtual monies are as value-laden and morally entangled as any other form of money. This assertion is demonstrated by exploring how one type of virtual money, the Linden dollar (L$), and some of its associated practices are bound up with research participants' moral categories and judgments in the virtual world of Second Life (SL). Participants' accounts of virtual money practices are linked to moral attributes, sometimes in stark ‘good’ or ‘bad’ dichotomies, but also in more nuanced terms. These framings reproduce classifications of people and practices along a continuum with virtuousness at one end and maliciousness or harm at the other, passing through various states of possible moral dubiousness. For respondents, these two judgments go together; people are what they do with money. As a result, respondents decide what ‘people like that’ deserve. Evaluating someone's money practices means assessing the person. Participants' accounts of Linden dollar practices overlap with explanations of what SL is and how residents should live there. In SL, money is a form of material culture through which appropriate ways of being in the world are debated and reproduced

Pricing Bodies: A Feminist New Materialist Approach to the Relations Between the Economic and Socio-Cultural

Arguments that the economic and socio-cultural should be understood as relational and intertwined, and that price involves a reciprocal relationship between the economic and socio-cultural, are increasingly prevalent in the social sciences. I develop these notions of relationality and reciprocation through a feminist new materialist perspective, which emphasises the entanglement of and intra-action between what might usually be seen as independent and autonomous entities. To do this, I focus on a range of recent body-image initiatives, led by government, corporate and non-profit organisations, which aim to improve girls’ and young women’s levels of confidence and self-esteem. I explore how feminist theory tends to see such initiatives in terms of the expansion of the economic sphere into the socio-cultural, which involves a tainting or contamination of embodiment and feeling. Rather than dispute these arguments, I take seriously theories and practices from cultural economy that see the economic and socio-cultural as co-constitutive. I augment these ideas with a feminist new materialist approach and argue that the economic and socio-cultural are in intra-active relations: they do not precede or exist apart from each other. In doing so, I consider how body-image initiatives can be understood as phenomena produced through these entangled intra-active relations, and offer an understanding of pricing as a simultaneously socio-cultural and economic process, where value and values become. I also raise questions regarding how, ethically and politically, boundary making and unmaking can be conceived, and how despite being in entangled relations, asymmetries between economic and socio-cultural relations may be approached

Remittance micro-worlds and migrant infrastructure: circulations, disruptions, and the movement of money

Remittances are increasingly central to development discourses in Africa. The development sector seeks to leverage transnational migration and rapid innovations in financial technologies (fintech), to make remittance systems cheaper for end-users and less risky for states and companies. Critical scholarship, however, questions the techno-fix tendency, calling for grounded research on the intersections between remittances, technologies, and everyday life in African cities and beyond. Building on this work, we deploy the concepts of “micro-worlds” and “migrant infrastructure” to make sense of the complex networks of actors, practices, regulations, and materialities that shape remittance worlds. To ground the work, we narrate two vignettes of remittance service providers who operate in Cape Town, South Africa, serving the Congolese diaspora community. We showcase the important role of logistics companies in the “informal” provision of remittance services and the rise of fintech companies operating in the remittance space. These vignettes give substance to the messy and relational dynamics of remittance micro-worlds. This relationality allows us to see how remittances are circulations, not unidirectional flows; how they are not split between formal and informal, but in fact intersect in blurry ways; how digital technologies are central to the story of migrant infrastructures; and how migrants themselves are compositional of these networks. In doing so, we tell a more relational story about how remittance systems are constituted and configured

Renewing Criminalized and Hegemonic Cultural Landscapes

The Mafia's long historical pedigree in Mezzogiorno, Southern Italy, has empowered the Mafioso as a notorious, uncontested, and hegemonic figure. The counter-cultural resistance against the mafiosi culture began to be institutionalized in the early 1990s. Today, Libera Terra is the largest civil society organization in the country that uses the lands confiscated from the Mafia as a space of cultural repertoire to realize its ideals. Deploying labor force through volunteer participation, producing biological fruits and vegetables, and providing information to the students on the fields are the principal cultural practices of this struggle. The confiscated lands make the Italian experience of anti-Mafia resistance a unique example by connecting the land with the ideals of cultural change. The sociocultural resistance of Libera Terra conveys a political message through these practices and utters that the Mafia is not invincible. This study draws the complex panorama of the Mafia and anti-Mafia movement that uses the ‘confiscated lands’ as cultural and public spaces for resistance and socio-cultural change. In doing so, this article sheds new light on the relationship between rural criminology and crime prevention policies in Southern Italy by demonstrating how community development practice of Libera Terra changes the meaning of landscape through iconographic symbolism and ethnographic performance

Optimising ‘cash flows’:Converting corporate finance to hard currency

Following recent works that have underlined the increasing search for liquidity in economic exchange, this article studies how illiquid forms of money are converted into liquid forms by corporate finance actors. In the name of ‘shareholder value’, the various forms of value generated by companies (such as ‘trade credit’) tend to be increasingly transformed into liquid forms of money that are easily distributable to shareholders (‘cash flows’). Describing this phenomenon as an example of what anthropologists of money call ‘conversion’, this paper highlights how such a conversion process was necessary for the historical development of ‘shareholder value’ policies in corporate finance. Considering documentary sources and interviews with consultants, auditors, and private equity fund managers involved in ‘cash flow’ optimisation practices, this paper details this conversion phenomenon and shows how it has relied on the historical elaboration of specific metrological, technical, legal, and moral norms

Grudge spending:The interplay between markets and culture in the purchase of security

In the paper, we use data from an English study of security consumption, and recent work in the cultural sociology of markets, to illustrate the way in which moral and social commitments shape and often constrain decisions about how, or indeed whether, individuals and organizations enter markets for protection. Three main claims are proffered. We suggest, firstly, that the purchase of security commodities is a mundane, non-conspicuous mode of consumption that typically exists outside of the paraphernalia of consumer culture - a form of grudge spending. Secondly, we demonstrate that security consumption is weighed against other commitments that individuals and organizations have and is often kept in check by these competing considerations. We find, thirdly, that the prospect of consuming security prompts people to consider the relations that obtain between security objects and other things that they morally or aesthetically value, and to reflect on what the buying and selling of security signals about the condition and likely futures of their society. These points are illustrated using the examples of organizational consumption and gated communities. In respect of each case, we tease out the evaluative judgements that condition and constrain the purchase of security among organizations and individuals and argue that they open up some important but neglected questions to do with the moral economy of security

The moral economy of security

In this article we draw upon our recent research into security consumption to answer two questions: first, under what conditions do people experience the buying and selling of security goods and services as morally troubling? Second, what are the theoretical implications of understanding private security as, in certain respects, tainted trade? We begin by drawing on two bodies of work on morality and markets (one found in political theory, the other in cultural sociology) in order to develop what we call a moral economy of security. We then use this theoretical resource to conduct an anatomy of the modes of ambivalence and unease that the trade in security generates. Three categories organize the analysis: blocked exchange; corrosive exchange; and intangible exchange. In conclusion, we briefly spell out the wider significance of our claim that the buying and selling of security is a morally charged and contested practice of governance

What about money?:Earnings, household financial organization, and housework

Objective: This research investigates the role played by household financial organization in configuring the housework participation of women and men and in moderating the influence of earnings on housework. Background: Existing research has focused on the ways in which earnings shape gendered power and housework performance in couple relationships. However, no research has examined how household financial organization intervenes between the receipt of earnings in the labor market and the performance of housework at home. Method: Two-stage least squares regressions were used to analyze data from Waves 2 and 4 of the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (N = 6,070 couples). Results: Management of household finances is associated with an increase in housework time for both men and women, whereas control of household financial decisions reduces men’s but not women’s housework time. Women’s individual earnings reduce their housework time only when they can access these earnings. Supporting both resource bargaining theory and gendered resources theory, men’s relative earnings reduce their housework time when they or their partners manage the couple’s earnings, but not when partners manage their earnings independently. Women’s individual earnings and men’s relative earnings reduce their housework time only when they have partial or full control of household financial decisions. Conclusion: The management and control of household finances influence the time spent by women and men on housework in ways distinct from yet equally as important as those of earnings. Household financial organization is a key premise moderating when and how gender equality in the public sphere helps promulgate gender equality at home

Childhood Labor in India: issues and complexities

It is estimated that more than 12 million children in India under the age of 14 engage in paid labor at least part time, due mostly to economic reasons. Dominant discourses about childhood however conceptualize childhood labor not only as unethical but as exploitation. This article explored will the tensions between Western notions of childhood (within which paid labor is considered taboo) and the realities of children's lives in India, arguing that childhood labor must be contextualized and understood not only as a colonial legacy but also as part of its socio-cultural context. The author argues that separating children from the world of work fosters a culture of childhood that emphasizes entitlement over participation and privileges the rights of the consumer over children's rights as citizens