Actor-network theory

Actor-network theor

Defining the gift

Economics has tended to neglect giving, and thus both its important contemporary economic role and its potential contribution to alternative, non-market systems. To remedy this, it will need to draw on the broad debates on the nature of the gift that have developed in and across the other social sciences. This paper addresses several of these by asking how we should define the terms gift and giving. It rejects definitional associations of giving with obligation, reciprocity and the development of social relationships. Such definitions exclude many phenomena commonly understood as giving and underpin misguided attempts to analyse gifts in contemporary late-modern societies in terms derived from anthropological discussions of very different societies. Instead, the paper develops a definition of the gift based on contemporary giving institutions. A more open, contemporary definition of the gift helps to sensitise us to the continuing importance of gift institutions in social and economic life

Material parts in social structures

There has been much debate on whether and how groups of human agents can constitute social structures with causal significance. Both sides in this debate, however, implicitly privilege human individuals over non-human material objects and tend to ignore the possibility that such objects might also play a significant role in social structures. This paper argues that social entities are often composed of both human agents and non-human material objects, and that both may make essential contributions to their causal influence. In such cases the causal influence of social structures should be attributed to the emergent causal powers of socio-technical entities

Materialising social ontology

Social theorists increasingly recognise that material things often play vital roles in the causation of social events. However there is substantial disagreement on how to theorise these roles. Several members of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group have made important contributions in the form of their work on the ontology of technological objects. This paper builds on their work to develop an ontology of socio-technical structures: social entities composed of both humans and technological objects, with causal powers that depend on how these parts relate to, and interact with, each other. The implication is that material things are not just significant in their own right, or as parts of technical complexes, but that they can play a central role in social structures themselves. Indeed many of the most important and consequential social structures in contemporary societies, and in particular in contemporary economies, are socio-technical structures

Lifeworld and systems in the digital economy

The digital economy has provided opportunities for new forms of economic practice. At their purest, these forms deliver economic benefits as gifts and depend on cooperation without authority. Drawing loosely on Habermas, we may call this a lifeworld economy – an economy that is coordinated by communicative interaction – as opposed to the systems economy of market and state, coordinated by money and power. This formulation, however, faces both theoretical and practical challenges. On the theoretical side, the notion of a lifeworld economy does not sit easily with Habermas’s own formulation of the distinction between lifeworld and systems. On the practical side, the digital lifeworld economy has been colonised steadily by capitalist businesses, which have frequently found ways to incorporate forms of gift and cooperation into profit-oriented business models. This paper proposes to reformulate Habermas’s distinction as a reference to different kinds of causal mechanisms, detaching it from his functionalist framework and enabling more flexible application to empirical cases. It then applies it to a series of iconic cases from the digital economy: amazon, Wikipedia, and open source software, to demonstrate its continuing relevance to very current issues

The moral economy of digital gifts

The significance of giving as a contemporary socio-economic practice has been obscured both by mainstream economics and by the influence of the anthropological tradition. Andrew Sayer’s concept of moral economy offers a more fruitful framework for an economic sociology of contemporary giving, and one that appears to be largely consistent with social quality approaches. This paper analyses giving from the perspective of moral economy, questioning the view that giving is a form of exchange, and opening up the prospect of seeing it as the outcome of a more complex constellation of causal factors. It uses examples from the digital economy, in particular the phenomenon of open source software, which nicely illustrates both the progressive potential of digital gifts and the ways in which they can be absorbed into the commercial economy

Appropriative practices and the ontology of economic form

Despite their differences, both mainstream economics and Marxist political economy see the contemporary economy as a thoroughly capitalist market system. This leads both to ignore large areas of the economy and thus to obscure the widespread presence of other economic forms. This has become both more significant and more obvious with the profusion of novel economic forms in the growing digital economy, including gift forms and gift-commodity hybrids. In response, this paper proposes a new framework for analysing diverse economic systems: an ontology of economic forms in which each form is a complex of appropriative practices. Different economic forms are structured by different combinations of practices, and we can explain how each form operates by analysing the practices involved and the tendencies generated by their interaction. The argument is illustrated by applying it briefly to some sample cases from the contemporary digital economy: Wikipedia, Apple, and Google’s web search service. The paper may also be read as an application of critical realism to an empirical case and thus as an illustration of some of the issues that arise when we seek to apply the realist framework in social research

Reflections on sociology’s unspoken weakness: Bringing epistemology back in

Reflections on sociology’s unspoken weakness: Bringing epistemology back i

Emergence and the realist account of cause

The concept of emergence is routinely invoked in critical realist theory, but rarely examined. Yet emergence is fundamental to the realist account of cause. This paper aims to improve critical realism's understanding of emergence by discussing, first, what emergence is and how it works; second, the need for a compositional account of emergence; and third, the implications of emergence for causation. It goes on to argue that the theory of emergence leads to the recognition of certain hitherto neglected similarities between real causal powers and actual causation

Towards a realist social constructionism

Towards a realist social constructionism Social constructionism has often been seen as incompatible with realist approaches to the socialworld. This paper argues that critical realism is thoroughly compatible with moderate versions of social constructionism and indeed provides stronger ontological backing for it than the anti-realist approaches that are often associated with more extreme versions of social constructionism. The paper illustrates the argument by offering a realist account of how discourse may underpin processes of social construction. This is then applied to the case of the subject, an application that is framed as a critique of Judith Butler's performative account of the subject