Some recent anthropological and sociological work on consumer society has begun to explore themes... more Some recent anthropological and sociological work on consumer society has begun to explore themes of patriotism, nostalgia and non-consumption on the basis of where goods were made, but no shared concepts or framework for analysis has yet emerged. This paper offers a new conceptual framework based on social representations; and the anchoring process, how social representations are used to make unfamiliar entities comparable and 'knowable'. This approach also builds upon oft-repeated empirical insights from two well-established quantitative literatures on patriotic non-consumption: country-of-origin effects; and consumer ethnocentrism. The framework presented here allows us to explain how an American in Russia can understand toothpaste manufactured in the Netherlands as a safe, well-made, and healthy, choice. Toothpaste made in the Netherlands becomes 'Dutch toothpaste' through an anchoring process that associates commodities with social representations of nations, or countries, grafting qualities of peoples, or places, onto goods.
This paper explores money's numbers and quantities in affluent expatriates' adaptation to differe... more This paper explores money's numbers and quantities in affluent expatriates' adaptation to different money practices in urban Russia using three analytical categories: difficult sums (5,000); denomination and usage problems (Five Thousands); and rule-of-thumb calculations (five thousands). Each category illustrates different entanglements of money quantities, qualities, and material forms, particularly coin, and bank note, denominations. For example, quantities—exchange rates, denominations, prices—are called upon to justify moral judgments of Russian people and culture, and the country's economy. Thus, relations between money quantities provide ways of participating in, but not becoming one with, others. This analysis also suggests that money's multiplicities exist on a more basic, fundamental level: in regular use, conversion and mental reckoning across multiple currencies.
Ambiguous goods are not a category of things. No goods are ambiguous by default, not even digital... more Ambiguous goods are not a category of things. No goods are ambiguous by default, not even digital virtual ones. Ambiguity may arise in many ways, but this article examines one specific process: ambiguity that occurs when entities appear as objects that blur category boundaries. Ambiguity is created around pre-existing categories through socio-material entanglements. This article explores how a central category in consumer capitalist societies – property – takes on ambiguous forms in distributions and recirculations of prestige items in the massively multi-player online role-playing game Final Fantasy XI (FFXI). Prestige objects are powerful, sought-after armour and weapons acquired in the game world by completing difficult battlefields or tasks, often in large groups. When discussing these items, respondents are not confused actors trying to make sense of slippery things. Instead, they produce ambiguities around property by blurring distinctions between gifts and commodities. Blurred boundaries help resolve tensions arising from different orderings of people, relations and things. Hybridised property forms allow selective alienation of goods, allowing participants to privilege some relations and connections over others.
With this article I hope to spark further debate on building a conceptual toolkit to explore ambiguities, and contribute to increasing interest in non-dyadic gift relations in consumer culture research. 'Ambiguous goods' is not a viable category for thinking about things, people and relations or digital virtual objects. But ambiguity can be a useful way to think about how people and things – whether they are digital, virtual or neither – are related.
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory
Virtual monies present a limit case in debates about money's moral and political entanglements be... more Virtual monies present a limit case in debates about money's moral and political entanglements between sociologists, anthropologists and economists. Digitised virtual monies seem ephemeral, almost ideal typical examples of money as a pure medium of exchange. This paper begins with 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 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 along a continuum with virtuousness at one end and malicious or harmful at the other, passing though various states of possibly 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.
In virtual worlds, consumption of digital, virtual commodities is apparently limitless. In game-o... more In virtual worlds, consumption of digital, virtual commodities is apparently limitless. In game-oriented worlds like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI the acquisition of desirable goods is limited only by skill, time and patience – but mostly patience. Given enough attempts to kill an enormously powerful monster, each player will receive the item she desires. What limits can be meaningfully placed on consumption in an economy of such apparent abundance that patience is the main obstacle to possession, a world in which everyone could eventually acquire everything given enough time?
This paper examines two limits of a spectrum of self-imposed limits to virtual consumption as explained by players of Final Fantasy XI with the moral limits of arbitrage at one end, and a focus on collective accumulation of wealth at the other. The moral constraints on arbitrage in FFXI are tied to a deeply rooted sense of economic fairplay and a strong – and surprisingly pervasive, given that this research was conducted before the financial crisis – ideology of “fair” rather than “free” markets. Some economic behaviour that is morally questionable, such as price gouging and supply manipulation, is understood not only as market manipulation that detracts from users’ game play experience, but also as a threat to players’ enjoyment of the virtual world of FFXI as a commodity, and their acquisition of digital virtual commodities. Players band together in linkshells (guilds) in FFXI to defeat powerful foes and acquire powerful and highly desirable equipment, or more baldly put, to increase their consumption capacity. Distribution of goods through these organisations can be a fraught affair, but generally, the spoils of conquest are distributed evenly. Though such rewards are individually held, the prestige and power of the organisation is increased as its members acquire increasingly sought-after goods, transforming individual accumulation and consumption into collective achievement.
This project explores divergences and parallels between lay theories of economic life as experien... more This project explores divergences and parallels between lay theories of economic life as experienced and developed in two virtual worlds – Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) and Second Life (SL) – and academic theories from sociology and anthropology as well as economics. My intent is not a critique ofeconomics, but a suggestion that other economic sociologies are possible, and to provide points of departure and ideas for such alternative configurations. Exploration of lay theories is organised around four key conceptual categories – value, exchange, money and markets – which were suggested by participants' accounts and economic organisation within each field site. Respondents' theories offer polyphonic, heteroglossic approaches to economic life that sometimes diverge substantially from academic conceptualisations. Lay theories examined in this research emphasising plurality and multiplicity – especially with respect to monies – going so far as to suggest a radical reorganisation of economies based on monies rather than markets. When lay theories from each category are pieced together, they reveal a social imaginary of boundless abundance, strong reliance upon practices as ways of knowing about and theorising economic life, and strange parellels with studies of “primitive” cultures.
This dissertation is based on comparative ethnographies of two disparate virtual worlds, FFXI and SL, which offer different slant-wise views of contemporary capitalist, consumer societies. Final Fantasy XI is a proprietary massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created, owned and maintained by Square-Enix, while Second Life (SL) is a free-form, non-proprietary, three-dimensional virtual world created and maintained in a laissez-faire fashion by Linden Lab. Fieldwork consisted of participant observation, one-on-one interviews, group interviews with FFXI respondents and analysis of fan-made media and corporate texts.
If your library subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database, you ma... more If your library subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database, you may be entitled to a free electronic version of this graduate work. If not, you will have the option to purchase one, and access a 24 page preview for free (if available).
Many video games are designed for leisure, skilled play and narrative exploration. Yet in massive... more Many video games are designed for leisure, skilled play and narrative exploration. Yet in massively multi-player online games like Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft or Destiny, economic knowledge is believed to be essential to players' success or failure in the game and cultivated at a fairly sophisticated level. These spaces created for amusement and entertainment are permeated with economistic and moral theories that players use to explain, legitimate and criticise their own and others' practices. This paper explores moral and market logics underpinning pricing practices in one virtual world, Final Fantasy XI (FFXI), an adventure-oriented fantasy game. In FFXI, players build elaborate normative theories about how economies function in which fair prices play a central role. Sometimes these lay theories are supported by diagrams, charts and graphs that would not look out of place in university economics or business textbooks. Such visualisations are produced with data collected by player-created scripts and application programming interfaces (APIs). One API scrapes Auction House sales on all FFXI servers and logs them in a relational database that can be searched on the website Final Fantasy XI AH (ffxiah.com).
What constitutes a fair price, how prices should be determined, when prices may be acceptably raised or lowered, and to what degree, are framed as both moral and economic questions. For FFXI players, price stability is believed to be essential to maintaining fair access to goods and participation in the virtual world. Without essential consumable commodities, such as arrows, and consumer durables like weapons and armour, players' online adventures would grind to a halt. As the vast majority of economic activity is trade between players, maintaining 'good' prices and avoiding inflationary tendencies is framed as a personal responsibility. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of players are involved in price setting on a daily basis as they buy, sell and browse goods in FFXI's Auction Houses and bazaars. Being knowledgeable about fair prices and exercising good judgement in setting appropriate prices for virtual goods are ways of reproducing and maintaining economic stability and demonstrating responsible economic citizenship in the virtual world. In this context, market knowledge is produced in tandem with, if not through, moral judgements.
Finally, players often support or justify their pricing rules of thumb with examples of economic practices and market logics beyond virtual worlds and video games. This paper also briefly considers some of the parallels and divergences players present between moral and market rules of pricing in actual economies and in FFXI's virtual economy.
National currencies, especially paper notes, are emblems of the nation-state and its power. This ... more National currencies, especially paper notes, are emblems of the nation-state and its power. This paper builds on these literatures to explore iconic representations of Canada's Aboriginal Peoples in its monies, using examples of colonial and (ostensibly) post-colonial notes. Research on images of imperialism and nationalism in African colonial and African and East Asian post-colonial monies and stamps is a well-established field. However, Canada's imperialist, colonialist legacy is a neglected, sometimes denied, history, and its monies are barely studied from critical, social science perspectives.
Beginning with an 1870 Dominion of Canada $2 bill, and culminating in the 2004 Canadian Journey series $20 bill, this paper asks whether Canada's claim of multiculturalism vis-a-vis First Nations Peoples is indeed supported by nation-building imagery on its own currency. Hudson's Bay Point Blankets were traded between colonisers and First Nations in 19th century Canada. These wool blankets were re-purposed by Aboriginal peoples as garments, ceremonial exchange and prestige goods. On the 1870 $2 bill, the blanket draped across an Aboriginal man's body is an imperialist icon of le doux commerce that 'tames' the 'noble savage'. In the 2004 $20 bill, First Nations are represented by a modern sculpture by a Haida artist, Bill Reid, depicting the creation of mankind, 'Raven and the First Men'. But on this bill is contemporary Aboriginal art and 'traditional culture' – the sculpture depicts a key event in Haida cosmology – presented as truly valuable?
This paper explores two aspects of expatriate money practices with Russian rubles, focusing on ev... more This paper explores two aspects of expatriate money practices with Russian rubles, focusing on everyday shopping: conversion rules of thumb and denominations. The Russian ruble is a currency whose base denomination is one hundred (100) rather than one (1). Many expatriates living in Moscow are accustomed to currencies like the United States dollar, the Euro or British pounds sterling, whose base denominations are one not one hundred. Conversion becomes a way of managing 'sticker shock', a means of making sense of how a can of coffee can cost 800 currency units (rubles in this case), and coming to understand new regimes of value and price for everyday goods. Yet even expatriates from countries with a currency whose base unit is 100 – Japanese yen, South Korean won, Swedish krona – talk of curious conversions that shift, so that a rule of thumb that 150 of one unit equals 100 of another eventually becomes a 1:1 ratio. Learning to use rubles, especially in buying daily necessities, means not only developing a handy conversion to assess prices, but also adjusting to new arithmetic based on different monetary denominations, even when the base unit may be the same. I will argue that conversions are slowly adjusted to better match not official rates of currency conversion, but notions of worth and value that are linked to available denominations of money at 'home' and abroad.
Transhumanism is a system of belief that emphasises endless scientific and technological progress... more Transhumanism is a system of belief that emphasises endless scientific and technological progress and eagerly anticipates the emergence of the post-human. In the global north, popular imaginings of the Internet and cyberspace are suffused with Enlightenment notions of a steadily improving world achieved through technological advancement. For Transhumanists these technologies are entangled with techno-futurist, science (fiction) imaginaries. Though there is a large insider literature written by H+ activists in their own peer-reviewed journals, scholarly literatures on Transhumanism (H+) are small and largely confined to the humanities. These analyses are based on non-fiction books, websites and speeches produced by public figures in the H+ movement, and science fiction novels, rather than the perspectives of people for whom Transhumanism is a personal belief, not a career or professional activity. This paper explores the views of several users of Second Life who identify themselves as Transhumanists. These respondents are ordinary Transhumanists, who are neither celebrities nor published 'experts' in the H+ movement. H+ is often portrayed as divided into two segments – Extropian and Singularitarian – and as quasi-religious or utopian. Analysis of ordinary Transhumanists' accounts troubles these binary classifications, and suggest that H+ is neither utopian, nor fringe. It is a distillation of rather banal beliefs in consumer capitalist societies of the global north about science, progress and human potential.
This paper draws equally on feminist science studies, actor-network theory and urban surrealist f... more This paper draws equally on feminist science studies, actor-network theory and urban surrealist fiction to explore conceptual problems in contemporary economic sociology. The now dismantled Tent City of London's Occupy movement, positioned directly outside London’s financial heart, becomes as a spatial metaphor to explore the curious parallel lives of theoretical approaches in economic sociology. Embeddness and performativity are purified conceptualisations of economic life that occupy different theoretical spaces. Though they are divided by ontology and epistemology, and sometimes methods as well, these two approaches create disparate imagined worlds from the same empirical ‘stuff’: economic life, broadly defined. These ‘two’ approaches are actually a heterogeneous polyphony; to imagine them as a simply dichotomy is yet another purification, a comforting abstraction.
We can move beyond embeddedness and performativity by abandoning purifications and making peace with partiality. I will argue that, like China Mieville’s detective Tyador Borlu, we must step bravely into breach areas, the spaces between disciplines and conceptual extremes. Such an economic sociology is inspired by Donna Haraway’s image of the cyborg, and aims to see and think from multiple perspectives. Economic 'realities' cannot be found through purifications, but can be glimped in these breaches, through extensions and what Strathern (1991:38) calls ‘connections without assumptions of comparability’.
Some recent anthropological and sociological work on consumer society has begun to explore themes... more Some recent anthropological and sociological work on consumer society has begun to explore themes of patriotism, nostalgia and non-consumption on the basis of where goods were made, but no shared concepts or framework for analysis has yet emerged. This paper offers a new conceptual framework based on social representations; and the anchoring process, how social representations are used to make unfamiliar entities comparable and 'knowable'. This approach also builds upon oft-repeated empirical insights from two well-established quantitative literatures on patriotic non-consumption: country-of-origin effects; and consumer ethnocentrism. The framework presented here allows us to explain how an American in Russia can understand toothpaste manufactured in the Netherlands as a safe, well-made, and healthy, choice. Toothpaste made in the Netherlands becomes 'Dutch toothpaste' through an anchoring process that associates commodities with social representations of nations, or countries, grafting qualities of peoples, or places, onto goods.
This paper explores money's numbers and quantities in affluent expatriates' adaptation to differe... more This paper explores money's numbers and quantities in affluent expatriates' adaptation to different money practices in urban Russia using three analytical categories: difficult sums (5,000); denomination and usage problems (Five Thousands); and rule-of-thumb calculations (five thousands). Each category illustrates different entanglements of money quantities, qualities, and material forms, particularly coin, and bank note, denominations. For example, quantities—exchange rates, denominations, prices—are called upon to justify moral judgments of Russian people and culture, and the country's economy. Thus, relations between money quantities provide ways of participating in, but not becoming one with, others. This analysis also suggests that money's multiplicities exist on a more basic, fundamental level: in regular use, conversion and mental reckoning across multiple currencies.
Ambiguous goods are not a category of things. No goods are ambiguous by default, not even digital... more Ambiguous goods are not a category of things. No goods are ambiguous by default, not even digital virtual ones. Ambiguity may arise in many ways, but this article examines one specific process: ambiguity that occurs when entities appear as objects that blur category boundaries. Ambiguity is created around pre-existing categories through socio-material entanglements. This article explores how a central category in consumer capitalist societies – property – takes on ambiguous forms in distributions and recirculations of prestige items in the massively multi-player online role-playing game Final Fantasy XI (FFXI). Prestige objects are powerful, sought-after armour and weapons acquired in the game world by completing difficult battlefields or tasks, often in large groups. When discussing these items, respondents are not confused actors trying to make sense of slippery things. Instead, they produce ambiguities around property by blurring distinctions between gifts and commodities. Blurred boundaries help resolve tensions arising from different orderings of people, relations and things. Hybridised property forms allow selective alienation of goods, allowing participants to privilege some relations and connections over others.
With this article I hope to spark further debate on building a conceptual toolkit to explore ambiguities, and contribute to increasing interest in non-dyadic gift relations in consumer culture research. 'Ambiguous goods' is not a viable category for thinking about things, people and relations or digital virtual objects. But ambiguity can be a useful way to think about how people and things – whether they are digital, virtual or neither – are related.
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory
Virtual monies present a limit case in debates about money's moral and political entanglements be... more Virtual monies present a limit case in debates about money's moral and political entanglements between sociologists, anthropologists and economists. Digitised virtual monies seem ephemeral, almost ideal typical examples of money as a pure medium of exchange. This paper begins with 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 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 along a continuum with virtuousness at one end and malicious or harmful at the other, passing though various states of possibly 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.
In virtual worlds, consumption of digital, virtual commodities is apparently limitless. In game-o... more In virtual worlds, consumption of digital, virtual commodities is apparently limitless. In game-oriented worlds like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI the acquisition of desirable goods is limited only by skill, time and patience – but mostly patience. Given enough attempts to kill an enormously powerful monster, each player will receive the item she desires. What limits can be meaningfully placed on consumption in an economy of such apparent abundance that patience is the main obstacle to possession, a world in which everyone could eventually acquire everything given enough time?
This paper examines two limits of a spectrum of self-imposed limits to virtual consumption as explained by players of Final Fantasy XI with the moral limits of arbitrage at one end, and a focus on collective accumulation of wealth at the other. The moral constraints on arbitrage in FFXI are tied to a deeply rooted sense of economic fairplay and a strong – and surprisingly pervasive, given that this research was conducted before the financial crisis – ideology of “fair” rather than “free” markets. Some economic behaviour that is morally questionable, such as price gouging and supply manipulation, is understood not only as market manipulation that detracts from users’ game play experience, but also as a threat to players’ enjoyment of the virtual world of FFXI as a commodity, and their acquisition of digital virtual commodities. Players band together in linkshells (guilds) in FFXI to defeat powerful foes and acquire powerful and highly desirable equipment, or more baldly put, to increase their consumption capacity. Distribution of goods through these organisations can be a fraught affair, but generally, the spoils of conquest are distributed evenly. Though such rewards are individually held, the prestige and power of the organisation is increased as its members acquire increasingly sought-after goods, transforming individual accumulation and consumption into collective achievement.
This project explores divergences and parallels between lay theories of economic life as experien... more This project explores divergences and parallels between lay theories of economic life as experienced and developed in two virtual worlds – Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) and Second Life (SL) – and academic theories from sociology and anthropology as well as economics. My intent is not a critique ofeconomics, but a suggestion that other economic sociologies are possible, and to provide points of departure and ideas for such alternative configurations. Exploration of lay theories is organised around four key conceptual categories – value, exchange, money and markets – which were suggested by participants' accounts and economic organisation within each field site. Respondents' theories offer polyphonic, heteroglossic approaches to economic life that sometimes diverge substantially from academic conceptualisations. Lay theories examined in this research emphasising plurality and multiplicity – especially with respect to monies – going so far as to suggest a radical reorganisation of economies based on monies rather than markets. When lay theories from each category are pieced together, they reveal a social imaginary of boundless abundance, strong reliance upon practices as ways of knowing about and theorising economic life, and strange parellels with studies of “primitive” cultures.
This dissertation is based on comparative ethnographies of two disparate virtual worlds, FFXI and SL, which offer different slant-wise views of contemporary capitalist, consumer societies. Final Fantasy XI is a proprietary massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created, owned and maintained by Square-Enix, while Second Life (SL) is a free-form, non-proprietary, three-dimensional virtual world created and maintained in a laissez-faire fashion by Linden Lab. Fieldwork consisted of participant observation, one-on-one interviews, group interviews with FFXI respondents and analysis of fan-made media and corporate texts.
If your library subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database, you ma... more If your library subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database, you may be entitled to a free electronic version of this graduate work. If not, you will have the option to purchase one, and access a 24 page preview for free (if available).
Many video games are designed for leisure, skilled play and narrative exploration. Yet in massive... more Many video games are designed for leisure, skilled play and narrative exploration. Yet in massively multi-player online games like Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft or Destiny, economic knowledge is believed to be essential to players' success or failure in the game and cultivated at a fairly sophisticated level. These spaces created for amusement and entertainment are permeated with economistic and moral theories that players use to explain, legitimate and criticise their own and others' practices. This paper explores moral and market logics underpinning pricing practices in one virtual world, Final Fantasy XI (FFXI), an adventure-oriented fantasy game. In FFXI, players build elaborate normative theories about how economies function in which fair prices play a central role. Sometimes these lay theories are supported by diagrams, charts and graphs that would not look out of place in university economics or business textbooks. Such visualisations are produced with data collected by player-created scripts and application programming interfaces (APIs). One API scrapes Auction House sales on all FFXI servers and logs them in a relational database that can be searched on the website Final Fantasy XI AH (ffxiah.com).
What constitutes a fair price, how prices should be determined, when prices may be acceptably raised or lowered, and to what degree, are framed as both moral and economic questions. For FFXI players, price stability is believed to be essential to maintaining fair access to goods and participation in the virtual world. Without essential consumable commodities, such as arrows, and consumer durables like weapons and armour, players' online adventures would grind to a halt. As the vast majority of economic activity is trade between players, maintaining 'good' prices and avoiding inflationary tendencies is framed as a personal responsibility. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of players are involved in price setting on a daily basis as they buy, sell and browse goods in FFXI's Auction Houses and bazaars. Being knowledgeable about fair prices and exercising good judgement in setting appropriate prices for virtual goods are ways of reproducing and maintaining economic stability and demonstrating responsible economic citizenship in the virtual world. In this context, market knowledge is produced in tandem with, if not through, moral judgements.
Finally, players often support or justify their pricing rules of thumb with examples of economic practices and market logics beyond virtual worlds and video games. This paper also briefly considers some of the parallels and divergences players present between moral and market rules of pricing in actual economies and in FFXI's virtual economy.
National currencies, especially paper notes, are emblems of the nation-state and its power. This ... more National currencies, especially paper notes, are emblems of the nation-state and its power. This paper builds on these literatures to explore iconic representations of Canada's Aboriginal Peoples in its monies, using examples of colonial and (ostensibly) post-colonial notes. Research on images of imperialism and nationalism in African colonial and African and East Asian post-colonial monies and stamps is a well-established field. However, Canada's imperialist, colonialist legacy is a neglected, sometimes denied, history, and its monies are barely studied from critical, social science perspectives.
Beginning with an 1870 Dominion of Canada $2 bill, and culminating in the 2004 Canadian Journey series $20 bill, this paper asks whether Canada's claim of multiculturalism vis-a-vis First Nations Peoples is indeed supported by nation-building imagery on its own currency. Hudson's Bay Point Blankets were traded between colonisers and First Nations in 19th century Canada. These wool blankets were re-purposed by Aboriginal peoples as garments, ceremonial exchange and prestige goods. On the 1870 $2 bill, the blanket draped across an Aboriginal man's body is an imperialist icon of le doux commerce that 'tames' the 'noble savage'. In the 2004 $20 bill, First Nations are represented by a modern sculpture by a Haida artist, Bill Reid, depicting the creation of mankind, 'Raven and the First Men'. But on this bill is contemporary Aboriginal art and 'traditional culture' – the sculpture depicts a key event in Haida cosmology – presented as truly valuable?
This paper explores two aspects of expatriate money practices with Russian rubles, focusing on ev... more This paper explores two aspects of expatriate money practices with Russian rubles, focusing on everyday shopping: conversion rules of thumb and denominations. The Russian ruble is a currency whose base denomination is one hundred (100) rather than one (1). Many expatriates living in Moscow are accustomed to currencies like the United States dollar, the Euro or British pounds sterling, whose base denominations are one not one hundred. Conversion becomes a way of managing 'sticker shock', a means of making sense of how a can of coffee can cost 800 currency units (rubles in this case), and coming to understand new regimes of value and price for everyday goods. Yet even expatriates from countries with a currency whose base unit is 100 – Japanese yen, South Korean won, Swedish krona – talk of curious conversions that shift, so that a rule of thumb that 150 of one unit equals 100 of another eventually becomes a 1:1 ratio. Learning to use rubles, especially in buying daily necessities, means not only developing a handy conversion to assess prices, but also adjusting to new arithmetic based on different monetary denominations, even when the base unit may be the same. I will argue that conversions are slowly adjusted to better match not official rates of currency conversion, but notions of worth and value that are linked to available denominations of money at 'home' and abroad.
Transhumanism is a system of belief that emphasises endless scientific and technological progress... more Transhumanism is a system of belief that emphasises endless scientific and technological progress and eagerly anticipates the emergence of the post-human. In the global north, popular imaginings of the Internet and cyberspace are suffused with Enlightenment notions of a steadily improving world achieved through technological advancement. For Transhumanists these technologies are entangled with techno-futurist, science (fiction) imaginaries. Though there is a large insider literature written by H+ activists in their own peer-reviewed journals, scholarly literatures on Transhumanism (H+) are small and largely confined to the humanities. These analyses are based on non-fiction books, websites and speeches produced by public figures in the H+ movement, and science fiction novels, rather than the perspectives of people for whom Transhumanism is a personal belief, not a career or professional activity. This paper explores the views of several users of Second Life who identify themselves as Transhumanists. These respondents are ordinary Transhumanists, who are neither celebrities nor published 'experts' in the H+ movement. H+ is often portrayed as divided into two segments – Extropian and Singularitarian – and as quasi-religious or utopian. Analysis of ordinary Transhumanists' accounts troubles these binary classifications, and suggest that H+ is neither utopian, nor fringe. It is a distillation of rather banal beliefs in consumer capitalist societies of the global north about science, progress and human potential.
This paper draws equally on feminist science studies, actor-network theory and urban surrealist f... more This paper draws equally on feminist science studies, actor-network theory and urban surrealist fiction to explore conceptual problems in contemporary economic sociology. The now dismantled Tent City of London's Occupy movement, positioned directly outside London’s financial heart, becomes as a spatial metaphor to explore the curious parallel lives of theoretical approaches in economic sociology. Embeddness and performativity are purified conceptualisations of economic life that occupy different theoretical spaces. Though they are divided by ontology and epistemology, and sometimes methods as well, these two approaches create disparate imagined worlds from the same empirical ‘stuff’: economic life, broadly defined. These ‘two’ approaches are actually a heterogeneous polyphony; to imagine them as a simply dichotomy is yet another purification, a comforting abstraction.
We can move beyond embeddedness and performativity by abandoning purifications and making peace with partiality. I will argue that, like China Mieville’s detective Tyador Borlu, we must step bravely into breach areas, the spaces between disciplines and conceptual extremes. Such an economic sociology is inspired by Donna Haraway’s image of the cyborg, and aims to see and think from multiple perspectives. Economic 'realities' cannot be found through purifications, but can be glimped in these breaches, through extensions and what Strathern (1991:38) calls ‘connections without assumptions of comparability’.
For many Europeans and North Americans, five thousand is a fairly large sum in everyday life. In ... more For many Europeans and North Americans, five thousand is a fairly large sum in everyday life. In euros, dollars or pounds sterling, it buys a well-maintained used car. This quantity no longer exists as a denomination for United States dollars, and never existed as such in Euros or pounds. But in Moscow, 5 000 rubles is an everyday quantity: a bar fridge bought in an informal market; a brand name food processor purchased in an electronics store; or a light weekly grocery shop for middle class Moscovites. Through qualitative interviews and grocery shopping expeditions with recently arrived, affluent migrants, this paper traces the trajectory of 5 000 as a number, materiality and quantity.
As expatriates adapt to different price scales for everyday subsistence goods, this quantity changes from being '5 000 is a used car', to 'five thousand is my grocery bill' or '5 000 is an impossible denomination, five 1 000s is better'. New residents struggle with quantity divisions using different multiples – .01, .05, 0.1, 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 100, 500, 1 000, 5 000 – and orders of magnitude that conversion to 'familiar' currency does little to remedy. Currency redundancy also causes confusion; the quantity of 10 rubles exists as both coins and notes. Rarely, old 5 ruble notes supposedly withdrawn from circulation crop up alongside the same denomination in coin. Adjusting to life in rubles involves using different quantities divided into even smaller notional amounts than at 'home' – ten kopeks (0.1 rubles) is less than one cent or one pence – and managing a larger number of denominations as well.
Since Polanyi ([1994]2001) and Granovetter (1985) it is now uncontroversial to suggest that no ma... more Since Polanyi ([1994]2001) and Granovetter (1985) it is now uncontroversial to suggest that no man is an economic island and that market calculations, social ties and relationships are entangled with one another; but as a type of exercise this paper considers what economic life might be like if calculations, or economic decisions,were explicitly framed and understood in terms of group interests. It is only fair to admit that I come to this thought experiment by way of the back door as it were, with some tentative responses already in hand because of experiences with a field site that already conforms to its parameters: Final Fantasy XI (FFXI). In this online swords and sorcery fantasy world, players create a character and invest time and effort in improving its abilities, powers and skills, and acquiring possessions. The economy of this world is player-run, that is to say it is the activities of characters in the game world that determines what goods are available and in what quantities, and it is the players themselves who arrange buying and selling, set prices and form organisations for economic and other purposes. Final Fantasy XI is a multi-lingual simulation, players are not segregated by language or geographic location, which is not the case in similar virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft, Everquest or Age of Conan. This is important, because many participants see the world's economy as a site of competing cultural framings of what constitutes appropriate behaviour in an economic arena.
Would you tell strangers a stigmatising secret? In the virtual world of Second Life (SL), members... more Would you tell strangers a stigmatising secret? In the virtual world of Second Life (SL), members of chronic illness support groups do. Women in these groups possess hidden, stigma-conferring attributes like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), Fibromyalgia or chronic pain. Through online support groups, these imperceptible stigmas are transformed into visible prestige symbols. This shift relies upon social and technical factors. Second Life's technological affordances facilitate support group creation and maintenance, while social success in SL depends on accumulating social capital through groups with restricted membership. These support groups are prestige-conferring because of their strict membership. Social ties and prestige-conferring affiliations provide Parsonian secondary gains for support group members, reinforcing positive associations with chronic illness. Together, these factors provide an account for how, in Second Life at least, it can be “sick”, or hip, to be ill.
Is it Enough to Think Before You Tweet?: Applying a Systems-and-Practices Approach to ICTs
Eliza... more Is it Enough to Think Before You Tweet?: Applying a Systems-and-Practices Approach to ICTs
Elizabeth Shove has suggested that climate change policies based on behavioural approaches – the so-called 'ABCs': attitudes, behaviours and change – obscures the extent to which governments, economic institutions and organisations maintain and reproduce unsustainable infrastructures that constrain and sometimes obstruct sustainable choices and practices. This paper considers how such a systems-and-practices perspective might be applied to information and communication technologies. ICT industries produced 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2007, and their emissions have increased at a greater rate than that of the aviation industry, whose emissions are of the same order of magnitude. Yet there have been no protests at new server farm construction sites; there are no climate change camps outside any of the new coal-powered mega-data centres built by prominent social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Organisations like the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI) promote of an image of ICTs as environmentally neutral, if not beneficial. However, emissions estimates and projections in the GeSI's Smart 2020 report proceed from Panglossian assumptions about development and adoption of new energy efficiency technologies. Despite the fact that over 75% of carbon emissions produced by an electronic device – from mobile phones to routers and iPods – will be generated by 'consumer' use (which includes industrial consumers, such as data centres), there is very little reflexivity in industry about emissions. Though there is growing awareness of the knock-on ecological effects of our increasingly networked social lives and practices in the global north – Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff project, and Greenpeace's 'Get Facebook to Unfriend Coal' campaign, for example – most campaigns remain rooted in consumer behaviour rhetorics. This paper also examines how a systems-and-practices approach might contribute to raising awareness and developing effective activist campaigns.
Making Agency and Re-gaining Control: Women’s Resistance to Expectations of Patient Passivity
Pa... more Making Agency and Re-gaining Control: Women’s Resistance to Expectations of Patient Passivity
Patients are objects of the medical gaze, and subjects of medical treatment. Chronically ill patients, whose conditions can only be managed, not cured, spend years of their lives under a series of medical gazes, struggling with medical expectations of ‘good’ and ‘compliant’ patient behaviour. Like Estragon and Vladimir, from Waiting for Godot, women with chronic illnesses or infertility can feel trapped in an endless cycle of waiting – for the next procedure, for the next horomone cycle, for the next battery of tests, for results – in which their assigned role is characterised by passive acceptance of treatments, orders and scrutiny. However, when placed such positions, women seek ways to resist, to reassert their agency.
This paper explores the strategies used by infertile women and chronically ill women to reconstruct and exercise agency and control over their treatment, and is based on qualitative research with two online support communities: two self-help groups for chronic pain sufferers in Second Life; and a discussion forum for women experiencing infertility or involuntary childlessness. Attending support group meetings and exploring complementary medicine therapies helps chronically ill women in Second Life turn the stigma of chronic illness inside out, building new, empowering identities and enabling resistance against medical expectations of passivity and abjection. For infertile women, interrogating medical practices, sharing experiences and seeking advice on online forums and use of ‘count down tickers’ are efforts to actively regain some agency from the medical experts.
Tracing the Outlines of an Economy: A Thought Experiment with Monies
Markets have become a maste... more Tracing the Outlines of an Economy: A Thought Experiment with Monies
Markets have become a master category in contemporary economic sociology to which other concepts or categories are subordinate, especially since the field's performative turn (Callon, 1998). An over-emphasis on markets, particularly in high finance, has created an intellectually rich dialogue, but one based on a small slice of economic life. What if there were another way to think about economic organisation, a way that does not center on a conceptual black box – markets – and reflects a wider cross-section of economic life in contemporary Western consumer societies? This is not a call to political revolution, but a suggestion to rummage through economic sociology’s impressive conceptual toolkit and think about using some other tools.
Guyer (2004) suggests that monetary conversions are compasses, they direct our attention to where the economic “action” is, in a Goffmanesque sense. This paper puts Guyer’s observation to the test of a speculative exercise that asks how an economy would look if our point of departure were monies, not markets. Instead of assembling an economy from market units whose connections are not often conceptually clear – an economy consisting of a market for fashion, for currencies, for labour, for strawberries, and so on – such an economy would have clear points of connection and routes of circulation, patterns of behaviour and modes of actions that are empirically observable (and quantifiable) through movements of money. This thought experiment was suggested by lay formulations and theories of economies and economic life – as explored in seven years of ethnographic field work in two virtual worlds – which emphasise the importance of monies in moulding, shaping and organising economic life.
For the purposes of this thought experiment, monies are not a dominant category, but tracking dyes tracing the contours of an economy through exchanges, conversions and other money acts. Drawing on Bohannon and Bohannon’s (1968) spheres of exchange – the uncredited inspiration for Zelizer’s (2004) circuits of commerce – along with Guyer’s (2004) and Graeber’s (2001) re-considerations; and using a broader conceptualisation of monies that embraces monetary proliferation in contemporary consumer societies, I propose a bottom-up assembly of economic life that focuses on economic structures and patterns produced through repeated monetary circulations. When economic life in Western capitalist consumer societies is seen in this way, economic practices and social structures more familiar from so-called “primitive” societies appear in strange, yet quotidian guises. For example, special domains of consumption, generated not by the cosmological or cultural significance of objects, as in kula or potlatch, but created and sustained by consumers’ reliance upon corporate controlled and produced token monies, emerge as an important element of economic life. These ring-fenced economic areas – which produce their own logics of consumption, and their own practices of valuation, exchange and money use – are explicitly held back and separated from markets and market logics.
Uploads
Papers by Sandy Ross
With this article I hope to spark further debate on building a conceptual toolkit to explore ambiguities, and contribute to increasing interest in non-dyadic gift relations in consumer culture research. 'Ambiguous goods' is not a viable category for thinking about things, people and relations or digital virtual objects. But ambiguity can be a useful way to think about how people and things – whether they are digital, virtual or neither – are related.
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 along a continuum with virtuousness at one end and malicious or harmful at the other, passing though various states of possibly 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.
This paper examines two limits of a spectrum of self-imposed limits to virtual consumption as explained by players of Final Fantasy XI with the moral limits of arbitrage at one end, and a focus on collective accumulation of wealth at the other. The moral constraints on arbitrage in FFXI are tied to a deeply rooted sense of economic fairplay and a strong – and surprisingly pervasive, given that this research was conducted before the financial crisis – ideology of “fair” rather than “free” markets. Some economic behaviour that is morally questionable, such as price gouging and supply manipulation, is understood not only as market manipulation that detracts from users’ game play experience, but also as a threat to players’ enjoyment of the virtual world of FFXI as a commodity, and their acquisition of digital virtual commodities. Players band together in linkshells (guilds) in FFXI to defeat powerful foes and acquire powerful and highly desirable equipment, or more baldly put, to increase their consumption capacity. Distribution of goods through these organisations can be a fraught affair, but generally, the spoils of conquest are distributed evenly. Though such rewards are individually held, the prestige and power of the organisation is increased as its members acquire increasingly sought-after goods, transforming individual accumulation and consumption into collective achievement.
to provide points of departure and ideas for such alternative configurations. Exploration of lay theories is organised around four key conceptual categories – value, exchange, money and markets – which were suggested by participants' accounts and economic organisation within each field site. Respondents' theories offer polyphonic, heteroglossic approaches to economic life that sometimes diverge substantially from academic conceptualisations. Lay theories examined in this research emphasising plurality and multiplicity – especially with respect to monies – going so far as to suggest a radical reorganisation of economies based on monies rather than markets. When lay theories from each category are pieced together, they reveal a social imaginary of boundless abundance, strong reliance upon practices as ways of knowing about and theorising economic life, and strange parellels with studies of “primitive” cultures.
This dissertation is based on comparative ethnographies of two disparate virtual worlds, FFXI and SL, which offer different slant-wise views of contemporary capitalist, consumer societies. Final Fantasy XI is a proprietary massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created, owned and maintained by Square-Enix, while Second Life (SL) is a free-form, non-proprietary, three-dimensional virtual world created and maintained in a laissez-faire fashion by Linden Lab. Fieldwork consisted of participant observation, one-on-one interviews, group interviews with FFXI respondents and analysis of fan-made media and corporate texts.
Talks by Sandy Ross
What constitutes a fair price, how prices should be determined, when prices may be acceptably raised or lowered, and to what degree, are framed as both moral and economic questions. For FFXI players, price stability is believed to be essential to maintaining fair access to goods and participation in the virtual world. Without essential consumable commodities, such as arrows, and consumer durables like weapons and armour, players' online adventures would grind to a halt. As the vast majority of economic activity is trade between players, maintaining 'good' prices and avoiding inflationary tendencies is framed as a personal responsibility. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of players are involved in price setting on a daily basis as they buy, sell and browse goods in FFXI's Auction Houses and bazaars. Being knowledgeable about fair prices and exercising good judgement in setting appropriate prices for virtual goods are ways of reproducing and maintaining economic stability and demonstrating responsible economic citizenship in the virtual world. In this context, market knowledge is produced in tandem with, if not through, moral judgements.
Finally, players often support or justify their pricing rules of thumb with examples of economic practices and market logics beyond virtual worlds and video games. This paper also briefly considers some of the parallels and divergences players present between moral and market rules of pricing in actual economies and in FFXI's virtual economy.
Beginning with an 1870 Dominion of Canada $2 bill, and culminating in the 2004 Canadian Journey series $20 bill, this paper asks whether Canada's claim of multiculturalism vis-a-vis First Nations Peoples is indeed supported by nation-building imagery on its own currency. Hudson's Bay Point Blankets were traded between colonisers and First Nations in 19th century Canada. These wool blankets were re-purposed by Aboriginal peoples as garments, ceremonial exchange and prestige goods. On the 1870 $2 bill, the blanket draped across an Aboriginal man's body is an imperialist icon of le doux commerce that 'tames' the 'noble savage'. In the 2004 $20 bill, First Nations are represented by a modern sculpture by a Haida artist, Bill Reid, depicting the creation of mankind, 'Raven and the First Men'. But on this bill is contemporary Aboriginal art and 'traditional culture' – the sculpture depicts a key event in Haida cosmology – presented as truly valuable?
We can move beyond embeddedness and performativity by abandoning purifications and making peace with partiality. I will argue that, like China Mieville’s detective Tyador Borlu, we must step bravely into breach areas, the spaces between disciplines and conceptual extremes. Such an economic sociology is inspired by Donna Haraway’s image of the cyborg, and aims to see and think from multiple perspectives. Economic 'realities' cannot be found through purifications, but can be glimped in these breaches, through extensions and what Strathern (1991:38) calls ‘connections without assumptions of comparability’.
With this article I hope to spark further debate on building a conceptual toolkit to explore ambiguities, and contribute to increasing interest in non-dyadic gift relations in consumer culture research. 'Ambiguous goods' is not a viable category for thinking about things, people and relations or digital virtual objects. But ambiguity can be a useful way to think about how people and things – whether they are digital, virtual or neither – are related.
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 along a continuum with virtuousness at one end and malicious or harmful at the other, passing though various states of possibly 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.
This paper examines two limits of a spectrum of self-imposed limits to virtual consumption as explained by players of Final Fantasy XI with the moral limits of arbitrage at one end, and a focus on collective accumulation of wealth at the other. The moral constraints on arbitrage in FFXI are tied to a deeply rooted sense of economic fairplay and a strong – and surprisingly pervasive, given that this research was conducted before the financial crisis – ideology of “fair” rather than “free” markets. Some economic behaviour that is morally questionable, such as price gouging and supply manipulation, is understood not only as market manipulation that detracts from users’ game play experience, but also as a threat to players’ enjoyment of the virtual world of FFXI as a commodity, and their acquisition of digital virtual commodities. Players band together in linkshells (guilds) in FFXI to defeat powerful foes and acquire powerful and highly desirable equipment, or more baldly put, to increase their consumption capacity. Distribution of goods through these organisations can be a fraught affair, but generally, the spoils of conquest are distributed evenly. Though such rewards are individually held, the prestige and power of the organisation is increased as its members acquire increasingly sought-after goods, transforming individual accumulation and consumption into collective achievement.
to provide points of departure and ideas for such alternative configurations. Exploration of lay theories is organised around four key conceptual categories – value, exchange, money and markets – which were suggested by participants' accounts and economic organisation within each field site. Respondents' theories offer polyphonic, heteroglossic approaches to economic life that sometimes diverge substantially from academic conceptualisations. Lay theories examined in this research emphasising plurality and multiplicity – especially with respect to monies – going so far as to suggest a radical reorganisation of economies based on monies rather than markets. When lay theories from each category are pieced together, they reveal a social imaginary of boundless abundance, strong reliance upon practices as ways of knowing about and theorising economic life, and strange parellels with studies of “primitive” cultures.
This dissertation is based on comparative ethnographies of two disparate virtual worlds, FFXI and SL, which offer different slant-wise views of contemporary capitalist, consumer societies. Final Fantasy XI is a proprietary massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created, owned and maintained by Square-Enix, while Second Life (SL) is a free-form, non-proprietary, three-dimensional virtual world created and maintained in a laissez-faire fashion by Linden Lab. Fieldwork consisted of participant observation, one-on-one interviews, group interviews with FFXI respondents and analysis of fan-made media and corporate texts.
What constitutes a fair price, how prices should be determined, when prices may be acceptably raised or lowered, and to what degree, are framed as both moral and economic questions. For FFXI players, price stability is believed to be essential to maintaining fair access to goods and participation in the virtual world. Without essential consumable commodities, such as arrows, and consumer durables like weapons and armour, players' online adventures would grind to a halt. As the vast majority of economic activity is trade between players, maintaining 'good' prices and avoiding inflationary tendencies is framed as a personal responsibility. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of players are involved in price setting on a daily basis as they buy, sell and browse goods in FFXI's Auction Houses and bazaars. Being knowledgeable about fair prices and exercising good judgement in setting appropriate prices for virtual goods are ways of reproducing and maintaining economic stability and demonstrating responsible economic citizenship in the virtual world. In this context, market knowledge is produced in tandem with, if not through, moral judgements.
Finally, players often support or justify their pricing rules of thumb with examples of economic practices and market logics beyond virtual worlds and video games. This paper also briefly considers some of the parallels and divergences players present between moral and market rules of pricing in actual economies and in FFXI's virtual economy.
Beginning with an 1870 Dominion of Canada $2 bill, and culminating in the 2004 Canadian Journey series $20 bill, this paper asks whether Canada's claim of multiculturalism vis-a-vis First Nations Peoples is indeed supported by nation-building imagery on its own currency. Hudson's Bay Point Blankets were traded between colonisers and First Nations in 19th century Canada. These wool blankets were re-purposed by Aboriginal peoples as garments, ceremonial exchange and prestige goods. On the 1870 $2 bill, the blanket draped across an Aboriginal man's body is an imperialist icon of le doux commerce that 'tames' the 'noble savage'. In the 2004 $20 bill, First Nations are represented by a modern sculpture by a Haida artist, Bill Reid, depicting the creation of mankind, 'Raven and the First Men'. But on this bill is contemporary Aboriginal art and 'traditional culture' – the sculpture depicts a key event in Haida cosmology – presented as truly valuable?
We can move beyond embeddedness and performativity by abandoning purifications and making peace with partiality. I will argue that, like China Mieville’s detective Tyador Borlu, we must step bravely into breach areas, the spaces between disciplines and conceptual extremes. Such an economic sociology is inspired by Donna Haraway’s image of the cyborg, and aims to see and think from multiple perspectives. Economic 'realities' cannot be found through purifications, but can be glimped in these breaches, through extensions and what Strathern (1991:38) calls ‘connections without assumptions of comparability’.
As expatriates adapt to different price scales for everyday subsistence goods, this quantity changes from being '5 000 is a used car', to 'five thousand is my grocery bill' or '5 000 is an impossible denomination, five 1 000s is better'. New residents struggle with quantity divisions using different multiples – .01, .05, 0.1, 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 100, 500, 1 000, 5 000 – and orders of magnitude that conversion to 'familiar' currency does little to remedy. Currency redundancy also causes confusion; the quantity of 10 rubles exists as both coins and notes. Rarely, old 5 ruble notes supposedly withdrawn from circulation crop up alongside the same denomination in coin. Adjusting to life in rubles involves using different quantities divided into even smaller notional amounts than at 'home' – ten kopeks (0.1 rubles) is less than one cent or one pence – and managing a larger number of denominations as well.
Elizabeth Shove has suggested that climate change policies based on behavioural approaches – the so-called 'ABCs': attitudes, behaviours and change – obscures the extent to which governments, economic institutions and organisations maintain and reproduce unsustainable infrastructures that constrain and sometimes obstruct sustainable choices and practices. This paper considers how such a systems-and-practices perspective might be applied to information and communication technologies. ICT industries produced 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2007, and their emissions have increased at a greater rate than that of the aviation industry, whose emissions are of the same order of magnitude. Yet there have been no protests at new server farm construction sites; there are no climate change camps outside any of the new coal-powered mega-data centres built by prominent social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Organisations like the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI) promote of an image of ICTs as environmentally neutral, if not beneficial. However, emissions estimates and projections in the GeSI's Smart 2020 report proceed from Panglossian assumptions about development and adoption of new energy efficiency technologies. Despite the fact that over 75% of carbon emissions produced by an electronic device – from mobile phones to routers and iPods – will be generated by 'consumer' use (which includes industrial consumers, such as data centres), there is very little reflexivity in industry about emissions. Though there is growing awareness of the knock-on ecological effects of our increasingly networked social lives and practices in the global north – Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff project, and Greenpeace's 'Get Facebook to Unfriend Coal' campaign, for example – most campaigns remain rooted in consumer behaviour rhetorics. This paper also examines how a systems-and-practices approach might contribute to raising awareness and developing effective activist campaigns.
Patients are objects of the medical gaze, and subjects of medical treatment. Chronically ill patients, whose conditions can only be managed, not cured, spend years of their lives under a series of medical gazes, struggling with medical expectations of ‘good’ and ‘compliant’ patient behaviour. Like Estragon and Vladimir, from Waiting for Godot, women with chronic illnesses or infertility can feel trapped in an endless cycle of waiting – for the next procedure, for the next horomone cycle, for the next battery of tests, for results – in which their assigned role is characterised by passive acceptance of treatments, orders and scrutiny. However, when placed such positions, women seek ways to resist, to reassert their agency.
This paper explores the strategies used by infertile women and chronically ill women to reconstruct and exercise agency and control over their treatment, and is based on qualitative research with two online support communities: two self-help groups for chronic pain sufferers in Second Life; and a discussion forum for women experiencing infertility or involuntary childlessness. Attending support group meetings and exploring complementary medicine therapies helps chronically ill women in Second Life turn the stigma of chronic illness inside out, building new, empowering identities and enabling resistance against medical expectations of passivity and abjection. For infertile women, interrogating medical practices, sharing experiences and seeking advice on online forums and use of ‘count down tickers’ are efforts to actively regain some agency from the medical experts.
Markets have become a master category in contemporary economic sociology to which other concepts or categories are subordinate, especially since the field's performative turn (Callon, 1998). An over-emphasis on markets, particularly in high finance, has created an intellectually rich dialogue, but one based on a small slice of economic life. What if there were another way to think about economic organisation, a way that does not center on a conceptual black box – markets – and reflects a wider cross-section of economic life in contemporary Western consumer societies? This is not a call to political revolution, but a suggestion to rummage through economic sociology’s impressive conceptual toolkit and think about using some other tools.
Guyer (2004) suggests that monetary conversions are compasses, they direct our attention to where the economic “action” is, in a Goffmanesque sense. This paper puts Guyer’s observation to the test of a speculative exercise that asks how an economy would look if our point of departure were monies, not markets. Instead of assembling an economy from market units whose connections are not often conceptually clear – an economy consisting of a market for fashion, for currencies, for labour, for strawberries, and so on – such an economy would have clear points of connection and routes of circulation, patterns of behaviour and modes of actions that are empirically observable (and quantifiable) through movements of money. This thought experiment was suggested by lay formulations and theories of economies and economic life – as explored in seven years of ethnographic field work in two virtual worlds – which emphasise the importance of monies in moulding, shaping and organising economic life.
For the purposes of this thought experiment, monies are not a dominant category, but tracking dyes tracing the contours of an economy through exchanges, conversions and other money acts. Drawing on Bohannon and Bohannon’s (1968) spheres of exchange – the uncredited inspiration for Zelizer’s (2004) circuits of commerce – along with Guyer’s (2004) and Graeber’s (2001) re-considerations; and using a broader conceptualisation of monies that embraces monetary proliferation in contemporary consumer societies, I propose a bottom-up assembly of economic life that focuses on economic structures and patterns produced through repeated monetary circulations. When economic life in Western capitalist consumer societies is seen in this way, economic practices and social structures more familiar from so-called “primitive” societies appear in strange, yet quotidian guises. For example, special domains of consumption, generated not by the cosmological or cultural significance of objects, as in kula or potlatch, but created and sustained by consumers’ reliance upon corporate controlled and produced token monies, emerge as an important element of economic life. These ring-fenced economic areas – which produce their own logics of consumption, and their own practices of valuation, exchange and money use – are explicitly held back and separated from markets and market logics.