This article is built on a close reading of the use of the term 'calculation' by Max Weber. On the basis of this reading, I argue for a deeper understanding of Weber's views on uncertainty in the Calvinist ethos, and for a new approach to some key issues in the moral and discursive world of financial capital today, in which accounting, accountability and profit-making have become dangerously delinked from one another.
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In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 3–17 (15 total)
Report. The World Social Forum on Migrations 2012
Consolidating efforts towards an equitable society
Shirlita Africa Espinosa
From the back alleys of Madrid to the financial capital of Singapore, the migration of peoples either to flee persecution or to pursue a high-stakes transnational job is a global phenomenon. One may even say that the one permanent presence these days is a temporary migrant. The mobility of workers—and the mobility that characterizes the social world in which they live—has always had an economic interpretation manifesting in the antagonism of locals against labor migrants. The issue of migration and the attendant discourses of citizenship, social cohesion, population, resource sharing, employment, criminality, and cultural differences, to mention a few, are a common specter often raised for political maneuvering. To use the migrant subject as a scapegoat for sundry social and economic ills of the “host” society—a term that perpetuates the stereotype of the migrant as parasitical, thus, creating a fitting formula for those who hold power—is integral to the production of their subjectivity as an unwanted sector of a society. Nevertheless, the centrality of migration today in the creation of wealth in advanced economies is very much tied to the role that migrants play in the development strategies of their own nations. Through the billions of dollars transferred through remi ances, migration is regarded as the vehicle of development for countries in the South. But if exporting cheap and temporary labor remains inexpensive as it continues to support the growth of industrialized countries both in the manufacturing and service sectors, including the domestic and affective spheres of the home, then how does migration specifically drive the development of sending countries?
In Regions and Cohesion
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2013
- Article Type:
- Meeting Report
- Pages:
- 146–154 (9 total)
Elizabeth Ferry
this book, it also suggests a moment at the cusp of the two periods described by Smith (a postwar, Keynesian world oriented toward production and “expansive hegemony,” and a world defined by the channeling and flow of financial capital and “selective
Afterword
After the commons—commoning!
Don Kalb
Netherlands by 1980 had consequently one of the largest social housing sectors in the world. But Nonini also notes how financial capital in the postindustrial epoch, even though obviously interested in a privately owned real estate sector and the associated
Introduction
For or against commoning?
Ida Susser
regulation of social housing to create an urban housing commons. Under the Fordist regime, keeping housing costs low for workers was a negotiated compromise with capital. In the 2000s, as financial capital became more powerful, the state regulations that had
Introduction
States of Displacement: Middle Eastern Refugees, Internally Displaced Persons and Asylum Seekers in Global Context
Lucia Volk and Marcia C. Inhorn
applications receive different kinds of attention and assessments of merit, and lead to different kinds and amounts of aid. How refugees manage the political and legal hurdles in any given locale depends on their own cultural and financial capital, and their
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2021
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 1–8 (8 total)
Ladies Selling Breakfast
COVID-19 Disruption of Intimate Socialities among Street-Engaged Food Traders in Ho Chi Minh City
Ngoc-Bich Pham, Hong-Xoan Nguyen, and Catherine Earl
lacked sufficient financial capital to rent fixed shops or to formally register their businesses. Even though they know that their current activities violate these laws, they continue trading. As one lady who sells chè (sweet soup) on the pavement in
In Anthropology in Action
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 34–38 (5 total)
A gendered ethnography of elites
Women, inequality, and social reproduction
Luna Glucksberg
recently. Such headline-grabbing cases, however, distract attention from the financial vulnerability of most elite women in relation to their husbands and fathers. As discussed earlier, control over financial capital among global wealth elites is
Financialization from the margins
Notes on the incorporation of Argentina's subproletariat into consumer credit (2009–2015)
Hadrien Saiag
finance With the expansion of new forms of consumer credit, labor is directly exploited by financial capital: the former fuels ever-increasing income transfers toward the financial institutions to whom the working class is indebted (see also Chena and
Urban tourism via dispossession of oeuvres
Labor as a common denominator
Marc Morell
of dispossession initiated and maintained by public authorities, planners, developers, speculators, banks, digital platforms, and the financial capital required to gentrify neighborhoods and to build boutique hotels and turn residential accommodation