One argument developed by the American economist William J Booth, and more recently developed by UK social scientists Russell Keat and Andrew Sayer, is that economies are intrinsically moral, in so far as they are reliant on norms, values and ethical presumptions for their effective exercise. How might we demonstrate this?

Markets are socially embedded
[image of Leadenhall Market, London © 2008 Jupiterimages Corporation]

Firstly, (as I discussed in my posting on Karl Polanyi) economies can be judged moral because they are socially embedded within non-economic institutions (for example the state, but also institutions of family, religious, voluntary, charitable or communitarian origin) that help set norms and ethical frameworks for acceptable economic conduct. Despite coming under ideological attack from market-liberals, these institutions remain important for checking capitalist tendencies for unfettered accumulation of profit.

Secondly, because people are socially embedded, moral beings (and not just ‘rational’ economic actors), moral presumptions and conventions external to economic rationality are always heavily implicated in everyday patterns of economic exchange. These moral presumptions and conventions would include such motivations as love and care for others, respect, fairness and justice). So people must continually strike a balance between ethical and economic imperatives when transacting. In practice this means that most of us wouldn’t choose to sell our own mother!

Thirdly, economic institutions themselves operate according to intrinsic moral norms and conventions (even if this often appears hard to spot); for example in capitalism there are ethical standards that affect the application of property rights, reward systems, distributions of rights and responsibilities, as well as norms and values shaping the way we treat other people in economic situations (the exercise of ‘professionalism’, ‘business ethics’ and so on) – and these are not merely contractual in origin but involve ethical judgment. For economies to function there has to be moral framework for economic action.

What should properly concern us is not the absence of morality but the particular quality of morality...

However this is not to say that because the economy is ‘moral’ that it is intrinsically ‘good’. The persistence of greed, fraud, corruption and other economic crimes and misdemeanours indicate that this is not the case. But, equally to assume that economies are devoid of ethical substance is to misunderstand their character. To paraphrase Russell Keat what we should recognise is that "all economies are moral but some are nicer than others." What should properly concern us is not the absence of morality but the particular quality of morality inherent to different kinds of economic system. Providing we accept that any kind of economy is shaped by the norms of the community of which it is a part, then the political issue becomes not whether an economy is moral per se, but whether or not the particular moral principles of an economic system are compatible with (say) our own understanding of equality and our requirements for social justice.

Why is this important? By recognizing the moral basis to economic life we retain the theoretical ammunition we need to conceive of alternative economic futures – for if economies always have some kind of moral principles (derived from being socially embedded), this means they are amenable to transformation from within the social contexts that created them. This helps counter the market-liberal myth that certain ‘self-governing’ economic processes (e.g. ‘free hand of the market’) lay beyond social determination, but also checks ‘market fatalism’ – the belief we are powerless to transform capitalist economic institutions and practices.

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• Interested in listening to Sandel's Reith Lecture on markets? Get the 'Markets & Morals' podcast
• More from Open2 on the Reith Lectures 2009
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About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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The film contrasts markedly with David Peace’s novel (The Damned Utd), from which the film is adapted. The book doesn’t have many laughs. In fact it is uncompromisingly dark, bleak and dystopic. The book largely takes place inside the mind of Cloughie, who recounts his various fears, hatreds and obsessions; mainly his fear of failure, hatred of Don Revie and Leeds United, and obsessions with money, power and fame, all conducted through an expletive-strewn fog of whisky and cigarettes.

Brian Clough [image © copyright BBC]

But the release of the film has reignited some of the controversy that surrounds the book. The Clough family reacted strongly to Peace’s portrayal, with wife Barbara objecting vehemently to seeing her late husband represented as a "chain-smoking, obscenity-shouting and selfishly driven man". Ex-Leeds player Johnny Giles (who appears in the book as the sullen and duplicitous character "The Irishman") called the book "outrageous and wrong" and won damages against the claim in the book that he had played an instrumental role in Clough’s sacking.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, the pain and upset caused by the book (published shortly after Clough died, and therefore rendering Peace and his publishers immune to a libel suit from the great man) should not be discounted - think how we might feel if we were represented in this way - but, at the same time, there is the issue of artistic freedom to consider. The Damned Utd is described by Peace as a "Yorkshire Fairy Story" and a "fiction based on a fact" – not a reportage or replay of what actually happened.

Critics have tended to argue that what the book is "really" about is (variably) failure, redemption, vengeance, loneliness and despair; others have read it as a specific evocation of the "problem" of the North at a particular point in time - with the fictional character of "Brian Clough" merely providing the vehicle through which these various issues are explored. I tend to sympathise with this position; however, such aesthetic justifications can appear hard to defend when fact and fantasy are combined and real people get hurt.

The debate raises some important questions for social science. What is the social duty of art and authorship? How far can we hold authors responsible for their texts? Further, for those of us who are students of media studies, it raises issues that routinely crop up as central concerns in the context of our OU course, DA204 Understanding Media; namely, What is the nature of celebrity? To what extent is it possible to define a fixed and "authentic" meaning of a text? What is the relationship between text and audience(s)? How is our reading of a text shaped by our knowledge, values and beliefs?

These are well-established questions which obtaining clear answers to has proved difficult – not that Cloughie would have struggled, he always got things done; as he said: "Rome wasn't built in a day. But I wasn't on that particular job."

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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In socio-speak, Shulman argues that “deceptive behavior [has] an integral and functional role in social interaction”. That is, lying and deception ought not necessarily to be seen as bad or wrong but as an essential component of communication and maintaining social order. We do it because we have to.

Deception in the workplace.

 

Of course when fat-cats and managers lie and cheat in order to deceive their employees, or obtain some personal or corporate gain, we quite rightly condemn them. But on a everyday basis, workers must themselves rely on deception – maybe to dodge work or protect their own nefarious schemes, but more often for good and noble reasons, such as to do their jobs effectively, to avoid unnecessary conflict, to protect the feelings of others, or simply to make the monotony and grind of work easier to endure. Telling white lies is what gets us through the day. Come on, you know you’ve done it (I know I have, but I’m not telling when).

In his book Shulman shows how lying pervades a variety of workplaces, such as real estate management (no surprises there I hear you thinking), private detective work but also more ‘ethical’ occupations such as environmental activism and work in the not-for-profit sector. Throughout Shulman takes a pretty dispassionate view of workplace deception, neither subscribing to conservative views of deceivers as ‘bad apples’ to be stigmatized or ejected from the workplace, nor overtly celebrating workers’ own deceptions as evidence of resistance or subversive radicalism. Of course, he’s not endorsing a relativistic position – we still have to make decisions about what constitutes appropriate behaviour. Nevertheless, he accepts lying for what it is – a necessary part of everyday life. So don’t feel too bad next time you pull a fast one over your boss or workmates, in this regard you’re just like the rest of us – and you might well be doing it for the best of reasons.

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Do you have an interest in philosophy and ethics and want to take it further?

The psychology of deception

The ethics of lying on bbc.co.uk

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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Much of this is intervention seen by market liberals as potentially damaging – dangerously socialist even – as the state now appears to be ‘meddling’ in the affairs of the free market, ‘distorting’ the operations of money and the economy. But what these interventions underline is not that the state has suddenly ‘returned’ – but that it never goes away, and, if capitalism is to proceed, never can and never will.

Such a view was long-ago advanced in Karl Polanyi’s wonderful book The Great Transformation. Here, Polanyi showed how the growth of a market society was dependent on the actions of the state in creating the social and legal frameworks that allowed markets to freely operate. Polanyi famously argued that ‘laissez faire was planned’ – observing that the market was not a ‘free’ and self-regulating entity but actually required the provision of a new set of institutional arrangements and social relationships in order to enable its apparently ‘free’ hand to work. These were not only regulations around what constituted fair and free trade, the drafting and fulfilment of contracts, financial regulations and so on, but involved state management of the supply of money and credit, as well as rules and regulations regarding the provision of land and labour (these latter constituting what Polanyi termed ‘fictitious commodities’). In short, the market relied on the state to provide the field conditions that enabled it to work.

Without state interventions ‘free’ markets cannot survive

Polanyi argued that trying to separate or ‘disembed’ the market from state and society (as market liberals are wont to do) was to misunderstand how markets work. Markets are part of society and cannot work without the legitimation and structures that states provide - nor the protection that states can offer from various crises and negative social impacts of market systems. Without state interventions ‘free’ markets cannot survive.

Polanyi also identified what he called a ‘double movement’ at work in the heart of the capitalist system. As the market became dominant, state and society sought to find ways to protect people from what Polanyi termed ‘the ravages of this satanic mill’:

Social history in the nineteenth century was thus the result of a double movement: the extension of the market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones. While on the one hand markets spread all over the face of the globe and the amount of goods involved grew to unbelievable dimensions, on the other hand a network of measures and policies was integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labour, land and money... a deep seated movement sprang into being to resist the pernicious effects of a market-controlled economy.
From The Great Transformation, pages 79-80

Market-led societies corresponded with the growth of a whole new social and welfare apparatus that could guarantee workers for the factory, but also protect them from excesses of capitalistic zeal. The idea that market-led societies must always contain measures for their moderation and repudiation (policies around work, welfare, housing, health and education) in order to stave off social collapse (and allow markets to continue functioning) is central to Polanyi’s approach. On the one hand, this could be seen as an apologetic for capitalism, but should more roundly be seen I think as an analysis of the constant potential for conflict that exists between market forces and social values. Polanyi wanted to show how the market and society existed in related tension, and particularly how, since markets were embedded within societies that contained non-market organizations and values, society had the power to shape and reform market operations – much like UK and US governments are attempting to do today.

The economist Fred Block has suggested a nice metaphor for Polanyi’s approach:

In this sense one might say that disembedding the market is similar to stretching a giant elastic band. Efforts to bring about greater autonomy of the market increase the tension level. With further stretching, either the band will snap – representing social disintegration – or the economy will revert to a more embedded position

At present, we seem to be entering a period where the tension on the band has been released – since the market liberals have stretched things too far – and states are attempting to temper the market in the interests of society. Whether this will work - and how far the band retracts - remains to be seen.

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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Struck by the recognition that everyone is trying to ‘make money’, but no-one literally does, Kraemmer saw the production of artmoney as a practical means of stimulating trade amongst struggling artists who couldn’t otherwise afford to pay their rent or buy art materials – a modern revival of traditional bartering.  But also critical of the cold and objective nature of conventional transactions, Kraemmer devised artmoney as a means to a more humanised and ‘expressive’ type of monetary exchange. Not only was each artmoney to be designed as a unique work of art, but was intended to bring people together in affective, rather than impersonal, forms of trade.

Artmoney can be produced by anyone registered with BIAM and, like conventional currencies, has some standard rules of design. Artmoney must measure 12x18 cm (in order that it resembles a banknote) and only durable materials may be used. Each piece of artmoney must show a serial number, the year of production, the url for BIAM and the name, signature and nationality of the artist. The only other proviso is that artmoney must be an original work of art. Like conventional currency, artmoney has a market price. Each piece of artmoney is purchased for 200 Danish Kroner (about £20 or 26 Euro) and increases in value by 5 Euro per year for 7 years, with the increase in value being redeemable only when purchasing art from artmoney artists. When spending artmoney in other places, each piece retains its original value, regardless of the year of production – inflation being accounted for by periodic revaluations (when launched ten years ago each piece was worth 100 Kroner).

Once produced, artmoney can then be used like standard currencies. It can be used in exchange for goods and services (Kraemmer claims to have bought his stereo, computer and fridge with artmoney and used it to finance a trip around America).  Currently around 50 registered businesses (including cafés and bars, galleries, various retailers, even a psychotherapist) also accept artmoney as part payment for goods and services, at a rate determined by the individual business. There is also a host and guest programme where artmoney can be used to pay for travel accommodation.

But why would conventional businesses accept non-legal tender? According to Kraemmer, traders may be motivated by the opportunity to own a piece of original art,  touched by a desire for more meaningful exchange relations or simply amused by the quirkiness of the concept. As the BIAM website idealistically claims, using artmoney to pay for goods and services ‘will help bring people together in an intimate private situation’, offering ‘the chance for new friendships among strangers from all over the world’. And while it might be some time before we see Asda and B&Q accepting artmoney, the number of firms buying into this sentiment is steadily rising. 

the purpose of artmoney is to make art accessible and money meaningful

But is artmoney art? There is no denying the beauty and craft of artmoney (and that exhibitions of artmoney have proved popular with the critics and attracted collectors) – but since anyone can produce it (providing they stick to the given rules) there is plenty of artmoney in circulation in which even the most generous of critics would struggle to identify any artistic merit. For BIAM, such concerns are beside the point – the purpose of artmoney is to make art accessible and money meaningful. Bringing art into the hitherto mundane world of exchange helps overcome the modern separation of ‘art’ and ‘everyday life’ and also restores a sense of creativity, uniqueness and humanity in the exchange relationship. Stimulated into conversation by simple acts of ‘natural’ exchange, people become part of something communitarian and internationalist in focus – in this respect individual artistic ability is less important than using art to enhance sociability and communication.

Currently, however, it seems artmoney is in fiscal crisis. The project suffers from a surfeit in the ‘money supply’ but a shortage of ‘aggregate demand’ - indeed the project is in some danger of folding. Funds are also required since BIAM is currently embroiled in legal disputes with Danish authorities over the legitimacy of its use of the term ‘Bank’; a problem which highlights that the (now jail-threatened) Kraemmer has achieved at least one of his aims – to expose the politicised character of finance by challenging the state monopoly on the production of money.

So while in this time of credit crunch and impending recession, the idea of playing the currency markets might not appeal, people could speculate on a little artmoney. They would be helping artists and may well get themselves a mini-masterpiece - and if not they could always try and spend it on something else.

For further information see www.artmoney.org.

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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One area of life which 1968 appears to have had a profound (but largely unacknowledged) influence upon is the realm of work. I recently finished Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's much-praised (and exhaustingly thick) book The New Spirit of Capitalism which takes up this theme and argues that, in the wake of 1968, employers and governments began to carefully manipulate emerging desires for individual freedom, creativity and autonomy raised by the counterculture. Thus, traditionally conservative capitalism began to take on board (rather than reject) radical values, absorbing them into the world of business, in order to provide disaffected populations with opportunities for more meaningful and fulfilling kinds of work. This had the effect of ‘buying off’ the counterculture; so tempering revolutionary impulses while also protecting established corporate and governmental interests.

Thus in the 1970s and 80s, in order to appeal to desires for ‘individual freedom’ work became more personalized, and was placed more under individual control. Indeed, what we refer to as the ‘individualization’of work came to the fore, realised in the increased use of personalized contracts, performances, tests and rewards, the promotion of flexible and portfolio working, the growth of an ethic of self-responsibility in the workplace and the disavowal of collectivization, unionization and the idea of ‘shared’ interests - all of which proved seductive, not just to revolutionary artists and political agitators, but young people more generally inspired by the possibilities of ‘creative freedom’, ‘selfhood’ and ‘autonomy’. The concurrent growth of various kinds of cultural, informational and knowledge based occupations (in public services, in media, design, technology and science) also gave rise to the idea that work could become more ‘creative’, choice-laden and personally ‘expressive’. The old idea that work is intrinsically boring, functional, alienating or oppressive was soundly challenged by the growth of a new discourse that promoted work as the principal route to personal freedom and individual growth. Work became, not the barrier to freedom, but freedom’s provider.

Thus for Boltanski and Chiapello, capitalism hijacked the values of 1968 and inserted them at the heart of economic life – and the social and artistic critiques that flowered in the 1960s have now been incorporated into the management ideology and textbooks of contemporary capitalism. Take for example Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, published in 1967 as a searing indictment of the inauthenticity and alienation induced by capitalism, highly valued at the time as a must-read text for any budding Left revolutionaries, and strongly condemned by the Establishment - yet as Boltanski and Chiapello point out, with its emphasis on free expression, self-directedness and choice there is little in there that would now be out of place in any contemporary corporate training manual or management textbook:

"The problem then is how to organize, without creating a hierarchy; in other words, how to make sure the leader of the game doesn't just become 'The Leader'"
Raoul Vaneigem

"Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders"
Tom Peters – contemporary management guru

I realise I’m being a bit selective. But while we often think of the counterculture as being a glorious failure, it was in some sense a huge success. The demands of the revolutionaries were not ignored – on the contrary they have been absorbed and contained into the heart of the economy, embedded in organizational life, and workers in all kinds of service and knowledge based, creative and artistic, advertising, marketing and media, public service professions have been rewarded with some semblance of the kind of freedom, authenticity and enchantment that the counterculture so vocally demanded. Ironically, then, the revolution has occurred – but inside rather than outside of capitalism. But is work really the new freedom? Maybe for some – doubtless not for many more others.   

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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Boris Johnson on Have I Got News for You.
[image © copyright BBC]

Mind you, given the lack of any evident policy differences between our main political parties and interests perhaps its no surprise that elections are now reduced to media-driven personality contests – whether its Ken versus Boris, or David versus Gordon (wake me when its all over). But as I was watching Boris’s triumph I was struck by another thought – does this victory mark the return from the media wilderness of that most British of social species – the lesser-spotted Toff? Ten years ago, in Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’, it was all pop stars at No. 10, self-made talent and ordinary aspiration - the old values were out. Tories (and their elite cadre the Toffs) appeared to be ‘blackballed’ from the new meritocracy – and the media played a crucial role in this, promoting the new world of opportunity and disparaging the Tory world as elitist, corrupt and out-of touch with popular sentiment.

Reality TV promoted the virtues of this new meritocracy – and any Toffs that were captured in its orbit were invariably portrayed as braying idiots (think of all those ‘posh but dim’ Big Brother contestants), feckless fops (Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen) or bossy Sloanes (Trinny and Susannah). But now, the public, perhaps exhausted by New Labour’s failure to deliver on its promises, appear to be turning back to the Tories  (indeed, Edward Timpson the so-called 'Tarporley Toff' recently won the Crewe and Nantwich by-election) and so the Toffs have been welcomed back into the media fold. Location, Location, Location host Kirstie Allsop was the first to come boldly out of the closet as a fully fledged Toff, now it seems everywhere we look Toffs are in the ascendancy, getting positive media coverage for their apparent urbanity, decency and charisma. So if it's not Boris jollying up the news, or David Cameron and George Osborne coming across all suave and reasonable on serious TV (an impossibility two years ago), it's the likes of Raef Bjayou, recently performing as the token toff on BBC’s hit reality show The Apprentice looking a charming and decent human being compared to some of Suralun’s toe-curlingly awful wannabes. Make no mistake, the Toffs are coming back! – and the media are leading the revival. Good grief. Anyone for Pimms?

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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The craft historian Peter Dormer argued that this attitude stemmed from the Modernist separation of 'having ideas' from 'making objects'. So, for example, after 1917, once Marcel Duchamp has exhibited his selected 'readymades' (urinals, bottle-racks, bicycle wheels and the like) he created the possibility of art without craft. It then became common to think that using skills to make things somehow detracted from the purity of 'higher' conceptual thought. So in modern societies, while the term 'artist' still carries some glimmering traces of romance, glamour and intellectual superiority, to declare that you are a 'craftsman' (or craftswoman) conjures up some distinctly unglamorous images of dusty workshops, parochialism and practicality – not to mention chunky knitwear and country fairs.

But craft is not just about 'making objects'. It is also concerned with a particular philosophical approach embodied and expressed in one's work - any kind of work, not just pottery, basket-making and the like. Paramount here is the idea that 'craft work' should be based on the possession of distinctive learned skills, rooted in a respect for tradition, and operate through a creative convergence (rather than a separation) of mind and body. This is argued in Richard Sennett's recent (and highly readable) book The Craftsman where he also argues that craft focuses on 'objective standards' on 'good work for its own sake' and is always 'quality-driven'. Craft-based work is also locally controllable in terms of pace and quality, and so represents what sociologists often term 'non-alienated labour'.

But while craft has many recognised virtues, being 'radical' isn't usually one of them. Indeed we only think of art as being a threat to the 'establishment' because it is based on extrovert creativity, self-expressivity and rule-breaking – whereas craft is seen as more introvert, obedient and passive. But maybe there has been a reversal of these critical positions.

Mexican craft skulls.
[Photograph taken by gruntzooki. accessed under a Creative Commons licence]

Firstly, as many critics are now arguing, the world of work has itself become more 'art-like' in so far as it is more premised on rule-breaking, visionary intuition, self-expression and creativity. Furthermore, the individualization of work, realised in the promotion of personalized contracts, performances, tests and rewards, the promotion of 'portfolio-working', the ethic of self-responsibility and so on is designed to appeal (like art) to our desires for self-evaluation and individual expression. If this is the case then the 'radical' credentials of art looks a lot less secure – art work becomes indistinguishable from any other kind of work – its values seamlessly absorbed into the mainstream.

Secondly, while the market now appears happy to accept any kind of art production that is premised on a commitment to radicalism, rule-breaking and newness (think of 1960s Situationism, Sex Pistols, culture-jamming, Damien Hirst, Banksy) it is maybe less happy to tolerate a commitment to craft. Which is not to say that craft is not commodified, or that craft objects are not sold, or that high craftsmanship does not sell in elite markets, but rather to suggest that when craft is considered as a political value, as a critical approach to the world, it can exert significant friction and drag on market relations. Craft work of this nature is slow, methodical and historically-orientated. It is a world of quality-driven and communitarian production (think of the LINUX system, the Fence Collective or the Ultimate Holding Company). It appears to wrinkle its brow at the needy demands of fast capitalism and does not present itself for easy commodification – it is stubborn, phlegmatic and inward-looking. It also appears to contradict the incessant demands of the 'new' economy for upbeat 'creative individualism' – valuing anonymity and obedience, disavowing celebrity, and privileging versioning over originality.

In 1892 in The Claims of Decorative Art, Walter Crane called craft 'a protest against the domination of our modern commercial and industrial system of production for profit' – could it still be so? At a time when appeals to radical aspects of art appear ambiguous and uncertain, could a revived politics of craft provide a counterweight to some of the instrumentalizing and desocializing demands of the new economy?

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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