One theme explored by Michael Sandel in his recent Reith Lectures is the link between morality and markets. But – given current concerns about the rampant excesses of various money-makers, city traders and financial speculators – one might be forgiven for thinking that no such link exists. Capitalists have created an advanced market system that over-rides moral concerns in the interest of profit – end of story. Yet if we look closer we can see that even markets need morals.

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.

Find out more

• Interested in listening to Sandel's Reith Lecture on markets? Get the 'Markets & Morals' podcast
• More from Open2 on the Reith Lectures 2009
• What do you think? Join the the Reith Lectures debate

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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Has football become a game where winning matches or even trophies does not matter?

The agreement is that all around this has been a sound economic exchange. BBC Sport’s Chief Football writer Phil McNulty makes that point. Manchester United are poised to make a handsome profit of some £68 million. Real Madrid will begin to make a commercial campaign with the likes of Kaka and Ronaldo by selling as much merchandise as possible with the club brand. One even wonders if it really matters that Real Madrid wins any trophies. We can speculate that not winning any trophies would bring more attention and thus fame to the club than winning anything.

Cristiano Ronaldo.
[image by Paolo Camera,
some rights reserved]

Has football become a game where winning matches or even trophies does not matter? A quick glance over the Deloitte Football Money League (2009) suggests so. Take a look at the league and you will find teams that won no trophies such as Fenerbahçe, a newcomer. But, from the point of view of the two clubs, apparently a sound investment has been made. So Ronaldo, we are told, will prove his worth and will make lots of money for himself and his clubs. 

About the author

Engin F Isin is professor in politics and international studies and director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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As mentioned in the programme, many organisations are turning to automated call-handling systems, on-line self service systems and other forms of technology to interact with their customers. Customers can find these approaches off-putting at best – and absolutely maddening at worst, particularly when things go wrong. I am sure most of us have had occasions when we are trying to tell our bank, mobile phone operator, utility company or other service provider about a difficulty we are facing – and getting stuck in what seems like an endless loop of recorded messages, menus of options and requests to key in 16 digit customer passcodes!

However, in addition to providing a source of frustration, these systems also have other side-effects that may be even more detrimental for all of us. The increased use of technology, particularly information technology, to automate the customer interface means that increasing amounts of data about our use of services, our movements and our tastes and preferences are stored on databases of both private and public sector organisations.

For example, my local railway station has recently "retired" the gentleman that worked in the car park pay-station for many years. Rather than handing over coins and notes to pay for parking, while receiving a ticket and a cheery greeting from another human being, users of the car park now have the option of going online or sending a message via their mobile phone.

Rather than displaying a printed ticket on the windscreen, the online or phone booking and payment is recorded in the database of the car parking provider, and all cars in the car park are checked against this database. So, what was a previously private matter, where and when I parked my car, has now become an ongoing record in a corporate database. Replicate this over all the customer interactions that are now based on the use of IT and it is easy to see why many people are concerned about the amount of personal data that is held about all of us and hence the increased potential for misuse of that data. UK citizens are already viewed as the most surveyed in the world; data capture as a by-product of de-personalising the customer interface will simply add to this.

The subject of the collection and use of personal data both from consumers and from people in the workplace has formed a basis of ongoing research at the Open University Business School, see for instance Ball, Daniel, Dibb and Meadows (2009). This team of researchers, which have backgrounds in surveillance, information management and marketing, has recently won funding from the Leverhulme Trust to explore what they have termed “new uses of customer data”; that is, uses of data that customers may not be aware of or that firms are being required to undertake, for example, by regulators and law enforcement agencies.

"So, what was a previously private matter, where and when I parked my car, has now become an ongoing record in a corporate database."

 The focus of the work will be firms in the financial services and travel sectors, which is particularly relevant when two of the three guests on the programme are from the travel sector. Both the financial services and travel sectors espouse the benefits of customer relationship management and the related activities of customer profiling and segmentation. For these activities they collect and store considerable amounts of information on their customers, including personal details and a record of all their transactions and purchases. However, as the focus of the research suggests, this data may be used for purposes that are not obvious to those that are providing it and may have unforeseen side-effects or consequences, both for the individual customers involved and for society at large.

As more and more organisations make use of technology to automate their interfaces with their customers, this collection of data will increase. Indeed, as in the case of the use of my station car park, customers may not even be aware of the information about them that is being stored, let alone how it might one day be used.

Find out more

Open University Business School research project Taking Liberties: New Uses of Consumer Data in the UK

Who's watching you work? Surveillance in business

A Report on the Surveillance Society
by KS Ball, D Lyon, D. Murakami Wood, C Norris and C Raab, Surveillance Studies Network.

Democracy, surveillance and 'knowing what's good for you': the private sector origins of profiling and the birth of 'citizen relationship management
by KS Ball, E M Daniel, S Dibb and M Meadows
from Surveillance and Democracy
edited by M Samatas and K Haggerty

Coercion versus Care: Using Irony to Make Sense of Organisational Surveillance
by G Sewell and J Barker
from the Academy of Management Review, Volume 31, Number 4, pages 934-961

About the author

Elizabeth Daniel is Professor of Information Management at the Open University Business School where she undertakes research and teaching in the fields of e-business and information systems. Elizabeth also undertakes consultancy work for a number of blue chip and leading public sector organisations.

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After watching recent news images of Afghani refugees climbing razor-wired fences around a Greek port, I prepared myself for the tabloid headlines screaming ‘invasion’ that would inevitably come the next day and for the government to announce yet more measures to sure up the borders of Great Britain. It seemed impossible to imagine a time when politicians in Europe actually encouraged ‘free’ movement, and discouraged the use of passports. Writers in the 16th century extolled the virtues of travel just for the sake of ‘curiosity’, and the onus was on receiving territories to extend a sense of hospitality to the traveller.

Of course, this is an idealised description: then as today, some travellers were more welcome than others. But reading Adam McKeown’s new book, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalisation of Borders, reminded me that our current web of migration regulations has a history, one embedded in the 19th century exclusion of Asian migrants from white settler colonies in the Pacific. His detailed research raises several paradoxes which perhaps point to why, even with the intense focus given to migration control by successive governments, we still have a situation that the International Organisation of Migration (2003) has called a ‘migration governability crisis’.

The first paradox is that contemporary border controls evolved from regulations developed by settler nations such as the United States and Australia, which were ostensibly founded on the premise of egalitarianism by pioneers of political freedoms despite the obvious racism in ‘white only’ migration policies and the decimation of indigenous populations. As a result, over time, discrimination has become acceptable at borders but not overtly within the state itself.

A boat crowded with Cuban refugees arrives in Key West, Florida, during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift
[image in the public domain, from United States Coastguard Service, sourced from Wikimedia]

Second, while neo-liberal globalisation is premised on an idea of free trade between countries, migration control is an obstacle to mobility. As a result, we have seen increasing separation between regulations relating to commerce and those relating to migration. Border control is now designed to facilitate some kinds of mobility, and migrants, and block others. Attempting to guarantee freedom, for some at least, through the imposition of regulations, transformed migration for others into an act of evasion and criminality. The meaning of ‘free’ has become ambiguous and opaque as a result.

The third paradox raised in McKeown’s research is that while migration laws coerce and exclude, interrogate, evaluate and attempt to quantify migrants, they are also considered as vehicles of justice, fairness, the ‘rule of law‘, and ‘efficiency’. They reflect normative ideals of how things should be, including the international order of states. It is impossible not to reflect on these distinctions and the right to be mobile when arriving at Heathrow Airport with an EU passport that only needs to be held up for a cursory glance by an immigration officer. To the left Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe queue up and wait. I am classified as a professional migrant, incorporated into a legal, formal administration, probably disappearing from the category of migrant altogether. In contradistinction are the ‘others’, those that work in 3D (domestic, dirty and dangerous jobs) who face resistance to their formal recognition within national labour regimes.

State institutions appear unable to resolve the inherent tensions in these paradoxes so the migrant continues to find their own way through red tape and over razor-wire. The kafka-esque world of immigration bureaucracy and rigid state regulations is met by the resilient human abilities of evasion and obfuscation in the hope of a better life.

Find out more

Explore global migration on our world map

Try a course taster: Living in a global world

Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalisation of Borders
Adam McKeown, published by Colombia University Press

About the author

Melissa Butcher is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Open University. Her research and teaching focuses on managing change in culturally diverse urban spaces.

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