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.

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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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I’ve been looking forward to seeing the film The Damned United - the story of Brian Clough’s 44 day tenure as manager of Leeds United in 1974. The film has received generally positive reviews, helped by Michael Sheen’s uncanny impersonation of "Old Big ‘ead", and the laughs and knowing references to seventies popular culture it contains – it offers a kind of upbeat nostalgia fest for those with misty-eyed memories of a time when men were men, smoking was obligatory and everything else was either brown or orange.

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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“It is a terrible thing,” said Oscar Wilde, “for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.” I’m not sure many of our current politicians, bankers or journalists are likely to be troubled by this trauma. After reading the accounts offered in a recent book by David Shulman called From Hire to Liar: The Role of Deception in the Workplace it is unlikely that many of us will have either. Shulman examines the intriguing topic of telling lies in the workplace. While fibs and fabulations are usually frowned upon as activities we ought best to avoid, Shulman’s study reveals deception to be an important glue for holding organizations together.

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.

Find Out More

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.

Subscribe to Mark Banks's posts