The Highland Clearances: A Reassessment

It is argued that, in the period under consideration, 1925–49, black colliers employed in the Transvaal and Orange Free State coal industry were probably the most militant workers in South Africa. Specifically, it is shown that between 1939 and 1948, a decade for which we have comprehensive and reasonably reliable data, this industry, referred to here as highveld coal mining, experienced more than twice as many days lost per thousand workers than occurred in gold mining. The question is ‘why was this group of workers so relatively militant?’ Answers draw, firstly, from archival evidence of the 57 strikes that have been located, secondly, from aspects of the social history of the collieries, and, thirdly, from insights gained from Dunbar Moodie's work on ‘moral economy’ and existing theories of mining militancy in other countries. Several suggestions are advanced, and these include: the isolation of the main centre of coal production from large concentrations of police, the average size of the collieries, an extensive repertoire of contention, and a strong ethnic basis for mobilisation. Further, it is argued that Moodie's conceptualisation of ‘moral economy’ would gain greater depth if it were rooted in salient features of ‘political economy’.

In this article I discuss some of the theoretical implications of adopting moral economy as an approach to analysing new forms of flexible production and work. Despite a growing interest in the anthropology of precarity and work, the linkages between political and moral economies have been relatively neglected. By discussing E.P. Thompson’s approach to moral economy as well as ways moral economy has been discussed in anthropology, the article argues it is a timely and encompassing approach for the study of flexible work and precarity, as well as compliance and resistance to inequality. A nexus of diverse moral frameworks of value converge at the production site and back home, contributing to the reproduction of precarity and capital under flexible forms of accumulation. The article suggests that moral economy may offer an encompassing approach to studying individual ideas and practices and their relation with collective moral frameworks and confinements and to exploring change and change potential. It draws from an ethnography based on long-term fieldwork in a privatized factory in Bulgaria, in the context of radical economic transformations and privatization projects. It scrutinizes solidarities, tensions and inequalities developed around the conveyor belt, with a particular focus on gender and employment status inequalities and their intertwinement with managerial and household practices.

Investigating the political ecologies of everyday engagements with environments—including material as well as policy and ideological interactions—requires consideration of the moral economy at play, as well as the political economy and social ecology. A.V. Chayanov (1966/1925), E.P. Thompson (1971, 1991), and Jim Scott (1976) have provided useful ways to think about moral economy. They framed moral economy as a way of enacting understandings of just commons, subsistence entitlements, and desirable economic relations based on social struggle. This framing can be particularly useful in combination with political ecology approaches to investigate 'moral ecologies.' These are society-environment assemblages that are often more aspirational than enacted, but toward which considerable effort is expended, and whose moral and ecological dynamics are functionally linked, perhaps as best illustrated in recent attention to agroecology as a powerful mechanism for ensuring rights to food (De Schutter 2011a, 2011b, 2012). Given political ecology's focus on power relations, moral ecologies that do not exercise considerable power are often overlooked by political ecologists. However, even if particular understandings may not be highly efficacious in exercising power, they may have considerable influence on relational conceptualizations. This mismatch between habitual inattention to moral ecologies and their potential importance contributes to tensions within contemporary society-environment scholarship between structuralist and poststructuralist modes of engagement. Given the value of both modes, particularly for understanding what Peet and Watts (1993) describe as liberation ecologies (and the regional discourse formations that shape them), I argue that political ecology provides useful frameworks for documenting and analyzing the socio-ecological experience of regions—in terms not only of the functions of society and environment, but also of the performance and curation of knowledge about those functions.Keywords: moral economy, food systems, curation, critical regional studies, land use planning, participatory action research, environmental justice, integrated natural resource management science

Cultural political economy (CPE) is a distinctive alternative approach in political economy that takes the 'cultural turn' seriously. This chapter explains how CPE draws on Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault to reveal how sense- and meaning-making describe, critique, and explain political economy; and account for capitalism's historically specific properties, dynamic, and crisis-tendencies. It explores the discursive, structural, technological (Foucauldian), and agential mechanisms that select, retain, and institutionalise economic, political and social imaginaries. Objectively overdetermined crises are subjectively indeterminate. Which construals prevail in crisis resolution depends on their scientific validity, narrative plausibility, and ability to read the conjuncture to see what exists in potentia.

This article explores practices of gleaning in Indonesia to analyse how different values are generated from residual materials under conditions of economic marginalisation, environmental degradation, and uneven governance. Moving beyond gleaning’s agrarian conception as the ancient practice of gathering leftover crops after the main harvest, it compares the collection of loose seaweed in coastal aquaculture with the informal gathering of post-consumer plastic waste outside formal waste management systems. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article examines how marginalised communities generate value from materials deemed residual through labour shaped by subsistence needs, moral claims, social hierarchies, and unequal distributions of obligation and risk. Framing these practices within a ‘moral economy’ – in which shared values and notions of the common good are integral to economic life – the article shows how gleaning functions not only as a survival strategy, but also as a contested ethical project that both reproduces gendered divisions of labour and enables claims to dignity and belonging amid contested environmental governance and shifting regimes of value.

This article evaluates Polanyi’s work from two complementary theoretical perspectives: moral economy and cultural political economy. Polanyi’s comparative historical analyses of substantive economies, their modes of distribution and the bases for their respective kinds of relative unity and stability, the rise of the market economy in and through its disembedding from more encompassing social relations, the social bases and motives for resistance to this disembedding, and its subsequent re-embedding in a market society are major theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of moral economies. Polanyi’s work can also be explored for insights that anticipate the emerging post-disciplinary approach of cultural political economy, which combines critical semiotic analysis and the critique of political economy. More importantly, cultural political economy provides new theoretical and methodological tools for elaborating Polanyi’s brilliant insights into moral economy.

The aim of this article is to show that economic experts are not the product of one single social field, with one identity and one role. They are rather the product of a trans-epistemic discursive field. By a combination of discourse analytical tools from post-structuralism and a theory of symbolic power derived from Bourdieu's work, the contribution explores how economists occupy a powerful, hegemonic position in the global political economy. While classical approaches in Political Economy reduce power mainly to money and violence, this paper takes the recent debates on the cultural turn in Political Economy as a starting point to develop the idea of a Discursive Political Economy of Economics. In the first step it is shown how discourse and power interact. In the second step the paper explores the discursive power logic of economic expert discourses at the interface between academia, politics, media and the economy with illustrations from empirical research. The claim of this paper is that the power of economic expert discourses in the media, politics and the political economy is based on an elitism dispositif which emerged in the academic world of economics in the USA as an ‘excellence myth’.

This article examines how speakers of Lao (a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia) make references to persons in the course of everyday conversation. This seemingly simple referential problem turns out to be a rich locus of meaning in the domain of human social relations. In everyday person reference, the Lao system requires that speakers make fine distinctions in social hierarchy. Speakers must mark if a person is socially "lower" or "higher" than themselves. While to outsiders this may seem like a surface obsession with social hierarchy, it is virtually invisible to insiders, being the standard, normal way of talking. The paper argues, however, that while the meanings coded in ordinary behavior can become virtually invisible, speakers are nevertheless reproducing and making public the basic cultural perspective on human relations. The last part of the article explores this point with reference to English, in which person reference is highly "egalitarian", reflecting a cultural concern with "social equality".

The birlinn or West Highland galley has been used frequently as an image on clan crests, and appears on more than eighty medieval gravestones in the west of Scotland, yet not a single example of the ship itself remains or has been discovered, and definite information on its dimensions and construction is scarce. Some information about the birlinn can be gleaned from Gaelic poetry from the period 1300–1760, from oral tradition, stories, and also from land charters, estate papers, and accounts. The birlinn as seen on gravestone carvings appears to be closely related to the Viking ship, and my intention in this paper is to compare the West Highland vessel with the Norse vessel, using information from the square sail tradition still extant in Norway, to interpret information from the Gaelic bards. As well as increasing our practical knowledge of the birlinn, I hope to increase understanding of its important place in Gaelic heritage and illuminate links between Norse and Gaelic culture during the Midd...

Economics, as it emerged as an academic discipline at the turn of the twentieth century, claimed to offer a scientific basis for the study of economic affairs. Its dominant form presented capitalism as a network of markets, regulated by rational self-interest, whose organization and outcomes could be modeled mathematically. Empirical inquiry was fenced off from questions of value, cutting the links to moral philosophy that had been central to the project of political economy launched in the late eighteenth century as part of a more general search for a secular basis for moral action. The catastrophic financial crash set in motion by the collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank in September 2008 has now forced questions of ethics back into discussions of economic affairs in the most brutal way. This “moral turn” is particularly marked in Britain where, for over a decade, the City of London has been uncritically celebrated as one of the key hubs of the new capitalism and left to compete in the global marketplace with the minimum of oversight. The social and human costs are now being counted in rising unemployment, decimated retirement savings, and savage cuts in public provision as funding for essential services is diverted to pay for the unprecedented scale of government borrowing required to bail out failing banks. Despite the havoc visited on countless working lives, many bankers have continued to display a callous disregard for public misery and to pay themselves huge bonuses. Faced with this selfishness and self-regard several notable celebrants at the altar of finance have

Through the lens of political and moral economy, I examined the dominant values and actors in the legislative process of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. In my content analysis of federal hearings, I found that witnesses from government agencies, Congress and think tanks had almost equal presence at the hearings. Witnesses who were invited by Congress to testify at the hearings expressed twice as much support for private interests than for the general Medicare population or low-income beneficiaries. Few expressed concern for the uninsured population. Witnesses offered almost four times as many expressions of support for market rationalism than social insurance and three times as many than for improving Medicare's solvency/sustainability. The 2008 presidential candidates are split between support for social insurance and support for the private market. Medicare advocates will need to devote extraordinary efforts to significantly counterweigh the strength and influence of market rationalists.

Economic conservatism in India today is associated with the BJP’s embrace of markets and competition. This article argues that conservatism within the nationalist movement was founded on rejecting both the market and the planned economy, embracing instead ‘moral economy’ principles of economic life guided by social norms, and development founded on small-scale craft production. After independence, conservative nationalists, while acknowledging the need to enhance state power through industrial growth, protected the moral economies of craft-based and agrarian production. But as the Congress party fractured, farmers’ movements asserted interests in market-based agricultural transformation and liberalization shifted the issue space of economic debate, new pro-business conservatives presented a new vision based on enhancing national wealth and strength through capitalist enterprise.

This thesis posits a novel method for engaging with the cultural turn in political economy that explicitly recommends feasible strategies for social reform and development. I combine socio-cognitive critical discourse studies and political economy analysis to provide a replicable interdisciplinary research strategy. I argue that this combination enables researchers to convert critique into reform recommendations that can feasibly be implemented in existing structural conditions. To exemplify the approach, I situate my research within the context of ongoing antagonism over the recognition of transgender identities on Twitter. There has been a recent proliferation of research and discussion on the issue, much of which highlights the contributory role of social media. I aim to determine potential causal explanations for the ongoing issue and identify opportunities for social development. The data analysis is a two-part process. Initially, secondary data are used to contextualise the existing structural conditions of political economies in the global West. The primary data – a corpus comprising 3,700,000 tweets from 2,882 transgender Twitter users – are then analysed using both quantitative corpus linguistic techniques and qualitative linguistic tools to explore the ideological structures of transgender Twitter. Findings from the two stages are cross-referenced to identify potential causal mechanisms for the ongoing antagonism over transgender recognition on Twitter and to determine potential reform strategies. This thesis contributes to both the field of critical linguistics and efforts towards transgender socio-legal recognition. For the latter, I recommend feasible reform strategies that may lead to an incremental decrease in antagonism. This framework can also be replicated and applied to other contexts of social inequity in order to manifest the aim of critical linguistics research to effect social change.

This fascinating volume offers a critique of recent institutional and cultural turns in heterodox economics and political economy. Using seven case studies as examples, the authors explore how research on sense- and meaning-making can deepen critical studies in political economy, illuminating its role in critiquing the specific categories, contradictions and crisis-tendencies of capitalism.

Political economy is a term in wide use and has been for centuries. Yet standard economic theory reduces politics to ethics or economics. This reduction is enabled by the presumption of closed choice data or given utility and cost functions. In this conceptual framework, the political vanishes into an activity of preference satisfaction according to a welfare function (ethics) or into trade (economics). To bring the political back to life within a theory of political economy requires that closed schemes of thought be replaced by open schemes. The ways in which individuals react to the indeterminacy of their subjective choice data, in innocuous small-scale settings as well as in situations of dramatic exception to constitutional rules, separates them into leaders and followers. Followership creates an opportunity for political enterprise at the social level (enterprise in rules) and at the subjective level (enterprise in visions of options, and hence preferences). At both levels the political comes to the fore of political economy as an answer to the “challenge of exception.” Much of our inspiration for this argument traces to the work of Friedrich Wieser, Carl Schmitt, and Vincent Ostrom.