Free movement frameworks in regional economic communities across the world are often evaluated using the European Union as a benchmark. However, this EU-centric lens overlooks diverse regional contexts and the crucial role of informal cross-border circulation and migrant labour. This article analyses free movement regimes in Mercosur and ECOWAS, drawing on 58 interviews with government and civil society stakeholders. It examines how informal circulation and labour, often compensating for policy gaps, are not exceptions but central to these frameworks, reflecting historical, normative, and economic regional contexts for human mobility. Policymakers tolerate or even encourage informality for pragmatic and normative reasons, with attitudes varying based on context and perceived risks, resulting in trends of spatial convergence and divergence. Integrating regionalism theories and the autonomy of migration perspective, while acknowledging the artificiality of colonial borders, the article argues that informality drives free movement and challenges hierarchical comparisons with the European Union. By reframing informality as a constitutive element of free movement, it offers a broader, context-sensitive understanding of (in)formal free movement regimes in the Global South.

Against the background of the EU's eastward enlargement project, this article examines the role of Germany’s political and economic relations with Poland and Romania in the recruitment of seasonal labour in the German agricultural sector. The article shows how EU’s macro-territorial processes go hand in hand with transformations of the legal framework for labour recruitment, following a pattern that is repeated with each new accession of a candidate country. Drawing on theories of migration infrastructure for recruitment, the article analyses how the latter contributes to the formation and refiguration of spatial arrangements that prove fundamental to the stabilisation of the agrifood sector and its associated labour migration regimes. At the same time, it shows how macro-territorial processes accentuate power imbalances between the Western EU countries and the new member states.

Spaces are often considered material objects through which their morphologies, or the interactions that make them unique, can be understood. They reveal the challenges and the multiple forms of spatialization of the society that produces them. Shaped by those who inhabit them, they allow for spatialities and territorialize activities, which are illustrated by the modes of diffusion. Reconfigurations are typically examined from a spatial perspective, which obscures the role of temporality. The interplay among actors who print variations and redeploy centralities remains under-explored. Dakar, located in Senegal, is a city that experiences a surge in activity during nocturnal hours, with a vibrant blend of leisure, work, and mobility. The city’s advancement in lighting technology has played a significant role in enhancing its nighttime ambiance and safety. Through direct field observation, this study explores the “night of Dakar” to detect the spatial elements that reconfigure the nocturnal environment. The results show spatialities linked to dominant night-time activities such as transportation, commerce, and leisure. They also reveal a multicentric city with an asymmetrical distribution of centres and peripheries.

How is doing health transformed into a measurable entity? Based on empirical research,1 we will analyze relevant aspects of quantifying health in two distinct fields: diet and mood-tracking. From the perspective of the economics of convention, self-trackers within these fields are investing in new forms and measures of equivalence for how health can be measured and handled. In doing so, they are confronting three main obstacles: the inaccuracy of measuring, the cumbersome materiality of objects and everyday practice, and the fuzzy relation of everyday doings and measuring. On the one hand, self-trackers are striving for practical consent over what an “accurate” measuring looks like and in what cases inaccuracy can respectively not be tolerated. On the other hand, self-trackers draw on varying criteria for adequate accuracy depending on how they practically integrate their tracking practices into everyday life. In the economics of convention, objects are granted a vital role, supporting competent everyday actors in their coordination efforts as well as tackling normative and ethical issues. We suggest that technologies such as sensors, mHealth applications, and smartphones are involved in everyday practices as intermediate objects in varying engagements and negotiation processes. In both fields of self-tracking, quite a unique configuration of measuring, objects, resistiveness, and engagements (Thévenot 2002, 2014) emerges, making present conventions of health evasive and fragmented, and still quite unavailable to health organizations, policy makers, and users alike.

The First World War and the social policies supporting its victims played an essential role in the development of the Italian welfare state, its spectrum of benefits, and its organization. The relief programs for millions of soldiers and their families as well as disabled veterans and survivors led to a new dimension of state intervention in the field of social policy. The influence these programs have had on the successive reforms of the post-war period is clearly visible. An obvious example are the measures to increase the employment of disabled veterans, which were precursors of the 1919 compulsory insurance against unemployment and represented the first concrete state intervention in the labor market, meant to even out some of its flaws and help particularly disadvantaged groups of employees. Another wartime legislation that inspired post-war measures was the law supporting the Great War’s widows and orphans. It paved the way for the first and most important social law of the Italian fascist regime of the 1920s: the Law on Protection of Mothers and Children. Additionally, the modernization of relief services during the war diminished the importance of traditional charitable and confessional assistance and resulted at the same time in a nationalization of social policy. This in turn brought about the bureaucratization and technocratization of welfare services throughout state departments and public agencies. The nexus between warfare and welfare, a relationship which can be identified in several belligerent countries after the Great War, was particularly evident in Italy. During the war, a pronounced process of “compensatory state building” gripped the country, with the consolidation of new social rights guaranteed by the state going hand in hand with the limitation of several political and civil rights. This paper will, based on these considerations, analyze the connections and continuities of Italy’s social legislation during the war and post-war period. It will include modernization factors and limits and contradictory developments of the Italian welfare state between World War I, the Civil War, and the rise of fascism.

Discourse surrounding healthcare constructs physical activity to be the moral obligation of individuals for preventing illness. Commercial fitness centers are the principle places for doing physical exercise and represent a commercial and relatively standardized socio-material setting aimed at helping to create a fit and healthy body. Despite their success, fitness centers in Germany have a customer turnover rate of 25 % and often appear unable to retain their members over the long term. Why do people who were once motivated to become a member of a fitness center turn their back on it? We argue that these disengagements can be explained to a considerable extent by the non-fulfillment of latent personal expectations. The discourse on health creates manifest normative expectations which actors on the fitness market respond to by providing functional environments (supply) and by developing individual physical exercise projects (demand). Yet, the establishment of personal routines, which is an integral element of the marketized good in question, could fail in the functional setting of a fitness center – a critical moment that brings to light personal latent expectations that are usually difficult to verbalize. This paper focuses on the justification of engagement in, and disengagement from, physical activity by analyzing qualitative interviews with (former) members of fitness centers. Regimes of engagement and orders of worth are two concepts from the sociology of conventions which enable us to disentangle typical tensions in this specific socio-material setting. Our analysis provides access to user experiences that are only rarely explicitly verbalized as a critique of commercial market providers. It also allows us to reflect upon preventive health policies aimed at the promotion of physical activities.

This contribution highlights the relevance of biographical research for the economic sociology of the healthcare system. In particular, the economy of conventions could be enriched by an approach that is suitable for studying the actors of economic coordination as well as for analyzing the significance of economic knowledge within the framework of specific conventions. This contribution is based on an exploratory study on the economization of the healthcare system in Switzerland. Biographical interviews were conducted with 14 influential experts and senior managers. The careers of four physicians with a strong vocation to influence the public healthcare system are presented. In the concluding discussion, the findings are compared with economic sociology research on the healthcare system in the US and France. The conclusion states that the biographical perspective brings additional aspects into light that are not taken into account by more traditional concepts and methods of economic sociology.

The practice of digital self-tracking of health data addresses inter-related contingencies on the micro and macro level: on the micro level, digital self-tracking can be perceived as facilitation of lifeworld contingencies and the expression of the way contingency is dealt with in (socially) exhausted societies. Together, these can be understood as a strategy of the “privatization of contingency.” The attempt to reduce the individual’s contingency of action is accompanied by the increase of lifeworld contingency, resulting in a contingency dilemma in contemporary self-tracking which produces (new) dependencies and vulnerabilities with respect to the technology used. Through a multilevel analysis of digital self-tracking and an empirical study on vulnerable self-trackers, a number of those pathological effects of the contingency dilemma are examined using methods from pragmatism and theory of conventions, while highlighting a possible solution to this dilemma.

With his concept “functional democratisation,” Norbert Elias articulates how a specific type of “social equalisation” is connected to expanding interdependency networks and long-term civilising processes. This article initially focuses on connections between functional democratisation and informalisation, throwing new light on the wider framework of the theory of civilisation and informalisation, as well as on these processes themselves. These insights are followed by a discussion into how functional democratisation and informalisation are interconnected with social differentiation and integration as the two major process drivers of globalisation, thus illuminating directions of processes of civilisation, informalisation, and functional democratisation within the overall process of globalisation. Special attention goes to trends of differentiation and integration on the one hand, and integration conflicts or disintegration and defunctionalisation on the other. Considering from a global perspective which side of these opposing trends is dominant helps to clarify directions in processes of (in-)formalisation and of (de-)civilisation. In addition, it helps to explain the declining power and status of the West as a global establishment, and changes in the balance of power between national and international political and economic centres. Expanding global interdependencies have given rise to a variety of practical problems and theoretical questions – a major policy question among them: “How to steer clear of financial and/or political turbulence?” Issues such as economic crises, global migration, and populism, brought up major theoretical questions: “Have the driving processes of differentiation, integration, and increasing complexity of social functions stalled, changed direction, or ceased altogether?” In other words, “Have civilising processes changed direction?,” an issue that was first raised in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Today, as strong spurts of globalisation give rise to feelings of loss and decline, it is reappraised once again in this paper.

The effect of warfare on welfare state development in Western democracies has been a matter of growing interest among scholars. The question of how mass warfare influenced social reforms in former colonies on the other hand, has been completely neglected. This is astounding, considering the fact that most European colonial powers relied on colonial troops to maintain the colonial order, to conquer new territories, and to repress struggles for independence and colonial revolts. This contribution addresses the role of the military, warfare, and conscription for the provision of social protection in former French African colonies, particularly in French West Africa from the beginning of the 20th century until shortly after World War II. French African colonies are most likely cases to exhibit such an effect, as no other imperial power militarized its colonial societies to the extent France did. The results show that World War I and the introduction of mass conscription did not lead to any systematic handling of social issues in French West Africa. However, the militarization and the experience of the First World War formed soldiers and veterans as a societal group that started to demand social rights. This development paved the way for later social changes and major reforms in the course of World War II such as the introduction of uniform pensions for soldiers throughout the Empire and the expansion of education and health services.