Chipping Away at the State: Workers' Resistance and the Demise of East Germany

1996 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Kopstein
Keyword(s):  
Economic Reform ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Labor Discipline ◽  
East German ◽  
Archival Record ◽  
Everyday Resistance ◽  
State Archives

This article is a study of everyday resistance and political protest among East German workers under communism. It develops and adduces evidence for two hypotheses based on evidence from Communist Party and state archives. First, in contrast to the standard explanation for the revolution of 1989, which emphasizes intellectual and popular mobilization against the regime, this essay emphasizes the long-term capacity of otherwisepowerless workers to immobilize the regime through nonpolitical acts of everyday resistance. This resistance, coupled with the rare act of political protest, rendered ineffective the conventional methods of labor discipline and undermined any hope of meaningful economic reform. The second hypothesis concerns the motivation for working-class behavior. Two models of social action have dominated studies of subalterns: rational choice and moral economy. The models are evaluated against the archival record. While the evidence is not overwhelmingly in favor of either model, the moral economy approach provides a better account of the sporadic acts of rebellion and the myriad acts of everyday resistance.

(China's Long-Term Economic Reform: Perspectives and Implications)

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pyeong Seob Yang ◽  
Su Yeob Na ◽  
Soojoong Nam ◽  
Sang Hun Lee ◽  
Ho Lim Yoo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Reform

Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitra Kofti
Keyword(s):  
Employment Status ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Conveyor Belt ◽  
Flexible Production ◽  
Flexible Work ◽  
Production Site ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Moral Frameworks

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.

Lethal Borders and the Translocal Politics of ‘Ordinary People’

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-104
Author(s):  
Gerhild Perl
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Eu

How are politics generated by grief actually lived, and how do they endure? By exploring long-term repercussions of Europe’s lethal borders, I show what shape shared grief takes in the minute encounters between ‘ordinary people’ across borders and how alternative politics are lived as a vivid critique of the moral economy of the EU border regime. Therefore, I explore intimate uncertainties that arise both in the confrontation with death and in the unexpected affection between strangers. The analysis of a single shipwreck in 2003 indicates the need for more ethnographically nuanced, historically informed and translocal approaches to death during migration in anthropology.

scholarly journals International Real Estate Review

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-183
Author(s):  
Oliver Bischoff ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Household Income ◽  
Birth Rate ◽  
Flow Model ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Rental Market ◽  
East German ◽  
Vacancy Rates ◽  
Stock Flow

We apply the stock flow model for the German residential rental market using a data set that includes the overwhelming majority of nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (NUTS) 3 regions for the 2004-2007 period. Aside from proving conditional rental price convergence, we have detected a turnaround in vacancy stocks between the short and the long term. While East German counties and West German independent cities currently exhibit the highest and lowest vacancy rates, respectively, the opposite holds true at equilibrium. Leaning on theoretical suggestions, landlords in well-developed areas have incentives to hold onto vacancies in view of future rent increases. Our results support this idea, which demonstrates the significantly positive impact of household income and net birth rate on the natural vacancy rate.

The Filipino Peasant in the Modern World: Tradition, Change and Resilience

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Eduardo Climaco Tadem
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Agrarian Change ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Small Farm ◽  
Physical Separation ◽  
Peasant Society ◽  
Everyday Resistance ◽  
Peasant Community ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

This article examines a traditional upland peasant community subjected to change-oriented interventions from external state and nonstate forces. As a result, various modifications took place in the villages with the introduction of new technologies, crop diversification, market contacts, social differentiation, formal governmental structures, decline in the number of farmers, growth of a working class, increased contacts with and knowledge of the non-peasant external world, and physical separation of families. Using various analytical frameworks on the nature of peasant society via a modified peasant essentialist approach, agrarian change, rural development, social movements, everyday resistance, moral economy, and a history from below approach, this article depicts and analyzes how traditional peasant society is able to withstand the changes brought about by external factors and essentially retain its household-based small farm economy, socially-determined norms and practices, and feelings of community and solidarity.

YaskoT 7OKM EL3aSKaR

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Michael Raish
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Multinomial Logistic Regression ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Current Effort ◽  
Multinomial Logistic Regression Analysis ◽  
Code Choice ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of the linguistic contents of political protest signs that were erected at sit-in sites in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, during the summer of 2011. Sign authors employed a wide variety of linguistic codes and symbolic visual resources to subvert state authority, urge fellow citizens to action, and advocate a number of other political goals. Drawing on the methodology of Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies, the current effort investigates the relationship between linguistic code and factors such as sign location, medium, length, and thematic content. Multinomial logistic regression analysis reveals a significant relationship between sign code and medium, for example, as handwritten signs show more linguistic diversity than printed signs. Qualitative analysis focuses on sign authors, use of the symbolic and semiotic resources associated with these codes. This study of the ephemeral, transitory LL of Egyptian sit-in sites demonstrates the many and varied ways in which citizen sign authors manipulate concepts of formality, code choice, and imagery to encourage audiences to take up their messages as resources for social action in their own worlds.

scholarly journals Emotional Compliance and Emotion as Resistance: Shame and Anger among the Long-Term Unemployed

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 794-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Peterie ◽  
Gaby Ramia ◽  
Greg Marston ◽  
Roger Patulny
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Recipients ◽  
Policy Tools ◽  
Sociology Of Emotions ◽  
Unemployed People ◽  
Everyday Resistance ◽  
The Unemployed ◽  
Emotional Resistance ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Important Form

Contemporary governments employ a range of policy tools to ‘activate’ the unemployed to look for work. Framing unemployment as a consequence of personal shortcoming, these policies incentivise the unemployed to become ‘productive’ members of society. While Foucault’s governmentality framework has been used to foreground the operation of power within these policies, ‘job-seeker’ resistance has received less attention. In particular, forms of emotional resistance have rarely been studied. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed welfare recipients in Australia, this article shows that many unemployed people internalise activation’s discourses of personal failure, experiencing shame and worthlessness as a result. It also reveals, however, that a significant minority reject this framing and the ‘feeling rules’ it implies, expressing not shame but anger regarding their circumstances. Bringing together insights from resistance studies and the sociology of emotions, this article argues that ‘job-seeker’ anger should be recognised as an important form of ‘everyday resistance’.

Creative Subversion: Staking a Claim for Critical Qualitative Inquiry

2020 ◽  
pp. 107780042093329
Author(s):  
César A. Cisneros Puebla
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Knowledge Object ◽  
Radical Transformation

It is important to define the ethnographical practices as a way of thinking and doing critical qualitative inquiry. Creative subversion currently arises as a breaking of rules, institutional change, social or political protest, popular or civic rebellion, fighting the law or simply radical transformation of situations. Today it is everywhere even though there is too much silence around it, which could be catastrophic for qualitative research. Reflexive methods could be enriched if researchers looking for social transformation and collaborating in civil resistance integrate in their ethnographical practices the creative subversion as shared knowledge object. It is pertinent to interpret the social action involved in such transformative processes as a poetics of rage collective or individually performed. Doing a review of how creative subversion has been dealt in the contemporary social science, this article is an effort to provide a nuance and rigorous definition.

Islamic finance merging public finance within public–private partnership

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-592
Author(s):  
Hanna Kociemska
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Deductive Reasoning ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Private Investment ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Investment Projects ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Profit Maximisation

Purpose This paper aims to describe cooperation between public and private market players from different legal and religious orders. The author argues that such public–private partnerships (PPPs) enable the development of a possible convergence between selected areas of mainstream public finance and the Islamic moral economy (IME). Design/methodology/approach This paper explores the theory of both mainstream finance and the IME, and using deductive reasoning from axioms, develops the assumptions of a theoretical approach to heterodox PPP. The proposed method affects the ability to find common platforms between mainstream public finance and the IME, through the example of public–private investment projects. Findings This endeavour is subject to trade-offs between profit maximisation and social justice values on the basis of long-term PPP contracts. The author shows the assumptions under which this compromise would be beneficial to public entities, multicultural societies and conventional and Islamic investors. It is proposed to distribute profit to the owners up to a predetermined value, above which the PPPs would finance public services for persons otherwise excluded from them. Originality/value The success of this approach must depend on a compromise between profit maximisation as the sole investment objective and investment guided by social justice values. Private investors can achieve a capped level of profit on a long-term contract basis, and public partners can obtain long-term contracts for providing public goods. Both would undertake a project with a strong emphasis on corporate social responsibility, with particularly large opportunities in developing Islamic countries.

Economie Action and Buddhist Morality in a Thai Village

1983 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 851-868 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles F. Keyes
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Theravada Buddhism ◽  
Agricultural Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rational Calculation ◽  
Economic Constraints ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Central Thailand

Although the Thai-Lao peasants living in rain-fed agricultural communities in northeastern Thailand have experienced some improvements in their socioeconomic situation as a consequence of the growth of the Thai economy since the mid-1950s, these peasants still constitute the poorest sector of the population of Thailand. Moreover, the socioeconomic position of the rural northeastern Thai populace has actually declined relative to that of the urban populace and that of the rural populace living in central Thailand. The economic disadvantageous position of Thai-Lao peasants is linked with a sense of being an ethnoregional minority within a polity that has been highly centralized since reforms instituted at the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the social action of Thai-Lao peasants with reference to the political-economic constraints on their world can be understood, as long-term research in one community reveals, as having been impelled by rational calculation aimed at improving the well being of peasant families. The ways in which peasants have assessed in practice the justice of these constraints as well as the ways in which they have assessed the limits to entrepreneurship must be seen, however, as being rooted in moral premises that Thai-Lao villagers have appropriated from Theravada Buddhism as known to them in their popular culture.

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