Darren Thiel

Contacts and contracts: Economic embeddedness and ethnic stratification in London’s construction market

Debates over the constitution and operation of economic markets tend to neglect their empirical variability and frequently fail to recognize the specific qualities of labour and contract markets. Based on one year’s participant observation on a London construction site in 2003/4, this article demonstrates how labour and contract markets were informally regulated and reproduced, characterized by alternative exchange forms that sometimes involved illegitimate practices. Chains of informal social networks, their mores and methods of association and exchange, closed down the markets to competition and framed the development of ethnic stratification patterns. The patterns were locked in place by strong social ties that had formed in relation to the highly deregulated construction marketplace, and which came to constitute it. This revealed the construction economy as predominately socially embedded in a ‘moral economy’ that was ultimately underpinned by violence, putting into question numerous claims from the economic sociology of markets.

Builders, bodies and bifurcations: How London construction workers ‘learn to labour’

This article examines how the ideas about working-class culture presented in Paul Willis’s classic monograph (1977) Learning to Labour apply or do not apply to the data generated by an ethnographic analysis of a London construction site that I conducted in 2003/4. While Learning to Labour had significant relevance to understanding the class-bound masculine cultures of the construction workers, because building work has a pre-industrial history and a post-industrial contemporary, the claim that working-class masculinity is driven predominately by the features of industrial work life is found wanting. Rather than being bound exclusively to industrial work, the exigencies of working-class-bound masculinity could be found in the builders’ problematic and attenuated relationships with the modern state and its legal and moral injunctions. Such relationships to the modern state illuminate why fundamental features of working-class masculine culture are reproduced in a post-industrial global London by both migrant and more indigenous workers, and thus also illustrate part of the reason why class and ethnic inequality persist in the contemporary UK.

Charismatic violence and the sanctification of the super-rich

Abstract Drawing historical comparisons between the nineteenth century and the present, this paper describes and analyses how an elite section of the global rich, through mega-giving and a re-emerging notion of ‘noblesse oblige’ that is enshrined in the philanthrocapitalism movement, have fostered a sacred rationale for their extreme wealth. Not only do the new nobles hold the power of wealth but, through mega-giving, they generate a moral imagery akin to religious figures who ostensibly self-sacrifice for the good of everyone else. This generates a form of charismatic authority that affords the super-rich an influential space from which to spread a ‘theodicy of privilege’ – shielding growing wealth concentration from criticism and sanctifying the claim that individual mega-wealth is collectively beneficial. Through its contribution to and facilitation of the inegalitarian status quo, this theodicy engenders various forms of structural violence. Here we explore the mechanisms that enable wealthy donors to position themselves as apparent benefactors of humanity, including a reliance on metrics that appear to justify the claim that targeted philanthropic expenditures can and are reducing global wealth and health inequalities, but which raise unanswered questions surrounding the actual effects of the outcomes claimed.

Moral Truth and Compounded Trauma The Effects of Acquittal of Homicide Defendants on the Families of the Victims

This article examines the impact of acquittal of homicide defendants on the families of the homicide victim(s), illustrating how the families’ trauma was framed and complicated by the criminal justice process. Homicide trials had particularly compounded their trauma because to manage and partially repair the shattered reality wrought by the homicide, the families were compelled to construct moral and causal narratives about the event. Yet, defense counter-narratives conflicted with those of the families, and the acquittal validated those as truth. This fractured the families’ repair work, denied their claims to victimhood, and prolonged their bereavement indefinitely.