Frederick F. Wherry

The Social Characterizations of Price: The Fool, the Faithful, the Frivolous, and the Frugal*

This article extends both Viviana Zelizers discussion of the social meaning of money and Charles Smiths proposal that pricing is a definitional practice to the under-theorized realm of the social meanings generated in the pricing system. Individuals are attributed with calculating or not calculating whether an object or service is “worth” its price, but these attributions differ according to the individuals social location as being near to or far from a societal reference point rather than by the inherent qualities of the object or service purchased. Prices offer seemingly objective (quantitative) proof of the individuals “logic of appropriateness”—in other words, people like that pay prices such as those. This article sketches a preliminary but nonexhaustive typology of the social characterizations of individuals within the pricing system; these ideal types—the fool, the faithful, the frugal, and the frivolous—and their components offer a systematic approach to understanding prices as embedded in and constituents of social meaning systems.

International statistics and social structure: the case of the Human Development Index

Our statistics are too much with us. Measure for measure, we lay waste the opportunity to ask how the measures emerge and become institutionalized in the professional field. Some statistical measurements have become institutionalized, taken-for-granted entities, while similar measures have failed to gain widespread usage. For example, the number of people living on less than a dollar per day is commonly used as a way to count the number of poor among us; Gross National Product (GNP) accounts for the wealth of nations. But the development of human capacities for a long time seemed esoteric and too subjective to be considered on a worldwide scale. How did human development become institutionalized as a statistical measurement and a taken-forgranted category of thought? How do the dominant worldviews and the social structure affect the emergence, form, and institutionalization of international development statistics?

Performance Circuits in the Marketplace

This paper introduces the concept of performance circuits as a means for understanding economic transactions. The concept of the performance circuits emphasizes the script-like sequences and the existing cultural narratives that enable the believable performances of those scripts. The concept of performance circuits allows for Zelizer’s concept of relational work to be applied in ethnographic studies of economic life, decomposing the constituent parts that enable the accomplishment of value in the marketplace. The paper opens with a dramaturgical performance at the United States Federal Reserve and then turns to microstudies of handicraft production, modern art markets, and neighborhood branding to demonstrate how one can study market dramas unfolding, sometimes unremarkably, emotions being generated, and background representations making loosely scripted actions understandable.

Trading Impressions: Evidence from Costa Rica

The case of indigenous artisans in Costa Rica trying to succeed in the global markets for handicrafts and international tourism demonstrates that the public narratives of the countrys character circulated by their national government and other institutional actors impose severe constraints on artisans and other economic actors. Market opportunities and socioinstitutional constraints arise not only from the beliefs that people within a national territory have about themselves but also from the roles that outsiders recognize as appropriate to a people within a given territory. The Costa Rican case suggests that the promises and pitfalls of the NAFTA free trade agreement cannot be understood adequately by solely examining the structural conditions of each country. Instead, the uneven spread of benefits and liabilities will depend, in part, on how nation-states and their subnational communities are framed in the imaginations of the global marketplace.

Cognitive effects on entrepreneurial intentions: a comparison of Chinese émigrés and their descendants with non-émigré Chinese

Cognitive characteristics of individuals have previously been established as important predictors of entrepreneurial intentions. Yet, we know little about this relationship in a transnational and ethnic entrepreneurship context. In this paper, we examine if and how emigres differs from those individuals staying at home with regard to entrepreneurial intentions and with regard to their cognitive make-up. Also, we examine differences in the impact of cognitions of emigres and homeland individuals respectively on their entrepreneurial intentions. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor in 2012 on 3,681 adult homeland Chinese 111 adult first generation emigres and 295 adult second generation emigres from China. Findings suggest that second generation Chinese emigrees are less likely to have entrepreneurial intentions than Chinese staying in China. Contrary to our initial expectations, we also find that both first and second generation emigres are less likely to have entrepreneurially oriented cognitions.

The Sacred and the Profane in the Marketplace

This chapter modifies Randall Collins’ interaction ritual chains theory in order to identify how individuals distinguish between what is sacred (off limits to competitive market rules) and what is profane. The empirical examples come from international trade shows in Thailand, home decor and handicraft markets in Thailand and Costa Rica as well as from small factories and artisans’ workshops. Interaction rituals enable individuals to embody moral codes and to revivify distinctions between the sacred and the profane. Individuals are not fully cognizant of the moral standards they have embodied, but these standards accomplished anew with each interaction and begin to crystallize when there is a focused interaction where most distractions are submerged. While each market situation regenerates normative principles, the concatenation of these normative principles throughout a chain of interactions gives rise to trans-situational values. Although, Durkheim theorized the clear separation of the sacred from the profane and thought about the machinations of the market as profane, Durkheim’s analysis of religious ritual can usefully be applied to such nonreligious realms as the marketplace. By taking a Durkheimian approach, one can identify various ritual ingredients that regenerate moral distinctions in the marketplace, and one can ask how the disabling or the removal of those ingredients might alter the regeneration of these distinctions.

Economic culture in the public sphere: Introduction

European Journal of Sociology http://journals.cambridge.org/EUR Additional services for European Journal of Sociology: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Economic Culture in the Public Sphere: Introduction Nina Bandelj, Lyn Spillman and Frederick F. Wherry European Journal of Sociology / Volume 56 / Issue 01 / April 2015, pp 1 - 10 DOI: 10.1017/S0003975615000016, Published online: 30 April 2015 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003975615000016 How to cite this article: Nina Bandelj, Lyn Spillman and Frederick F. Wherry (2015). Economic Culture in the Public Sphere: Introduction. European Journal of Sociology, 56, pp 1-10 doi:10.1017/ S0003975615000016 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/EUR, IP address: 86.61.122.100 on 02 May 2015

Dramatic performances in the play of politics: Egypt, Obama and the works of Jeffrey Alexander

This review article explores Jeffrey Alexanders cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in Egypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: Obamas Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), Alexander analyses the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the rise of President Barack Obama, respectively. Alexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the material conditions of a population, demographic changes, and the capacity of a group of contenders to gather material support for an overthrow. He also argues that the stagecraft of the political horserace matters for national elections. The strong versus weak dramaturgical performances of presidential candidates (rather than macroeconomic or geopolitical changes) proved consequential for changes in the poll numbers of Obama versus McCain, for example. Macroeconomic conditions had to be filtered, interpreted, and made meaningful; the candidate who could cast these material conditions onto the sacred side of civil discourse improved his likelihood of victory. Curiously, many social scientists and political pundits have largely taken performances for granted in the democratic struggle for power, and have therefore rendered the charismatic speeches and the grand narratives (culture) as epiphenomena, plays in the shadow of large structural shifts – a residual variable, or else as shifting, evanescent meanings produced in local, face-to-face settings. In the newer understanding, ‘culture’ is a level of analysis researchers use to investigate symbolic patterns and meaningful practices that structure how people act, how they define identities, even how they define what counts as ‘strategic’ or instrumental. Since the 1980s, sociologists working with this notion of culture have crafted different approaches to political culture, in national, organizational, and informal everyday arenas. Their different culture concepts carry different strengths and liabilities for research and they rely on different assumptions about action and meaning. This article reviews these arguments and asks what the limits to Alexanders performative theory are, how his theory can be reformulated to address settled versus unsettled political regimes, and how disaggregating Alexanders concept of audiences along with their roles in political change would provide the theory with greater predictive power.

The Play of Authenticity in Thai Handicraft Markets

In village handicraft markets, the play is the thing wherein you’ll catch the conscience of consumption. The play itself teases the (potential) buyer in the multiple meanings that play suggests — a gay distraction, a past-time without consequences, a representation of the absent, a plot in the service of greed or envy. Through amusement, ritual, or trickery, handicraft markets are spaces of performance — enacted dramas staged, blocked, and riddled with props. Is the play of authenticity the mere amusement one feels by walking into a colorful place where one can see the carver carve, the painter paint, and ‘authentic’ cultural traditions be born-again? Is the shopper carefree, behaving playfully from one moment to the next in the midst of a shopping experience that has more to do with what one experiences than what one can ‘rationally’ assess about the qualities of the objects for sale? Regardless of the seller’s intentions or the irony of the outcomes, the buyer may participate in the market performance in order to be entertained, taught, or in some other way entangled. The nature of these entanglements is the subject of my investigation. Rather than exhaust the possibilities of play in a handicraft market, I will examine how I got played, and saw others in play in northern Thailand.

Fragments from an ethnographer’s field guide: Skepticism, thick minimalism, and big theory

This article challenges Isaac Reed’s discussion of interpretation in the social sciences by honing in on the unique properties of ethnographic research and the relationship between ethnography and theory. What are the practicalities of using theory to structure ethnographic engagement and of developing maximal theoretical explanations from participant observation? This article first advocates establishing skepticism by searching out evidence to counteract our claims and identifying how our conclusions could have turned out otherwise. Second, ethnographers should specify thick minimal matches between what our concepts are and how they manifest themselves in thick description (often in a reformulated forms) in our field sites; and third, thick minimal matches can be made to facilitate big theory by re-signifying the evidence within a body of existing significations and within a community of scholars.