Kieran Healy

Embedded Altruism: Blood Collection Regimes and the European Union's Donor Population 1

Blood donation is often cited as a perfect example of altruism. But blood must be collected as well as donated, and the organizational basis of the blood supply has been largely neglected. This article is a comparative study of blood collection regimes in Europe. Regimes are found to affect donation rates and donor profiles. When the Red Cross collects blood, donation is tied to religious activity and other volunteering, unlike state and blood bank systems. This study argues that collection regimes produce their donor populations by providing differing opportunities for donations. The analysis contributes to an institutional perspective on altruism and highlights the need to attend to the socially embedded nature of altruistic as well as self‐interested action.

Altruism as an Organizational Problem: The Case of Organ Procurement

This article presents a social-organizational approach to explaining empirical variation in rates of altruism. The efforts of organizations are mostly responsible for much of the altruism seen today, and the substance of these efforts varies. Although research from social psychology and organizational studies suggests that altruistic action is sensitive to social context, the link between individual and organizational aspects of altruism has not been clearly articulated. In particular, our knowledge of “one-shot,” organizationally managed altruism is limited. I suggest that the factors of organizational resources, scope, and persistence are likely to generate higher rates of individual altruism in the absence of long-term relationships that encourage giving behavior. The approach is applied to the case of cadaveric organ procurement in the United States. The analysis highlights the central role of organ procurement organizations (OPOs). Quantitative analysis of OPO procurement rates shows that, while demographic characteristics are important, OPO resources and scope are important predictors of procurement. The findings strongly suggest that the ability of organizations to produce contexts for giving explains a substantial amount of variation in rates of one-shot altruism.

What's New for Culture in the New Economy?

This paper reviews and evaluates recent work arguing for the rising importance of the cultural sector, and creativity in general, in the context of the new economy. Each of these keywords — new economy, creativity, cultural sector — is ambiguous without further definition. This paper aims to clarify the big arguments made using these terms, and see whether there is good evidence to support them. In particular, I will focus on claims that individual creativity and innovation have become central to economic productivity and competitiveness. I will argue that although large-scale structural changes in social and economic life have been evident for some time, recent commentary may oversell or misidentify these shifts. The paper has four main parts. First, I discuss the “new economy” and ask whether we really are now living in a global marketplace driven by information technology that values innovation and creativity. Second, I describe the institutional changes in firms and labor markets alleged to have come about in response to the new economy and its demands. Third, I review two recent efforts to argue that (first) the creative sector and (second) a new creative class are emerging as the most important features of post-industrial societies. Finally, I raise some questions about and criticisms of these arguments.

CONCEPTUALISING CONSTRAINT: MOUZELIS, ARCHER AND THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE

This paper outlines and evaluates recent contributions by Nicos Mouzelis and Margaret Archer to the structure-agency debate. Mouzelis offers an internal reconstruction of Giddenss structuration theory; Archer an external alternative. I show that, although representing an advance on Giddenss position, Mouzeliss account fails because he relies on the formers definition of structure as comprising rules and resources. I then examine Archers solution to the problem. I argue that her definition of activity-dependence makes her account of the relationship between agents and structures unclear. I outline an alternative account in terms of supervenience, and argue that it contains the minimum ontological claim necessary for a realist understanding of the structure-agent relationship.

Digital Technology and Cultural Goods

THIS ARTICLE examines the implications of the Internet for the ownership, distribution and consumption of cultural and expressive goods, broadly defined.1 By this I mean literature, music, visual and performance arts, libraries, archives, and the like. The growth of the Internet has affected many areas of life besides this one, of course. It has allowed the growth of new ways to associate with others, new ways to work and do business, new ways to be politically active, amongst many others.2 So why focus on cultural goods? It turns out that one of the main attractions of the Internet to ordinary users is its ability to deliver content over the network quickly and at zero cost. Literature, images of all kinds and archival materials are accessible to anyone with a network connection. Music is also easy to come by, and has been the most controversial (and popular) kind of cultural good exchanged so far. Video is available to those who—like many college students—have a lot of bandwidth and the knowledge to use it. In each case, however, the Internet’s technical capacity to move these goods around does not mesh easily with established legal practice, government policy or commercial interests. For many interested parties, the Internet’s most distinctive characteristic is a bug, not a feature. This makes cultural goods interesting and important. Being able to search for and freely download a novel, a few hours of music, or an entire film is both immediately appealing to many people and completely incompatible with how many corporations and artists now make their money. Although the Internet’s effects are manifold, it is in the sphere of cultural goods that digital technology is putting the most pressure on established ways of doing things. Given the new possibilities, we want to know how literature, music and film will be produced and made available to people. Will people’s tastes change as their choices do?

The emergence of HIV in the U.S. blood supply: Organizations, obligations, and the management of uncertainty

In the early 1980s, blood suppliers in most Western nations went through at least a crisis, and often a scandal. Thousands of people were infected with HIV after receiving a blood transfusion or some other blood product. Blood-borne AIDS, like the AIDS epidemic as a whole, was a human tragedy. It was also an organizational disaster. If we want to understand what happened, the experience of the United States provides a particularly important starting point. It has the largest blood industry in the world. Unusually, a non-pro¢t whole blood sector that relies on voluntary donations coexists with a large, for-pro¢t plasma industry that buys its raw material from suppliers. Almost the same volume of raw plasma is purchased as whole blood is donated each year. In retrospect, the blood industry in the U.S. between 1981 and 1983 provides a kind of natural experiment that allows us to test and develop our ideas about the social embeddedness of economic transactions, and the reactions of complex organizations to uncertainty.

The Performativity of Networks

The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis is quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions. I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies.

Public Sociology in the Age of Social Media

I informally examine how the idea of public sociology has been affected by the rise of social media. New social media platforms disintermediate communication, make people more visible, and encourage public life to be measured. They tend to move the discipline from a situation where some people self-consciously do “public sociology” to one where more sociologists unselfconsciously do sociology in public. I discuss the character of such “latently public” work, the opportunities and difficulties it creates for individuals, and its tendency to be associated with academic fields that believe in what they are doing.

Classification situations: Life-chances in the neoliberal era

This article examines the stratifying effects of economic classifications. We argue that in the neoliberal era market institutions increasingly use actuarial techniques to split and sort individuals into classification situations that shape life-chances. While this is a general and increasingly pervasive process, our main empirical illustration comes from the transformation of the credit market in the United States. This market works as both as a leveling force and as a condenser of new forms of social difference. The U.S. banking and credit system has greatly broadened its scope over the past twenty years to incorporate previously excluded groups. We observe this leveling tendency in the expansion of credit amongst lower-income households, the systematization of overdraft protections, and the unexpected and rapid growth of the fringe banking sector. But while access to credit has democratized, it has also differentiated. Scoring technologies classify and price people according to credit risk. This has allowed multiple new distinctions to be made amongst the creditworthy, as scores get attached to different interest rates and loan structures. Scores have also expanded into markets beyond consumer credit, such as insurance, real estate, employment, and elsewhere. The result is a cumulative pattern of advantage and disadvantage with both objectively measured and subjectively experienced aspects. We argue these private classificatory tools are increasingly central to the generation of ‘‘market-situations’’, and thus an important and overlooked force that structures individual life-chances. In short, classification situations may have become the engine of modern class situations. 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Visualizing the Baby Boom

I provide a tiled visualization of average monthly birth rates between 1938 and 1991 for the United States and England and Wales. Ideas about demographic “generations” such as Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials are in widespread use in popular discussions of social change, often quite fancifully. The visualization makes apparent the sheer scale of the U.S. Baby Boom in comparison to other alleged generations.