Attending to the “face of the other” in intercultural communication: Thinking and talking about difference,identity, and ethics

This essay contributes to the discussions in intercultural communication scholarship on key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges in today's world through the ethical framework of Emmanuel Levinas and his discussion of “absolute otherness” that informs and expands the dialogue on interculturality, cultural humility, and ethics. Levinas's discussion of “absolute otherness” aims to preserve difference—the otherness of the other—by asserting the ethical relation prior to the ontological relation and carries significant communicative implications in terms of the relation of the self and the other as well as making sense of difference and identity, and offers a new way of talking about these issues in the field of communication studies, specifically in intercultural communication. An illustration of attending to the other beyond reduction to the same is offered through a pedagogical application of the Levinasian framework in the intercultural communication class.     

Digitalizing consumer society: equipment and devices of digital consumption

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy focuses on the digitalization of consumption and its social, cultural, ethical, political, and gendered implications. It thus answers the call for more research on how digital devices spread from the purely personal domain to multiple sociocultural domains. Through their use, new cultural practices have emerged between consumers and these devices, and devices and markets, that lead to change, in terms of consumer demand, consumption norms, and issues of ethics, culture, and power. Closely examining the role that devices play in consumption behavior enables us to address the supposed manipulative power of hi-tech companies, infrastructures, and systems at the global level, and the view ordinary market actors hold of digital appliances as empowering tools at the local level. The papers in this volume bridge ‘actor network theory' and ‘consumer culture theory' from the perspective of market ‘agencements.’ Ruckenstein-Granroth and Beauvisage-Mellet, and Arriagada-Concha focus on the device-mediated relationship between large digital market infrastructures and consumer behavior; Petersson McIntyre and Licoppe unveil the societal and cultural underpinnings of digitalized markets. Last but not least, Sörum and Soujtis address the political dimensions and implications of our new digital consumer equipment and society.     

‘Beasts of Burden’: Productive Tensions between Haraway and Radical Animal Rights Activism

Coming from a critical animal studies perspective, this essay develops an urgent challenge to what Zipporah Weisberg describes as the ‘largely depoliticized approach within animal studies’ (2009: 5), with a focus on the work of Donna Haraway. Drawing on grassroots activist literature and practice, the essay analyses some productive tensions between animal rights perspectives and the work of Haraway, which centre on their different strategies for challenging the symbolic and material role of animals within biocapitalism. This approach reinstates the value of activist praxis to animal studies, arguing that it has the capacity to unsettle the positioning of animals as biocapital more successfully than Haraway's own ethical project. Due to being at the heart of debates between Haraway and theorists from within critical animal studies, vegan activism illustrates an animal rights practice that can work to undermine the structures that render animals ‘legitimately’ exploitable: despite Haraway's arguments to the contrary. The work of activists involved in the Hori-zone, a temporary eco-village established as a protest camp near the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, is used to explore how veganism can be used as a micro-sociological tactic to challenge the exploitation that pervades everyday life.     

Reassembling the Cultural

The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, so too can ‘culture’. To explore this, we focus on objects of concern that – unlike the financial markets that have formed the core of ANT-inspired thinking about the economy – are assembled by actors in and through what they themselves understand to be cultural materials, cultural calculations, cultural processes, cultural institutions. In such examples, ‘culture’ is continuously invoked and enacted by actors in constructing their actions, whatever critical sociologists might have to say about its ontological status. It seems paradoxical that a theoretical approach that makes sacrosanct the associations constructed by agents who assemble their own world, generally discusses ‘culture’ only from the point of view of critical epistemology. Bearing all this in mind, we argue that it is time for us to ‘reassemble’ the cultural.     

An Educational Imperative: The Role of Ethical Codes and Normative Prohibitions in CBW-applicable Research

This paper examines the role of ethics in research with potentialapplicability to chemical and biological warfare. It focuses uponbiological warfare research, and examines the ethical dilemmas faced bythose working with dual-use potential technologies. It discusses thenormative, legal and ethical prohibitions against participation inchemical and biological warfare programmes from a Western perspective.It examines the motivations of individuals participating in CBW researchand concludes with recommendations for increasing awareness aboutethical and normative prohibitions. An appendix lists the results of asurvey of ethical codes in relevant scientific disciplines conducted viathe Internet.     

Netflix: global hegemon or facilitator of frictionless digital trade?

Trade in cultural products has traditionally been constrained by a combination of law and technology. In Europe, digital sellers based in a given EU country are not always able to distribute across borders. In January 2016, US-based Netflix announced an expansion to 243 countries, accomplishing cross-border distribution through business strategy. Changes in law or technology that facilitate cross-national cultural trade have traditionally drawn the concern of observers worried about the cultural heritage—and products—of small markets. The expansion raises questions about what Netflix is doing. Is it a cultural hegemon, distributing US fare into 243 countries? Or it is a facilitator of free trade, making the products of even small countries more available outside their home markets (relative to traditional distribution)? And how does the curated model—which limits the number of movies the platform wants to distribute—affect Netflix’s function? To shed light on these questions, we develop a new measure of the global availability of a repertoire, the value-weighted geographic reach. Using this measure we find, first, that Netflix makes many of the works from a wide variety of countries available in many other countries. Second, we find that theatrical distribution strongly advantages US-origin fare. Third, the pattern of origin repertoire available through Netflix also favors the USA, although less overwhelmingly. Moreover, many countries are relatively advantaged by their Netflix availability patterns. Finally, we discuss some issues related to the Netflix platform, including horizontal competition with other platforms, vertical struggles with content providers (and its backward integration into production), and we speculate on possible challenges for regulators.     

From shanzhai chic to Gangnam style: seven practices of cultural-economic mediation in China and Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency.     

Posthuman Ethics and the Becoming Animal of Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

This essay considers Levinas' face-to-face ethical relation together with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of ‘becoming animal’ as a response to the radical dehumanisation involved in biopolitics. Framing his analysis in terms of an archaic law banning wrongdoers as wolves, Giorgio Agamben shows that biopolitics strips humans of subjectivity and exposes them to political power. Levinas' answer to radical dehumanisation is an ethical humanism of the other, but his ethical program is barred from politics. Moreover, he writes that in his own experience of dehumanisation, the only ethical being he encountered was Bobby, the camp dog. It seems biopolitics calls for an ethical politics that we might possess as bare life, outside of the autonomous, individualising conditions of the humanist subject. To this aim, I apply Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming animal as a devise to transport Levinas' ethics of alterity to the political realm.     

What Your Consumer Wants

With what mechanisms and cultural resources do market actors pursue change? Based on an analysis of business-to-business advertisements in two US food industry trade publications, we show the generative influence of social movements on perceived market opportunities. Building on recent scholarship on market-making, we find that market actors articulate and reshape critiques of their own industry by making claims about what consumers ostensibly want and about how their products can satisfy those desires. We find that business-to-business food ingredient advertisements selectively articulate precepts of the emergent ‘good food’ movement by urging manufacturers to develop healthy, natural, and ‘clean’ foods. While ‘good food’ advocates typically portray processed and packaged food as inherently unhealthy, suppliers and trade associations' advertisements transform this critique by claiming that products will be more marketable to consumers if they are made with ingredients designed to provide specific health benefits and to comply with federally mandated product labeling regulations. As such, we find that these business-to-business advertisements mediate between imagined demands and pragmatic constraints while serving as a conduit for the influence of social movements on industry practices and products.     

Steps towards an ecology of money infrastructures: materiality and cultures of Ripple

ABSTRACT

Money’s materiality produces an ontological conundrum for social theory: should the analysis of money foreground the objects used as money, or the abstract relations that underpin it? Provoked by the emergence of cryptocurrencies, this paper develops a conceptualization of money as a technological and social infrastructure which directly addresses this theoretical impasse. Cryptocurrencies’ sole form of material existence coincides with their underpinning infrastructure of records, accounting and payments. In the past decade, cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in number, and they have been applied to a host of use cases. This paper focuses on cross-border payments through the example of the fintech company Ripple, the cryptocurrency XRP, and the design of the XRP Ledger. Combining literatures from the social theory of money, science and technology studies and new materialisms, this article develops steps towards an ecological conceptualization of money infrastructures. Infrastructures, understood ecologically, include devices, active forms, and imaginaries in seamless webs of mutual relations of co-evolution. These ecologies are always potentially prone to slippage, dissolution, disassembling, reassembling and reappropriation, dependence, and competition.     

Tipping the Balance

In its emphasis on the legal technicalities this article is concerned with materiality of financial markets – a key theme in social studies of finance. The paper insists on the importance of local legal culture by articulating this concept in distinction to politics. Focusing on the Amendment to Article 1062 of the Russian Civil Code concerning an important class of financial products – cash-settled currency derivatives – it synthesises the insights of actor-network theory and finitism, and argues that local legal culture is a composite of both distributed agencies and interpretative acts.     

An economic perspective on rock concerts and climate change: Should carbon offsets compensating emissions be included in the ticket price?

Musicians, singers and bands can use their popularity to promote various causes and products, either through endorsements or more individual initiatives. Environmental activism is becoming more widespread as humans are trying to tackle and mitigate climate change. In this paper, we ask how best a band can compensate for the carbon emissions generated by fans travelling to its shows. We first report on the various “green” initiatives and practices of the music industry. We then focus on greenhouse gas emissions that result from tours and concerts since they are one of the largest environmental impacts generated by the music industry. We take the perspective of the artist or band wishing to internalize their carbon emissions and present a model of carbon offsets in the context of rock concerts, which amounts to the private provision of a public good. In our model, bands have the option to include offsets in the ticket price or to offer voluntary offsets. To illustrate our point, we present a field study conducted by a Quebec rock band at shows in Montreal and in Europe to show how the artists can reduce the environmental impact of their concert by buying carbon credits equivalent to their fans’ footprint. We show that at 1 % of the ticket price on average, the cost of carbon offsets is marginal and discuss the numerous challenges that arise for those artists wanting to engage in carbon offsetting.     

Character and organization

In recent years, questions of ‘character’ have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various contemporary paens is an assumption that building ‘character’ is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of ‘character’ is at best under-valued and at worst actively undermined and denigrated in any number of contemporary economic and organizational practices. In this paper, we seek to interrogate key aspects of this upsurge of interest in ‘character’ as it has been articulated in particular recent and on-going debates about the reform of organizational life. We argue that this ‘turn’ suffers precisely from an abstraction and lack of contextual specificity – not simply in relation to questions of ‘character formation,’ but also in regard to matters of organization, and indeed the relationship of the one to the other – that severely curtails both its ethical reach and explanatory power.     

Beginning in the Middle: Deleuze,Glissant, and Colonial Difference

Abstract

This essay reads Rosi Braidotti's philosophical nomadism from a decolonial perspective with the goal of uncovering the irreducible colonial difference which underlies the Eurocentric ontological vision embedded in Braidotti's reading of Gilles Deleuze. In particular, I read Edouard Glissant in tandem with Deleuze through the notion of the ‘middle’, a key concept which grounds the three thinkers' ontology of multiplicity. To this end, I borrow Nelson Maldonado-Torres' Fanonian critique of Eurocentric ontology and show how Braidotti fails to escape from the trap of Eurocentrism due to her inability to capture the abyssal and totalitarian character of coloniality imprinted in the cry of the damné. Against Braidotti's simplistic misreading of Glissant as a future-oriented constructivist, I argue that the enigmatic trope of Relation in Glissant opens up at the middle space of groundlessness constituting the ontological edifice of the colonial subject: revealing the abyssal middle in which the ineffable experience of shared suffering never stops haunting the freeing knowledge of relation.     

The multiple worlds of equity analysts: valuation,volume, and volatility

This paper contributes to the increasing research on how experts within financial institutions co-produce and organize financial markets, and in particular how equity analysts enact stock markets characterized by high volume and volatility. The 20 equity analysts studied give qualitatively different accounts of what, from an outsider's perspective, appear to be very similar work. The analysts understand investment objects, equity markets, and what constitutes good analytical work in qualitatively different ways. This heterogeneity, or multiplicity, could be one source of the, unexplained by orthodox financial theory, ‘excess’ volatility and ‘excess’ trading volume on financial markets. Therefore, the paper complements accounts within heterodox finance theory and sociology-based studies of financial market activities.     

An assemblage of framings and tamings: multi-sited analysis of infrastructures as a methodology

ABSTRACT

The social life of methods – the idea that research methods are an important topic of inquiry in and of themselves – has been receiving increasing interest in scholarship on the organisation of the economy and social life, including Science and Technology Studies (STS). In STS, especially ethnographic methods have been important for decades. This article develops an ethnographic methodology for the study of a very new case that challenges the assumptions underpinning many STS ethnographies. This case is the networked energy infrastructure, and we specifically focus on its risk management and markets. Drawing upon recent STS interest in multi-sited ethnography, the article’s research design is termed the multi-sited analysis of infrastructures (MSAI), and it develops the concepts of framing and taming to focus on meaning formation as mundane sense-making and as technicalised reasoning on different sites. We demonstrate these concepts in a multi-sited ethnography of energy infrastructure and its risk management and market activities in public regulation, special control rooms (including energy trading), and households. The article rounds up by explaining how the application of our methodology contributes to the advancement of interests in multi-sited ethnography, relating our research to the previous work in the fields of STS, infrastructure studies, and their methods.     

Responses of American research universities to issues posed by the changing environment of higher education

Conclusions This study clearly reveals that the benefits ascribed to strategic planning typically are achieved through a variety of means. A formal process that seeks to plan in a comprehensive, linear fashion is likely to be too complicated, politically divisive, expensive and inflexible, and to ignore how decisions are made in a complex, highly decentralised university. While many approaches to planning are used, universities must ensure they provide periodically opportunities for university staff—freed from daily responsibilities—to consider strategic concerns. Accurate and relevant information must be available to all who make and carry out decisions. Planning should be viewed as a learning process rather than a document producing exercise. Extensive communication among university staff and faculty is needed to ensure informed debate and substantial acceptance of decisions—otherwise they are unlikely to be implemented. Perhaps most important is not the process employed but the decision-maker's breadth of perspective and sophistication. No process will overcome lack of competent leadership. The importance of daily decision-making in various councils and committees on issues such as cost containment and budgetary priorities is underestimated in the literature on planning.Critics have doubted whether universities' structures and processes permit them, or their leaders have the resolve, to confront the emerging issues. However, in many respects, the universities' decentralised, multiple decision-making practices may suit them well. They face the same challenging societal changes as other sectors of society. Their staff include some of the most capable individuals in the United States, and in the past they have been highly adaptable during periods of profound social change.Universities do not appear to be less aware of the need to adapt, nor more constrained in adapting to new conditions, than other sectors of society. In fact, university research and scholarship will be highly important in pointing the way for the whole of society to meet this era's challenges. If pessimistic predictions about current trends turn out to be accurate, universities no doubt will adapt at least as well as other kinds of institutions. The travails of business in this environment are daily news! There will be occasional casualties among the universities, as frequently occurs during major social transitions, but institutions that have grown in importance for over 1,000 years, will doubtless emerge from this period perhaps somewhat changed but still performing their historic social functions.     

Can they all be ‘Shit-heads’?: learning to be a contrarian investor

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to explain one of the sensibilities or dispositions that novices learn in the process of becoming financiers, namely, to be a contrarian. We will review investment pitches from an American undergraduate collegiate investment fund, interviews with some members of the club, and field notes from a few of their outings, and treat instances of their contrariness as moments in their process of going from non-investors to investors, moments in which they experiment with and learn new social habits, identities and practices. Moreover, we connect this contrariness with a much longer tradition in the formation of an identity and subjectivity as an investor. More than any simple technology of thought to be deployed in a particular situation, contrarianism is a thoroughgoing mode of framing and understanding life, both in investment contexts and beyond, which we suggest was born between the 1880s and 1940s and has persisted in various forms to this day. This paper offers two instances of how someone becomes contrary, and suggests that contrarianism may be a fairly typical way for humans to make sense of financial markets.     

The new digital face of the consumerist mediator: the case of the ‘Yuka’ mobile app

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Mallard’s contribution [2007. Performance testing: dissection of a consumerist experiment. The sociological review, 55 (2), 152–172] on the work undertaken by consumerist journals to evaluate products independently from the mediation of market players, our goal is to characterize the new digital form of the consumerist mediator by using a specific case: Yuka, a mobile application (app) enabling consumers to obtain alternative health labeling on foodstuffs. Relying on interviews, observations of the app and analysis of underlying product databases and reports on food labeling issues, we examine the new forms of consumer-to-market interactions brought about by the app, the conceptions of health inscribed in its product qualification algorithm and the operation of the database on which it is based. Our position is threefold: firstly, we argue that the relationship between the consumer and the market established by Yuka is less distant than the one established by traditional consumerist mediators. Secondly, in the case of Yuka, we argue that the market relationship is based on a compromise between scientific logic, technological uncertainty and consumer concerns. Thirdly, we claim that this case demonstrates new ways for consumerist prescribers to politically intervene on markets, but that the potential of the intervention is tied to new issues related to the openness of product data.     

THE MEANING OF PRICE IN WORLD MARKETS

What is a global price? Studying the making of prices in spot, options and futures markets, the article ethnographically addresses this question by using world cotton trade as its empirical context. It argues that global market prices are not set by the mere coming together of demand and supply, but are produced as mercantile tools. These tools or prosthetic prices are realized by a multiplicity of actors. The article shows that instead of focusing narrowly on price setting, policy makers and researchers should attend to the conditions of price realization. In world and regional markets, prices are realized in multiple forms. Drawing on contemporary economic anthropology and sociology, the article maps the rich world of prices in their multiple manifestations and processes of realization. Price realization in the world cotton market is performed and maintained by constant interventions in the making of the markets and their prices through different forms of perceptions, scientific assumptions, standardizations of the object of exchange, various calculative tools, rumours and indexes. In conclusion, the article hints at the political implications and social scientific consequences of seeing the world price as a mercantile prosthesis.