1,720,955 research outputs found
Profit as Social Rent: Embeddedness and Stratification in Markets
No full textThis article shows how research on the social structure of markets may contribute to the analysis the growing income inequality in contemporary capitalist economies. The author proposes a theoretical link between embeddedness and social stratification by discussing the role of institutions and networks in markets for the distribution of economic profits between firms. The author claims that we must understand profit and free competition as opposites, as economic theory does. In the main part of the article the author illustrates six typical mechanisms of rent extraction from networks or formal and symbolic rules that embed markets. They emerge from material as well as symbolical access to and influence on the orientation of other market actors. Social structures in markets lead to unequal chances for rent extraction, even if actors produce them for coordination rather than for accumulation purposes. This is how market sociology and theory of capitalism can be linked more closely
The "Economy of the conventions": Basics and Developments of the new french Economic Sociology
No full textThieves, Fools, Fraudsters, and Gamblers? The Ambivalence of Moral Criticism in the Credit Crunch of 2008
Full text linkThis article examines public debates on the legitimacy of banking profits in the 2008 credit crunch. A content analysis of 957 newspaper articles published in Germany and the UK in the early weeks after the Lehman Brothers collapse examines critical statements directed at illegitimate forms of financial profit in order to identify the cultural legitimacy of financial capitalism. The conceptual framework provided by the French sociology of justification points to the role of shared orders of value as a normative reference for public discourses. In both national debates, four important boundaries for legitimate profits were drawn that concerned the problems of ownership, risk-management capacities of traders, fraudulent client relations, and speculative gambling. The meaning of this classical moral criticism of banks was transformed in the context of the 2008 crisis: a line between “normal” and “excessive” financial profits was drawn, defining an area of legitimate profit-seeking that hewed to the basic assumptions of the market model. Economic theory was used as a scheme of public economic morality. The seemingly harsh critical debate effectively reproduced a legitimate image of a functioning financial market, deflecting public attention away from the structural ambivalences of financial profit-seeking and granting legitimacy to the institutional status quo of financial capitalism.Cet article étudie les débats publics consacrés à la légitimité des profits bancaires à l'occasion de la crise du crédit de 2008. Une analyse du contenu de 957 articles de journaux publiés en Allemagne et au Royaume-Uni dans les premières semaines qui suivirent la faillite de Lehman Brothers recense les principales critiques dénonçant l'illégitimité des profits financiers. Le cadre conceptuel apporté par la sociologie française de la Justification souligne le rôle des ordres partagés de valeurs comme référence normative pour les discours publics. Dans les deux débats nationaux étudiés, sont particulièrement discutés en rapport avec l'idée de profit légitime des problèmes d'appropriation, la capacité des traders à gérer les risques, les relations frauduleuses avec la clientèle et les paris purement spéculatifs. La critique morale classique des banques prend un sens nouveau dans le contexte de la crise de 2008 : une ligne est désormais tirée entre les profits financiers « normaux » et les profits financiers « excessifs » définissant du même coup une zone de recherche du profit légitime. La théorie économique apparaît alors comme un schème de moralité publique. Le débat critique en apparence virulent ne fait que reproduire l'image d'un marché financier fonctionnel, détournant l'attention publique des ambivalences structurelles de la recherche de profit financier et accordant une nouvelle légitimité au statu quo institutionnel du capitalisme financier.In diesem Artikel werden öffentliche Debatten über die Legitimität von Finanzprofiten in der Bankenkrise von 2008 untersucht. In einer Inhaltsanalyse von 957 Zeitungsartikeln, die in Deutschland und Großbritannien in den ersten Wochen nach dem Zusammenbruch von Lehman Brothers erschienen, werden kritische Angriffe auf die Legitimität von Finanzprofiten betrachtet um die kulturelle Dimension des Finanzkapitalismus in den Blick zu nehmen. Aus Sicht der französischen Soziologie der Rechtfertigung geraten geteilte Wertordnungen als normative Bezugspunkte einer öffentlichen Moralökonomie in den Blick. In beiden nationalen Diskursen finden sich vier wichtige Grenzziehungen des legitimen Profits die den Eigentumsstatus der gehandelten Gelder, die professionelle Kompetenz der Risk-Manager, die Frage von betrügerischen Kundenbeziehungen und die Rolle von spekulativem Glücksspiel betreffen. Die Bedeutung dieser klassischen Elemente jeder moralischen Kritik an Banken veränderte sich im Kontext der Krise von 2008: So wurden Profite aus Finanzgeschäften nicht generell in Frage gestellt, sondern in der Debatte wurde eine Linie zwischen „normalen“ und „exzessiven“ Finanzprofiten gezogen. Als Maßstab für die so definierte Zone des legitimen Profits diente das ökonomische Marktmodell. So wurde ökonomische Theorie in den Debatten von 2008 zum Maßstab öffentlicher Wirtschaftsmoral. Die scheinbar radikale öffentliche Kritik am Profitmodell der Banken reproduzierte somit letztlich das legitime Bild eines funktionierenden Finanzmarktes „in greifbarer Nähe“, wenn nur die Akteure sich moralisch, d.h. systemkonform verhalten würden. Dies zog die öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit weg von den strukturellen Ambivalenzen aller Finanzprofite und legitimierte so den institutionellen Status Quo des Finanzmarktes
Readjusting Imagined Markets: Morality and Institutional Resilience in the German and British Bank Bailout of 2008
Full text linkWhy was there no fundamental change of financial regulation after the 2008 credit crunch? This article argues that the limited regulatory changes of German and British financial markets can be explained by the influence moral boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate financial practices had on policymakers’ crisis perception. In German public debate of 2008, speculation as opposed to firm investment was seen as cause of the crisis. The British crisis narrative held illegitimate profits responsible that were gained from excessive risk-taking as opposed to risk management. These distinct legitimizing patterns (a) fostered a selective perception of the crisis that downplayed domestic structural causes of the crisis, and (b) directed regulatory efforts away from fundamental reforms. In fact, both national debates saw the institutional regime of their financial markets re-affirmed by the crisis and in need of readjustment. Conceptually, the article shows the affinity between public moral boundaries of legitimate economic practices and the core institutional principles of market regimes
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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