Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany
, by Stefan Bargheer, claims that work and play orientations have respectively organized German and British wild bird conservation ...efforts. The book argues that work and play are nonmoral categories, and—more broadly—that moral justifications for action should be understood as mere post-hoc surface phenomena that contribute little to social action. The new French pragmatic sociology provides conceptual tools to examine how categories like work and play intertwine with logics of moral evaluation that define what activities rightly qualify as each category, what public goods might each yield, and what value ought to be attached to them. With this approach in mind, this review examines
Moral Entanglements
’ claims, and identifies ways in which moral logics did indeed play a role in establishing different bird conservation styles in each country. The review highlights the broader importance for comparative-historical sociologists to take moral repertoires into account as they reconstruct historical institutional emergence.
Recent literature has highlighted the central role that donor identity, the perception of oneself as a giving person, plays in fundraising. In this, nonprofit organizations develop strategies to ...encourage a generous self-perception among potential donors and volunteers to elicit donations. However, existing literature has not yet examined the cultural repertoires that organizations develop to portray convincing representations of donor identity to their donor and volunteer base. This article argues that nonprofit organizations draw on broad, culturally defined notions of the moral good to create idealized depictions of a donor identity. To demonstrate, the article looks at the early decades of the Red Cross movement. It shows that the movement developed four different logics to depict romanticized notions of donors and volunteers, each based on a different idea of the social good. The article argues that such meaning-making is a key aspect of nonprofit organizations’ work.
Field theory largely treats the cultural dimensions of social fields as an emergent property of their objective structures. In this article, I reconsider the role of culture in fields by studying how ...the logics that govern their emergence develop. As a study case, I examine the rise of the field of transnational humanitarianism by focusing on the early endeavors of the International Committee of the Red Cross (established 1863). I show that the specific nineteenth-century strand of Calvinist doctrine espoused by the early Red Cross activists motivated and shaped the genesis of the humanitarian field through its convictions about the nature of war, state and society relations, and charity. Activists drew on this doctrine to justify and advocate the establishment of a permanent, independent, and neutral humanitarian field. Based on this analysis, I argue that preexistent belief systems have a key role in differentiating new fields from existing social institutions.
Although there is burgeoning research on environmental activism, few studies have examined the interrelationship between nationalism and nature protection in detail. This article examines how groups ...manage the tension between national commitment and caring for the environment. It focuses on two opposing Israeli activist groups: a settler movement that aims to establish new communities in the fast‐dwindling Israeli open expanses and a “green” movement intent on preserving open spaces. Our observations, interviews, and textual analysis show that both groups believe themselves to be committed to the protection of nature, and that both groups see environmental responsibility as an integral aspect of their Zionist identity. However, the Israeli green movement sees abstaining from interventions in nature and adhering to sustainable development as Zionist because it preserves Israel for future generations. Conversely, the settler movement sees active intervention in nature—by building new communities, planting trees, and hiking—as the proper way to protect Israeli natural expanses and to maintain the livelihood of Israeli society. Our case study demonstrates that, although environmental movements often aspire to universalism, local movements also interlace environmentalism and nationalism in ways that generate multiple (and even contradictory) interpretations of the appropriate way to care for nature.
Although a great deal of literature has looked at how individuals respond to stigma, far less has been written about how professional groups address challenges to their self-perception as abiding by ...clear moral standards. In this paper, we ask how professional group members maintain a positive self-perception in the face of moral stigma. Drawing on pragmatic and cultural sociology, we claim that professional communities hold narratives that link various aspects of the work their members perform with specific understanding of the common good. These narratives allow professionals to maintain a shared view of their work as benefitting society and to perceive themselves as moral individuals. As a case study, we focus on the advertising industry, which has long been stigmatized as complicit in exploitative capitalist mechanisms and cultural degradation. We draw on nine total months of fieldwork and seventy-four interviews across three US advertising agencies. We find that advertising practitioners use narratives to present their work as contributing to the common good, depicting themselves as moral individuals who care about others in the process. We analyze three prevalent narratives: the account-driven narrative, which links moral virtue to caring for clients; the creative-driven narrative, which ties caring to the production of meaningful advertisements; and the strategic-driven narrative, which sees caring in finding meaningful relationships for consumers and brands.
Although the study of institutions is one of the longest standing sociological topics, numerous recent studies have revisited questions about the genesis of new institutions and institutional ...domains. In this review, I argue for increased attention to the role cultural beliefs play in the emergence of new institutions. I highlight three substantive research areas where sociologists have demonstrated a relatively independent causal effect of beliefs on the genesis of new institutions: (a) studies of states and state institutions; (b) studies of emergent markets; and (c) studies of the charitable aid sector. I conclude by highlighting promising avenues for future research on beliefs and institutional emergence.
Recent years have seen numerous sociological disagreements devolve into heated debates, with scholars openly accusing their peers of being both empirically wrong and morally misguided. While social ...scientists routinely reflect on the ethical implications of certain research assumptions and data collection methods, the sociology of knowledge production has said little about how moral debates over scholarship shape subsequent research trajectories. Drawing on the new French pragmatic sociology, this article examines how sociologists respond to criticisms of the moral worth of their research. The article outlines three typical responses: (1) accepting the criticism and changing direction completely; (2) accepting the criticism but changing discursive framing to incorporate existing research without being subject to critique; and (3) navigating through the debate by devising new research directions that do not trigger such criticism. To demonstrate, the article looks at how sociologists of religion responded, in their published scholarship, to criticisms of secularization theory as depreciating religious people and spiritual experience. Across the responses, we show that sociologists have included moral considerations in their empirical investigations, and have switched among several diverse moral justifications to address—and also avoid—criticism. We conclude by demonstrating that this model can be extended to other domains of sociological inquiry, including the study of gender-based wage inequality and methodological nationalism. The article highlights the importance of mapping the moral frameworks sociologists use for the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of morality.
Despite the growing interest in transnational fields and their influence on national-level dynamics, existing literature has not yet addressed the processes involved in creating such fields in the ...first place. This article provides insight into the complexities involved in national–transnational interactions amidst national and transnational field formation. It examines the nascent transnational humanitarian field of the late nineteenth century through the work of the emerging Red Cross Movement in the 1860s–1890s, drawing primarily on the archive of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The findings show that National Red Cross (NRC) societies employed a discourse drawn from a transnational cultural arena in order to gain central positioning in their national fields and to convince other parties of their necessity. Conversely, NRCs used nationalism as a form of symbolic capital in establishing themselves in their national fields, seemingly at odds with their cosmopolitan aspirations. Thus, by contrast to the ideal-typical representation of global humanitarianism as non-national, these findings suggest that nationalism and impartial humanitarianism are historically intertwined. More broadly, the article argues that national-level field dynamics as well as nationalism play important roles in the creation of transnational fields, even when field actors present themselves as acting for universal causes.
Urban sociology has tended to study interactions between passersby and "street persons" with an emphasis on the ways street persons become bothersome, harassing, or dangerous. This article moves away ...from the focus on the ways interactions in public go awry and focuses on how individuals account for the mundane, everyday exchanges they have with strangers who seek their help. Based on interview data (N = 31) and qualitative analysis of data from an Internet survey (N = 110), this article suggests that the presence of beggars does not inherently symbolize urban decay to passersby and does not necessarily elicit anxiety, but instead provides a valuable texture of urban life. Further, the article argues that individuals, when justifying their responses to requests for help from needy persons (beggars) in urban spaces, use a variety of cultural strategies to maintain their perception of themselves as moral persons, both when they choose to help and when they refuse. Drawing from these findings, the article suggests that urban sociology and the sociology of risk would benefit from sensitizing their studies of public interactions to the diverse meanings individuals assign to them, rather than presupposing annoyance, anxiety, or fear as their predominant characteristic.
Negotiations about reparations tend to take the language of interests and to deal primarily with monetary compensation for disadvantaged groups. In such proceedings, aggrieved claimants are likely to ...make a variety of claims about the use of money to represent their experience, ranging from demands for increased compensation to rejections of the entire process altogether. This article draws attention to the communicative functions of money in the reparation process. It claims that actors may grudgingly agree to attach a monetary value to what they hold sacred, but simultaneously strive to preserve their sense of self‐worth and to elicit identification by raising moral critiques about the use of fiscal logic. To exemplify, the article focuses on the 2005 removal of Jewish‐Israeli settlers from Israeli‐occupied territories. It shows that settlers indeed demanded to be compensated fiscally for their lost property. At the same time, it shows that they raised objections to the use of fiscal logic in representing their experience and offered alternate logics of evaluation. The settlers resisted shame and devaluation through such competing logics, demanding that the state reaffirm a positive and embracing relationship with them despite its decision to evict them.
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