Download The Making of Market Societies

The Making of Market
Societies
A challenge for sociology-some
Polish voices which need to be
listened to!
Some pointers
• How CEE sociologists have reached a reflexive
understanding of their changing societies and their role
in it.
• Confrontation of indigenous emergent conceptual
apparatus with the imitative western understandingswhat do they see as applicable to the processanticipatory scholarship?
• External normative order vs internally generated
normative orders- peripheral status points to specificity!
• Less adaptive more constructivist
• Moralised markets
Transformation rather than
transition-object to subject• “ Sociologists began to study the gradual social
anchoring of new rules and their legalisation at
the level of the individual. Sources of change
were located in processes of social construction
and symbolic negotiation”. Poles were seen as
owners of assets, cultural and social.. society
was no longer object of reforms from above but
the motor force of change were people in their
roles and subjects” Kolasa-Nowak
Examples
• Poles see social conflict in moral, historical and
ideological categories less class or even
regimes.
• “ Poles accept Polish capitalism but not its
capitalists” Gardawski- e.g. skilled workers are
incorporated into the system but not accepting of
its rules- hence egalitarian and interventionist
demands when they benefit from the existing
market order.
• Research into social exclusion and poverty,
homelessness as well as new consumerism
Social capital and trust
• Poles have low social capital and trust
• How is trust being actively created?
• High levels of access to internet and high levels of net
sociability- Pew Global Attitudes have 43% using social
networking sites- close to UK (43%) and US (46%)-82%
of 18-29 year olds.
• 6.5 million registered with one auction portal (Allegro)
with 4 million trades per day. E bay is losing out.
• Trust is built and reflected through moral control of
participants and the norms they establish. Pay more for
trustworthy exchange than most profitable. Durkeim
revived. (B.Mika Networks of Trust).
• New milieux of norm creation- Solidarity to Smolensk
Moralised markets
• “ Markets are explicitly moral projects saturated
with normativity” (Fourcade and Healy)
• What is the role of social scientists not just in
understanding this societal project but their role
in it.
• Especially in CEE transformation where the shift
from the distributive order of party state with
weak ethical Marxism to robust consumerist
driven market orders raises important questions
of social solidarity and market legitimacy of the
latter.
Sources of legitimacy
• Meritocracy, social mobility,
• Civic integration through rights and
responsibilities- underdeveloped
• New class order- transfer rather than mobility
• Markets and morality are connected through
citizenship- laissez-faire and loyalty, bonuses
and benefits,
• How actors learn to be consumers, to deal with
poverty, accept secularism, within a globalising
context- will decide on the quality of the market
order that emerges.