| Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector [book review] |
2020 |
291 |
In a world lousy with crises from the spectacular to the mundane, we often glimpse an immense infrastructure of humanitarian nongovernmental organizations seeking to relieve human suffering. But as Shai Dromi reveals in Above the Fray – an intricate ... |
| Commodity Fetishism and Consumer Senses: Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Consumer Activism in the United States and England |
2017 |
1280 |
At the turn of the twentieth century, the National Consumers’ League, the Co-operative Wholesale Society, and the Women's Co-operative Guild encouraged people to become ethical consumers. I argue that we can explain their common strategies by invokin... |
| Commodity Fetishism as Semblance |
2020 |
1555 |
With the aid of Hannah Arendt’s distinction between authentic and inauthentic semblances, this article reconstructs Karl Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism as a phenomenological concept. It reveals two distinct interpretive moments in the fetish: t... |
| Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction [book review] |
2016 |
192 |
The crisis of 2007 and 2008 brought a once-shadowy realm of finance and its component instruments—securities, derivatives, brokerage firms, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, credit rating agencies, high-frequency trading, and mor... |
| Protest Politics in the Marketplace: Consumer Activism in the Corporate Age [book review] |
2018 |
165 |
Nothing conjures the anxieties of affluence like the politics of consumption. Does consumer politics augur the collapse of democratic engagement and public life? Or does it promise to renew democratic participation, rights, and privileges? The schola... |
| Sociology Towards Death: Heidegger, Time, and Social Theory |
2018 |
1596 |
In this article, we draw on the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger to propose an approach to sociology that takes human experiences of finitude and possibility as crucial topics of investigation. A concern with death is not absent in socio... |
| “That British Sound”: Nation as a Branding Device |
2016 |
172 |
This article proposes the concept of “nationalness” to account for the persistent circulation of national labels as a tool of distinction. We argue that the concept expands on the traditional conception of nation as country of origin to include cultu... |
| Three Layers of History in Recurrent Social Movements: The Case of Food Reform |
2016 |
1130 |
Using the understudied genre of food reform movements for illustration, we advocate greater attention to recurrent social movements. Analysis of these movements calls for combining three levels of historical analysis. One links the incidence and char... |
| Toward a Theory of Alienation: Futurelessness in Financial Capitalism |
2021 |
1558 |
There is an extensive body of literature detailing the forces behind and experiences of alienation in a modern capitalist world. However, social scientific interest in alienation had become parochial and balkanized by the 1970s. To reconstruct a unif... |
| Unseen Suffering: Slow Violence and the Phenomenological Structure of Social Problems |
2019 |
1474 |
Social scientists have severed social problems from the study of framing work in social movements. This article proposes to rejoin problems and framing work via attention to the phenomenological structure of social problems. By describing basic 1) te... |