Work,employment and society through the lens of moral economy

Introduction

Twenty-five years of WES articles reveal that work is important. It is what connects people, to each other and to the social fabric of society. It offers an essential source for human flourishing and well-being by providing a platform for people to exercise and actualize their skills and capacities and gain recognition for it. Work may also be a source of disadvantage, discrimination and suffering when employment conditions are unjust or the work demeaning (Gomberg, 2007; Sayer, 2009a). Considering the backdrop of the prevailing financial crisis, which has led to radical economic and workplace restructuring, it is ever more important to understand how contemporary employment relationships support or deny human flourishing with potentially disruptive consequences for people and society (Streeck, 2008; Stuart et al., 2011). What is required is a theoretical lens that shines light on the connection between people, work, employment and society; an analytical framework that gives voice to critical concerns for the workings of an increasingly liberalized and disconnected capitalism, its inherent tendencies to treat labour as a ‘fictitious commodity’ and the impact this has on the well-being of individuals and wider society. On the other hand, there is also a need to represent the status, self-confidence, security, companionship and joy that can be derived from work.

In this article a moral economy framework is proposed that is informed by three key strands of thought: Karl Polanyi (1957), who captures the ubiquitous tension between a stable, moral and human society and the economic practices of self-regulating markets; E.P. Thompson’s (1971, 1993) richly historical, community based, moral economy approach; and Andrew Sayer’s (2005, 2006, 2007, 2011) understanding of lay morality and political norms that underpin and inform market economies. Through a combination of these inspirational ideas the moral economy framework presented here connects different layers of analysis that form an analytical bridge between individual agency, institutionalized structures of community, family, social and work organization and political economy.

In this way opportunities are created to explore the tensions inherent in an idolized market view: between economic values (rationalized views of people and a dominance of exchange and use values logic) and moral and, thus, human values (social dependency within a web of mutual reciprocity and essential recognition for human flourishing). The moral economy framework accomplishes this through its focus on the on-going moral dimensions and reflective capacities of people set within community norms and economic constraints. In particular, the concept of an ethical, reflective and deeply social agent adds to a political economy analysis of organizational and work practices and breathes life into accounts of the lived experiences and deliberations that are inherent in all economic practices. Furthermore, the article underscores the continuing need to question the nature of exploitative practices, the division of labour and the unequal distribution of meaningful and fair work (Gomberg, 2007; Sayer, 2009b).

The moral economy approach set out in this article offers a timely view on work and employment and an analytical scaffold to support one of the most essential sociological inquiries under capitalism: if and how capitalism civilizes or dehumanizes workers (Hirschman, 1982). The forthcoming discussion suggests that moral economy holds endless analytical opportunities through which the contemporary lived experiences of work can be empirically examined. The aim here is to offer an integrated moral economy framework that offers insights into people, work and society and is accessible to a wider audience interested in work and employment in order to advance further debate and development.

WES and the idea of moral economy

Spanning 25 years, articles published in Work, Employment and Society (WES) have tracked and analysed continuous and significant change, highlighting major shifts in the organization of work and its material realities for a range of occupational groups within different political, economic and social systems. The strength of WES articles is the way they most commonly offer opportunities to examine the structure of economic regimes, their impact on the shape and strategy of workplaces and the behaviours of managers and workers (Ackroyd and Bolton, 1999; Hyman, 1987; Smith and Meiksins, 1995; Streeck, 1987; Thompson, 2003). Examples of this include: the financialization and globalization of markets and the disconnection of capitalism (Lapavitsas, 2011; Thompson, 2003); the decline of manufacturing work and rise of services (Gardiner et al., 2009); the mobility of labour (Holgate, 2005) and its indeterminacy (Smith, 2006); the increasing utilization of contingent labour and portfolio careers (Cohen and Mallon, 1999; Worrall et al., 2000); new forms of aesthetic and emotional labour (Bolton and Boyd, 2003; Warhurst and Nickson, 2007); the social nature of customer service (Bolton and Houlihan, 2005); new forms of work organization (Glucksman, 2004; Korczynski et al., 2000); and, of course, the endurance of class, gender and racial inequality (Bolton and Muzio, 2008; Bonney, 2007; Bottero, 2000; Jordan and Redley, 1994).

WES articles demonstrate a strong critical chorus of concern for the plight of humanity within an increasingly autonomous market economy, utilizing a range of theoretical perspectives that rely on a materialist approach (Anderson-Connolly et al., 2002; Pollert and Charlwood, 2009). There have also been recent calls for new frameworks that will capture both the collective and individual consequences of markets in action (Darr, 2011; McBride and Martínez Lucio, 2011). It is, then, a little surprising that the classic concept of moral economy has not been more widely utilized in WES and other journals interested in the sociology of work, as an effective lens through which the contemporary condition of work might be viewed. Arguably, the neglect of moral economy in general and morality in particular might be explained by the ‘divorce of the study of morality from [that of] political economy’ (Sayer, 2000: 86; see also Hirschman, 1982). Though morality and ethics have been pursued by cultural and poststructuralist inspired accounts, that has been at the expense of a respect for people’s capacity to reflect and evaluate things that matter to them and the different types of community in which they work and live (Archer, 2010; Sayer, 2011). Thus there remains the long-standing dilemma of a strong analysis of political economy, but one that has attracted the critique of presenting an economic analysis without agency, or an analysis of prevalent ideologies and people’s habitualized reactions to them that neglects both agentic properties and the political economy (Sayer, 1995; Wolfe, 1989).

A small group of scholars, however, ‘stubbornly refuse to give up on the idea of a moral economy’ (Streeck, 2011: 6) under liberal capitalism and highlight that people who engage in economic practices draw consciously and unconsciously upon historically established customs, practices and their lay morality. This includes understandings of the norms and obligations of people who may resist economic practices that violate their sense of justice, fairness and morality (Bolton et al, 2013; Sanghera and Iliasov, 2008; Sayer, 2006; Streeck, 2008). Ultimately, advocates of moral economy highlight the possibilities for people to defend social commitments and obligations from the erosive tendencies of economic processes (Streeck, 2011). Nevertheless, these voices are few and the use of moral economy as an analytical framework in the study of work is relatively rare.

Despite its recent neglect, moral economy has a long and prestigious pedigree as an analytical framework (Mauss, 1967; Olsen, 2009; Sayer, 2005; Scott, 1976; Thompson, 1991; Tönnies, 2001). This article will explore the foundations of moral economy, how it has been utilized over time and its perceived strengths and weaknesses. The article then builds on this review to suggest a combination of Polanyi’s, E.P. Thompson’s and Sayer’s ideas as an analytical scaffold that offers moral economy as a lens through which the contemporary condition of work may be examined. In so doing, the article highlights the ability to more clearly connect the analysis of radical political economy, the (a)morality of markets under liberal capitalism and the lived reality of the everyday work situation for a range of people. The notion of lay morality breathes life into a political economy framework and fills accounts of market systems, changing organizational shapes, occupational groupings and different labour processes with a consideration of reflective actors who care (or do not care) about each other, about the work they do, the recognition they receive for it and the communities they create. It is suggested that a moral economy framework provides a means to capture both the rich and the impoverished nature of employment and social relationships in and out of organizations and provides a stimulating positive and normative framework for future investigation of work and employment. Looking back and moving forward through the lens of moral economy allows us to see how debates introduced during the past 25 years in WES, during one of the most significant periods of change for work and employment, are just as relevant today, as human flourishing is at risk, as they ever have been.

Review of moral economy

The concept of moral economy has a rich history that goes back to the 18th century. As E.P. Thompson states, one of the earliest references that explicitly mentions the moral economy stems from Bronterre O’Brien who uses the concept as an attack on the, at that time dominant, classical political economy school of thought and its market ideology.

It is, indeed, the moral economy that they always keep out of sight. When they talk about the tendency of large masses of capital, and the division of labour, to increase production and cheapen commodities, they do not tell us of the inferior human being which a single and fixed occupation must necessarily produce. (Bronterre O’Brien, 1837, cited in Thompson, 1991: 337)

This explicit critique of the neoclassical and modern economic analysis remains one of the central features of the moral economy concept throughout its development. A key concern of the early moral economy school of thought is the relationship between society and the economy. On the one hand is the pre-modern ‘Gemeinschaft’, in which the economy is embedded in society and is in its character substantive as it serves to meet human needs. The premarket societies in which ‘labor and land […] formed part of the organic structure of society’ (Polanyi, 1957, 1968) had a moral architecture which framed economic practices with shared values of subsistence rights, redistribution, reciprocity and mutuality (MacIntyre, 2007; Mauss, 1967; Polanyi, 1968; Scott, 1976; Thompson, 1971; Tönnies, 2001; Weber, 1988). On the other hand orthodox social theory assumes that the ‘Gesellschaft’, following the industrial revolution, was built on primitive accumulation which not only disembedded economic transactions from the social sphere and commodified labour, land and money (Block, 1990; Marx, 1976; Tönnies, 2001), so that social relations became soaked ‘in the icy water of egotistical calculation’, but also ‘resolved personal worth into exchange value’ (Marx and Engels, 2009: 7). The orthodox separation of sociological and economic analysis became a tour de force in economic, sociological and organizational analysis. Parson’s influential work, for example, emphasizes the need for functional differentiation (Parsons, 1991; Swedberg, 1997). Here, market and society are constructed as separate spheres that operate by satisfying requests of the external environment through identifying that environment’s distinctive logics and codes (Beckert, 2009a; Krippner et al., 2004; Parsons, 1991). Parson’s functionalism led to the dominance of rational choice, free-market and general equilibrium theories to explain the functioning of markets and economic behavior (Sen, 2004), while systems theory became the dominant paradigm for the study of organizations. Arguably, this division continues to inform contemporary social science approaches to work and employment (Krippner, 2001).

Karl Polanyi is a pivotal figure in the development of a coherent moral economy approach that has long served to dispute a separatist position. He rejects the influential idea that a disembedded and self-regulated market can exist without destroying the human character of labour and the natural resources of the environment. Polanyi highlights that land, labour and money are ‘fictitious commodities’ that cannot be exchanged according to the law of the market. He particularly laments the commodified status of labour because of its deeply human and vulnerable character. Rather, he emphasizes that a sustainable market economy has to be always underpinned by a social, political and moral sphere which protects society. It is this ‘embeddedness’ of the economy that enables past and present economies to coordinate market activities characterized by reciprocal, redistributive and market logics. However, the quality and intensity of the embeddedness of the market in society is subject to the constant struggle of a ‘double movement’ between a liberal school of thought, which advocates an expansion of markets towards a disembedded economy, while government, unions and workers insist on the prevalence of moral and social obligations and form a counter movement that aims to restrain market forces (Polanyi, 1957, 1968).

Polanyi’s analysis of market economies remains highly influential as it defies an economic orthodoxy that excludes moral dimensions from a rational market analysis. Polanyi sets the groundwork of a moral economy approach that highlights the web of social, moral and economic dimensions that oils the wheels of modern market societies (Akturk, 2006; Beckert, 2009b; Sayer, 2006; Streeck, 2008). Indeed, the concept of embeddedness has been popularized by Granovetter, in an attempt to overcome the neglect of cultural, ethical and social factors in economic theory. Granovetter claims that actors and economic practices are ‘embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations’ (1985: 487). Hence, new economic sociology understands behaviour in markets as influenced at the microscopic level of thick and thin social relations and at the macro level by institutional frameworks and historically grown norms and values in society (Beckert, 2009a; Block, 1990; Krippner, 2001; Swedberg, 1997; Zelizer, 2007).

There is some debate concerning varied readings of Polanyi’s work. It is argued that his proposal concerning a ‘double movement’ is too static and under-emphasizes that an embedded economy can be understood as a dynamic, historically contingent and social variable which can be thick or thin, depending on institutional, social and market related factors (Barber, 1995; Block and Polanyi, 2003; Granovetter, 1985, Krippner, 2001). It is also suggested that Polanyi, in his grave warnings of the destructive effects of an unbridled market, underestimates the ability of people to initiate a counter-movement. His emphasis lies with the central role of the state as a constraining force (Block and Polanyi, 2003; Lie, 1991). As Burawoy (2003) observes, Polanyi operates with a class concept that assumes a working class community is formed only in the light of external threats and has no independent consciousness. Thus, the on-going ethical evaluations of people during different periods of change and ‘the preexisting community that shaped the drama’ (Burawoy, 2003: 222) are neglected. Likewise, new economic sociology that utilizes the concept of embeddedness suffers from similar failings. For example, Granovetter’s thesis is unable to overcome Parson’s functionalism as it continues to draw a boundary between the market, social and moral relations in society (Krippner et al., 2004; Sayer, 2006; Zelizer, 2007). It is this dichotomist view between economic practices and the morality of people and the embedded versus disembedded notion that hinder a deeper understanding of social relations and everyday morality as constituting markets, economic actions, decisions and how working lives are shaped. Furthermore, new economic sociology has neglected the relationship between production and exchange within markets, by focusing mainly on the conditions and consequences of exchange.

Despite different readings and uses of his work, Polanyi’s contribution to understanding moral economy is remarkable in the way he counters a free market advocacy that markets can reach equilibrium unaided. His analysis displays how markets are embedded in society in different ways, that they can never be entirely free as they rely on (often invisible) exchange mechanisms that belong not to the market but the social sphere. Polanyi’s insights reveal the way markets attempt to treat land, labour and money as fictitious commodities and that this impetus is dangerous for society if it is left unfettered, forcing the state to take on a role of policing market forces. Such intervention not only saves society from destruction by the market but also saves the market itself. However, with this focus Polanyi neglects people’s capacity to resist, individually and collectively, market domination without state intervention. Despite Polanyi’s significant contribution to an understanding of the relationship between markets and society, his thesis has some limitations in building an holistic moral economy analytical frame.

Here E.P. Thompson’s work is introduced as a means of overcoming the lack of exploration of community and class consciousness in Polanyi’s analysis. E.P. Thompson’s seminal historical approach (1971, 1993) proposes a moral economy framework that stresses the agentic capacity of people, who are the bearers of historical customs and moral evaluations of their community, to oppose unfair and destructive economic practices. E.P. Thompson’s historical anthropology of the English crowd in the 18th century ‘intended to rescue history from below’ (Woods, 1982: 45) by portraying the moral and political struggles between the crowd and the ruling class set against the background of the growing dominance of the free market and its property law and profit making practices (Thompson, 1993). His moral economy is grounded in strong community customs that are tied together by a wider consensus of entitlements and fair practices across communities, so that even early capitalists recognized that ‘social peace was more important than absolute property rights or, rather, profit rights’ (Thompson, 1993: 293). E.P. Thompson enables an understanding of the food riots in 18th-century England not as ‘rebellions of the belly’ (1971: 77) but as the conscious decision of the crowd to defend traditional customs and entitlements to their livelihood. Hence, the violation of the moral sphere by early capitalists’ raising of bread prices and thus profiting from people in need in times of scarcity led to a counter-movement of the plebeian community that aimed to protect the social stability and survival of their group (Thompson, 1993).

The core of E.P. Thompson’s moral economy is his understanding of customs as historically contingent traditions of communities of people that connect them to each other and foster social and ethical bonds. Customs, however, are not identical with paternalistic or religious norms, they are actors’ own and ‘a defence against the intrusions of gentry and clergy; it consolidates those customs which serve their own interests’ (Thompson, 1993: 12), needs and responsibilities. Customs that inform the moral economy need to be set in the context of power asymmetries, exploitation and class conflict and ‘the shared experience with fellow workers and neighbours of exploitation, hardship and repression, which exposes the text of the paternalist theater to ironic criticism and (less frequently) to revolt’ (Thompson, 1993: 12).

E.P. Thompson’s moral economy implicitly follows Gramsci’s ‘two theoretical consciousnesses’ philosophy which understands consciousness as emerging on the one hand from shared experiences in the material world, particularly through the labour process that unites agents with their fellow workers and on the other from norms and values of customs which the actor inherited from the past (Gramsci, 1971). This is an insight that is mirrored and extended in contemporary analyses of the labour process that aim to develop an understanding of the organization of work and employee responses to it, by placing it in the context of institutionalized structures of domination and control (Braverman, 1974). By analysing the relationship between the macro level of economy and political system with the micro level of the organization and its operations, the analysis of structure is carried down to the organizational actor via the labour process and the politics of production (Burawoy, 1982; Edwards, 1979; Thompson, 1989).

What Karl Polanyi’s, E.P. Thompson’s and later seminal contributions of Scott and others to the moral economy approach suggest is that the market is a social and political construction that is steadily shaped and re-shaped by social, political and moral struggles. Further, this struggle does not imply that economic inequality and power asymmetries in the marketplace always provoke resistance. The strength of the moral economy framework is that it highlights the economic logic of a system that moves beyond individuals, their community and the state apparatus (Thompson, 2003). Certainly this logic is a central concern for Polanyi in his graphic predictions of a world rendered lifeless by it. Nevertheless, the central insight Polanyi and E.P. Thompson offer is that, more often than not, the market is (however gently) mediated by institutions, individuals and communities and this is what enables both to survive. Markets require legitimacy to operate, people accept the material reality of living and working in a market driven society and do what they have to do to get by. Open struggle occurs but it is not the norm. A moral economy frame reveals the struggle below the surface of the homogeneity of the capitalistic system between different parties that evaluate, re-negotiate, revise and re-establish the conditions they live under.

Nevertheless, the moral economy approach is also subject to criticism for over-idealizing premarket society and its communities as moral spaces. It downplays the prevalent patriarchal structure of a pre-industrial society that imposed norms and values via ideological institutions, such as churches and guilds, which constituted some human beings as inferior, based on gender, race or heritage (Bennett, 1987; Booth, 1994; Hanawalt, 1986). On the other hand, while the commodification of labour and land is rightfully attacked by Polanyi and others, the opportunities that a market system holds for certain groups of actors to flourish and take more control over their lives is overlooked (Sayer, 2000). Further, a moral economy concept that is centrally grounded in community dependent customs, values and norms neglects the diversity and complexity of social and moral life, debilitating individual character. Shared values, norms and inherited customs may inform people’s sentiments, but the accumulated experiences of social life and people’s reflective capacities enable them to embrace certain community dependent morals while rejecting others. As Sayer observes: ‘wider social values of others mediate our own experiences, but they don’t fully determine them’ (Sayer, 2011: 27).

Hence, what is underdeveloped in E.P. Thompson’s and Polanyi’s moral economy is the plurality of people who are pursuing different and often contradictory goals in life, dovetailing commitments and concern about things that matter to them, while seeking esteem and recognition for their activities from a variety of institutions and actors (Brennan and Petit, 2000; Honneth, 2010; Sayer, 2011). The moral dimensions and ongoing evaluations by people of everyday life are neglected by Polanyi’s and E.P. Thompson’s focus on economic and political class conflicts, a weakness that is repeated in Marxist accounts of the labour process. To overcome this, Sayer’s concept of lay morality introduces people as ethical and evaluative beings (Sayer, 2011: 142). This article argues that a moral economy framework that includes recognition of lay morality not only sheds light on conflicts between political classes, in and out of the workplace, but also highlights the day-to-day dilemmas people face.

Moving on through lay morality

Andrew Sayer’s seminal contribution to moral economy and lay morality (2005, 2007, 2011) offers a thick description of people and a multi-dimensional, bottom-up morality approach that bridges the gap between a workplace focus on occupational community, the labour process and the rich moral economy frame of Polanyi and E.P. Thompson. Sayer adds to Polanyi’s analysis by highlighting that economic practices are intertwined in the non-economic realm of webs of norms and values of humanity, affecting and being affected by human evaluations and sentiments (Sayer, 2000), as well as stressing external values that are about responsibilities, distribution and rights (Polanyi, 1957; Sayer, 2005). People make judgements about what is fair and just in the workplace and, rightly or wrongly, tend to ‘look over the fence’ at others to place themselves on the subjective and objective scales of distributive justice (Gromberg, 2007). This can lead to collective demands for equal pay and improved working conditions or may result in individuals prioritizing their own needs and that of their community outside of the workplace (i.e. family) above that of colleagues in work.

At the heart of Sayer’s concept of lay morality is an understanding of people as needy and vulnerable beings whose capacity to flourish and also to suffer are universal and dependent on how and if their needs are met (Archer, 2010; Nussbaum, 2011; Sayer, 2011; Sen, 1992). The well-being of people not only relies upon material resources, but also on social dimensions of life (Honneth, 2010; Nussbaum, 2011). Central to Sayer’s approach is the importance of actors’ ‘fellow-feeling’ and ‘inter-dependence’. In this light lay morality is central to an understanding of the social and moral dimension of life as it reflects people’s on-going moral evaluations about ‘relations to others, about how people should treat one another in ways conducive to well-being’ (Sayer, 2005: 951), but also about normative issues that economic practices pose upon social commitments and responsibilities. As highlighted by Polanyi and E.P. Thompson, people meet, mediate and sometimes resist the material demands made by a market economy. The notion of lay morality takes an analytical leap further in the way it embodies the practical and instrumental responses of people to given situations, not only as a community as portrayed in E.P. Thompson’s account, but also as individuals so that care and concern, misery and merriment, bitching and bullying are revealed as everyday interactional realities within work communities (Korczynski, 2003; Sotirin and Gottfried, 1999; Taylor and Bain, 2003).

On the one hand this approach emphasizes that people are reflective beings who can react in moral or unmoral ways in given contexts and thus have responsibility for their responses (Benhabib, 1992; Sayer, 2011). On the other hand their agency is constrained by the power imbalance and inequality ever present in the contemporary political economy. Indeed, gender, race and social class influence views of the world that are not chosen but inhabited through shared values, norms and ‘feeling rules’ that are linked to socio-economic positions (Sayer, 2011). Hence, structural constraints limit, deny or guarantee access to goods that are valued and thus harm or foster flourishing, but do not free the person of reflexivity and responsibility for their actions (Sayer, 2010). Here Polanyi’s concerns for the plight of humanity and E.P. Thompson’s concerns for the maintenance of community norms and values are emphasized in the way lay morality brings to life people who both suffer and flourish as part of a market economy. Thus the economy is and always has been, though in different shapes and forms, embedded in webs of norms and values of humanity, affecting and being affected by individual and very human evaluations and sentiments (Booth, 1994; Sayer, 2000, 2005).

Work, Employment and Society through the lens of moral economy

Moral economy captures the way political, economic and social regimes play out in different contexts. It depicts not only the formative context, but the human capacity for both compassion and cruelty that go to the heart of relational and social connection. It offers a clear view of the workings of a market system and their impact on individuals, communities and societies so that it reveals how people may thrive or wither from a detailed ethnographic account, but there remains the theoretical capacity to create comparative case studies and place analyses on a broader stage. The introduction of lay morality brings individual agency into sharp focus so that how people reflect and consider their position is highlighted. This is not just as pawns to be traded in a market system, but as reflective beings that rely on human connection. It also acts as a reminder that without the creative capacities of and the moral commitments made by people, the market could not survive. Neither markets nor people act autonomously. Karl Polanyi warns of the consequences for social cohesion of treating people as fictitious commodities, where the human value of work and its impact on material, psychological and social well-being is neglected. Nevertheless, understanding morality as a function of social order restricts thinking about moral obligations in markets and treats morals as an abstract value system that is inherent in actions over which people cannot actively reason, while the variety of human capacities to reason about norms, inequalities and obligations is neglected.

The firmly situated social actor within a moral economy framework is the reason it and other materialist analyses of work make comfortable analytical bedfellows. For example, labour process analysis (LPA) adds nuance and detail to the notion of people as exploitable resources through its understanding of the variability of labour power and management’s efforts to control, capture and contain such capriciousness (Bolton, 2010; Thompson and Smith, 2009; Thompson and Van den Broek, 2010). LPA is all too aware of the social relations of production and a moral economy framework enhances an understanding of the employment relationship as not only a thin, rational, economically based and often degrading relationship, but as a thick relationship that embodies on-going inter-and intra-organizational social and moral relationships between people, which significantly shape the labour process.

A moral economy approach offers an analytical framework that brings together individuals, institutions and their practices under liberal capitalism and explores the dynamic shifts and patterns of these connections and interactions. To accomplish this, economic practices are understood as necessarily complex, enmeshed and shaped by moral sentiments and norms, while the material arrangements of markets and economic practices act to undermine and re-shape moral norms (Sayer, 2000). However, that does not mean that people’s engagement with economic and competitive principles of status and income have to be in conflict with their ultimate concerns, as they can also be a means to fulfil economic and social responsibility to others (Keat, 2000; Sayer, 2005).

It is the on-going relationship between these dimensions that oils the mechanisms of market, community and social exchange and creates spaces for human flourishing and suffering. By connecting the concepts of community values in and out of the workplace, moral economy further emphasizes the double indeterminacy of labour – people’s capacity to consider labour effort and mobility (Smith, 2006). Thus, moral economy can add to existing approaches and be used as a vehicle to carry insights derived from empirically driven workplace studies of the labour process into a deeper understanding of the actions of reflective agents. How they are treated at work impacts on individual lives, occupational communities, wider institutions (such as the labour market and family) and society.

Many articles published in WES over its 25-year history display how various organizational practices fail to capture the essence of what it is to be human, as people merely comply or evade attempts to objectify them, saving their energies for non-work pursuits, even if they are pursued on company time (Mulholland, 2004). Applying a moral economy framework to a small selection of some of the most well known articles published in WES displays the multi-layered nature of different work experiences. For example, insights into the emotional labour process highlight the commodification of emotion and also the spaces for gift-giving outside of the labour process (Bolton, 2009; Bolton and Boyd, 2003; Jenkins et al., 2010). Bolton and Boyd (2003) offered a critique of an over-deterministic analysis of the emotional labour process and portrayed cabin crew as deeply moral and insightful beings whose social commitments to each other and to passengers were guided by moral dispositions and evaluations in the light of the concern for their own and others’ well-being. Cabin crew built their own work community that, by offering a space for emotional release, mutual recognition and respect, helped them to cope with the physically and emotionally demanding nature of their work. They also drew on their lay morality to go beyond the formal requirements of their job role and offer care and constraint to passengers who demanded both positive and negative attention. The cabin crew refused to be objectified by the exploitation of their embodied capacities, instead affirming their status as professionals who held the safety and well-being of passengers in their hands. A moral economy approach strengthens the existing conceptual frame by offering analytical connective tissue that more fully binds together the different strands of the cabin crews’ experience of work. Examples of this include: the exploitation of their emotional labour power by an industry that faced constant competitive market pressures; the community they created at work that resisted and mediated the excesses of the demands made upon them and gave cabin crew the confidence to assert themselves and offered a source for recognition among staff and customers; and the values and norms of interactional conduct that were carried from social communities outside the workplace and were enacted by cabin crew in their communications with passengers. An example of the latter was when staff created an ethical surplus when dealing with an elderly passenger who was ill and prevented an ethical deficit when passengers demanded a level of intimacy that defied contemporary social norms.

Similarly, a moral economy lens can further illuminate research on insecure and precarious employment. Existing studies highlight its negative impact on the life outlook of individuals and their families and on their commitment to organizations (Beaud, 1999; Cohen and Mallon, 1999; Gold and Fraser, 2002). Moral economy more strongly connects the conflicting institutional logics of family and community with those of the flexible workplace and the contradictions and moral dilemmas people face in balancing commitments to both. Research on call centres, for example, suggests that how work is structured can mean the difference between human engagement or a bureaucratization of the spirit (Bolton and Houlihan, 2005; Houlihan, 2002; Knights and McCabe, 1998; Taylor et al., 2002). Phil Taylor and colleagues’ (2002) study of ‘work organization, control and the experience of work in call centres’ reveals that despite different forms of call centre operation, a Taylorized labour process that deprives people of any form of involvement, recognition or empowerment was the norm. Not only were targets set for the number of calls completed and successful outcomes (i.e. sales), but also a finely grained mechanism for assessing call centre operators’ interactions with customers was implemented. In line with a moral economy’s understanding of the logic of the market, it was the quantitative measurements of targets that took precedence and extended the demands of the market into employment relationships, causing instrumental and dehumanized relations in which the cash nexus prevailed. This also served to disable any opportunity for relationship building with customers or with each other. The call centre was portrayed as a barren place, bereft of human connection. Yet moral economy enables it to be understood how human connection persists even in ‘vicious’ work environments as people borrow from the norms and values of communities outside of the workplace or from their past working experience to render current practices as fair or unfair while searching for ways to improve the situation. A moral economy frame also sheds light on thin social relationships that are built on distrust, detachment from work and self-survival created by a market mentality. That does not mean that social relationships within such a context are amoral. Implicit in Taylor et al.’s study and other work on customer service (Bolton and Houlihan, 2005), call centre operators’ expressions of frustration and dissatisfaction with the pace of work and expectations placed upon them represent ongoing moral evaluations of how they and others are treated and thus are mechanisms of coping. The moral economy frame presented here, with its emphasis on lay morality as an essential layer of analysis, reveals more clearly the call centre workers’ reflections on disrupted human connection and their sense of injustice, for themselves and consumers of their services, about a system that rendered them vulnerable to failure through the setting of impossible targets. What an holistic analysis of the connection between the different layers of individual contemplation, community values and the lean operation of the call centre displays is that, without call centre operators’ considerations of what good customer service actually means, such a system could not survive. Further, a moral economy lens enables it to be understood how certain workplaces and employment practices fail to connect to people’s aspirations, values and norms in and outside the workplace and thus have no connection to ‘who they are or who they wish to become’ (Breen, 2007: 395). Ample studies reveal that poor working conditions, unequal divisions of labour and lack of dignity and respect for persons in the workplace result in a sense of alienation that creates mistrust and opportunistic behaviour, impacting not only on management’s capacity to engage in a fruitful effort-bargain but also deeply affecting community in and out of the workplace (Foff-Paules, 1991; Korczynski and Ott, 2005; Oakes, 1990).

Furthermore, accounts of how gender, race and class play out in different workplace regimes reminds us of the deeply embedded and structural nature of status inequalities that limit access to a full range of resources, including exclusion from social networks and family ties (Bottero, 2000; Hills, 2001; Russell, 1999). Yet workplace studies also reveal how such structured inequalities are played out by the people involved – meeting, mediating and resisting the gendered role expectations placed upon them. For example, Filby’s article on sexuality and working class culture in betting shop service encounters was one of the earliest to pinpoint so clearly the exploitation of the material and relational realities of women’s lives through a sexualized labour process and poorly paid part-time working (Filby, 1992: 25). The way the women attempted to exercise power through overt expressions of their sexuality might be described as collusion in their own objectification as a fictitious commodity. Nevertheless, they display how a gendered working class consciousness, created through a lifetime of immersion in particular roles, institutions and communities, is carried into the workplace and affects every aspect of it, including the occupational community, the terms of the employment relationship and social interaction with ‘punters’ and managers. A moral economy frame highlights lay morality in action in the way the women did not merely exercise power over their labour process but also sought status and esteem for self and others. Even when ‘ridiculing’, ‘scolding’ and ‘mimicking’ customers and management (Filby, 1992: 28) they recognized vulnerabilities and offered care and concern amidst the sarcasm and put-downs. As Sayer observes, the labour process may offer enablers as well as constraints. The sexualized labour process offered the women opportunities to create new hierarchies of interactional power and status inequalities in the way they derided the punters. A new community order, very different to that which they experienced in the domestic realm, was created. Filby’s now classic article, appearing in WES in 1992, is but one useful example of how moral economy may shed new insights into an already insightful empirically based analysis, in the way it brings together different avenues of analysis and portrays people operating within layers of reality. These layers might include: a logic of capital that works beyond people; gendered norms and expectations that shape lives in a multitude of ways; organizational systems that create angst and insecurity, camaraderie and animosity; and communities that emerge thanks to people’s capacities to reflect on different situations and support or undermine others.

Conclusion

The moral economy frame introduced here focuses on three strands of thought: Polanyi’s emphasis on the market’s reliance on social dimensions of life and his concern for the vulnerability of people who need protection from the logic of capital; E.P. Thompson’s recognition of a collective consciousness, which shapes people’s normative understanding and mediates and influences economic practices and political struggles between different groups in society; and Andrew Sayer’s lay morality and normativity approach which, building on E.P. Thompson and Polanyi’s assumption of economic practices as always embedded in the social sphere, stresses the moral agency and fellow-feeling of people that is essential for understanding the deeply social and human aspects of work. Bringing these three analytical strands together creates an holistic framework that is able to focus on political economy as a structural context in which economic forces foster unequal power and control relations between institutions and individuals and people as reflective, social beings. Such a focus allows an analysis of how and why the material reality of economic practices are mediated and re-shaped by different groups of actors and the ways in which the labour process and workplace communities are suffused with norms, values and sentiments drawn from customs and the mentalité of communities in and out of the workplace.

In offering an holistic analytical lens, the moral economists offer a powerful way of thinking about work, employment and society. Polanyi’s predictions of disruption and disconnection that occur when people are treated as tradeable commodities and E.P. Thompson’s insights into rebellions against the violations of popular customs are now being played out on the contemporary stage as people demonstrate and riot in response to the neoliberal agenda that runs through state policies across the globe. Andrew Sayer’s notion of lay morality captures the actions of thinking, feeling people who wriggle and squirm within a market system that continually attempts to objectify them. Moral economy offers a multi-layered framework within which state and organization policies can be examined, revealing their institutional and normative dimensions and the individual lives, relationships and communities that are created, supported or destroyed. It is also a reminder that WES has always understood that the study of work is not only about the social relations of employment; caring activity in the domestic sphere and volunteering activity is also work of social and economic significance (Bonney and Reinach, 1993; Brown, 1987). The very term moral economy allows us to boldly humanize an analysis of the economic (including an analysis of contemporary work) and revitalize a social justice agenda where human dignity and flourishing are ends in themselves.