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As a “fictitious commodity” (Polanyi), that cannot be separated from the human being who is its owner, labor has a special moral significance. However, this moral quality is not a given but must be asserted in struggles over the value of labor. With the example of disabled workers in Switzerland, this chapter examines the moralization of labor as a means to revalue a category of workers who range far down the labor queue. Moralization mediates the tension between the normative societal goal of inclusion for disabled people and the freedom of employers to select the most “productive” workers. Drawing on the theoretical approach of the Economics of Convention the chapter analyzes the valuation frames proposed by economic and welfare state actors in political debates over the establishment of the Swiss disability insurance and the role of employers regarding occupational integration. A core concept used in negotiations of the value of disabled labor in the public arena and within individual businesses is the “social responsibility” of employers. Historically, employers’ associations successfully promoted the liberal principle of voluntary responsibility to prevent state interference in the labor market. In contrast, disability insurance argues predominantly within the market and the industrial convention to “sell” its clientele in the context of employer campaigns and case-related interactions with employers. Only recently, both sides started to reframe the employment of disabled people as a win–win affair, which would reconcile economic self-interest and the common good.

Teaching is seen as a morally significant endeavor, but there is a lack of clarity about the entire domain. While teachers usually do not develop a refined professional knowledge base or vocabulary of the moral work of teaching (Sanger, 2017) during pre- and in-service teacher education, there is a need to explore more in detail what kind of expertise is required and employed in the moral work of teaching, and how the components of that expertise are related to each other. The purpose of our theoretical chapter is not to present the “foreground,” that is the results of “what works” but instead to highlight the “background” of teaching profession. We note that the complexities of teaching can be structured through the relational viewpoints of ethical principles, moral judgments, and virtuous policies. From these three standpoints, which often appear separate and disconnected, we try out a constructive synthesis. Our framework denotes that teaching is a peculiar kind of relationship that brings with it special ethical guidelines, moral judgments, and constant considerations of how to realize human well-being in the real-world dilemmas of teaching.

In this chapter, we contextualise an ethical codex introduced in the Danish Central Administration. As a management tool, the codex is intended to curb a mounting distrust induced by a number of political-administrative scandals. This is attempted via a revitalisation of classical bureaucratic duties. At the same time, the codex’s attempt at restoring trust is challenged by a number of obstacles. Launching our exploration from an ethos of office-perspective, we contextualise the codex in three dimensions: an organisational dimension, a semantic dimension and a training dimension. From this three-pronged analysis, we show how a number of historical and contemporary obstacles work counter to the codex’s stated attempt to revitalise the ethos of the civil servants. Building on these analyses, we discuss the tensions between official and private selves in particular ethical training exercises as well as the implications the codex brings with it, including a possible obscuring of political-administrative responsibility.

Moral struggles in and around markets abound in contemporary societies where markets have become the dominant form of economic coordination. Reviewing research on morality and markets across disciplinary boundaries, this introductory essay suggests that a moral turn can currently be observed in scholarship, and draws a direct connection to recent developments in the sociology of morality. The authors introduce the chapters in the present volume “The Contested Moralities of Markets.” In doing so, the authors distinguish three types of moral struggles in and around markets: struggles around morally contested markets where the exchange of certain goods on markets is contested; struggles within organizations that are related to an organization’s embeddedness in complex institutional environments with competing logics and orders of worth; and moral struggles in markets where moral justifications are mobilized by a variety of field members who act as moral entrepreneurs in their striving for moralizing the economy. Finally, the authors highlight three properties of moral struggles in contemporary markets: They (1) arise over different objects, (2) constitute political struggles, and (3) are related to two broader social processes: market moralization and market expansion. The introduction concludes by discussing some of the theoretical approaches that allow particular insights into struggles over morality in markets. Collectively, the contributions in this volume advance our current understanding of the contested moralities of markets by highlighting the sources, processes, and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets, both through tracing the creation, reproduction, and change of underlying moral orders and through reflecting the status and power differentials, alliances, and political strategies as well as the general cultural, social, and political contexts in which the struggles unfold.

In this commentary I take issue with Torpey's claim that political developments at the dawn of the new millennium caused liberal democracies to tilt away from those visions that have the potential of promoting an inclusive and just society. I argue that the politics of identity and its modes of repair do not necessarily undermine these visions but rather render them often possible and even infuse them with their true meaning. I present my argument against Israel's recent policies to privatize state-owned lands and of the various strategies employed by different social groups to influence these policies in their favor. These policies, I claim, involve all the ingredients that figure in Torpey's lamentation against the politics of identity and its modes of repair. In a way, they buttress Torpey's disdain for the politics of difference, for they show how the category of culture or cultural affiliation figure detrimentally in the articulation of social groups’ demands for reparation based on their past. But nonetheless, and in contrast to his condemnation of identity politics, I present this account with the aim of underscoring its significance and of stressing the importance of reparation as a means to promote equal and full citizenship. My claim is that social and political arrangements in the nation-state are so ordered – either formally or informally – that they promote the interests of the dominant groups, based on their alleged past contribution to the res public, i.e., the common good of the nation. Put differently, the promotion of these interests is grounded in what we may label republican meritocracy. Republican meritocracy amounts to a reward system allocating benefits to dominant groups for the efforts they allegedly exerted in the past in promoting the ‘vital interests’ of the nation. Thus, this system takes on board the notion of compensation but incorporates it within a meritocratic system. It does not grant these groups with a compensation for past injustices inflicted upon them but a compensation for their alleged past contribution to the nation. Hence, when marginalized and oppressed groups embark upon identity politics they do not actually depart from a political system that looks askance at the idea of reparation and compensation, but rather they employ moral vocabulary which is already embedded in that system.

The Gandhian-Vedic approach to development is synonymous with the advancement of spiritual agency. It emancipates society by trying to raise people's interconnectedness with nature, mitigating capitalism's hegemony of consumerism on people's psyche and hence reducing the chances of individuals perpetuating the cycle of exploitation by adhering to capitalist norms. That is, the Gandhian-Vedic approach to discursive accountability minimises the risk of circularity in the dialectics of contradictions, which occurs when consenting behaviour replaces existing contradictions with another set of contradictions. It enables the actor to step off capitalism's treadmill of materialism and exploitation by centralising spiritual development. Its spiritual revolution involves caring for the whole whilst engaging with social structures. Here the Gandhian-Vedic logic is extended to emancipatory accounting by developing accounting as a discursive risk assessment tool that minimises the fragmentation of time and space aspects of performance. Its holistic representation of performance could change perceptions about interconnectedness between an individual's behaviour, nature and society. It is the antithesis of conventional accounting's prioritisation of private interest over responsibility for the whole.

This paper reflects on the divorce between The Archer’s Shula and Alistair Hebden Lloyd. It considers in particular Shula’s main reason for the separation (‘I just don’t love you anymore’) and her inability to explain any further (‘It’s just how I feel’). It does so by bringing Shula in conversation with the British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who was an avid listener to The Archers. Love is for Murdoch a moral virtue, though she is also aware of its trappings. I shall use the recent scholarly debate on the love in Murdoch’s work to help Shula reflect on her claim.

The present article sets out to explore the ethical aspect of emotional competence used as both a personal and a collective resource in the occupational context of caring work. The data discussed in this article consists of interviews of and writings by Finnish social workers and nurses. By combining the concepts ‘emotional capital’ and ‘ethics of care’, this article concludes that the emotional competence of care workers manifests itself as the capability to use one's emotions in a way that enhances the ethical values of caring work and provides the employees with a sense of professional competence.

This chapter examines the Kenyan Fairtrade flower as a site of value making, one that provides a constructive lens into how moral obligation and ethical accountability are shaped by risk perceptions and become visible through the process of transnational commodity exchange. Specifically, it argues that while Fairtrade labeling responds to the risks of corporate capitalism through consumption practices predicated on extending care and compassion to distant communities, it is also embedded within commodity chains that advance liberal ethics as a mode of “governmentality” over African producers. These ethics are associated with new technologies of information gathering, regulation, and surveillance that simultaneously assuage consumers’ anxieties and channel their sympathy-based humanism into new forms of ethical normativity. Fairtrade's relational ethic, for example, is accompanied by a private regulatory assemblage that authorizes certain knowledge forms, thereby circumscribing the social and economic rights available as well as the form of personhood through which they can be claimed. Thus, although Fairtrade is cast as morally unproblematic, it can also serve as a mechanism through which specific interests are naturalized and circulated through a benevolent vernacular of economic and social rights.

This paper analyses how social workers in the German child protection system rhetorically frame their cases, and how their rhetoric defines its categorical labels corresponding to positions of gender and generation: to what degree are mothers considered as perpetrators and children as victims? Seventy case narrations of social workers on the frontline are analysed regarding the rhetorical idioms they applied. The results show that violence is an irrelevant interpretive framework for the social problems at work in child protection. Instead, irresponsible mothers and their limited agencies are staged front and centre. Categories of limited agency serve as rhetorical devices for the social workers to justify diverse decisions ranging from implementing interventions to terminating the professional-client relationship due to the labelling of the mother as mentally ill. As the rhetorical idiom of unreason does not operate with categories of perpetration and victimization, equivalences for the labels of the practical objectives of victimization are analysed. Consequently, the responsibility of the mother is deflected as her limited agency is seen as a product of troubling conditions. In turn, children are either ignored as victims or even treated as a troubling condition for the mothers’ limited agency. This may lead to the blacking out of the adverse consequences of child abuse and neglect as well as of possible resources for the children to avoid or prevent violent situations. In this way, child protection helps the reproduction of the generational order, which is the basis for child abuse and neglect.