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Past research on collectivist-democratic organizations has attributed their distinctiveness to their socio-political goals and democratic decision-making and largely ignored their work processes. This ethnographic study examines how such organizations resist alienating forms of work even in the face of direct competition with for-profit companies. It focuses on Scopix, a French cooperative sheet-metal factory where the first author spent one year as a shop-floor worker. Cooperators there developed various practices to retain an emancipatory dimension to their work, regularly putting forward “craft ethics” as a counterweight to the sheet-metal industry’s drive to rationalize work processes. Drawing on the sociology of worth, the authors analyze how these practices emerged from the arrangements that workers made between the industrial world on the one side and the domestic and inspired worlds on the other. This study contributes to the literature into two main ways. First, the authors refine the sociology-of-worth framework by conceptualizing the emancipatory dimension of work as the result of ad hoc arrangements between different worlds. Second, the authors highlight the need for the literature on collectivist-democratic organizations to increase its focus on work, introducing the concept of work degeneration as a step in that direction.

Sovereignty retains considerable currency today insofar as it fuses ordinary understandings of the state, the nation, and democracy. Against widespread expectations, however, the European Union has increasingly harnessed sovereignty as a source of vitality. We are thus witnessing a mainstreaming of populist politics, as the rhetoric of sovereignty no longer disqualifies new EU institutions and policies. This can be better understood if we consider sovereignty, from a constructivist perspective, as an evolving set of practices. First, sovereignty evolves within political and administrative circles, as European officials act to modify longstanding practices of state sovereignty. Second, sovereignty evolves in an increasingly politicized context, as political leaders dramatize EU crises in order to mobilize coalitions around new practices of popular sovereignty. This dual dynamic of state sovereignty and popular sovereignty is demonstrated in the case of the Eurozone and then extrapolated to the current trajectory of the EU polity against the benchmark of US federalism after the Civil War. An open question is whether sovereignty practices in the European Union will continue to evolve without compromising the Union's cosmopolitan and liberal objectives.

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.

This chapter examines Francis Bacon’s influence on Émile Durkheim and demonstrates that Bacon’s theory of mental “idols” has a significant presence in Durkheim’s work. Both Bacon and Durkheim sought to demarcate new methods of inquiry against contemporary contenders. Both were wary of unfettered philosophical abstraction, as well as the pseudo-scientist’s preoccupation with immediately practical results. Thus, it is fitting that Durkheim would explicitly characterize perceived dangers to sociological knowledge in terms of Bacon’s idols – as objective obstacles which habit substitutes for fact in the absence of a sufficiently powerful epistemological mechanism. In preparation against these idols, Durkheim and Bacon offer rhetorically and logically similar remedies of self-imposed discipline and restraint. A close reading of key texts reveals that Durkheim’s references to Bacon capture surprisingly deep similarities, suggesting that Bacon influenced Durkheim to a greater degree than is commonly recognized.

The author places the departure by the Change to Win Coalition from the AFL–CIO in contextual and theoretical terms. For context, it is argued that associational rights for U.S. wage-earners have historically and generally been subordinate to the rights of capital owners. As such, the rules regulating industrial relations tend to punish broad acts of wage-earner solidarity, channeling labor toward a strategy of achieving a larger share of the rewards of production through private contracts with employers. This has given birth to business unionism, a style of union representation characterized as exclusionary, neutral with regard to political party, business-like in operation, and accommodative to market capitalism. Presently, the internationalization of capitalism is challenging business unionism by exposing its contradictions and vulnerabilities. As political theory would predict, this is pressuring the AFL–CIO and affiliates to socialize labor–capital conflict. This shift, in turn, resulted in several major points of contention within the house of labor, leading to the departure of the Change to Win affiliates.