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In this article, we make the point that managerial domination as described by pragmatic sociology is an appropriate notion to make sense of complex forms of domination in contemporary organizations. Based on Lemieux’s work on ‘grammars’, we complement approaches of complex domination put forward by pragmatic sociologists such as Boltanski and Thévenot. We illustrate these ideas by means of an ethnographic study of the financial intermediation industry. Our analysis sketches out an alternative conceptualization of power in such environments, and by so doing, helps us delineate the features that characterize complex financial domination. We conclude by arguing that this type of domination is the result of specific contradictions inherent to the grammars of financial intermediation.

In a village of Eastern Yucatan, Mexico, cargo or kuuch sponsors compare their ritual tasks to “buying life” from crosses, Catholic saints, and Mayan deities or “owners.” The local notion of compromiso, engagement, or commitment, helps these festival participants express the condition of possibility to successfully perform such exchanges. Decisive for these life renewals, promises, and compromisos depend upon empathy to authorize ritualists and subsume social and natural phenomena under exchange paradigms. By defining, critiquing and using the concept of “disposition” as an inherently self-other stance through which economy transforms into religiosity and vice versa, this chapter analyzes this particular regime of engagement and the temporalities it implies. Through a commitment to the past and the practice of promissory exchange, sponsors develop a new perceptual scheme in which the ritual cultivation of discipline, awareness, expectation, and responsibility are expressed.

Purpose – This chapter introduces the book collection and sets the theoretical framework for the subsequent chapters.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach of the book is to re-interpret major challenges to global agriculture – particularly climate change and the food crisis of 2008 – as demonstrating shocks to the resilience of global food systems.

Findings – Using resilience to shocks as a key quality of food systems enables recent crises to be understood as central to the ongoing dynamics of food systems rather than simply atypical events. Alongside climate change and food security, other potential shocks are identified: biosecurity, energy, financial and volcanic.

Originality/value – This framework establishes new criteria for examining the potential merit of multifunctional and neo-liberal policy regimes with world food systems.

How is moral legitimacy established in pluralist contexts where multiple moral frameworks co-exist and compete? Situations of moral multiplexity complicate not only whether an organization or practice is legitimate but also which criteria should be used to establish moral legitimacy. We argue that moral legitimacy can be thought of as the property of a dynamic dialogical process in which relations between moral schemes are constantly (re-)negotiated through dynamic exchange with audiences. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ framework, we propose a process model of how three types of truces may be negotiated: transcendence, compromise, antagonism. While each can create moral legitimacy in pluralistic contexts, legitimacy is not a binary variable but varying in degrees of scope and certainty.

Joining recent calls to focus our attention on how institutional logics work on the ground, I offer a critique of current studies of institutional logics that often offer a macro and reified depictions thereof. I suggest that to fully appreciate how institutions matter, we need to complement these studies with a research program that is based on a constructivist ontology, ethnographic methods of inquiry, and use of theories of action. I exemplify this emerging research agenda, and discuss its broader analytical and empirical implications.

Particularly in governance and policy processes, critique is embedded in highly institutionalized formats. In this chapter, the authors apply Boltanski’s concept of critical tests to examine accepted forms of expression in the context of an institutionalized policy setting, the annual Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The authors find that different policy actors’ uses of critique reflect embedded field positions and interests. While marginal actors drew upon existential tests to construct radical critique, the highly ritualized performance of critique called into question its efficacy in promoting change within the overall structure of a highly institutionalized event. The authors discuss inroads to studying the relations between critique, power, and microfoundations of institutions.

Socially responsible investment (SRI) engagement currently performs a variety of supportive regulatory functions such as reframing norms, establishing dialogue and providing resources to improve performance, however corporate responses are voluntary. This chapter will examine the potential gains in effectiveness for SRI engagement in a responsive regulatory regime.

Global warming is a pressing environmental, social and governance (ESG) issue. By using the example of climate change the effectiveness of SRI engagement actors and the regulatory context can be considered. This chapter builds the conceptual framework for responsive regulation of climate change.

SRI engagement may face resistance from corporations due to its voluntary nature and conflict with other goals. Legitimacy and accountability limit the effectiveness of SRI engagement functioning as a voluntary regulatory mechanism. This chapter argues that the effectiveness of SRI engagement on climate change could be enhanced if it served as part of a responsive regulation regime.

Engagement is used by SRIs for ESG issues. A comprehensive regulatory regime could enhance corporate adaptation to climate change through increasing compliance with SRI engagement. The implication for SRI practitioners is that lobbying for a supportive regulatory regime has a large potential benefit.

Responsive regulatory policy involves both support and sanctions to improve compliance, enhancing policy efficiency and effectiveness. There are potentially large net social benefits from utilising SRI engagement in a regulatory regime.

In seeking to re-articulate voluntary and legal approaches this research addresses a gap in the literature on climate change regulation.

The Rajapaksa regime over the 2005–2022 period promoted a national-popular project based on a militarised Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism promoting a market-driven rentier economy. It illustrated a form of patrimonial capitalism undermining public accountability and the efficacy of the state bureaucracy. This popular-national project was dependent on strengthening ties with China while distancing relations with India and the Global North (USA and the EU). The ways in which the external relations were coordinated reinforced discrimination against Tamil and Muslim communities, while disregarding their demands for justice and reparations. The increasing integration of the economy with financial markets, driven by the Central Bank, amplified the commercialisation of the state, restraining public revenues and state oversight. Meanwhile, the militarisation of the state involved the commercialisation of the military, opaque military budgets and violent repression of protests. The Rajapaksa regime, which enabled a minority-privileged (leisure) class to culturally flourish in regulated safe spaces, also instigated multiple protests from below demanding democracy as well as justice.

This chapter explores “politic talks” (also known as political information) on the websites of academic libraries in land-grant state universities of the South in the context of a global retreat of democracy that emerged during former President Trump’s regime as the 45th President of the United States. The exploratory qualitative evaluation applies website content analysis of seven information offerings in three categories that include: (1) information sources (collections, resources), information policy and planning (assigned role, strategic representation), and connections (internal, external, news and events). Promising practices and illustrative examples of “politic talks” representation on academic library websites show how they are serving as significant providers of political information during current politically turbulent times. The discussion of these findings in relation to each state’s voting likelihood based on trends since 2000 has significant political implications in enhancing the role of academic libraries moving forward.