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This paper documents the case of La Verde, a producer cooperative in Andalusia, Southern Spain, whose members grow and sell organic fruit and vegetables. Fieldwork data reveal a range of assessments and practices with respect to just price. Historical experiences of working as day laborers, with little access to cash or other resources informs the members’ radical political views on money, prices, and markets. These ideas modulate exchanges at the local level, and in their political networks. However, working their own land and selling a prized product allows them to generate good market returns from private shopkeepers in cities. The paper proposes that for a price to be considered just, criteria for commensuration, or equivalence between a price and the perceived value of an object must adhere, but adjudications about this vary according to the relationship between exchangers. Rather than an objective just price, the paper considers assessments and judgments about the relation between prices and justice to be contextually defined, contested, and negotiated.

Relationships between long-distance exchange, especially of luxury goods, and the centralization of political power represent a fundamental dimension of political and economic organization. Precolumbian American societies, outside familiar European contexts that have shaped analytical perspectives, provide a broadened comparative field with the potential for more nuanced analysis.

Analysis focuses on four cases that vary in political centralization, institutional complexity, and geographic scale: Ulúa societies without political centralization; small Maya states; Aztec; and Inka empires. Emphasis on relationships between principals and agents highlights the potential of social practices to perform the functions often associated with state institutions

In the Ulúa region, commerce flourished in the absence of states and their concomitants. The very wealth of Ulúa societies and the unusually broad dispersion of prosperity across social segments impeded the development of states by limiting the ability of local lords to intensify their status and convert it to political power. Intensity of market activity and long-distance exchange does not correlate well with the florescence of states. Less centralized and non-centralized political systems may in fact facilitate mercantile activity (or impede it less) in comparison with states.

These cases frame a useful perspective on the organizational configuration of long-distance trade. Informal social mechanisms and practices can be an alternative to state institutions in structuring complex economic relations. The implications for understanding trajectories of societal change are clear: the development of states and centralized political organization is not a prerequisite for robust long-distance commerce.

The chapter elaborates a critical theoretical narrative about the political economy of European capitalism. It illustrates how precariousness has been exacerbated by the impact of the global financial crisis and the emergence of a new system of European governance. Theoretical accounts in the sociology of work and labor studies have demonstrated the complexity of the outcomes and widely discussed the role of national labor market institutions and employment policies and practices, political ideology, and cultural frameworks impinging upon precarious work as a multidimensional concept. The chapter’s core concern is to illustrate how shifts in power resources, and particularly the weakening and deinstitutionalization of organized labor relative to capital, has acted as a central social condition that has brought about precariousness during the years leading up to and following the 2007–2008 crisis. In so doing, the chapter aims to overcome the existing theoretical accounts of precariousness which have often been limited by one or another variant of “methodological nationalism,” thereby exploring the transnational apparatuses that are emerging across national economies to date, and which impinge upon the structures and experiences that workers exhibit in an age of growing marketization.

Our point of departure is a reservation concerning the validity of cosmopolitan ideas in response to 9/11. Cosmopolitanism in the social and political sciences plays an important role in the reconstruction of conceptual tools, the diagnosis of the current epoch and the creation of new normative standards. Its key motif, however, that of epochal change from a nationally-based to a cosmopolitan world order, is prematurely dismissive of traditional categories and assimilative of a normative vision. The separation of the present from the past is as overstated as is its conflation with the future.

Following Braudel's conceptualization of capitalism and Arrighi's periodization of systemic cycles of accumulation, the authors focus on the patterns of recurrence of financial expansions enabling capitalism to revitalize itself through crisis; in this, crisis is considered in both aspects — crisis‐as‐restructuring and crisis‐as‐rupture. The ways in which finance aided by the blocks of governmental and business agencies in the present stage affects investment and business cycles result in a progressive increase of inequality between rich and poor countries, as well as inequality within the most developed countries. The authors tackle the crisis phenomenon through a genealogical analysis of the formation, consolidation and disintegration of the successive regimes of accumulation on a world scale through which the capital economy expands. They furthermore examine the crisis of capitalist accumulation through the relation of money and the state, which leads them to the field of debates on the changed relationship between the global economy and the national state. However, the crisis is also marked by a milestone which, despite dangers and pitfalls, opens up endless possibilities. They end the paper with a critique of the politics of money and advocate a socially responsible finance management, which will pave the way for a structure of society in which humanity will exist as an end in itself, rather than as a resource for the accumulation of money.

Following Braudel’s conceptualization of capitalism and Arrighi’s periodization of systemic cycles of accumulation, the authors focus on the patterns of recurrence of financial expansions enabling capitalism to revitalize itself through crisis; in this, crisis is considered in both aspects ‐ crisis‐as‐restructuring and crisis‐as‐rupture. The ways in whichfinance aided by the blocks of governmental and business agencies in the present stage affects investment and business cycles result in a progressive increase of inequality between rich and poor countries, as well as inequality within the most developed countries. The authors tackle the crisis phenomenon through a genealogical analysis of the formation, consolidation and disintegration of the successive regimes of accumulation on a world scale through which the capital economy expands. They furthermore examine the crisis of capitalist accumulation through the relation of money and the state, which leads them to the field of debates on the changed relationship between the global economy and the national state. However, the crisis is also marked by a milestone which, despite dangers and pitfalls, opens up endless possibilities. They end the paper with a critique of the politics of money and advocate a socially responsible finance management, which will pave the way for a structure of society in which humanity will exist as an end in itself, rather than as a resource for the accumulation of money.

A Community Studies tradition based on the theory and methods of a functionalist social anthropology has since the 1930's been the dominant one in both characterising the social structure of rural Ireland and in theorising social change in Ireland in general. This social anthropological method, while of possible utility in the study of primitive cultures and peoples, confronts certain difficulties when attempts are made to employ pure ethnographic analysis as a method for studying social change in either urban or rural settings in industrialising societies like Ireland. Despite attempts to do so, the Community Studies tradition has been unable to establish a coherent method for the study of local social systems and their structural relations of dependency on wider social, economic and political forces at play in capitalist social formations. Instead, it has fallen on an isolationist approach to studying local areas. In Irish sociology this abstractionism is inevitably undergirded by some variant of the modernisation thesis in which ‘traditional life and culture’ is progressively ‘threatened’ by the onslaught of urban‐industrial modernity.

This paper aims to report on subalterns' emancipatory accounting (SEA) embedded in transformation of governance and accountability structures (GAS) in Ceylon Tea.

The paper draws on James Scott's political anthropology to examine how subalterns' resistance and emancipatory accounting triggers structural transformations.

An attempt is made to theorise subaltern resistance as a form of emancipatory accounting. Concerning the commentaries that accounting has been to suppress or hegemonise the subalterns and appreciating the analysis of indigenous resistance implicated in emancipatory potential, this paper examines how a distinct subaltern group in Ceylon Tea deployed their own weapons towards the changes in GAS.

The accounting literature neglects how subalterns reconstruct governance and accountability structures: this paper introduces a social accounting perspective on resistance, control and structural transformations. Also, it introduces to accounting researchers James Scott's political anthropology as an alternative framework.

While sharing fundamental similarities with other colonial and post-colonial experiences, Latin America has a unique history of having been the proving ground for early Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects, of having experienced a relatively long duration of – but also historically early end to – these projects, and of negotiating a particular and complex trajectory of internal and external post-colonial relations. What can the study of this distinct colonial and post-colonial experience contribute to a broader program of postcolonial sociology? Conversely, what can a revitalized postcolonial sociology contribute to the study of Latin America? This article develops provisional answers to these questions by reviewing major currents in South and North American scholarship on the Latin American colonial and post-colonial experience. Some of this scholarship self-consciously identifies with broader movements in postcolonial studies; but much of it – both historical and contemporary – does not. By bringing together diverse strands of thought, this article sheds new light on what postcolonialism means in the Latin American context, while using the comparative leverage that this set of often overlooked cases provides to contribute to a new program of postcolonial sociology.