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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted labor markets around the world. Workers and corporations scrambled to adjust their workstyles to a new normal, by avoiding the commute and working remotely from their homes or elsewhere. Japan is a country that stood out for its inability to adjust to the remote work imperative. Comparative statistics show that Japan reported the lowest number of people engaged in remote work among the OECD countries, as well as the lowest percentage of corporations that offered remote work policies. In this article, I investigate why telework in Japan is difficult. The lack of telework in Japan may seem paradoxical, given the country's reputation for being technologically advanced. I argue that it is not the technological infrastructure that is lacking in the Japanese workplace, but distinct features of work embedded in Japanese culture and its collectivist roots that prevent the effective implementation of telework. I rely on recently published data from various sources, and apply key sociological theories such as implicit contracts, gift exchange, dramaturgy, and impression management to substantiate my main arguments. The paper concludes by drawing on implications for the future of work in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the role of science and technology studies (STS) journal editors in organizing and maintaining the peer review economy. We specifically conceptualize peer review as a gift economy running on perpetually renewed experiences of mutual indebtedness among members of an intellectual community. While the peer review system is conventionally presented as self-regulating, we draw attention to its vulnerabilities and to the essential curating function of editors. Aside from inherent complexities, there are various shifts in the broader political–economic and sociotechnical organization of scholarly publishing that have recently made it more difficult for editors to organize robust cycles of gift exchange. This includes the increasing importance of journal metrics and associated changes in authorship practices; the growth and differentiation of the STS journal landscape; and changes in publishing funding models and the structure of the publishing market through which interactions among authors, editors, and reviewers are reconfigured. To maintain a functioning peer review economy in the face of numerous pressures, editors must balance contradictory imperatives: the need to triage intellectual production and rely on established cycles of gift exchange for efficiency, and the need to expand cycles of gift exchange to ensure the sustainability and diversity of the peer review economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the use of gift-giving as a theoretical and conceptual framework for analyzing social behavior in online networks and communities. Not only has gift-giving the potential to frame and explain much social media behavior, but reversely, and perhaps more importantly, mediated social behavior also has the potential to develop gift-giving theory. Information and communication technologies form joint sociotechnical systems where new practices emerge. The paper focuses on describing the academic background of the gifting framework to help develop a deeper, theory-based, understanding of these sociotechnical phenomena. Three themes are prevalent in the gifting literature: other-orientation, social bonding and generalized reciprocity. The paper gives examples of how these themes are enacted by end-users via the use of information and communication technologies. Finally, sociotechnically embedded economies, called gifting technologies, are identified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on informants' accounts of gifts displayed on their living room mantelpieces drawn from a recent study exploring domestic display in Cardiff. The mantelpiece is an ideal space for looking at a particular category of salient objects: gifts on show in the home. An interpretation of narrative accounts is located within existing theoretical and empirical studies of gift exchange to reconsider the complex enmeshment of this traditional relation in everyday practices. An equivalence between the mantelpiece and the ‘gifts’ it presents in the home as taken-for-granted, inherited practices and materials leads to a final discussion focusing on the apparently democratised yet still gendered character of everyday gift practices. In conclusion, a consideration of the gendering of the gift questions whether this traditional, problematic method of accounting for and maintaining relations is desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central research finding of this article is that the standard policy feedback effects in the literature cannot alone explain the outcomes of the Brazilian Bolsa Familia program/ Programa Bolsa Família (PBF). While conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have remained a resilient policy instrument in Brazil – newly elected officials did not dismantle, replace or wholesale transform PBF – our empirical research tells us that this resilience is due not only to policy feedbacks, but also to another mechanism. We suggest that previous explanations have not paid sufficient attention to the concept of policy capacity or to the role of the bureaucracy in defending PBF over time. We analyse the internal dynamics of Brazil's PBF in changing political and economic environments. Our key explanatory factor is the impact of alternations of power. We suggest that PBF's resilience to changing political and economic contexts is underpinned by its policy capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policy of density agreements, allowing extra density for condominium developers in exchange for affordable housing units, is seen as an example of the neoliberalization of urban governance in North American and European cities. The consensus of scholarship on urban neoliberalism has suggested this practice is indicative of the rise of the entrepreneurial, market-orientated local state. Through a study of urban development in Vancouver, British Columbia. I illustrate how exchanging density for affordable housing also operates on the basis of gift giving. In doing so I integrate Karl Polanyi's framework of substantivism, which highlights various forms of economic exchange including markets, redistribution, and reciprocity, into research on urban governance. Applying the principles of substantivism to the case of Vancouver, I argue that reciprocity obfuscates the negative effects of the privatization of affordable housing provision by making social welfare contingent on increasing profits for developers, concealing the role of political power in land-use decisions, and gentrifying low-income neighbourhoods. These findings hold implications for the study of urban politics, the neoliberalization of affordable housing, and urban-economic research more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sacrifice is central to the flourishing of human culture and is integral to everyday life through practices of gifting, abstinence, donation and substitution. Consumer studies have predominantly taken a theological view of consumption-based sacrifice as medium of self-transformation, purification and transcendence to the realms of the sacred. Yet, there is a darker side to marketplace sacrifice. An alternative reading of sacrifice acknowledges the violence that is also often present in sacrifice – a violence that is directed and ritualised through the sacrifice of the scapegoat. Violent sacrifice can unite and reconcile conflicting individuals into a cohesive community, the taking of a life – at least symbolically – to restore social order and the status quo. This violent turn is missing from accounts of sacrifice and sacrificial gift giving in marketing and consumer studies that do not account for the deep, visceral, human desire for violent sacrifice – in both non-blood and bloodletting forms. To address this gap, I first introduce René Girard's perspectives on violence, sacrifice and scapegoating to conceive an ideology of violent sacrifice in markets and consumption. I then re-examine extant market and consumer studies that investigate acts of sacrifice to reveal dimensions of violence and expand conceptions of sacrifice as being both light and dark. Thus, acknowledging the dual nature of sacrifice: purifying sacrifice to transform through abstinence and giving; and, violent sacrifice through mechanisms of scapegoating. Understanding these two faces of sacrifice has significant implication for marketing scholarship and marketing practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study investigates the effects of charitable giving on the life satisfaction of older Korean adults, examining the moderating role of relationship satisfaction and social trust, as the indicators for social capital. Methods: Nationally representative sample of individuals aged 65 to100 (N = 8,359) from the 2019 Social Survey was used for the analyses. Results: The results from Coarsened Exact Matching and Structural Equation Modeling show that charitable giving positively affects older Korean adults' life satisfaction. Moreover, the results of moderation analyses suggest that the effects of charitable giving on life satisfaction are stronger for those with lower levels of relationship satisfaction and social trust. Discussion: The results imply that social capital, such as relationship satisfaction or social trust, needs to be taken into consideration when exploring the effects of charitable giving in later life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stigma presents specific ethical and epistemological problems for qualitative researchers of violence against women. Narrative research methods promise to enable ethical research on violence while still offering deep insight into stigmatized topics. This article describes narrative methods used in six focus group discussions and four in-depth interviews with victim-survivors of violence against women, all African migrant women living in Ireland. The article connects narrative and stigma in research with the social lives of participants. It concludes with specific recommendations for creative uses of narrative inquiry to explore stigmatized themes, noting that stigma can never be entirely removed from the research encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research conducted in Sri Lanka has revealed that victim survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) and their notions of justice and accountability are influenced by their lack of trust in an ineffective criminal justice process. Moreover, the fear of reprisal by State allied perpetrators deters them from accessing formal justice. The failure of a criminal justice system steeped in patriarchal, discriminatory gender insensitive procedures in which CRSV victim survivors search for justice is analyzed through a recent judgment. The case highlights that searching for accountability in the current political context is not feasible and that CRSV victim survivors must be provided with support systems and forms of relief to move on with their lives until justice and accountability can be achieved. The article argues that although criminal accountability is the ideal, alternative possibilities for justice for CRSV victim survivors in Sri Lanka need to be explored, given the Sri Lankan political context and a criminal justice process fraught with many challenges. The role of the Office for Reparations in providing reparations to CRSV victim survivors and the options of a "partial" justice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the prospect that alteration in the profile of resources relied on by African civil society will affect citizen's relationships with their states. Description and analysis advance an ontological narrative of Africa's pre- to postcolonial gift-giving, or "gifting" rapidly diverging in this century. Gifting processes exhibit both non-agonistic "horizontal" and agonistic "vertical" dimensions, connecting Ekeh's "two moral publics" that characterize the continent's neo-patrimonial political systems. The unfolding context exhibits pluralization, localization, and privatization of financing that a historically determined, multilayered African civil society can access and self-provide. The notion of "civic space" guides analysis of intersections between gifting and African civil society, in relation to governance, resourcing, and equity. A conclusion is that gains in scale and diversity of domestication in gifting to and by civil society are unlikely to bring significant change to Africa's politics: more likely is a governance future resembling the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the movements and placings that work to confi gure food as waste. At issue here--following the work of Nicky Gregson, Kevin Hetherington, and Rolland Munro--are the multiple conduits that exist for 'moving things along' and the idea that consumption research needs to move beyond the unfortunate conjunction of disposal and waste. I suggest that the disposal of surplus food is enacted via a graduated process in which it first enters a 'gap' where ambiguities and anxieties surrounding its residual value and onward trajectory are addressed. Drawing on ethnographic examples, I explore the shifting contours and gradients that reduce the possibilities for disposing of food through conduits in which it can be handed down, handed around, or otherwise saved from wastage. I also unpack the overwhelming tendency for surplus food to be cast as 'excess' and placed in conduits--typically the bin--that connect it to the waste stream. Crucially, it is suggested that food is a specific genre of material culture and that this underpins the normativity of its binning alongside the attendant prevention of its recirculation or recovery. To conclude, I reflect on the broader implications of this analysis for understandings of consumption, disposal, and waste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the potential for small-scale acts of giving that are not directly reciprocated, or generalized generosities, to build social bonds and promote contributions to the group. Social exchange theorists define such acts as generalized exchange. The potential for generalized exchange to build strong social bonds relative to other forms of exchange is the subject of theoretical debate. In this article, I build on two prominent theories of social exchange—affect theory and the theory of reciprocity—to propose that a strong norm of generalized reciprocity may bridge the connective benefits of generalized exchange with the connective benefits of productive exchange, which is a collaborative form of social exchange that involves sharing pooled resources. I argue that a strong norm of generalized reciprocity will activate mechanisms theorized to build strong social bonds in generalized and productive exchange systems, and will promote additional behavioral investments into the group. I test my argument with a controlled laboratory experiment, finding strong support for the proposed causal model. The results of this study have implications for research on generosity, collective action, collaboration, sense of community, and social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article mobilises Heather Love's writings on description to provide a novel analysis of recovery from drugs and alcohol. It discusses thin descriptions deriving from the presence of the researcher in the recovery space, and the service-users' thick descriptions of their recovery experiences, produced through one-to-one interviews and photovoice. Thin and thick descriptions of recovery are brought together with the Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage, for the provision of an insight into the practice of recovery that focuses on its daily crafting through small practices of care. Observing and describing how phone calls and text messages, assessment forms, doorways and art materials inform the generation of caring practices, recovery is reconfigured as an amalgam of small gestures that gradually expand life possibilities. This epistemological and methodological shift has the potential to unsettle the way we understand and do policy, and to re-think it as a practice emerging organically inside the recovery assemblage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If homo economicus exists anywhere, surely he must be found among financial traders. Amid the shouting and shoving of trading pits and the manic clicking and phone slamming of electronic trading desks, the atomized, rational, self-interested agency of neoclassical economic theory appears to emerge. Ethnographers of traders have refuted atomism and instead proposed a socially embedded but still rational and self-interested agent: an embedded homo economicus. I take this critique a step further and argue that traders are neither rational nor self-interested. Certainly, traders present themselves as rational and self-interested, but a 'thick' understanding of their social performances and cultural forms proves otherwise. My analysis focuses on the practice of friendly betting among Chicago traders. Despite its competitive appearances, friendly betting constitutes a non-rational, non-self-interested system of gift exchange and evinces why the myth of embedded homo economicus is both beguiling and false. This conclusion cuts to fundamental issues of agency and practice, and calls for widespread scepticism of theories of rational self-interest. As neoclassical economic theory and market ideology spread around the globe and rational self-interest becomes increasingly normalized, we must be wary of confirmation bias and remember the old ethnographic principle that people aren't always what they say they are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at a critical reevaluation of the trading zone concept (Galison). It starts from a case study of the Faraday–Whewell collaboration in coming to terms with electrolysis experiments. The case is supposed to be an example of a trade zone of science/philosophy interaction though it demonstrates the unequal nature of the "trade." This requires the analysis to log in some details concerning Galison's metaphor of trading zones, which reveals its market-oriented connotations. The following criticism of the market metaphor for science applies a revised version of Boris Hessen's argument ("commodity fetishism") against misinterpretation of technology by some British scientists. A closer look at the ancient trade rituals in Marcel Mauss' seminal work enables discovering another cultural pattern for describing scientific communication as opposed to trade—gift. This helps picture science as a distribution of social roles and statuses and uncovers the normative and value dimension of gift zones language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on financial vulnerability has largely focused on the relationships between the economic environment, consumer financial activities and indebtedness, limiting our understanding of the role assumed by interpersonal relationships that underlie this socially embedded phenomenon. Using the common Brazilian practices of borrowing-lending amongst family and friends as the research context, we show that these practices can be viewed as a gift guided by the logic of a moral economy. Our findings show that individuals resort to the market economy to maintain a moral economy of credit which can be a blessing (when the extension of financial help to important others alleviates financial vulnerability by negotiating the marketplace) or a curse (when extension of financial help to others leads to one's own financial constraints). This study illustrates an inverted gift giving process whereby the recipients' own indulgence is presented as a monadic gift in accessing the dyadic gift giving relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the shifting discourse and visual rhetoric of consumer rituals in the cultural media during wartime. Specifically, we examine Japanese newspaper advertisements for seasonal gifts and sympathy gifts in urban cities published between 1937 and 1940. This research addresses two questions: (1) how were advertising arguments constructed justifying spending for gifts while instructing readers on being thrifty during the wartime material shortages, and (2) how was the consumer ritual practice of gift giving used to propagate nationalism? The results of our iconographic-semiotic analysis show four advertising themes: compatibility with national policy, timeliness under the wartime circumstances, empathy with families whose members were serving at the front, and sympathy with those serving at the front. The advertisements enhanced nationalism in two ways: (1) through the promotion of nationalistic gift giving, and (2) by appealing to patriotism, which involves emotionally laden nationalistic sentiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against competing political theories of the integration of immigrants, we propose to reframe the relationship between the populations of host countries and arriving refugees in terms of a neo-Maussian theory of gift exchange. Using the example of the European refugee crisis of 2015 and the welcoming attitude of significant parts of German civil society, we argue that this particular situation should be understood as epitomizing the trend toward internal transnationalism. Increasingly, the “international” is becoming part and parcel of the “domestic” sphere. Since Marcel Mauss was concerned with the question of how separate, culturally different communities can establish ties of solidarity and cooperation between each other, we use his work to answer key questions about the relations between international refugees and native citizens in their home countries: What are the expectations underlying gift-giving in the context of welcoming refugees? Should refugees feel obliged to repay the arrival gifts? How should we deal with the normative ambivalence of gift-giving and its potentially humiliating effects on those who receive gifts but are unable to reciprocate? Most importantly, how does gift theory help us to clarify the very concept of integration which is at the heart of recent debates on the ethics of immigration? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time of increasing calls from policy makers for the use of ‘hard evidence’ in driving decision-making at national and local levels in educational contexts, this article contributes to debates about evidence-based practice in early literacy research. It proposes that a reliance on studies designed to generate ‘hard’ evidence limits understanding about innovations and interventions, arguing that such reliance is not just problematic because interventions and innovations are interpreted differently in diverse sites, or because programmes need to be locally relevant, but because they are constituted differently through different evaluation studies. The article draws on Law’s notion of ‘method assemblage’ to consider how different studies produce different assemblages that have implications for how innovations are conceived. These ideas are exemplified using studies scrutinised through a systematic literature review of one kind of literacy intervention, early years book-gifting, which aims to promote book-sharing in the home. The discussion focuses specifically on how books as mediating objects are instantiated in various ways through different studies, with different implications for how book-sharing, book-gifting and, ultimately, reading are understood. When considered together, these studies construct book-gifting in multiple ways, problematising and complicating the causal relations assumed in methodologies driving for ‘hard’ evidence. Drawing on the book-gifting example, this article explores what might be gained by embracing ‘multiplicities’, the multiple ways in which things – such as objects, activities, principles and indeed literacy interventions – are constituted through method assemblage. It argues that literacy evaluations can best serve children and their families, and the organisations, agencies and groups working alongside them, by seeking fluid, open and ‘generous’ accounts of innovations and interventions. Such accounts, it is argued, are more likely to acknowledge the complex relationships and practices associated with early literacy and to generate new understandings and productive possibilities for early literacy learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In New Zealand, embryo donation (ED) is “open,” allowing offspring to access genetic information. Donors and recipients meet prior to donation. Drawing on interviews with 15 recipients, 22 donors, and nine counselors, this article discusses how ED may be constructed as a form of gifting. This discourse may evoke expectations that recipients will express gratitude for the gift, including through honoring contact agreements. Donation becomes a relational practice of obligations and counter-obligations. However, the gift discourse may not adequately capture the emotional sacrifice experienced by donors. Donors describe significant attachment to their embryos, ambiguity about relinquishment, and interest in offsprings’ welfare. Furthermore, embryos may be constructed as inalienable bodily gifts resulting in children with whom the donors share immutable social ties. A discourse of ED as mutual exchange, collaboration, and extended family building may be more useful to donors and recipients in managing ED. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, Founder and Director of Google Ideas, contend that ‘for governments and companies’, the user-generated content that constitutes big data is ‘a gift, enabling them to better respond to citizen and customer concerns, and, within the emergent field of predictive analysis, to predict what the future will hold’. In this article, I interrogate what it means for data from our social lives to be interpreted as a ‘gift’ by private enterprises such as Google. Who is giving what to whom? What is the nature of the transaction? Whose property is this data? By putting into conversation Schmidt and Cohen’s gift thesis with an analysis of the ‘value’ of participation in digital communication networks, this article seeks to uncover an intellectual property conundrum that legitimizes the rise of new kinds of labour vulnerabilities in the digital age; intensifying the extension of the logic of privatization into our digital social lives; and, in doing so, the importance of intellectual property as a language of critique and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Erik Erikson’s theory on the stages of human development, achieving wisdom later in life involves revisiting previous crises and renewing psychosocial accomplishments. However, few studies have used Erikson’s theory as a framework for examining how older adults self-manage physical and mental health changes that commonly occur later in life. This article presents findings from two qualitative studies that demonstrate how older adults apply wisdom in new domains. Specifically, it was found that older adults (1) reasserted autonomy by initiating creative problem solving and (2) applied skills gained from productive activities earlier in life to new health-related problems that arise later in life. These findings highlight the importance of engaging older adults to repurpose their life skills and thus reapply wisdom to new areas of their lives. Implications for practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how different groups of men negotiate and produce distinct masculinities in actual encounters. The article studies the establishment of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) during the 1940s and focuses on how American and Israeli Jews interacted in fund-raising events. It identifies the threats to the masculine faces of these groups that arose in this setting and examines the organizational practices that were developed in order to allow these groups to cooperate and coproduce their distinct models of masculinity. Exploring masculinities in interaction highlights the importance of concrete organizational practices and monetary transactions, in particular, for the construction of masculinities. Specific discursive and organizational arrangements allow actors to act in a masculine manner and receive affirmation for their masculine claims. In the case examined here, specific discursive practices and the temporal and spatial organization of fund-raising events eased the tensions between two distinct groups of men and allowed them to maintain their distinct and potentially conflicting masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fusion of gift giving and market exchange elements in economic transactions creates practical difficulties. How can the parties involved agree about the meaning of their engagement and the value of the exchanged objects? This article tackles the topic—an important one in economic sociology—by looking at moral transactions (i.e., transactions that combine pecuniary and ethical considerations). Through an empirical study of the issuance of Irish and Israeli diaspora bonds during the 1920s and 1950s, respectively, I identify practices that help actors overcome the difficulties inherent in moral transactions. Clarification practices allow actors to treat the exchange as either gift giving or market exchange. Blurring practices allow actors to complete a transaction without agreeing on its meaning. Blurring practices require creating a zone of indeterminacy, that is, a context in which the parties can cooperate without agreeing on their relationships. The broader implications of these practices are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural traditions at the end of life solidify societal members. As the world becomes more globalized, socio-economic factors affect how traditional practices are expressed, and the role and toll they make on modern societies. This article examines the contemporary Akan funeral practices in Ghana. Akan lineage members, from birth through puberty, marriage, maturity, old age, go through various rites of passage that bond them culturally and spiritually to others in society. One such ritual is funeral celebration. Funeral celebration, an old practice, has always been at the heart of public social events of Akan people. However, the changes in Ghanaian Akan funerals over the past 4 decades, and their impact on the people, make this an important topic. The article describes the Akan belief of life after death, the respect accorded to the dead, the prestige associated with successful funeral celebrations, and socio-economic factors that continue to shape Akan funeral practices. Socio-economic impact and the resulting challenges are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Valentine’s Day is a culturally hybridized and popularly celebrated consumption ritual in Japan. We examine its historical transformation based on a visual and textual analysis of advertisements in print media over fifty years. Changes in the meanings, functions, and structure of gift-giving rituals correspond to changes in the national economy, social values, consumer ideology, and gender roles and power relationships in Japanese society. There are five major findings: one, the importance of food—chocolate—in the creolization process of the consumer ritual; two, the persistent gender asymmetric nature of the Valentines consumer holiday; three, the ritual’s structural aspects and changes over the time; four, the importance of confession in the ritual process; and five, the transformation of its role from a simple instrument of love and a way to elevate a relationship to a rite to reconfirm gender identity. This study supplements the very limited literature on Japanese gift-giving rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this study was to examine inefficiency in gift giving, and in particular, the "deadweight loss" that results from giving apparel gifts to college students. Deadweight losses from gift giving were calculated using gift recipients' estimates of gift cost and gift valuations, for both December holiday and Valentine's Day gifts. Probit models were used to estimate the likelihood of receiving apparel gifts and the likelihood of receiving cash gifts. OLS regression was used to investigate the impact of gift cost, gift type, gift occasion and giver's relationship to recipient on gift value. Findings suggest that deadweight loss is a function of giver's relationship to recipient and gift type. Gifts received from parents, siblings, significant others and friends were shown to be more efficient than gifts received from aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. The deadweight loss resulting from apparel gifts was shown to be significantly greater than the deadweight loss resulting from cash gifts and all other types of gifts, except perfume. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]