The transformation of morals in markets: death, benefits, and the exchange of life insurance policies

Differential sensitivity to adversity by income: Evidence from a study of Bereavement

Adverse life events are often understood as having negative consequences for mental health via objective hardships, which are worse for persons with less income. But adversity can also affect mental health via more subjective mechanisms, and here, it is possible that persons with higher income will exhibit greater psychological sensitivity to negative events, for various reasons. Drawing on multiple sociological literatures, this article theorizes potential mechanisms of increasing sensitivity with income. The proposition of differential sensitivity is tested using the strategic case of spousal and parental bereavement among older US adults. The analyses find consistent evidence of increasing sensitivity of depressive symptoms with income. A series of robustness checks indicate that findings are not due to endogenous or antecedent selection. Further, exploratory analyses of mechanisms suggest that higher sensitivity among the affluent was driven by greater expectations and better relationship quality with the deceased. These findings problematize the conceptualization and assessment of human suffering in economically stratified societies.

Green and Sustainable Life Insurance: A Bibliometric Review

Presently, there is a growing concern about implementing sustainable practices among businesses worldwide. Risk management is observed to contribute to the promotion of exercised business sustainability significantly. The study aims to examine published articles focusing on the role of risk management in promoting business sustainability practices and its advancement in the Cambridge online database to determine the current trend direction of this field. The paper’s conducted analysis is based on bibliographic co-word clustering analysis of the collected studies from the database. The research’s output disclosed four keyword clusters in the gathered articles’ titles and identified the most interested journals, countries, authors, subject areas, and organizations in the said topic and its popular research period. Based on the research output, recommendations regarding future research were provided, including expanding the list of databases for the data collection phase and utilizing the bibliographic coupling relations approach in the bibliometric analysis.

Speciation in Nascent Markets: Collective learning through cultural and material scaffolding

The construction of market infrastructure is a key component of market formation. In this article, we explore when and how this process leads to the fragmentation of a nascent market. We study the emergence of new markets in the context of social and impact investing in the United Kingdom during the period 1999 to 2019. We identify a recursive process of building the cultural and material infrastructure of the market, which we label cultural and material scaffolding, that drives collective learning by envisioning alternative futures and conducting institutional trials. We show how this scaffolding process explains the split between the social investment and the impact investment markets, which we theorize as market speciation. We identify two scope conditions under which we expect speciation to occur: field overlap and material anchoring. The paper contributes to the literature on market formation, and to the empirical understanding of how social and impact investment have emerged.

Toward a sociology of finitude: life, death, and the question of limits

Progressing beyond the given has been a key modern tendency. Yet modern societies are currently facing the problem of how to put limits on progress, expansion, and growth, live within them, and preserve (rather than transcend) the present. Drawing on economic sociology scholarship on valuation and morality in economic life, this article develops and applies the term economization to analyze the enactment of limits on progress. The question of end-of-life care-when to stop medical efforts to prolong life, postpone death, and advance the scientific frontier-serves as an illustrative empirical case that sheds light on limit-setting in general. My analysis of this case combines historical, ethnographic, and in-depth interview data on US palliative care clinicians, who specialize in making life-and-death decisions in acute care hospitals.

Opening Constructive Dialogues Between Business Ethics Research and the Sociology of Morality: Introduction to the Thematic Symposium

Over the last decade, scholars across the wide spectrum of the discipline of sociology have started to reengage with questions on morality and moral phenomena. The continued wave of research in this field, which has come to be known as the new sociology of morality, is a lively research program that has several common grounds with scholarship in the field of business ethics. The aim of this thematic symposium is to open constructive dialogues between these two areas of study. In this introductory essay, we briefly present the project of the new sociology of morality and discuss its relevance for business ethics. We also review the contributions to this thematic symposium and identify four specific domains where future research can contribute to fruitful dialogues between the two fields.

Whips, Chains, and Books on Campus: How Emergent Organizations With Core Stigma Gain Official Recognition

This article explores how emergent organizations with core stigma manage stigma, and work toward official recognition. The qualitative research design used organizational constitutions, listserv communications, and interviews to examine officially-approved student organizations focused on kinky sexuality in U.S. universities. Our findings indicate (a) due process and impersonal evaluations enable official approval of emergent organizations, particularly if this focuses on operational concerns; (b) emergent organizations leverage credible social discourses, such as individual rights, to emphasize issues pertinent to approval bodies and mainstream throughout society; (c) organizations can strategically embrace stigma, entailing complex decisions about balancing revelation and concealment; and (d) organizational tactics shift depending on the maturity of the stigmatized issue, important because organizational stigma can be resilient and persistent despite organizational legitimacy. The article contributes to research on organizational management of stigma by examining how emergent organizations with core stigma manage stigma while moving from informal to official status.

The science of value: Economic expertise and the valuation of human life in US federal regulatory agencies

This article explores efforts to apply economic logic to human life. To do so, it looks at federal regulatory agencies, where government planners and policy makers have spent over a century trying to devise a scientifically sound way to measure the economic value of lives lost or saved by public programs. The methods they have drawn on, however, have changed drastically in the past 40 years, shifting from a 'human capital' approach based on models of economic productivity and producing relatively low dollar values to a 'willingness-to-pay' approach reflecting consumer choice and producing much higher values. Why, in an era of intense deregulatory pressures, did the valuation model that produced significantly higher estimates - making it easier to justify costly regulation - ultimately win out? This unlikely transition follows a shift in the nature of professional expertise dominating the federal bureaucracy during the 1970s and 1980s, as changing conceptions of health and safety regulation during this period gave academic economists the opportunity to make new claims about the exclusive authority of microeconomic theory for understanding the economic value of life in federal planning. Supporting this argument is a comparative case, the largely unsuccessful attempt to extend the willingness-to-pay model to the valuation of life in the courtroom. Pricing human life thus results not only from the renegotiation of moral boundaries around the economic logic of the market, but also from the reorganization of expert authority and the consolidation of scientific expertise around both the meaning and the measurement of value.

Contradictions in the commodification of hospital care

The "moralized markets" school within economic sociology has convincingly demonstrated variation in the relationship between economic activity and moral values. Yet this scholarship has not sufficiently explored either the causes of this variation or the consequences of this variation for organizational practice. By examining different moral-market understandings and practices in the context of a single market-based organizational field, this article highlights the contradictory character of processes of commodification, as different historically institutionalized ideas conflict, in different ways, with the market logic that increasingly organizes the field as a whole. The article examines the contradictory commodification of hospital care in three hospitals within one Northern California community.

Market-Based Responses to Climate Change: CO2 Market Design versus Operation

This study highlights significant discrepancies between CO2 market design and the actual operation of CO2 markets. Our findings are based upon an empirical investigation undertaken in the context of the European Emissions Trading Scheme between January 2009 and May 2010. CO2 markets are examined from a practice-based perspective in which actors are engaged in exchange, representational and normalizing practices. Discrepancies between the actual and intended CO2 market practices are explained using the concepts of framing, overflowing and regulatory capture. We argue that the design of the European Emissions Trading Scheme has been influenced in such a way that it does not actually challenge market participants to reduce their CO2 emissions. In this way, the study challenges the near universal reliance upon CO2 markets as the primary policy mechanism for mitigating climate change.

A Market for Weather Risk? Conflicting Metrics, Attempts at Compromise, and Limits to Commensuration

In this paper, we examine the process of risk commodification involved in the creation of a market for weather derivatives in Europe. We approach this issue through an in-depth qualitative study in which we focus on the commensuration process by which promoters try to draw weather risk into the financial world. By offering a concrete description of a derivatives market as a meeting place between different metrics, our results highlight the failure of a process of commensuration – a phenomenon rarely studied empirically in the literature – and its unexpected results. Compared to existing research, we use the theoretical framework provided by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) to enrich the literature on commensuration specifically as regards the different forms of agreement to which commensuration attempts can lead. Our results highlight the crucial role of a common interest for commensuration to succeed, and the conditions necessary for this common interest to occur. We conclude that there are limits to the thesis of financial theory, according to which all kinds of risk can be transformed into financial risk, and exchanged on financial markets.