New Political Economy

ISSN: 1356-3467 (Print) 1469-9923 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnpe20

Moral Economy as Critique

Andrew Sayer

To cite this article: Andrew Sayer (2007) Moral Economy as Critique, New Political Economy,
12:2, 261-270, DOI: 10.1080/13563460701303008
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13563460701303008

Published online: 15 Jun 2007.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 3634

View related articles

Citing articles: 34 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cnpe20
New Political Economy, Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2007

REVIEW ESSAY

Moral Economy as Critique

ANDREW SAYER

Radical political economy aims to be critical not merely of rival economic the-
ories, but of economic practice itself. Any critique presupposes critical stand-
points, from which it can be argued that certain phenomena may be problematic
in some respect. Inasmuch as radical political economy has declined, this is argu-
ably a consequence not only of the decline of socialism and the rise of neoliber-
alism, but also of the fact that these have exposed the longstanding neglect of
its critical standpoints. In this essay I review the potential of ‘moral economy’
for strengthening them.
‘Moral economy’ may sound like an oxymoron because economic behaviour is
strongly associated with power and the pursuit of self-interest, and economic
forces often act regardless of moral concerns. Nevertheless, all economic insti-
tutions are founded on norms defining rights and responsibilities that have legiti-
mations (whether reasonable or unreasonable), require some moral behaviour of
actors, and generate effects that have ethical implications. Moral norms are not
merely conventions, but embody assumptions about what well-being consists in,
and these can be evaluated. In abstract, normative terms, the point of economic
activity is to enable us to live well, though in practice particular forms of economic
organisation may be driven by other goals and have other effects, such as profit or
the interests of men at the expense of women. I argue that political-economic
analysis may claim to be ‘critical’ if, implicitly or explicitly, it shows that
particular economic processes and forms of organisation are harmful to well-
being or that actors’ understandings of them are inadequate. This involves relating
morality to everyday life and the experience of well-being and ill-being without
reducing it to a matter of individual subjectivity or social convention, as tends
to happen in sociology and economics. It also implies a rejection of the reduction
of critique to mere reflexivity or opposition to constraints, as in post-structural-
ism.1 I will focus on both old and recent moral economic literature incorporating
(or consistent with) objectivist approaches to well-being, viewing it as an
objective state which we fallibly seek to discover and create. Examples of this
are Adam Smith’s approach to morality and economic life, John O’Neill’s

Andrew Sayer, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK.

ISSN 1356-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online/07/020261-10 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13563460701303008
 Andrew Sayer

Aristotelian critique of the market, the capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and
Martha Nussbaum, and the feminist ethic of care that informs much of feminist
economics.

Definitions
The terms ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ are used interchangeably here to refer to dis-
positions, sentiments, valuations and norms regarding how people should
behave with respect to others so as to harmonise conduct and maintain
actors’ well-being; they imply certain conceptions of the good. Either term
can be used in both positive and normative (evaluative) senses. We may there-
fore view certain practices that actors consider to be ethical – for example,
those of the patriarchal household – as unethical. Moralities are related –
albeit in ways distorted by prevailing patterns of domination – to well-
being, to capacities for flourishing and suffering, and to our essential needi-
ness and vulnerability as well as our capacity for autonomy. Legitimations
of forms of domination are usually provided to the effect that the economic
arrangements are natural, efficient or deserved.
‘Moral economy’ studies the moral norms and sentiments that structure and
influence economic practices, both formal and informal, and the way in which
these are reinforced, compromised or overridden by economic pressures. The
term ‘moral economy’ can also refer to the object of this kind of inquiry. On
this definition, all economies – not merely pre- or non-capitalist ones – are
moral economies, though again we might contest what is seen as moral.2 Moral
economy could be seen as a positive form of study, but in paying close attention
to how economic arrangements affect well-being, it can hardly avoid normative
implications; indeed, the positive-normative distinction breaks down in dealing
with matters of needs and flourishing and suffering.
Critiques of domination, exploitation, misrecognition, abuse and the like imply
notions of well-being, equal moral worth and common capacities for flourishing
and suffering. Without an ethical stance, critiques of social life could as easily
point in a fascist direction as an emancipatory direction. Critique, therefore,
cannot be divorced from matters of ethics or morality as we have defined them,
although ethics should not be seen as separate from social practice and well-
being and hence reducible to an external normative theory.

Three moral dimensions of economic life

Amitai Etzioni has used the term ‘the moral dimension’ to refer to the way in
which economic behaviour is driven not only by self-interest and economic valua-
tion but moral values (the ‘I-and-we paradigm’).3 However, as Irene Van Staveren
shows, economic phenomena and morality have a closer relation, involving both
interdependence and tension, indeed economic institutions and processes are
partly constituted by moral concerns and norms.4 Three dimensions of this relation
may be identified.
262
 Moral Economy as Critique

The moral dimension of economic institutions

Any social relation or practice of any determinacy has a constitutive moral dimen-
sion, inasmuch as actors have to have some idea of their responsibilities, entitle-
ments or rights, how they are supposed to behave, and the kind of circumstances to
which they are supposed to apply in order for a social relation of that kind to exist.5
Such matters are likely to affect actors’ well-being, whether psychological, social,
economic or political, and hence to concern what is seen as moral or ethical. Thus,
in the case of economic relations and roles such as those of employer and
employee, traders, accountants, bankers and individuals have to have some idea
of how they should behave towards each other, and what would constitute impro-
per or unreasonable behaviour, for the roles to be successfully enacted. Concepts
of property are included in these; as anthropologists emphasise, property involves
relationships between people with respect to things, and these may vary according
to the nature of the constitutive norms in the society in question.6 Insofar as any
division of labour defines not only responsibilities for tasks that directly or
indirectly impinge on the welfare of others, but also responsibilities for others–
particularly for those too old, young or infirm to work or unable to find paid
work – we might speak of a ‘moral division of labour’.
In any economy, the particular forms taken by the social relations of production,
distribution, exchange, consumption, care, and mode of regulation embody
assumptions and norms concerning such matters. The ‘instituting’ of economic
practices, to use Polanyi’s term, includes the settling of these ‘constitutive’ norma-
tive issues of rights and responsibilities, whether by argument or power.7 This is
most evident where proposals are made for new kinds of economic practice, such
as the commodification of human organs or genetic data. Such proposals raise
questions of whether they should be allowed at all and, if so, how the relevant
rights and responsibilities should be defined and distributed, what codes of beha-
viour should be established, and how the practice should be regulated. While these
are indeed precisely the kinds of question that might fall under the rubric of moral
economy, they could of course be asked of existing, familiar economic practices
and institutions too, such as private property rights, employment relations, patent-
ing systems and state pensions. Even where they were imposed rather than nego-
tiated, some form of justification usually accompanied them,8 whether compelling
or unconvincing. In many cases their legitimacy was debated in classical political
economy, as in the case of the justifications of profit and interest (profit as ‘a
reward for waiting’, ‘a reward for entrepreneurship’, and so on). In some cases,
the focus was on the basic rights and responsibilities, in others more on the
actual volumes and distribution of resources gained or committed through the
relationships.
Once economic institutions and practices have become established, these nor-
mative questions tend to be forgotten, and a shift takes place from the normative
to the normalised or naturalised. Indeed, legitimations of the arrangements may
scarcely be needed. Thus it is not questioned why workers should have no owner-
ship rights over the goods they make,9 or why shareholders who have acquired
their shares second hand should have rights to dividends from companies
despite having contributed nothing to them. In Habermas’s terms, this is a shift

263
 Andrew Sayer

from questions of validity to questions of behaviour, and accordingly political

economy switches to analysing the observable behaviour and its effects.10 What
was once a matter of legitimacy becomes simply a matter of ‘how things are’
or, as in the ‘belief in a just world’, where what we get is what we deserve,11 or
is at least rightfully ours and not due to others.12 Occasionally, old-established
constitutive moral economic norms are questioned, as in the feminist critique of
the gendered domestic division of labour or right-wing critiques of taxation and
welfare benefits, but most such norms remain unchallenged.
A key task of moral economy, or indeed any political economy purporting to be
‘critical’ of its object, is to reverse this shift from validity to behaviour by unearth-
ing and assessing these legitimations.

(Im)moral sentiments, virtues and vices

In addition to their constitutive moral economic assumptions, economic activities,
like any other social interaction, are contingently affected by actors having some
ability to understand others’ situations, some degree of propriety and sense of
justice and some awareness of the kinds of behaviour which are conducive to
flourishing and suffering, as Adam Smith emphasised in The Theory of Moral Sen-
timents.13 These qualities, though generally imperfectly realised, are essential for
social life in general, economic activities included. As social beings, we can scar-
cely engage in any social interaction or relations without making moral decisions,
though much of the time these are made ‘on automatic’, through an ethical ‘feel
for the game’ as part of our habitus.14 In Aristotelian terms, through repeated
good (bad) practice, actors acquire virtues (vices) – habitual tendencies to act
(un)ethically. These moral sensibilities are a precondition of social life and
moral order; where it is lacking, as in the autistic, successful social interaction
is difficult. As part of his implicitly objectivist view of values and well-being,
Smith had a strongly social concept of the individual, as not only economically
dependent on others, but psychologically dependent too, needing their recognition
and company as a condition of their well-being. Individuals are self-interested, but
not exclusively so; they may care about others not purely for their own gratifica-
tion, and they may seek not merely to do whatever brings them praise or reward,
but also what they see as proper (‘praiseworthy’) in itself, even if it brings them no
reward.
This non-instrumental aspect of employees’ motivations and its relation to
monetary rewards and esteem is analysed in recent studies by Bruno Frey,
Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit.15 Actors also form commitments to others
and to practices or causes, which they may then come to see as their responsibility
to serve, sometimes regardless of their self-interest.16 Thus, care for dependents is
central to all economies. To the extent that actors are self-interested this need not
necessarily involve selfishness;17 many actions benefit both self and others simul-
taneously, without involving self-sacrifice. In its more enlightened forms it
embraces the treatment of others as ends in themselves rather than merely as
means.18 As Smith demonstrated, motivations can best be understood not by
reducing their analysis to a crude matter of egoism versus altruism or duty (as
in Etzioni’s work), but by considering the full range of moral and immoral
264
 Moral Economy as Critique

sentiments, virtues and vices, such as benevolence, gratitude, compassion, pride,

shame, envy, selfishness and vanity, sense of justice, prudence and propriety. All
of these can affect economic processes.
In practice, behaviour also tends to be based on convention or discursive or cul-
tural construction, but these can be acknowledged without conceding anything we
have claimed about moral dispositions and sentiments. They value objects, beha-
viours, persons, institutions and practices in various ways, and have a moral
dimension insofar as they include claims about what is conducive to social
well-being. Nor does acknowledging this moral dimension preclude recognition
of power, for power is often exercised by taking advantage of actors’ moral com-
mitments; one of the main reasons workers often work hard, even when not being
monitored, is that they do not want to burden or let down their fellow workers or
clients. If workers lacked such moral concerns and commitments, their employers
would have less power over them.
Since moral and immoral qualities are themselves influenced by prevailing
social circumstances, including economic arrangements, so that particular ten-
dencies (virtues or vices) are encouraged or discouraged – for example, commer-
cial society may both ‘civilise’ and encourage vanity and selfishness19 – we can
evaluate not only particular behaviours but the social and economic circumstances
which allow or encourage them. O’Neill’s critique of the market is largely directed
at the corrupting effects of market society on how we value things, relationships
and ways of life.20 Thus, not only quantities of money, labour time and goods,
but qualitative matters of what might be termed the ‘moral texture’ of economic
practices are important for well-being – for example, whether employment
allows workers’ dignity to be respected and provides fulfilment, autonomy and
sociability, or whether it requires servility.21
Although economic actors may, particularly where economic incentives and
pressures allow or encourage it, behave in ways which are anti-social, economic
institutions and practices generally rely heavily upon actors’ propriety, in at
least not cheating or deceiving others. We might call these moral qualities ‘the
general moral preconditions of economic functioning’. In recent years, this has
been widely acknowledged in the literature on trust,22 but trust is itself conditional
upon trustworthiness, which in turn is based on propriety and competence.

Ethical implications of the unintended consequences of economic actions

The third moral dimension takes account of the fact that economic actions, what-
ever their motivations, have innumerable unintended consequences and are likely
to affect actors’ well-being. It has been widely argued that in a market economy
vanity and the pursuit of self-interest produce unintended benefits in terms of
rising real incomes. Such arguments have, of course, featured prominently in legit-
imations of capitalism.
This threefold distinction is of course fuzzy, but it is worth making for it avoids
reducing the moral dimensions to just the first, in effect reducing agency and
effects to structure by ignoring actors’ motivations and reflexivity; conversely,
insisting on the first, constitutive moral dimension avoids reducing structure to
agency, as Etzioni’s perspective tends to do.23
265
 Andrew Sayer

With the development of economic systems and regulation by exchange value,

economic relations become ever more numerous, roundabout and ‘thin’ individu-
ally, as noted by a wide range of social theory; hence, as Georg Simmel commen-
ted, they become ‘cooler’ and seemingly unrelated to ethical matters,24 such as in
the case of sacrifices made by producers. In turn, exchange-value is itself affected
by technical, amoral factors such as differences in scarcity, productivity, elastici-
ties, capital intensity and economies of scale and scope, as well as by power
relations which may lack moral warrant. As Smith and later Hayek argued, with
an advanced division of labour no actor can know what is best for others, and
therefore cannot be expected to act with respect to such matters. In a sense,
Smith’s two books deal with two kinds of situation – The Theory of Moral Senti-
ments with the moral regulation of interactions between individuals, The Wealth of
Nations with the regulation of market systems.25 Regulation of behaviour by
actors according to their moral sentiments and imaginations is not totally absent
in the latter but the pursuit of self-interest within the sphere of market relations
is affirmed by Smith as not simply generally optimal but as the only appropriate
behaviour given the absence of adequate knowledge of consequences for others.26
There is no reason why ethical and economic pressures should be in harmony in
any economy, but the forms in which the tension arises are specific to different
types of economy. Thus, under capitalism, economic pressures are registered by
the economic system via exchange-value, rather than need or lack, and need
and purchasing power are more likely to be inversely than positively related.
Pay is not determined primarily by judgements of what workers deserve or
need, but by relative scarcities, productivity differences, strategies of closure
and social conventions. Capitalism is an extraordinary economic system
because it is not driven by the goal of provisioning so that people can live well;
insofar as it does enable well-being, it does so as a by-product of profit
making.27 Hence the oxymoronic character of ‘moral economy’.

Why norms matter: against the de-rationalisation of values

Many researchers in political economy and economic sociology may prefer to
regard the constitutive moral norms just as ‘conventions’ or ‘norms’ or forms of
‘embedding’,28 abstracting from their moral content, perhaps partly in order to
maintain neutrality with respect to it.29 Moral norms are indeed a kind of conven-
tion, but not all conventions have any particular moral implications (they may just
be convenient, innocuous ways of reducing contingency and coordinating
actions). Treating the constitutive moral economic norms of institutions simply
as conventions or forms of ‘embedding’ may help denaturalise the relationships,
but in simultaneously ‘de-normativising’ them it can have the perverse effect of
reinforcing their normalisation: they become no more than ‘what we do round
here’. Contrary to Polanyi’s critical intentions, the concept of embedding may
produce ‘soft’ or domesticated accounts of capitalism.30
This sociological treatment de-rationalises values, both in the analysis of social
practice at large and within social science itself, so that in the latter case they come
to be seen as a contaminant threatening objectivity, or more recently as potentially
ethnocentric. It ignores the cognitive element of values, that is how, directly or
266
 Moral Economy as Critique

indirectly, they involve or imply assessments of behaviours and situations in

relation to well-being. Thus, for example, people care about their income
because it is important for their physical and psychological well-being; they
need it both to live and have some recognition and self-respect. It is precisely
because of this relation to well-being that values matter to people. Of course,
valuations of such matters are fallible, but the same goes for understandings
and assessments of things not bearing upon well-being. Their fallibility implies
that they are about something independent of them, hence about which they can
be mistaken, and over which we can argue; for example, we may be complacent
about things that threaten our well-being, such as global warming.31
There is an irony in the treatment of values as merely subjective in political
economy, since this view of values has much to do with the rise of the liberal,
market society that political economy claims to historicise and understand. In a
liberal society individuals are supposedly free to define their own conceptions
of the good. In markets, they may have reasons for wanting to buy certain
things, but they do not need to provide these reasons as justifications; money is
all they need and their use-valuations appear merely as subjective preferences
beyond reason.32 It is remarkably unreflexive of sociology and political
economy to accept this subjectivisation or de-rationalisation of values as if it
defined their transhistorical nature.
By contrast, an objectivist view of values and valuations takes them seriously as
embodying or implying forms of reasoning related to matters of well-being that
are not merely matters of wishful thinking, but independent of our beliefs and
hence about which we may be mistaken.33 While there were tendencies for a div-
ision to be made between the passions and reasons in the Enlightenment, in the
discussion of moral sentiments and judgments made by actors in concrete situ-
ations, discussed by Smith, values are treated as reasonable – that is, as being
responsive to objective situations in their specificity. The moral sentiments are
thus not unruly passions, nor are values to do with ‘demons’, to use Weber’s
term. Similarly, Polanyi’s critique of market society in The Great Transformation
was mainly directed at the cultural damage done by commodification, particularly
of labour power and the consequent ‘loss of self-respect and standards’,34 in terms
of possibilities for working people to live with dignity and security, developing
their capacities and achieving fulfilment. More recently, although it does not
use the term ‘moral economy’, feminist economics has examined the implications
of forms of economic organisation for each of the three dimensions described
above – for example, addressing the first in relation to the economics and
ethics of care,35 the second in relation to gender orders,36 and the third in relation
to implications of sectoral change for women’s and men’s economic positions.37
The ‘capabilities approach’, developed by Sen and Nussbaum, also rejects the
de-rationalisation of values.38 It arose in development studies, in reaction against
approaches which took the improvement of economic indices as an end itself
rather than as means to the end of human well-being or flourishing. Capabilities
are the substantive freedoms people have to choose a life they have reason to
value, through access to ‘functionings’ – ‘beings and doings’ – that are intrinsi-
cally important and not merely as means to other ends, such as being healthy and
able to live a life of normal length, being secure from violence, being able to
267
 Andrew Sayer

appear in public without shame and take part in the life of the community, being
able to develop skills, and having the social bases of self-respect.
Nussbaum refers to the capabilities approach as embodying a ‘thick, vague’
conception of the good – thick in the sense of involving multiple dimensions,
and vague enough to allow different cultural expressions of the functionings
and hence to avoid ethnocentrism. Just what should be included in the functionings
is a matter for debate, one to which political economists and other social scientists
as well as lay people might contribute. It is not an illiberal approach, since it prior-
itises the freedom of individuals to have a genuine choice of functionings rather
than imposing them as compulsory. Nor is it a standard liberal approach, for it
makes claims about what constitutes well-being, rather than leaving such ques-
tions to individuals. Sen notes from his experience of studying poverty that it is
all too common for individuals in subordinated groups to adapt their preferences
to their position so that they accept it. In other words, he treats their values as fal-
lible, following a classical tradition which regards flourishing and suffering as pro-
ducts of determinate ways of living rather than subjective preference.
Of course, well-being and flourishing are vague terms and there are both many
forms of flourishing and many different views on what constitutes it. However, not
just anything can be passed off as flourishing. Cultures often provide legitimations
of forms of oppression or inhibited flourishing as natural or in some way beneficial
– for example, patriarchal culture maintains that women will flourish best where
they are subservient to men, capitalist culture that accumulating more and more
commodities is the key to happiness. That cultures themselves provide concepts
of the good, and value practices, people and relationships in various ways, does
not prevent them being open to challenge from within, because they are invariably
internally inconsistent and thus allow different norms to be played off against
others, and because they refer to objective states of being. Cultures are also
increasingly overlapping and hybrid, partly as a result of the growth of a global
economy, so their grounds for refusing external critiques have weakened.

Conclusion
A critical moral or political economy turns questions of economic behaviour back
into questions of validity, by asking not only what happens but on the basis of what
kinds of legitimation, and it assesses those legitimations. Of course, a simple
answer to questions of why economic actors in dominant positions have the
powers they do is ‘because they can’. Various actors and theorists of course
have offered functional justifications, arguing that they are justified by the unin-
tended but beneficial effects that they allegedly produce. Such justifications
might in turn be questioned of course, but it is remarkable how little this
happens, or rather how often the arguments are taken as already understood and
hence not in need of articulation in radical political economy. Thus, for
example, it is extraordinary that the rise of financialisation has been treated
largely as a matter of behaviour, as another phenomenon to document, rather
than also as a matter of validity.39
The argument of this review of moral economic literature implies the need to
reunite parts of the curriculum that have become divorced – specifically, political
268
 Moral Economy as Critique

economy and economic sociology with moral and political philosophy –

countering the tendencies of the former to de-rationalise values, and the latter to
individualise action by abstracting from the specific contexts in which people
act and develop. Work in political philosophy on normative aspects of economic
matters can provide distinctions between behaviours and situations which are
easily missed in ‘positive’ economic analysis, and which are great importance
for well-being; for example, Michael Walzer’s work on ‘spheres of justice’,
Elizabeth Anderson’s on values in ethics and economics, and Margaret Radin’s
on property.40 Smith’s work offers some starting points, though the contemporary
relevance of his economic observations is limited. Sen and Nussbaum’s capabili-
ties approach helps us evaluate economic circumstances, and feminist economics
offers examples of the close analysis of the moral texture, norms and implications
of specific forms of economic organisation.
Economics and ethics share the presupposition that we are needy beings,
capable of both flourishing and suffering, and concerned with our well-being. A
moral economy approach can strengthen the standpoints from which economic
life can be criticised by drawing attention to the ways in which it induces and
involves unjust or unethical behaviour, institutions and outcomes and restricts
flourishing. In particular, it requires us to unearth and examine the legitimations
that are offered for familiar economic institutions and their effects.

Notes
1. For example, Michel Foucault, ‘Interview with Didier Eribon’, in Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), Foucault:
Politics, Philosophy, Culture (Routledge, 1981).
2. William Booth, ‘On the Idea of the Moral Economy’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 3
(1994), pp. 653–67. As Arnold notes, the concept of moral economy has been too closely associated with
resistance to markets but his revisions of the concept remain tied to resistance to markets, and are restricted
to ideas concerning social goods. T. Clay Arnold, ‘Rethinking Moral Economy’, American Political Science
Review, Vol. 95, No. 1 (2001), pp. 85–95.
3. Amitai Etzioni, The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics (Free Press, 1988).
4. Irene van Staveren, The Values of Economics: An Aristotelian Perspective (Routledge, 2000).
5. Hardly any social relationship ‘is intelligible without a recognition of the ethical responsibilities and
obligations which it carries with it, and . . . much of our moral life is made up of these kind of loyalties
and commitments’. Richard Norman, The Moral Philosophers, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1998)
p. 216.
6. Katherine Verdery & Caroline Humphrey (eds), Property in Question (Berg, 2004).
7. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1944).
8. Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévènot, On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton University Press,
2006); Marieke de Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minnesota University
Press, 2005).
9. David Ellerman, Property and Contract in Economics (Blackwell, 1992).
10. Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Beacon Press, 1979), p. 6.
11. Claire Andre & Manuel Velasquez, ‘The Just World Theory’, Issues in Ethics, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1990), at http://
www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3/n2/justworld.html.
12. Liam Murphy & Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership (Oxford University Press, 2002).
13. This was not only his first book, but his last, for the sixth, substantially revised edition was published in 1790,
a year after the fifth and final edition of The Wealth of Nations. There is no way in which Smith could have
considered the two books to be in anyway inconsistent with each other, as proponents of ‘The Adam Smith
problem’ used to claim.
14. Andrew Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

269
 Andrew Sayer
15. Bruno Frey, Not Just for the Money (Edward Elgar, 1997); Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, The Economy
of Esteem (Oxford University Press, 2005).
16. Margaret S. Archer, Being Human (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
17. For example, looking after oneself saves burdening others. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(Liberty Fund,1759), p. 304.
18. John O’Neill, The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics (Routledge, 1998).
19. Albert O. Hirschman, ‘Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble?’, Journal
of Economic Literature, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1982), pp. 1463–84.
20. O’Neill, The Market.
21. See, for example, James B. Murphy, The Moral Economy of Labor (Yale University Press, 1993); Andrew
Sayer, ‘Dignity at Work: Broadening the Agenda’, Organization, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2007), pp. 565 –81.
22. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Polity, 1990).
23. Archer, Being Human.
24. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (Routledge, 1978), p. 457.
25. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (University of Chicago Press, 1976 [1776]).
26. James R. Otteson, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
27. William Booth, Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy (Cornell University Press, 1993).
28. Mark Granovetter ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness’, American
Journal of Sociology, Vol. 91, No. 3 (1985), pp. 481 –510.
29. The desire to be neutral often derives from a confusion of neutrality with objectivity. It is not necessary to be
normatively neutral with regard to something in order to be able to understand it. Indeed, sometimes neu-
trality may inhibit understanding. We do not necessarily understand the things we care about less than
those to which we are indifferent.
30. Andrew Sayer, ‘For a Critical Cultural Political Economy’, Antipode, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2001), pp. 687– 708.
31. Andrew Collier, In Defence of Objectivity (Routledge, 2003).
32. Ross Poole, Morality and Modernity (Routledge, 1991); Russell Keat, Cultural Goods and the Limits of the
Market (Palgrave, 2000).
33. The objective nature of well-being implies the fallibility rather than certainty of beliefs about it.
34. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 157.
35. Barbara Ehrenreich & Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds), Global Women (Granta, 2003).
36. Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations (Routledge, 1997).
37. Linda McDowell, Redundant Masculinities (Blackwell, 2003); Diane Perrons, Globalization and Social
Change (Routledge, 2004).
38. Amartya Sen, Inequality Re-examined (Oxford University Press, 1992); Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and
Human Development (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
39. De Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith.
40. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1983); Elizabeth Anderson, Values in Ethics
and Economics (Harvard University Press, 1993); Margaret Radin, Contested Commodities (Harvard
University Press, 1996).

270