CULTURAL AND MORAL ECONOMY: THE DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO CULTURE AND ECONOMY - A CRITIQUE OF ‘CULTURAL ECONOMY’ AND TOWARDS ‘MORAL ECONOMY’

We can identify the key features of the traditional approaches to culture and economy. Table 1 highlights the strengths and weaknesses of economic liberalism and (Marxist) political economy. Furthermore, we can observe the ways in which cultural economy differs from these traditional perspectives (see Table 2). Indeed, the cultural economy framework has several distinct advantages over them (see Table 3). Yet, nevertheless, there are particular difficulties within the cultural economy perspective, and we shall examine some of its internal weaknesses. While acknowledging the importance of ‘culture’ in the economy, and appreciating how cultural economy is an improvement on economic liberalism and political economy, we shall evaluate cultural economy with moral economy (see Table 4), preferring the latter over the former.

In the first part of the course, we examined how the economy had become ‘culturally stylised’, or aestheticised. By this, we meant two things. First, that more cultural goods were produced through the market, and we examined the implications of this process by looking at fashion, advertising, mass consumption. A second meaning is that production systems have become sensitive to people’s work meanings and to the efficacy of re-constructing meaning at work (here, we examined the elements of a corporate culture and the process of making identity).

In the second part of the course, we shifted our attention to examine how the economy is morally regulated or has implications for morality. Here, we examined the politics of economic and cultural regulation of the UK leisure activity, and asked the questions: should pornography be transmitted on the television and the internet? should children be taught homosexuality? should there be a public service broadcasting? We saw that different moral perspectives (e.g. liberalism, conservatism and feminism) provide different moral answers.

Part of the weakness of the political left has been its failure to provide a coherent moral approach to the economy. Indeed, it has been the ‘New Right’ that has hijacked the debate and propelled a vision of a moral economy, consisting of consumers, entrepreneurs, the family, voluntary self-help organisations, minimal state expenditure and low taxes, more commodification and privatisation. However, this vision is deeply flawed, as we saw last week (Lecture ‘Moral Obligations’). We shall say more of its inadequacy in the next section.

Market operations have implications for individual’s identity, autonomy and desire for recognition. I will argue that cultural economy’s dependence on market systems undermines its project of autonomous individual, who desires recognition. We can identify three internal weaknesses of the cultural economy approach.

Identity: According to ‘cultural economy’ framework, identity revolves around leisure and centres on looks, images and consumption. It celebrates the market as it develops an autonomous character: as consumers, we can choose our own taste, and as entrepreneurs, we are responsible for our own success. Cultural economy highlights the playfulness of choosing our own identities at will from an array of market choices and opportunities (i.e., the enterprising self and consuming self).

Yet, the market can undermine identity and personal character, because identity under market conditions tends to be unstable and subject to change (i.e., the market incentives to act in particular ways are constantly changing). Individuals are no longer engaged in life projects, fail to make long-term commitments and abandon deep responsibilities (e.g., social movements, raising children and political and social action). Autonomy requires settled commitments, values, life projects and responsibilities that define what it is to have a character. Under changing market conditions and incentives, such long-term commitments and deep responsibilities are discouraged.

Authority and Autonomy: Autonomous people accept only that which they are able to affirm according to their own reasoning or experiences. Such a person appears most readily in the guise of the sovereign consumer and the individual entrepreneur. Cultural economy appeals to autonomous people who can use their own power of judgement and decision to formulate projects and to make commitments. The individual does not depend on the authority of others. Authoritative standards in the product market (such as safety and quality standards for consumer goods) and labour markets (such as workers’ rights) are seen as incompatible with autonomy and freedom, and tends towards paternalism, eliteness and lack of individual responsibility. Here the sovereign self emerges with the responsible self.

However, we can distinguish between social authority (authority conferred on a person in virtue of its institutional or social position, such as political leaders and religious figures) and epistemological authority (authority that it arrived at on impersonal standards – knowledge arrived through discussion, dialogue and practical reasoning in a public forum). While we can be suspicious of the former, the latter is both necessary and desirable in making reasonable judgements and decisions. Without authority, we are prone to make mistakes (e.g. ignoring the advice of our own doctor not to smoke and drink) that undermine our desire for autonomy.

Recognition: Recognition is required to confirm our self-worth as beings with powers of rationality and the capacity to stand above and shape particular desires. Yet recognition of worth and praise (or compliments) counts only from other individuals whom we recognise to have worth. Recognition requires professional and trade associations, academic and scientific communities and craft guilds, whose recognition we respect and worth having. Recognition requires other people located in non-market institutions, and because of this we must reject an individualised economy.

Cultural economy describes cultural goods as desires for recognition, though it would be more accurate to say desire to be noticed. However, recognition takes place entirely at the level of appearances – we buy goods that are ‘cool’ and aesthetically pleasing to the senses. Here, there is no distance between recognition for looking good and for being good. Individuals do not seek recognition to confirm their independent worth and praise for worthy acts, but recognition of their appearance, in pursuit of love of praise. Appearance is fought over by producers and consumers usually in the form of better or worse aesthetic tastes. Indeed, the idea of recognition of worth, dependent on professional or trade association, is absent. In short, the market rewards self-esteem rather than self-respect.

There are many positive effects of the cultural turn - both in taking culture, meaning and subjectivity more seriously and in escaping from reductionist treatments of culture as mere reflection of material situation. The cultural turn coincides with the decline of socialism and the diversification of concerns of radical politics beyond economic questions of distribution to cultural questions of recognition and identities. Research into forms of domination and division that went beyond those deriving from capital and class was long overdue.

A crucial feature of many of the goals or goods associated with culture is that they are primarily internal, i.e., intrinsic. For example, a certain kind of music might be valued, but this value is not accorded merely in order to achieve some external goal, but because the kind of music is valued in itself. By contrast, economic activities and processes involve a primarily instrumental orientation; they are ultimately a means to an end, satisfying external goals to do with provisioning. The meaningful aspects of activities, artifacts and relationships, whose value is primarily internal, are combined in various ways with instrumental activities directed towards the external goal of reproduction of social life. The internal association of the cultural and the economic implies that it is wrong to think of the relation between them as simply external. A question like 'How has the economy been influenced by culture?' implies that there was first a pristine economy which somehow later fell under the influence of culture, when of course economic activities have always been culturally embedded or influenced. It also ignores those economic activities that take place outside the formal economy, for example in households.

Central to the question of the relationships between culture and economy is that of the nature and role of moral-political values. The tendency of the liberal theorists and cultural economy writers to reduce culture to the stylisation of life is complicit in the de-moralisation of culture. There is a tendency to ignore moral influences on social life, usually by interpreting them either as merely subjective and emotive or in instrumental, power-based terms, 'strategies of distinction'. In order to counter these tendencies, a new version of the concept of moral economy is required that highlights the ways in which all economic activities - both formal and informal or domestic - are influenced by norms, including ethical principles. The moral economy embodies norms regarding the responsibilities and rights of individuals and institutions with respect to others and regarding the nature and qualities of goods, services and environment. These norms shape both the formal and informal, including household economies. While the norms may be considered part of a moral order, they are invariably influenced by networks of power and considerations of costs.

To paraphrase Habermas, the development of economic systems (institutions characterised by formal rationality such as markets and bureaucracy) has turned questions of validity into questions of behaviour, and this is what has happened to many of the fundamental questions of moral economy. As people lost control over their economic lives, and most economic relations came to be with distant unknown others, the competitive laws of global economy tended to reduce the normative standpoints on moral economy, correspondingly making philosophical discourse on ethics appear irrelevant. However, we need to return to the questions of validity (see below some of the fundamental questions of moral economy), otherwise we collude with the dominance of the economic systems over the cultural sphere. In short, the sphere characterised by formal rationality and impersonality dominates the sphere characterised by deliberation and negotiation.

Some questions of validity - the fundamental questions of moral economy.

• Whose keeper are we? Who is our keeper? - What are our responsibilities towards children, the elderly, the disabled and infirm, to distant others and future generations, and to the environment?
• What standards of care and provision should we expect to receive, give and fund? What goods should be provided?
• How should we discharge our responsibilities to others? -through paying taxes to fund transfer payments? through direct unpaid labour? By paying others to do the work?
• How should these responsibilities be allocated between men and women, between people of different people of different incomes and wealth?
• What standard of living should people expect? Should there be limits on pay and income from capital?
• To what extent should people be reliant on wages/ salaries for their income? (How far should income be subject to the 'stark utopia' of the 'self-adjusting' market?
• What things should not be commodified?

Table 1: Traditional approaches to economy and society/culture

Table 2: Comparison of the main approaches to economy and society/culture

Table 3: The strengths of cultural economy in relation to traditional approaches

Table 4: A comparison between moral economy and cultural economy