Moral economy at the crossroads of history and social science: A roundtable with Dr Melissa Beresford, Professor Andrew Sayer and Professor Neville Kirk, chaired by Professor Robert McMaster
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neville Kirk (social and labour history) were invited to answer the question: What for you, offers a valuable way of approaching moral economy?Sayer's moral economy (2000, 2007), grounded in neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy, characterises people as vulnerable, dependent on others, and having the ability to flourish or suffer (Sayer, 2011).Sayer argues moral dispositions are formed by social relationships that enable or constrain attachments and connection.In this way, the economic and cultural context builds a moral economy that 'is deemed appropriate and acceptable' (Sayer, 2011: 129).Beresford's moral economy (Beresford et al., 2023) invokes concepts from both Thompson and Scott, to explore how communities mobilise notions of justice.Based on moral economies of water, Beresford's research traces the foundations of moral economy concepts, to capture shared understandings of justice, normative economic practices and social pressure mechanisms.Exploring 'basic states' of how moral economies cycle through balanced struggle, intensified reaction, mass revolt, collapse and dissolution, Beresford's economic anthropology highlights the actions of communities facing uncertain futures (Beresford et al., 2023).This helps us understand how people develop the resources they need for a good life, differentiating between moral economy leaning on anthropology, with a focus on deep human history, over the last ten thousand years, and historical and sociological accounts.Kirk's approach, alternatively, is socially rooted in firsthand experience of the Thompson's and genesis of his moral economy.Though Kirk deployed a Thompsonian approach to 'moral economy' in his 2007 Custom and Conflict in the Land of the Gael: Ballachulish, 1900Ballachulish, -1910, here he provides contextualisation to the special issue, clarifying the object of Thompson's analysis, uncovering the nature of conflict between custom and tradition against a backdrop of the market economy and modernisation.He urges us to reevaluate and celebrate Thompson by avoiding loose employment of descriptive and derogatory terms to describe plebeian movements.The three voices demonstrate an emancipatory, reflective, and outward looking body of ideas at the crossroads of history and the social sciences.Each, in their own way, defend their disciplinary positions through reflecting on Thompsonian approaches to moral economy research, but also demonstrate significant cross-disciplinary customs in common.These communalities take account of the past, the present, and embody belief in the potential of moral economic concepts for understanding forms of economic and industrial democracy, emerging across, but not limited to, workplaces, communities and ecological and environmental crises.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".