African Peasant Problems and Moral Economy

Moral Economy and the Upper Peasant: The Dynamics of Land Privatization in the Mekong Delta

This paper examines how people mobilize around notions of distributive justice, or ‘moral economies’, to make claims to resources, using the process of post-socialist land privatization in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam as a case study. First, I argue that the region’s history of settlement, production and political struggle helped to entrench certain normative beliefs around lando...

HIV and the moral economy of survival in an East African City.

Based on fieldwork in the city of Kisumu, Kenya, the article examines the survival of HIV-positive people on antiretroviral (ARV) medicines and situates this within broader moral economies of their lives-in matters of food, hunger, social relationships, and networks of care, including NGOs. Through locating survival at the level of individual adherence to medication, ARV programs medicalize it....

Conceptualizing Moral Panic through a Moral Economy of Harm

This paper explicates a critical theory of moral panic, arguing that there is an afŽ nity to be discerned between the sociology of moral panic and the sociology of moral regulation. It is demonstrated how efforts to distance sociological investigations of moral regulation from studies of moral panic have been founded on a narrow treatment of the ways in which the latter have conceptualized pani...

Wiring the African Economy

Hidden Insurance in a Moral Hazard Economy

Hidden Insurance in a Moral Hazard Economy We consider an economy where individuals privately choose effort and trade competitively priced securities that pay off with effort-determined probability. We show that if insurance against a negative shock is sufficiently incomplete, then standard functional form restrictions ensure that individual objective functions are optimized by an effort and in...