Law & Society scholars often dismiss Law & Economics (L&E) as insoluble with our core beliefs about distributive justice, culture, and social solidarity. This reaction has yielded missed opportunities for new theory emergent between the fields. One such opportunity came in 1978, when Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt argued that societies make “tragic choices” about scarce resource allocations so as to reconcile such choices with core culture, ethics, and values. In Calabresi’s later words, their book was a “more or less explicit appeal to anthropology for help.”1 Today, sociolegal studies remain well-poised to answer this appeal. Taking theory about moral costs from Calabresi in L&E and adding anthropological thought on the meaning of “value,” this essay presents situated valuation – a contextualized notion of value that accounts for the moral costs of inequalities while supporting principled scrutiny of redistributive policies meant to reduce inequality but sometimes worsening it. This discussion highlights the importance of interpretive social science in the study of distributive inequality, while showcasing a neglected but generative link between mutually imbricated interdisciplinary communities.

A too rarely emphasized feature of modern deontological ethics is the structure of its directives. Faced with alternatives, the question for the moral agent is “which, if either, must I perform (or avoid)?” Getting it right, one is, morally speaking, done…until the next set of freighted options presents. We should wonder whether this makes sense: whether there is not a more complex structure to deontological requirements that resists the “one and done” idea. Rehabilitating the Kantian idea of duty as a value-based deliberative principle, I argue for a more plausible deontology whose requirements are often temporally extended and interpersonally complex.

This article revisits ear ornament data from Tikal—both material and visual—to better understand the varied roles of ear ornamentation in ancient Maya society over time. The author discusses relevant terms and terminology, then emphasizes the social aspects of ear piercing and stretching as well as the place of ear ornaments in economic exchange. Ear ornamentation was a critical aspect of socialization for ancestral Mayas, but the extent of this practice was classed. Whereas the styles of nonelite ear ornaments were more resistant to change over time, the jade earflares of elites became more standardized in form while growing in complexity. With this standardization, jade earflares achieved a status close to currency, not just to be coveted or collected but also to be displayed on the body to the fullest extent possible. However, like many currencies, jade earflares were more complex than simple tokens of exchange. The symbolic dimensions that gave these objects meaning and economic value were integral to their power.

Early-career secondary school music teachers navigate many challenges as they settle into the profession. These include consolidating their knowledge of subject content, gaining classroom confidence and honing skills in classroom management. In addition, their sense of belonging can be enhanced by working at collegial relationships within their faculty, across the school and feeling a part of the wider school community. These factors can elicit a ‘make or break’ response for continuing in the profession.

This paper reports on a case study of an Australian early-career secondary school music teacher, in her fifth year in the profession. The case study, as a part of a larger study, sequenced quantitative and qualitative research methods, allowing insight into the music teacher’s working life and enabled the researcher to understand factors that impact daily practice. Themes explored in the study include motivation, perception of value, stress and the difficulties of securing permanent employment. The music teacher presented a positive approach to her work through her development of resilience and shared her future goals and dreams.

This research offers suggestions on how schools and education authorities can best support early-career secondary school music teachers to enable them to become resilient, confident and valued practitioners for the future.

The institutional logics perspective provides a powerful theory that emphasizes how symbolic beliefs and material practices are intertwined in relatively enduring configurations that can profoundly shape behavior across space and time. In this article, we build upon the arguments and insights of Haveman, Joseph-Goteiner, and Li, suggesting the need for a broader research agenda on the dynamics of institutional logics in China and around the world. Building on some of our recent writings, we argue for the need to go beyond the study of how logics have effects, to understand how logics themselves cohere, endure, and co-evolve in dynamic interrelationships with other logics.

In this article, we explore whether hierarchy and linearity conspire to affect agreement. The data come from an experimental study of honorific agreement between verbal si and coordinate subjects in Korean. We focus on computing the mismatch driven by honorifically mixed conjuncts. Unlike South Slavic gender agreement, Korean has neither Resolved Agreement nor First Conjunct Agreement. Only Last Conjunct Agreement is attested in Korean honorification. We show that honorific agreement within coordinate subjects is triggered only when the honorific verbal si appears, which is substantially different from the case with the honorific nominal nim. We also show that acceptability significantly decreases when the last conjunct of coordinate subjects is incongruous with an honorific verb. We thus argue that verbal honorific agreement with Korean coordinate subjects is sensitive to linear order, mimicking South Slavic gender agreement.

In our 2018 film, A Modest Proposal, we proposed to financialize the assets of public museums, their collections, and buildings, and distribute the generated values for the benefit of the producers of those values: the artist community. Reality seems to have caught up with our proposal. In the wake of the pandemic, public museums started to sell NFTs of their master pieces. But this did not inspire any new form of mutualization. In this text, we question whether blockchain infrastructures can be considered a public good. The individualistic logics that pervade the crypto sphere consider human relations in transactional terms and the enforcement of property rights as the only valuable governance principle, defining property as the basis for representation in many of the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The trust placed in automated processes might lead to ‘governance by algorithms’, making the ‘Leviathan’, the sovereign machine, a frightening possibility. Other blockchain infrastructures may offer more inclusive alternatives. Distributed Cooperative Organizations (DisCOs) acknowledge the need for the individual to sustain her/himself and yet also create a solidarity economy by the mutual distribution of collectively generated values among all contributors. We focus on the above questions on property, public goods and governance using our home in Brussels, which we have defined as an artwork and framing device. It is the ‘house as artwork’ that helps us evaluate how these concepts play out in an accelerating world in which blockchain and other technologies might equally generate emancipation or new enclosures.

This article develops a basic typological framework for understanding and analyzing financial risk from a political economy perspective. It is motivated by growing awareness of the contemporary significance of financial risk and by the fact that the political-economic literature on such risk currently lacks a workable heuristic. The framework distinguishes between and fleshes out what I refer to as the principal ‘value models’ of finance: fees, gains, premia, and spreads. Its primary aim is to facilitate the identification and conceptualization of: (1) the different risk configurations characterizing the heterogeneous political economy of finance; and (2) the different ways in which key stakeholders — such as finance capital, non-financial capital, and labor — come to be enrolled in such configurations. It also aims to contribute to the wider project of demystifying not just financial risk in particular but modern finance more generally.

In this essay we propose a reframing of the Bloomberg Terminal, an interface used to track financial trades and values, by using it as a creative, critical and curatorial device to explore the relationship between the art and finance. To contextualise this approach, we offer a history of the Bloomberg Terminal alongside an analysis of the power of interfaces to shape both the user and the represented information. We use the terminal as a way to critique the relationship between art acquisition and financial trading companies. We then describe some outcomes of a series of workshops themed around the idea of ‘building an alternative Bloomberg’. We conclude by offering some potential applications of a re-framed Bloomberg Terminal as an open and modular interface for engaging with issues around art and finance, both in terms of content and curation.