Contested Commodities
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Contested Commodities
Author: Margaret Jane Radin
language: en
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Release Date: 2001-11-05
How far should society go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services? Radin addresses this controversial issue in an exploration of contested commodification. As a philosophical pragmatist, the author argues for an incomplete commodification, in which some contested things can be bought and sold, but only under regulated circumstances.
The Routledge Handbook of Commodification
Some goods are freely traded as commodities without question or controversy. For other goods, their commodification – their being made available in exchange for money, or their being subject to market valuation and exchange – is hotly contested. “Contested” commodities range from labour and land, to votes, healthcare, and education, to human organs, gametes, and intimate services, to parks and emissions. But in the context of a market economy, what distinguishes these goods as non-commodifiable, or what defines them as contestable commodities? And why should their status as such justify restricting the market choices of rationally consenting parties to otherwise voluntary exchanges? This volume draws together wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research on the legitimate scope of markets and the kinds of goods that should be exempt therefrom. In bringing diverse answers to this question together for the first time, it finally identifies commodification studies as a unique field of scholarly research in its own right. In so doing, it fosters interdisciplinary dialogue, advances scholarship, and enhances education in this controversial, important, and growing field of research. Contemporary theorists who examine this question do so from across the disciplinary spectrum and ground their answers in diverse scholarly literature and divergent methodological approaches. Their arguments will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, economics, law, political science, sociology, policy, feminist theory, and ecology, among others. The contributors to this volume take diverse and divergent positions on the benefits of markets in general and on the possible harms of specific contested markets in particular. While some favour free markets and others regulation or prohibition, and while some engage in more normative and others in more empirical analysis, the contributors all advance nuanced and thoughtful arguments that engage deeply with the complex set of moral and empirical questions at the heart of commodification studies. This volume collects their new and provocative work together for the first time.
Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred
The capacity of human beings to invent, construct and use technical artifacts is a hugely consequential factor in the evolution of society, and in the entangled relations between humans, other creatures and their natural environments. Moving from a critical consideration of theories, to narratives about technology, and then to particular and specific practices, Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred seeks to arrive at a genuinely transdisciplinary perspective focusing attention on the intersection between technology, religion and society and using insights from the environmental humanities. It works from both theoretical and practical contexts by using newly emerging case studies, including geo-engineering and soil carbon technologies, and breaks open new ground by engaging theological, scientific, philosophical and cultural aspects of the technology/religion/nature nexus. Encouraging us to reflect on the significance and place of religious beliefs in dealing with new technologies, and engaging critical theory common in sociological, political and literary discourses, the authors explore the implicit religious claims embedded in technology.