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>> 3 1 Constructing Moral Markets Today, we’re the focus of one of the most organized, most sophisticated , most expensive corporate campaigns ever launched against a single company. For whatever reasons, our success has generated a lot of fear in some circles. —Former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, Wal-Mart shareholders meeting, June 2005 Despite what its title might suggest, this is not really a book about Wal-Mart. Curiosity about the world’s largest retailer has prompted a spate of recent books about the company’s business model, history, and influence on the world’s economy—all worthy topics, to be sure. But as a sociologist, I am less concerned with what Wal-Mart does and more with what Wal-Mart represents . As a beacon of capitalism in a global marketplace, Wal-Mart invites both praise and condemnation from entrepreneurs, shoppers, and cultural critics alike—judgments that tell us more about what we value as a society than what we might value about any particular corporation. When considered as an icon of economic power, Wal-Mart is but one of a host of economic symbols that attract enough attention—indeed, much of it negative—to be a worthy object of investigation in its own right. This book might have been written about other public examples of controversial economic policy—such as whether immigrants should be allowed to receive public health services, or the Tea Party movement’s objections to the current tax code. Although all these controversies raise difficult questions about budgets, taxpayers, and the sanctity of market freedom, the central premise of this book is that such economic dilemmas are not really about the policy-specific details of dollars and cents, taxes or deficits. Instead, this book argues that beneath the surface 4 > 5 crisis notwithstanding, concerns about capitalism endure even in times of plenty, when credit is easy to come by and “market bubbles” seem unthinkable . The debate about Wal-Mart (which continues even as of this writing) challenges us to think about larger questions addressing the relationship between morality and market processes, particularly as they affect a range of people and issues, including low-wage workers, the environment, small businesses, taxpayers, and the array of consumers that make up the American public. Even though critics of capitalism are sometimes quick to accuse the market of immorality, I begin with the premise that markets are actually highly normative institutions that create moral meanings through the words and actions of those who interact with them. In particular, my interest here is in the recurring, patterned ways that Americans articulate different visions of a moral market through the strategic use of language—what sociologists call “public discourse.” In recent years, sociologists have become increasingly interested in showing us just how much of what we call “the market” is subject to this kind of social construction. Fourcade and Healy, for instance, describe economic systems of monetary exchange as “more or less conscious efforts to categorize , normalize, and naturalize behaviors and rules that are not natural in any way, whether in the name of economic principles (e.g., efficiency, productivity ) or more social ones (e.g., justice, social responsibility).”4 In other words, key components of market systems, such as legal forms of exchange, market regulations, and even currency itself, aren’t fixed entities at all. Instead, people and societies use markets to negotiate moral meanings and obligations, and draw on these webs of significance to justify different kinds of market activities. In fact, we could think of the market as a dependent variable that takes on particular forms of meaning and significance based on the cultural context in which it is situated.5 A good example of what this might look like in actual practice appears in Weber’s classic argument about the Protestant ethic. Fueled by angst over their uncertain salvation, Weber argued, the Calvinists turned to material success as an indicator of their divine status , prompting the savings and reinvestment that created bourgeoning markets in western Europe. The marketplace was considered a moral symbol of divine salvation, and Calvinists saw capitalism and the workings of market society as a place to affirm their individual moral worth. Other, more recent work demonstrates that human beings do indeed use economic life to create shared expressions of moral significance. As the leading champion of this view, Viviana Zelizer has illustrated this point through her analysis of the social norms and legal codes surrounding intimate relationships.6 Challenging the “hostile worlds” notion...

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