Alienation: The critique that refuses to disappear

Abstract

Although it is often condemned as an imprecise concept, alienation continues to flourish as critique in contemporary philosophy, theology, and psychology, as well as in sociology. Historically originating in Roman law, where it referred to the transfer of land ownership, alienation has since been applied extensively to analyses of labor relations, politics, and culture. In the 19th century, Marx showed that workers' alienation, their dehumanization and estrangement, was a consequence of the structure of exploitation in capitalist industry. The concern was echoed in Weber's metaphor of the 'iron cage' as an outcome of rationalized structures, as well as in Durkheim's conceptualization of anomie as a variant of alienation causing socially induced psychological states. Today, while research in the structural tradition does not assume that people necessarily are aware of their condition, researchers who assume that alienation is a conscious experience have invented scales to measure its intensity. Continuing both the structural and the psychosocial traditions, researchers now study alienation in relation to uses of digital technologies and new forms of exploitation in work, as well as in politics and popular culture. Alienation is also studied in families, especially in investigations of parenthood.

From Solidity to Liquidity: Macro-Level Consumption Patterns in the Sharing Economy

“…Specifically, the sharing economy falls short of democratizing consumption and empowering consumers because consumption objects in the sharing economy are highly commodified and focus on exchange value rather than use value (Eckhardt and Bardhi 2015; 2016), which in turn results in low levels of human activity and social relationships as well as high levels of private consumption and consumer alienation. As Kalekin-Fishman and Langman (2015) observe, “because consumption has become commercialized, mass produced, and decreasingly subject to individuals’ control, aspirations can easily be frustrated and alienation enhanced” (p. 919).…”

“…It is also important to point out that consumers may actually have difficulties self-reporting their own consumption patterns. For example, Kalekin-Fishman and Langman (2015) observe that “many workers who are objectively powerless and lead fragmented lives are unaware of being alienated and even declare themselves satisfied with their lot at work” (p. 925). Actors are usually able to assess micro-level or macro-1-level phenomena (i.e., phenomena of marketing systems within which actors act and which are closer to the experiences of these actors), whereas it is much more difficult for actors to assess macro-2-level phenomena (i.e., phenomena that relate to well-being for abstract entities such as society or nature) (Haase, Becker, and Pick 2018).…”

The possibility of disalienated work: Being at home in alternative organizations

“…In Marx’s writings it gained a specific meaning as an experience endured by workers who did not have control over their labour or its products. The concept has remained the focus of continued scholarly attention, albeit recently more often in the field of sociology (Kalekin-Fishman and Langman, 2015) than in organization or management studies (though see Endrissat et al, 2015; Golden and Veiga, 2015). In contemporary critical work, it has been applied most often to the estrangement felt by workers in post-industrial workplaces despite managerial attempts to produce various forms of affective attachment through ideas such as ‘teamwork’, ‘community’, ‘culture’ and so on (Barker, 1993; Bauman, 1998; Costas and Fleming, 2009; Cederström and Fleming, 2012; Vincent, 2011).…”

Altruism: New perspectives of research on a classical theme in sociology of morality

“…However, one more objective of the article is to show how sociology, which now arguably does not play a key role in the studies of altruism, can contribute to this interdisciplinary field by drawing attention to the classical sociological conceptions of altruism, for which it was of primary significance. I argue that altruism is a crucial classical sociological concept which, like anomie or alienation (Kalekin-Fishman and Langman, 2015), still has a considerable potential for both theoretical and empirical application.…”