The Transformation of Morals in Markets: Death, Benefits, and the Exchange of Life Insurance Policies

Abstract

This article adopts an institutional approach to describe the changing secondary market for life insurance in the United States. Since the 1990s, this market, in which investors buy strangers' life insurance policies, has grown in the face of considerable moral ambivalence. The author uses news reports and interviews to identify and describe three conceptions of this market: sacred revulsion, consumerist consolation, and rationalized reconciliation. Differences among the conceptions are considered in view of the institutional legacy of life insurance and its success in organizing practices, perceptions, and understandings about markets and death. From this case, the author draws implications for analyses of morals in markets, an important and emergent topic within economic sociology.

« La mort est mon métier »

“…Dans le même sens, les entreprises de l'Internet n'hésitent pas à rappeler à leurs membres qu'ils doivent organiser leur mort numérique et mettre en place, même à un âge peu avancé, les mesures pour s'effacer des réseaux sociaux ou autres. Les entreprises, par leurs discours, pratiques, innovations, stratégies, participent à changer l'ordre moral (Quinn, 2008) en démystifiant la mort. Par leurs efforts, les acteurs de ces industries légitiment l'élargissement des activités ouvertes au commerce de la mort (Anteby, 2010).…”

Theorizing command-and-commodify regulation: the case of species conservation banking in the United States

“…"Property," as Roy (1997: 16) summarizes, "institutionalizes power," and of course a central insight of the sociology of markets is that these institutions are anything but autonomous or "free" of political and state intervention (Campbell and Lindberg 1990;Fligstein 2001;Polanyi 2001;Carruthers and Ariovich 2004;Vogel 2016). Indeed, contemporary sociologists have in many ways gone well beyond the legal realist critique, highlighting the ways that markets and exchange are not only social and political creations of the law and thus of states, but are culturally contingent (Fourcade and Healy 2007;Quinn 2008;Zelizer 2011) and continuously shaped by contention, mobilization, and 'power plays' within them (Rao et al 2000;King and Pearce 2010;Rao et al 2011).…”

“…Examples include specific prescriptions for action outlined in administrative rules, including legal precedent (Schneiberg and Bartley 2001;Quinn 2008); the passage or dissolution of laws constraining particular exchanges (Vogel 2012;Funk and Hirschman 2014); and even the direct use of state-sponsored physical coercion and violence to force actors to take particular actions, or to make space for particular markets (Levien 2013). As in the case of economic power discussed above, movements, mobilization, and contention, including political battles over the morality and cultural embeddedness of particular market exchanges (e.g.…”

Obilježja i dosezi razvoja memorijalnog turizma u Hrvatskoj

“…Među tim otvorenim pitanjima različiti autori ističu npr. pitanje etičnosti eksplicitnih reinscenacija tragičnih događanja, kao i prikazivanja posljedica nasilja u turističke svrhe (Sather-Wagstaff, 2008: 80), zatim opasnost od moguće trivijalizacije važnih povijesnih činjenica kroz masovnu turističku potrošnju (Strange i Kempa, 2003: 387) pretvarajući mjesta masovnih stradanja u tematske parkove (Johnston et al, 2013: 269), kao i opasnost od pojave kulturne erozije zbog pretvaranja smrti u potrošačko dobro (Quinn, 2008: 19 prema Sandel, 1998. Za isticanje zajedničkog nazivnika svih prethodno navedenih, ali i drugih dilema vezanih uz komodifikaciju smrti, može nam poslužiti razmišljanje Dalea i Robinsona (2011: 207) koji ističu da su, zbog pretvaranja smrti i tragedije u potrošačko dobro, zvjerstva počinjena nad drugim ljudima često puta ili podcijenjena ili pretjerano komercijalizirana, što u konačnici rezultira gubitkom povijesnog konteksta prerano izgubljenih života.…”