Economic Metaphors Research Articles

«Преодоление диалектики» и семантическое пространство экономической метафоры в философии различия Ж. Деррида: к ценностному измерению деконструкции

The article discusses the conceptual design of the semantic space of economic metaphor proposed in J. Derrida’s philosophy in the context of its demarcation with the dialectical interpretation. The purpose of this work is to show how Derrida mixes under one idiom (the «economy of difference» or simply «différance») several meanings of «economy», conflicting, but functionally correlated with each other, and also, through revealing this point, to bring to the question of the value foundations of deconstructivist thinking. For this, the study employs a comparative analysis of texts by Derrida and some authors from whom he borrows and transforms the economic metaphor in the context of criticism of dialectical method of philosophizing (G. Bataille and E. Levinas). Derrida’s philosophy, by reconfiguring dialectical economy, rethinks the economic metaphor and brings out non-dialectical Difference as an independent philosophical project. The article, while also referring to F. Laruelle’s commentary, establishes that the pairing of conflicting meanings of economy, only from which a pure Difference can be obtained, is achieved by Derrida through an active balancing or shifting of emphasis in a newly understandable economic metaphor (economy and dialectic are sometimes surmountable, sometimes necessary). The principle according to which, due to this rearrangement, the semantic space of «economy» is organized, also indicates the presence of certain value preconditions in deconstruction. The results of the analysis open up prospects for exploring the question of the role of values in deconstruction. For example, it is possible to continue research with a deeper analysis of Derrida’s and Levinas’s projects in the context of the ethical questions of their philosophy.

Behaviour recommendations with a deep learning model and genetic algorithm for health debt characterisation

Human behaviour is a dense longitudinal multi-featured measure that directly impacts the health of individuals in the short and long terms. Therefore, issues usually emerge from the insistence on performing risky behaviours, such as smoking or eating fast foods, which continuously increase the gap between current and beneficial health states. This paper introduces the term “health debt” as an economic metaphor to represent the quantification of this gap in domains such as sleep, contributing to physical and mental health states. Then, we present a theoretical framework that relies on behaviour change recommendations to quantify this debt. The practical instantiation of this framework relies on passively assessed sleep related data via personal wearable devices, and uses of an attention-based predictive model as the fitness function of a genetic algorithm that acts as a recommender. We evaluate this proposal by means of a case example aimed at improving the sleep duration of individuals. Results show, for example, that the use of individual rather than generic datasets produces more accurate models. At the same time, the use of constraints on the variability of behaviours features generates more feasible recommendations. These foundations open new research opportunities to support the adoption of preventive medicine based on longitudinal wearable passive data analysis.

ORA ET LABORA В «ТЕМНОЙ АНТРОПОЛОГИИ» СОВРЕМЕННЫХ ПРАВОСЛАВНЫХ МОНАСТЫРЕЙ: Рец. на кн.: ДАРЬЯ ДУБОВКА. В МОНАСТЫРЬ С МИРОМ: В ПОИСКАХ СВЕТСКИХ КОРНЕЙ СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ДУХОВНОСТИ. СПб.: Изд-во Европ. ун-та в Санкт-Петербурге, 2020. 208 с.

The book under review is the first systematic study of subjectivation practices in contemporary Russian Orthodox monasteries based on long-term participant observation. The monograph questions the idealized, timeless image of monastic convents and their inhabitants, as if elevated above earthly life with its socially unsightly aspects—the labour exploitation, everyday violence, and the orientation toward material gain. Monasteries thus appear in the book as derived from certain configurations of power and economic relations rooted in the secular past. The monograph is also distinguished by its theoretical innovations and bold anthropological interpretation. The proposal of a new, communicative, model for the study of charismatic authority—as well as the introduction of a new variable, temporality—in the study of agency and resistance in religious contexts should be recognized as important analytical findings; these can and should be applied in studies of other religious and spiritual practices. A cautious critique of the review focuses mainly on the chosen model of ethnographic representation and the misuse of the economic metaphor, often reducing the spiritual life of the convent inhabitants to rational choice, reciprocal exchange, and the search for economic benefits, albeit understood in spiritual terms.

Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age

Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age

The foundational economy-as-an-organism assumption of ecological economics: Is it scientifically useful?

This paper documents prominent biological metaphors in ecological economics and argues that the discipline is founded on an untested assumption, essentially an analogy: The economy-as-an-organism. A transdisciplinary approach is taken to test the scientific usefulness of this analogy, and eight propositions are put forth and examined. Results show that: 1) This analogy bears all the characteristics of scientifically useful analogies, as documented in the relevant literature. 2) World Bank data from 165 countries from 1960 to 2013 show that empirically verifiable laws that apply to all organisms apply analogously to all economies – supporting the ecological economics view that economies and organisms are metabolically analogous. 3) Empirical results affirm those of a mature GDP-energy literature, despite employing very different assumptions and perspectives – thus validating the analogy's scientific potential. 4) The analogy offers a new perspective on economies, correctly predicts their “characteristics,” and generates new testable hypotheses, hallmarks of scientific analogies. 5) New perspectives and predictions relate to sustainability and are particularly relevant to researchers interested in this field – thus satisfying the “goal relevance” characteristic of scientific analogies. All results of this exploratory and conceptual paper suggest that our analogy is scientifically useful and worthy of additional research.

Clouded futures: Economic barometers and the making of the unpredictable economy

Much of what passes as economic knowledge is metaphorical in nature. This study focuses in particular on the meteorological origins of economic metaphors. Once markets became imagined in terms of atmospheric phenomena, economists and financial services providers began to construct instruments, especially forecasting models, which resembled those used in meteorology. These tools allowed them to better mimic their own metaphors. Forecasting-oriented indicators, so-called ‘barometers’, contributed to making the economy readable. Their paradoxical impact, however, was that they also created a concept of economy that offered only one type of future, namely unpredictability. This shows that economic metaphors are ambiguous, and they contribute to conceptualizations of economy that are not fully determined by economics.

From planning to entrepreneurship: On the political economy of scientific pursuit

This paper examines debates about the “planning of science” that took place in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States and Britain and argues for their enduring relevance to today's philosophical literature on scientific pursuitworthiness. In addition to proposing desiderata for scientific pursuit that retain philosophical interest, such as social utility, coordination between branches of science, and the comprehensive development of science as a whole, advocates of the planning of science shared a sense of the inextricable relationship between the philosophy of scientific pursuit and the political economy of science, including the structure of science funding and scientific institutions. Critics of the planning of science were alarmed by the movement's socialist political orientation and developed a rival account of scientific pursuit framed by the economic metaphor of the independent businessman or entrepreneur. Taking advantage of the red scare in the United States in the early years of the Cold War, advocates of scientific entrepreneurship seized the upper hand over advocates of science planning during the shaping of the postwar American science policy regime. According to the science-as-entrepreneurship view, the role of science policy was only to make judgments about which individuals seemed best equipped, due to their personal intellectual or moral virtues, to make decisions about pursuitworthiness. The ultimate triumph of this view over the planning of science opened up a gap between the philosophy of pursuit and the political economy of science that persists to the present day.

METAPHORICAL MODEL GOD IS THE NEED IN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN BIBLICAL DISCOURSE

The paper considers the critical problem of contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors underlying the conceptualization of Biblical (the Pentateuch) realia in English and Ukrainian discourse within the cognitive- discoursive framework. The complex methodology used in the research is based on the procedures of the contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors developed in works of A. Barcelona, E. V. Budaiev, and A. P. Chudynov. It allowed, first, establishing and systematizing (based on the source-domain) the main shared models of metaphorical conceptualization, namely: anthropomorphic, nature-morphic, phitomorphic, zoomorphic, sociomorphic, artifact, military, temporal, and economic metaphors; second, reconstruction and contrastive cognitive-semantic analysis of the metaphorical model GOD IS THE NEED / БОГ Є ПОТРЕБА pertinent for the English and Ukrainian, but at the same time not elaborated in the Pentateuch. The heuristic and axiological potential of the model was established. The frame-slot conceptual domain THE NEED serves as a source-domain for the target-domain GOD thereby uncovering the cognitive meanings related to the most important spheres of experience of English-speaking and Ukrainian respondents. The obtained results account for some subtle contrasts in metaphorical conceptualization of Biblical (the Pentateuch) realia by present-day representatives of English and Ukrainian linguocultures, and demonstrate the ethnocultural specificity of the national mentality against the background of the universal and shared in the process of the figurative interpretation of the world. In addition, it was found that in contrasted discourses, the concept of GOD figuratively represents the collective idea of the highest spiritual value.

Economic metaphors with the key tokens ‘price’ and ‘market’ in modern Russian media texts

Economic metaphors with the key tokens ‘price’ and ‘market’ in modern Russian media texts

Jews, Economic Metaphors, and the Healthy Body Politic: The Jewish Role in Christian Economic Narratives and the Birth of Modern Economics

Jews, Economic Metaphors, and the Healthy Body Politic: The Jewish Role in Christian Economic Narratives and the Birth of Modern Economics

Picking the right metaphors for addressing microbial systems: economic theory helps understanding biological complexity.

Any descriptive language is necessarily metaphoric and interpretative. Two somewhat overlapping-but not identical-languages have been thoroughly employed in the last decade to address the issue of regulatory complexity in biological systems: the terminology of network theory and the jargon of electric circuitry. These approaches have found many formal equivalences between the layout of extant genetic circuits and the architecture of man-made counterparts. However, these languages still fail to describe accurately key features of biological objects, in particular the diversity of signal-transfer molecules and the diffusion that is inherent to any biochemical system. Furthermore, current formalisms associated with networks and circuits can hardly face the problem of multi-scale regulatory complexity-from single molecules to entire ecosystems. We argue that the language of economic theory might be instrumental not only to portray accurately many features of regulatory networks, but also to unveil aspects of the biological complexity problem that remain opaque to other types of analyses. The main perspective opened by the economic metaphor when applied to control of microbiological activities is a focus on metabolism, not gene selfishness, as the necessary background to make sense of regulatory phenomena. As an example, we analyse and reinterpret the widespread phenomenon of catabolite repression with the formal frame of the consumer's choice theory.

Функции политической метафоры в современных электронных СМИ (на материале сетевого издания «Газета.ru»)

The paper aims to reveal specificity of the political metaphor functioning in the modern electronic media. Scientific originality of the study involves justifying the thesis that pragmatic functions of the political metaphor, its manipulative potential depend on the source sphere of metaphorical conceptualization. The conducted research allows drawing the following conclusions: military metaphors are among the most frequent ones in the modern electronic media, they perform basically the cognitive function; the expressive function is peculiar to sports metaphors, economic metaphors, anthropomorphic metaphors; the pragmatic function is characteristic for game metaphors and technological metaphors, the aesthetic function - for medical metaphors and nature-morphic metaphors.

Funds of Knowledge, Community Cultural Wealth, and the Forms of Capital: Strengths, Tensions, and Practical Considerations

Funds of Knowledge (FK), Community Cultural Wealth (CCW), and Bourdieu’s analysis of capital (BAC) have each been applied in powerful ways to address complex issues of urban education; however, the overlaps and tensions between them have been largely underexplored. When brought together, these three economic metaphors—funds, wealth, capital—surface divergences and tensions that foreground questions of educational praxis and social justice. We argue the quest for social justice requires an approach that both validates and substantively utilizes learners’ FK and CCW and critically grapples with the pervasive logic of capital that has been impressed in the fabric of our educational system.

Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Marxian Critique of Theology

ABSTRACT Marcella Althaus-Reid offers a Marxian critique of the production of theology. This article offers analysis of three aspects of this critique: First, it describes how Althaus-Reid diagnoses the intertwined realities of capitalist economies, heterosexual patriarchy in societies, and hierarchical theologies. Second, it traces her use of ideology critique as she adapted Marx’s critique of the Young Hegelians as part of her own critique of Liberation Theologians. Third, it explains her account of the production, marketing, and consumption of theology in relation to her uses of economic metaphors derived from Marx. By isolating the Marxian influence on Althaus-Reid, the article develops an account of her critique as an undressing of theological method that echoes Marx’s critiques of political economy as an unveiling of hidden mechanisms that can be applied more broadly as well. Her critique is then related to how theology can be practiced in more self-aware ways.

The use of ‘bubble’ as an economic metaphor in the news: The case of the ‘real estate bubble’ in Spain

This article analyses the emergence of the bubble metaphor and how it quickly became a widely used metaphor in the world of trade and finance since the early 18th century. The paper traces the evolution of the meaning of this economic metaphor and its popularization at different times in history, especially around periods of financial boom and crisis. Taking as a reference its current use, the study also analyses how these different significant dimensions of the economic metaphor of the bubble are used in the Spanish press, when covering the boom and the real estate crisis of 2008. Finally, the article identifies some paradoxes and inconsistencies in the use of the conceptual metaphor of the bubble in complex economic circumstances, such as a real estate boom and crash.

Framing metaphor use over time: ‘Free Economy’ metaphors in Hong Kong political discourse (1997–2017)

Diachronic studies on metaphor use in public discourse have primarily focused on Inner Circle English and European languages. However, the usage patterns of specific metaphorical frames over time is universal or cultural-specific remains underexplored. This article investigates the diachronic changes of economic metaphors focusing on the concept of free economy in a corpus of Hong Kong political discourse spanning two decades (1997–2017). We analyzed fundamental changes (transformations of source domains) and incremental changes (transformations of source-target mapping principles) in free economy metaphors. We found that free economy metaphors have slightly decreased over time. No fundamental changes were found in the use of the four frequently occurring source domains: journey, living organism, sport, and building. The meanings of free economy metaphors either remained mostly constant (living organism and sport metaphors) or underwent incremental changes (journey and building metaphors). We argue that the constancy and the incremental change were two rhetorical strategies political leaders used to frame their political agenda for achieving full economic liberalization in Hong Kong. Given the complex socio-historical background of Hong Kong, this study provides a distinct East–West perspective on diachronic economic metaphor use in an Outer Circle English context.

Budząc wampira. Z Jakubem Kornhauserem o Gherasimie Luce, rumuńskim surrealizmie i niespełnieniu rozmawiają Marta Baron-Milian i Piotr Bogalecki

Jeden z głównych tematów rozmowy Marty Baron-Milian i Piotra Bogaleckiego z Jakubem Kornhauserem, tłumaczem prozy Gherasima Luki z języka rumuńskiego i francuskiego, badaczem i popularyzatorem jego twórczości, stanowi próba usytuowania dwujęzycznej twórczości autora Biernego wampira w obszarze literatury rumuńskiej i francuskiej oraz na mapie praktyk awangardowych, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem historii surrealizmu. Poruszona w rozmowie problematyka ogniskuje się wokół zagadnień związanych z działaniem historii w tekstach Luki, ich politycznym charakterem, a podjęte tu interpretacje zmierzają do prób uchwycenia twórczości tego artysty między innymi przez pryzmat figury marana, ekonomicznych metafor czy jąkania, stanowiącego osobliwą właściwość języka zarówno prozy, jak i poezji Gherasima Luki.

AIDS as a Metaphor

In this excerpt from the essay AIDS and Its Metaphors Susan Sontag considers how the AIDS epidemic has affected lifestyles and morality. When epidemics persist for many years, the precautions that had started out as briefly enforced precautions become a part of social morality. Until 1981 the successes of medicine in treating sexually transmitted diseases encouraged emancipation from sexual morals. Sontag uses economic metaphors to designate those decades as a period of sexual spending, speculation and inflation, after which the early stages of a sexual depression set in. AIDS caused fear of sexuality to return. If cancer has taught us to fear environmental pollution, AIDS triggered a fear of pollution through people. The AIDS epidemic led to the disappearance of many secular ideals, which Sontag regards as closely linked to freedom. AIDS provided an incentive for a resurgence of conservatism in many areas. Its effect on the arts in particular was to force a rejection of modernist discoveries and a return to tonality, melody, plot, character, etc. AIDS then becomes a new realism. Sontag also addresses post-colonial issues related to the AIDS epidemic. If AIDS had been a purely African disease, notwithstanding the scale of the epidemic, it would have been considered a “natural” cataclysm similar to famine. But once the epidemic affected the West, it was no longer perceived as a natural disaster. In First World countries, disasters are understood as historical events which bring about important social change, while in Asian and African countries they are viewed as one part of a general cycle of nature and as something closer to natural phenomena. The new disease has changed very little in the operation of that logic.

Environmental Planning and Economic Resources Optimization Modelling: An Empirical Approach Based on the Earth Ecological Economic Metaphor Principle

This paper is with an objective of exploring a top-level design system model for environmental planning and economic resource optimization. Based on the economic metaphor theory of the earth’s ecological environment, of which “economic man” and “ecological man” are both involved, this study has self-built a WEMC corpus for empirical purpose. The study’s findings have revealed that, environmental planning and the optimization of economic resources reflect the relevant “eco-systemicity” from the perspective of economic metaphor, which is embodied in three major ecological categories (human, plant and animal) discovered in this empirical study; therefore, it is necessary and highly feasible to, based on the theory of systems engineering and ecological mechanics, explore and analyse the constituent factors, functions, stability, and evolution of the economic ecosystem from a new perspective and method. This paper has drawn a conclusion and proposed a top-level design system model for environmental planning and economic resource optimization based on the ecosystem integration.

The Use of Stable Expressions in Modern Economic Discourse as an Emotional Increase in the Potential Impact on Purchasing Power

This study is an attempt to analyse economic discourse metaphors and stable expressions. Significant attention is paid to metaphor creative potential in the field of terms formation as well as representation of certain aspects of economic reality events. Some rhetoric models are especially studied from the point of view of their rhetoric impact on the potential audience. The market of goods and services began to develop rapidly in the modern consumer society, and as a result, the corpus of language tools began to expand to attract the attention of potential recipients of goods and services. Economics and linguistics are two spheres of science that are united by humans – acting and thinking/ speaking. Modern consumer society requires members of society equipped with economic knowledge that facilitate the process of acquiring something. Today, advertising with economic terminology is becoming more diverse, and it can be targeted at professionals and the broadest segments of the population. Recently, not only linguistic but also paralinguistic levels of advertising discourse realisation have become more and more relevant. The authors consider the phenomenon of linguistic metaphors in economic advertising discourse. The complexity of understanding the material is due to the use of linguistic and cultural stereotypes of the local type. The authors propose to pay attention to the fact of using metaphors of a language culture to attract potential consumers of economic services and create an image of an attractive product of economic discourse in one of the primary mechanisms for managing economic interests in the consumer society. Hence, there is a need to study economic terminology and its functioning in modern economic discourse. This study considers the metaphors of economic discourse as a manifestation of his interdiscursive nature. We analyse the compatibility of economic metaphors with national and cultural symbols and possibilities to influence the audience.