This study examines how olive oil SMEs in Palestine and Greece construct and communicate sustainability as a marketing narrative, addressing four research questions: how sustainability is defined by producers, how these meanings translate into marketing narratives, what ethical logics underpin communication practices, and how macro-contextual factors shape narrative convergences and divergences. Conceptualizing sustainability as a contextually embedded system of meaning shaped by socio-political, institutional, and moral conditions, the research adopts a qualitative comparative multiple-case study design. Data were collected through 60 semi-structured interviews with SME owners, production managers, and marketing coordinators (30 per context), complemented by marketing materials analysis and exploratory consumer feedback (n=16). Thematic analysis with a structured coding hierarchy was employed, achieving saturation after the 25th interview per context. Findings reveal that sustainability functions as a narrative mechanism for articulating legitimacy, authenticity, and continuity. Greek SMEs frame sustainability through heritage, certification, and market legitimacy, reflecting integration into European institutional regimes. Palestinian SMEs construct sustainability through moral responsibility, resilience, and place attachment, shaped by political constraints and economic precarity. Exploratory consumer insights suggest that narrative reception is context-dependent: certification-based claims resonate in regulated markets, while moral narratives gain traction among culturally proximate audiences. The study contributes a conceptual framework positioning sustainability as a dynamic, relational narrative construction process, advancing sustainability marketing literature through a moral economy perspective. This shifts analytical attention from predefined sustainability indicators to producer-driven sensemaking and provides five testable propositions for future cross-context research on sustainability communication in agri-food systems.

ABSTRACT This article examines betrayal and loyalty as recurrent moral-political categories that function as structuring elements of historical experience in twentieth-century Central Europe. It argues that moments commonly described as political crises such as Munich 1938, Trianon 1920, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, and the Polish crises of 1939, 1945, and 1981 were also constitutive episodes in a moral economy of small nations, in which horizons of trust collapsed and orientations of loyalty had to be repeatedly renegotiated. Combining conceptual history, memory studies, and phenomenological reflection, the article shows how betrayal reorganised expectations, redefined legitimacy and responsibility, and reconfigured the temporal orientation of political meaning. Rather than treating betrayal as political rhetoric or as a symbolic memory motif, the study demonstrates how betrayal and loyalty operated at the intersection of political discourse, cultural memory, and lived experience of disrupted trust. By historicising the concept of small nations, the article situates Central European experiences within broader European debates on vulnerability, solidarity, and legitimacy.

ABSTRACT Animal experimentation occupies a morally contested space within human–animal relations, where the pursuit of scientific knowledge coexists with the infliction of harm. Veterinarians stand at the center of this tension, balancing commitments to animal welfare with their role in enabling research. This qualitative study examined how veterinarians working with laboratory animals in Türkiye interpret and negotiate ethical tensions emerging at the intersection of regulatory frameworks and everyday laboratory practice. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with veterinarians recruited via purposive sampling across diverse research settings and were analyzed thematically. Three main themes emerged from the analysis: (1) frameworks justifying animal experimentation, (2) dynamics shaping research processes, and (3) veterinarians stuck between ethical autonomy and hierarchical relations. Findings indicate that ethical tensions do not arise solely from individual moral ambivalence but are embedded within infrastructural conditions, ethical review processes, and hierarchical decision-making structures that shape professional agency. While these challenges resonate globally, resource constraints, fragmented institutional structures, and publication pressures driven by performance-based evaluation systems in Türkiye further intensify ethical vulnerability. Animal experimentation thus operates within a broader moral economy in which regulatory frameworks and productivity pressures shape how animal use is justified and routinized. Addressing these tensions requires strengthening institutional accountability, investing in well-equipped facilities, incentivizing the development and adoption of alternative methods, re-centering animal welfare as a shared moral concern, and safeguarding professional autonomy. Such measures are essential for redistributing ethical responsibility from individual resilience to structurally embedded governance and for fostering a more ethically coherent practice of animal research.

The Moral Economy of Worth: Why Rights-Based Mental Health Must Engage Cultural Logics of Contribution

ABSTRACT This study examines migrant incorporation and informality in the Korea–Central Asia migration corridor, focusing on Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Using 2024 administrative data from the Korean Immigration Service, it compares registration outcomes and visa composition across four sending countries with distinct institutional profiles. Rather than treating informality as policy failure, the study shows that the coexistence of formal incorporation and unregistered residence is a structured feature of migration governance. The findings are organised into an ideal‐type typology of corridor profiles—kinship‐driven, institutionalised hybrid, diversified emerging and new‐frontier informal—demonstrating how bilateral infrastructure, diaspora composition and origin‐state capacity interact with destination‐state policy to produce corridor‐specific configurations. Drawing on a transnational moral economy framework as an interpretive lens, the analysis highlights how responsibility for social reproduction is distributed across states, households and transnational networks. The typology is proposed as a transferable analytical framework for comparative corridor research, contributing to debates on selective institutionalisation, migrant precarity and the governance of managed labour mobility.

ABSTRACT This article examines the lived work experiences and challenges of Thai trans women (kathoey) sexual content creators (TKSCs) who hold microcelebrity status on platforms such as X and OnlyFans. Drawing on interviews and platform observations, the article argues that, despite illegality and moral stigma, TKSCs operate within a moral economy constituted through everyday work practices. Erotic capital is transformed into income through visibility, aesthetic and relational labour, and sustained audience engagement, improving financial stability. The study shows that fragmentation within the TKSC community is shaped by platform architectures that intensify competition alongside uneven law enforcement, producing distrust and legal precarity. Rather than passively submitting to authority, TKSCs negotiate illegality in uneven ways, while earnings are circulated through bun-khun reciprocity, reflecting expectations of familial support and obligations to parents. Overall, the article demonstrates how tacit enforcement, transnational platforms, and filial obligation shape the moral economy of sex creator work in Thailand.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how English education in South Korea has become a site of moral negotiation and ideological contestation. Once associated with global mobility, English now signifies both aspiration and inequality. Adopting a post-qualitative approach that ‘thinks with theory’, the study brings Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital and Foucault’s notion of governmentality into dialogue with policy documents, media editorials, and academic debates. It introduces the concept of moralised capital to explain how linguistic competence is evaluated not only economically but also morally. The analysis shows how moral vocabularies formed during early globalisation continue to shape contemporary debates on fairness and educational virtue. Situating English education within the moral economy of post-neoliberal Korea, the paper argues that the ‘English question’ constitutes a form of moral politics. It concludes by proposing pedagogical rationality as a way to decouple proficiency from moral judgement and restore communicative agency.

ABSTRACT This article examines how migration imaginaries are constructed prior to migration and transformed through the lived experiences of settlement. It conceptualises imagination not as a static or purely individual act but as a dynamic, socially embedded process that shapes aspirations before departure and undergoes transformation in response to lived realities abroad. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 30 middle-class Iranian immigrants and return migrants holding Iranian and Canadian citizenship, the study explores two interlinked dynamics. First, it investigates how a homogeneous, idealised imaginary of the West emerges before migration, captured by the Persian notion of Kharej, and shaped by Western media, the moral economy of departure, and the context of emigration under restrictive mobility regimes. Second, it analyzes how this migration imaginary unravels during settlement in Canada, particularly through the devaluation of cultural capital, experiences of racial discrimination, and exposure to the broader political economy of migration. The article introduces the concept of collective fantasy to theorise imagination not simply as hopeful or liberatory but also as hegemonic, idealising, and at times distorting. In doing so, it reveals how migration imaginaries both shape and complicate mobility aspirations, and how middle-class privilege becomes unstable across borders.

<i>The Moral and Market Economies of Bread: Regulation and Reform in Vienna, 1775–1885</i>

ABSTRACT This article examines Twiza, a traditional Amazigh practice of collective labor, as a gendered moral and social infrastructure in the Gheris oasis of southeastern Morocco. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Goulmima between July and August 2023, the study approaches Twiza not as a residual cultural tradition but as a historically layered system through which cooperation, authority, and social obligation are continuously produced and reconfigured. Combining feminist anthropology, moral economy, and critical heritage studies, the article traces the transformation of Twiza from a vernacular mode of governance embedded in the tajmaʿt into a dispersed and increasingly informal set of practices shaped by colonial juridification, postcolonial bureaucratization, and socio-economic change. Particular attention is given to women’s domestic Twiza, especially collective couscous making and oral performance, as resilient infrastructures of social reproduction that sustain communal life under conditions of institutional erosion and ecological scarcity. The analysis shows that rather than disappearing, collective labor has been redistributed into gendered and less visible social domains, where cooperation persists through affective, moral, and symbolic economies. By foregrounding women’s labor, voice, and everyday cooperation, the article reframes Twiza as a living form of intangible cultural heritage and proposes a relational understanding of resilience grounded in ordinary practices of care, reciprocity, and endurance.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to offer an analysis of the sexual economy of bacha bazi; (“boy play”) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Pakistan. The population focus of this study was khwaja sira, a culturally specific transgender and gender-diverse population in South Asia, legally recognized as a third gender in Pakistan. Drawing on fieldwork with khwaja sira in Mingora, Swat, Pakistan, we retrospectively examined how poverty and precarity shape the conditions where young boys are coerced into transactional sexual relationships with older men, a practice locally termed “bacha bazi.” We conducted semi-structured interviews with 45 khwaja sira in Mingora regarding their lived experiences with bacha bazi in their youth. Findings demonstrate that youth vulnerability is structured by age, class, gender, and power, where life choices are made within constrained socioeconomic possibilities. The study centers the positionality of khwaja sira as adults reflecting on their experiences of marginalization and exploitation in their youth. Moving beyond reductive binaries of victimhood and agency under extreme constraint, the present study situates bacha bazi within intersecting theoretical frameworks that conceptualize hegemonic masculinity and moral economy. Bacha bazi relationships are therefore not only a site of exploitation, but also a performance of masculine dominance, prestige, and power. By offering a qualitative account of sexual economies and queer childhoods in South Asia, the findings reframe bacha bazi as both a transactional economy and a culturally embedded expression of power and sexuality in northwestern Pakistan.

This article focuses on a commercial sector deeply entwined with diaspora humanitarianism: transnational Somali telecommunications. Telecom companies in Somalia are celebrated for innovations in digital finance and are powerful economic actors in a context affected by conflict and recurrent humanitarian crises. Emphasising the embeddedness of mobile money, the article analyses online content from a leading provider about its ‘corporate social responsibility’ activities. This dominant company's communications reflect and promote a moral economy of digital capitalism within a wider political economy of instability and humanitarian response. The article argues that the telecom sector occupies a distinctive infrastructural position from which it engages Somalia's population with a legitimating narrative of connectivity, empowerment, nationalism and piety. Analyses of different modes of crisis humanitarianism thus need to take into account the ideological characteristics of emergent forms of regional digital capitalism that can thrive in conditions of protracted state weakness and ongoing conflict.

ABSTRACT Inclusion is widely invoked as a democratic ideal in education, yet its realisation in schools takes the form of conditional belonging. This paper examines how austerity reshapes inclusion into a moral economy in which recognition is granted only to those who perform competence according to normative expectations of independence, flexibility, and evenness. Drawing on critical phenomenology and contemporary research in inclusive education, the paper conceptualises conditional inclusion as a practice that links institutional scarcity to lived experiences of pace, rhythm, and regulated participation. It argues that the baselines used to judge competence – what counts as a ‘basic skill,’ or an acceptable form of participation – are historically contingent and intertwined with shifting ideals of usefulness. Austerity hardens these baselines into moral demands, obscuring their political origins and narrowing the conditions under which learners can appear as capable. As an alternative, the paper proposes a relational conception of inclusion grounded in resonance, attentiveness, and temporal generosity rather than auditability. Pedagogical implications highlight the need to cultivate rhythm, relational presence, and space as ethical conditions for teaching. By reframing inclusion as an ongoing relational practice , the paper offers a conceptual lens for rethinking policy, support, and classroom pedagogy under conditions of austerity.

ABSTRACT Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered a historic wave of emigration, reshaping the landscape of Russian political opposition abroad. Thousands of wartime migrants and exiles have sought to contest the Kremlin’s war and authoritarianism through transnational activism. Yet, as this special issue demonstrates, the relationship between exile and activism is deeply ambivalent. Rather than an automatic extension of dissent across borders, activism in exile is marked by complex tensions–between empowerment and despair, hope and burnout, solidarity and disengagement. Drawing on six contributions spanning diverse contexts and methods, the issue develops approaches to grasp the contradictions and a shared analytical framework built on three interrelated themes: ambivalent agency, deservingness, and fragmented solidarities. Together, the articles show how new Russian exile communities in Europe and beyond navigate moral economies of guilt and responsibility, struggle with internal divisions and contested narratives in receiving societies, and confront emotional and material constraints on political engagement. By tracing these dynamics across multiple sites of migrants’ activism, this issue advances broader insights into the possibilities and limits of transnational mobilization against authoritarian regime in times of war.

This qualitative study examines how silence and family communication taboos shape academic identity among low-income scholarship students in Indonesia. Grounded in interpretive family communication scholarship and critical perspectives on power, the study conceptualizes silence not as an absence of communication but as a morally regulated practice embedded in classed life conditions. In-depth interviews with 31 first-generation scholarship students identify four interconnected processes: silence learned and normalized as a family norm; selective disclosure enacted to protect parents’ emotional stability; fragmentation of academic identity resulting from limited narrative space at home; and student agency cultivated through peers, faculty relationships, and reflective practices. The findings demonstrate that silence functions as a moral economy of endurance and sacrifice, structuring what students perceive as permissible to voice or withhold within relationships. Although students construct meanings beyond family boundaries, this agency entails emotional strain and distance from familial recognition, challenging disclosure-centered assumptions while illuminating how class, morality, and power shape academic lives.

Abstract This conceptual review examines how autonomy became the dominant moral grammar of late modern Western societies and how its expansion reshapes subjectivity, institutions, public life, and healthcare practice. A genealogy traces autonomy from Enlightenment duty bound self legislation and civic self rule, through liberal non interference, to later forms shaped by expressive individualism, therapeutic culture, and recognition based claims. The paper argues that autonomy’s normative achievements remain decisive, yet its cultural absolutization can generate a fragile subject who is highly expressive but insufficiently equipped for sustained responsibility. Five linked pathologies are analysed: autonomy as entitlement and boundary protection, transgression emptied by indeterminate norms, opinion transformed into performative positioning under hyperpluralism and platform surveillance, symbolic authority eroded across education and the professions, and duties devalued within a rights centred moral economy. In response, the paper proposes a reconstructive framework that redefines autonomy as ethical maturity, a formed capability sustained by responsibility, legitimate authority, deliberative practices of opinion, and duty. Particular attention is given to philosophy of medicine, where patient autonomy and professional autonomy illuminate the difference between supported agency and consumerist choice. Methodologically, the article combines genealogical reconstruction, phenomenological interpretation, and a purposive interdisciplinary synthesis of sociology, developmental psychology, philosophy of medicine, moral psychology, and media studies. Implications are sketched for education, healthcare, professional trust, and platform governance, with emphasis on proportional accountability and repair.

Detty December has emerged as a recurrent feature of urban economies in West Africa, driven by large-scale diasporic return and intensified seasonal consumption. Despite its growing visibility in policy, tourism, and media discourse, the phenomenon remains under-theorised within development studies and is rarely examined as an economic system with governance and ethical implications. This paper conceptualises Detty December as a diaspora-driven, SME-centred seasonal economy characterised by compressed demand cycles, informal enterprise dominance, and weak institutional mediation. Drawing on development economics, SME and informal economy scholarship, and moral economy perspectives, the paper argues that short-term demand surges interact with institutional voids to generate concentrated but unstable value creation. While seasonal inflows produce significant income opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises, they also intensify risk exposure, labour precarity, and asymmetric responsibility between mobile diasporic consumers and place-bound local economic actors. To situate these dynamics within longer-run development patterns, the paper introduces the illustrative case of Eruku Oshodi, a locally embedded cocoa-based beverage, to demonstrate historical continuity in the informal circulation of African-origin value without durable institutional protection or developmental consolidation. This parallel highlights how recurring informal economic systems can generate visibility and value while remaining structurally unmanaged. The paper contributes to development scholarship by reframing diaspora engagement beyond remittances and entrepreneurship, foregrounding seasonal time as an organising economic dimension, and integrating ethical governance into the analysis of informal SME economies. It concludes by outlining selective, ethics-informed policy directions for engaging with predictable seasonal demand systems in ways that reduce vulnerability and enhance developmental outcomes in urban African contexts.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the dynamic interaction between global sukuk markets and climate policy uncertainty (CPU), examining how Islamic financial instruments respond to climate-related policy shifts. It explores the potential of Islamic finance to support sustainability-linked investment and contribute to ecological resilience by analyzing sukuk performance in the context of evolving environmental policies. As a result, it is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, Infrastructure) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). Design/methodology/approach The analysis uses continuous wavelet transform methods to examine time–frequency relationships between CPU and 15 sukuk indices across diverse regions from 2010 to 2024. This technique captures both short- and long-term comovement patterns, which allows an in-depth understanding of the market response to evolving policy dynamics. The results reveal nuanced responses of sukuk markets to crisis-driven events and global climate policy signals. Findings The results reveal that sukuk markets exhibit heightened sensitivity to climate policy shifts, particularly during global environmental events such as conference of the parties (COP) summits and the COVID-19 pandemic. Sukuk are especially responsive over longer time horizons, suggesting they can absorb and reflect structural sustainability concerns and are well positioned to advance sustainable finance. These findings suggest that sukuk serve as asset-backed, adaptable instruments that promote intergenerational equity, one of the principles of sustainable development described by the United Nations. Practical implications Global and regional sukuk have the potential to act as effective hedging instruments during periods of heightened climate policy uncertainty, especially as environmental awareness grows and green sukuk markets expand. These findings are particularly relevant for countries aiming to integrate sukuk into their sustainable development strategies, notably those facing high climate vulnerability. To support this, regulatory bodies should ensure that sukuk issuance and investment practices align with established environmental, social and governance standards. Social implications The findings offer valuable insights for ethical and faith-based investors who seek to align their portfolios with environmental sustainability and social responsibility. It reinforces the role of Islamic finance in advancing inclusive, values-driven investment practices. Originality/value This study presents a novel analysis of the relationship between CPU and major sukuk markets. It fills a critical gap in the sustainable finance literature by demonstrating how sukuk can serve as a bridge between Islamic finance and climate-aligned investment. In doing so, the study offers a credible pathway toward inclusive and resilient financial systems grounded in the principles of the Islamic Moral Economy framework. The paper provides original insights into how Islamic financial instruments directly contribute to achieving SDG 13, SDG 9 and SDG 17.

ABSTRACT This article uses moral economy as a framework to explain why women publicans and street sellers were made to spin yarn for manufactories and spinning houses in eighteenth-century Sweden. As a case study it compares two textile manufactories established in Falun in the 1720s and 1740s, looking at how the plans and aims differed over time and what effects this had on the economic outcomes for both institutions. The article refers to the legal discourse concerning the women who were subject to spinning houses and finds similarities with the women in Falun who were supposed to spin at manufactories. Finally, the article analyses how the ideology of moral economy changed there in the 1740s, as selling women disappeared from the discussion and the manufactories became more commercial.

This article examines how UNESCO World Heritage listing and its subsequent tourism developments reshape livelihoods, participation, and cultural continuity. The study case is Jingmai Mountain, Yunnan—a tea-forest cultural landscape maintained by the Blang and Dai communities in southwestern China. The research, carried out 18 months after UNESCO’s earmarking, unveils the early tourism developments and the community changes in response to these. Based on observation and interviews across four villages in the area, the analysis integrates Community-Based Ecotourism, the Sustainable Livelihood Framework, and critical heritage perspectives into a new model. The results show that residents assess benefit-sharing through a moral economy in which fairness is defined as proportional return, while participation is channelled through mediated representation via hierarchical local governmental structures. Ecotourism is largely a supplementary, risk-buffering strategy that complements under-forest tea cultivation, sustaining livelihood resilience while re-weighting valued competencies toward hospitality, Mandarin language, and platform visibility. Heritage recognition has strengthened cultural confidence and renewed intergenerational engagement with tea-related practices, yet environmental pressures and regulatory demands expose uneven capacities to participate and benefit.