Moral Order Research Articles

The climate-nature emergency and higher education

The Climate-Nature Emergency (CNE) is an existential crisis that makes urgent the need to fundamentally transform the dominant model of social and economic development. Amid the wreckage created by competitive accumulation and hyper consumption, the crucial need is to develop a sustainable moral order, embodying constructive human-nature and human-human relations. Following Durkheim, the main components of a moral order are the state, which is the crucial repository of collective interest, and individuals who take responsibility for self-improvement and the implementation of social values. The CNE foregrounds the capacity of states everywhere to both organise centrally and foster devolved community agency that can effectively address local problems and disasters. Working with government, higher education has a central role to play in advancing and defending science, fostering skills and knowledge in government, and in developing reflexive agents effective in social action in all of the local, communal, national, regional and global scales. The CNE also calls up the need to overhaul the curriculum to render it consistent with ecological survival. Higher education has an advanced capacity to cooperate across national borders and can assist nation-states in the difficult but vital process of building stable global cooperation. In addressing these issues, China and higher education in China have strong endogenous traditions, ancient and recent, on which to draw, including the consensual role of the Sinic state, which when functioning effectively draws on widespread public support; governance through deep devolution within the framework of central policies; Confucian self-cultivation with its capacity to foster consciously reflective lifelong learners; and tianxia an approach to global cooperation founded in moral values and norms of conduct rather than coercion. When combined with the Western respect for personal freedom and initiative, these qualities have much to offer in addressing the CNE, not only in China but across the world.

Être libre et sans roi ? Nationalisme et antimonarchisme au Québec et en Écosse

Independence, as a political quest for nationhood, does not sit well with the existence of a monarch in whom such sovereignty resides. The Scottish reality, however, is more nuanced in this respect. This article analyses anti-monarchist arguments in the Quebec (1980 and 1995) and Scottish (2014) referendum campaigns, through the prism of the functions associated with the monarchy as a symbol of unity, as the embodiment of a national history, as the guardian of liberal democracy and a certain notion of equality, of a moral and religious order redefined as a collective ethos to better suit the course of modernity. The analysis shows every function of the monarchy is targeted by nationalists. This is true of its symbolic dimension, seen as a mere accessory, but also of its position in the institutional architecture, where its role as guardian of social unity in the face of the division inherent in democracy is turned against it. It is then described as fundamentally inegalitarian and responsible for the injustices perpetrated against Francophones in Canada. However, the monarchy is treated very differently in the two territories, ranging from indifference and disdain in Quebec to an intimate relationship that is difficult to question in Scotland.

Rebel, Traitor, Sailor, Spy: The Social Figure of the Smuggler in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain

Smuggling was a common practice in eighteenth-century Britain and British governments tried to prevent it with an increasing arsenal of penal statutes. Beyond the practice of smuggling, however, it was much debated as evidence of deeper problems. Among local populations, it was often regarded as a “socially accepted crime”. In government circles, the wide-spread nature of smuggling led to the belief that it was morally corrupting the people and contributing to the decline of state authority. During times of war, it was linked to the suspicion that smugglers were collaborating with enemies of the kingdom by working as spies. In this line of thinking, smugglers were actively betraying their country. The article focuses on these contradicting views on smuggling during the 1740s. It analyses a number of different discourses on smuggling in order to demonstrate how the social figure of the smuggler changed its appearance in relation to the debates in which it served as an example and argument. It puts particular emphasis on the moments when the social figure of the smugglers turned into a traitor (by betraying his kingdom to the enemy) or rebel (by wilfully corrupting the moral and political order of the kingdom)

Être libre et sans roi ? Nationalisme et antimonarchisme au Québec et en Écosse

Independence, as a political quest for nationhood, does not sit well with the existence of a monarch in whom such sovereignty resides. The Scottish reality, however, is more nuanced in this respect. This article analyses anti-monarchist arguments in the Quebec (1980 and 1995) and Scottish (2014) referendum campaigns, through the prism of the functions associated with the monarchy as a symbol of unity, as the embodiment of a national history, as the guardian of liberal democracy and a certain notion of equality, of a moral and religious order redefined as a collective ethos to better suit the course of modernity. The analysis shows every function of the monarchy is targeted by nationalists. This is true of its symbolic dimension, seen as a mere accessory, but also of its position in the institutional architecture, where its role as guardian of social unity in the face of the division inherent in democracy is turned against it. It is then described as fundamentally inegalitarian and responsible for the injustices perpetrated against Francophones in Canada. However, the monarchy is treated very differently in the two territories, ranging from indifference and disdain in Quebec to an intimate relationship that is difficult to question in Scotland.

Presença de São Tomás de Aquino na construção da narrativa medieval sobre o dinheiro

ABSTRACT As a reverse effect of constraining interpretation and limiting itself to the moral ordering of commerce defended by Aquinas, the Summa Theologica both motivated the enrichment of the Christian imaginary in narratives like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and Geoffrey Chaucer’s work, The Canterbury Tales. In the case of the Divine Comedy, it expanded the reflection on the categories of sinners related to money, and as regards The Canterbury Tales, it provided support for the construction of anti-models in some of the framed narrative types of misers, simoniacs, and fraudsters. This article aims to present Aquinas’ instructions regarding the uses of money, juxtaposing, at times, with literary texts. For this purpose, biblical passages, commentators of the Catholic tradition Bible, and texts from economists are brought in as the Summa Theologica is analyzed. Theoretical thinkers of Christian thought, such as Augustine and Boethius, and economic thought, such as Molina and Robbins, have been used.

Security, Society, and the Perennial Struggles over the Sacred: Revising the Wars of Religion in International Relations Theory

AbstractInternational relations theory tends to build on the conventional narrative of the Wars of Religion (WoR), which holds it was the irrationality of religious violence that generated the modern international system of pragmatic secular states—resulting in the presumed secularized, rational, and unemotive nature of politics. In contrast, this article reorients our focus to Durkheim's more social view of religion as a community of believers and to the continued role of the sacred and shared emotion/affect in social and political life. Specifically, it examines how modern communities (such as nations) remain constituted by a shared faith in conceptions of the sacred and how the corresponding sense of moral order is central to the enduring pursuit of ontological security. Therefore, it argues that international relations should focus on the perennial struggles over what communities hold sacred and that we can better understand the propensity for (“religious” or “secular”) violence by examining the continual interplay between the sacred, ontological security, and the hermeneutics of morality—with the so-called WoR being the locus classicus of this argument. Historical studies exploring how participants in the WoR navigated such struggles over the sacred thus allow us to explore these dynamics and further conceptualize our understanding of the sacred within modern “secular” politics. The article concludes by examining how the prospect for violence is interrelated with the perennial struggles over the sacred within, and between, political orders—a sentiment that brings into relief some of the hazards accompanying growing intrastate moral polarization and interstate ideological rivalry.

Symbolic violence or semiotic mediator? Examining the regulative order through school rituals in China

This paper contributes to the discussion on how Chinese ‘unpromising’ pedagogic practices featured with strong framing over teacher-student relations contribute to students’ educational involvement. Based on semi-structured interviews with 120 students from 4 secondary schools in Eastern China, this qualitative study employs Bernstein's concept of the ‘regulative order’ to examine the regulative dimension of schooling inscribed in school rituals. The Bernsteinian approach offers both an internal perspective on specific configurations of school rituals and an external perspective on socio-cultural meanings attached to them. The present study finds that the regulative order in China's schooling comes to be in a double-faced position. On the one hand, the regulative order imbued with the notion of ‘impersonality’, enacted through consensual rituals that make explicit authority relationships, serves as a ‘semiotic mediator’ in effecting a desirable separation from home and commitment to the school code. On the other hand, it imposes ‘symbolic violence’ on low-achieving students, through differentiating rituals which deepen existing academic divisions. It argues that the strongly framed regulative order is encapsulated within Confucian educational ideals and the distribution of its different aspects among students reflects a moral order characteristic with exam-oriented meritocracy in society.

Milli Eğitim Yönetimi Sürecinde Kamu Politikasının Analizi

If policy analysis in education management is considered as a whole, it can be divided into parts and decomposed to understand this whole, and parts or sections are examined and details are revealed, so that the activity of having an idea about the whole can be called education policy analysis. The starting point of policy analysis in the educational process is to conceptualize the problem in order to achieve the desired goals and facilitate the determination of appropriate systems. This stage is generally related to policy problems and policy options. It is important to pay attention to the focus of policy areas in content creation, to ensure consensus to a large extent and to be meticulous on sensitive issues. In the analyses, the problem areas can be reviewed according to fairness, equality, effectiveness and ineffectiveness, quality or quantity, impact on the economy and similar issues. Policy analysis is partly descriptive. Because policy analysis is based on social and behavioral sciences that make claims about the consequences and causes of policy. But it is also normative. Normative, economic and decision analysis are also closely related to other branches of social and political philosophy and morality in order to verify and evaluate the moral values of politics and claims about expectations. This normative aspect of policy analysis is necessary. Because political knowledge allows achieving the desired results and is based on preferred forms of behavior, value judgments and processes based on morality. A policy problem is an unrealized value or, with it, the opportunity for defined development that can be achieved through public action. The knowledge that will solve the problem requires knowledge about the previous conditions of the problem (such as school safety or standard of living) as well as knowledge about the values of success that lead to the solution of the problem. Knowledge about policy problems plays a critical role in policy analysis. Because the path of the identified problem requires searching for appropriate solutions. Insufficient or incorrect information can lead to a very important error. Key Words: National Education, Education Management, Public Policy, Policy Analysis

Fasilitasi Musyawarah Daerah VII Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim se-Indonesia (ICMI) Organisasi Daerah Kabupaten Wonosobo

The Indonesian Muslim Scholars Association (ICMI) is a community organization that is Islamic, Indonesian, cultural, scientific, and intellectual. ICMI aspires to realize a moral and competitive civil society life order, so that it is prosperous outwardly and mentally. This research was motivated by the curiosity of researchers to find out the contribution of ICMI Wonosobo Regency to the lives of Muslims in Wonosobo. This paper is a qualitative field research, and is analyzed excitively. Conducted on Thursday, November 23, 2023 in Wonosobo Regency, with the object of research ICMI Regional Deliberation VII Wonosobo Regency Regional Organization, and the research subjects consisted of the activity committee, ICMI Wonosobo regency administrators, and several organizations, which involved 27 responses. The results of this activity show that the existence of the Indonesian Muslim Scholars Association (ICMI) in Wonosobo Regency implicitly has an impact on the community through inspiration. The idea emerged from the Indonesian Muslim Scholars Association in Wonosobo Regency to be able to advance Muslims themselves. The real impact can be proven by the large number of cadres of the Association of Scholars who enter the government bureaucracy with expertise in their respective fields. The conclusion focuses on the importance of the Indonesian Association of Muslim Scholars and its contribution and implications for the expansion of community empowerment in the social domain of the community. This research contributes to more specific future research directions and their contribution to sustainable human resource development.

Young children's narratives of exclusion in peer relationships in early childhood education and care

In peer culture, children develop social and moral orderings that justify exclusion of one or more peers – an area that has sparked debate among early childhood education groups. Therefore, the present study employed the idea of the power order or social and moral ordering of belonging to explore young children's narratives of social exclusion. We asked what story types can be identified in these narratives and how exclusion is reasoned in them. The data consisted of 25 narratives produced by 12 children, aged 4–6 years, via the Story Magician's Playtime method in early childhood education and care in Finland. Four story types were identified (repulsion, hierarchy, adult as mediator and conciliation), in which the moral reasoning for and conclusion of the exclusion differed. The diverse story types manifested complex negotiations, meaning-makings and diversity of emotions, in which children transcended dichotomous, black-and-white moral reasoning. Children's narratives illuminate how they negotiate social orders in situational interactions. Rules prescribed for children from adults are reproduced, modified and reinterpreted in these interactions. The narratives imparted the contradictions between preserving specific rules and members for ongoing play and the altruistic all-can-participate rule. The study highlighted the importance of addressing exclusion situations in ECEC. If social exclusion is not reflected on with children, they are left alone to solve these situations, which may cause a vicious cycle for repeatedly excluded children.

The Moral Matrix of Capitalism: Insights from Central and Eastern Europe

This special section aims to shed light on moral milieus and agencies in contemporary capitalist central and eastern Europe. Drawing on case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Russia, it offers insight into changing perceptions of proper economy and practice amongst a broad range of actors—from landfill workers to business managers and the super-rich. The contributors explore how actors at various scales morally construct, contest, and defend ideas of justice, (re-)distribution, and social worth, as well as socio-economic hierarchy, inequality, and harm. They analyse the capitalist moral transformation and order in the region and examine the local appropriation of and buy-in to (as well as critique of) aspects of neoliberal moral orders—a topic sidelined in much of the existing moral economy scholarship. Exploring a broad range of moral economic phenomena, the contributors move beyond the conventional definition of morals as prosocial norms and action, approaching morals as a broader empirical phenomenon of economy and politics. They examine the actions, practices, and reasoning of different actors in relation to shifting notions of acceptable and unacceptable, just and unjust, and praiseworthy and blameworthy behaviour. As such, this collection makes the case for widening the empirical object and analytical purchase of moral economy to include the study of not only moral critiques and resistance to capitalism but also the diverse moral agencies, milieus and orders of capitalism, and the ways in which the advancement and embedding of the capitalist moral order has shaped economic life in the region.

“I Keep Forgetting You’re Still Alive”: Unmasking Impoliteness in the Xsphere

Pragmatic competence entails awareness-raising of impoliteness. This paper delves into the pragmatics of impoliteness in online communication, focusing on X (Twitter) interactions, with a particular emphasis on 126 replies to Elon Musk's controversial tweet. Utilizing Culpeper's (2011) model of impoliteness formulae and implicational impoliteness, the study analyzes responses to this tweet, exploring the multifaceted dimensions of impoliteness. The research also investigates the moral order expectations expressed by the repliers, shedding light on the factors influencing their reactions and responses. By employing qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis, the study reveals the nuanced forms of impoliteness and the underlying moral order themes inherent in these online exchanges. Responsible wealth behavior, appropriate and non-offensive language, respect and decency, refraining from political narratives, engaging in social responsibility, and showingtransparency, accountability, and ethics were the identified moral order expectations. The findings underscore the relevance of examining impoliteness in the digital age, where public figures’ tweets can have far-reaching consequences and provoke diverse reactions from the online community. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of impoliteness in online discourse and its implications for social media interactions by language learners, which are currently lacking in language classrooms.

Beyond school-related learning: Parent-child homework talk as a morality building activity

Family interactions constitute an arena for children's moral development: it is indeed through ordinary talk, and shared, task-oriented activities that children are socialized into moral orders and culturally informed ways of thinking and acting. Drawing on a video-based study on the everyday life of 19 middle-class families and adopting a discourse analytic approach, the paper sheds light on the socializing function of a domestic activity: homework. We illustrate that, when it unfolds as a family activity, the issues at stake go far beyond its school-oriented goals: homework provides ‘ethical affordances’ that make relevant moral talk whereby parents introduce children to some unquestioned principles such as homework must be done neatly and it is part of the child's duties. We contend that, by participating in morally loaded homework interactions, children are socialized not only into a school-aligned cultural list concerning what is right and what is wrong about homework, but moreover into a constitutive, taken-for-granted pillar of human sociality: the moral assessability of human conduct, i.e., its being subject to evaluations informed by the ‘right vs. wrong’ category. Implications for teacher training and parent education programs are discussed in the conclusion.

‘That’s not how you do it’: Moralising the migrant in the Norwegian outdoors

Participation in outdoor recreational activities is encouraged as a successful method for refugees to learn Norwegian language and culture, based on an assumption that this facilitates social inclusion into Norwegian society. Whilst diversity and engagement in the outdoors is highly valued and strongly encouraged, much because of their social and health benefits, there is also much to suggest that the Norwegian outdoors works to include some more than others. The outdoors is, hence, not a neutral space for everybody to access and enjoy. This article engages with organisers of outdoor recreational activities, or friluftsliv, for refugees through an investigation of how and why organisers are ‘engineering’ the refugees’ behaviours so as to fit established normativities and ideologies inherent in the outdoors. By drawing on conceptualisations of moral geographies and the ‘moralisation of citizenship’, the article identifies three categories of normativities which serve as a basis for a discussion of how the moral ordering of bodies contributes to a citizen-making project, aiming to create certain types of ideal outdoor citizens. The article also contributes to discussions of whether and how moralisation of citizenship can create a moral order that places newcomers as outsiders, fuelling already-existing challenges regarding inclusion and exclusion of refugees in Norwegian society.

Accountability in the environmental crisis: From microsocial practices to moral orders

AbstractThe global environmental crisis is the result of a complex web of causation and distributed agency, where not even the most powerful individual actors can be considered responsible nor remedy the situation alone. This has prompted multiple calls across societies for transformative social change. What role can accountability play in this context? Starting in the theoretical traditions of microsociology and pragmatic sociology, this article elaborates the role of accountability in social interactions. To provide an account that justifies an action or inaction is here understood as a process of social ordering, where accounts are assessed as acceptable only after they have been tested against higher normative principles. Microsocial practices are, in this way, linked to macrosocial order. The following section turns to the global environmental crisis, showing that the crisis raises normative as well as epistemic challenges. The complexity of the socio‐environmental situation makes it hard to know what should be done and opens normative orders and epistemic claims to contestation. This situation provides increased opportunities for strategic maneuvering to justify actions as well as opportunities to question social practices and social order. The article concludes by discussing the role of accountability in climate change. Accountability can serve as a mechanism to attach issues to the current environmental crisis and re‐embed decisions and practice in an environmental moral order. As part of a broader palette of instruments, rules and norms, accountability has an important function to play in transforming society towards sustainability.

Impoliteness and morality as instruments of destructive informal social control in online harassment targeting Swedish journalists

This study investigates the interplay between morality, impoliteness, and moral order in the online harassment of Swedish journalists on Twitter. It reveals how impoliteness serves as a tool to harm the media's epistemic credibility, rooted in anti-press and populist rhetoric, and exert destructive informal social control. The highlighted paradox is that provisions for freedom of speech, designed to protect, are paradoxically used to suppress journalists' voices through targeted insults and derogatory language. The study uncovers that such harassment is systematic, politically motivated, and morally grounded. We emphasize the urgent need to recognize and confront these subtle tactics that threaten journalistic freedom and, consequently, access to information in Sweden and internationally under growing criticism that seeks to delegitimize the media.

Defensive racism and Christian righteousness in the time of Trump

This paper interrogates the relationship between Christianity, race and politics in the US through what I call ‘defensive racism’ — a multi-modal form of anti-Black racism that displaces racism, denies its existence toward Black Americans, and deflects racism away from white people. Drawing on ethnographic data, including qualitative interviews and participant observation data, collected in the US with white conservative Evangelicals from October 2020 to November 2022, I show how white evangelicals reproduce a racial, moral order through expressions of defensive racism. By focusing on the meanings and enactment of righteousness, this paper also deepens and refines the concept of Christian nationalism, which seeks to uphold the idea of a righteous Christian nation. By situating conservative white Evangelicals' anti-Black racism in relation to Trump's presidency, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the rise of racial consciousness around anti-Blackness in the US, I examine how white evangelicals reposition themselves racially and religiously in response to socio-political changes.

Philosophy of Body: Practicing Logic, Managing Diversity and Telling about that Practice and Management: the African Contribution to the Practice of Philosophy

While in predicating and designating, quantifying and generalizing, and in numbering, English speakers use one/many figuring, Yoruba speakers do the same in whole/part as they, like their English counterparts, do the little embodied rituals (with hands, eyes, gestures) that go with these acts. Numbers as used in English and Yoruba languages reveal two systems of abstraction constructed in two diverse systems of categorization. The disparity in the two strings of abstraction is the divergence between Yoruba and English, regarding the forms of actions that bodies do, actions that are in turn coded as the language users engage in predication and designation. As a part of grammar, natural number is a historical product; an attempt at giving meaning. It has been naturalized, and is no longer seen as a social product. Establishing how the truths numbers form come into existence, Verran explains quantifying as resulting from ritualized and routinized collective embodied acting. She renders an account of generalization in the explanatory frame of “emergent worlds.” She tells of the experience of doing quantification and managing diversity in a manner that allows a “going-on together” in Yoruba classrooms, markets, and civil administration. She tells of practicing diversity and telling about that practice, a responsible communication of diversity as practicable and amenable to matters of mutual concern. She also recounts an ‘irresponsible’ doing and telling of difference (conservativist universalism and liberalist relativism), a contriving that legislates a moral order, presenting difference as undoable and unmanageable. Contemplating worlds as outcomes of reciprocally rebelling and cooperating co-players, we find explanatory frames that not only celebrate difference and sameness, and appreciate the place of the inanimate in the animate (human), but also that do not radically sever the symbolic from the material.

Creativity - Fundamental Factor in Professional Success

In modern society, there is an increasingly intense search for not only the economic efficiency of labor, but also human efficiency, but above all, to achieve the satisfaction of labor. The satisfaction of the mountain is the result of the difference between the amount of moral or financial order that a man finds in the restored mountain and what he estimates that he should get. It determines performance and the characteristics of personality, motivation, adherence, creativity, mental and organizational health. The present study aims to verify the role of creativity factors in determining professional success. It is to be expected that people with a high creative potential can also present a high level of professional satisfaction, a level especially associated with professional success. We are also interested in studying which dimensions of professional success are related to aspects of creativity.

Legitimacy and Respectability on the Skin: Bruises, Women’s Rugby and Situational Meaning

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores amateur rugby women’s reflexive negotiation of the bruises they earn as a result of the physicality of the game. On one hand, participants take pride in body marks that confirm their athletic strength and rugby identity and which grants them respect and belonging. On the other hand, these body marks can be anchors of stigma, signalling women’s rugby bodies as ‘deviant’ to non-initiated audiences. The article unpacks this tension between bruises as empowering or disempowering artefacts by demonstrating the situational and interactional nature of gendered dispositions and expectations. I show that the moral and symbolic order of entrenched gendered expectations is perpetuated in the flesh, but that it must be understood as being produced and reproduced in situ through intercorporeal processes. Through the analysis of bruises, I argue that to study bodies is to study (social) space.