Papers by Tad Skotnicki
Meaning and the Commodity Form, 2024
Social scientists often treat the commodity form and commodity fetishism as concepts that reduce ... more Social scientists often treat the commodity form and commodity fetishism as concepts that reduce meaning to an economic base. The paper claims that this view is misguided and, furthermore, that these concepts enable
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Critical Historical Studies
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Journal of Classical Sociology, 2018
In this article, we draw on the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger to propose an appro... more In this article, we draw on the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger to propose an approach to sociology that takes human experiences of finitude and possibility as crucial topics of investigation. A concern with death is not absent in sociological thought. To the contrary, Durkheim’s Suicide grounds a sociological research tradition into death and dying. Yet Heidegger’s existentialism renders our finitude – not just death – a matter of everyday life, a constitutive feature of human existence and a source of sociological investigation. By explicating Heidegger’s interconnected concepts of finitude, futurity, authenticity and resoluteness, we propose to investigate people’s ordinary temporal experiences as well as the institutional contexts that make them possible. On this basis, we develop two concepts – existential marginalisation and existential exhaustion – that foreground questions of time, meaning and institutions in the study of poverty, inequality and everyday life.
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In capitalist societies, consumers use a range of goods mass produced under conditions of they kn... more In capitalist societies, consumers use a range of goods mass produced under conditions of they know very little. Over the last two centuries, many consumer activists have sought to remedy this ignorance and promote ethical purchasing as a solution to problems such as labor exploitation, poverty, and public health issues. This dissertation examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century origins of modern consumer activism as it arose out of consumers' encounter with anonymous goods. By comparing three pioneering groups of consumer activists -- the National Consumers' League, the Co-operative Wholesale Society, and the Women's Co-operative Guild -- we can see how this basic problem of anonymous mass- produced goods shaped their activism. It draws on the extensive archival records of these groups as well as their contemporaries to trace and compare the dynamics of their activism. Despite their contrasting origins, character, and structure, these turn-of-the-twentie...
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Theory and Society
Social scientists have severed social problems from the study of framing work in social movements... more Social scientists have severed social problems from the study of framing work in social movements. This article proposes to rejoin problems and framing work via attention to the phenomenological structure of social problems. By describing basic 1) temporal, 2) spatial, and 3) experiential features of social problems, we facilitate comparisons of different kinds of movements across distinct historical periods and regions. The approach is demonstrated via the example of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011)—suffering that develops gradually across time and extends across space as well as disproportionately afflicts disempowered people. A comparison of two very different historical cases—environmental justice advocacy in the wake of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India and consumer activism in early twentieth-century America—illustrates how slow violence presents parallel issues with respect to representing the problem and identifying the culprits. On this basis, the argument demonstrates parallels among disparate social movements by including the analysis of the phenomenological structure of social problems into comparative studies of framing work in movements. As such, this article presents analytical possibilities for incorporating experiences of social problems into the study of framing work and social movements
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Theory and Society , 2021
There is an extensive body of literature detailing the forces behind and experiences of alienatio... more There is an extensive body of literature detailing the forces behind and experiences of alienation in a modern capitalist world. However, social scientific interest in alienation had become parochial and balkanized by the 1970s. To reconstruct a unifying theory of alienation that addresses general features of capitalism, such as compulsory growth and commodification, and particular phases like financialized capitalism, we begin with the notion of futurelessness. Futurelessness refers to a deficient relationship to the future in which people's senses of possibility ossify, narrow, or dissipate. It may result from inclusion in and exclusion from capitalist mechanisms or processes. Moreover, processes of inclusion and exclusion may appear more voluntary or involuntary. With these general terms, we identify four manifestations of futurelessness in financial capitalism: commercial exhaustion, imaginative marginalization, therapeutic nowism, and pragmatic denialism. The conclusion addresses future-sustenance in an alienating world and the prospects of a more systemic and synthetic approach to alienation.
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Sociological Theory, 2020
With the aid of Hannah Arendt’s distinction between authentic and inauthentic semblances, this ar... more With the aid of Hannah Arendt’s distinction between authentic and inauthentic semblances, this article reconstructs Karl Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism as a phenomenological concept. I reveal two distinct interpretive moments in the fetish: the interpretation of goods as anonymous in exchange and the interpretation of commodity-exchange as natural. As authentic semblances, interpretations in commodity-exchange cannot be “seen through” or corrected with a shift in perspective; in contrast, as inauthentic semblances, interpretations of commodity-exchange can be corrected with such a shift. This reconsideration of commodity fetishism suggests phenomenology and interpretive analysis should contribute to an analysis of social systems.
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Theory and Society, 2019
Social scientists have severed social problems from the study of framing work in social movements... more Social scientists have severed social problems from the study of framing work in social movements. This article proposes to rejoin problems and framing work via attention to the phenomenological structure of social problems. By describing basic 1) temporal, 2) spatial, and 3) experiential features of social problems, we facilitate comparisons of different kinds of movements across distinct historical periods and regions. The approach is demonstrated via the example of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011)—suffering that develops gradually across time and extends across space as well as disproportionately afflicts disempowered people. A comparison of two very different historical cases—environmental justice advocacy in the wake of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India and consumer activism in early twentieth-century America—illustrates how slow violence presents parallel issues with respect to representing the problem and identifying the culprits. On this basis, the argument demonstrates parallels among disparate social movements by including the analysis of the phenomenological structure of social problems into comparative studies of framing work in movements. As such, this article presents analytical possibilities for incorporating experiences of social problems into the study of framing work and social movements
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Journal of Classical Sociology, 2019
In this article, we draw on the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger to propose an appro... more In this article, we draw on the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger to propose an approach to sociology that takes human experiences of finitude and possibility as crucial topics of investigation. A concern with death is not absent in sociological thought. To the contrary, Durkheim's Suicide grounds a sociological research tradition into death and dying. Yet Heidegger's existentialism renders our finitude – not just death – a matter of everyday life, a constitutive feature of human existence and a source of sociological investigation. By explicating Heidegger's interconnected concepts of finitude, futurity, authenticity and resoluteness, we propose to investigate people's ordinary temporal experiences as well as the institutional contexts that make them possible. On this basis, we develop two concepts – existential marginalisation and existential exhaustion – that foreground questions of time, meaning and institutions in the study of poverty, inequality and everyday life.
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Signs and Society, 2016
This article proposes the concept of " nationalness " to account for the persistent circulation o... more This article proposes the concept of " nationalness " to account for the persistent circulation of national labels as a tool of distinction. We argue that the concept expands on the traditional conception of nation as country of origin to include cultural notions of sensuous and aesthetic qualities that are semiotically tied to national " essence. " Nationalness connects products to nations not only through indexicality but also iconicity. It is made possible through " rhematization, " the process of appropriating signs whose interpretants are taken to be iconic. Talk of nationalness enables consumers to make sense of national labels in today's world where the both ends of capitalism—manufacturing and consumption—are thoroughly global. Instead of confining our analytical focus to top-down national branding projects, we examine how consumers invoke the idea of a nation to describe their uses of industrial products. Our case study is the popular concept of " British sound " circulated among audiophiles. Drawing on online discussions of an internet community, the article shows that audiophiles refer to Britishness as a key mechanism to distinguish their consumption experiences from mass market consumption. We further show how the label " British sound " can be used to describe the experiences of consumer products that are no longer manufactured in Britain.
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Social Movement Studies, 2016
Using the understudied genre of food reform movements for illustration, we advocate greater atten... more Using the understudied genre of food reform movements for illustration, we advocate greater attention to recurrent social movements. Analysis of these movements calls for combining three levels of historical analysis. One links the incidence and character of mobilization to long-term, large-scale historical changes; the second shows how periods of activism are also animated and shaped by specific historical contexts; and the third tracks legacies from earlier to later periods, thus both tracing additional causal influences and connecting separate cases into coherent sequences. The social movements literature includes excellent examples of each type of historical account. Combining types is much less common. Doing so, we contend, offers methodological advantages for scholars comparing and sequencing mobilization around similar problems in different historical periods. We develop the argument from three eras of food protest: Grahamites in the 1830s and early 1840s, dietary reformers and food safety campaigners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and organic advocates who gained popular support beginning in the late 1960s.
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Journal of Historical Sociology, 2017
At the turn of the twentieth century, the National Consumers’ League, the
Co-operative Wholesale ... more At the turn of the twentieth century, the National Consumers’ League, the
Co-operative Wholesale Society, and the Women’s Co-operative Guild encouraged
people to become ethical consumers. I argue that we can explain their common strategies by invoking commodity fetishism. By casting their consumer activism as a practical response to the fetish of commodities, we explain: 1) activists’ use of sensory techniques – both figurative and literal – to connect producers, commodities, and consumers and 2) their commitment to the ethical power of the senses. This account reveals the virtues of commodity fetishism as a tool for understanding the dynamics of consumer activism.
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In philosophy agency designates the inalienable ability of individuals to make choices about thei... more In philosophy agency designates the inalienable ability of individuals to make choices about their conduct that are not determined by the environment. In empirical social science, however, agency designates not autonomous free will but the launching of patterned action that surpasses constraints in the setting and that directs the course of institutional change. Many social scientists have limited the explanatory task they take on to show that agency is an indispensable part of ongoing social life. They have also reasoned that portrayals of institutional structures alone or even of the cultural resources that accompany them, such as shared scripts for social interaction, are inadequate for explaining important changes. It is typical therefore to feature agency as a logically necessary contributor. Study of agency can be improved by specifying affirmatively when and how action is in decisive ways organized independently of the constraints in the setting and this sense transcends them. This sharper requirement for positive demonstration of how agency brought about change is satisfied by reconstructing the actors' independent invention of a new master problem that guides their conduct. This promising approach to explaining transformative action has disseminated from study of artistic and scientific innovation to that of institutional change.
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Book Reviews by Tad Skotnicki
Contemporary Sociology, 2020
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Books by Tad Skotnicki
Stanford University Press, 2021
When people purchase consumer goods in the marketplace--sugar, clothes, phones--they necessarily ... more When people purchase consumer goods in the marketplace--sugar, clothes, phones--they necessarily gloss over information about their origins. The goods will, in this way, remain anonymous, and the labor that went into making them, including the supply chains through which they travel, will remain obscured. In this book, Tad Skotnicki argues that this circumstance is an endemic feature of capitalist societies, and one with which consumers have struggled for centuries in the form of activist movements constructed around what he calls the Sympathetic Consumer.
This book documents the uncanny similarities shared by such movements over the course of three centuries: the transatlantic abolitionist movement, US and English consumer movements around the turn of the twentieth century, and contemporary Fair Trade activism. Through a comparative historical study of consumer activism, the book shows, in vivid detail, how people have wrestled with the broader implications of commodity-exchange. These activists arrived at a common understanding of the relationship between consumers, producers, and commodities, and concluded that consumers were responsible for sympathizing with invisible laborers. Ultimately, Skotnicki proposes a way to identify a capitalist culture: by examining how people interpret everyday phenomena essential to capitalism as a system.
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Papers by Tad Skotnicki
Co-operative Wholesale Society, and the Women’s Co-operative Guild encouraged
people to become ethical consumers. I argue that we can explain their common strategies by invoking commodity fetishism. By casting their consumer activism as a practical response to the fetish of commodities, we explain: 1) activists’ use of sensory techniques – both figurative and literal – to connect producers, commodities, and consumers and 2) their commitment to the ethical power of the senses. This account reveals the virtues of commodity fetishism as a tool for understanding the dynamics of consumer activism.
Book Reviews by Tad Skotnicki
Books by Tad Skotnicki
This book documents the uncanny similarities shared by such movements over the course of three centuries: the transatlantic abolitionist movement, US and English consumer movements around the turn of the twentieth century, and contemporary Fair Trade activism. Through a comparative historical study of consumer activism, the book shows, in vivid detail, how people have wrestled with the broader implications of commodity-exchange. These activists arrived at a common understanding of the relationship between consumers, producers, and commodities, and concluded that consumers were responsible for sympathizing with invisible laborers. Ultimately, Skotnicki proposes a way to identify a capitalist culture: by examining how people interpret everyday phenomena essential to capitalism as a system.
Co-operative Wholesale Society, and the Women’s Co-operative Guild encouraged
people to become ethical consumers. I argue that we can explain their common strategies by invoking commodity fetishism. By casting their consumer activism as a practical response to the fetish of commodities, we explain: 1) activists’ use of sensory techniques – both figurative and literal – to connect producers, commodities, and consumers and 2) their commitment to the ethical power of the senses. This account reveals the virtues of commodity fetishism as a tool for understanding the dynamics of consumer activism.
This book documents the uncanny similarities shared by such movements over the course of three centuries: the transatlantic abolitionist movement, US and English consumer movements around the turn of the twentieth century, and contemporary Fair Trade activism. Through a comparative historical study of consumer activism, the book shows, in vivid detail, how people have wrestled with the broader implications of commodity-exchange. These activists arrived at a common understanding of the relationship between consumers, producers, and commodities, and concluded that consumers were responsible for sympathizing with invisible laborers. Ultimately, Skotnicki proposes a way to identify a capitalist culture: by examining how people interpret everyday phenomena essential to capitalism as a system.