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Recently, as a corollary of intensified efforts to understand the rise of right-wing populism, the topic of social recognition has gained renewed attention in sociological research. It seems that a sense of misrecognition and exclusion is shaped as much by cultural as by economic factors. Just how these elements are interlinked, however, remains a black box. In this article, I offer an empirical contribution to this problem: I demonstrate that social recognition is nourished in everyday interpersonal relations and that people negotiate ideas of economic deservingness in their social surroundings—so much so, in fact, that they make social ties dependent on them. The article studies the case of the post-1989 societal shifts in formerly communist-ruled East Germany, a context marked by a pervasive sense of social exclusion today. In interviews with 41 individuals who lived through this rupturing process, I identify a crucial dynamic of social misrecognition in how respondents evaluate other peoples’ strategies of coping with the economic fallout of this time and how they draw—often deeply personal—boundaries between themselves and others on these grounds.

As the spread of Covid-19 hit societies around the world, governments stepped up to contain the pandemic’s economic shock. Governments saved businesses and stabilized employment through extensive fiscal relief packages. In this paper, we analyze public debates around zombie firms – businesses that are unprofitable and/or unable to pay interests on their debt but still receive public aid. In popular culture, zombies are contagious creatures that threaten the “healthy” order of society; in economic discourse, we suggest, the zombie trope is no less rich in cultural meaning and metaphor. Specifically, we are interested in how narrative meaning around zombie firms can be employed to describe the role of the state and the role of the market in addressing economic crises and economic transformations. We comparatively explore how zombie firms are discussed in two societies, Germany and Italy, during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Combining computational and qualitative text analysis, we investigate how newspapers on the left and on the right imbue this term with meaning. Our results show that German and Italian debates are more similar than expected. Right-leaning newspapers in both countries depict zombie firms as a problem of debt, which is seen as caused and aggravated by undesired state intervention in market dynamics. Left-leaning newspapers articulate more nuanced positions: while German left-leaning newspapers tend to reject the trope of zombie firms and defend pandemic state interventions such as short-time work programs, their Italian counterparts also argue for the need for such policies but associate zombie firms with doubts about the efficiency of state support in the long term.

ZusammenfassungDer vorliegende Beitrag präsentiert Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojekts zur Nachwendezeit in Ostdeutschland, das mit 41 Personen, die den Umbruch von 1989 als junge Erwachsene erlebt haben, durchgeführt wurde. Auf Basis von semi-strukturierten Interviews diskutiert der Beitrag symbolische Grenzziehungen, die Gesprächspartner/innen in Bezug auf die Erfahrungen dritter Personen nach 1989 artikulieren, und mit denen sie ein legitimes „Wir“ nach 1989 konstruieren. Es zeigen sich zwei Muster symbolischer Grenzziehungen: erstens die Abgrenzung zu politisch Begünstigten nach 1989 („Wendehals“); zweitens die Abgrenzung zu Personen, die sich nach der Wende aufgrund von sozialer Auf- oder Abwärtsmobilität negativ im Charakter verändert hätten. In Bezug auf den zweiten Typus wird das Phänomen der Brüche in ehemaligen Nahbeziehungen (vor allem Freundschaftsbeziehungen) nach 1989 als eine wichtige Form der symbolischen Grenzziehung analysiert. Der Beitrag stellt insgesamt die Bedeutung einer Ethik desSich-treu-Bleibensvor dem Hintergrund der kollektiven Krisenerfahrung nach 1989 heraus, die auf eine Verschränkung sozioökonomischer und moralischer Grenzziehungen verweist.

The concentration of wealth is a key component of the rise in economic inequality at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While the abolition of taxes on private wealth during the 1990s and 2000s is recognized as an important institutional driver behind this development, comparatively little is known about the justification of tax cuts for the wealthy in advanced democracies. This paper investigates how the abolishment of the personal net wealth tax in Germany, a country with high levels of wealth inequality, has been debated and justified in parliament over a period of 20 years. Using a mixed methods approach that combines computational social science methods and a qualitative analysis, we examine how Germany’s two major parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), have variously construed the meaning and purpose of the wealth tax and justified their support for or opposition to it. While the Social Democrats debate the wealth tax primarily from a social justice perspective, the Christian Democrats rely on an efficiency frame that invokes biological metaphors, enabling them to narrate the wealth tax as a threat to the social body. Paradoxically, then, by arguing that the tax is “poison to the economy”, conservative discourse succeeds in linking opposition to the wealth tax to a principle of social unity. On these grounds, we suggest that future research should scrutinize how the interrelation between political discourse and institutional architectures has facilitated the rise of wealth inequality in recent decades.

This chapter argues that the ‘moral economy’ concept can contribute to our understanding of the relation between morality and economy in economic sociology. The benefits of the concept are twofold: First, it allows scholars to conceptualize the relationship between morality and economic action not only on the level of single markets, as is common in economic sociology, but also with regard to the larger institutional architecture of capitalist societies. Second, while many economic sociology studies tend to focus on the role of morality for the functioning of markets, the moral economy perspective allows for the consideration of the potentially conflictual relationship between morality and economy. We discuss exemplary studies from the moral economy perspective in four substantive areas - transitions to capitalism, welfare regimes and the moral economy of (re)distribution, commodification and taboo markets, and collective agency - in order to flesh out these ideas.

Power in sociological studies of memory is commonly understood as a function of political interests that are successfully framed as an inclusive and convincing story about selected elements of the past. By showing how negotiations of memory are driven by dynamics of symbolic exchange and by distinguishing techniques of narration emerging from this process, I develop a theoretical model that helps to better understand the locus of symbolic power in mnemonic agency. I consider the case of the plans surrounding a European history museum to show how persistent notions of cultural unity can be drafted in democratic societies.

A majority of today’s visitors to the Auschwitz memorial site take photos to document their stay. By calling attention to visitors’ photography on site, this article investigates the role of visual perception and visual techniques of memory for visits to memorial sites and empirically discusses the significance of historical imagination in linking the past with the present. Visitors’ photography at Auschwitz can be considered a mnemonic practice because seemingly lookalike, amateur pictures express modes of experience which are negotiated within an ethical and social framework. The strongest emotional impulse expressed in amateur photography on site is the feeling of the sublime, which supports the need to promote moral ideas like freedom or justice in the face of the past. Through participant-orientated research, this article contends that visual perception regulates sensual impressions during a visit and identifies six dominant photographic genres through which visitors focus their historical understanding of the site. Single images function within this as “storyboards” because of their strong narrative as well as mnemonic quality.

Employing a cultural sociological approach, this article asks how individuals from two postsocialist societies articulate principles of justice by providing narrative accounts of other peoples’ perceived choices and social mobility trajectories after 1989. Using data from an interview study of 67 respondents from former East Germany and the Czech Republic, I present two interrelated findings: First, as respondents negotiate the tension between the principles of merit and need, they show widespread support for the idea that individuals are personally responsible for their fate despite the legacy of egalitarianism commonly associated with postsocialist societies. Second, individuals can effectively challenge the principle of merit by using a certain type of eventful knowledge about economic change after 1989 that is articulated morally but points to the limits of choice. The article distinguishes different notions of deservingness and contributes to the current debate on the links between culture and economics.