TY - JOUR
T1 - Exploiting Ambiguity
T2 - A Moral Polysemy Approach to Variation in Economic Practices
AU - Altomonte, Guillermina
N1 - Funding Information:
Many thanks to Rachel Sherman, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Iddo Tavory, Adam D. Reich, Sonia Prelat, Jussara Raxlen, Sidra Kamran, Beth Bechky, Manuela Badilla Rajevic, Julia Ott, Tina Wu, and Clara Mattei for valuable comments and generous readings of various drafts. I am especially indebted to Eliza Brown for key suggestions during the revision process, including the idea for the title. Participants of NYU’s Ethnography Workshop and The New School’s Sociology Department Writing Seminar and Heilbroner Center Graduate Fellows Workshop also provided helpful feedback. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2018 Impairment and Social Sciences Conference at Columbia University and the American Sociological Association 2018 Annual Meeting. I thank the ASR editors and three anonymous reviewers for their thorough comments and guidance, which improved this article significantly. The author received funding from the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School: Dissertation Fellowship, 2017–2018, and the Sociology Department at the New School: Dissertation Fellowship, 2017–2018.
Funding Information:
The author received funding from the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School: Dissertation Fellowship, 2017–2018, and the Sociology Department at the New School: Dissertation Fellowship, 2017–2018.
Publisher Copyright:
© American Sociological Association 2020.
PY - 2020/2/1
Y1 - 2020/2/1
N2 - Sociologists have shown that the relationships people establish between moral orientations and market practices vary considerably across historical, geographic, and institutional contexts. Less attention has been paid to situational variation in how the same actors moralize different economic goals, especially in their workplace. This article offers an account of situational variation by theorizing the implications of the ambiguity of moral values for economic activity. I draw on the case of a post-acute care unit, where reimbursement policies create the contradictory demands of discharging elderly patients quickly while ensuring their safety to avoid re-hospitalization. Using ethnography and interviews, I show that the same actors switched between different normative evaluations of “independent aging” to legitimize divergent organizational goals. A shared understanding of autonomy as synonymous with “home” moralized the organizational mission of discharging patients off the unit. Expectations that elderly people attain independence by acknowledging need for assistance moralized the extension of services. Conversely, interpreting independence as a constellation of duties to be self-reliant moralized practices that lead to fast discharge. Based on these findings, I develop a framework of moral polysemy to analyze ambiguity as a resource for cooperation in organizations and a tool to expand understanding of moral economies.
AB - Sociologists have shown that the relationships people establish between moral orientations and market practices vary considerably across historical, geographic, and institutional contexts. Less attention has been paid to situational variation in how the same actors moralize different economic goals, especially in their workplace. This article offers an account of situational variation by theorizing the implications of the ambiguity of moral values for economic activity. I draw on the case of a post-acute care unit, where reimbursement policies create the contradictory demands of discharging elderly patients quickly while ensuring their safety to avoid re-hospitalization. Using ethnography and interviews, I show that the same actors switched between different normative evaluations of “independent aging” to legitimize divergent organizational goals. A shared understanding of autonomy as synonymous with “home” moralized the organizational mission of discharging patients off the unit. Expectations that elderly people attain independence by acknowledging need for assistance moralized the extension of services. Conversely, interpreting independence as a constellation of duties to be self-reliant moralized practices that lead to fast discharge. Based on these findings, I develop a framework of moral polysemy to analyze ambiguity as a resource for cooperation in organizations and a tool to expand understanding of moral economies.
KW - aging
KW - culture
KW - economic sociology
KW - morality
KW - organizations
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U2 - 10.1177/0003122419895986
DO - 10.1177/0003122419895986
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85078754234
SN - 0003-1224
VL - 85
SP - 76
EP - 105
JO - American sociological review
JF - American sociological review
IS - 1
ER -