Informal markets and global value chains – the disembedding of Romanian dairy smallholders

The Romanian dairy-farming sector is marked by subsistence and semi-subsistence farms. Through consolidation in the retail and dairy sector, the price pressure has moved toward producers of raw milk. Through new European, national and private standards and global actors tapping into the Romanian market this development is reinforced. At the same time, the smallholders, formerly accepted to be acting on an informal level, cannot access their main distribution channels anymore. Additionally, through several legal constraints being developed since Romania’s accession to the European Union, the smallholders are neither able to issue invoices, nor to access certain subsidy programmes as they are not considered juridical persons. This article focuses on the consequences of this disembedding of farmers. The peasants are pushed toward informal activities or value chain positions, in which they do not have any bargaining power with the globally sourcing intermediaries they are supplying. The contemporary approaches of global value chains and global production networks build the theoretical framework for the study. Here it is argued that informal markets must be included into these approaches more concisely.     

The Abstraction of Care: What Work Counts?

Nurses provide essential health care labor, but their work, a mix of caregiving and clinical expertise, is often undervalued and unacknowledged by health care administrators and the policies and practices that govern health care more broadly. Based on interviews with nurses working in the New York metropolitan area and through pairing feminist political economy with literature on abstraction and politics of the possible, I show that the ways in which nurses’ work is measured creates a value hierarchy of tasks. Examining various tools of measurement, I argue that methods for measuring work are rooted in an historical and continuous hierarchy of what counts as work and what has value. For nurses, these processes obscure the essential care work they perform. I argue that bringing an explicit politics of social reproduction to the politics of measuring and accounting for work makes visible necessary and often‐obscured tasks, spaces, and social relations.     

The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, 1954–1970

This article offers a re-contextualization of the Positivism Dispute between the Frankfurt School and advocates of empirical sociology in the German sociological profession between 1954 and 1970. Investigating the reasons why the German Sociological Association convened in Tübingen in October 1961, it assigns a more peripheral role to Karl Popper and this now famous seminar. Focusing instead on the debate among German sociologists from the mid-1950s which prompted the convention of the seminar and the invitation for Popper to speak, the article maintains that philosophy of history was the central concern of the Positivism Dispute. In this debate, members of the Frankfurt School emphasized contingency in history and society, while sociologists such as René König, Helmut Schelsky, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Arnold Gehlen advocated sociology as the empirical study of ‘given’ social facts. By doing so the article questions the narrative of the Positivism Dispute advanced by Karl Popper and some of his followers, as well as interpretations which have focused on debates during the aftermath of the Tübingen seminar in the 1960s.