The Moral Economy of Failure

This paper attempts to place contemporary market and state-based surveillance and monitoring regimes within a moral economy framework with the aim of developing a sociological approach to the moral economy of failure. The paper begins by reviewing different understandings of moral economy and their applications, both historical and contemporary, across different political, economic, and cultural contexts. It then sets out an approach to moral economy that focuses both on the norms and sentiments that frame economic and social relations and their associated practices as well as the ways in which these practices are legitimated. Following this the paper examines the literature on failure in different spaces including failure of markets, valuation regimes, and innovations. We focus on organisational and professional failures, market failures, failures of governance and policy and failures in innovation and experimentalism. In each case the discussion relates the scholarship on failure to the moral economy highlighting the interrelationships between the two and how practices related to failure are reframed and legitimated. Our discussion highlights a double standard with respect to failure. For some, generally the wealthy and powerful, it is possible to embrace failure; to hold it up as an example of ones capacity to adapt, to survive to embrace new ideas and through individual resilience, to learn and grow from the experience. But in other circumstances particularly for those living in poverty, for marginal groups and for the racially profiled, failure attracts shame, stigma, and punishment. We conclude by arguing that a research agenda addressing the moral economy of failure needs to be built on socio-historical understandings of failure in different contexts, cultures, and environments. We suggest this offers a way of identifying progressive futures and acts as innovation.