Toward a Sociology of Monetary Compensation: A Diagnostic View

• In Event: 30462 - Theory Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5. Theorizing Economy

Abstract

This article advances a diagnostic framework for analyzing the moral scope and flaws of monetary restitution for human injury. The law and economics literature expands upon optimism regarding money’s capacity to restore and deter. The critical sociolegal scholarship views legal commensuration as suffocating civic virtues and reinforcing inequalities. In contrast to this binarism, cultural economic sociology treats monetary compensation as a context-bound moral project—the meanings negotiated over and placed on the payment—and thus asks how intersubjective meaning-making informs what counts as morally appropriate criteria, format, and amount of monetary compensation. The proposed approach extends this cultural analysis with a framework for studying how the moralization of monetary compensation can perpetuate systemic harm. The diagnostic framework focuses on the categories of evaluation, the scripts of action, and the principles of restitution that are institutionalized through monetary compensation to identify how these cultural processes can be biased in favor of the status quo, hindering the perceptions and actions available to injured groups. I identify three cultural routes: justification, standardization, and depoliticization, through which the purported moral foundations behind monetary compensation obscure systemic disregards, deflect attention away from broader accountability, and confine the matter as nonpolitical. The diagnostic framework complements cultural economic sociology to better understand the ways monetary restitution perpetuates avoidable hazards and unequal distribution of injury.

Author

• Yalcin Ozkan, Dickinson College