The social as metaphor and the case of cooperatives
Subtitle: a critique of economic individualism
By: by Marie L. Pellegrin-Rescia and Yair Levi.
Contributors: Levi, Yair.
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Burlington, Vt
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
Subjects: Economic history; Social psychology; Critical discourse analysis
Description: "Drawing on Polanyi, Austin and Lacan; Marie Pellegrin-Rescia and Yair Levi offer a powerful critique of the language and categories of thought that dominate the contemporary intellectual and political landscape. The general tendency to dichotomize concepts such as left and right, social and economic, globalization and anti-globalization, is, they argue, a consequence of our subservience to the primacy of the rational economic agent."

"The authors offer a selection of case studies of co-operatives, which are shown to be paradoxical entities in a worldview in which the social exists only as a metaphor for a space concerned with the damage caused by the economic. Through an analysis of experiences in achieving civil accord in South Africa and in establishing a new town in the mountains of Sicily, they offer a new political orientation in a world of uncertainty. In doing so they attempt an answer to one of the most intriguing questions of our time: should we accept as a fait-accompli the way our society is conceived and shaped, or can we have a say in the matter and assume the ethical responsibility involved?"--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The thinking-talking human being and his categories of thought; title: The speaking-acting subject and the symbolic register; title: The speaking-acting individual and the imaginary of the 'social' discourse; title: Interdependence and places of wandering; title: Symbolic delimitation vs imaginary bonds; title: Anthropological debt vs imaginary work places; title: Readiness to lose vs imaginary places of production; title: Conclusion; title: Images, myths and stereotypes; title: Origins and constituent elements; title: Tensions and inconsistencies; title: Interpreting the socio-economic duality; title: The paradoxes of cooperatives; title: Case studies; title: What have we learned from cooperatives?; title: Summary and conclusions; title: Thinking 'nestedness' as a system of constituent rules; title: Thinking the political with the categories of the symbolic : the case of South Africa; title: Thinking the virtual more real than reality : the Città Aperta, Sicily; title: Conclusions.