About
Research Team: Benjamin Fong, Jennifer Silva, Monica McDermott, and Jared Abbott
The moral economy project is a collaborative deep dive on the economic values and orientations of contemporary American working people. We aim to excavate popular economic views and aspirations, modes of economic evaluation, and practices by working inductively and qualitatively towards building more general survey-based investigations. We will endeavor to capture a variety of communities of interest like unions, cooperatives, and intentional communities representing a variety of American working people in a variety of regions. To overcome the distance between academic discourse on these issues and the language being used by working people in their communities and workplaces we will collaborate with organizations of working people in both designing and executing the research with the goal of not just contributing to academic research but contributing to the organizational and institutional knowledge of working people.
We have piloted a study on food service workers and are currently writing up our research for a forthcoming academic article.