In the past two decades, social movements advocating for food sovereignty, the most visible being Via Campesina (the peasant's way), have successfully articulated an alternative paradigm to the dominant models of industrial food production and free trade. Food sovereignty is constructed upon particular conceptions of the moral economies of peasants and assumptions about how peasants deploy moral values and economic practices to resist commoditisation. This ethnography establishes how peasants relate to the commoditisation of grain, land and labour in their everyday lives, and in turn reflects on what a food sovereignty rooted in campesino moral economies would look like. To do this, I conducted fieldwork in a village in the Matagalpa Highlands of Nicaragua, documenting campesinos' everyday practices, moral ideologies and social norms regarding the production, transfer and exchange of food, land and labour. This research breaks down the idea that market exchanges are only profit-seeking and gift-giving is solely the product of mutuality. I argue that campesino households and communities engage partially with capitalist markets whilst pursuing autonomy from them. This is achieved through resisting commoditisation to different degrees for different commodities, with moral norms allowing certain things to fall in and out of commodity status. Moral norms allow for grain and labour to be sold as a commodity in particular circumstances whereas fully resist the sale of land. Autonomy from the market is underpinned by ideologies of solidarity, shaped by the social embeddedness of exchanges determined by relations of kinship, affiliation and locality. Whilst these ideologies succeed in stalling capitalist accumulation, they can reproduce conservative notions of the family and disguise intra-community class inequalities. I show how market exchanges are frequently used to deliver solidarity and that family networks can also be used to extract profit: exchanges have become a contested battlefield, where exploiters can portray themselves as helpers.

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In India, the efforts by the welfare state to aid the poor and improve their lives focus on formal, quantifiable, and bureaucratic policies in the form of housing, education, and employment. Yet, little is known about the less formal and experiential aspects of their lives and livelihoods. The Gonds, living in a Central Indian district of Panna in the state of Madhya Pradesh, are one group that has rarely partaken of the above welfare state policies designed to aid them, yet are surviving in the face of continuous threats to their traditional ways of forest-based livelihoods. The Gonds are an indigenous group of people, also known as adivasis, that are categorized as a scheduled tribes (STs). They lack basic literacy and possess no material assets like land. How then are Gonds creating their own forms of social welfare and economic security? Having worked on the Gonds' lives in their labouring roles as majdoors (labourers), and having understood how they experienced hardships has lead me to reflect on how they aspire to live dignified lives and exercise agency within the informal economy. A life-course perspective of Gonds' livelihood practices show that the informal economy works for Gonds because they exercise their agency in various ways, including by demanding desired wages and forms of work that are unavailable through formal welfare state schemes. The Gonds in fact experience dignity as they use the informal economy to stay debt-free, avoid starvation, and create formidable and reliable forms of care for their families. Thus, the thesis contributes to the literature on informal and precarious forms of work in India by showing, through the example of the Gonds, how even though the poor may feel vulnerable and disconnected from formal welfare schemes, they may still experience dignity through livelihood diversification and their exercise of agency and access to social capital. The thesis also presents empirical findings on labour contracts, the informal economy, and poverty.

Natural economic orders are made and unmade. Industries such as telecommunications, rail transportation, and electricity distribution are prime examples. In the last two decades we have witnessed the widespread unmaking of these long established public natural monopolies. This study focuses its attention on the state-owned monopoly in Swedish telecommunications which became complete in 1918 and prevailed until the beginning of the 1980s. Given the present widely-held understanding that this was a natural monopoly eventually unmade by technological change, this study asks how this natural monopoly once emerged. The study concentrates on the creation and the technological and economic stabilisation of a national state-owned monopoly in telephony in Sweden during the period 1903 - 1930. At the centre is the termination of competition in telephony in Stockholm in 1918. The study is devoted to a detailed investigation into the various controversies whose eventual settlement led to the creation of the monopoly and the introduction of automatic exchanges, a central theme in the stabilisation of the monopoly. Focusing on techno-economic controversies, this study presents a perceptive approach to the inquiry into order and change in industries, allowing for an inclusion of how notions of the natural order and the inevitable change are made and sustained within such fields of economic practice. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 1999