Galit Ailon
Biographic Data
| ID | 95617 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Galit Ailon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Galit |
| FAMILY NAME | Ailon |
| SIGNATURE | AILON G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bar-Ilan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4595-5439 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 64 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Multiple Realities of Action: A Phenomenological Answer to the Question of Unsettled Contexts
How is action constituted when the taken‐for‐granted cultural resources and supports usually shaping it lose their taken‐for‐grantedness? This question is relevant to a range of culturally unsettled situations, including those stemming from crises, displacements and even extensive reflexivity. Existing answers nevertheless remain incomplete, lacking the theoretical tools necessary for understanding taken‐for‐grantedness and its loss as lived expe…
Out of time: The Temporal Limits of Coronavirus-Inspired Solidarity With Workers
Researchers note that cultural images of possible economic futures are to a great extent rooted in the frames of thinking of the present. But not all present frames of thinking yield such images; some are excluded from our sense of what the future can be. Analyzing how the Wall Street Journal referred to workers at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, this study identifies such a frame—a solidarity frame—and reveals discursive formations that…
Profit, Self, and Agency: A Reevaluation
In 1939, Erich Fromm argued that capitalist culture imbues the pursuit of economic advantage with moral tensions that harm self and psyche. Since this time, the inner implications of such tensions have been somewhat overlooked by theorists, and not without seemingly good reasons. By many accounts, social and technological developments in the later decades of the 20th century have ostensibly reduced the cultural tensions surrounding profit making …
The Double Meaning of Money
How does monetization affect interpersonal relationships? Drawing on social phenomenology, I argue that an answer must account for money's symbolic dualism: On the one hand, as Zelizer has shown, money is differentially earmarked according to the interpersonal relationships it flows through. On the other hand, in everyday life, people tend to associate money with cold impersonality. Money's dual association with both the interpersonal and the imp…
Life is about risk management: Lay Finance and the Generalization of Risk Thinking to Nonfinancial Domains
This article examines the financial discourse on insecurity using a case study of the promotion of lay finance in Israel. Based on an analysis of financial courses, conferences, online texts and books that are designed for the lay public, the analysis shows that promoters of financial market engagements use everyday stories of marital and work-related insecurities-stories of divorce, betrayal, abandonment, unemployment and the like-to illustrate …
The Phenomenology of Homo Economicus
Much has been written about the fictitious nature of the atomistic model of homo economicus. Nevertheless, this economic model of self-interest and egoism has become conventional wisdom in market societies. This article offers a phenomenological explanation for the model's commonsensical grip. Building on the work of Alfred Schutz, I argue that a reliance on homo economicus as an interpretive scheme for making sense of the behavior of economic Ot…
No one to trust: The Cultural Embedding of Atomism in Financial Markets
The paper ethnographically explores the cultural embedding of atomistic indifference in online, global financial markets: arenas that have been digitally designed according to economic ideals and that demand an extreme form of relational and social dissociation from the partners to exchange and from those affected by the transactions. Its case-study is lay financial-trading in Israel, a country undergoing extensive neoliberalization. The study sh…
Bracketing the Nation: Lay Financial Trading in Israel
In recent years, anthropologists have raised questions regarding the ways in which global financial cultures shape national imaginaries and sentiment. On the basis of an ethnographic study of the popularization of financial trading in Israel, I show in this paper that the calculative orientation of lay traders toward the nation involves attempts to cultivate what they refer to as "market cynicism": a normatively detached perspective in which they…
The Paradoxes of Self-Branding: An Analysis of Consultants’ Professional Web Pages
Research has demonstrated the growing preoccupation with self-branding among professionals struggling with the precarious labor market. Much of this work has considered self-branding a commodification process turned inward, blurring the distinction between self and market. Yet, little attention has been paid to self-branding implementation. Conceptualizing self-branding as a rhetorical genre, the authors analyze the webpages of 100 self-declared …
From superstars to devils: The ethical discourse on managerial figures involved in a corporate scandal
This article draws upon a growing body of Foucauldian-inspired literature on business ethics. Looking at the media as a prime site of dynamic discursive production in contemporary times, it offers an analysis of the underlying moral sensitivities and ethical frameworks characteristic of reports about the two top managerial figures involved in the Enron scandal: Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay. Analysing Forbes and BusinessWeek articles, the a…
Rethinking calculation: The Popularization of Financial Trading Outside the Global Centres of Finance
The paper looks at the popularization of financial trading in Israel. It presents a qualitative analysis of the calculative models and techniques that are promoted by financial trading schools, service firms and books. Broadly, the popularization of trading in this field involves a focus on ‘technical analysis’ (TA) and relies upon a socio-psychological reading of financial charts. Incorporating explicitly non-economic ideas into traders’ calcula…
Financial Risk-taking as a Sociological Gamble: Notes on the Development of a New Social Perspective
This article attempts to bring into focus a sociological aspect of financialization that has evaded theoretical attention. Integrating the findings of a growing body of literature on the sociology of finance, it assembles evidence that financial markets entail a particular awareness of, and perspective on, the social. This perspective is characterized by three attributes: a ‘reflexive social distancing’ whereby financial actors observe social pro…
The psycho-discursive origins of moral panics: Attempting a new theoretical synthesis
Setting Sail on Stormy Waters: On the Role of Organizational Ethnographers in the Age of Financialization
Current financialization marks a broad cultural shift in the economy. It also marks a cultural shift within organizations. Primarily, it seems to challenge the status of profit as an ultimate measure that no logic transcends, sanctifying in its place the concept of 'shareholder value'. This article discusses this transformation and argues that it has two major implications for organizational ethnographers. First, it holds the potential for overco…
The Discursive Management of Financial Risk Scandals: The Case of Wall Street Journal Commentaries on LTCM and Enron
Mapping the cultural grammar of reflexivity: The case of the Enron scandal
Theorists of political economy, institutional sociology and late modernity have recently embraced 'reflexivity' as a pivotal concept in their accounts of change in capitalist society and institutions. Despite significant differences between them, these theorists jointly promote an image of reflexivity as a culturally unstructured or disembedded reflection upon problematized conventions and beliefs. The paper turns this joint theoretical image int…
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Culture's Consequences in A Value Test of its Own Design
The paper offers a critical reading of Geert Hofstede's (1980) Culture's Consequences using an analytical strategy where the book is mirrored against itself and analyzed in terms of its own proposed value dimensions. “Mirroring” unravels the book's normative viewpoint and political subtext and exposes discursive interests in its research process. Making all this evident in the canonical book's own terms, this paper communicates critical concerns …
What B Would Otherwise Do: A Critique of Conceptualizations of ‘Power’ in Organizational Theory
The paper presents a critique of organizational theories that is based upon Robert Dahl’s famous definition: ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’. This definition highlights the fact that appreciating ‘power’ often demands knowledge not only about what B does but also about what B would otherwise do. Organizational theorists, it is argued, lacked such knowledge. Instead, they relied up…
The Paradoxes of Self-Branding: An Analysis of Consultants’ Professional Web Pages
Research has demonstrated the growing preoccupation with self-branding among professionals struggling with the precarious labor market. Much of this work has considered self-branding a commodification process turned inward, blurring the distinction between self and market. Yet, little attention has been paid to self-branding implementation. Conceptualizing self-branding as a rhetorical genre, the authors analyze the webpages of 100 self-declared …
Mapping the cultural grammar of reflexivity: The case of the Enron scandal
Theorists of political economy, institutional sociology and late modernity have recently embraced 'reflexivity' as a pivotal concept in their accounts of change in capitalist society and institutions. Despite significant differences between them, these theorists jointly promote an image of reflexivity as a culturally unstructured or disembedded reflection upon problematized conventions and beliefs. The paper turns this joint theoretical image int…
No one to trust: The Cultural Embedding of Atomism in Financial Markets
The paper ethnographically explores the cultural embedding of atomistic indifference in online, global financial markets: arenas that have been digitally designed according to economic ideals and that demand an extreme form of relational and social dissociation from the partners to exchange and from those affected by the transactions. Its case-study is lay financial-trading in Israel, a country undergoing extensive neoliberalization. The study sh…
Rethinking calculation: The Popularization of Financial Trading Outside the Global Centres of Finance
The paper looks at the popularization of financial trading in Israel. It presents a qualitative analysis of the calculative models and techniques that are promoted by financial trading schools, service firms and books. Broadly, the popularization of trading in this field involves a focus on ‘technical analysis’ (TA) and relies upon a socio-psychological reading of financial charts. Incorporating explicitly non-economic ideas into traders’ calcula…
Bracketing the Nation: Lay Financial Trading in Israel
In recent years, anthropologists have raised questions regarding the ways in which global financial cultures shape national imaginaries and sentiment. On the basis of an ethnographic study of the popularization of financial trading in Israel, I show in this paper that the calculative orientation of lay traders toward the nation involves attempts to cultivate what they refer to as "market cynicism": a normatively detached perspective in which they…
The Phenomenology of Homo Economicus
Much has been written about the fictitious nature of the atomistic model of homo economicus. Nevertheless, this economic model of self-interest and egoism has become conventional wisdom in market societies. This article offers a phenomenological explanation for the model's commonsensical grip. Building on the work of Alfred Schutz, I argue that a reliance on homo economicus as an interpretive scheme for making sense of the behavior of economic Ot…
The Discursive Management of Financial Risk Scandals: The Case of Wall Street Journal Commentaries on LTCM and Enron
Life is about risk management: Lay Finance and the Generalization of Risk Thinking to Nonfinancial Domains
This article examines the financial discourse on insecurity using a case study of the promotion of lay finance in Israel. Based on an analysis of financial courses, conferences, online texts and books that are designed for the lay public, the analysis shows that promoters of financial market engagements use everyday stories of marital and work-related insecurities-stories of divorce, betrayal, abandonment, unemployment and the like-to illustrate …
Financial Risk-taking as a Sociological Gamble: Notes on the Development of a New Social Perspective
This article attempts to bring into focus a sociological aspect of financialization that has evaded theoretical attention. Integrating the findings of a growing body of literature on the sociology of finance, it assembles evidence that financial markets entail a particular awareness of, and perspective on, the social. This perspective is characterized by three attributes: a ‘reflexive social distancing’ whereby financial actors observe social pro…
The psycho-discursive origins of moral panics: Attempting a new theoretical synthesis
Setting Sail on Stormy Waters: On the Role of Organizational Ethnographers in the Age of Financialization
Current financialization marks a broad cultural shift in the economy. It also marks a cultural shift within organizations. Primarily, it seems to challenge the status of profit as an ultimate measure that no logic transcends, sanctifying in its place the concept of 'shareholder value'. This article discusses this transformation and argues that it has two major implications for organizational ethnographers. First, it holds the potential for overco…
Out of time: The Temporal Limits of Coronavirus-Inspired Solidarity With Workers
Researchers note that cultural images of possible economic futures are to a great extent rooted in the frames of thinking of the present. But not all present frames of thinking yield such images; some are excluded from our sense of what the future can be. Analyzing how the Wall Street Journal referred to workers at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, this study identifies such a frame—a solidarity frame—and reveals discursive formations that…
Profit, Self, and Agency: A Reevaluation
In 1939, Erich Fromm argued that capitalist culture imbues the pursuit of economic advantage with moral tensions that harm self and psyche. Since this time, the inner implications of such tensions have been somewhat overlooked by theorists, and not without seemingly good reasons. By many accounts, social and technological developments in the later decades of the 20th century have ostensibly reduced the cultural tensions surrounding profit making …
The Double Meaning of Money
How does monetization affect interpersonal relationships? Drawing on social phenomenology, I argue that an answer must account for money's symbolic dualism: On the one hand, as Zelizer has shown, money is differentially earmarked according to the interpersonal relationships it flows through. On the other hand, in everyday life, people tend to associate money with cold impersonality. Money's dual association with both the interpersonal and the imp…
What B Would Otherwise Do: A Critique of Conceptualizations of ‘Power’ in Organizational Theory
The paper presents a critique of organizational theories that is based upon Robert Dahl’s famous definition: ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’. This definition highlights the fact that appreciating ‘power’ often demands knowledge not only about what B does but also about what B would otherwise do. Organizational theorists, it is argued, lacked such knowledge. Instead, they relied up…
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Culture's Consequences in A Value Test of its Own Design
The paper offers a critical reading of Geert Hofstede's (1980) Culture's Consequences using an analytical strategy where the book is mirrored against itself and analyzed in terms of its own proposed value dimensions. “Mirroring” unravels the book's normative viewpoint and political subtext and exposes discursive interests in its research process. Making all this evident in the canonical book's own terms, this paper communicates critical concerns …
Mapping the cultural grammar of reflexivity: The case of the Enron scandal
Theorists of political economy, institutional sociology and late modernity have recently embraced 'reflexivity' as a pivotal concept in their accounts of change in capitalist society and institutions. Despite significant differences between them, these theorists jointly promote an image of reflexivity as a culturally unstructured or disembedded reflection upon problematized conventions and beliefs. The paper turns this joint theoretical image int…
The Discursive Management of Financial Risk Scandals: The Case of Wall Street Journal Commentaries on LTCM and Enron
Financial Risk-taking as a Sociological Gamble: Notes on the Development of a New Social Perspective
This article attempts to bring into focus a sociological aspect of financialization that has evaded theoretical attention. Integrating the findings of a growing body of literature on the sociology of finance, it assembles evidence that financial markets entail a particular awareness of, and perspective on, the social. This perspective is characterized by three attributes: a ‘reflexive social distancing’ whereby financial actors observe social pro…
The psycho-discursive origins of moral panics: Attempting a new theoretical synthesis
Setting Sail on Stormy Waters: On the Role of Organizational Ethnographers in the Age of Financialization
Current financialization marks a broad cultural shift in the economy. It also marks a cultural shift within organizations. Primarily, it seems to challenge the status of profit as an ultimate measure that no logic transcends, sanctifying in its place the concept of 'shareholder value'. This article discusses this transformation and argues that it has two major implications for organizational ethnographers. First, it holds the potential for overco…
From superstars to devils: The ethical discourse on managerial figures involved in a corporate scandal
This article draws upon a growing body of Foucauldian-inspired literature on business ethics. Looking at the media as a prime site of dynamic discursive production in contemporary times, it offers an analysis of the underlying moral sensitivities and ethical frameworks characteristic of reports about the two top managerial figures involved in the Enron scandal: Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay. Analysing Forbes and BusinessWeek articles, the a…
Rethinking calculation: The Popularization of Financial Trading Outside the Global Centres of Finance
The paper looks at the popularization of financial trading in Israel. It presents a qualitative analysis of the calculative models and techniques that are promoted by financial trading schools, service firms and books. Broadly, the popularization of trading in this field involves a focus on ‘technical analysis’ (TA) and relies upon a socio-psychological reading of financial charts. Incorporating explicitly non-economic ideas into traders’ calcula…
The Paradoxes of Self-Branding: An Analysis of Consultants’ Professional Web Pages
Research has demonstrated the growing preoccupation with self-branding among professionals struggling with the precarious labor market. Much of this work has considered self-branding a commodification process turned inward, blurring the distinction between self and market. Yet, little attention has been paid to self-branding implementation. Conceptualizing self-branding as a rhetorical genre, the authors analyze the webpages of 100 self-declared …
No one to trust: The Cultural Embedding of Atomism in Financial Markets
The paper ethnographically explores the cultural embedding of atomistic indifference in online, global financial markets: arenas that have been digitally designed according to economic ideals and that demand an extreme form of relational and social dissociation from the partners to exchange and from those affected by the transactions. Its case-study is lay financial-trading in Israel, a country undergoing extensive neoliberalization. The study sh…
Bracketing the Nation: Lay Financial Trading in Israel
In recent years, anthropologists have raised questions regarding the ways in which global financial cultures shape national imaginaries and sentiment. On the basis of an ethnographic study of the popularization of financial trading in Israel, I show in this paper that the calculative orientation of lay traders toward the nation involves attempts to cultivate what they refer to as "market cynicism": a normatively detached perspective in which they…
The Phenomenology of Homo Economicus
Much has been written about the fictitious nature of the atomistic model of homo economicus. Nevertheless, this economic model of self-interest and egoism has become conventional wisdom in market societies. This article offers a phenomenological explanation for the model's commonsensical grip. Building on the work of Alfred Schutz, I argue that a reliance on homo economicus as an interpretive scheme for making sense of the behavior of economic Ot…
Life is about risk management: Lay Finance and the Generalization of Risk Thinking to Nonfinancial Domains
This article examines the financial discourse on insecurity using a case study of the promotion of lay finance in Israel. Based on an analysis of financial courses, conferences, online texts and books that are designed for the lay public, the analysis shows that promoters of financial market engagements use everyday stories of marital and work-related insecurities-stories of divorce, betrayal, abandonment, unemployment and the like-to illustrate …
Profit, Self, and Agency: A Reevaluation
In 1939, Erich Fromm argued that capitalist culture imbues the pursuit of economic advantage with moral tensions that harm self and psyche. Since this time, the inner implications of such tensions have been somewhat overlooked by theorists, and not without seemingly good reasons. By many accounts, social and technological developments in the later decades of the 20th century have ostensibly reduced the cultural tensions surrounding profit making …
The Double Meaning of Money
How does monetization affect interpersonal relationships? Drawing on social phenomenology, I argue that an answer must account for money's symbolic dualism: On the one hand, as Zelizer has shown, money is differentially earmarked according to the interpersonal relationships it flows through. On the other hand, in everyday life, people tend to associate money with cold impersonality. Money's dual association with both the interpersonal and the imp…
Out of time: The Temporal Limits of Coronavirus-Inspired Solidarity With Workers
Researchers note that cultural images of possible economic futures are to a great extent rooted in the frames of thinking of the present. But not all present frames of thinking yield such images; some are excluded from our sense of what the future can be. Analyzing how the Wall Street Journal referred to workers at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, this study identifies such a frame—a solidarity frame—and reveals discursive formations that…
The Multiple Realities of Action: A Phenomenological Answer to the Question of Unsettled Contexts
How is action constituted when the taken‐for‐granted cultural resources and supports usually shaping it lose their taken‐for‐grantedness? This question is relevant to a range of culturally unsettled situations, including those stemming from crises, displacements and even extensive reflexivity. Existing answers nevertheless remain incomplete, lacking the theoretical tools necessary for understanding taken‐for‐grantedness and its loss as lived expe…
Sociology (14 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (6 works) · Social science (6 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (5 works)