This paper aims to show how insurance mechanisms that historically propelled a conception of fairness based on solidarity and a collective approach shifted along the 20th century towards an idealistic adjustment to individual risk. Insurance originally assumed that, while individual hazards remained unknown, risk could be measured and managed on the aggregate. An examination of the proceedings of the American Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) during the 20th century demonstrates the slow crystallization of another conception of fairness, that aims at a scientific adjustment of insurance premiums to actual “individual risks.” I argue that this conception of fairness deconstructs the one based on solidarity. Big data technologies have further radicalized this shift. By aiming at predictive individual risk scores rather than average costs estimated on the aggregate, the algorithms contribute to replacing fairness as solidarity by the correctness of a computation.

The Latin American model of vocational education has been widely portrayed as a homegrown success story, particularly by scholars and stakeholders who are aware of the region’s skill deficits, wary of alien solutions, and suspicious of institutional transfers more generally. Is the Latin American model really homegrown? I use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to trace the model’s mores and methods not to the New World but to Central Europe and go on to identify three different transmission paths in the 20th century: imitation by Latin Americans of German origin, descent, and/or training in the run-up to World War II; propagation by West German attachés and advisors in an effort to rehabilitate their country’s image in the wake of the war; and adaptation by local employers and policymakers—who received additional support from Germany—at the turn of the last century. The results suggest that institutional importation is less a discrete event or outcome to be avoided than an ongoing process that, first, entails translation, adaptation, and at times obfuscation by importers as well as exporters; and, second, is facilitated by immigrants, their descendants, and diplomats in transnational contact zones.

People use money in everyday life in ubiquitous ways. In addition, they know that money has quite different and multiple meanings in different social contexts, depending on the situation in which it is used. That said, what do people actually know about money, money creation, money backing and the institutional foundations of the monetary order? While contributions in the rapidly extending field of financial literacy have empirically studied people’s knowledge about mathematical and financial issues, people’s knowledge about the functioning of the money system and monetary institutions remained mostly unexplored. To improve our understanding of people’s knowledge of the money system and the most important money institutions, we questioned 2,000 individuals in Austria using a standardized population survey. In this paper, after a short critical review of the sociology of money and the literature on financial literacy, we present and critically discuss the results of the survey. We found that, independently of age, gender, education and income, people know very little about the money system or money institutions and mostly believe in money myths, such as the notion that money is still backed by gold. Finally, we discuss our empirical findings against the backdrop of the state of research on the sociology of money1.

Scholars have generally taken a “diffusionist” view of the rise of national standard languages—the state pushes for the wider adoption of such languages, and other forces (principally economic modernization) facilitate its diffusion. But such a view is too mechanistic and Eurocentric, and an examination of other, less-familiar cases lends itself to a revised interpretation. Amid Western imperialism and the rise of nationalism in East Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a massive shift in language practices took place between about 1870 and 1950, as regional hegemony shifted from China to Japan. Bound for two millennia by their common use of Classical Chinese, elite literati in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam all moved away from that abstruse lingua franca and turned to the creation of new national vernaculars. I argue for a more “integrationist” perspective: language nationalization was a state-led and top-down process directed at remaking society.

The battlefields are spaces of death and destruction. In the combat zone soldiers fight and kill while witnessing the death of their comrades. These unprecedented life experiences are regularly shaped by strong emotional responses. In this paper I analyse the complex emotional dynamics of fighting and killing in the combat zone. I explore the war-time experiences of ordinary soldiers who fought in the 1991-1995 wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper is based on the interviews I conducted with the members of the Croatian Army and the Bosnian Serb Army who had direct experience of the battlefield. The focus is on the relationship between emotions and violence in the theatres of war with a spotlight on the personal experiences of fighting and killing. The paper challenges the existing interpretations of this phenomenon and argues that the killing in war is neither uniformly easy nor unvaryingly difficult but is context-dependent, variable and highly contingent. Furthermore, the acts of fighting and killing do not automatically trigger pre-existing and stable emotions but the violent processes themselves generate distinct emotional dynamics. Rather than simply following the violent actions emotions are in fact often made in the very acts of fighting and killing.