Kieran Healy will join Duke in fall 2009 as associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Kenan institute for Ethics. He is the author of Last Best Gifts (2006), a book about the social organization of blood and organ donation in the United States and Europe. Other published work has focused on the relationship between information technology and cultural policy, wage growth, and unemployment in labor markets; debates about structure and agency in social theory; and the moral order of market society. Ethics in Action editor Aimee Rodriguez talked with Healy from his current home in California.

You call yourself an economic sociologist. So what exactly do you study?

I study economic exchange from the point of view of sociology. My research interests are at the intersection of economic sociology, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of organizations. I got into it in part because I’m fascinated by goods that are hard to put a cash value on—like blood or human organs or genetic material— and by the way the exchange of these goods is organized. I don’t have a personal story about donating a kidney or anything like that to directly explain my interest, but the stories of the people I’ve met since working in this area have been more than compelling.

One of your major areas of work is on “the moral order of market society.” Can you talk about that?

It’s basically trying to take a fresh perspective on what are really some very old questions in social science: What sort of moral effect does capitalist society have on people and institutions? What kind of moral order does capitalism rest on? For some scholars, markets are civilizing institutions, while for others they are terribly destructive. A third group argues that markets can be unexpectedly fragile. You don’t have to look too hard to find people arguing for each of these views in the middle of the present crisis.

“Civilizing” because it’s within one’s best interest to act ethically within the marketplace?

Yes—the positive view follows the idea that trade brings peace between both people and countries, that it essentially serves as a much better alternative to theft or war. There’s a society-wide version of the argument that talks about how trade between nations is pacifying. And then there’s an individual-level version which claims that the virtues promoted by trade and market behavior are civilizing virtues of respect and prudence and so on. Then you have the counterpart view, which is that markets are destructive and morally corrosive—that they are fundamentally based on exploitation and encourage envy. Recently economic sociologists have been reassessing these arguments. It might seem odd to have sociologists talking about the economy, but the idea that economic life is intensely social is right there in Adam Smith’s work, in big and small ways. For instance, he has this idea that offering money to someone is like having a kind of conversation with them. You are trying to persuade them to part with something, and either they’re convinced or they’re not. Cash transactions, even really abstract ones, are ultimately social exchanges.

So sociologists look at the market— whether they see it as a positive or negative force—as a series of social exchanges?

While a philosopher or an ethicist will look at the explicitly moral questions first—Is this transaction good or bad? Are there some goods that are always morally wrong to exchange?—a sociologist is interested in how people themselves make sense of the exchanges that they engage in, how economic life is organized and categorized in general, and how those two things are related. Sociologists don’t make the ethical questions go away by not focusing on them immediately— if nothing else, people are constantly moralizing about markets—but you start from a different place. Take the case of blood or organ donation. Why is this sort of exchange classified as a gift here and not there? Why do some countries have many donors and others much fewer? Where do different ideas about the moral obligation to donate come from? What is it about a society—its institutional organization, history, or culture— that would explain all this variation?

Even though you’re a sociologist, it sounds like an interdisciplinary approach is very much a part of your work.

These are big and complicated questions, so you need to know a reasonable amount about perspectives beyond your own. With blood and organ donation, psychologists ask what makes individual donors special or different: What are their motivations? Do they have a different view of morality? Ethicists worry about whether organ sales are morally right or wrong. Economists want to know how an ideal market for organs would work. And so on. You can’t just ignore that stuff, even if you believe your own perspective has something pretty useful to offer.

You’ll be teaching a course on the morality of the market here at Duke. What will be your approach?

After the first few weeks, when I’ve offered a number of different frameworks for thinking about the topic, I want to leave the door open for people to react based on their own interests. There’s a lot of exciting work being done on the moral order of markets right now. I’d like to spark students’ interest by getting them to think about these ethical questions as also empirical problems—problems they can investigate through observation and experiment in addition to reflection. These issues play out in everyday life and they are also very important to social theory. Whether you care about the growth of intellectual property or the cash value of care work or the moral dimension of credit rating, there’s an awful lot you can do in this area.

Will this be your first time living in North Carolina?

Yes, and my first time living in the South. I grew up in Ireland and came to the United States for graduate school. I’ve lived in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Arizona so far, and now I’ve just spent a year in California, so I’ve been getting a pretty good tour of the country. I’m looking forward to being in North Carolina—both at Duke and as part of the Kenan Institute for Ethics as well. There’ll be some challenges—my wife is a philosopher teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, so we’ll have to decide which basketball religion to bring the children up in. That’s a serious moral problem in itself.

Tell me about your contributions to the Crooked Timber blog.

Crooked Timber [crookedtimber.org] has been in existence for over five years now, having grown out of a group of people who were following each other’s online writing. We have ten or so regular contributors living all over the place. Most but not all of us are academics, so there’s some coherence from that side, but we also have our own interests and various bees in our various bonnets. When we started out, we didn’t know if anyone would pay attention, but now we get about 10,000 readers a day, and we have a group of regular commenters on the site and interlocutors on other blogs. It’s not an academic seminar, and it’s not just trivia – although it can tend toward either of those things. It’s turned out to be a forum where interesting ideas get batted around a lot. More than once, journalists reading about topics we’ve been arguing about have picked up an idea for a story.

Yes, I saw that your post about male academics thanking their wives for typing their manuscripts was picked up in The New York Times.

I guess that’s on the trivia side! But yes, often the post or thread that generates the biggest reaction isn’t what you think will get picked up. You write up something you think is particularly serious or really funny and it gets no reaction, but then something else that you thought of offhandedly elicits a huge response. It’s not that different from leading a discussion in a classroom. You try to generate a few sparks but you never quite know what’s going to catch.

Kieran Healy’s articles have appeared in numerous journals including the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and the American Journal of Sociology. He has taught at the University of Arizona and was a research fellow at Australian National University. He was awarded a Residential Fellowship with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2008. Healy earned an undergraduate degree in sociology and geography at the National University of Ireland (Cork) and a PhD in sociology from Princeton University.