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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 and mitigated their inner effects. This article, however, presents a different account. Drawing from literature on culture, self, and subjectivity in the neoliberal era, it argues that the tensions Fromm identified have actually been recreated in new, sometimes more elusive ways that bear substantial inner costs. Moreover, focusing on economic elites, this article analytically explores the agentic implications of these inner costs. It argues that the moral tensions that haunt profit making ironically stand at the basis of capitalist agency, shaping its materialistic default through processes rooted in self.

Abstract
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 that economic risks are ubiquitous. Their stories render risk-thinking a general practice of knowing that is applicable to everyday life. At the same time, the stories shift the focus from the statistical meaning to the symbolic meaning of the risks taken. They present the risks of key social institutions as symbols of personal weakness, helplessness or humiliation, and grant the impersonal risks of financial markets a relative advantage. Analysing these findings from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, I argue that lay financial discourse marks a radicalization of neoliberal discourse as studied by Foucault and that it is characterized by a much broader deconstructive scope than currently acknowledged. Its focus on frightening insecurities deconstructs the social knowledge that constitutes key institutions, exacerbating and feeding on their dissolution.

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 processes in the market in a socially attentive but self-detached way and through which they recognize financial market prices as socially constituted; a 'social forgetting' inherent in stochastic configurations and engagement with financial chance; and 'social dissociation' with regard to the outcomes and implications of financial decisions. Taken as a whole, these elements constitute 'financial risk-taking' as a type of 'sociological gamble'. The article discusses the importance of studying the social perspective inherent in financialization as a means of furthering our understanding of its character and implications.

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 article examines the sudden appearance of these managers as a heightened moral threat, asking what constellations of knowledge and meaning were expressed through the demonization of these once idealized managerial superstars. It shows that while speaking in the name of ethics, the examined discourse also undermines ethics in that it promulgates a largely paradoxical and ethically incapacitating concept of self and logic of action.

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 upon untested and ideologically biased assumptions concerning what B would otherwise do. Reviewing major conceptualizations of power in organizational theory, the paper unravels and categorizes six underlying assumptions of this sort. Then it goes on to promote an alternative, empirically-grounded and emically-oriented strategy for dealing with this issue. This strategy, it is argued, offers a new and less problematic research path with which to pursue the different theoretical interests in the field.