ABSTRACT
The last point, and a broader topic of commodification of risk discussed above meshes with what must bring to mind N. Gogol's great novel Dead Souls. In 1999, Michael Rice, a forty-eight-year-old employee of the supermarket firm Walmart, collapsed while helping a customer carry a television to her car. As market thinking penetrated the life insurance industry, a moral line was crossed, and the application of market ideas was taken too far. "Over the past three decades," Michael Sandel writes, "markets and market values, have come to govern out lives as never before". In this interdisciplinary transaction, the concept is borrowed and the original meaning extended until the new concepts often have nothing left in common with their initial referents. Jacek Tittenbrun offers a critical analysis of human, social, and cultural capital on the basis of their uses and misuses across a wide range of social sciences, simultaneously revealing the source of conceptual diffusion in the real world.
