More than 140 phrenologists ascended the platform as popular lecturers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand during the second half of the nineteenth century, seizing on scientific spectacle for their own physical and social mobility. These scientists – usually men – also often offered private consultations and blended phrenology with other forms of knowledge such as mesmerism or physiognomy. Joining waves of migration to and from new settlements, phrenologists faced harsh physical conditions, with women performers confronting the additional risks of gender-based violence. Phrenologists generally did not pursue respectability. Rather, in building up their personas, lecturers embraced the word ‘science’ as a signifier of progress and authority, policing the boundaries between the ‘valid’ science that they supposedly offered and that of their rivals. They lived in a state of tension between their public, fee-earning selves – founded on supposedly good reputations – and their private ordeals, struggling to make ends meet.

This chapter explores the insights that ethnography offers into understanding the interface between commerce and ethics. The first section argues that the anthropology of exchange, in which commerce is seen as a distinctive sphere of transaction, risks truncating our understanding of the relationship between commerce and ethics. The second section explores the relationships between trade, violence, and state power, noting that merchants often articulate ethical ideals as they negotiate these relationships. The third section discusses scholarship on long-distance trading networks and trust, and suggests that the category of ethics is most helpful when it is used to describe not the basis of trust but the ways in which merchants manage and confront mistrust: for example, how they conceive of tensions between sentiment and self-interest. The final section identifies four areas stimulated by attention to the ethical dimensions of commerce: the diverse notions of reputation and personhood that animate the conduct of trade; the ways in which merchants conceive of the relationship between commerce and systems of morality and negotiate moral dilemmas; the way that commerce is informed by vernacular notions of value, abundance, and prosperity; and the forms of self-making that traders pursue through commerce.

Online marketplaces have permeated many aspects of our lives, as we use them to procure goods and services of all sorts, and many have relied on them during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Both sides of the market must feel comfortable trusting each other for online marketplaces to thrive, and for that, they need to have safeguards that alleviate the problems caused by asymmetric information. In this chapter I explain how feedback and reputation systems work in practice, and how they support ecommerce in online marketplaces. It starts by covering the theory behind reputation mechanisms and how they support more efficient trade, followed by descriptions of the actual working of typical online feedback and reputation systems. A survey of empirical findings from a host of papers is presented that explore how reputation works in actual online marketplaces, and how these relate to the theory. I then highlight some of the shortcomings of feedback systems and offer some suggestions and considerations for the future design of feedback and reputation systems that can augment their effectiveness.

In this chapter, we examine the relationship between corporate sustainability and reputation. We show that sustainability in business moved centre stage in the reputation landscape and is a critical component that influences the overall reputation of a company. We start by introducing key terms, and by defining reputation alongside other related constructs such as identity, image and legitimacy. We then discuss Corporate Sustainability (CS) as an important part of a company’s reputation, and illustrate different ways in which companies engage in CS to enhance and protect their reputation. Specifically, we distinguish between walking and talking CS. Based on an overview of the involved risks and rewards, we advocate that companies ‘walk the talk’ and transparently communicate about and report on their commitments to, and progress on, substantial CS activities such as reducing their carbon emissions and enhancing worker welfare.

While recognising that the private domain of individual decision-making is driven by multifarious desires that ought to be respected, I argue in this chapter that public sectors are each driven by a limited number of collectively agreed-upon objectives, with these objectives – e.g. health, literacy – being in some sense primary (i.e. foundational, if people are to have a reasonable opportunity of fulfilling their private desires). Given that public sector objectives are collectively agreed upon a priori, respect for autonomy can be to some extent relaxed in this domain. With this, and given that the complexity of many public sector services lends scope for egoistically inclined suppliers to exploit market failures and the behavioural influences for their own interests, I contend that demand-led competitive markets in the public sector ought to be disallowed. Instead, I propose that providers and users be given direct incentives to reciprocate, by, for example, instituting reputational competition between service suppliers.

This chapter discusses the right to respect for ones private life as it is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, other Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. A wide variety of different aspects of the right are discussed, including secret surveillance, personal identity, the right to respect for ones home and the freedom of correspondence. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

In the Conclusion, I record the rival fates of Giovanni and Giorgio Amendola since 1980, whether in scholarship, public memory or Italian streetscapes. In each regard, the liberal democrat Giovanni Amendola has moved up and the communist Giorgio Amendola down. The (humane) communist world Giorgio believed in has all but totally disappeared. But liberal democracy, however much transmuted by an all but totalitarian neoliberalism, has prospered and, perhaps, triumphed. Certainly, when the centenary of Giovanni’s death occurs in 1926, it is likely that he will be celebrated as a father of his patria. What might be viewed as the historical limitations of his understanding of where the world was going, his all but non-existent commentary on capitalism and finance, his patriarchalism, his positive view of Italian imperialism – these no longer matter. He can take the leading place as his country’s most admirable saint and martyr of Anti-Fascism.

A postlude acts as a précis of my argument about honor across the Romantic period. In the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands – the popular 1857 autobiography from a Creole nurse known as “the Other Florence Nightingale” – we witness the complex legacy of feminist honor in the literature of the black diaspora. Building her reputation at the height of Britain’s imperial conquests, Seacole seems to embrace the “manly” liberal-republican values that Mary Wollstonecraft urged women to adopt. But Seacole also deliberately cultivates her outsider status, especially within the colonial borderlands’ autonomous black collectives, where mutualist activity happens beyond the sanctioned, Western apparatus of respect.

Drawing on archival material, interviews with editors and collaborators, and available publication history, this essay will situate Wallace’s writing within the publishing environment of his lifetime. The essay will be structured in three sections. The first will survey the material contexts of Wallace’s published output, tracing how his work entered the literary marketplace as well as the changes in that marketplace during the consolidation of what has been called the “Conglomerate Era” of US publishing. The second will consider the ways in which the author integrated these changes into his own writing – from his anxieties about the threats to literary culture from television in the 1980s, his development of these fears in the spectacle of weaponized entertainment within Infinite Jest, to his sustained act of Information Age media archaeology in The Pale King in response to the corporate-dominated “Total Noise” of the twenty-first century. The final section will survey Wallace’s posthumous publications, considering the ways in which his legacy is continued and contested in publications across physical and digital media.

In the famous 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace called himself “an exhibitionist who wants to hide.” It’s a quote that many Wallace scholars and fans can throw out at a moment’s notice as an example of Wallace’s endearing, self-deprecating wit. However, as self-effacing as that comment may seem, it nevertheless suggests concealment, contradiction, perhaps even deceit. For every aspect of Wallace on display, another remains hidden from view. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way he constructs his biography in his writing. Through carefully selected details and statements in fiction, essays and especially interviews, Wallace crafts a literary and public persona that is very much at odds with (or a heavily curated version of) his actual life. Much of the backlash against Wallace and the various debates over whether he ought to be studied, taught, respected or outright canceled stem from the disconnect between the biography presented to his readership and the actual human who has emerged in subsequent biographies, memoirs, testimonials, archives and tweets that have made writing about Wallace a cottage industry in publishing.

As much as these paratexts may appear to carry more authority as more accurate depictions of the “real” Wallace, it is important to examine how these accounts are themselves constructed versions of Wallace grappling with Wallace’s (and at times the author’s own) place in a rapidly shifting literary and media culture. Discussion of the many constructed biographies of David Foster Wallace, including the likes of D. T. Max, David Lipsky, Mary Karr, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and more, would show how much literary culture has changed in the decade since his death and show how much David Foster Wallace is a distinct product of his own time and place. Wallace and Franzen may have believed that writers such as Pynchon and DeLillo had an easier, less public literary life than they did because “they made their bones in a different time,” but the past decade has shown that Wallace made his bones in a different time as well, to the extent that he would not have been able to craft such a persona free from public scrutiny (or the truth) today. In this regard, Wallace may truly be the last of his kind, part of an extinct breed: the last white male writer of the twentieth century, the greatest, male-est narcissist.

This chapter considers Molière as an icon of French national identity and a celebrated hero. It sketches the trajectory of this national veneration as it evolved over centuries, from the first years after his death, when he was transformed from ordinary scribbler to a writer of discerning common sense and humanitarian empathy. In the century that followed, Enlightenment thinkers elevated Molière to the status of a philosopher; the secularisation of national honour paved the way for Molière’s investiture in the ‘cult of great men’. Authors of the Romantic movement solidified his reputation as a suffering genius while the efforts of historians secured Molière’s status as a French national treasure worthy of archival investigations. The Molière of the twentieth century became a distinctly more earthy presence. He comes to be viewed first and foremost as a theatre-maker, a ‘man of the theatre’, with his plays, his life and the practicalities of his livelihood now defining him as a working man. The efforts of nineteenth-century historians come to fruition in the twentieth century’s definitive art form, film, where Molière comes alive through leaps of imagination that expose contested French views of his importance.

This chapter aims to investigate the extent to which the Netherlands has attempted to rein in transnational corporations from developing and emerging states by imposing requirements as a matter of regulatory compliance, either directly as an obligation formulated in a rule, or indirectly by offering corporations the opportunity to defend against civil violations. Section 1 of this chapter examines the Dutch Child Labour Duty of Care Law (2019). An evaluation of the parliamentary debates increases our understanding as to whether and to what extent competition from non-Dutch corporations – and, in particular, transnational corporations from developing and emerging states – in the global marketplace has had an impact on the stringency and reach of this legislative initiative. Section 2 discusses the (largely hypothetical) avenues available to bring claims against transnational corporations from developing and emerging states in Dutch courts.

This chapter introduces clichés and discusses their uses and contemporary debates in academic and public domains. It argues for a functional approach to the study of clichés and outlines the scope of the book.

This chapter advances a theory of the citizen-consumer that connects the quality of basic services to trust in government, trust in government to consumer behavior, consumer behavior to citizen political participation, and citizen political participation back to the quality of basic services. When basic services are sound, citizens trust the institutions of government; when basic services fail, citizens distrust those same institutions. People who trust government rely on public services, whereas those who distrust government opt instead for more expensive commercial alternatives. This distrust premium is pure profit to government’s commercial competitors and is paid disproportionately by the politically marginalized. Consumers who use public services have a strong interest in safeguarding quality, so they are politically active citizens, demanding high-quality public services. Consumers who abandon public services in favor of commercial firms withdraw from political life. These distrustful, disengaged citizens demand little from government and oppose public investments. Starved of resources and attention, governments’ service quality declines and a vicious cycle of distrust ensues.