This study examines activities and processes through which projects of moral regulation are implemented as well as lived, transformed, and resisted by their targeted actors. Our ethnographic study focuses on discourses and practices of civic duty for orderly and hygienic conduct in the rehabilitation of marketplaces in Yaoundé, Cameroon. By drawing on the inhabited institutions approach and the literature on ethics as practice, our analysis extends research on moral work to put forward a perspective on moral regulation as a situated practice. We show how moral work is built on individual reflections but is simultaneously negotiated through actors’ relationships, that is, responsibilities to family, interactions within the community, and personal history.

Post-genomic research relies on blood samples and health information from great numbers of individuals as well as on access to medical records. Studies of collecting and banking bio-resources have increasingly focused on the policy and commodification issues that arise when human DNA enters the information economy. Yet, what has been given much less attention is the process through which citizens are recruited to contribute to post-genomic research. This article analyses practices of recruiting psychiatric patients to a pharmacogenomic research centre in Denmark. It argues that recruitment activities may be conceived as interpellation practices that ‘hail’ individual patients and ask them to place themselves in relationships to other citizens and state institutions by giving researchers access to blood samples, medical records and sensitive life-and-illness information. The interpellation practices studied demonstrate a tension between techniques that operate through distance (sending out letters with information and consent forms) and techniques that operate through presence (making phone calls to patients). These techniques are not simply seen as contrasting ethical conducts, but as complementary and coexisting ways of constituting spatial and social state–citizen relationships.