Rankings as coordination games: the Dutch Top 2000 pop song ranking

The Dutch Top 2000 pop song ranking has been broadcast each year since 1999 between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. As a nationwide event, it receives cult status in the Netherlands. In this paper, it is argued that rankings are coordination games. To demonstrate this, statistical methods are applied, first to analyze the extent to which competition prevails between pop songs. While conventional charts collect pop song rankings on a commercial basis, the Top 2000 ranking is voted on once a year. Moreover, a very wide range of songs is allocated to 2000 positions. The ranking displays tremendous stability among the top five songs over the years and demonstrates the importance of superstardom. Moreover, a detailed statistical analysis provides evidence that there is hardly any competition among the most liked 100–150 songs. The empirical distribution of these songs follows a Pareto distribution, whereas the songs up to rank 1500 are exponentially distributed. These different distributions may be explained by two different voting strategies, namely voting for the individually most liked songs and voting to maximize the social value of the Top 2000 by taking account of the assumed preferences of other voters. In this manner, superstardom acts as a coordination device in a large-scale coordination game.     

Making architecture compete: open-ended accumulation meets objectification and singularisation in the UK construction industry

Sociologists over the last two decades have taken inspiration from actor-network theory to suggest that competition, like ‘the market’, takes place through a dynamic of detaching objects from one set of relations and reattaching them within another: objectification and singularisation. Yet there has been little theorisation of how competition differs between situations. To approach this question, we can ask how competition, as a process of objectification and singularisation, interacts with other patterns of movement. Ethnographers have described one such pattern in the everyday work of architects. Here a building emerges from an ever-increasing number of ‘versions’, images and models, in an open-ended accumulation. This study considers the interaction between, first, the objectification and singularisation of competition and, second, the open-ended accumulation of architectural work. To do so, I examine architectural competitions in the UK. I draw from document analysis of one competition for a school in northern England, as well as interviews with architects about their work on competitions. This study concludes that architectural competitions repeat the multiplicity of architectural work but in a more delimited form. Multiplicity is not ‘cut-off’ so much as winnowed down through an explicit process of selecting images and blocks of text.     

The Law's Markets

Recent research has suggested that one of the key ways in which economics and cognate calculative discourses and practices ‘perform’ the economy is through the drawing of conceptual boundaries between economic activities and entities of various sorts. One such boundary is the boundary between markets. This article shows that a critical contemporary arena for the differentiation of one product or service market from another is competition (or antitrust) law, which, through its work of market definition, seeks to identify the boundaries of competition: the location of the borders between meaningful economic spaces within which buyers and sellers encounter one another and establish prices. The article argues that in envisioning markets (‘the law's markets’), competition law simultaneously constitutes markets, and it demonstrates this through an empirical examination of the exercise of such law in three economic sectors: insurance, grocery retailing, and pay-television. It also shows, however, that competition law is perennially dogged by conflict – both over the placement of such conceptual boundaries, and over the very process of placement and the status of the market boundary itself – and that its application and effects can only be understood in this light.     

Learning about movies: the impact of movie release types on the nationwide box office

Major Hollywood studios typically release new movies in North America in one of the two ways, wide release or platform release. In this paper, we investigate how release form affects the demand of a new movie after it is nationally released. In particular, we focus on movies for which the platform release is pre-planned to make the problem tractable. We estimate our model using a sample of Hollywood movies that eventually received nationwide release from 1999 to 2003. Our results show that platform release shifts consumers’ perception of unobservable movie appeal through its first stage performance, which turns out to be a stronger effect than that of advertising. Meanwhile, we find that the demand for platform movies decays faster than for wide release ones after their national release. Using counterfactual analysis, we find that more than half of the platform movies which later went to national release would have earned higher profits if they had been given a wide release.     

A good hustle: the moral economy of market competition in adult webcam modeling

In this article, we examine how models working on Chaturbate, one of the world’s most popular adult webcam platforms, negotiate and make sense of the dynamic ways in which this platform configures their competitive environment. By combining different perspectives from the field of economic sociology, we demonstrate how competition on Chaturbate is shaped by various market devices whose strategic negotiation informs – and is informed by – the moral economy articulated on web forums where models gather to discuss their work experiences and market strategies. We first introduce Chaturbate and the ways in which it organizes market competition, surveying the environment models have to negotiate. We then zoom in on two controversial strategies for beating the competition, each of which upset the moral economy of Chaturbate’s model community. Subsequently, we turn to what models term ‘the hustle,’ which encompasses a number of competitive strategies and criteria judged to be fair and thus legitimate. The final part of our analysis considers the limitations of the hustle, as well as the meritocratic and entrepreneurial discourse that surround it, in light of what we identify as Chaturbate’s ‘manufactured uncertainty.’     

Deal or no deal? Some reflections on the ‘Baker-Thompson rule,’ ‘matching,’ and ‘market design’

ABSTRACT

This article raises the issue of why the idea of a ‘deal’ has become so prevalent in the discussion of political matters and policy proposals associated with future economic developments. It does this by linking the deal with several features of market design. Principal amongst these are game theory and matching algorithms. The Barker-Thompson Rule is presented as an example of a particular type of market construction operating in a game theoretic context, while the ‘matching engine’ is explored in a variety of contexts where it is argued to have become a standardized technique indicating to a possible reshaping of the economic terrain more generally. The consequences of these developments and trends are the emergence of a ‘dealing culture’ that threatens to overwhelm other forms of decision-making and consume the policy-making environment with the immediacy of its dealing logic.     

Simulating the Ethical Community: Interactive Game Media and Engaging Human Rights Claims

Abstract

This paper examines the external bystander’s (un)ethical engagement with the suffering of distant others in the brave new world of the 21st century, where, thanks to the growth of information technologies, we are all daily spectators and bystanders of human atrocity. In a recent turn, humanitarian movements have sought to incite their audiences to action through the use of simulation and new game media – the last few years have seen a surge of ‘serious games’ such as Darfur is Dying and Sim Sweatshop, as well as the creation in online community Second Life of simulated refugee camps and political protests. The paper draws on the post‐modern theories of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj ?i?ek, as well as the ethical philosophies of Michael Ignatieff, Stanley Cohen and Avishai Margalit, to expose the limitations of this move, arguing that interactivity and public remembering via online simulations are more properly aligned, in the real world, to interpassivity and ethical amnesia than to the forging of an effective ethical community of human beings.     

The ‘secret code’ of honour – on political enjoyment and the excrescence of fantasy*

Fantasies and especially excessive or ‘phantascistic’ fantasies, as they are referred to here, have the power to suppress within political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, inner antagonisms in times of crisis. More precisely, they help to blur aporias within the ideological structures of a community through the evocation of a sensus communis (Kant) that establishes the community anew, similar to an act of religious conversion. Their impact on the space of reasons is analysed in this article as one that does not take part in the game of giving and asking for reasons, but operates in the background of communal reason via an emotionally and clandestine ‘code’ of what it means to be ‘We?…?– We who we are’. Next to theoretical elaborations of how and why these phantascistic fantasies are produced, the theory will be further explained through a series of exemplifications demonstrating the way that it has played out across a long history of conflict in the Middle East and a shorter history of contemporary politics in the United States. Through all of this, the aim is to illustrate how very concrete excessive fantasies have an impact on a body politic's form of enjoyment.     

Optimal timing of movie releases in ancillary markets: The case of video releases

The optimal time for the release of a film in the video market is derived theoretically and shown to depend on characteristics of its cinema performance and on several other parameters. It is empirically confirmed that the model can explain the changing film release patterns in the years of video market growth. The model can also be applied to other ancillary markets for motion pictures as well as to paperback releases of books.     

The creative instability hypothesis

This paper provides an analysis of why many ‘stars’ tend to fade away rather than enjoying ongoing branding advantages from their reputations. We propose a theory of market overshooting in creative industries that is based on Schumpeterian competition between producers to maintain the interest of boundedly rational fans. As creative producers compete by offering further artistic novelty, this escalation of product complexity eventually leads to overshooting. We propose this as a theory of endogenous cycles in the creative industries.     

‘Excellence’ and Exclusion: The Individual Costs of Institutional Competitiveness

A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom’s ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities’ response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014) calls “neoliberalism’s war on higher education” or more precisely the deleterious consequences of non-participation in the REF. We also discuss the ways with which higher education’s competition fetish, embodied within the REF, affects the instrumentalization of academic research and the diminution of academic freedom, autonomy and criticality.     

Cool governance: Japan’s ubiquitous society,surveillance, and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The rapid reform of the Akihabara district of Tokyo during the first decade of the twenty-first century, in conjunction with the Japanese government’s policy on the global promotion of Cool Japan, has been envisioned under the Japanese government’s new direction of becoming a ‘ubiquitous society’. From the postwar period when Akihabara became the techno-gadgetry hub of Tokyo, into the twenty-first century where it transforms itself into the Mecca of anime and video games, Akihabara has become the embodiment of national hope and technological future. Noticeably, what also implemented alongside this advance of techno-future is a new form of governance and surveillance. After Katō Tomohiro’s murderous rampage in Akihabara in 2008, numerous CCTVs have been installed to secure the neighbourhood from crime and news of this solution became a spectacle in international media. This form of ubiquitous techno-governance integrated as part of everyday life had already been imagined in anime such as Dennō Koiru (Coil A Circle of Children), which broadcast on Japan’s national broadcast station NHK in 2007. In light of the concerted effort of the Japanese government’s promotion of anime to the global consumers seamlessly integrating the urban developmental project of Akihabara, the production of Dennō Koiru at that historical juncture presents a pertinent foreshadowing of Japan’s ‘society of control’. This article will examine the notion of ubiquitous society and surveillance in Dennō Koiru and situate its production against the backdrop of Japan’s growing techno-governance vis-à-vis its creative industries in the twenty-first century.     

What Your Consumer Wants

With what mechanisms and cultural resources do market actors pursue change? Based on an analysis of business-to-business advertisements in two US food industry trade publications, we show the generative influence of social movements on perceived market opportunities. Building on recent scholarship on market-making, we find that market actors articulate and reshape critiques of their own industry by making claims about what consumers ostensibly want and about how their products can satisfy those desires. We find that business-to-business food ingredient advertisements selectively articulate precepts of the emergent ‘good food’ movement by urging manufacturers to develop healthy, natural, and ‘clean’ foods. While ‘good food’ advocates typically portray processed and packaged food as inherently unhealthy, suppliers and trade associations' advertisements transform this critique by claiming that products will be more marketable to consumers if they are made with ingredients designed to provide specific health benefits and to comply with federally mandated product labeling regulations. As such, we find that these business-to-business advertisements mediate between imagined demands and pragmatic constraints while serving as a conduit for the influence of social movements on industry practices and products.     

CREATIVITY,CAPITAL AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE

This article discusses the role of creativity, graphic design innovations and tacit knowledge within advertising agency competition processes during the first half of the twentieth century. This period witnessed the arrival of the ‘advertising creative’: the artist-designer, whose output and tacit understanding of consumer tastes became key for the competitive advantage of agencies. Adapting Bourdieu's concept of the social field within which actors create and trade various forms of capital, I show how and why William Crawford's advertising agency in London became a pioneer in promoting the social, cultural and economic role of this new group of agency workers. I argue that Crawford's became the first advertising agency that carved out a unique position within a highly competitive market by defining its visual production and organisational identity entirely through notions of creativity. This places Crawford's at the heart of the emergence of a cultural economy for which creative skills are a paramount source of value creation.     

The Way We Ask for Money… The Emergence and Institutionalization of Grant Writing Practices in Academia

Although existing scholarship offers critical insights into the working mechanisms of project-based research funding, little is known about the actual practice of writing grant proposals. Our study seeks to add a longitudinal dimension to the ongoing debate on the implications of competitive research funding by focusing on the incremental adjustment of the funder/fundee relationship around a common discursive practice that consists in describing and evaluating research projects: How has the perception of what constitutes a legitimate funding claim changed over time and why? By investigating the normative framework enacted in the justification strategies of applicants, we shed light on the historical coevolution of the increasing competition for project funding, the epistemic culture of applicants, and grant writing rhetoric. To do this, we mobilize a comprehensive data set consisting of archival data from Europe’s oldest and largest funding agency, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, as well as a corpus of 80 successful grant proposals written between 1975 and 2005. We find that the 1990s mark an important normative consolidation of what we consider to be a legitimate funding claim: Ensuring the success of the project and the project’s results becomes a major concern in applicant rhetoric. This time period coincides with a substantive rise in the level of competition for project funding. Yet, even though justification strategies might seem to address the same issues in grant proposals across the disciplines under investigation, the normative framework to which applicants refer differs according to the applicant’s epistemic culture.     

Cryptocurrencies as market singularities: the strange case of Bitcoin

Since its creation in 2009, the electronic currency Bitcoin has generated volumes of online debate in the business press. While there have been plenty of economic arguments situating it as a financial bubble about to collapse including from Nobel Prize winning economists, its price value has proven to be more durable than many have predicted. To explain this durability, Karpik’s conception of market singularities is used to understand the Bitcoin phenomenon by outlining the beliefs that maintain Bitcoin’s status as a volatile financial asset. Market singularities are markets for particular kinds of goods and services that are of uncertain and incommensurable value. Singularities markets have communities of followers and a distinctive belief system that ascribes value to a particular product, service, or asset. Developing Karpik’s conception, the paper explores the libertarian political belief system that surrounds Bitcoin’s status as a financial asset. I also outline some political tensions within the electronic currency community concerning governance and centralisation.     

LIVE Baccarat calculations: Macau machine gambling and the production of the post-socialist subject

ABSTRACT

Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, and the subsequent liberalization of the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly, Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming. Today Macau attracts more than 30 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. This article analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was created by a Hong Kong biopharmaceutical company, and designed to appeal to Chinese gamblers in Macau. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation, including calqulation, hedging, arbitrage, and portfolio management. LIVE Baccarat is a biopolitical apparatus of subjection of a post-socialist Chinese homo economicus, a form of ‘human capital’ which Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self.’ This subject not only plays a remunerative role in Macau’s gaming industry, but conforms to China’s macroeconomic goals to engender ‘quality’ citizens equipped to support a domestic consumer market which may supplant the unsustainable production-for-export regime that drove the country’s initial post-reform development.     

PATHWAYS TO CREATIVITY

Focusing on the ‘talent pathways’ outlined in the 2008 Department of Culture, Media and Sport Creative Britain report, this article explores how different forms of creative agency are positioned to make a ‘contribution’ to the creative economy. Drawing on Paul du Gay's concept of personhood, case studies on digital gaming explore the formation of two forms of personhood – creative consumers and creative workers. Specifically, these forms of creative agency are analysed in terms of their connections on the ‘talent pathway’, and the transitions that see creativity and talent as inherent in all individuals and in need of channelling and directing. The creative-consumer case study unpacks the digital games industry strategy of enrolling fan-creators within their commercial operations. This case study reveals the increasing importance of co-production for the creative economy, and the extent to which diverse cultural practices are facilitated and positioned. Higher education Games Design courses will then provide the case study for examining how the creative-consumer can be positioned to make a productive contribution to the creative economy as a worker. Within this context, the formation of fans/students into a creative worker or industry-ready worker is evident. Through tracing different forms of creative agency and how they are connected to make a contribution to the creative economy, this article explores the governance of creative agency and economic subjects.     

GOOD TASTE

In political theory citizens are defined as being willing to serve the ‘common good’ while consumers are supposed to seek ‘pleasure’. The two terms pull in different directions, so that adding a hyphen is not enough to craft a figure capable of acting in ways that are generous as well as gratifying. This, or so I will argue, is linked with the understanding of the body that lurks in the background. The idea is that the body is naturally greedy. It only acts ‘properly’ if norms are imposed on it from the outside. To interfere with this understanding, I seek help from advertisements for ‘good food’ as well as from ethnographic research into the way bodily pleasure (rather than being innate) is being shaped in socio-material practices. It might as well be shaped in wise, sensitive and responsive ways. This leads me to suggest that, in theory, we experiment with a ‘consumer-citizen’ whose normativity is literally incorporated. I propose that, despite the caveats, we might call this normativity good taste.