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.     

Representing and Performing Businesses

This article investigates a segmentation model used by the Danish Tax and Customs Administration to classify businesses' motivational postures. The article uses two different conceptualisations of performativity to analyse what the model's segmentations do: Hacking's notion of making up people and MacKenzie's idea of performativity. Based on these two approaches, the article demonstrates that the segmentation model represents and performs the businesses as it makes up certain new ways to be a business and as the businesses can be seen as moving targets. Inspired by MacKenzie the argument is that the segmentation model embodies cleverness in that it simultaneously alters what it represents and then represents this altered reality to confirm the accuracy of its own model of the businesses' postures. Despite the cleverness of the model, it also has a blind spot. The model assumes a world wherein everything around it is in motion and can be shaped, however, it sees itself as stable. This assumption turns out to be problematic as the tax administration questions the model's ability to produce valid comparisons. The article presents a detailed analysis of the model's performativity, providing an example of a performativity study whose methodology differs from the methodological criteria set up by MacKenzie.     

The craft of urgency: performing prosperity,running capital,and the making of a buying crowd in home presales in Nanjing,China

ABSTRACT

This article examines home presales – the selling of future residential properties – at the urban fringe of Nanjing, China. It argues for an analytical focus on urgency as a temporal quality that creates the local housing market and facilitates urban accumulation. I examine how urgency, grounded in a linear imagination of urban development, motivates home presales for developers, estate agents, and homebuyers. In particular, to speed up the turnaround time of investment, developers conjure up a vision of prosperity by building extravagant sales centers to organize home presales. Estate agents working at the sales center organize promotional events to attract, register, and manage a buying crowd. If properly managed, the buying crowd could reach the size of a festival-like presale, whereby hundreds of apartments are sold within one day. Capital at the urban fringe accumulates through the synchronization of these activities in which the sales center crafts an affective temporality of transaction by cultivating and managing an exuberant buying crowd. The craft of urgency emphasizes the performative agencement that assembles the condition for urgency to come into being.     

On the Politics of Calculative Devices

This article examines the politics of calculative devices in one of the most successful areas of finance, the life insurance business. By empirically tracing an insurance applicant's risk trajectory, it analyses how calculative devices perform insurance underwriting through acting on insurance risk decisions. This allows one to document what calculative devices exactly do, and to point out the political effects of what they do. First, it highlights the fact that, contrary to thinking in terms of ‘the insurance logic’, there are multiple ways of calcuting life insurance risks. Second, it underscores the crucial role of calculative devices in that process by demonstrating how they align considerations as divergent as economics and medicine to perform a life insurance market. It then demonstrates the political effects of these calculative devices by making explicit how the latter contribute to the production of inequalities in calculative power in life insurance. In this way, the article links up insights from the performativity approach in the sociology of markets with the broader question of governing economic life. Such an approach, it is argued, provides the opportunity to open up the organization of economic markets and to put classic questions of justice and power struggles in economic markets on the agenda again.     

Intellectual property and optimal copyright protection

Copyright protection, or more generally, intellectual property rights, can be regarded as a means for the stimulation of production of information goods. This paper analyses the basic problem of production and dissemination of information and the role of copyright protection as an incentive for the producers of creative works. Using a simple model, it is shown that not only a cause for limiting the extent of copyright protection does exist, but that also an argument for a minimum level of protection can be found. Even optimal copyright protection, given the restriction that production and dissemination of information goods has to be co-ordinated by a market mechanism, however, does not lead to a first-best (allocatively efficient) solution. Hence, the judgment that copyright protection is the best solution to the basic problem can be grounded only on a comparative institutional approach.Indeed, one has ample reason to despair of finding a legal tenet that governs the rights of authors and artists. There exists no legal principle by which the state is forced to grant to authors a right in their creation. They cannot claim any right thereupon. This is not to say that the state shall not award such a right. On the contrary, there is every reason to treat them like the most favoured workers, as they deliver a work that is more robust than ashlar, and bring food that does not decay...     

On the construction of property rights in aesthetic ideas

The paper attempts to formulate concrete proposals for a change in laws of intellectual property, based on a communication-oriented theoretical analysis of the issue. The particular role of collection societies is investigated. The proposals arrived at suggest a strengthening of non-negotiable, non-hereditary authors' rights, and a refinancing fee collected for copies of works of art with classical status and distributed to members of currently active art circles.     

The appropriate extent of intellectual property rights in art

The paper examines whether intellectual property rights in art should be extended to the entire world. In earlier papers, the economics of patent rights have been examined and the argument made that world welfare is likely to fall if patent rights are extended to the entire world. This argument is recapitulated here with special attention to the assumptions that are needed for its validity. These assumptions are then reexamined in the context of markets for art to see whether the argument carries over. It is found that while most of the assumptions do carry over well enough to justify the argument, there are also certain circumstances that may require greater geographic extension of intellectual property rights in some cases.Paper prepared for a conference on The Economics of Intellectual Property Rights, International Center for Art Economics, University of Venice, October 6–8, 1994.     

UNDERSTANDING ORDINARY WOMEN

The paper reflects on the ways market research in Britain helped produce understandings of and information about the ‘mass housewife’ in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper does this through a case study of the market research used and generated by the London subsidiary office of J. Walter Thompson advertising. The paper focuses on key client accounts, as well as the agency's non-product specific research, as a way of exploring how it sought to understand the ordinary housewife and her consumption habits. In exploring JWT London's approach to the ‘mass market’ housewife, the paper draws on recent sociological arguments about advertising and market research that have conceptualized these commercial practices as technologies or socio-technical devices for ‘making-up’ the consumer. However, the paper also seeks to revise certain aspects of this sociological approach. It does this by proposing a more differentiated sense of the various marketing and market research paradigms that were used by advertising agencies in order to contest the claim that post-war market research was subject to growing sophistication under the influence of the psychological sciences. Secondly, the paper seeks to bring a more international and specifically trans-Atlantic dimension to the understanding of post-war market research. US-derived techniques formed a visible presence within post-war British market research and constituted a key point of reference for British-based practitioners. This influence was neither totalizing nor did it go unchallenged, but even as they rejected elements of ‘American’ approaches to the consumer, British practitioners still had to reckon with their intellectual authority and commercial force in this period.     

Institutional anomalies in the contemporary art market

This paper analyses two anomalies of the contemporary art market and the institutions created in order to allow the market to develop. The first anomaly concerns the incomplete specification of property rights in the market of successful artists. The second one originates with the lack of credibility, or time consistency, that characterises the relationships between young artists and gallery owners.     

Economizing Habitus

Pierre Bourdieu's classical sociology and the actor network-based ‘economization’ literature are often considered contradictory, despite some agreement on the constructed nature of economic man. Through an examination of the publishing industry, we argue that Bourdieu's concept of habitus may offer a useful contribution to the literature on economization. We examine how those new to a field come to understand their position and the role of material devices in structuring this. We argue that Bourdieu's theory, appropriately stated, sheds light on the tacit assessments made by market agents alongside their involvement in network-based calculative mechanisms and allows studies of markets to deal with some persistent criticisms of the economization programme.     

A care-infused market tale: on (not) maintaining relationships of trust in energy retrofit products

ABSTRACT

Issues of maintenance offer exceptional opportunities for advancing our understanding of how market-driven innovation can meet societal objectives for energy transitions. In this article, I present a case study of ongoing attempts by two spin-outs and one start-up to stabilise innovative socio-technical agencements – ‘customer journeys’ – designed to catalyse economic exchange of certain singular goods – energy retrofit products – in the Netherlands. This market-driven innovation relies on sustaining carefully crafted relationships of trust among supply-chain actants and homeowners. I mobilise the analytical lens of ‘care’ to show how the multiplicity of connections that form through socio-technical agencements – and function as a market – are tentative, contested, and unpredictable. Trust relationships are in a constant process of becoming through contestation and convergence among supply-chain actants. In doing so, I expose the precarious and arduous work involved in maintaining a market for singular public goods. This implies a knowledge politics as well: in a call to sensitise us, market scholars, to processes of maintenance integral to market-driven innovation for energy transitions I propose to advance Callon’s call to civilise markets by sharing troubled, though encouraging, care-infused market tales in an effort to counteract the storification of energy transitions as innovation fairy tales.     

Senses and artifacts in market transactions: the Korean case of agricultural produce auctions

This article examines the relationship between the senses, artifacts, and trade at South Korean agricultural produce auctions. It explores the impacts of market devices on sensory interactions between auctioneers and buyers that are essential to market transactions. Through ethnographic interviews and participant observations at Garak Market, Seoul, this study compares hand signal trading with electronic trading in agricultural produce auctions. It analyzes how the senses affect auction price estimation and formation, as well as their contribution to economic agency and social relationship among economic actors. The study then examines the impact of new market devices in electronic trading (e.g. trading screens, computer monitors, and wireless bidding terminals) on trading’s sensory aspects of seeing or hearing. It argues that the devices change the modality of sensory interactions between auctioneers and buyers. This transforms power struggles, forming a looser but more equal relationship between auctioneers and buyers and decreasing the overall auction price in the market.     

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.     

‘This could be our reality in the next five to ten years’: a blogpost platform as an expectation generation device on the future of insurance markets

William James (1919) characterises hypotheses as either live or dead. A hypothesis is live when it is taken into account as a ‘real possibility’. We follow James’ suggestion to not attribute intrinsic properties to hypotheses, but rather investigate how they came into being and look at the effects they generate. Expectations of digital technologies are a topic of vivid debate in the insurance industry. Before these expectations can become ‘live’, they have, in the first place, to be generated by market devices. We investigate how the reinsurance blogpost platform Open Minds functions as an ‘expectation generation device’ on the future of insurance markets. Combining Beckert’s work on the role of fictional expectations with the pragmatist turn in sociology of markets, we propose to study ‘expectation generation devices’, provoking expectations on economic markets. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate the explicit fictional character of the Open Minds contributions, and analyse how a contained space of openness is generated to provoke expectations. We demonstrate how Open Minds can become live through circulation to other expectation generation sites in the insurance industry and beyond. We conclude by reflecting on the importance of expectation generation devices as a particular type of market devices.     

The economic impact of intellectual property rights: An overview and guide

This paper, adapted from a conference presentation in Venice, links the history of intellectual property protection to two important trends in this field: (1) the shifting baseline, from a presumption of no property rights and open competition, to the presumption that all intellectual effort deserves the award of a property right; and (2) growing awareness of the political economy of these rights, which legislators can create and strengthen with little direct effect on government budgets. The paper also considers a shift in the scholarly emphasis, from the brand question of the overall worth of intellectual property to defailed consideration of individual doctrines and rules.     

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.’