THE ROLE OF SENSES AND SIGNS IN THE ECONOMY

Since some years back a number of scholars have argued that the analysis in social science, including the analysis of economic life, needs to take materiality into account. In this article, the author suggests that one way to do push the debate about materiality one step further would be to look at the role of the senses in mediating between outside materiality and the inside reality of the actor. Drawing on Georg Simmel's essay The Sociology of the Senses the author suggests how we may look at the senses from a sociological perspective; this article also discusses what an economic sociology of the senses might look like. In order to show the mechanism by which the senses operate when they mediate between outside materiality and inside reality, the author draws on the sign theory of philosopher Charles Peirce. The signs, and what they refer to, come together in the mind of the subject, Peirce argues. They also impact the subject, rather than the other way around.     

MAX WEBER AND THE MORAL ECONOMY OF OFFICE

This article focuses upon a crucial aspect of Max Weber's work, one that has been largely neglected by scholars of organization, in cultural economy as much as in economic sociology more generally. That is Lebensführung, the conduct of life. The article argues that Weber's approach to questions of Lebensführung locates him as a late but prodigious practitioner in a tradition of the ethics of office, particularly as the latter becomes a defensive doctrine. In making this case, the vocabulary of office in Weber's work is explored and its importance for an understanding of the ethico-cultural constitution of a variety of instituted personae is highlighted. The article concludes by briefly suggesting why and how a Weberian ethics of office remains a key resource for scholars of organizational life, including those operating in the emergent field of ‘cultural economy’.     

PERFORMATIVITY,CORPOREALITY AND THE POLITICS OF SHIP DISPOSAL

This paper provides a posthumanist performative reading of spaces of disposal as sites of economic activity. Its empirical focus is ship breaking, as practices and political techniques. Drawing on the work of Donald Mackenzie, Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, it frames ship disposal as a boundary-making intervention in the world and as part of the demolition assemblage. The paper challenges the oppositional politics that characterise international debate about ship disposal. Through an articulation of the academic register and literary narrative, the paper develops a material politics of ship disposal which draws connections, rather than making distinctions, between labouring bodies in different parts of the world. It reconfigures ship disposal through a material politics that centres the proximate intimacy of human bodies, demolition technologies and vital inorganic materials, highlighting the importance of shared corporeal vulnerabilities, a biopolitics of occupational health and a material politics of globalisation where the long distance associations are temporal, of a ‘now’ and future-past ‘then’.     

Documenting financial performativity: film aesthetics and financial crisis

Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistleblower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics.     

Non-marketizing agents in the study of markets: competing legacies of performativity and actor-network-theory in the marketization research program

One line of criticism leveled against studies of markets inspired by the economization research program [Çal??kan, K. &; Callon, M. (2009) ‘Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization’, Economy and Society, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 369–398 and Çal??kan, K. &; Callon, M. (2010) ‘Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets’, Economy and Society, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 1–32.] is that their analytical priorities reflect an economics-centric perspective: they prioritize the study of market exchange itself and of agents promoting market framing, while leaving non-economic agendas and the broader contexts of markets both understudied and undertheorized. This weakness tends to be attributed to contingent analytical priorities, which can be remedied by extending the program’s focus without changing its theoretical tenets. This article, in contrast, suggests that these analytical priorities stem from a theoretical tension within the program, which is caused by the complete, instead of a selective adoption of the theoretical tools of the performativity agenda in the marketization program. As a result, while the program promotes the inclusion of non-marketizing agents through the notion of co-performation, its call to focus on those phenomena that agents qualify as ‘economic’ and on the making of market exchange delimits the analysis of non-marketizing agents to their helping/hindering effects on market framing. The solution proposed is to reassess some of the performativity-inspired tools of the program in favor of a more ANT-inspired approach to markets.     

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.     

The performativity of sports statistics: towards a research agenda

Statistical analysis has become increasingly integral to contemporary sports. Most existing studies, regardless of whether they endorse or criticise the growing influence of statistical analysis in professional sports, attribute agential capacities exclusively to humans. In this conceptual article, we challenge both what we call ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘romantic’ approaches by applying insights from the expanding literature on the performative effects of statistical models in economic markets to the area of sports. Rather than understanding statistics as mirrors of an objective reality, we conceptualise them as interventions in the analysis and conduct of sports. The use of sophisticated techniques for data collection and analysis by scouts, managers, referees and athletes has profound feedback effects on how these sports professionals come to understand their sport and seek to improve their performance. An interdisciplinary performative understanding of statistics allows for an unpacking of the socio-material mechanisms through which data-heavy analytical technologies shape processes of valuation, commercialisation and regulation in professional sports.     

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.     

Performativity and grassroots politics: on the practice of reshuffling mafia power

Recent uses of performativity have been engaged with bridging the gap between the economy and politics. The concept of performation has for instance been used to enable discursive and material assemblages that challenge this dichotomy, with the general aim of transforming the economy. While the overall intent of this article is to contribute to this bridging, its direction of travel is the opposite: to bring the economy into politics. Specifically, it situates the notion of performativity within studies on grassroots politics in a material sense. First, it discusses some of the leading scholarship on grassroots movements, focusing on their take on the economy. It moves on to suggest that some of the problems that are identified can be addressed using performativity theory, the benefits of which are discussed in the second part. Finally, it empirically illustrates the theoretical discussion by analysing the performativity of the discourses, things and people that are jointly fighting the Mafia today. The article places social movement studies in dialogue with scholarship which is preoccupied with the economic-political cleft, in order to encourage thinking of the economy as a space for political possibility and social struggle, rather than seeing it as a place of capitalocentrism, structural exploitation and inescapability.     

Stigma,agency, and motherhood: Exploring the performativity of dual mother–female sex workers identities in Kathmandu,Nepal

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon the lived experiences of 35 female sex workers (FSW) in Kathmandu, Nepal, this article explores the performativity of sex work–mother dual identities. Performativity presents a way to rupture proscribed singular identities of being a sex worker and highlight agency through the act of expressing dual identities. Global South research has established a link between mothers’ vulnerability and the likelihood of sex work becoming the means of livelihood. Thematic analysis highlights performativity of the dual identities as well as highlighting agency of FSWs to navigate economic necessity, stigmatized societal conditions, gender inequalities, and motherhood through performativity of dual identities.     

MATERIAL,LITERARY NARRATIVE AND CULTURAL ECONOMY

In this paper I argue that thinking about the material in cultural economy has much to gain from culture itself. Specifically, I explore the potential of literary narrative for conceptualizing and writing material within a performative cultural economy. Drawing on the industrial short stories of Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, The Wrench, A Tranquil Star), I provide a literal reading of these works, highlighting their foregrounding of material encounters, the importance of process (and not just product), and materials’ instability in process, and their connections to theorizations of economies as assemblage. The paper also explores how Levi writes material to presence using the techniques of narrative discourse, particularly mimesis. The paper concludes by arguing that narrative is a means to writing a performative cultural economy and that cultural economy needs to rekindle the arts of story-telling. Paying attention to literary narrative shows how this might be achieved.     

Performing property cycles

Economists characterize fluctuations in property markets as ‘cyclical’ in that characteristics repeat and recur instead of being temporally isolated or random. I argue that cycle metaphors naturalize change and distract us from the social and institutional relations underpinning transformation in local property markets. I emphasize the performative nature of cycles by focusing on the networks of actors – brokers, appraisers, investors, and planners – that move capital through the built environment, articulating arguments for its free passage, identifying inflexion points, and temporarily stabilizing the meanings associated with individual buildings, submarkets, and periods. Drawing from a case study of an office development cycle in downtown Chicago (1998–2009), I argue that cycles can be treated not only as metaphors that describe economic processes, but also as socially effective constructions in their own right. Specifically, I consider three ways in which actors perform cycles, including (1) professionals’ use of market devices that contain within them assumptions regarding the proper timing of (dis)investment; (2) the existence of incentives for herding among professionals that draw them to and away from assets at roughly the same times; and (3) the importance of cycle thinking in instilling the confidence necessary to speculate on an unknown future.     

BIRDS OF THE INTERNET

Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birder's handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public.     

(De)politicising and Ecologising Bicycles

Self-service bicycle systems are today being set up in a number of cities across the world. Seen as a means to promote a sustainable city and new forms of ecology, and valued for their ‘planet friendly’ character, these systems have become a hallmark for cities that want to become part of the so-called green culture. Drawing from the experience of the Vélib’ programme in Paris and adopting a pragmatist perspective, this paper analyses the controversies which developed as this transportation infrastructure was implemented, as well as the definitions of ‘ecology’ which were at the centre of the dispute. In doing so it shows the capacity of the private firm involved in the system, JCDecaux, to ‘hijack’ and integrate the ecological critique, its rather powerful capacity to persuade other actors, and the popularity that the project achieved through a hard-won process of justification. At the same time, this paper argues that the mobility turn played a performative role in the justification and the definition of this new transport project.     

The –ography of markets (or,the responsibilities of market studies)

How should we write about markets? What responsibilities does this writing bring upon us? This paper offers an immanent critique of ‘market studies’ scholarship, and through this a call to reflection and reformed action. Turning the intellectual framework of market studies upon itself, we come to see its texts as performative and agential. We discuss these qualities and the associated responsibilities via a reading of literature from the domain of ethnography. An auto-ethnographic sketch of market writing allows us to consider the problematic nature of expertise for market studies scholars and the agency and power of our texts. We find a dual moment of performativity from which our texts emerge more powerful than their authors. On this basis we offer a vision of critical interventions embedded in our texts, underpinned by the intellectual axioms of the market studies programme.     

MULTIPLICITY JUSTIFIES CORPORATE STRATEGY

This study conducts an analysis of the relationship between strategic theory, industry- or market-wide practices, valuation metrics, and justification rhetoric in performing strategic practice. In doing this, we refer to Michel Callon on the performativity of economics and Boltanski and Thévenot on the justification of strategic action. The paper introduces an analytical framework for studying the corporate strategy pragmatics of a forest industry company – Stora Enso – over the 1990–2008 period. The authors argue that Stora Enso's corporate strategy is justified by and represents the outcome of multiple performances that coexist and interact with each other. These multiple performances, ranging from general strategic management conceptual theories to industry-wide practices and valuation metrics, may lead to conflict when creating successful businesses.     

On the Possibility of Organ Markets and the Performativity of Economics

Callon's (1998) ‘performativity thesis’ encourages us to consider how the boundaries of the economy are negotiated. This paper explores one such discussion: the contributions of economics to the debates over the introduction of markets for transplant organs. The paper pays particular attention to the normative aspects of economic valuation. It examines the philosophical antecedents of economic contributions to the debate, notes the rhetorical and linguistic power of economic calculation and then focuses on three distinct sets of calculations concerning the value of a transplant kidney: a contingent valuation calculation, a risk-premia based calculation, and a cost-efficiency simulation. In each case, it shows that economic facts, once created, may travel freely through normative debates and claim moral force. The technical process of economic modelling is therefore seen to be a crucial aspect of the economisation of this area, and of economic performativity more generally.