In their article “Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization” [ (2009), Economy and Society 38(3): 369 - 398], Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon propose a research programme for the study of the processes of economization, very much along the lines of Callon’s (1998) The Laws of the Markets project. They define economization as follows:
This term is used to denote the processes that constitute the behaviours, organizations, institutions and, more generally, the objects in a particular society which are tentatively and often controversially qualified, by scholars and/or lay people, as ‘economic’. The construction of action (-ization) into the word implies that the economy is an achievement rather than a starting point or a pre-existing reality that can simply be revealed and acted upon.
The article reconstitutes the debate on how to conceptualise economic phenomena, by reviewing relevant works from economics, economic sociology (including “new economic sociology”), and anthropology. Drawing on science studies (among others invoking the ANT principle of generalised symmetry between humans and nonhumans), they shift the attention onto the apparatuses at work in economization:
Envisaging institutions as socio-cognitive prostheses that enable the (economic) formatting of individual behaviours is an important contribution to the understanding of the processes of economization as well as the role of economics and, more generally, the social sciences in these processes.
The article builds on and advances Callon’s (1998) original critique of Granovetter’s notion of embeddedness. The authors promise to expand on the process of how value is co-created by humans and things in the forthcoming second part of the article, which will zoom in on the process of marketization as a particular example of economization. Their goal is
to understand how complex and hybrid social configurations are perpetually being constructed through the conjoined contributions of circulating material entities, as well as competent agents engaged in valuation practices,
(at which point intriguingly they reference Bruno Latour’s unpublished “modes of existence” manuscript).
Hat tip to socializing finance.
Envisaging institutions as socio-cognitive prostheses that enable the (economic) formatting of individual behaviours is an important contribution to the understanding of the processes of economization as well as the role of economics and, more generally, the social sciences in these processes.
Tags: apparatus, economization, Economy and Society, Koray Caliskan, marketization
20 August 2009 at 9:30 pm |
Sweet, this looks really interesting! I’m downloading a copy right now, and will be reading through it soon.
14 November 2009 at 10:08 pm |
I’m glad to see this article has been published! I think that what’s most interesting about Çalışkan and Callon’s project is not just reorienting focus on apparatuses but also the “democratization” of the myriad forms of agency at work within an apparatus, the realization that once we stop privileging human agency over all of these other relevant agencies, apparatuses of which human agencies are only a component, and which are far more complex and interesting, come into focus. Thus we can even see markets themselves as apparatuses, though I am not entirely sure of the utility of that particular theoretical turn.
25 November 2009 at 6:13 pm |
Hi Sam,
I agree with your points. Re: “Thus we can even see markets themselves as apparatuses, though I am not entirely sure of the utility of that particular theoretical turn.” I think the utility depends on whether it also becomes an ‘empirical turn’, meaning that particular markets will be studied empirically and described in their specific details, and whether these social scientists (in addition to the economists) thus will be able to affect the designs of these assemblages or apparatuses.