finally getting under way… A nice post from the Understanding Society blog on the rediscovery of Gabriel Tarde.
Archive for the ‘Economic sociology’ Category
After Markets recordings
19 May 2010The organisers of the 23 April 2010 “After Markets: Researching Hybrid Arrangements” workshop at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, have now posted the recordings of the event as well as a report summarising the talks. You could characterise this event as “Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies” (to borrow the subtitle of Pinch and Swedberg’s Living in a Material World book, some of whose contributors were also present), although there were plenty of people there from the wider reaches of sociology and anthropology, as well as business school academics. See photos here. This event followed in the now well-established tradition of stimulating inter- or cross-disciplinary encounters organised by the Oxford STS group (see e.g. Scalography, A Turn to Ontology, and the Does STS Mean Business workshops).
If you want to get to grips with this event, I suggest you start with reading the Provocation Piece [PDF] first, then read the Report [PDF], and then listen to the talks. I found particularly interesting Will Davies’ talk, who used the example of the change of the UK “sick note” form to a “fit note” to illustrate how the boundaries between the “economic” and the “social” get reconstituted; Fabian Muniesa’s talk on how marketplaces can be described in terms of “trials of explicitness”, drawing on Sloterdijk, Deleuze and ANT; Emmanuel Didier’s talk on the mechanics of how assemblages decompose, suggesting that the STS tradition in its focus on innovation neglected the issue of decay; and Linsey McGoey and Noortje Marres’ paper in which – similarly to Didier – they focused on “experimental failure,” presenting a typology of the ways in which experiments can fail.
Illuminating and infuriating
8 May 2010In today’s “The Interview” on the BBC Word Service, Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, gave an insightful and comprehensive overview of the possible causes of the financial crisis, discussing among others how the nature of both the product (sub-prime mortgage) and the customer (the borrower) has been redefined, the cosy relationship between regulators and investment banks, the stories of the few investors who actually made money, and also the role of Goldman Sachs. Listen to it on the BBC website (28 min).
Market studies explosion?
11 March 2010Looking at the list of accepted papers (RTF file) at the 1st Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop coming up in Sweden in June this year, I’m wondering if “explosion” is too hyperbolic a term or just right to describe what seems to be a dramatic increase of interest in the social study of markets these days. Many of the titles appear to be referring to the concept of market devices introduced in the volume edited by Callon, Millo & Muniesa in 2007, who draw on the insights of science and technology studies and actor-network theory for the study of economic phenomena, especially markets.
P.S. And there is also of course the After Markets event coming up in Oxford in April, along similar lines, in the tradition of their excellent “Does STS Means Business” series. Check out the provocation piece for this event here (PDF).
Market Studies Workshop
21 December 2009
See this call for papers for EIASM’s 1st Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop to be held near Stockholm on 3-4 June 2010. The announcement gives a good summary of the recent surge of interest in the nature of markets and the contributions actor-network theory driven approaches and science and technology studies (STS) have made to this area in recent years. The workshop aims to be interdisciplinary and calls for contributions from all areas that have an interest in markets, such as business studies, marketing, STS, economic sociology, economics, economic geography, consumer research, cultural studies and anthropology.
Possible topics:
- the various forms markets may assume
- the processes through which markets are realized
- the import of economic theories at large on markets (economics, marketing, strategy)
- the role of devices and metrics in shaping markets
- the role of “market professionals” in the organizing of markets
- how regulators act in and on markets
- how representations of markets contribute to shape the markets they depict
- how market agencies are equipped
- how markets produce values
To apply, submit a 3-page abstract by 29 January 2010. The organising committee consists of Hans Kjellberg (Stockholm School of Economics), Debbie Harrison (Norwegian School of Management), Claes-Fredrik Helgesson (Linköping University), and Susi Geiger (University College Dublin). Guest speakers include Bernard Cova (Euromed Marseille), Barbara Czarniawska (Gothenburg School of Economics), and Steve Woolgar (Saïd Business School, Oxford).
Translation and Charles Péguy
24 November 2009“Everything is external to everything else, and it takes difficult work to link any two things” – thus summarises Graham Harman one of Bruno Latour’s metaphysical points (Prince of Networks, pp. 104-105). The blog medium makes linking unrelated things rather easy, so hopefully it is not an entirely frivolous act to link transaction-cost economics with actor-network theory through the figure of Charles Péguy. The Organizations and Markets blog has just highlighted that the following Péguy quote is evoked at a crucial moment in Oliver E. Williamson’s (yes, this year’s economics Nobel Laureate) 1996 book, The Mechanisms of Governance, in support of the ” microanalytic program” of TCE:
“The longer I live, citizen. . .” — this is the way the great passage in Peguy begins, words I once loved to say (I had them almost memorized) — “The longer I live, citizen, the less I believe in the efficiency of sudden illuminations that are not accompanied or supported by serious work, the less I believe in the efficiency of conversion, extraordinary, sudden and serious, in the efficiency of sudden passions, and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work. The longer I live the less I believe in the efficiency of an extraordinary sudden social revolution, improvised, marvelous, with or without guns and impersonal dictatorship — and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work.” (pp. 13-14)
