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This paper offers an exploration of women's experiences of engaging in digitally mediated care work. Data for this article is drawn from qualitative interviews conducted with 15 young women in Australia to explore their experiences of securing care work through a digital platform. Importantly, we focus on both online and offline dimensions of securing work, thus contributing to the extant literature which has tended to focus on the online aspects of securing platform work. Through the complementary lenses of performativity and affective atmospheres, we examine the complexities of presenting an idealised self to obtain work opportunities from an online pool of diverse care-seekers, and the bodily performances and attributes required offline to secure actual work. We conclude by reflecting on how online and offline interactions explicate the normative performativity required by young women to successfully access digitally mediated service work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a revision to a projected deficit figure in 2009 touched off deep recession and austerity, much scrutiny and skepticism focused on the role of economic forecasts, statistics, and experts in the nearly decade-long 'Greek crisis.' This article takes an ethnographic approach to macroeconomic forecasting, examining it both as a process through which numbers come to exert profound effects and a charged object of popular concern for the ways in which this happens. It asks how to reconcile the lack of popular faith in forecasts with their ability to persist as objects of attention. Through tracking the making and circulation of forecasts, I answer this question by demonstrating what numbers do. Specifically, I argue that the fundamental work of forecasting consists in how it renders numbers routine means of thinking about the economy and its future. I show how numbers carry out this work through their ability to at once describe and represent, such that contention over descriptions of the economy nevertheless routinizes representations of it. This argument points to a type of performativity that occurs through routinization and it presents an understanding of the multivalence of numbers that can inform critical approaches to quantification, objectification, and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stock market indices are among the important figures that are followed in the trading rooms: on the movements of the Dow Jones or the S&P 500 depends the allocation of billions of dollars. At the same time, for the companies that produce and publish them, but also for those whose shares are included in them, they represent a significant source of visibility – and therefore of income. Based on an ethnographic survey at the Brussels stock exchange, this article documents how the different financial actors – aware of the performativity of stock market indices – try to impact their shape. The divergent opinions and interests of these actors are the source of methodological tensions at the heart of these numbers. Through the methods of calculation and selection chosen, the engineers of the indices make perilous trade-offs with far-reaching consequences. By exposing the cognitive and political debates that these indicators crystallise, this article also highlights the unequal representation of the various stakeholders within these statistics. This type of inequality, veiled by the numerical formatting, often goes under the radar of social scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food and agriculture have recently become focal points of tech sector innovation and financing. Rapidly multiplying agri-food tech startups are promising to import the tech sector's trademark disruptive innovation into an industry they deem sclerotic, inefficient, and unsustainable. This paper interrogates the cultural and market frictions attending Silicon Valley's foray into food and agriculture through the lens of what is perhaps the tech sector's most prominent narrative genre: the public investment pitch. Building on scholarship that views pitching as a performative practice, we show how pitches serve to mediate the tech sector's entrée into this established industry. Our analysis of four key moments of the agri-food tech pitch reveal how carefully curated framings of agri-food problems and solutions work to reconcile the world-changing ambition and profit-making potential demanded by Silicon Valley investors with the deeply entrenched political economic realities of food and agriculture. Our analysis also suggests a tendency towards 'non-disruptive disruption' (Goldstein, J., 2018. Planetary improvement: Cleantech entrepreneurship and the contradictions of green capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Despite nods to disrupting the established industry, the tech sector primarily offers incremental improvements on existing technologies, often developed or marketed in partnership with industry incumbents, underscoring the distinction between technological disruption on the one hand and genuine systemic transformation on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an examination of a game-based business simulation. We approach the simulation as a provocative technique and analyse it as a business simulacrum. Business simulacra are referential artifacts that partake in the coordination of business and economy. In the study, we shed light on how business simulacra affect actors' subjectivity. We suggest that Lyotard's writing provides hitherto underappreciated inspiration for addressing this issue. Lyotard offers a theorization and a vocabulary which centers the simulacrum's performativity in the space between the perceived and the perceiver. The analysis shows how the simulation designers have assembled the game by sourcing established business simulacra and translating them into easy-to-discern figures of business reality. The designers couple this translated business simulacrum with ludic elements and reflexivity techniques, aimed at making the learning subjects realize and articulate change management problems. With the sensitives provided by Lyotard, the paper discusses simulacra's potentials to provoke business reality in events that entangle business subjects' subconscious with figures of business reality sourced from popular business discourse. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the analysis for current debates on artificiality in business education, and business simulacra's performativity more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue addresses a series of post-2008 financial developments by mobilising the concept of the tale, understood as a discursive artefact composed of a meaningful story or script that serves to separate good from evil, make sense of historical situations, stimulate action, and prefigure scenarios. Unlike standard workplace narratives, which are useful for practical decision-making, tales have strong collective and political connotations. As such, they assume two distinct forms: tales of 'experiment,' stemming from innovative projects that seek to transform the financial system from within, and tales of 'defiance,' which deal with the more ample changes that horizontal and disobedient practices prefigure. Several analytical coordinates are proposed in order to capture the semiotic and pragmatic natures of the tale. Regarding semiotics, tales involve not only themes and motifs but also polysemic metaphors and what are here defined as processes of characterisation, through which persons or institutions are positioned as characters and assume specific roles within a story. As for the pragmatic dimension, tales mobilise people toward specific functions and address audiences while also relying on material infrastructure to embed some of the content they convey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic conceptualism takes its cue from conceptual art and uses artistic interventions as an anthropological research tool. The term 'ethnographic conceptualism' was coined to sum up the method of the exhibition project Gifts to Soviet Leaders (Kremlin Museum, Moscow 2006) as simultaneously a reflection on the vast and complex economy of public gifts to heads of Soviet state, a distinctly post-Soviet political and cultural artefact, and as a tool for ethnography of post-socialism. This article explores ethnographic conceptualism's contribution to performativity theory. I look at how it makes visible the tension between what such projects perform and describe. In doing so, I use ethnographic conceptualism as a vantage point to revisit the foundational distinction of performativity theory between the constative and performative statements (Austin). Drawing in this artistic and research method, I redefine the performative, not as a domain or a type of utterance that is distinct from the constative, but as an act of drawing this distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of metaphors in the production of re-descriptions of the world within the framework of technological design processes. Drawing on a collaborative ethnography with the Economic Space Agency (ECSA), a start-up developing post-blockchain technology, this paper illustrates how metaphors mimic the toponymy of decentralized material infrastructures, while simultaneously pushing forward 'posthuman' values that are expected to become fixated through software. Through an analysis of a 'collection' of metaphors produced by ECSA, this paper sheds light on the work performed by specific vocabularies, within technological communities, in shaping a symbiotic relationship between futuristic politics and material culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the understanding of how first-time buyers and their parents form attachments to housing debt. Interviews, carried out in the Czech Republic, with 40 first-time homebuyers and 10 with their parents were used to identify multiple layers of debt performativity. These layers consist of statements expressing moral evaluations and emotions; calculative and cognitive devices; and references to practices. Two arguments are advanced through a framework of layered performativity. The first argument concerns the subjectivities of debtors. Debtors adopt investment concepts in their statements and use calculative devices. However, by relying on familial moral orders of security and familial financial transfers, these debtors must be regarded rather as semi-financialised subjects. The second argument relates to the re-configuration of social and economic relations in families. Debt attachment endorses the use of intergenerational financial transfers, which in turn may enforce continued intra-familial reciprocity, both in terms of the recipients’ obligation to the providers of a gift or loan as well as concerning an obligation to help their children attain homeownership in the future. Finally, intergenerational transfers also transform the character of the mortgage market and mortgage debt, making informal debts an important part of formal debt circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociologist Bruno Latour has often expressed aversion to immanent critique, framing actor-network theory in terms of focus on visible phenomena. In spite of this, research on financial performativity inspired by Latour’s perspective can still be interpreted in terms of immanent critique and related to Political Economy (a critical discipline), through Kant’s critique of metaphysics as a ‘regulative axiom’. Research on financial performativity has uncovered evidence of the existence of constructive processes that show how an idea (like a financial model) can become something like an ‘object’. This ‘objectivity’ appears to contradict Kant’s critique of metaphysics - that there always remains a gap between our ideas and the world itself. This paper therefore explores financial performativity as a ‘contradiction’, historicizing it to argue that ‘Barnesian performativity’ and ‘financial liquidity’ are ‘immanent’ to one another in the events of recent financial crises. The paper conducts this interpretation to provide a new conceptualization of ‘financial liquidity’ that is more empirically apparent, helping to overcome some of the limits in the discussion of ‘liquidity’ in Political Economy (that Latour might want to highlight), where discussion occurs in metaphysical terms difficult to connect to actual events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As economic ideas gain prominence in environmental governance, scholars of economic practices are well positioned to analyze how environmental markets are constructed and maintained. To do this, I present an ethnographic study of environmental reverse auctions conducted in Cidanau, Indonesia. I invert the question of how economic assumptions transform environmental management decisions to specific practical challenges and their resolution as revealed in decisions taken by auction organizers, such as where to conduct the auction, how many participants are needed to engender competition, which exchanges among competing participants to restrict, how to organize facilitators, and what to announce to encourage strategic bidding. In contrast to sociological theories of auctions or the microeconomic model of individual competition, specific attributes of the auction’s materiality, such as the design of bid slips, sealed bids, announcements of winners, and the multi-round auction structure, sustain the performance of competition. A paradoxical tension emerges in the process of auction organizing, wherein sticking to the auction script necessitates working around it. Building on ethnomethodological studies of economic activities, I argue for a need to go beyond studying how auctions are socio-materially performed and instead study how the performance is demonstrated as adequately accountable for the concerns at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cultural economy of finance examines the cultural constitution and implications of financial markets in light of the growing financialization of economies and social life. In the effort to explain ‘how finance actually works’, it rejects both depoliticized mainstream financial economics and predetermined Marxist political economy. However, this rejection has resulted in a lack of analyses of the politics of finance. In this paper, I suggest that cultural economy of finance should nurture a form of analysis indigenous to cultural studies – provisional framework building – whereby politically urgent and contextually specific frameworks could be offered to provoke debate about the power relations within and political impacts of financial activity. I offer a description of provisional framework building based on key commitments of cultural studies, and several examples of the practice that have already taken place in research on financial markets. More of this work can create a more rigorous and grounded understanding of the politics of finance within the umbrella of cultural economy of finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although failure and misappropriation have been central to Judith Butler’s theorizing of performativity, such concerns have been largely absent in the performativity studies of markets inspired by Michel Callon. Indeed, Callon’s performativity has been criticized for ‘presuming efficacity’ and overemphasizing ‘stabilizing processes’. In this paper, I propose a distinction between ‘science studies’ performativity (which privileges economic theory) and ‘performative agency’ (which attends to the constitution of economic agency). Previous attempts to discuss Callon and Butler together have tended to oppose her performativity to the former approach, but I suggest that the latter allows for a more productive engagement. I illustrate how this alternative offers a way to address persistent critiques of market performativity by incorporating Butler’s understanding of performative failure. The usefulness of this argument is demonstrated through a case study of the recent transformation of the street food market in San Francisco. The details of the case are drawn from ethnographic study conducted in 2009, and describe how a market that had been ‘known’ to lack dynamism became remade almost overnight. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines attempts by professionals in the Danish branch of the environmental NGONatureAidto optimize their practice by developing a local standard. Describing these efforts as an experiment in optimization, we outline a post-critical alternative to critiques that centre on the reductive effects of management and audit. The notion that reduction is inherently negative fails to recognize that achieving specific forms of reduction is often the reflexive aim of standardization. Rather than resisting monitoring and evaluation, the environmental consultants we study try to create a system capable of constraining their work in theright way. Focusing on this experiment in optimization allows us to redescribe audit as a varied set of practices and aspirations, embedded in standards that generate relative forms of organizational transparency and opacity. This offers a view of management as ‘broken up’; as a distributed, ambient activity, variably performed by different actors using different standards. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the wide-ranging influence of the yield curve – a diagrammatic device for representing the term structure of effective interest rates on market-traded debt instruments – in contemporary monetary, financial and economic life. Drawing on the expanding literature on financial performativity, including within the field of cultural economy, the article submits that by virtue of its centrality to multiple, closely interconnected and often highly recursive sets of relations between economies, financial markets and central banks, the yield curve is performative at a range of different levels; and, parsing various different extant understandings of performativity, the article theorizes the particular nature of such performativity in the yield curve context. Against the grain of the bulk of the literature on financial performativity, however, the article also endeavors to connect the yield curve’s performativity explicitly to questions of privilege (the privilegesofrepresentation) and power (the powertoperform) and their unequal distribution. That is to say, the article argues that to understand the multidimensional performativity of the yield curve, we need to draw out its political as well as cultural economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One line of criticism leveled against studies of markets inspired by the economization research program [Çalışkan, 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 Çalışkan, 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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to current debates about financial performativity, this article seeks to explore the multiple and overlapping layers of performativity within central banking. The specific focus is upon the press conferences of the Bank of England, which coincide with the release of their Financial Stability Reports and results of their stress testing exercises. Three positions in the debate about financial performativity are identified and outlined – namely, ‘Austinian’, ‘generic’, and ‘layered’ performativities. Analysis of the transcripts and video footage of the press conferences shows that both Austinian and Generic performativity are at work in the ‘layered performances’ of financial stability by the Bank: the manner in which technical devices affect the economy intersects with the way reiterative practices bring about the effect they name. Moreover, drawing on the writings of Derrida, Deleuze and Sedgwick on iterability, difference and performativity, the article analyses the disruption, creativity and drama that is also present in the central bank's press conferences. The ostensible production of financial stability by the Bank is thus shown to draw attention to an additional layer of financial performativity that has been previously neglected in cultural economy research – that which I group together under the umbrella term of ‘lively practices’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary approaches to finance as diverse as performativity theory and Marxist value-form theory have a tendency to lapse into a dogmatic structuralism that merely replicates the orthodoxies of financial economics. These approaches are unable to account for the possibility of either systemic failure or historical rupture in the organization of financial markets. This introduction considers several possible ways of exiting this impasse and presents an overview of the papers in this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I consider how descriptions of finance since the 2007–2008 credit crisis have offered a new template of representation for value and its changing valences, both theoretical and aesthetic. My particular concern is social scientific writing about the crisis that might be grouped loosely under the rubric of ‘performativity’, namely the argument that models (or representations, either mathematic or linguistic) produce markets, and that markets are best studied through ethnographic observation. I ask why language, performance and metaphor itself – what was once the province of a more literary tradition – have become a methodological tool for social scientists now in their particular investigations of finance. I suggest that a more complete analysis of finance may be located if economic performativity and aesthetic theories of performance are brought into dialogue. In part one, I read the ethnographic work of Donald MacKenzie, most centrally, as well as that of Janet Roitman, both of whom have isolated some literary problem of the economy: performativity and narrative, respectively. In the second section, I look at a series of artists and theorists of performance who might be understood to offer a critique of the relationship between language, money and performativity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analysing the European Union's regulatory response in the wake of the credit and sovereign debt crises, this paper argues how its adoption of risk management as the core strategy for governing the credit ratings space may undermine European efforts to rebalance the growing asymmetry between private expertise and public democracy. While centralised oversight, enhanced transparency and restorative, technical intervention seem like sound regulatory initiatives, I problematise the methodologies, models and assumptions of sovereign ratings to show how the new ratings framework may actually impede the ability of the technocratic European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) to redress the most egregious deficiencies of ratings. Drawing on the performativity of market relations, the paper argues how ESMA's supervisory conflicts undermine the EU's capacity to perform an alternative political economy of limits. Neither is it democratically sanctioned to interfere in the analytical substance of ratings nor should it distort the social facticity of creditworthiness by relying primarily on quantitative risk analysis, ESMA will be forced to either repoliticise the ratings process or promote the status quo, which diminishes fiscal sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Judith Butler's work on performativity takes an explicitly Foucauldian approach to politics. The economic performativity literature, in comparison, has been criticised for failing to foreground power. This paper uses a case study of market creation in UK marine fisheries to suggest, after Butler, ways in which a Foucauldian analysis of the exercise of power can inform our understanding of economic performativity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Basel Accords of 1988 and 2004 (Basel I and Basel II) ostensibly set out to regulate bank risk at the international level, they were effectively in the grip of neoliberal beliefs in the self-regulating potential of free markets. In 2009–2011, the Basel Accords were revised once more with the intent of establishing financial regulations that would prevent future stampedes on the financial markets. This could be seen as the introduction of a new order in which markets are, indeed, governed through standards. However, this paper argues that Basel III is, like its predecessors, caught in rhetorically charged performation struggles in which neoliberal principles continue to hold sway, and may, at best, be seen as postliberalism in the making. Beginning from a reconceptualization of the theory of performativity of economics that highlights the contingent and political nature of performative agency, the empirical argument is substantiated through textual–intertextual analysis of the rhetorical circulation of affective signs in the Basel III negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay posits the ontology and tendencies of financial markets as akin to those of fiction – as neither actual nor false, but (re)affirmed in each instance through re-citation and interpretation. To do this, the paper analyzes the generic development of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statements issued by the United States Federal Reserve since 1994 to understand the interpretive acts and the presumptions about markets that these statements iterate. The essay tracks how the diction, form, and circulation of FOMC statements cultivate the causal logic by which financial markets are purportedly organized, and also considers the iterability of the statement as a critique of that causal logic itself. In so doing, the essay appeals to the Butlerian version of performativity that is well known in the humanities and uses it to probe the methods and assumptions of the field of performative economics. This methodological intervention demonstrates the crucial insight into matters of citationality and iterability that Butlerian performativity affords, and implies much for an understanding of the ficitonality as well as the political standing of financial markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, significant studies of finance have explored, on the one hand, the ways in which a specific financial theory might act as a ‘performative utterance’ which through its use makes itself true and, on the other hand, the ways in which discourses and practices of finance might act as continuous performatives that constitute key categories of finance and the financial subject. On first glance, the idea of self-actualising financial theory might seem closer to J. L. Austin's original conception of the performative utterance. However, in this article, I argue for the need to reclaim the Austinian heritage for the broader and more generic understanding of performative finance as well. In this sense, I suggest, a return to Austin reveals the importance of maintaining a focus not only on the potential performance of financial theory, but also those discourses and practices of finance that make up the deeper layers of performativity. I use questions about the role of financial engineering in the sub-prime crisis to illustrate that it is only through a conception of performative finance as self-actualising theories and as discourses and practices that the often obscured layers of financial engineering in society can be fully understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes as its starting point the diffusion of ICT applications associated with so-called 'customer relationship management' (CRM). CRM encourages organisations to shift their understanding of customers from an episodic and transaction-based perspective to one that emphasises continuous 'relationship management'. CRM applications thus promise to deliver more, real-time accurate information about consumer habits and behaviours therefore allowing organisations to maximise their extraction of business value. This paper explores the ways in which such inscriptive technologies are not merely referential but also constitutive of contemporary re-presentations and ideals of the consuming subject. Focusing on what we might call the 'digital doubles' of customer relationship management the authors explore how such inscriptive apparatuses simultaneously work to perform an image of the consuming subject, whilst also appearing endemically prone to instability and representational excess. Through an investigation of managerial imagery of computer enabled CRM, the paper explores the ways in which ambiguity and ambivalence continue to haunt advances in corporate technologies of surveillance and tele-control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case of industrial assurance, this paper argues that a focused concern with the pragmatics of market devices can offer a particularist politics of analysis by uncovering the material, technical and social conditions through which economic objects and persons are constituted. Industrial assurance grew exponentially in the UK after 1880 to become, through a series of political and economic twists and turns, by the 1910s the key commercial institution offering to 'foster and protect' the savings of the poor. Deploying a business model - based on door-to-door agents' collection of small weekly premiums - unchanged in its key particulars for more than a century, industrial assurance was extraordinarily successful. The paper argues that pragmatic description of industrial assurance as an agencement reveals how entangled emerging industrial assurance markets were with political theorising, government and law [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours has often been described as one of success. The man was a well-known statesman, economist and entrepreneur in late eighteenth-century France and his main legacy, the famous and still thriving Du Pont company, suggests a brilliant trajectory. The aim of this paper, however, is to analyze Du Pont's failure in performing the political and economic doctrine of which he was an active promoter all through his life: physiocracy. In all of his very diverse activities, be they scientific, political, or entrepreneurial, Du Pont indeed deliberately attempted to enact this original liberal doctrine. He tried, along with fellow physiocrats, to introduce freedom of trade and enterprise in Old Regime French minds and economic practices. Later, when emigrating to the United States, he devised a plan for a physiocratic colony. But none of these ventures was actually a success during Du Pont's lifetime: the performation of some of physiocracy's main propositions only came later, in a diffuse and partial way. We contend that this relative failure of performativity can be explained by Du Pont's specific type of agency: one relying mainly on political engineering, based on personal ties and reputations, as well as on a strict distinction between ends and means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human body parts (HBP) are made available to professionals either through market relations or through gift-giving. Market transactions were made legal in Iran during the 1980s; but this solution did not spread to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the mere existence of a possible alternative to the current policy in favor of gift-giving opens up a political issue: are market relations legitimate and efficient in the domain of organ procurement? Once so stated, the question becomes: are economists able to perform such commerce as just another form of market relations? After a discussion of Michel Callon's theory of performativity, justifying the use of a restricted definition of performativity, the paper examines Alvin Roth's suggestion that a computerized matching market for non-compatible pairs of donor-recipient be created, and explains why this is a consistent example of performativity of gift-giving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Markets are regularly relied upon to realize many different and changing values, a state of affairs that in turn attracts many efforts to engage with them. Such efforts, moreover, may draw on a wide variety of theoretical ideas about markets. Viewing real markets as on-going constructions, our aim is to explore different modes of engaging with markets to have them realize different values. We describe three different modes of engaging with markets based on empirical cases: (1) engaging to incorporate values in market exchanges; (2) engaging to reform the values that are to govern a market; and (3) engaging to represent the values produced by markets. We then use a fourth empirical case to expand on how the current realization of a market may interfere with and prove differentially fertile to efforts to incorporate, reform or represent values. Finally, we discuss when and how efforts to engage with markets may become political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instead of looking at performativity in economics and politics, this paper proposes to explore the economic politics of performativity. More precisely, it focuses on the politics of Progressive Grocer, a trade journal which from the early 1920s thrived by promoting new ways to modernize the grocery business for a readership of small independent grocers. This journal faced a dilemma: while it had to bring some new thoughts, behavior and objects into the real world, it could achieve this goal only through paper means. Progressive Grocer shows how thoroughly such a dilemma can be overcome. This magazine does almost everything that can be done through the mediation of simple paper. Progressive Grocer implements a true politics of performativity. This politics consists of introducing a new kind of text, distinct from economic theories and managerial textbooks. Instead of just putting words into its pages in the hope that they would ultimately shape the external reality, Progressive Grocer relies on a language that mixes what is said and what it does, signs and artifacts, reports of actual practices and dreamed states of commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]