Performativity and market change [DRAFT 1.1 ASA 2014]: San Francisco's street food boom.

This paper seeks to advance Michel Callon's performativity theory in the sociology of markets by applying the theory to a case of market change. Drawing on ethnographic data on the transformation of the street food market in San Francisco, CA from 2008 to 20010, I argue that performativity theory can be improved by more fully incorporating the distinction.first highlighted in this context in Judith Butler's (2010) critique.between illocution and perlocution. Callon's performativity theory in economic sociology shows that economic theories are not mere descriptions of naturally arising phenomena by revealing the work that necessarily goes into assembling markets (and the agencies that inhabit them). In particular, Callon's theory highlights how theories themselves, through the intervention of market devices, come to reshape the markets they purport to describe such that they become accurate descriptions. However, performativity theory has been criticized for overemphasizing the stability of markets while leaving market change undertheorized (Overdevest 2011). Starting from the exchange between Butler and Callon (2010) in the Journal for Cultural Economy, I extend the linguistic concepts of illocution and perlocution by analogy to illocutionary and perlocutionary use of material devices .devices that are either deployed as intended in the right "total situation" or used 'gspeculatively" to produce uncertain effects. I argue that the devices deployed in the transformation of the street food market in San Francisco can be understood as an example of this second type, thus opening the way for a fuller theorization of market change from within performativity theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]