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1.
This article departs from the post 2008 financial crisis context, from its intersection with technological developments, and from the socio-technical arrangements configured by this conjuncture. It explores plans and actions – of mainstream financial institutions, and of a community seeking for alternatives to centralised economy and governance – for the use of digital platforms supported by blockchain infrastructure. In particular, it explores how such plans and actions relate to conceptions of public and peer trust and how they appear to produce, or reinforce, reputational imaginaries and quantification practices within added value philosophies. By illuminating a tension between the two identified case examples, I seek to render alternative communities’ and financial institutions’ conceptions, imaginaries and practices (more) visible and to analyse their organisational marketing strategies – where there is a pragmatic and discursive operationalisation of technology as well as of trust as means to gain more self-sovereignty in action, while navigating markets and regulated actual world contexts.  相似文献   

2.
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.  相似文献   

3.
This text analyses the relationship between institutionalism, context and cultural criticism. Its main objective is to identify how universalism has permeated the different waves of Institutional Critique, conditioning the subversive potential conferred to creative practices and locating radical, alternative institutionalism within the narrow geo-cultural landscape of mainstream biennials. Taking as point of departure Cildo Meireles’s participatory public intervention in documenta 11, I consider how representational concerns are privileged vis-à-vis visual practices related to coloniality and difference. From that position, the article argues that only by challenging the assumed universality of the debates on cultural institutionalism will we be able to stress the relevance of critique in addressing cultural policies and non-representational practices. This implies confronting the troublesome relationship between Institutional Critique and modernity from a ‘geographically-informed’ position capable of recognising institutionalism as a heterogeneous body of practices that are being globally transformed.  相似文献   

4.
Focusing on the ‘talent pathways’ outlined in the 2008 Department of Culture, Media and Sport Creative Britain report, this article explores how different forms of creative agency are positioned to make a ‘contribution’ to the creative economy. Drawing on Paul du Gay's concept of personhood, case studies on digital gaming explore the formation of two forms of personhood – creative consumers and creative workers. Specifically, these forms of creative agency are analysed in terms of their connections on the ‘talent pathway’, and the transitions that see creativity and talent as inherent in all individuals and in need of channelling and directing. The creative-consumer case study unpacks the digital games industry strategy of enrolling fan-creators within their commercial operations. This case study reveals the increasing importance of co-production for the creative economy, and the extent to which diverse cultural practices are facilitated and positioned. Higher education Games Design courses will then provide the case study for examining how the creative-consumer can be positioned to make a productive contribution to the creative economy as a worker. Within this context, the formation of fans/students into a creative worker or industry-ready worker is evident. Through tracing different forms of creative agency and how they are connected to make a contribution to the creative economy, this article explores the governance of creative agency and economic subjects.  相似文献   

5.
ABSTRACT

Between 2013 and 2014, PED virus (PEDv) swept through American pig farms, killing millions of animals and causing a market panic that drove the prices of both physical pork and lean hog futures to all-time highs. However, a divergence between pricing in financial markets and on-farm realities allowed some producers to reap record profits via a unique form of biological arbitrage. This arbitrage was novel in that it allowed for an underlier (pigs) to be used to profit from fluctuations in the price of a derivative (lean hog futures). This article explores the case of PEDv to examine the entanglements and divergences between ‘real’ and ‘abstract’ values in financialized industries, paying particular attention to the schisms between the imaginaries and practices of actors in the financial and tangibly productive links of the agricultural value chain. To do so, it examines the historical co-constitution of American agriculture and the financial sector, and shows how in the contemporary moment these two ever-more-intertwined sectors are nonetheless marked by important differences. It argues that the nature of agricultural production can confound the expectations of finance, and highlights the fact that financialization entails contextually-specific practices that can lead to uneven and unexpected market outcomes.  相似文献   

6.
Following recent works that have underlined the increasing search for liquidity in economic exchange, this article studies how illiquid forms of money are converted into liquid forms by corporate finance actors. In the name of ‘shareholder value’, the various forms of value generated by companies (such as ‘trade credit’) tend to be increasingly transformed into liquid forms of money that are easily distributable to shareholders (‘cash flows’). Describing this phenomenon as an example of what anthropologists of money call ‘conversion’, this paper highlights how such a conversion process was necessary for the historical development of ‘shareholder value’ policies in corporate finance. Considering documentary sources and interviews with consultants, auditors, and private equity fund managers involved in ‘cash flow’ optimisation practices, this paper details this conversion phenomenon and shows how it has relied on the historical elaboration of specific metrological, technical, legal, and moral norms.  相似文献   

7.
Recently, scholars begun to urge an approach to the study of finance that interrogates the accepted wisdom of financial models and practices by examining the forces of power behind their development. Drawing from the field of cultural studies, Hardin and Rottinghaus (in their 2015 article, “Introducing a cultural approach to technology in financial markets”) advocate for a cultural studies of finance, which emphasizes the critical consideration of the co-constructive nature of financial technologies and cultures. This paper builds off that provocation using the concept of ‘rhetorical closure’ (as described by Pinch and Bijker in 2012) to explore how industry media aimed at derivatives developers, traders, and investment bankers worked to define the meanings of new financial technologies. Using critical discourse analysis, this study examines how credit default swaps (CDSs) were presented in the financial industry media in the years 1995–2007, and how this framing contributed to the politics of these artifacts. It finds that the financial industry media produced a discourse about CDSs using multiple overlapping frames that overgeneralized the success of CDSs from narrowly specific evidence and applied constant competitive pressure to adopt new financial technologies. These discourses implicitly encouraged the rapid adoption and broad application of CDSs, thus helping to (re)produce a financial culture in which self-interest and short-term gains were prioritized.  相似文献   

8.
WAGES OF SIN?     
The ‘global credit crunch’ is only the latest and most virulent among a series of financial crises stretching back to the 1970s and beyond. Yet, more than any of its predecessors, the current crisis is being presented in apocalyptical libidinal terms. Accounts of the crisis and its aftermath tend to be predicated on a sharp contrast drawn between prudent, conservative, risk averse, sober financial practice and a more exuberant, greedy, hedonistic, risky counterpart.

This kind psychosexual analysis is neither new, nor does it represent an accurate depiction of the dilemmas and challenges posed by modern finance. It tacitly suggests, for example, that a return to ‘traditional financial values’ (akin to repeated calls for returns to ‘family values’) would restore calm and normality to a system undermined by the excesses of the perverse few.

This paper argues that although a return to ‘traditional values’ is unlikely to solve any of the current problems, the representation of the crisis and its aftermath is significant. The crisis and its aftermath are embroiled in a wider fundamentalist and puritanical backlash against ‘hedonistic’ capitalism. It represents not a crisis of capitalism as a whole, but a schism within (predominantly) financial communities over the morality and acceptability of ‘risk’. As such, a strongly libidinal language already common within the markets is being adapted and redeployed to create new divisions and exceptions in the context of crisis.  相似文献   

9.
ABSTRACT

A central trope of the information society is that of ‘information flows.’ The implicit assumption underlying such a vision involves the removal of gatekeepers and intermediaries who are perceived to impede such flows. Drawing from field research on information circulation, trade, and money in rural markets in Myanmar and India, we show why intermediaries persist alongside information and communication technologies (ICTs) in trade and financial transactions in the ‘Information Age.’ We examine the range of roles, (human and non-human) actors, and material practices that are involved in conducting financial transactions, and we show the importance of historical legacies and politics in explaining why both cash and financial intermediaries persist in the digital age. Focusing on the different value that human and non-human intermediaries bring to financial encounters helps explain what characteristics make each resilient or replaceable in a time of change. By situating intermediaries and mediations in the social relations within which they operate, we bring back the role of power and politics – an element that is often missing in accounts focused on the unmediated and ‘free’ circulation of information using ICTs – in explaining processes of mediation and circulation.  相似文献   

10.
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11.
ABSTRACT

This paper explores how pricing has historically been involved in the making up of persons and how the ability to ‘personalize’ price is reconfiguring the ability of markets to discriminate. We discuss a variety of contemporary pricing practices, and three types of personhood they produce: generic, protected, and transcontextual. While some contemporary developments in pricing draw on understandings of the person that are quite familiar, others are novel and likely to be contested. We argue that many newer pricing techniques make it harder for consumers to identify themselves as part of a recognized group. We conclude that contemporary price personalization should be understood in terms of the intensification of individualization in combination with dividualization, and as such, contributes to novel and consequential forms of classification.  相似文献   

12.
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13.
This paper contends that political economy may profit from an understanding of money that is both able to account for its systemic importance as well as money’s specific role for the contemporary distribution of wealth. ‘Money-ness’ is a strategic factor in profit-making and capital accumulation. If we accord moneyness to all those instruments that make the repackaging of credit and other financial assets and liabilities and their capitalization possible, we arrive at an understanding of money that underscores the Marxian analysis of the structural importance of the money relation for capital accumulation that is up to speed with current financial innovations. As a social structure and process, moneymaking through capital permeates society. As a public-private deal between the state, rentiers, banks, and taxpayers that has existed since the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, it binds these actors together in shifting relations of dependence. Under financial capitalism today, what counts as money and how far moneyness stretches into the realms of financial innovation has been a core object of struggle in the public-private deal of money creation.  相似文献   

14.
This paper contributes to the increasing research on how experts within financial institutions co-produce and organize financial markets, and in particular how equity analysts enact stock markets characterized by high volume and volatility. The 20 equity analysts studied give qualitatively different accounts of what, from an outsider's perspective, appear to be very similar work. The analysts understand investment objects, equity markets, and what constitutes good analytical work in qualitatively different ways. This heterogeneity, or multiplicity, could be one source of the, unexplained by orthodox financial theory, ‘excess’ volatility and ‘excess’ trading volume on financial markets. Therefore, the paper complements accounts within heterodox finance theory and sociology-based studies of financial market activities.  相似文献   

15.
This paper examines the potential pitfalls for academic research associated with goal displacements in the implementation of goals and indicators of research commercialization. We ask why patenting has come to serve as the key policy indicator of innovative capacity and what consequences this has for the organization of academic research. To address these questions, the paper presents a case study from Denmark on, firstly, why and how the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ introduced patenting as a central instrument to Danish science policy and, secondly, the effects the Act has had on Danish university organization and research practices. We trace why and how commercialization was introduced as an important objective in Danish science policy since the 1980s. The increased focus on patents is explained as an isomorphic adjustment to an international ‘science policy field,’ manifested in particular through OECD statistics, where patenting has come to serve as a key metric in international rankings. In a second step, we examine what effects the patenting requirements have had on organization and research practice at a Danish university. We show that in practice ‘number of patents’ changed from serving as an indicator of innovative capacity to being a policy goal in itself, thus in effect producing a goal displacement that is potentially damaging for both academic research and innovation capacity of the surrounding society. As a consequence of this goal displacement, active scientists now increasingly engage in patenting primarily as a means to fulfill organizational targets and to increase their ‘fundability,’ rather than to promote commercial applications of their research. In conclusion, we discuss how these unfulfilled policy ambitions have led to a retrospective redefinition of policy goals rather than an adjustment of the actual policy tools.  相似文献   

16.
This paper aims to reflect on some key issues linked to the production of digital objects in business settings. In doing so, it problematizes current social science scholarship, which emphasizes the analysis of digital data and analytics, and reinforces the magnitude of its consequences and ‘data power’. The paper proposes making three corrective ‘movements’ that might enrich our approaches to how databases and analytics are assembled in business settings. The first movement involves the problem of ethnographic access to data-making practices. We propose taking seriously the issue of fabricating an ethnographic encounter where the process of making digital objects is exposed. The second movement concerns the visibility and the type of politics taking place in data practices. We argue for the need to displace attention from data impacts and results to the myriad of mundane practices and devices through which these objects are assembled. The third movement we suggest requires a focus on examining error and failure as key aspects of the manufacturing of consumer databases. Each of these movements is illustrated by ethnographic vignettes from a 9-month ethnographic experiment that involved participating in the first stages of the manufacturing of an online financial retail company's consumer database.  相似文献   

17.
In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been widely adopted in international development policy. Organizations around the world have replicated this model successfully. This essay takes the comparative case more explicitly to read against the tendency to understand microfinance as the globally institutionalized and realized norm, and local unruly credit economies as the exception. We go beyond comparing credit in India and Paraguay in order to illustrate how comparison is actually central to the banking practices of microfinance. Moreover, it is the collaborative anthropological project that helps to show this, allowing not only for empirical grounds of comparison, but also raising theoretical and methodological questions of comparison itself. In juxtaposing microfinance in our two fieldsites, we find that as credit proliferates globally, so do the comparative projects both of borrowers and lenders in the disparate worlds of Kolkata and Ciudad del Este. At the same time, these were constrained by the global financial comparisons between countries made by investors. Ethnographic methods are vital for understanding how microfinance becomes part of a wider repertoire of financial strategies used by women while simultaneously offering the grounds for women to undertake their own acts of comparison.  相似文献   

18.
GOOD TASTE     
In political theory citizens are defined as being willing to serve the ‘common good’ while consumers are supposed to seek ‘pleasure’. The two terms pull in different directions, so that adding a hyphen is not enough to craft a figure capable of acting in ways that are generous as well as gratifying. This, or so I will argue, is linked with the understanding of the body that lurks in the background. The idea is that the body is naturally greedy. It only acts ‘properly’ if norms are imposed on it from the outside. To interfere with this understanding, I seek help from advertisements for ‘good food’ as well as from ethnographic research into the way bodily pleasure (rather than being innate) is being shaped in socio-material practices. It might as well be shaped in wise, sensitive and responsive ways. This leads me to suggest that, in theory, we experiment with a ‘consumer-citizen’ whose normativity is literally incorporated. I propose that, despite the caveats, we might call this normativity good taste.  相似文献   

19.
The article explores how a National Institute of Health policy of racialization-as-inclusion in research informs the building of Asian DNA databases at Biopolis, an emerging biomedical hub in Singapore. Citing variability in DNA and populations in the Asian region, Singaporean biostatisticians challenge DeCode Genetics of Iceland as an exemplary model of genomic research. They claim that genetic traits among populations in Asia that are relatively new to medical genomics – and being gathered ‘in the wild’ – gain value from being calculated and databased. The infrastructure deploys the ethnic heuristic in different registers. First, the network of ethnicity becomes a supple membrane coextensive with the network of genetic data points. Second, ethnicity is rendered an immutable mobile that circulates databases beyond tiny Singapore, making the infrastructure at once situated, flexible, and expansive. Third, the ethnic signifier carries affective value that enhances a sense of what is at stake in the building, mobilization and implications of such Asian databases. In short, the origami-like folding together of multiple, flowable, and perfomative data points shapes a unilateral topological space of biomedical ‘Asia.’  相似文献   

20.
ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency.  相似文献   

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