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1.
This paper explores the possibilities offered by recent Science and Technology Studies (STS) research on markets for engaging with market innovation. Although there exist few reflections on how innovation happens in markets, market innovation has not been singularly theorized in STS-inspired market studies. In this paper, we explore the potential analytic utility of different sets of ideas in the field of market studies, such as ‘framing’ [Callon, M. (1998) ‘Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics’, in The Laws of Markets, ed. M. Callon, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–57; Callon, M. (2007) ‘An essay on the growing contribution of economic markets to the proliferation of the social’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 7–8, pp. 136–163], ‘productive friction’ [Stark, D. (2009) The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ] and ‘bricolage’ [MacKenzie, D. & Pardo-Guerra, J. P. (2014) ‘Insurgent capitalism: Island, bricolage and the re-making of finance’, Economy and Society, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 153–182]. Drawing on our research into the online personal data industry and start-ups developing personal data control products, we put together five sensibilities that we think are of use for broader considerations of market innovation.  相似文献   

2.
In this paper, we adopt the framework of analysis of the economy of qualities [Callon, M., Méadel, C. & Rabeharisoa, V. (2002) ‘The economy of qualities’, Economy and Society, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 194–217] to describe the sales and marketing practices of a French farm supply company whose products have uncertain characteristics and disputed effects. We show that this uncertainty leads sales staff of the company to develop an argument designed to generate attachments but also, and even more importantly, detachments. We also show that these detachments and attachments do not just concern the farmer, the company and its products. To understand the competitive dynamics involved here, it is also necessary to focus on the associations that are broken and established with natural entities, actors in the supply chain, institutions of agricultural science and conceptions of the farming profession.  相似文献   

3.
Pierre Bourdieu's classical sociology and the actor network-based ‘economization’ literature are often considered contradictory, despite some agreement on the constructed nature of economic man. Through an examination of the publishing industry, we argue that Bourdieu's concept of habitus may offer a useful contribution to the literature on economization. We examine how those new to a field come to understand their position and the role of material devices in structuring this. We argue that Bourdieu's theory, appropriately stated, sheds light on the tacit assessments made by market agents alongside their involvement in network-based calculative mechanisms and allows studies of markets to deal with some persistent criticisms of the economization programme.  相似文献   

4.
ABSTRACT

Issues of maintenance offer exceptional opportunities for advancing our understanding of how market-driven innovation can meet societal objectives for energy transitions. In this article, I present a case study of ongoing attempts by two spin-outs and one start-up to stabilise innovative socio-technical agencements – ‘customer journeys’ – designed to catalyse economic exchange of certain singular goods – energy retrofit products – in the Netherlands. This market-driven innovation relies on sustaining carefully crafted relationships of trust among supply-chain actants and homeowners. I mobilise the analytical lens of ‘care’ to show how the multiplicity of connections that form through socio-technical agencements – and function as a market – are tentative, contested, and unpredictable. Trust relationships are in a constant process of becoming through contestation and convergence among supply-chain actants. In doing so, I expose the precarious and arduous work involved in maintaining a market for singular public goods. This implies a knowledge politics as well: in a call to sensitise us, market scholars, to processes of maintenance integral to market-driven innovation for energy transitions I propose to advance Callon’s call to civilise markets by sharing troubled, though encouraging, care-infused market tales in an effort to counteract the storification of energy transitions as innovation fairy tales.  相似文献   

5.
William James (1919) characterises hypotheses as either live or dead. A hypothesis is live when it is taken into account as a ‘real possibility’. We follow James’ suggestion to not attribute intrinsic properties to hypotheses, but rather investigate how they came into being and look at the effects they generate. Expectations of digital technologies are a topic of vivid debate in the insurance industry. Before these expectations can become ‘live’, they have, in the first place, to be generated by market devices. We investigate how the reinsurance blogpost platform Open Minds functions as an ‘expectation generation device’ on the future of insurance markets. Combining Beckert’s work on the role of fictional expectations with the pragmatist turn in sociology of markets, we propose to study ‘expectation generation devices’, provoking expectations on economic markets. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate the explicit fictional character of the Open Minds contributions, and analyse how a contained space of openness is generated to provoke expectations. We demonstrate how Open Minds can become live through circulation to other expectation generation sites in the insurance industry and beyond. We conclude by reflecting on the importance of expectation generation devices as a particular type of market devices.  相似文献   

6.
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   

7.
This paper analyzes China’s attempt at maintaining and stabilizing the market framing of wind power development as ‘sustainable.’ Drawing on mixed data and new directions in the social studies of marketization, the analysis focuses on the Chinese government’s responses to the ‘quality crisis’ in the wind turbine industry. Employing five types of framing – goods, marketizing agencies, market encounters, price-setting, and market design and maintenance – the paper sheds light on flexible government interventions to steer the socio-technical assemblage around wind power towards a ‘turn to quality.’ In essence, this is a study of market construction in the context of Chinese wind power experiments. The paper contributes to new directions in market studies by (1) demonstrating the importance of attending to the contested algorithmic transformation of wind resources to wind power; (2) taking market studies to a transitional and developmental context, which renders marketization prone to constant overflowing; and (3) elucidating a particular Chinese model of experimental market construction ‘through embracing overflowing.’ The paper proposes new trajectories for future market studies with a focus on non-Western contexts, to reveal the wide variety of how marketization unfolds.  相似文献   

8.
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   

9.
EROTIC ECONOMICS     
Since their inception, capitalist markets have been associated with a wide variety of psychological disorders. Freud argued that many of these neuroses were the result of repressing Eros, or the pleasure principle, in the interest of building a broader society or ‘civilization’. Drawing on the work of the Italian autonomist Franco Berardi and the psychology of Carl Jung, I argue that Eros, defined more broadly as relatedness, is an integral part of capitalist markets that has been consistently devalued and repressed both in economic discourse and economic policy. Identified with the ‘feminine’ behaviours of hysteria, emotion and irrationality, this aspect of capitalist markets was moralized throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the market was re-conceived as masculine. As both Berardi and Keynes have noted, however, we have paid a price for this absorption of Eros by the Logos of the market. By recuperating the erotic aspects of capitalism, we can build a more embodied, relational concept of the market.  相似文献   

10.
ABSTRACT

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.  相似文献   

11.
ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which middle class Muslims in Turkey talk about Islamic ‘community’ and analyses these discourses in relation to the phenomenon of market Islam. The evidence is drawn from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with donors, managers, and volunteers of a government friendly Islamic NGO, the Light House (Deniz Feneri Sosyal Yard?mla?ma ve Dayan??ma Derne?i) in 2009–2010, followed by subsequent trips in 2013 and 2015. I argue that Islamic charity is not merely a calculative economic behaviour or a reflection of deep-seated religious values, but rather a performative site of market Islam. In seeking to reconcile a faith-based understanding of charity with diverse interpretations of the neoliberal economy, I show that middle-class Muslims adhered to two discourses of ‘community’: whereas donors saw charitable giving as a market-enhancing mechanism, NGO managers defined their charitable work as part of an Islamic project focused on economic redistribution. Although they conceptualized the relationship between faith and markets in divergent ways, both discourses of market Islam posit ‘community’ as an intrinsic component of governing the poor in Turkey.  相似文献   

12.
ABSTRACT

In this paper, I conceptualise ethical consumption applications (ECAs) as market innovations inflected in processes of configuring market actors and market (re)framings. The introduction of ECAs through the work of civil society is not only about changing frames of market exchange, but also work in the register of making ‘good consumers’ and consumers as ‘agents of change’ and moralising markets. Thus, a more accurate concept for these devices is suggested: ‘quasi’ market devices. The main aim of this paper is to analyse how consumers attached to and resisted use of ECAs designed to assist in product choices and shape responsible everyday practices. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Sweden, the article applies a methodology grounded in Science and Technology-inspired market studies in combination with Consumer Culture Theory’s (CCT) interest in identity work and sense-making associated with technology consumption. Although available at the time of the empirical data collection period of the study, all three apps were off the market during the analytic work of this paper; a major argument for focusing on barriers to acceptance of the apps and trying to conceptualise how such non-acceptance can be understood.  相似文献   

13.
The idea of multiple markets, conceptualised as a variety of concrete market configurations, was fruitfully developed in the socio-material networks research programme. However, it has not yet been able to solve the following puzzle: the differentiation and specification of multiple markets that exist at the same time in the same place. In this paper, I argue that White’s model of ‘markets from networks’ can contribute to filling this gap, since it is centred on the specification of a market’s structural and cultural boundaries. His model allows for the analysis of concrete market practices intertwined with more abstract concepts of markets formed in discourses that move firms and markets across different levels – from local markets to market sectors. An in-depth analysis of the emergence of the World Music market demonstrates the advantages of employing this model in the analysis of multiple markets.  相似文献   

14.
This paper proposes and mobilizes a cultural economic framework to study the dynamic formation of digital markets for cultural goods. Adapting Hayek's theory of price to recent developments in the field of cultural sociology, it proposes the idea that an effective price system condenses information dispersed in society, and then enters into a performative process of symbolic communication that is perceived as ‘authentic’ by the consumers. After analyzing ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ current strategies aimed at producing digital markets for cultural goods, which are especially sensitive to the symbolic dimension of price, the article suggests the hypothesis that the digital market has been constructed as a zero- or quasi-zero-price economic space, and that it is the offline and material market of cultural products the one that collects the higher revenues derived from the ‘authentic’ generation of value taking place in the digital marketplace.  相似文献   

15.
The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, so too can ‘culture’. To explore this, we focus on objects of concern that – unlike the financial markets that have formed the core of ANT-inspired thinking about the economy – are assembled by actors in and through what they themselves understand to be cultural materials, cultural calculations, cultural processes, cultural institutions. In such examples, ‘culture’ is continuously invoked and enacted by actors in constructing their actions, whatever critical sociologists might have to say about its ontological status. It seems paradoxical that a theoretical approach that makes sacrosanct the associations constructed by agents who assemble their own world, generally discusses ‘culture’ only from the point of view of critical epistemology. Bearing all this in mind, we argue that it is time for us to ‘reassemble’ the cultural.  相似文献   

16.
Public policies such as feed-in tariffs have been widely introduced to stimulate the development of renewable energies, and sustain a decarbonisation of the electricity sector. Proponents argue that these governance instruments safeguard public goods such as the climate – yet they are accused of creating political markets, and political prices, here understood as market distortion. This paper studies the ‘politics’ of pricing by following the adoption of the first feed-in tariff in France. Pricing as a way of achieving non-economic ends, such as climate mitigation, brings the values of several public goods into play, all the while prompting a translation of these values into a single price. Following the struggles over the pricing of wind power in the early 2000s, the study illustrates that rather than a pollution of the market sphere by that of politics, a politics of pricing can be observed in four distinct struggles: namely the framing of the public interest; valuation as the articulation of the future; the possible agencies of governance; and role of valuation methods and calculations.  相似文献   

17.
ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy focuses on the digitalization of consumption and its social, cultural, ethical, political, and gendered implications. It thus answers the call for more research on how digital devices spread from the purely personal domain to multiple sociocultural domains. Through their use, new cultural practices have emerged between consumers and these devices, and devices and markets, that lead to change, in terms of consumer demand, consumption norms, and issues of ethics, culture, and power. Closely examining the role that devices play in consumption behavior enables us to address the supposed manipulative power of hi-tech companies, infrastructures, and systems at the global level, and the view ordinary market actors hold of digital appliances as empowering tools at the local level. The papers in this volume bridge ‘actor network theory' and ‘consumer culture theory' from the perspective of market ‘agencements.’ Ruckenstein-Granroth and Beauvisage-Mellet, and Arriagada-Concha focus on the device-mediated relationship between large digital market infrastructures and consumer behavior; Petersson McIntyre and Licoppe unveil the societal and cultural underpinnings of digitalized markets. Last but not least, Sörum and Soujtis address the political dimensions and implications of our new digital consumer equipment and society.  相似文献   

18.
ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, microinsurance has taken off in South Africa. The strength of this market is fuelled almost exclusively by funeral insurance, unsurprising considering the immense cultural value South Africans place on funerals. Moreover, insurance companies have achieved scale by working through brokers who are embedded within community-based institutions like burial societies and funeral parlours. The incursion of ‘insurance culture’ into this sphere has thus resulted in an ecosystem in which formal and informal institutions are in fluid states of tension and cooperation. Mediators sustain this ecosystem and enable the extension of microinsurance into low-income communities. I employ Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘translation’ in my analysis of three types of mediators: insurance agents, funeral parlour operators, and burial society administrators. The paper, which is based on fieldwork I conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, focuses on these actors’ specific techniques of translation, i.e. the different strategies/practices used to reconcile the disparate rationalities and institutions of the formal insurance system with those of the informal risk management sphere. An analysis attuned to the various social identities and positions embodied by these brokers reveals the dislocations, ambiguities, conflicts, and opportunities generated by the expansion of microinsurance markets into the low-income terrain.  相似文献   

19.
The website ‘Punternet’ contains customer service reviews (‘field reports’) of commercial sex encounters in the UK's indoor sex market. Treating Punternet as a calculative device shows how ordinary understandings of morality underpin consumer markets, as field reports qualify commercial sex to produce understandings of ‘good value’. The varied, messy and sometimes contradictory understandings of value, values, worth and goodness that are present in the calculative device of Punternet reveal the complex ways in which market actions are made moral by consumers. ‘Value’ in the market for sex is a moral judgement made by male authors whose understandings of themselves as deserving customers derives from the stories they tell of good and bad service providers. Although the moral status of prostitution is contested by many, Punternet reports lay claim to it being a legitimate consumer activity, with customers themselves vulnerable to being denied ‘value for money’. The good worker is seen as providing value for money by being professional, committed to pleasing the customer and appearing to enjoy her job.  相似文献   

20.
Recent research has suggested that one of the key ways in which economics and cognate calculative discourses and practices ‘perform’ the economy is through the drawing of conceptual boundaries between economic activities and entities of various sorts. One such boundary is the boundary between markets. This article shows that a critical contemporary arena for the differentiation of one product or service market from another is competition (or antitrust) law, which, through its work of market definition, seeks to identify the boundaries of competition: the location of the borders between meaningful economic spaces within which buyers and sellers encounter one another and establish prices. The article argues that in envisioning markets (‘the law's markets’), competition law simultaneously constitutes markets, and it demonstrates this through an empirical examination of the exercise of such law in three economic sectors: insurance, grocery retailing, and pay-television. It also shows, however, that competition law is perennially dogged by conflict – both over the placement of such conceptual boundaries, and over the very process of placement and the status of the market boundary itself – and that its application and effects can only be understood in this light.  相似文献   

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