Showing papers by "Danny Miller published in 2002"

Turning Callon the right way up

Abstract: This paper argues that, contrary to his own claims, Callon's work amounts to a defence of the economists' model of a framed and abstracted market against empirical evidence that contemporary exchange rarely if ever works according to the laws of the market. I start with an example from an Indian village, which shows how other societies also try to frame particular genres of exchange to protect themselves from other varieties of exchange. But both there and within capitalism the frame is precisely a moral system of how exchange ought to be carried out. I then use the example of car purchasing to suggest the highly entangled world of actual exchange within capitalism both between the exchange partners and also between consumers and commerce more generally. Indeed, the actual case studies in Callon's The Laws of the Markets seem to support this conclusion rather than the model put forward in his own introduction and conclusion. These studies, as others cited here, suggest the centrality of entanglements also for higher-level exchanges, such as stock markets and corporate take-overs, and not just for shoppers or other individual actors. As an alternative to Callon I briefly summarize an argument published elsewhere, called 'virtualism', in which I examine the increasing ability of economists and other agents of abstract models such as audit and consultancy to transform the world into closer approximations of their theories and models. I suggest this provides a more fruitful way of understanding the growth and power of abstraction in the contemporary economy.

Strategy from the Inside Out: Building Capability-Creating Organizations

Abstract: While popular brands and unique capabilities help sustain a company9s competitive advantage, they cannot be built by imitation. Managers have been able to develop sustainable capabilities not by emulating others, but by using their organizational designs and processes to identify, build on, and leverage their "asymmetries"—their evolving unique experiences, contacts, or assets. Such asymmetries may occur even in the simplest organizations. Unfortunately, they frequently are concealed, of little apparent use, and unconnected to value creation. Thus they require new strategy making and organizational approaches for their discovery, development, and application. Based on lessons from a two-year study of a diverse sample of companies, this article shows how managers can grow capabilities that sustain competitive advantage by constantly identifying and growing asymmetries, embedding and empowering them within an organizational design, and shaping market focus to exploit them.

Why some things matter

Abstract: The title of this chapter is intended to be taken quite precisely. It is as different from the question “Why things matter”, as it is from the question “Why some things are important”. It is these differences that represent the original contribution of this volume. The question “Why things matter” would have led to the general study of materiality and the foundation of material culture studies in the insistence upon the continued importance of material forms. This was in effect the battle fought against mainstream social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s and the insistence that taxonomies of material forms were often of significance precisely because being disregarded as trivial, they were often a key unchallenged mechanism for social reproduction and ideological dominance.

Spotting management fads.

Abstract: Business fads can change companies, for better or worse. They can introduce useful ideas but often fail to deliver on promises. So how can managers tell a fad from a tool that might endure? For one thing, beware of suspiciously simple techniques. If they seem too easy, they probably are.

Artefacts and the meaning of things

Abstract: Imagine we decide to establish a museum of contemporary material culture in order to preserve for posterity the artefacts of today. A comprehensive collecting policy is intended. It will not be very long before the farcical nature of this scheme becomes apparent. Some things, such as houses and ships, are too big, some things, such as candy floss and daisy chains, too ephemeral. Is a softwood plantation a natural or an artefactual form? Do we start with industrially produced goods and, if so, do we include every brand of car door mirrors and shampoo, and if a company proclaims a change in the product is this a new artefact or not? What about self-made artefacts, those that children have made at school, or that individuals have knitted on the bus? Clearly we cannot create such a museum, although we may observe the extraordinary variety of exhibitions that might be put on, featuring collections of anything from matchboxes to garden gnomes.

Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture.

Abstract: Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture. Elizabeth Chin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 272 pp.