Showing papers in "Journal of Cultural Economy in 2017"

Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy

Abstract: I read Lower ed with a former colleague mind, having had the pleasure of working together at the City University of New York. Jeanne is a black woman in her 40s, who is raising children in the city...

Regulating belonging: surveillance, inequality, and the cultural production of abjection

Abstract: Conditions of abjection are increasingly viewed as problems to be managed with surveillance. Across disparate domains, bodies that challenge normalized constructions of responsible neoliberal citizenship are categorized, monitored, policed, and excluded in dehumanizing and often violent ways. This paper explores the role of surveillance in such processes. The registers covered include everyday abjection (welfare systems, battered women’s shelters, and homelessness), criminalized poverty (police targeting of the poor and emerging ‘poverty capitalism’ arrangements), and the radically adrift (the identification, tracking, and containment of refugees). In each of these cases, surveillance is yoked to structural inequalities and systems of oppression, but it also possesses a cultural dimension that thrusts marginalized and dehumanized subjectivities upon the abject Other. Therefore, I argue that in order to critique the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of contemporary surveillance, it is ne...

Attachments, you say? … How a concept collectively emerges in one research group

Abstract: Can we interrogate a concept in a manner that is compatible with what the concept itself conveys, while also remaining connected with the specific site in which the concept is being used? This essa...

The social life of measurement: how methods have shaped the idea of culture in urban regeneration

Abstract: Although ‘culture-led regeneration’ has been critiqued as both a concept and practice, it is clear that policy-makers continue to make efforts to use cultural activity of varying forms to achieve ends which could be (and are) described in terms of urban ‘regeneration’. Whilst the idea of culture-led urban regeneration had gained considerable prominence in a range of policy by the early twenty-first century, many questions have remained over how exactly such ‘regenerative’ outcomes could be convincingly demonstrated, despite much activity to attempt such demonstration over the course of preceding years. The desire for convincing evidence can be seen in a continued, and increasing, focus on evaluation, and methods aimed at providing evidence of impact and outcomes. In light of the renewed political focus in recent years on ‘proving’ the effects and value of cultural activity, this paper considers the continuation of practice in this area, and asks what lessons, if any, have been learned in evaluativ...

Sourcing newness: ways of inducing indeterminacy

Abstract: This paper engages with the question of the new as the first stage in what may, at a later time, turn into an innovation Taking our cue from John Dewey, the new is here interpreted as a consequence of indeterminacy We study practices that induce indeterminacy in order to ‘source’ the new Based on findings from a collective research programme, we distinguish three ways of inducing indeterminacy: configuring situations, creating things and risking valuations For each of these ways of inducing indeterminacy basic variations are described and discussed in greater detail The three ways of inducing indeterminacy are shown to correspond to a present-centred concept of time that distinguishes the now from a past and a future horizon The cases presented affirm the claim that the new is not an inevitable consequence of the increasing entanglement of technoscience and the economy but something that needs to be sought for, cared for and actively produced

How are we now? Real-time mood-monitoring as valuation

Abstract: In a digital society, we are frequently invited to communicate our present affective state via interfaces. These include smart-phone apps which allow users to track their mood in ‘real-time’, plus touchpads in organisations and public spaces which seek rapid feedback on whether an experience is positive or negative. In contrast to the use of surveys as tools of valuation, these technologies seek to capture experience in ‘real-time’, which can then be viewed and evaluated critically at a later time. Based on study of a number of mood-monitoring technologies, this paper highlights some of the ways in which they challenge conventional accounts of (e)valuation. In particular, rather than inviting individuals to represent their feelings towards the past numerically, they invite them to make uncritical expressions of positive or negative mood in the present. The central question of value is no longer how much is something valued, but whether or not it is valued. Quantitative and calculated analysis of p...

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-wing Extremism, by David Golumbia

Abstract: In recent years we have seen a significant shift in the use and development of Bitcoin and its offshoots, so-called ‘alt coins’ and blockchain technologies. Despite the new uses, the death of Bitco...

Explaining the end of military tutelary regime and the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey

Abstract: What were the dynamics behind the July 15 2016 coup attempt in Turkey? At a time when academic literature has been focusing on the dissolution of the country’s military tutelary regime, how can this military coup attempt be explained? As an early response to this unanticipated puzzle, I argue that the success of civilian moves towards the dissolution of the military’s political power contributed – paradoxically – both to the emergence and to the failure of a coup organized by a junta of Gulenist officers and their collaborators. Through a description of the historical evolution of civil–military relations, I explain the dissolution of the military tutelary regime with reference to a combination of push and pull factors. The interaction of these push and pull factors presents the historical context behind the emergence and failure of the July 15 failed coup in Turkey.

The data analytics industry and the promises of real-time knowing: perpetuating and deploying a rationality of speed

Abstract: This article draws upon a sample of 34 data analytics providers in order to explore the rhetorical framing of the speediness of the data analytic solutions that they offer. General perceptions of cultural speed-up frame understandings of organisational life, against this backdrop of data analytics are presented as a potential solution to the need to speed-up and keep-up with the competition. As a result, it is argued that notions of speedy analytics are central to the spread and intensification of data-led decision-making, governance and ordering processes. The promises of real-time knowing are one means by which organisational speed and agility are seen to be achievable. The result is the pushing back of the limits of datafication. This article is concerned with the power of the data analytics industry and the powerful ways in which this industry presents and projects properties and promises onto data and data analytics. It suggests that this industry taps into, cultivates and then attempts to de...

Cryptocurrencies as market singularities: the strange case of Bitcoin

Abstract: Since its creation in 2009, the electronic currency Bitcoin has generated volumes of online debate in the business press. While there have been plenty of economic arguments situating it as a financial bubble about to collapse including from Nobel Prize winning economists, its price value has proven to be more durable than many have predicted. To explain this durability, Karpik’s conception of market singularities is used to understand the Bitcoin phenomenon by outlining the beliefs that maintain Bitcoin’s status as a volatile financial asset. Market singularities are markets for particular kinds of goods and services that are of uncertain and incommensurable value. Singularities markets have communities of followers and a distinctive belief system that ascribes value to a particular product, service, or asset. Developing Karpik’s conception, the paper explores the libertarian political belief system that surrounds Bitcoin’s status as a financial asset. I also outline some political tensions within...

Ten years after: it’s the economy and culture, stupid!

Abstract: This issue marks the start of the tenth anniversary volume of the Journal of Cultural Economy. The editors, together with the new chair of the editorial board, Fabian Muniesa, decided to use the anniversary as an opportunity to return to the vexed question of what it means to think about the economy through, and with, culture. We have planned a series of initiatives that will take place over the next year or so, beginning with contents in the main section of this issue that have been specially selected to reflect something of the scope and range of the questions that currently preoccupy our readers, reviewers and writers. In the Review and Commentary section, we feature Diane Coyle’s review All to Play for in Measuring the Economy; we reassert our commitment to providing a forum to enhance the circulation of non-Anglophone scholarship by publishing a revised and translated version of Antoine Hennion’s important essay on attachment and deliver on our previously expressed aim (McFall 2015) to be a little faster to respond to world events by publishing Koray Caliskan’s reflections on the Turkish coup attempt of 15 July 2016 in what we hope will be the first of a series of rapid response essays. Writing this Introduction in the week that Donald Trump secured victory in the US election, this seems more important than ever. Having gone to bed on 8 November, comforted by the unequivocal polls predicting a Clinton win, we woke to the post-factual upset that the big data analytics industry had overpromised again. Take that, science, measurement, quantitative modelling! Qualitative researchers were on Twitter the day after to demand that the big data power tool fetishes now be set aside and questions of meaning, interpretation and yes – culture, be given proper regard. It is far too soon to reflect seriously on the election result but there is something about culture, how it is thought about and addressed practically, in relation to politics and economies, that is implicated in the stunned shock surrounding Trump’s ascendancy. Thus, when Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic in September about the fact-checking bamboozlement surrounding so many of Trump’s claims, ‘the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally’ (2016) she struck at the heart of what was happening. This is something that Stuart Hall (1984) was at pains to point out when he remarked on the importance of the kind of stories people tell over their content. While Trump and his followers grasped meanings ‘already concealed or held within the forms of the stories themselves’ (1984, p. 7), narratively constructed in ways that infused a certain version of the world, the press, pollsters and the Democratic campaign sweated over analytics and content that in the end seem to have mattered much less. That Trump’s rhetoric was empty, slight, inaccurate, fantastical and inflammatory aided rather than undermined the circulation and consumption of his familiar stories about greatness heroically restored. As Katherine Murphy wrote, forensic interrogation of Trump and strong editorial lines ‘perversely helped Trump’s campaign, fuelling his grievance narrative and making him stronger’. Hall’s account of the narrative construction of reality of course is only one of the myriad ways that culture matters in shaping how political and economic events unfold. The important question is whether we have thought hard enough about this since the first bloom of cultural studies – and there is not a simple answer to that. To explain how this came to be the case, it is worth briefly rehearsing how some of the historical connections between cultural studies and cultural economy played out.

On (not) assembling a market for sustainable energy: heat network infrastructure and British cities

Abstract: Energy policies increasingly rely on market instruments to meet societal objectives for climate change mitigation. We explore the application of such instruments in low carbon heat markets. Using a conceptual framework derived from actor network theory and economic sociology, we examine the role of technical-economic models as market devices in two heat network proposals in British cities. Government intermediaries relied on the models to enact the mutual financial and carbon benefits of an area-wide heat market, and to enrol multiple public sector organisations in innovation. In practice, the models produced the opposite response: parties synthesised the modelled cost–benefit calculations into the existing public services market agencement and translated the model numbers ino opportunities to secure competitive advantage for their own organisation. These activities undermined the projected cost and carbon saving logic of the collective actor solution. The findings demonstrate the potent economic ...

Something new: value and change in finance*

Abstract: Ethnographic and social scientific accounts of the financiers that buy and sell companies for profit often homogenize the players in these social dramas, relying on blunt, totalizing definitions of culture or overly deterministic articulations of habitus. This article, drawing on a two-year study of private equity investors, offers an alternative analytic frame for making sense of how private equity people buy and sell companies. It explores the ways in which private equity people make arguments persuading one another and the larger public that an investment is worth making. Important to these arguments are not only substantive content, the evidence that investors marshal to support a thesis, but also reflective evaluation of what counts as good evidence, meta-commentary. It is in these split levels of analysis that we can appreciate the cultural diversity within finance, Wall Street, and investment banking. I will also suggest that understanding how investors are arguing substantively as well as ...

Twilight in the leadership playground: subrealism and the training of the business self

Abstract: What sort of reality is produced and conveyed to the business trainee through the set of pedagogical techniques that characterize the experiential business curriculum, and how does immersion in this particular kind of reality configure the business self? This essay discusses some of the rhetorical and theatrical contrivances that are used to generate artificial business situations in which the student can experience a moment of decision and test his quality as a leader These training formulas, we argue, rely on the therapeutic hope of dramaturgical self-realization, but often degenerate into a form of regressive fetishism in which the fantasy of existential resolve and serious decision-making can be playfully and safely enacted Surrealism and its demise provide an angle from which the peculiar fragility of these operations can be understood: what the experiential business curriculum provides, in this interpretation, amounts to a sort of subrealist shield, a protective dilution of the challenges

The performativity of the yield curve

Abstract: 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 privileges of representation) an...

Shadow banking: a story of the Doppelgänger (the Double) in science of finance

Abstract: After the 2007 financial crisis central bank economists in the US produced a map of shadow banking system, a fragile interconnectedness of regulated and unregulated financial institutions, to explain why the crisis had happened. This piece of cartographic work in banking regulation had two aims: (a) to represent the economic reality, including the parts that were not in regulatory sight, with full realism and (b) to develop a regulatory surveillance regime to monitor shadow banking to prevent future crises. This paper problematises the first aim as a peculiar cognitive response to the knowledge crisis of economics which challenges the consensus on modern finance as post-modern Baudrilliardian simulacra. The paper then introduces a cultural economy perspective to explore the regulatory fear in the second aim of the shadow banking analysis with references to the theme of the Doppelganger (the Double) in the genre of horror stories. Finally the societal consequences of the control oriented epistemolo...

Reframing austerity: financial morality, savings and securitization

Abstract: Austerity in the twenty-first century is different, compared both with the past, and across locations. This analysis explores the different role played by households in policies designed to maintain financial market liquidity in the context of aspirations of state deficit reduction. While in Europe there is austerity as popularly depicted, in the United States, where mortgage-backed securities have become central to monetary policy, the agenda is to keep households meeting their debt obligations. These differences are explained in terms of different conceptions of monetary policy and evolving conceptions of money itself. The evidence portends a changing role for households and their financial payments in anchoring the money system.

Revulsion and awe: charting the development of the moral economy of capitalism and its hero in the American imagination, from the protestant ethic to ecstasy of the entrepreneur

Abstract: The spirit of capitalism shifted throughout the twentieth century, Boltanski and Chiapello place it sometime in the period between the 1960s and 1990s [2005, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London], for Bell it had happened by the mid-1970s and its contradictions were already apparent [1998, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Basic Books, New York]. David Harvey is more specific and cites 1979 as the dawn of the new era [2005, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London]. This paper seeks to build on this scholarship of the changing spirit of capitalism and read it through the development of the heroic figure of the American imagination, through the representation of the capitalist hero. Its aim is to situate the figure of the capitalist hero in the post-crash era and ultimately to understand the seductive power of the new capitalism that enables it to thrive. My thesis is that the seductive power of the new capitalism can be understood as an oscillation between revulsion and awe, we ...

Rousseau’s Crusoe myth: the unlikely provenance of the neoclassical homo economicus

Abstract: The neoclassical homo economicus has escaped the narrow confines of economic theory and is today embodied countless times over in the everyday behaviour that so much of the modern economy is set up precisely to serve. Not all of the authors of leading books on economic principles have named the neoclassical homo economicus, but when they have done so it is overwhelmingly in the same way. They have given him the human form of a Robinson Crusoe figure, despite the fact that his behavioural motivations and his practical conduct owe next-to-nothing to Daniel Defoe’s original characterisation. I suggest that the route to today’s cultural familiarity with the neoclassical homo economicus instead passes through the entirely unwitting hands of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He substituted Defoe’s account of the castaway’s continuing deference to prevailing social norms with his own idealised vision of how the individual might use solitude to escape the corrupting influences of modern society. It is altogether ano...

Opiates for the masses: constructing a market for prescription (pain)killers

Abstract: This paper examines the discursive and material construction of the ongoing US opioid epidemic. It argues that the epidemic cannot be understood apart from the reciprocal relation of cultural and economic processes that have made possible the formation of a market for prescription painkillers. Through an analysis of the articulation and interaction of medical, cultural, political, and market discourses, the author shows how these have been mobilized within a network of actors and institutions in ways that govern the economic life of opioid products. Dramatic transformations in the domain of pain management have coincided with shifting attitudes toward drug use in popular culture and transformations in health and regulatory policy to orchestrate the materiality of an enormous market for opioid products and make intelligible the problem of a nationwide ‘epidemic’ of opioid use and abuse.

Dark Organizational Theory

Abstract: Institutions and organizations are defined by competing sociomaterial logics. Divergence between the ‘visible’ and the ‘hidden’ side of organization invites a critical work of ‘unveiling’. But such critique does not enable understanding of how coherency is accomplished between different modes of reason. This is performed in emergent third spaces, where parasitic relations are enacted. During moments of ‘crisis’ or ‘breach’, contradictions are both acknowledged and given concrescence. Management comes into being in the anticipation of its breaking. Four accounts of this process are offered – a discussion of a remark from Michel Serres’s The Parasite, a description of China Mielville’s novel The City and The City, stories from fieldwork in medium-secure forensic psychiatric units, and set of conceptual propositions. Together they perform a descriptive practice called ‘dark organization theory’ which analyses the functional aspects of divergence and breaking in management and organizational practices.

Learning from experiments in optimization: post-critical perspectives on monitoring and evaluation*

Abstract: This article examines attempts by professionals in the Danish branch of the environmental NGO NatureAid to 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 the right 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...

Feminists write the Anthropocene: three tales of possibility in Late Capitalism

Abstract: That is the overarching question posed to readers by three recent books, Alexis Shotwell’s Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Ki...

Misappropriation as market making: Butler, Callon, and street food in San Francisco, California

Abstract: 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 m...

Macroprudential versus monetary blueprints for financial reform

Abstract: New books by Avinash Persaud and Morgan Ricks present very different blueprints for financial reform Persaud builds upon the macroprudential programme to advocate a role for regulators in shepherding risk throughout the financial system Ricks rejects the direction taken by post-financial crisis regulation, offering a blueprint that addresses the panic-prone nature of money creation in shadow banking This review article provides a reading of their books which demonstrates how their evaluations of the global financial crisis shape their policy prescriptions It also suggests that although their blueprints are valuable thought-experiments they have a number of lacunae which economic sociologists and political economists can help fill In particular, I argue that questions concerning regulatory epistemology, the politics of regulatory reform, and simplicity versus complexity in regulatory rule-making might orient a productive empirical and conceptual research agenda

The politics of finance: cultural economy, cultural studies and the road ahead

Abstract: 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 groun...

Senses and artifacts in market transactions: the Korean case of agricultural produce auctions

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between the senses, artifacts, and trade at South Korean agricultural produce auctions. It explores the impacts of market devices on sensory interactions betw...

Values in motion: anti-counterfeiting measures and the securitization of pharmaceutical flows

Abstract: The past decade has seen an increase in anti-counterfeiting practices, especially in the pharmaceutical field. These practices aim at reducing the number of bad medicines available on the market, especially in countries where pharmaceutical regulation is still weak. But they have been accused of serving the interests of Big Pharma by reinforcing intellectual property instead of promoting better quality medicines. Based on a study of the controversies provoked by anti-counterfeiting laws and devices, this paper analyses anti-counterfeiting politics and shows: (a) the aim of this mode of government is to discriminate between medicines in order to regulate the value attached to distribution processes and (b) the tensions and contradictions which characterize anti-counterfeiting discourses and practices. As such, a central characteristic of pharmaceutical markets is the shift of value conflicts towards circulation and distribution rather than production. The securitization of pharmaceutical flows, rat...

Calculation in the pirate bazaars

Abstract: Recent debates in economic sociology have focused on the question of long-term calculation specific to capitalism. With a renewed interest in Max Weber’s work, particularly his seminal essay, The p...

Price-effectiveness: pharmacoeconomics, value and the right price for HPV vaccines

Abstract: Drawing on a pragmatist approach to pricing, this article discusses the impact of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) in the pricing strategies of pharmaceutical companies. Through an analysis of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination, this article illustrates the strategic appropriation of evidence-based medicine (narratives and practices) that pharmaceutical companies have undertaken to enhance the value of their products. While governments are concentrated on the measurement of costs and efficiency (cost-effectiveness), companies attempt to find the threshold of effectiveness that supports their estimation of value. I have called such mode of calculation, price-effectiveness. Pharmaceutical companies engage in different ways with CEA in devising their own price strategies. First, CEA is used as an instrument to raise HPV vaccines as a matter of interest for health authorities. Second, companies produce models to maximise the effectiveness of their products. Third, the expense side of CEA has ...