Organizing the (Sociomaterial) Economy: Ritual, agency, and economic models

ABSTRACT

Employing sociomateriality, communicative constitution of organization (CCO), critical discourse analysis (CDA), performativity, and ritual, this article offers a discursive explanation of the economy: that discourse organizes the economy. This process-oriented and relational explanation proposes discourse as an entry point for understanding and perhaps foreclosing financial crisis and austerity. An instance of ritual use in a US city's council meetings about municipalizing a power utility (turning the privately owned energy utility into a city-owned energy utility) is analyzed with CDA, revealing how ritual positioned the city council and the economic model in relation to grant economic models agency in shaping decision-making and producing economic effects. A blending of CCO literatures with literature on ritual is recommended, illustrating the striking similarity between the CCO concept of authoritative text and ritual, and suggesting that perhaps rituals are authoritative texts.

KEYWORDS:

• Ritual
• economy
• communicative constitution of organization
• sociomateriality
• authoritative text
• discourse
• agency
• economic model
• municipalization
• financial crisis

Acknowledgements

Author acknowledges the gracious support of David Boromisza-Habashi, Matt Koschmann, Tim Kuhn, Matthew Kopec, Nicholas Burk, Leah Sprain, and Larry Frey for their commentary during the development of this manuscript and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, all of which enhanced this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Amanda Szabo (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder studying the role of communication in the production of economies. Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder, 270 UCB, Hellems 96, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Notes

1. Rather than using these concepts as full frameworks, which would elicit theoretical and conceptual contradictions, I am using them as heuristics to shed light on different aspects of a complex phenomenon that is not yet well understood.

2. The Black-Sholes option pricing theory illustrates the theory of performativity excellently. When the theory was first introduced, its predictions of exchanges at the Chicago Board Options Exchange were not very accurate. As (cultural, ideological, and practical) adoption increased (in part due to an availability of technology that allowed the theory to be consulted in real time in the trading pit), the Black-Sholes theory normalized options trading and compelled pricers to price according to the model. Thus, the options pricing theory became much more accurate in its predictions (MacKenzie & Millo, 2003). MacKenzie and Millo (2003) attribute this ‘self-fulfilling’ ability to social forces like the respect traders exhibited for certain norms, reputation, and interpersonal networks that enabled the collective adoption of the theory, which in turn made it predictive.

3. While economies are not traditionally considered an ‘organization,’ CCO explores not just organizations, but also the process of organizing (Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011).

4. If energy municipalization was adopted (which it was), the city would buy the utility and its distribution system from the private energy provider, set up a separate city department to operate the utility, and the energy utility would become a public utility, serving all the clients, residents, and users that the private provider did, but users would pay the city, and decisions about the operation of the utility would be opened to political and democratic processes.

5. IRB Protocol #: 13-0070. The city's name will be redacted, and substituted for ‘city’.