Accounting for e-commerce: abstractions, virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital

Abstract

This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation. Drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, we attempt to demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions. The paper looks at the constitutive role of virtualism within the development of a domain called e-commerce. Mobilized by a heterodox group of actors, including academics, consultants, journalists and practitioners, abstractions demonstrated considerable agency in the construction of e-commerce, and were used in an attempt to demonstrate that a new, and potentially hyper-profitable, form of capitalism was being born. This paper undertakes a critical evaluation of these processes and draws attention to the neglected role of the cultural circuit of capital and a range of practical knowledges that are continually being revised and which we argue are equally constitutive of e-commerce. While it is easy to dismiss the promises of e-commerce as so much hyperbole, particularly in the wake of the dot.com crash, we argue that the success of e-commerce is signaled by the fact that it has lost much of its rhetorical power and has faded into the business background. E-commerce now constitutes an increasingly ambient set of technologies and practices.

Keywords:

• virtualism
• abstractions
• e-commerce
• business knowledge
• Internet

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of Economic and Social Research Council Grant R000239472, Putting E-Commerce in its Place: Constructing Electronic Times and Spaces. We are grateful to the comments of three anonymous referees on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

Louise Crewe is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Nottingham. Her interests lie in the areas of fashion, retailing, shopping and consumption with particular focus on commodity biographies, value and second hand exchange. She is the co-author of Second Hand Cultures (with Nicky Gregson, Berg, 2003).

Shaun French is Lecturer in Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, having previously worked at the University of Bristol. He has published work on the geographies of business knowledge and praxis.

Andrew Leyshon is Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham. Previously he has worked at the Universities of Bristol, Hull and Wales. In addition to investigating the origins and impacts of e-commerce, he is also currently researching the formation of ecologies of retail financial services. He is the author of Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation (with Nigel Thrift, Routledge, 1997) and co-editor of The Place of Music (with David Matless and George Revill, Guilford Press, 1998) and Alternative Economic Spaces (with Roger Lee and Colin Williams, Sage, 2003).

Nigel Thrift has taught or carried out research at the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol, Leeds, Wales, Uppsala, UCLA, the Australian National University and the National University of Singapore. He is Head of the Division of Life Sciences at the University of Oxford. Most recently, he is the author of Cities (with Ash Amin, Polity, 2002), The Cultural Geography Handbook (co-edited with Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh and Steve Pile, Sage, 2003) and Patterned Ground (co-edited with Stephan Harrison and Steve Pile, Reaktion, 2003). He is currently working on informational ecologies and body technologies.

Peter Webb is Lecturer in Media Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Birmingham. He previously worked at the University of Bristol. He has published work on popular music and social theory. He is also a musician who releases material under the name of ‘Statik Sound System’.

[email protected]; Shaun French and Louise Crewe, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG2 7GW, UK. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]. Nigel Thrift, Pro-Vice chancellor Research, University of Oxford, 9 Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PD, UK. Email: [email protected]. Peter Webb, Department of Sociology, University of Birmingham, 32 Pritchatts Road, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. Email: [email protected].

According to Lessig (2001: 75), the idea of selling radio spectrum can be traced back to work undertaken by the economist Ronald Coase for the US Federal Communications Commission in the 1950s. See, in addition, Guala (2001).

This is evidently the view from the ESRC, which proudly acclaims the work of the Centre on its website (http://www.esrc.ac.uk), and from commentators such as Will Hutton, who claims that the Centre's director, Ken Binmore, should be given an honour for raising so much money.

A key aim of this ESRC-funded study, entitled ‘Putting e-commerce in its place’, was to identify and map out the contours of what we term the e-commerce knowledge community. To this end over 100 interviews were conducted with actors, institutions and senior managers in companies in the United States and Europe between November 2001 and January 2004.

It was significant, however, that using the term e-commerce did not produce strong negative reactions in the UK and Europe, where the term still possessed rhetorical power, revealing a trans-Atlantic divide in the rate at which business ideas were turned over.

The San Jose Mercury News article is the earliest published use of the term cited by the Oxford English Dictionary (http://dictionary.oed.com/). In the article, entitled ‘Smart Valley to get $8 million: goal of U.S. grant is to help turn Internet into electronic marketplace’, Jay Tenenbaum – later to become Chairman of CommerceNet and whose endorsement as such would appear on the inside sleeve of Shapiro and Varian's (1999) canonical e-commerce text Information Rules – discusses the importance of a US Government grant awarded to Smart Valley Inc. for the CommerceNet Initiative, designed to ‘jump start e-Commerce’ in the San Francisco Bay Region (Bank 1993: 8D).

The ISI Web of Science database includes details of approximately 8,500 such texts from around the world.

Meeker was a technology analyst for investment bank Morgan Stanley. For a discussion of her role in the dot.com boom, see Cassidy (2002).

The assumption presumably being that, had the likes of Fortune, Wired and Business & Strategy magazines showcased Liebowitz's work in the way that they did that of Arthur, the outcome might have been very different.

See, for example, the work of Quah (2000).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Leyshon

Louise Crewe is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Nottingham. Her interests lie in the areas of fashion, retailing, shopping and consumption with particular focus on commodity biographies, value and second hand exchange. She is the co-author of Second Hand Cultures (with Nicky Gregson, Berg, 2003). Shaun French is Lecturer in Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, having previously worked at the University of Bristol. He has published work on the geographies of business knowledge and praxis. Andrew Leyshon is Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham. Previously he has worked at the Universities of Bristol, Hull and Wales. In addition to investigating the origins and impacts of e-commerce, he is also currently researching the formation of ecologies of retail financial services. He is the author of Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation (with Nigel Thrift, Routledge, 1997) and co-editor of The Place of Music (with David Matless and George Revill, Guilford Press, 1998) and Alternative Economic Spaces (with Roger Lee and Colin Williams, Sage, 2003). Nigel Thrift has taught or carried out research at the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol, Leeds, Wales, Uppsala, UCLA, the Australian National University and the National University of Singapore. He is Head of the Division of Life Sciences at the University of Oxford. Most recently, he is the author of Cities (with Ash Amin, Polity, 2002), The Cultural Geography Handbook (co-edited with Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh and Steve Pile, Sage, 2003) and Patterned Ground (co-edited with Stephan Harrison and Steve Pile, Reaktion, 2003). He is currently working on informational ecologies and body technologies. Peter Webb is Lecturer in Media Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Birmingham. He previously worked at the University of Bristol. He has published work on popular music and social theory. He is also a musician who releases material under the name of ‘Statik Sound System’. [email protected]; Shaun French and Louise Crewe, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG2 7GW, UK. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]. Nigel Thrift, Pro-Vice chancellor Research, University of Oxford, 9 Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PD, UK. Email: [email protected]. Peter Webb, Department of Sociology, University of Birmingham, 32 Pritchatts Road, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. Email: [email protected].