![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
How do market actors in the contemporary economy make decisions when they are uncertain of the value of what is being traded? To answer this question, this paper analyses the changing temporal and spatial orientation of economic valuations in increasingly digitalized economies, in which markets can no longer be understood as locally bound and closed sites of valuation and exchange. Drawing on ethnographic material from the fishing industry, the paper shows how digital tracking technologies link and synchronize auction markets with real-time information on fishing activities. Hence, ‘scopic media’ such as chart plotters and computer screens are not only deployed by skippers to monitor one another, but are also used as valuation devices that recontextualize local knowledge for the purpose of coping with economic uncertainty. As a consequence of this panoptic valuation regime, fishermen control their virtual identities by disciplining harvesting practices according to their buyers’ expectations.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the comments of Karin Knorr Cetina, Patrik Aspers, Sebastian Kohl, Dominik Döllinger, Jonas Bååth, Petter Bengtsson, Clara Iversen, Ugo Corte, Tobias Olofsson, Henrik Fürst, Elena Bogdanova, Jahn Petter Johnsen and the anonymous reviewers who all contributed to this paper in their own ways. All errors, however, are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Hence, the notion of ‘scopes’ is used by Knorr Cetina (Citation2003, p. 8) as in ‘periscope’, ‘telescope’, ‘microscope’, etc.
2 All references to ‘fisherman’ or ‘fishermen’, needless to say, refer to both genders.
3 With regard to the unusual phrasing in some quotations it should be noted that the interviews were not conducted in the mother tongue of the interviewees.
4 Field reports and transcripts were coded with the computer software Atlas.ti. Accordingly, three main types of codes have been used in the process of analysis: (i) descriptive codes, which identify subjects and structure the material according to a given subject, such as ‘scopic media’, ‘fishing technique’, ‘quota market’ or ‘fish auction’; (ii) theoretical codes, which are based on pre-given concepts, such as ‘scopic media’, ‘co-ordination’, ‘observation’ or ‘uncertainty’; and (iii) in vivo codes, which signify ‘native’ theories about the world, such as causal explanation of market development. Quotes from the transcripts will be marked ‘M’ for manuscript, followed by its number in the data set, which is marked with a roman digit; field notes will be quoted as FN.
5 In 2015, fishing accounted for 41.3 per cent of all exports and 4.9 per cent of GDP (Statistics Iceland, Citation2015).
6 Older fishermen with long-lasting ties or quota owners in poorer communities fishing on subsidized, so-called ‘community quotas’, however, may still have fixed arrangements with local processors.
7 During the period of fieldwork in summer 2014, however, several fishermen started to use the newer vessel-tracking website vesselfinder.com, which, in their opinion, provides more accurate data and ‘more information’ (FN, p. 97).
8 Nonetheless, there were some difficulties with implementing full coverage at the beginning. In particular, small fishing communities in rural areas had problems due to bad reception, as they needed ‘some equipment on the mountains here to catch the signal from the boats’ (MXIX). According to a manager of a processing plant who is using AIS-based online services for his business, the reception ‘is very good now, it was not good [before]; it was not receiving every signal from every boat’ (MXIX), but ‘we started to use it every day three years ago (2010) or so’.
9 The notion of ‘governmentalization’ was coined by Foucault (Citation2009) for highlighting the interconnectedness of the nouns ‘governance’ and ‘mentality’. Accordingly, neoliberal governmentality denotes a form of governance based on indirect control through incentives with the market as a central site of valuation.
10 For a striking example of how information technology has transformed a value chain see Lichtenstein (Citation2009, pp. 46–69), who demonstrates how Wal-Mart revolutionized its retail network by gaining informational advantage through the UPC barcode system.
11 An entire industry with leading companies such as Catapult Sports, STATSports, Adidas Micoach Elite and Zebra Sport Solutions has emerged for providing tracking technologies to measure performance in any sport ranging from American football or basketball to tennis.
12 The booming industry for digital tracking technology bears evidence of this development, in which GPS trackers take the form of ‘weapons in the fight against crime’ (www.brickhousesecurity.com, 2016), as one company aptly describes their product.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Alexander Dobeson
Alexander Dobeson recently completed his PhD on the role of markets and technology in the Icelandic fishing industry. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology at Uppsala University, Sweden, and affiliated with the Uppsala Lab of Economic Sociology. His interests include economic sociology, natural resources and the role of markets and technology in contemporary rural capitalism.