What's changing cultural economy?

In September 2014, editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy (JCE) gathered for the last Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) conference at the Friends Meeting House in Manchester¹.² As regular readers will have noticed, the JCE has been closely associated with CRESC since the beginning. What few will know is that what would eventually become the JCE was first imagined when CRESC began its formal funded existence in 2004, as one of the outcomes that a major Economic and Social Research Council funded centre was expected to produce. This made for a peculiar dependence between two things that shared a beginning but would set after different ends. Research centres, certainly those benefitting from government funding, have clear and bounded research programmes, are tied to the achievement of certain goals and are expected to be of limited duration. The funding imposes some of these limits, because, of course, it is finite. Other limits are imposed by the practicalities of academic life as key personnel move on and host institutions engage in those increasingly regular and discomforting shifts in priorities. Others still are about an inchoate need to somehow complete the research programme. Even if some questions remain unsettled (by definition, a centre for research on socio-cultural change was not going to exhaust its object since things just keep on going on), most researchers will reach the end of what they want to find out, or say, about certain questions. As Karel Williams (2014), one of CRESC’s three founding directors, put it: CRESC has to end, if it doesn't it risks becoming an institution and who wants to build an institution? ³

Well us, the journal’s editors sitting in the gallery, coughed, we do. From the start, the JCE was like and unlike CRESC. It shared CRESC’s founding concern with how the relations between culture, economy and the social, the three main organising concepts of the social and cultural sciences, were being reinterpreted. While CRESC organised itself into four substantive themes to coordinate programmes of research into cultural economy, the media and social change, cultural values and politics, and culture, governance and citizenship, the JCE was to offer an editorially independent means of probing further into these areas, examining and showcasing the connections between them. It would publish empirical and theoretical work that engaged with the interfaces between culture, economy and the social and challenged any taken-for-granted ontological separation. CRESC, through its own programmes and extended networks, would provide some of the source material for this but it was always clear that this had to be a restricted and diminishing intersection. An in-house journal soon risks draining its own supply and demand. The JCE had to reach beyond CRESC for content and, since a serial should not have to have its own end in sight, for an institution-like lifespan.

Anticipating an indeterminate lifespan has consequences for the content of content as well as the source. The JCE editors had to mark out some territory but not specify what might be written there. This, as any publication proposer knows, is initially an exercise in defining distinctiveness. It was partly this that derailed an early plan for the Journal to become Culture, Economy and Society on the grounds that it strayed too close to the territory already occupied by Economy and Society. By 2007, the first group of editors were trying to work out collectively how a journal that addressed the interfaces between culture, economy and society could avoid becoming a silo for just about everything, or worse, nothing. To this end, the first editorial began with this attempt to narrow things down:

Intriguing ground has opened over recent years as a result of multidisciplinary efforts to unsettle the partitioning off of the ‘economy’ and the ‘economic’ from those working outside the discipline of economics. It is now increasingly clear that economists are just one of a multitude of agents involved in ‘preparing and repairing’ markets as well as being generally active in many areas associated with economic life: organisations, markets, economies. These three are not pre-formed objects: they are given shape and meaning by a host of socio-cultural-technical practices that aid what has been called the ‘per-formation’ or performative action of economics (Callon 1998; Cochoy 1998; Mackenzie et al. 2007; Muniesa 2007). Recent empirical and theoretical work in this vein together with a longer heritage of anthropological and historical work targeted at uncovering the conditions of emergence of distinct areas of economic life have progressively called the notion of a settled divide between ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ into question (see Appadurai 1986; Buck-Morss 1995; Dumont 1977; Miller & Rose 1990; Sahlins 1976). This questioning has led the way towards new theoretical and methodological terrain for research into economic and organisational life. (Bennett et al. 2008, p. 1)

This statement was meant to signal that the journal had a problematic in its sights. It was not to be the catholic centre for anything and everything to do with culture, economy and society. Nor was it to be the exclusive journal of ‘the cultural economy’, then, still widely used to refer to an apparently new economic realm with borders overlapping those of the creative industries or the knowledge economy. Our first editorial was equally circumspect about adopting a narrow epistemological definition that followed the logic of the cultural turn to interpret economic practices and relationships as culturally constructed.⁴ Little in the research process is altered by the conviction that economies, markets, organisations are constructed: investigations and analysis proceed nevertheless according to their own situated logics. This was following Stanley Fish’s lead:

One often hears it said that once you have become aware of the political and constructed nature of all actions, this can be put to methodological use in the practices (history, literary criticism, law) you find yourself performing; but … insofar as awareness is something that can be put to play in a situation it will be awareness relative to the demarcated concerns of that situation. (1994, p. 255)

Emphatically, no new politics, no new method derives from the truth that everything is political, everything constructed. Even so, before the 2000s, a move in what Ian Hunter has called ‘an array of associated but rivalrous theoretical vernaculars’ (2006, p. 80; c.f. du Gay 2010) was under way that pushed constructionist arguments towards the problematic that pre-occupied the JCE and its precursor projects.⁵ This was that Ian Hacking’s Foucault-inspired argument that objects and persons are ‘made-up’ by the very discourses of which they are purportedly the cause, could, by the same means of meticulous investigation, cast light on the government of economic and organisational life (Burchell et al. 1991; Miller & Rose 1990). This provocation was augmented, supplanted or diverted – depending on your point of view – by a turn to the material practices and objects which produce the economic and an associated, bubbling interest in the performative character of knowledge and practice. Things, as John Law noted, form part of the ‘materially heterogeneous socio-technical economically relevant relations’ that perform markets; things as well as people act to produce market effects (2002, p. 25).

This interest in the material practices, knowledges and orderings of the economic was never designed to resolve into a debate addressing only the relations between the economy and culture. The social is always somewhere in the background whenever questions concerning the relations between culture and economy are under discussion. These three organising variables might only be the contingent, provisional, abstract, nimble, empty or full products of the separating intellectual labours of the social scientists who use them; but it remains very difficult, despite the heroic efforts of some, to get entirely away from them (Caliskan & Callon 2009, 2010; Latour 1993, 2005, 2013). Actor-network-theory, feminist cyborg theory, assemblage theory, Foucauldian and Deleuzian conceptions of the machinic, and post-humanist theory have all disputed the validity of separations which place nature on one side of a dividing line and the economy, the social and culture on the other side as, different, and certainly non-natural. And still it remains, even in a digital Internet of everything kind of world, the core pre-occupation of social scientists to worry about these separations, to explore where they are drawn, whether they are changing, how and with what sorts of consequences. Even those scholars who have sworn abstinence from words like ‘culture’, ‘economy’ and ‘society’ cannot quite leave the relations, associations, modes of connection or processes of becoming, that persist between them alone.⁶ After all, what kinds of scientists or philosophers or auditors or historians or anthropologists of society could they be if they did? For this reason, we concluded in the wake of CRESC’s 2007 Rethinking Cultural Economy conference that, whatever the limited denotative insinuations of a name like ‘cultural economy’ were, it seemed to be working to attract scholarship that investigated the nexus between economic, social and cultural life in a range of sites (McFall 2008). The happenstance coincidences of our naming, launch and the 2007–2008 global financial crises (GFC) also tapped into a moment in which settled boundaries between ‘the economy, stupid’, culture and everything else were showing some signs of permeability.⁷

If the editors imagined from the outset that our contributors would be concerned with how these connections were organised in different empirical settings, the range and scope of these settings proved much broader than anticipated. The ‘material politics’ (Law & Mol 2008) at play in the interactions of infrastructures, objects, knowledges and practices have been traced in sites from medical research, to internet use, ship disposal and datawars using methods including ethnography, historiography, field taxonomy and literary narrative.⁸ The concurrent timing of our first volume and the GFC led to a predictable flow of articles and special issue submissions exploring finance but the range of topics, locations and angles has been anything but. Liquidity, fictions, material subjects, historical panics, the world cotton trade, metaphors and flows, high-frequency trading through tunnels in the Allegheny mountains, Andrew Haldane’s gambit, Russian legal culture, the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, an association of five major emerging national economies (BRICS) as classificatory innovation, artisanal revitalisation and anthropology’s saving potential is not exhaustive and the list continues to grow.⁹ Beyond finance, the JCE’s contributors have steadily pushed past the forecast ‘dream topics’ of cultural consumption and production, expertise, public culture, ethics, technology, economic agency and governance once forecast, and observed a whole host of connections, challenges and matters of concern emerging elsewhere. This was marked by the publication in 2011 of a guest-edited issue exploring the value of transnational medical research. Ostensibly at the furthest remove from cultural economy, Kelly and Wenzel-Geissler’s collection identified how medical research generates multiple orders of value that ‘straddle the world of commodities and public goods, of fiscal costs and moral virtues’ (2011, p. 3). This was a bellwether of the proliferation of sites at which questions of worth, value, valuation and measurement had begun to be raised.¹⁰ The addition of one of the contributors to Kelly and Wenzel-Geissler’s special issue, Melinda Cooper, to the editorial team in 2012 gave us a further lead to scholarship that jettisoned the routine separations between nature, science, experiment, law and politics to explore, for instance, the ways:

the rise of the mass, statistical methods of the clinical trial should be understood in the context of wider shifts in accident law (torts) which took place during the same period, as industrial accidents moved from the realm of private tort law to the social administration of risks under the welfare state. (Cooper 2011a, p. 82)¹¹

This broader, infrastructural context, in which connections between markets, states, law, universities, science, commerce and so on, are being weaved has, arguably, been the casualty of a strict material empiricism. There is always a trade-off between the thickest of descriptions and the elaboration of context and, for some, the focus, for instance on material devices¹²:

led to a neglect of the interrelations between such instruments and the historically varying ideas or rationalities that require and inspire them. …this places relations at the heart of the analysis, and it highlights a key methodological injunction of Foucault’s: to accord primacy to the relations that link actors, instruments and ideas. (Mennicken & Miller 2014, p. 18)

Paradoxically, relations are at the core of the devices concept. That does not make Mennicken and Miller wrong. In the empirical execution, it is impossible to keep everything in play and there is a justifiable lament that the time taken to elaborate technically difficult ‘instruments’ has been at the expense of setting them in a useful context.¹³ This has bothered many of our contributors in recent volumes as can be witnessed in their efforts to find other ways to talk about how material practice intersects with senses, signs, value and culture.¹⁴ A similar impulse can be detected in the attempt to identify the pathways connecting material infrastructures and processes to atmospheres of uncertainty, compliance, altruism, love, death and so on.¹⁵

Parallel attempts to resolve the tension in social science between thick, empirical description and banality have been central, albeit in different ways, to the problems our distinguished incoming editors, Bill Maurer and Paul du Gay, have been working on throughout their careers. For Maurer, this has meant juxtaposing apparently unrelated things – mathematics and Shakespeare, digital payment technologies and mediaeval road tolls, knitting and finance – just so long as it makes some kind of radical empirical sense to do so (c.f. Maurer 2005, 2006, 2008). These combinations might sound unsettling but they are firmly grounded in a world facing pragmatist sentiment that puts the mess of lived experience at the centre of how reason is accomplished. As Maurer put it in a recent interview:

And for me, the tools of early anthropology, in terms of Boas and Benedict, but also American pragmatism, helped me to think through the way that people aren’t necessarily – and it doesn’t have to be people but any kind of agent –orienting themselves to a known world, in a way where they can know what their interests are and go about fulfilling them or meeting them. They are instead oriented to a world where there are always just-so approximations and they’re always kind of making-do and muddling through and attempting to hit a target but without any kind of understanding that they will hit that bull’s eye, that there is actually a bull’s eye there that they’re going to get to. So I found that cluster of ways of thinking about action from pragmatism or Deleuze very, very useful. I’ve also found it useful to continue to push back against the deep investment in structuralisms and poststructuralisms in anthropology because those things are so meaning, meaning, meaning oriented, which means that practically in terms of fieldwork what people do is they interview people and then they read what people said and then they talk about what it means, and it’s like ‘what were they doing when they were saying this?’, or just that classic old Malinowski point that people say a whole lot of stuff and do other things. What they say and what they do, and what they say they do, don’t necessarily all align and if you’re only attending to meaning, you’re going to miss all of that. (Tooker & Maurer 2014)

Paul du Gay too has a long-standing commitment to finding a way from structuralisms and post-structuralisms to a mode of research that makes classical, empirical sense. Applied to settings from retail organisations to bureaucracy, public service ethics to classic organisation theory, du Gay has steadfastly pursued a descriptive imperative that resists the temptations of theoretical gaming while still remaining engaged with the debate (c.f. 2000, 2007, 2012). His sense of the stakes is set out very clearly in his response to the JCE’s most widely circulated issue, 2010’s Performativity, Economics and Politics (Cochoy et al. 2010). In his contribution, du Gay identifies a tension between practical politics and the theoretical political programmes outlined in the same issue by Judith Butler (2010) and Michel Callon (2010). Du Gay (2010) restages the long Cambridge School contest over whether the history of political thought is better conceived as an empirical or a philosophical activity, by way of Ian Hunter’s evocation of the ‘moment of theory’, to explore the roles occupied by performativity and politics in the work of Butler (2010) and Callon (2010). He concludes that the manoeuvres of certain sorts of theory articulate a kind of politics that trumps empirical and historical circumstances and has little to do with politics of a practical kind. This tendency, though more pronounced in Butler’s philosophically stated performativity, he also finds in Callon’s more empirically oriented performation programme:

There is the deployment of theoretical schemas such as the ‘framing/overflowing’ model (I am tempted to say ‘dialectic’) where, for instance, every ‘economic performation’ is somehow assumed to bring into being its own counter-programme which takes as its starting point what was left out by the original programme (Callon et al. 2007). Here, contingent empirical circumstance and detailed description are subordinated to a theoretically driven automatic temporality (and ‘politics’). The use of these and other such schemas also trade on (and generate) a series of epochalist distinctions which in turn can lead to some wild normative generalisations entirely out of keeping with the pragmatism informing much of Callon’s oeuvre.

This aversion to epochalist distinctions takes the institutional story right back to the origins of CRESC. Even though CRESC’s diverse programme ultimately pointed in all sorts of different directions, it was fairly consistently branded by the determination to abandon the kind of histories that read change in ways that fit a theoretically ‘pre-scribed’ epoch. A history of the present, should, at minimum be informed, first and foremost, by practical observation of that present. There is a cost to this of course. Empirical description lacks the snap of theory. It is long, arcane and tedious, it can be hyper-specialised, the findings might not be generalisable easily and it might not be any use in forecasting the future.¹⁶ ‘Gray, patient and meticulously documentary’ research (Foucault 1984, p. 76), Thomas Piketty aside, does not usually build major academic reputations or commend itself to funders, policy-makers, the public, end-users or ‘impactees’.¹⁷ And yet as researchers we are faced with, and must face, a world in which empirical academic description is both in crisis and profoundly necessary.¹⁸ How this will end and what it will mean is of course uncertain. What is certain is that new alliances, new relations, new combinations are proliferant. The GFC may not have opened governmental and policy processes to many academics outside of mainstream economics,¹⁹ academic non-economists may not have responded with sufficient vigour to the policy challenge, but the conversation, the commerce, the exchange is moving fast. From Facebook’s much publicised ethical boundary breaking empirical experiments, to the digital mobilisation of everything from payment to motion sensors and health insurance premiums, from the financialisation of student loans and the burgeoning, although not unprecedented, surge of interest of big commerce in anthropologists, sociologists and ethnographers – relationships between the university and the rest of the world are changing in ways that require an active, thoughtful academic response. Just one that may, in some circumstances, need to be little faster.²⁰

This has direct implications for academic journal publishing. Print has already become less important, online versions of record, electronic submission and subscription are already the norm. An online and social media presence, video abstracts and dynamic content alongside experiments in academic journalism like The Conversation, are all pushing the speed of circulation of ‘super-abundant’, perhaps excess, information (c.f. Abbott 2014). ‘Search’ is the ascendant academic mode of discovery and this can run counter to the necessarily slower pace of modes of serious reflection, scholarship, thought and analysis.²¹ That said, there is cause for letting a little cold air among the ivory. Social scientists who might benefit from a Kardashian index,²² do exist but as a minority. Many academics would benefit from a bit of a world-facing shove to produce work that meets pragmatic standards of practicality, usefulness and humility. Social media and online presence is only a part of that but it is a significant part.

For this reason, Joe Deville has taken on a full editorial role from this issue with special responsibility for our online and open access strategy. Deville has worked with the JCE as review editor since 2011 and has led the development of our Review and Commentary pages into a section that serves a variety of different purposes. It provides first of all a forum for reviews and longer format review essays of some major field defining works.²³ Alongside that the section hosts review symposia like that dedicated to Michel Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics in volume 2, to Mary Poovey’s (2008) Genres of the Credit Economy in volume 1 and next year to Kate Bowler’s (2013) Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. It has also been important that the section offers a space for more experimental and dialogic pieces like Muniesa’s (2011) discussion of Javier Izquierdo, or Martha Poon’s (2012 ²⁴, 2013, 2014) triptych of essays reviewing the state of financial calculation and regulation post-GFC.

During his time as review editor, Deville has used his insights into emerging interdisciplinary research methods²⁵ to lead the production of content that combines both scholarly and ‘altmetric’ resonance. He has however also played a much broader role in informing our overall digital strategy. Our new editorial website www.journalofculturaleconomy.org will have launched by the time this issue goes to print and Deville will be leading its future development. Our continuing aim for the JCE is that we remain immersed in understanding the nexus and the conversations that knit cultural, economic and the social elements together in particular historical patterns.

Our investment in this is clear in this issue’s themed section The Political Economy of Rhetoric under Late Neoliberalism, guest edited by Joshua Hanan and Catherine Chaput. The contributors; Sine Just, Chaput and Hanan, Victor Villanueva, G. Thomas Goodnight, David Hingstman and Sandy Green, offer an extended critical engagement with Deirdre McCloskey’s provocative combination of rhetoric and economics. McCloskey riles almost everyone one way or another but her combination of meticulous economic history with an analysis of just why the cultural and political conversations preceding, and contemporaneous with, the rise of capitalism were crucial to its material success, as Chaput and Hanan show in their introduction, qualify her as an archetypal voice for this journal.

Two original articles follow the themed section. The first, by Thomas Abrams explores the ways Michel Callon’s economic sociology complements existing studies of the political economy of disablement. The second by John Allen and Stephanie Lavau argues that modern poultry farming provides prime conditions for the spread of Campylobacter, currently the main reported cause of food poisoning in the UK, and describes how the very control exercised over the lives of farmed birds paradoxically risks reversal into ever greater insecurity. Crystal Columbini’s essay picks up on McCloskey’s provocation in a review of three recent studies that demonstrate the capacity of rhetorically rooted inquiry to demystify the overextension of economic rationalities by drawing attention to the way persuasion underpins meaningful change in material arrangements. The final piece in this issue is Dave O’Brien’s appreciative, but still provocative, review of Tony Bennett’s Making Culture, Changing Society (2013).

O’Brien’s review also coincides with the end of Tony Bennett’s tenure as editor of the JCE. It is a neat reminder of just how significant Bennett’s role has been in the intersecting histories of the journal and CRESC. Without his intellectual vision, commitment and tenacity there would probably not have been a CRESC, and without CRESC there certainly would not have been a JCE. As we move forward post-CRESC to a reconstituted international board, that Bennett will continue his association with the JCE by chairing, to an enhanced digital presence and to an increase in frequency to six issues per volume, it is in full awareness that among the many debts we have accumulated our debt to Tony Bennett is particularly substantial. In addition to Tony, we are indebted to CRESC and all of its directors,²⁶ to the ESRC and the two host institutions, the Open University and the University of Manchester, for their consistent support even as our trajectories have started to diverge. Sincere acknowledgement is also due to our publishers, editors and production staff at Routledge Taylor and Francis. Finally, we owe our thanks to all our authors, referees and readers who have disregarded impact factors and circulation figures in their continued commitment to building a fledgling institution out of a new journal.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank Aditya Chakrabortty, Mike Power and Karel Williams for their permission to quote them out of context and for their suggestions and clarifications.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liz McFall

Liz McFall is Head of Sociology at the Open University. Her work explores how markets are made especially for dull products like doorstep insurance and credit that people don't really want to buy. Her book Devising Consumption: cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending (Routledge, 2014) argues that it takes all sorts of technical, material, artistic and metaphysical know-how to devise consumer markets. Liz is author of Advertising: a cultural economy (2004), co-editor of Conduct: sociology and social worlds (2008) and Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Notes

1. Tony Bennett, Melinda Cooper, Joe Deville, Paul du Gay, Bill Maurer, Michael Pryke.

2. CRESC Annual Conference Power, Culture and Social Framing, 3–5 September 2014. A video of our session ‘What is, was or will be cultural economy anyway? A panel discussion with the editors of the JCE with Tony Bennett, Joe Deville, 
Liz McFall and Bill Maurer’ is available on www.journalofculturaleconomy.org

3. ‘The End of the 30 Year Experiment?’ Plenary session CRESC Annual Conference 2014. Chaired by Karel Williams with Philip Augar, Aditya Chakrabortty, Steve Francis, Nick Pearce and Karel Williams (2014). The other founding directors were Tony Bennett and Mike Savage.

4. It is nevertheless true that the influence of the ‘cultural turn’ on new ways of thinking about economic practice was profound. See, for example, Morris (1988), Hall and du Gay (1996), Hall (1997), du Gay, Hall et al. (1997).

5. See, for example, Bennett (2000, 2005), du Gay (1996, 1997), du Gay and Pryke (2002), McFall (2004), Nixon (1997), Pryke and du Gay (2007).

6. Witness the gargantuan taxonomy of connections emerging at the AIME platform http://www.modesofexistence.org/inquiry/

7. In spring 2012, Aditya Chakrabortty, then economics leader writer at The Guardian, used his column to remark: When the history of how a good crisis went to waste gets written up, it will surely contain a big chapter on the failure of our academic elites. Because just like the politicians, the taxpayer-funded intellectuals at our universities have missed the historic opportunities gifted to them by the financial collapse (2012a, 2012b). His piece targeted political scientists and sociologists in particular, and provoked an at times angry, but entirely necessary, debate neatly encapsulated by Will Davies (2012) on openDemocracy. Despite the constitutional challenges looming around a prospective Yes vote in the Scottish Referendum on 18 September 2014, and some signs of energy in alternative and heterodox political economy programmes at Kingston and Goldsmiths, University of London, among other initiatives, for example, The Guardian/Soundings (2009–2013) new political economy network collaboration, panellists at The End of the 30 Year Experiment? agreed that the experiment continues. There are new combinations opening up between, for example, universities and big finance, commercial and university researchers, that might shake up the divide that Davies identifies, between ‘cultural’ and elite social sciences in their policy, governmental or commercial influence, but these present challenges as well as some opportunities. See also Bill Maurer’s remarks in Bennett et al. (2014) and Tooker and Maurer (2014).

8. Any list is arbitrary but the following articles and special issues are examples of this broadening: Muniesa and Trebuchet-Breitwiller (2010), Fish et al. (2011), Gregson (2011), Kelly and Wenzel-Geissler (2011), Amoore and de Goede (2012).

9. See, for example, special issues and sections edited by Pasanek and Polillo (2011), Pryke (2011), Poovey (2012), Langley and Leyshon (2012), Knight (2013), Caliskan (2009), Mackenzie et al. (2012), Gillespie (2013), Wansleben (2013), Milyaeva (2014), Thompson (2014).

10. See Stark (2009), Adkins and Lury (2012) and Helgesson and Muniesa’s (2013) introduction to the new open access journal Valuation Studies.

11. See also Cooper (2008, 2011a, 2011b).

12. This literature is vast but see Callon et al. (2007), Mackenzie et al. (2007).

13. The complaint that all the socio-technical description of derivatives did almost nothing to anticipate the GFC is a case in point. Instruments are not synonyms with devices but there is no final definition demarcation between them either. See also Law and Ruppert (2013), McFall (2014).

14. See especially Nixon (2009), Swedberg (2011), Moor and Lury (2011), Entwistle and Slater (2014).

15. See, for instance, how the various contributors to Lehtonen and Van Hoyweghen (2014), especially Collier (2014), work from insurance to catastrophe, uncertainty, time, welfare, etc.; In Helgesson and Kjellberg’s guest edited themed section on values and valuation a parallel attempt to relate tax compliance, online advertising, organ donation and the management of death to the infrastructural practices of its accounting is staged (Björklund 2013; Beuscart & Mellet 2013; Roscoe 2013; Trompette 2013).

16. Not that these problems are unique to empirical research. Theory suffers from at least some of them. The contrast is also overdrawn because of course pragmatist defences of careful description are themselves part of an epistemological or theoretical statement about how the world is.

17. This neologism is Mike Power’s (2014), and refers to the need to not only anticipate research findings before the funding but – assuming universities, RCUK funders and the Research Excellence Framework, in the UK at least, continue on their current path – also to identify users who will be impacted, hence ‘impactees’. Anecdotally, there may also be a GFC reverse to this as financial regulators are asking financial services providers to validate their product research using putatively independent academic experts, or perhaps ‘validatees’.

18. See Savage and Burrow’s (2007, 2009) prescient analysis of the coming empirical crisis in the social sciences. As the various contributors, especially Wendy Brown, Nick Gane, Andrew McGettigan, Mike Power, Elizabeth Popp Berman and Chris Newfield to LSE’s Governing Academic Life conference point out the connections between university research, funding, government and financialisation are changing shape in ways that make technical description and social analysis necessary and difficult http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2571. See also Gane (2012) and Davies (2014).

19. Mirowski and Nik-Knah (2007) are rousing on the unlikeliness of this and the optimism, or what du Gay (2010) might call the ‘political romanticism’, of the idea that this is likely to change by means of the current formations of academic political action.

20. Initiatives like The Conversation http://theconversation.com/uk offer a good example of the format rapid, public and widely circulated academic comment on major issues can take. Speeded up academic publishing raises many problems but to expand, diversify and enrich the very small pool of academic experts circulating in public space there is a need to develop mechanisms that can improve the responsiveness of the university to issues and that of the media to the university.

21. C.f. Latour (2013) on ‘double-click’ and the use of information as an unmediated, transparent access to reality.

22. In July 2014, Neil Hall (2014) wrote that social media could damage the ‘key metrics of scientific value, such as citation indices. To help quantify this, I propose the “Kardashian Index”, a measure of discrepancy between a scientist’s social media profile and publication record based on the direct comparison of numbers of citations and Twitter followers’.

23. See, for example, Daniel Beunza (2008) on MacKenzie et al. (2007), Paul Langley (2010) on Pinch and Swedberg (2008) and Preda (2009), Fabrizo Ferraro (2010) on Marion Fourcade’s (2009) Economists and Societies; Marc Lenglet on Gillian Tett’s (2010) Fool’s Gold; David Saunders on Latour’s (2009) The Making of Law, Will Davies (2013) on Caliskan’s (2010) Market Threads (6.1), Laurent (2013) on Marres’ Material Participation, Technology, the Environment, and Everyday Publics (2012), and finally Chris Kelty (2014) on Borch’s (2012) Politics of Crowds.

24. With Robert Woznitzer.

25. See Deville (2012, 2013).

26. Mike Savage; Karel Williams, Penny Harvey, John Law, Marie Gillespie, Sophie Watson and Fiona Devine.