Non-marketizing agents in the study of markets: competing legacies of performativity and actor-network-theory in the marketization research program

ABSTRACT

One line of criticism leveled against studies of markets inspired by the economization research program [Çalışkan, K. & Callon, M. (2009) ‘Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization’, Economy and Society, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 369–398 and Çalışkan, K. & Callon, M. (2010) ‘Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets’, Economy and Society, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 1–32.] is that their analytical priorities reflect an economics-centric perspective: they prioritize the study of market exchange itself and of agents promoting market framing, while leaving non-economic agendas and the broader contexts of markets both understudied and undertheorized. This weakness tends to be attributed to contingent analytical priorities, which can be remedied by extending the program’s focus without changing its theoretical tenets. This article, in contrast, suggests that these analytical priorities stem from a theoretical tension within the program, which is caused by the complete, instead of a selective adoption of the theoretical tools of the performativity agenda in the marketization program. As a result, while the program promotes the inclusion of non-marketizing agents through the notion of co-performation, its call to focus on those phenomena that agents qualify as ‘economic’ and on the making of market exchange delimits the analysis of non-marketizing agents to their helping/hindering effects on market framing. The solution proposed is to reassess some of the performativity-inspired tools of the program in favor of a more ANT-inspired approach to markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Actor-network-theory
• markets
• marketization
• performativity
• state

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments as well as Zsuzsanna Vargha, Christian Berndt, Leigh Johnson, Karin Schwiter and participants of the Economic Geography Research Colloquium of the University of Zurich for their feedback on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCiD

Léna Pellandini-Simányi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5426-4103

Notes

1. The study of marketization, which I will refer to in this article as the marketization research program, forms part of the broader economization research program. Studies using the program are often called Social Studies of Markets (Çalışkan 2010) or Social Studies of Economization and Marketization (SSEM) (Ouma 2015).

2. The marketization research program is only one of the several approaches in economic sociology, political economy and obviously, economics to the study of how the economy is made to function. Situating the approach in relation to these other approaches is beyond the scope of the article. Useful reviews include Aspers (2011), Berndt and Boeckler (2009), Christophers (2014), Çalışkan and Callon (2009), Geiger et al. (2014) and Jessop (2005).

3. Critiques use the term politics in three senses: that these accounts (1) are not normative enough; or worse, are complacent with neoliberal economic programs; (2) do not focus enough on the role of the state and political parties and (3) do not take into consideration interests and power. For a critique of these views, see McFall (2010), Overdevest (2011) and the Journal of Cultural Economy’s 2010 (3:2) special issue titled Performativity, Economics and Politics.

4. For the debate between Miller and Callon along these lines see Economy and Society’s 2002 (31:2) issue (Callon et al. 2002; Miller 2002; Slater 2002), as well as Mirowski and Nik-Khan’s (2007) and Holm’s (2007) contributions to Do economists make markets? (MacKenzie et al. 2007). For a review of critiques along other lines of the program, see Vosselman (2014).

5. For discussions of the marketization program see Berndt and Boeckler (2012) and Ouma (2015).

6. The market framing is often described by commentators as the severing of social ties, which allows disembedded transaction to take place. Perhaps, a better way to think about market framing is that it is not so much about severing all social ties, but rather about demarcating, as Ouma (2015) suggests, ‘those network relations (qualifications) that are taken into account during a monetary transaction from those which are ignored’. Market framing, in this reading, is similar to an extended form of the market cité, described by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), both discursively (as a regime of worth or justification) and practically (as the concrete arrangements that are needed to keep the cité in place). The question that interests performativity theory, to formulate it in Boltanski and Thévenot’s terms, is what makes it possible for the market cité to be established and to prevail as the dominant order of worth in certain situations (which we refer to as ‘markets’) and the material arrangements that these rely on.

7. Albeit the economization and within it, the marketization research program was elaborated in E1 and E2, some of Callon’s earlier work (e.g. Callon et al. 2002) already reflected a broader concern with market dynamics rather than with economic performativity. My contrast between the marketization vs. the performativity program therefore does not refer to different stages in Callon’s work, but to the different ways in which these theoretical lenses allow us to analyse the economy.

8. For a discussion of an ANT-based study of the economy see Entwistle (2009); on how it relates to SSEM see Ouma (2015).

9. I am inclined to think that the tension within the marketization program might come from the differences between Çalışkan and Callon’s perspectives; but this is for historians of sociological thought to decide.

10. McFall shows that the UK insurance market was ‘entangled … with political theorising, government and law’, with actors primarily concerned with social security for ‘working men’, rather than with economic theories. Often, even the effort to create the consumer with properties of the homo economicus was embedded in programs of building a particular society and political subjects. Fridman (2010), for instance, argues that in Argentina the homo economicus-type consumer appealed to policy-makers because consumers as political actors would have worked differently from the organized working class: as individualized rather than as collective actors.

11. These ‘aims’ are also results of specific agencements (see Callon 2007; Entwistle 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bolyai Research Grant, Hungarian Academy of Sciences [Pellandini-Simányi]; Hungarian Scientific Research Fund [OTKA-101261].