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Economization:
New Directions in the Social Studies of the Market
Michel Callon (CSI-Ecole des Mines de Paris)
Koray Caliskan (Bogazici University, Istanbul)
correspondence email: koray.caliskan@boun.edu.tr
Work in progress. uncorrected English, references to be checked.
Please do not cite or quote without consulting the authors.
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework for the analysis of markets and
to present the main elements of a program of future research. Locating marketization in
the larger framework of economization, the approach stresses the increasingly dominant
role of materialities and economic knowledge in market making. The paper has two parts.
The first introduces a short history of how researchers from different backgrounds
addressed the question of economization, referring to the actions, devices,
analytical/practical descriptions assembled by social scientists and market actors. In this
process of economization certain types of behaviours, preoccupations, logics of actions,
spheres of activities, forms of calculation or institutional arrangements are defined and
qualified as economic. The importance, meaning and framing of economization are
discussed through an analysis of selected works in anthropology, economics and
sociology. We argue that those works are now leading contemporary researchers of
markets to construct a program of studying economization. The second part of the paper
illustrates this point by focusing on six clusters of research, illuminating the new
directions in the social studies of the marketization as a case study of economization.
Introduction:
Markets are everywhere. Yet studies devoted to their actual functioning are still few. This lack
of research produces a striking contrast between the pervasiveness of the market concept and
the fuzziness of our knowledge on the actual realities to which it relates.
We believe that the lack of interest in the study of concrete markets is the outcome of a long
intellectual and political history.
The aim of this paper is to untangle the social scientific threads in order to give a
disciplinary base back to the contemporary understanding of markets and the dynamics of their
emergence and development. Drawing on the old and new approaches to the market, we
propose a draft research programme to better understand relations of economization of which
markets is a part. The proposed program is an invitation to move on from the study of the
economy to that of economization. We illustrate this point by two moves. First, we review
previous approached developed to study economic phenomena and reinterpret their findings
form the vantage point of contemporary approaches to economization. Second, we review
current research concerning the working of markets and propose a preliminary program for the
social study of marketization. We bridge these two moves with the concept of performativity.
Science studies' recent encounter with disciplines such as economic sociology or
economic anthropology has raised a question that is certainly not new, but that was never
considered as a research priority: the contribution of economics to the constitution of the
economy, i.e., the performativity programme. This encounter has posited that the development
of economic activities, their mode of organization and their dynamics could not be analysed
and interpreted without taking into account the work of economists in the broad sense of the
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term1. This programme has been captured by Callon in a provocative phrase: no economy
without economics (Callon 1998).
The research concerning the formative relationship between economic sciences and
markets has contributed to the furthering of our understanding of economic phenomena
(Mackenzie, Muniesa, Siu 2007; Callon, Millo, Muniesa 2007; Fourcade 2007; Pinch and
Swedberg 2008). In particular, it has focused attention on a number of new and important
issues. One of them is what Callon called economization (Callon 1998). This term is used to
denote the processes of constitution of the behaviours, organizations, institutions and, more
generally, objects which, in a particular society, are tentatively and often controversially
qualified by scholars and/or lay people as economic. One of the aims of this paper is to
provide elements of analysis to advance the exploration of these processes and to identify a
number of topics to be studies empirically.
The term “economization” implies that the economy is an achievement as much as an
outcome, a starting point or a reality already there that could simply be revealed. The diversity
of scientific or vernacular definitions of the economy or of behaviours and activities qualified
as economic, and the controversies triggered by these definitions, are an indicator of a state of
relative indeterminacy. We talk of economies, of economizing time, for example, or of the
economy of a literary work (to denote its organization). In each of these expressions the
meaning of economy or economic differs. We observe this polysemous diversity in the social
sciences and particularly in economics itself, not to mention sociology, anthropology, business
and political science. The neo-classical definition of economic behaviours is different from
those of institutional or evolutionary economics.
The process of economization is never complete; it is on-going and open. This
incompleteness obviously concerns contemporary societies, whether they have been developed
and economized for a long time, or are still developing and have been economized only
recently. In both cases the sphere of what is considered as the economy is expanding (and
rarely limited) and in turn this expansion alters our conceptions of the economy. This process
also concerns past societies, for which the very concept of an economy or the idea of
qualifying certain behaviours or activities as economic is the result of analytical work by
anthropologists or historians who constantly revise their interpretations. Hence, the
economization of past societies is also an on-going process.
Consider, for instance, Mauss' seminal essay and the long series of anthropological
studies that it inspired. These are still effecting our view of the role of economic activities in
non-Western societies and consequently in Western ones as well. This perpetually unfinished
work, in which present and past societies are redefined, is one of the visible manifestations of
this undertaking of representation and intervention (Hacking, 1999) that can be captured in the
verb 'to economize'.
Asserting that the economy, once it is produced, is variable and polymorphic and that
it cannot be dissociated from the constantly restarted process of economization in which
scholarly and vernacular discourses play an active part, is not a relativist position. Lay and
scholarly knowledge are instituted, maintained, perpetuated, and are able to frame practices
and impose on them the meaning that they attribute to them only if they overcome their own
tests of reality or verisimilitude; one cannot economize just anything, anyhow. Economization
has its own demands and is crowned with success only if it is undertaken properly. The
concept has the advantage of combining the pros of realism and constructivism, without the
torments of relativism. The economy does not exist in a natural state, just waiting to be
discovered, unveiled; nor is it the arbitrary outcome of equally arbitrary discourses. Whether it
is tracked down within our societies or in those which are distant in time and space, the
economy is the result of actions of performation; it is enacted (Law & Mol 2007). This
enactment implies actions which develop simultaneously in a discursive and material sense:
the economy exists as an assemblage, a socio-technical agencement that combines discursive
and material activities. Economizing means establishing agencements which are themselves
Rose and Miller’s work on governmentality have been a decisive contribution to the performativity programme,
even before this programme was formulated. (Miller and Rose 1990).
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interpreted as economic, and which produce this particular version of the economy with
materials that guarantee it a degree of longevity and stability. Hence, economization consists
of a process of establishing socio-technical agencements which are able to do what they say
they do, that is, to make their version of the economy coincide with the way in which they
frame and organize activities that, as a result, match their interpretation of them and can
readily be qualified as economic.
The aim of this paper is to propose a first draft of a research programme devoted to the
study of processes of economization, that is, of the socio-technical agencements they frame
and in which they are embodied. Some aspects of this programme pertain to the various
modalities through which these processes contribute towards shaping what is called the human
being: his/her agency, subjectivity, and mode of socialization. Thus, in certain respects it
coincides with what could be called an anthropology of economization. But agencements have
a collective dimension as well, so that this programme could also be called a social study of
economization. In a sense, it is the will to capture both of these components that could
characterize the way in which we position the programme that we propose.
In the first part we define the concept of economization and situate ourselves in
relation to other similar concepts. The strategy that we have opted for consists in starting from
a set of studies, chosen for their rigour and precision – dare we say their scientificity? –, which
are not explicitly on economization but revolve around the concept and, implicitly,
demonstrate its importance and relevance. This review enables us to position ourselves in
relation to certain established research streams. We analyze two broad strands of research. The
first consists of an analysis of substantivist and formalist debate in economic anthropology.
We show that this debate was instrumental in giving birth to subsequent research on the
economy, teaching us that one cannot qualify an economic situation without mobilizing a
theory of the economy. More technically-speaking, this controversy has shown that the only
way of questioning the economy has been to switch from a noun to an adjective, defining the
observable criteria as economic. The second strand of research we review consists of the
contribution of economics, economic sociology and the anthropology of value regimes.
Drawing on the empirical findings of these three literatures, we present a comparative analysis
of their strengths and weaknesses from the vantage point of understanding various
economization processes.
The second part of the paper presents our definition of economization in general and
marketization in particular. Given the vast terrain of relations that produce various trajectories
of economization, we chose to illustrate the programme we propose by focusing on social
studies of the market, or to better put it, marketization. We have therefore decided to focus on
only one of the modalities of the economization process, the one that leads to the
establishment of economic markets (or, in our terminology, market socio-technical
agencements), that is, the processes that we call marketization2. The reasons for this choice are
multiple. The study of marketization provides a clear illustration of what a study programme
on economization in general could be. Moreover, marketization is at present unquestionably
the dominant, even hegemonic, form of the oldest movement of economization. Nowadays
economizing primarily means marketizing. Finally, there are many studies on markets and
their socio-technical construction. The programme for studying marketization that we propose
and outline here makes it possible to link up as yet disparate studies whose numbers and
diversity are growing. We summarize the finding of the new directions in the social study of
markets under six headings: Things, Agencies, Encounters, Price, Market Maintenance, and
Market-Writ-Large. Arguing that these new research trajectories differ from what is usually
called the study of the social construction of markets, we show that a new programme of
research seems to be emerging in the social studies of marketization.
In the conclusion we examine the tracks opened by these new directions, especially the
question of the role of experiments in the process of marketization, and the role that the social
sciences could have in designing such experiments.
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Marketization is a sub-set of economization. In this paper we only consider the most recent aspects of the process.
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I. In search of economization
Until recently, economization as a process that established activities, behaviours, spheres or
fields qualified as economic (whether there was consensus on that qualification or not), was
not considered as a research subject in its own right. The reason for this is obvious. The study
of economization cannot be dissociated from that of the effects produced by those disciplines
which, directly or indirectly, analyse the economy. But the social sciences, like the natural or
life sciences with which they share the same ideal of objectivity, have always been very
reluctant to consider their impacts on the objects that they study, due to the epistemological
difficulties that this type of questioning entails. We felt that one way of lessening these
difficulties, or at least of circumscribing and relativizing them, was to start off from social
science studies which at some point have directly raised the question of the identification or
characterization of the realities that they qualify as economic. By studying them in their
undertaking of creating their own research subject, there is probably a lot to be learned about
the mechanisms through which they contribute towards transforming the realities that they
study.
The aim of this necessarily superficial, limited and selective inventory is to suggest
two things. First, due to their systematic and rigorous nature, these studies show (unwittingly)
the dead-ends to which research leads when it is loath to question its own contribution to the
constitution of its research subject. They also show that a way of putting an end to this
paralysis is to give a name, economization, to these mechanisms rather than turning around
them without naming them. In short, the message delivered, implicitly of course, is that to
study the economy one has to start by studying economization. Second, even though these
studies have not directly addressed the subject of economization, they provide conceptual and
methodological tools to constitute it as a research subject in its own right. The stumbling
blocks that it has encountered (how to agree on what can be qualified as economic?) and the
dynamic that they have followed in their endeavour to overcome them, yield valuable clues as
to what a research programme on the process of economization might be.
We will start this inventory with the famous controversy between formalism and
substantivism, which has been instrumental in shaping subsequent research on the economy.
This debate has been reported on extensively and our aim in revisiting it is to highlight one
aspect which, in our opinion, has not been sufficiently emphasized. The controversy between
formalists and substantivists teaches us that one cannot qualify an economic situation without
at some point mobilizing a theory that defines what is meant by economy. More technicallyspeaking, this controversy has shown, it seems, that the only way of questioning the economy
has been to switch from a noun to an adjective. In other words, rather than asking what the
economy is, one has to define the observable criteria which enable one to say that an activity,
behaviour or institution is economic.
After an analysis of this debate (I.1), which serves also as a reminder of its content for
those readers unfamiliar with it, we show how different disciplines have pursued this
exploration and how they have indirectly, without any explicit questions, highlighted the fact
that the establishment of an economy involves arrangements, institutional and material
assemblages, without which it cannot exist and be sustainable. For reasons pertaining to space
and competencies, we have limited our analysis to three contributions: that of economics, of
economic sociology, and of the anthropology of regimes of valuation (I.2). It would probably
have been possible to review other analytical approaches, but we felt that these three sufficed
to show what needs to be added to economics to account for the process of economization.
At the end of these two sections, we hope that the reader will have a more precise idea
of what we mean by the process of economization and of the terms on which it has to be
studied. At the same time, we would also have shown the contributions and limits (from our
point of view) of some of the most popular approaches.
I.1. Qualifying the Economy: Formalists and Substantivists
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The debate between formalists (F) and substantivists (S) reached its climax at the end
of the fifties and during the sixties. From the point of view of interest to us here (that of the
process of economization), we need to emphasize that formalists and substantivists shared the
same conviction: to decide on the nature of economic activities and their place in collectives,
the only acceptable approach is first to define a number of theoretical hypotheses and then to
make and collect theoretical observations that serve to confirm or invalidate them. As good
scientists, close to an epistemology that could be qualified as Popperian (quite popular among
researchers in those days), S and F are directly opposed not over the definition of the economy
or of what should be qualified as economic, but over the capacity of their definitions to
account for the variety of the observable real. What They denote by the word economy is not a
real object but a theoretical one whose robustness and relevance have to be tested. In short, F
and S meet to consider that the economy and what it is and does are in the hands of the
theoreticians; hence, it depends on economics. We would say that scientific work is an
essential component of the work of economization of the observed realities, and the modalities
of that economization are as numerous as the theoretical convictions engaged in the debate.
The Popperian epistemologist has the advantage of making this multiplicity of points
of view on the economy compatible with a realistic conception of the economy. This realism
can be strong if the scientist considers that the real matches the theory (when the facts argue in
its favour); it is weak if the scientist refuses to say anything at all on the real, and is content to
assess the relative degree of verisimilitude, fecundity or power of the theories developed
(Callon, 1994). In both cases the theory is subjected to a test of reality, which is that of the
observation of the facts anticipated by the theory. The controversy is not about the theoretical
objects themselves but the observable phenomena postulated in the assertion of the existence
of those objects. This form of realism makes it possible to reconcile the recognition of the role
of the theory with the criticism of relativism as an epistemological position. Thus, economics
is clearly a stakeholder in the object that it constitutes and the soundness of that object can be
tested in the controversy over the observable facts. Another way of summing up this
epistemology, on which the protagonists implicitly agree, is to emphasize that it exits the
aporias of relativism by making a move: to grasp the economy one has to look at that which is
economic since all that is visible are the qualities of the object, its characteristics, and not the
object itself. This shift from a noun to an adjective is the first step on the path to the study of
economization. In this move leading to the study of economic-X (in which X could be a
behaviour, a way of reasoning, forms of activity, institutions, or arrangements) and not of
economies, the role of economics is central. It is economics that is invoked to explain what
these Xs are and why they can be qualified as economic. We are now going to demonstrate this
point by considering, in turn, the positions and arguments of F and S which, beyond their
divergences, afford an identical framework for the study of processes of economization.
The Formalists: economizing individual behaviours
The F's position is closely linked to neoclassical economics which defines the economy by its
object, that is, the study of the maximization of utility under conditions of scarcity. In this
approach, the pivotal notion is instrumental rationality: individuals are decision-makers and
choose between alternative means to maximize their utility (maximization of utility with the
minimum input or effort). This necessity to choose implies a situation in which available
resources are scarce and are used to achieve various goals.
Formalism consists in asserting that all human societies can be analysed as collections
of choice-making individuals whose actions imply trade-offs between alternative ends and
similarly alternative means to attain them. (Salisbury, 1962; Pospisil, 1963; Belshaw, 1965;
Cook, 1968; Epstein, 1968; LeClair, Schneider et al., 1968; Swetnam, 1973; Schneider, 1974).
To guarantee the universality of this model, one simply has to posit that the ends pursued are
culturally defined. The goals assigned to the action do not necessarily refer to monetary or
financial values but to everything that is valued by individuals in terms of religion, ethics,
power or altruism. As we can see, the model of instrumental rationality is sufficiently abstract
(it is enough to distinguish means from ends and to posit that individuals are endowed with
adequate calculative capacities) to have a universal scope and simultaneously to account for
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the wide diversity of observable realities. From this point of view, the concept of culture is
crucial because it makes it possible to explain why certain ends and means are valued more
than others within a particular community, as individuals can moreover conform to these
values or reject them. When markets with monetary prices exist the model is applied explicitly
in its full force and purity (Fifth, 1961; Laughlin, 1973).
In this approach the economy as a set of activities is a secondary, not a primary notion.
Actually, the Formalists care little about defining the economy since it is everywhere. The
subject of their reflection and investigation is more simple and general: it concerns individual
action and its universality. This subject is obviously theoretical. It is advanced as a hypothesis,
and the supporters of the programme are left to verify whether empirical observations confirm
its validity. The advantage of this approach is its immense conceptual economy(!). A single
concept, instrumental rationality, is mobilized to account for the diversity of existing societies.
It would moreover be more accurate to say that two concepts are needed here, for individual
instrumental rationality is linked to culture, and the latter accounts for the variations whose
boundaries are defined by the former.
Another way of describing this approach is to say that the formalist programme
defines individual human action as an economizing behaviour (with economizing being
synonymous here to instrumental rationality) whose modalities, forms and expressions vary,
depending on the cultural model. We see how the Formalists lithely get rid of the question of
the economy by focusing on economic behaviours which are, more exactly, economizing
behaviours. The noun is replaced by an adjective (in this case a gerund) applying to an X that
(in this case) is individual action. From there, contending that the economy is consubstantial
with human cultures is one easy step that it could be tempting to take.
It stands to reason that these behaviours, qualified by the social scientist as economic
or economizing, do not necessarily correspond to what these qualifiers denote in everyday
language, or to what some associate with the economy in scholarly discourse. In cultures that
have price regulating markets (briefly, of the Western type), the theoretical and common
meanings can be similar. In other cultures, the analyst reveals logics which are ignored (even
denied) by the categories of practice: like any good science, economics (in this case neoclassical) contributes towards making visible the regularities and determinations which,
without it, would remain invisible to the actors themselves who unknowingly follow them. It
may seem that economizing behaviours exist only in certain types of society (developed
Western societies); in fact, and this is at least what the Formalists implicitely claim, they can
be seen everywhere, provided one has the right tools for analysis and observation. The analyst
produces an effect (of surprise) which corresponds to the role that economics plays in the
construction of economic reality, in what we call the process of economization.
The formalist approach can be characterized as an anthropological research
programme in its own right. It postulates the universality of instrumental rationality and the
"economic" behaviours that it induces, and uses the notion of culture to account for the
diversity of the concrete actions observed.3 The Formalists urge us to recognize that: a) from a
scientific point of view – the only one that allows for discourse to be put to the test of reality –,
what needs to be defined is not the economy but the individual behaviours that are qualified as
economic or economizing; both theory and observation focus on the epithet (economic) or the
gerund (economizing) and not the noun (economy); and b) the observable variations cannot be
ascribed to differences in the ways in which individuals are assumed to take their decisions: in
all cases they maximize their utility; they are explained by the modalities of valuation of ends,
which depend on culture. Anthropology, centered on cultural variations, is the continuation of
economics by other disciplinary means. As a result, economization remains caught in the
circle of academic disciplines.
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Thus characterized, the formalist programme can be greatly enhanced as "progress" is made by economics or
rather by certain strands of economics. The individual agent's calculative capacities can be upgraded to take
strategic interactions into account, as in game theory. It is also possible to introduce information searches and to
select less restrictive optimization criteria by replacing the criterion of maximization by that of satisfaction, or by
introducing the simple ranking of preferences.
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The Substantivists: Economizing societies
The substantivist approach was first proposed by K. Polanyi in The Great Transformation.
Like the formalist approach it has an implicit epistemology in which the economy or, more
precisely, what is commonly qualified as economic, depends on definitions proposed by
economics. The Formalists draw their inspiration from neo-classical economics; the
Substantivists turn to another, older stream, that of political economy. The former made the
rational individual the cornerstone of their theoretical framework; the latter place the notion of
society and the institution, derived from it, at the centre of their analyses.
For the Substantivists, the existence of behaviours, activities and forms of organization
which, in any society, can be qualified as economic, stems from the fact that, in order to
survive, humans everywhere rely both on nature and on their fellow beings. The term
economic qualifies everything which, in a given society, can be linked (by the observer armed
with her or his theory to verify/invalidate) to the mechanisms and arrangements through which
that society meets its material needs.
The Substantivists' economy is thus an economy of action embodied in a wide variety
of institutional configurations: there are a thousand ways of acting and organizing to survive or
subsist! To describe the institutional variety of these collective subsistence activities, the
Substantivists introduce distinctions which vary with the authors, but are generally inspired by
those proposed by Polanyi. For the author of The Great Transformation, the economy can be
likened to an institutionalized process. This process, which causes goods to circulate from
hand to hand, is organized around a triple distinction borrowed from political economy. In a
semi-empirical, semi-logical sequence, this distinction separates production, distribution and
consumption. If it is to be sustainable the process, which is universal, has to be framed by
institutions, variables, which weave interdependences between individuals and ensure that they
contribute to the different collective subsistence activities. Institutions ensure the viability of
these activities by giving meaning (most often not explicitly economic) to the technical and
materialized operations that individuals carry out to survive. The different resulting
institutional configurations can be described from the point of view of both the forms of
interdependency that they favour and the social structures that they mobilize. K. Polanyi thus
proposes a distinction between three eventualities: reciprocity, which needs groups of long
lasting relations in order to develop; trading, which takes place in markets; and redistribution,
which implies the existence of a centralized structure.
With the analysis of institutionalized processes, the accent is no longer on individual
"calculations", whether conscious or unconscious, but on the way in which goods circulate and
move from hand to hand: activities of production, distribution and consumption are grounded
in logics and collective structures that define forms of engagement and relations between
individual agents. By favoring this approach, the Substantivists are part of a longstanding
tradition in anthropology (marked, in particular, by the prestigious figures of Mauss and
Malinowski). They are also in a position to strengthen their ties with political economy (which
shares the idea that a society's economic activities stem from its most essential requirements
and that they are logically divided between production, distribution and consumption),
primarily with the Marxist tradition and its strong accent on the circulation of goods
(especially commodities).
The examination of the various existing modalities of circulation enables the
Substantivists to underscore the diversity of forms of rationality that prevail on both a
collective and an individual level. Instrumental rationality is simply one eventuality among
others, which corresponds to bartering or trading. The forms of circulation linked to
reciprocity or redistribution obey different logics and rationales. Polanyi's typology is
moreover simply a starting point. Like any classification, it can, and must, be revised on the
basis of observations made. Sahlins (1960, 1972), for example, distinguishes between
generalized reciprocity and restricted reciprocity (he argues that bartering and trade are a
negative reciprocity), thus highlighting the contrast between the gift without a counter-gift
(excluding any form of calculation) and the gift followed by a counter-gift (which implies a
calculation); Gudeman (1986, 2001) distinguishes between communities and markets;
Godelier (1975, 1977) follows the same line of research by linking individual rationality, as
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described by the Formalists, with the rationality of the capitalist mode of production. In the
analysis of these different modes of circulation, of which there is an abundance of illustrations,
the idea is maintained that each of these modalities corresponds to goods whose nature and
sphere of circulation may differ.
Apart from the diversity of the classifications that they propose, the Substantivists
agree among themselves that the market and the instrumental rationality that it promotes are
simply one eventuality among others. Any society – and this point is emphasized by Polanyi
himself – combines the different regimes in a way that is variable and empirically analysable.
Pure gifts, gifts and counter gifts, bartering and redistribution are present, with trade, in
Western societies which are wrongly described as market societies. Likewise, in non-Western
societies the most extreme forms of calculative behaviour (negative reciprocity) can exist, in
which everyone can acquire the goods they want free-of-cost or at a minimal cost (everyone
can try to maximize their interests at others' expense, through guile or fraud). What the
Substantivists nevertheless agree to recognize, is the existence of a divide between Western
and non-Western societies: self-regulated, price-regulated markets are found only in the
former.
Thus, the S have an approach very similar to that of the F. Like them, they avoid
giving general criteria which would make it possible to identify, for sure, that which in a
society could be considered as "its" economy. Their implicit epistemology, identical to that of
the F, makes them more interested in that which is economic, in what we have called the
economic-X. It is on the identity of the X that they differ. For the F, the X are individual
behaviours, whereas for the S they are the societies themselves; it is societies and not
individuals which, by necessity, are compelled to act "economically". To define and
characterize the activities that in a given society can be characterized as economic, the S, like
the F, resort to economic theory. In contrast they fit into the political economy tradition and,
with it, consider that producing, distributing and consuming are the base on which the variable
institutions shaping the collective and individual logic (or rationality) of these activities
develop. As in the case of the F, the process of economization starts with economics, but
rather than extending into an anthropology of cultural variations, it opens onto a sociology of
institutional differences.
Formalists vs Substantivists
There are obviously several ways of describing and analyzing the debate between Formalists
and Substantivists. We believe that it would be caricaturized and misleading interpretation to
see the debate as nothing but two opposing approaches, one focused on the priority that it says
should be given to individual rational agents, and the other on the pre-eminence of social and
institutional structures. Actually, the two camps share the same bipolar conception of
economic activities. The Formalists start with the individual and arrive at the culture that they
conceive of as a force and a case of coordination and integration; the Substantivists start off,
symmetrically, from the existence of institutionalized processes and mechanisms of integration
and reproduction that they establish, to describe and analyse the different observable
modalities of individual engagement. The disagreement pertains not to the distinction between
individuals and structures, but to the way of defining each of the terms and of describing the
distribution of agency between them.
This agreement on the essential (the agency/structure dichotomy) is one of the reasons
for which the parties in the formalist/substantivist debate described their respective positions
in exactly the same terms, as the following excerpts show.
Scott Cook, one of the outspoken formalists and author of the main article that fuelled
the debate with the strongest contentious power, “The Obsolete ‘Anti-Market’ Mentality: A
Critique of the Substantive Approach to Economic Anthropology,” wrote,
“Economic anthropology … is plagued by a series of communication
gaps between its practitioners. Since the impact on the field of the
writings of Karl Polanyi and his followers, a clear-cut dichotomy has
emerged between scholars who maintain that ‘formal’ economic
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theory is applicable to the analysis of ‘primitive’ and ‘peasant’
economies and those who believe that it is limited in application to the
market-oriented, price-governed economic systems of industrial
economies.” (Cook 1968)
Cook chose his article’s title in relation to that of an essay Polanyi had written more than two
decades earlier, “Our Obsolete Market Mentality” (Polanyi 1947). For Cancian, a critique of
Cook, the parameters of the debate were almost the same:
“The formalists say that economics is the study of the allocation of scarce
means to alternative ends. That is, it is the study of economizing, or the way in
which people maximize personal satisfactions. Economists have some theories
about how people do this, say the formalists, and there is no reason to think
that these theories are not general enough to be helpful in the study of nonWestern societies. In fact, say the formalists, some scholars have shown that
they’re helpful in understanding events in non-Western societies. No, say the
substantivists, economic theory is based on the study of economies where the
point is maximization of profit by both parties to a transaction, and nonWestern societies are not like that, so the theory is not general enough and
will not apply to non-Western societies… Economic anthropology is about the
institutions surrounding the provision of the material necessities of existence
to man”. (Cancian 1968)
For another critique of formalism, “… the main issue of contention [was] whether the
concepts and propositions of formal economics … [were] also applicable to the analysis of
non-market economies. The formalists say they are applicable and the substantivists that they
are not” (Kaplan 1968).
Marshall Sahlins clearly illustrated this deliberate refusal to ask the question of the
existence of the economy, while (unwittingly?) highlighting its importance. Dragging “the
economy” into the heart of anthropology in the late 1950s, he wrote in his article “Political
Power and the Economy in Primitive Society”:
“To live is to economize, but this indicates the worthlessness of so defining an
economy. The question is whether economic choices are specifically determined by
the relative value of the goods involved. If so, as can be true only in a price-setting
market system, then the entire economy is organized by the process of maximization
of economic value. If not, as in primitive societies where price-fixing markets are
absent and social relations channel the movement of goods, then the economy is
organized by these relations… We are indebted to Karl Polanyi for pointing out the
logical weakness of the identification of economy with economizing” (emphasis added,
Sahlins 1960).
As these excerpts show, the protagonists agree on the fact that, if the controversy is all
about defining that which is economic and that which is not, the only way of drawing the line
between the two is by means of the various available economic theories and by empirically
testing their validity to evaluate both their possibilities for application and their relevance. For
both camps, research is synonymous with producing and recording an increasing number of
empirical findings, field work accounts and "data". The aim is either to show the validity of a
few formalist assumptions in order to account for the diversity of observable individual
behaviours, or to show the validity of the distinctions proposed by the Substantivists in order
to describe the modes of production/consumption of goods and their regimes of circulation.
We could never over-state just how productive this approach has been (see below).
From our point of view, it has the advantage of reminding us, very clearly, that, scientificallyspeaking, it is not possible to study the economy without the theories that talk about them and
whose validity and relevance are evaluated by means of the empirical tests and observations
10
that they imply. In the case of the Formalists, as in that of the Substantivists, this results in a
dual movement. The first triggers interest in that which is qualified as economic: for the
Formalists, this is individual behaviours and, more particularly, the way in which individuals
take their decisions to fulfill their needs; for the Substantivists, it is societies confronted with
the need to survive and live.
This movement corresponds to an essential component of what we propose to call
economization, and it provides a first approach. Economizing means explaining and clarifying
that which can be qualified as economic in behaviours and in collective or individual
activities, or in both at once. Both Formalists and Substantivists clearly show that this
qualification is based on the construction of the more or less formalized, more or less
theoretical discourse that defines its nature. The word qualification is important here: it means
that it would be illusory and unrealistic to talk about what the economy is before agreeing on
what is considered to be economic.
To be sure, and this is the second movement, once the robustness of certain
qualifications has been tried and tested (especially through the trials of reality constituted –
from the point of view of the epistemology shared by Formalists and Substantivists alike – by
factual observations), it can be posited that there really is something which we call economy
and which explains that economic-X are observable (where X is an individual rationality or an
institutionalized process). As shown below, economization can encompass this return
movement, the conditions of which still need to be studied in detail. But Popperian
epistemology is unsuited to such an extension, for it overlooks the socio-technical
agencements necessary for the process of objectification. Whether we limit ourselves to the
first movement or include the second, economization is embedded in economic theory and,
like it, is multiple: Formalists opt for neo-classical theory, while Substantivists prefer the
political economy tradition.
I.2. Institutions and materialities: Economics, Embeddedness Approach of Economic
Sociology and the Anthropology of Regimes of Value
The study of economization cannot be dissociated from the mobilization of economic or socioeconomic theories designed to identify the realities that they qualify as economic and that are
supposed to be observable. That is the main lesson that we learn from the debate between F
and S. But what the controversy also shows is that it is no longer possible to talk of
economization in the same terms. If this programme is to be completed, certain difficulties
need to be overcome. Economization starts with economic theory but the qualification
enterprise stumbles against a series of obstacles that the debates between F and S have
highlighted. Saying that economizing means identifying economic-X is a considerable step
forward. But the controversy has not clarified the identity of the X. It has nevertheless
suggested that, at least initially, one has to disregard individuals and society, and focus on the
intermediate X, especially the institutional processes and the mechanisms of valuation.
The formalist approach needed the notion of culture to end its demonstration; it relied
on culture to explain the observable differences between societies. On this point, it seems
accurate to say that the formalist enterprise ended suddenly, not due to the Formalists
themselves but simply because anthropology veered away from the notion of culture which
proved to be empirically ungraspable. Concepts such as “symbolic order” or “the imaginary”
have gradually been preferred. The Substantivists, on the other hand, have developed the
concept of embeddedness which leads to the description and differentiation of institutional
configurations, modes of circulation of goods or forms of organization of productive or
consumptive activities: the concept of institution, with the interdependencies and modalities of
coordination that it implies, allows for the empirical and theoretical examination of these
differences. Of course the analysis of institutions remains, to better understand how they
contribute towards making certain activities economic.
In addition the controversy has made it possible to explicitly address the question of
the divide between Western and non-Western societies, in an argued way. On this subject, the
11
F's and the S's positions are both similar and different: similar in so far as they tend to consider
that Western societies are distinguished from others by the existence of price fixing markets
not found in non-Western societies4; different because the Substantivists accept the Formalists'
position on the West and question the applicability of formalist hypotheses in the non-West. In
doing so they merely replicate the more general assumption that anthropology is the study of
the non-West, and leave the Formalists with the advantage of a symmetrical position: the nonWestern individual is not ontologically different from the Western one; the only thing
distinguishing them lies outside of them, in the content of the cultures in which they live. This
was the Substantivists' weakest point, for they handed an easy victory to the Formalists on a
topic with which the latter were not prepared to deal ethnographically. However, one of the
Substantivists' essential contributions was to resist the Formalists' assumption that
economizing is a one-sided process, by showing the variety of forms taken by the economic
activities presented. The Substantivists see non-market forms of economy not only in nonWestern societies but also in Western ones. What the controversy finally leaves us with is a
series of questions on the existence of different forms of economic rationality, spheres or
regimes, and on their radical separation or, on the contrary, their constituent entanglements.
This affords a direction for the analysis of institutionalized processes and consequently
institutions.
One of the key questions raised by the Formalists and the Substantivists pertains
indeed to the valuation of goods that are produced, circulated or traded. As we have seen, for
the F, the singular and historically contingent culture in which individuals are immersed
explains why certain preferences prevail and certain choices are made. For the Substantivists,
valuation stems from the institutional mechanisms which format and organize the regimes of
circulation: value is not assessed in the same way in trade, in redistribution and in a
relationship of reciprocity, and the goods that are oriented towards one type of regime or
another do not have the same characteristics. Monetary valuation in terms of prices is simple
one case among many others.
How does an institutional configuration contribute towards the emergence of
economic activities and behaviours? What do we call economic valuation? To understand the
dynamics of the process of economization, as we define it, it is necessary to answer these
questions, for a precise delimitation of the economy, or rather of economic-X, will depend on
them. This is the perspective in which we are now going to examine three disciplines that are
going to help us to further our understanding of processes of economization.
I. 2.1 Economics: Institutions as Socio-Cognitive Prostheses
The real followers of the now obsolete formalist anthropology are its midwives: economists.
They enhanced and amended its core assumptions and even incorporated some central ideas of
the anti-formalist stance.
In many different schools of economic research, concepts of institution and culture
have increasingly become central even in simplified and disembodied forms. It is worth noting
the sea change: all major trends of economics in neo-classical, institutional and evolutionary
schools now employ the notion of institution. Even if they define it in dissimilar ways, they
agree that individuals would be incapable of coordination if they shared nothing more than
simply judgments or calculative capacities. Institutional arrangements such as conventions,
cultural values and routines provide the individual with prosthetic tools. Some try to determine
the extent to which and the conditions under which an unequipped coordination (that is,
between agents endowed only with their cognitive capacities) is possible and efficient. This
epistemological tension is highly productive because it obliges those who assume the necessity
of the existence of institutional prostheses to be extremely rigorous in order to define the
conditions of their efficiency and usefulness. The idea is that humans create institutions to
4
This agreement has led to a non-problematization of Western markets which are assumed to be known or
described by economists and have therefore received little attention from anthropologists, whether F or S.
12
solve the problems encountered in the pursuit of their interests or in their will to survive and to
expand. In these approaches the social becomes an outcome, not a contextual nest surrounding
the economy or setting the conditions of its limits. The social is not substantively exogenous,
but formally endogenous to the economy.5
For the majority of economists there is nothing revolutionary in the assertion that
markets are social and human constructions, but they do see it as worrying. For them such an
assertion is not merely a critique but a challenge. They would like to answer the following
practical questions: Are some configurations more efficient than others? If so, what criteria
can be used to rank them? What are the most efficient conditions under which these
configurations can appear and be maintained? When economists – irrespective of the school to
which they belong – answer these questions, they start with a number of shared assumptions.
First, the fact of agreeing on the existence of institutions as devices required for coordination
implies that economic agents have creative and innovative capacities. Faced with practical
problems, economic agents, because they know that their cognitive capacities are bounded,
strive to create useful devices. The history of markets is the long history of the inventiveness
of human beings, capable of reflection and innovation. Secondly, the sometimes explicit and
often implicit idea is that these different proposed solutions are always competing with each
other in a selection process. This is clear in the case of evolutionary economics, but equally so
in the case of neo-classical economics. In the management of this selection process, national
governments and international organizations, usually advised by economists, play an essential
part. Left to itself, the selection process could result in blatantly under-efficient and even
socially unbearable situations. The twofold concern of economics is to unfold the variables
that could explain the different levels of market efficiency, and to urge governments to follow
the experts' advice and expertise in either designing the markets or in structuring national (or
transnational) economies.6
The analysis of institutions as socio-cognitive prostheses which facilitate efficient
coordination has naturally led certain economists to enter into the black box of human agents’
cognitive capacities and then to imagine and propose adequate institutions.
At the centre of formalist theses lay a genuine anthropology: the human being was
defined as a rational maximizer. In its different theoretical versions economics pursues this
anthropological investigation by studying individual agents’ real cognitive competencies. This
cognitive turn (Thévenot, 2006) highlights the importance of certain factors (internal or
external to individuals) which limit the efficiency of what Sahlins called economizing
behaviors. Human beings’ base is this very ability to optimize or at least to reach satisfying
solutions, but their calculative capacities and strategic competencies are bounded. By studying
these limits in greater depth, the economist-anthropologist is in a position to conceive of the
institutions and tools designed to offset these deficiencies, in a finer and more appropriate
way. We could compare the economist to a designer of prostheses and equipment for the
disabled, the nature of which is to optimize their behaviors but which do not always have the
means or the capacity. The anthropology as implied by economists’ practice, becomes more
ambitious, more complex and richer, since the economist thinks about the conditions in which
humans in society (and no longer humans considered as individuals limited to their somatic
envelope) can be “economized”.
In the terminology used in this paper, we can say that economics reaches the
conclusion that markets, conceived of as human and non-human arrangements (rules, routines,
etc.), have a dual status: they are natural, since they extend human nature and its optimizing
behaviors; and they are artifacts, since they are partly the outcome of human activity. The
economist “knows” that the nature of the human being is that of an optimizer but also that that
nature can be fully expressed only if certain conditions are met. The organization of economic
5
Some economists go beyond the simple recognition of the existence of these institutions. They also want to
analyse their emergence, transformation and maintenance: (North 1990); (Williamson 1985); (Williamson 1991).
6
On the role of economists as professionals, see Fourcade (2006).
13
activities shaped by norms and incentives, rules and routines, provides a satisfactory answer to
this paradox. In this perspective, the role of economics is threefold: furthering our insight into
human behaviours and their logic; analysing the obstacles preventing or impairing those
behaviours; and designing institutional frames which will eliminate or alleviate the obstacles
and enable economizing individuals to express themselves freely. Economics is, strictly
speaking, an anthropology in action; an anthropology for which human beings are by nature
economizing beings. It is to enable this nature to express itself fully that this anthropology
endeavors to design, and to help create, the conditions of economizing behaviours. Thus,
without diverging from the tradition opened by the formalists, it goes further. It explicitly asks
itself the question of economization, that is, of the nature of the mechanisms which enable
economizing behaviours to become explicit and dominant.
Economists’ contribution is essential for the programme that we wish to develop. First,
it is demonstrated that the economization of human behaviours is closely related to
institutional frames. This link is different from the one postulated by the notion of
embeddedness. It is to emphasize this difference that we have employed the concept of sociocognitive prostheses (obviously not used by economists). Institutions enhance and bring into
existence the competencies or appetencies which potentially exist in human beings and to
which they afford the possibility of being enacted. Economics is right to maintain, contrary to
the substantivists’ thesis, that in the narrow frame of certain conveniently designed
institutional configurations, economizing behaviours can be observed. The truth of such an
assertion depends only on the capacity to imagine, test and implement the institutions which
make these behaviours possible and effective (MacKenzie 2006).
Second, and this point stems from the first one, economics and more generally the
social sciences might play an important part in designing and setting up institutions.
Economization is linked to economics.7
Yet economics remains a prisoner of the highly restrictive hypotheses on which its
anthropology is based. The diversity of empirically observable human behaviours generates
doubts – at least from a methodological point of view – on the uniformity of economizing
behaviours: to economize, as emphasized by substantivists when they criticize the overly
narrow definition given by formalists (economizing as maximizing), could mean many
different things. We have to leave open the possibility that there is not only one single
profound human nature. It would perhaps even be preferable to give up the idea of a profound
human nature. Human nature is an historical achievement, a multi-sided path-dependent
process. Several possible anthropological trajectories exist and, with them, several modes of
economization.
I. 2.2 The New Economic Sociology: the Embeddedness Approach
Like the heirs of formalism, the successors of Substantivism seem not to be anthropologists.
Neo-substantivists are recruited from the ranks of the new economic sociology (NES) that was
developed in the late seventies and early eighties. One of the emblematic figures of the NES is
Granovetter with his seminal article (1985). (New) economic sociology is now a soundly
established institutionalized discipline with academic departments, handbooks and
professional organizations (Swedberg 2004). The heritage left by the substantivists was the
pivotal and polysemous notion of embeddedness.
For (new) economic sociologists, embeddedness as developed by Polanyi – “human
economy is embedded and enmeshed in institutions, economic and non-economic” (Polanyi,
1957: 250) – had two advantages. First, it established a productive link between the essentially
7
The nature of the relation may change according to the theoretical frame. Neo-classical economics would focus on
the design of incentives and of information circulation; evolutionary economics would choose as an entry point the
conception and implementation of appropriate routines; behavioural economics would be more oriented towards an
experimental approach.
14
European tradition of the sociology of economy, such as that of Durkheim, Weber and
Simmel, and heterodox institutionalist economics such as that of (Commons 1934) and
(Veblen 1953 {1899}).8 The concept also had the advantage of calling off the peace Parsons
signed with economists: You study the inside of the economy, I do society and the flows of
exchanges and interrelations between the two!” The idea of embeddedness rendered the
boundary between economy and society obsolete. Rather than being an independent subsystem within society, economy is enmeshed in it. For the incipient Neo-substantivists,
imagining two distinct disciplines makes no sense, for economic sociology is nothing but a
case of applied sociology. The new economic sociology is based on a prevailing
epistemological and disciplinary project: sociology is the queen of disciplines.
By making the concept of embeddedness a rallying cry, new economic sociology has
also managed to rid itself of one of the susbstantivists’ goals; hence, it no longer needs to
define what the noun economy or even the adjective (economic or economizing) mean. This
explains why, especially at first, economic sociology adopted a critical point of view in
relation to economics. Economics is based on the assumption (see 2.1) that a general definition
can be given of economic rationalities (and behaviours) as such, and that they can be
distinguished from non-economic behaviours. The new economic sociology rejects this
assumption. It sees the market as simply one site amongst many others, where the unrealism of
economics can easily be demonstrated and where the tools of sociology can prove to be fertile
(Granovetter, 2002). One consequence is that for the new economic sociology, notions like
production, exchange and consumption are non-problematic. Not because they are considered
to constitute the substance of economic activities but because, in certain circumstances, they
are taken for granted and/or enacted by actors themselves: they are institutionalized categories.
From a scientific point of view the objective is to study this enmeshing (or embeddedness)
itself and not the economy as such.
It is difficult to define the outline of this new economic sociology with precision. First,
this is because the notion of embeddedness has multiple meanings. Sociologists who refer to
it, more or less directly, develop distinctly different approaches because they depend on the
type of sociological framework used. Granovetter's embeddedness is different to that of
Dobbin, itself different from that of Di Maggio or Fligstein, to name only a few leading
figures (Dobbin, 1994; Fligstein, 2001; Granovetter, 1985; DiMaggio, 1994).
Second, it would be more exact to consider that the concept of embeddedness has
frequently been used as a rallying cry. It applies to research programmes whose ultimate
objective is to show that the economy cannot be removed from sociological analysis and that
economics does not have a monopoly on the analysis of the economy. That is why it is
appropriate in this section to take into account not only the new economic sociology (which
refers positively to embeddedness and to Granovetter’s founding work) but also all the
sociological approaches (even when they criticize the notion of embeddedness or when they
ignore it) which claim that the analysis of economic activities is simply a field of application
of sociological theory. Sociologists such as White (2001), Fligenstein (2001) and Bourdieu
(2005) have a critical or distant attitude to the notion of embeddedness. They nevertheless
share with the NES the conviction that sociologists should not change their analytical tools
when they study the economy. This approach constitutes a new sociology of economy (NSE),
as opposed to the sociology that left it up to economists to study the economy. To characterize
it, we can conceive of maintaining the notion of embeddedness and saying that the NSE’s
ambitious goal is to embed the social study of the economy in sociological analysis;
irrespective of the strategy applied, economics has to be embedded in sociology! In the
English-speaking world the new economic sociology, that of Granovetter, is the most active
component of this general movement.9 NES can be seen as the American branch of NSE.
8
For a presentation of an analysis of the decline of institutionalism see Yonay (1998).
The list of elements conceived of by sociologists to dissolve economic relations in the social grows by the day:
after culture, norms and interpersonal relations, it is now individual emotions or even collective spirit that give
capitalism the strength it needs (Boltanski and Chiapello 2006 ).
9
15
The diversity of approaches followed by the new sociology of the economy has
triggered many attempts to fight against this fragmentation and to maintain some degree of
unity.10 This is reflected in the recent proliferation of textbooks, readers and handbooks.
Dobbin's long introduction to his reader, The New Economic Sociology, is a good example of
integrative strategy (Dobbin 2004). He presents a concise and elegant synthesis of all the
explanatory strategies of economic sociology and simultaneously gives an overview of all the
sites investigated. Dobbin considers that embeddedness can be studied from four points of
view reflecting the vantage points of institutions, social networks, power relations and
cognition. For him, the concept of convention, i.e. the set of scripts followed by actors, is the
bridge connecting these four vantage points.11 He sees economic sociology as aimed at
analyzing how conventions emerge and are stabilized by tracking the complex web of relations
constantly being woven between institutions, cognition, social networks and power relations.
All those who know the growing corpus of works belonging to new economic
sociology will probably agree that these key concepts account fairly well for the wide diversity
of approaches and reasoning of this discipline. But what Dobbin highlights strikingly well is
the unity of what we call the new sociology of economy: there is no reason to change
analytical tools when one redirects one’s sociological curiosity from society to the economy,
because the latter is embedded in the former. Dobbin presents various empirical examples to
make the case that “social and economic behavior alike originate not in the individual but in
society”. 12
We agree with new sociologists of economy (and with Dobbin at least) to a certain
degree. First, they rightly overcome one of the most worrying limits of the substantialist
approach. There is indeed a categorical difference between substantivist anthropologists and
embeddedness sociologists. Without changing the main theoretical cartography of the
substantivist argument, sociologists dragged the explanatory framework from the exotic nonWest to the all too human West; the analytical tools to apply should not be changed when
moving from one to the other.
Secondly, the notion of embeddedness has freed sociological analysis. It has given it
both strong programmatic coherence (dissolve the economy in the social by all possible
means) and a large degree of latitude and inspiration. Sociological theory has taken up objects
that until now were monopolized by economics or other disciplines such as anthropology or
political science (for a mapping of these new territories annexed by sociology, see Smelser and
Swedberg, 2005). Moreover, the absence of a rigid and strict definition of the economy as such
has opened up new sites of investigation such as technical innovation and the relations it
assumes exist between markets, scientific research and public policies (Powell and Brantley
1993), intimacy (Zelizer, 2005), law (Swedberg 2003) (Stark 1996) (Edelman 1990) or art
(White and White 1965) (Moulin 1992) (Velthuis 2005), to mention only a few examples. This
obstinate work of critical conceptual deconstruction of the economy, on all fronts, has the
immense advantage of rendering visible and analysable the multiplicity of relations and
entanglements needed in the construction and reproduction of economic activities and
behaviours.
Thirdly, by emphasizing the fact that the economy is a social activity like all other
human activities, albeit a particular one, the sociology of economy, following in the footsteps
of the substantivists, has contributed powerfully to the recognition that there are multiple
forms of organization of economic activities, in general, and of markets, in particular. The
notion of embeddedness indicates, at least implicitly, that the economy is the result of
processes which have given it the specific and variable forms it has had at different times in
10
Several syntheses have been attempted, such as: (Smelser and Swedberg 2005); (Swedberg and Granovetter
2001); (DiMaggio 2001) (Guillen 2003) (Carruthers, B. and B. Uzzi 2000).
11 On the centrality of the notion of convention, but defined differently, see also Dupuy and al. (1989)
12 (Davis, Diekmann et al. 1994; Carruthers 1996); (Fligstein and Markowitz 1993) (Roy 1997). See also: (Fligstein
and Mara-Drita 1996);(Uzzi 1996; Swedberg 1997) (Carruthers and Stinchcombe 1999) (Carruthers and Uzzi 2000)
(Podolny 2001); (Le Velly 2002); (Velthuis 2003) (Duina 2004).
16
diverse societies. By deconstructing the economy (by means of general concepts such as
networks, power, fields or institutions), the new sociology of the economy has contributed to
the understanding that the economy has constantly been constructed and reconstructed. It has
thus suggested the importance of processes of economization – even if it has neither
pronounced the word nor addressed the problem as such. At the same time it highlights
implicitly the possibility, at least theoretical, of processes of dis-economization which are
supposed to denote all mechanisms through which, locally and for some time, the specificity
of economic behaviours and activities can be called into question.
The sociology of economy, with its ambition to embed the economy in society and
economics in sociology, nevertheless helps to push into the background a number of questions
that we believe are important.
a) The NSE tends to be interested in markets simply as one site amongst others where
the unrealism of economics (which implies at least some degree of calculative autonomy in
agents) and possibly the fecundity of applying social theory can easily be demonstrated
(Granovetter, 2002). By trying to show that markets can be deconstructed and analysed like
any other social reality, this sociology of economy has difficulty explaining and characterizing
their specificity and, in particular, their galloping expansion. What it misses is the progressive
construction of the specificity and force, celebrated or challenged everywhere, of what is
known as economic markets. By socializing everything, the NSE misses the issue of the
specificity of what we suggest calling economization.
b) As soon as we examine the process of economization (or, in NSE’s words,
disembedding/re-embedding), the importance of techniques and, more generally, of
materialities appears. From a theoretical point of view the sociology of economy focuses on
sociology’s favorite objects: networks and social relations, institutions, rules, conventions,
norms and power struggles. Yet the empirical research that it has inspired highlights the
decisive role played by techniques, sciences, standards, calculating instruments, metrology
and, more generally, material infrastructure. To build itself up and to last, withstand attacks,
reproduce and even change, a market is anchored in materialities which contribute towards
profoundly structuring and manufacturing the irreversibilities ensuring its perpetuation
(Granovetter and MacGuire 1998). The construction of markets is a socio-technical
construction, not a purely social one.
The paradox of NES, irrespective of the approach, is to have empirically shown the
essential role of techniques in the shaping and dynamics of markets, without providing
theoretical insights or analytical tools to understand their contribution.13 From this point of
view they are simply following Polanyi, who never hesitated to see the machine as one of the
founding events of self-regulated markets but never dreamed of integrating it into his analysis
of markets and their functioning (Polanyi, 1944).
c) To sum up: the notion of embeddedness has had positive effects but there is a
chance of it becoming almost meaningless due to overuse.14 Is it really true that the notion of
society is clearer than that of economy? Do we explain something by dissolving the object to
13
A recent article by Yakubovitch, Granovetter and MacGuire (2005) enables us to assess the devastating effects of
this absence of theoretical treatment of techniques and materialities. Wishing to explain the setting of electricity
prices, the authors reach the conclusion that pricing can partially be explained by technical and economic elements,
and partly by social relations (in its case, social networks). We could talk of an underdetermination of the economy
by society, reminiscent of the famous Yalta proposed by Parsons to economists: finally the autonomy of economy
and … economics is again conceded.
14 A good example of this danger is the impressive work of Zafirovski. In three books and tens of articles published
in a period of a few years, all he could write was how embedded the economic was in the social, without publishing
even a single account of a concrete market (Zafirovski and Levine 1997) (Zafirovski 2000) (Zafirovski 2001)
(Zafirovski 2002) (Zafirovski 2003). Whichever dimension of markets is discussed, we are told by the
embeddedness approach that it is social. Even the best critique of the embeddedness approach, which argues that
“[t]he concept of embeddedness posits that the world of the market exists apart from society even as it attempts to
overcome that divide” (Kripner 2001: 798) proposes that the market should in the end be “fully appropriated as a
social object” (ibid.: 801-02).
17
be explained in another general and controversial frame – society? The explanans being
fuzzier than the explanandum, this approach leaves us with a more complicated and trickier
unanswered question: what is society made of? Is it really satisfactory to limit the answer to
the usual ‘sociological’ list without mentioning, even in passing, socio-technical assemblages
and things that circulate from hand to hand? What would an economy be without commodities
and their physical properties and materialities?
To further our understanding of the part played by materialities in processes of
economization, we will now turn to a third current of analysis which has placed things and
their circulation at the centre of the analysis of processes of economic valuation.
I. 2.3 Circulation of Things and their Value
I. 2.3.1. The end of the great divides
In recent decades anthropology has made two changes which have led it to propose
new orientations for the study of the economy and economization.
First, disowning the previous problems, many anthropologists have decided to
question the validity of imposing the a priori trilogy of production, exchange and consumption
over objects of social research (for a striking example of such an approach see: J. Roitman
2005). More generally, summing up twenty years of research in cultural and material
anthropology, Descola rightly emphasizes that a comparative anthropology has to detach itself
from these categories and raise a more challenging question concerning the mechanisms
through which beings, whether humans or non-humans, are characterized and can enter into
relations of various kinds whose nature and distribution are a matter of research, not
assumption. Relations of production and consumption, which imply an ontological divide
between animate and inanimate entities, are simply one mechanism among others organizing
the transformation of beings and their mutual attachments (Descola 2005).
Second, the hypothesis that radical qualitative differences exist between Western and
non-Western societies have grown weaker, at least for a certain literature.15
Several reasons explain this trend. Note, in particular, the importance acquired by a set
of studies which have empirically highlighted the complexity and richness of the interactions
and relations between colonizers and colonized, and have thus contributed towards rendering
irrelevant the idea of a great divide. Within that research stream a particular role must be
granted to the post-Said, post-Orientalism literature. It engaged with Subaltern Studies in
South Asia, in which subjectification – and not just interaction or hybrid forms – was a major
subject of study and debate. More pertinent than a disavowal of the idea of great divides
between societies, or cultures, was the study of how the disciplines (following Foucault and
Said) produce great divides, with both science and economy being the main disciplines
involved in producing that effect.16 From the point of view of our inquiry on the elements to
take into consideration in order to grasp the processes of economization, it seems useful to
grant particular attention to those studies that have developed such notions as assemblage
(Ong and Collier 2005), entanglement and hybridization. They show that it is difficult to claim
that radically different and logically incompatible economic logics exist.
Each collective tends to be analyzed as a combination of regimes, whose hierarchies
and proportions are variables and evolve with time. The definition of these regimes and their
list constitute an object of open investigation. There is no reason to consider this list as set for
once and for all, for new regimes can appear. Hence, the rejection of the existence of a radical
divide between us and them is no longer simply a matter of tolerance and open-mindedness.
We must not forget that ‘cultural studies’ gave rise to the authorization of claims to difference and thus to a wave
of studies regarding fundamental epistemological divides. We thank J. Roitman for drawing our attention on this
point.
16 All of these studies, as well as those concerning governmentality (for a review see Rose and Miller, 2008), are of
course akin to the approach that we propose, for they contribute directly to the analysis of the process of
economization and, more particularly, of economic agency (see II).
15
18
Each social formation is different from the others, but these are not differences of nature; in a
specific way they combine elements common to all collectives. By making this point, these
studies highlight the importance of materialities in the process of economization, the
(re)discovery of which was partly due to the fact of reverting to one of the founders of
economic anthropology: Mauss.
I.2.3.2. Rereading Mauss
From a theoretical point of view, a critical return to Mauss and his seminal article on
the gift has powerfully contributed to this movement. By reverting to Mauss, some
anthropologists called into question the relevance of the distinction which it postulated
between gift and commodity. It thus questioned the validity of the opposition between giftbased societies and commodity-based societies, as advanced by anthropologists who, like
Gregory (1982), were strongly influenced by both Mauss and Marxism.17 This return to the
sources led to significant advances. Some anthropologists gradually reached the conclusion
that concrete societies generally mix the two regimes of value and that it is pointless to talk of
pure market transactions or of a pure gift economy (RERS WILL BE ADDED).
From this point of view The Social Life of Things was a milestone in that it focused
attention on things per se and their careers, as well as on the different regimes of value into
which these things might fit. The concept of a career was a highly fertile point of departure for
studying how things, by circulating, changed status, and how they were valued differently,
alternately for example as a gift or as merchandise. Thomas went further in this analysis. To
account more fully for changes of regime and their hybridizations, he gave a more precise and
operational definition of the differences between gifts and commodities, starting with the idea
that different modalities of circulation of things exist.18 For Thomas, what distinguishes a gift
from a market transaction is the process of de-contextualization and re-contextualization of the
things to which it applies (Thomas, 1991). A gift is a thing that circulates while preserving the
presence of its giver, embedded within it. By contrast a commodity erases the connection with
its giver. The gift remains entangled in the giver’s world and ensures the giver’s presence in
the receiver’s world. The commodity is a thing that is carefully disentangled from the world in
which it has been designed and produced and of which it retains no trace.19 The thing may
have been marked or reconfigured either to convey with the circulating object the person who
put it into circulation and thus to represent her or, by contrast, to erase any previous
attachment and facilitate new appropriations. Depending on the case, we tilt over into the gift
or the market transaction regime.
I. 2.3.3 Regimes of value and materialities
This return to Mauss’ work to enrich and surpass it has led anthropologists to consider
the material aspects of the circulation of things.20 Reading the work of Myers (2001 and 2002),
Myers and Kisheblatt-Gimblett (2001), Weiner (1992), and Miller (2005) (REFS FROM
1980s and 1990s WILL BE ADDED) one learns a crucial lesson: things, their materialities,
17
For Gregory, gift-based societies are characterized by kinship-based groups as opposed to commodity-based
societies characterized by social classes. In later work he argued that his aim was to analyse the “efflorescence” of
gift exchange in a world dominated by commodities (Gregory, 1997: 47-48).
18
Thomas’ originality is that he chooses to start with the circulation of things to answer the classical questions: Is it
a gift? Is it an exchange of a commodity? Is there reciprocity?
19 The notion of service enables us to understand how this disentanglement is compatible with practices that
maintain a link with the seller and the buyer, like for instance after-sales service (Callon et alii, 2002).
20 Economic anthropologists, deeply influenced by Marx, have very soon observed the existence and importance of
diverse separate spheres of circulation (for a clear presentation of this approach see: Godelier (1975 and 1999)). But
they were not so interested in the relations between the materiality of things and their modalities of circulation.
19
the ways they circulate and are transformed, and the trails they follow can and need to be
analyzed empirically.21
Viviana Zelizer, a sociologist who is more interested in processes than in institutional
configurations, has contributed to the analysis of mechanisms of valuation and their links with
the materiality of the things that circulate. Her work presents a painstaking analysis of the
formatting of regimes of value and the links between them, as well as the modalities of
circulation of things and the related production of persons (Zelizer 1989) (Zelizer 1994)
(Zelizer 2002) (Zelizer 2005). Zelizer’s concept of earmarking is crucial if we wish to
understand the singularity of a regime of value which transforms circulating things into gifts.
Earmarking, as the etymology of the word suggests, denotes the material inscription (and
consequently the requalification) of things, which maintains the presence of the transmitter (or
donor or enunciator) in the thing that he or she puts into circulation.22 It is a key conceptual
innovation, especially in understanding the circulation of unalienable things (see below).
This approach shows how flawed arguments of a priori determination are: a thing can
live its life, be reconfigured (or earmarked), and later escape the intentions of whoever puts it
into circulation. Keane’s description of the career of a banner initially given to be put on a
stone tomb shows the complexity of these changes of regimes of value: “Note the rapid series
of roles through which the piece of cloth moved: by turn, it was a conventional obligation
between affines, a figurative banner, a physical encumbrance tangled in a tree, a token of
regard meant to placate an irritated guest, a vehicle of insult, a metaphoric rag of poverty, and
finally a rejected gift” (Keane 2001). To explain these unpredictable changes, he underscores
the material dimension of things. Clearly, their materiality does not automatically determine
the regime of value (as gift or commodity) in which they are or can be engaged; it nevertheless
exercises a number of constraints and produces differences: “Thus the very materiality of
objects means that they are not merely arbitrary signs. Their materiality makes a difference
both in the source of their meaning and of their destinations” (Keane, 2001: 70). 23
These observations enable us to understand why certain things have properties that
facilitate their engagements in certain regimes of circulation-valuation rather than in others
and, in particular, make certain forms of appropriation easier or more difficult. This is often
the case of things which are chosen (or designed) to act as money (Maurer 2006). Depending
on these characteristics, some regimes will be more readily accessible than others (Guyer
2004). But, once again, nothing is ineluctable. For example as illustrated by Zelizer, owing to
earmarking, money, seemingly ‘profiled’ to impose itself as pure merchandize, can be
transformed, with slight modifications, into a pure gift.24 Due to the gradients of resistance that
it establishes, materiality simply renders certain actualizations easier or more probable than
others.
With the recognition of the role played by the material dimension in the redefinition of
the respective positions of the gift and the commodity, a number of standard anthropological
issues have been reformulated in new terms. The emergent focus on regimes of circulation and
values has triggered keen interest in formerly neglected issues such as the inalienability or
alienability of goods or the nature of property relations. Things can move, change hands and
not change owners. Annette Weiner shows how the circulation of things might be compatible
with their inalienability: “Inalienability is not a category but a process” and can only been
21
This point is reminiscent of Marx's famous intuition: the collective can only be reconstructed by starting from
that which circulates in it and understanding these things’ regimes of circulation (M-C-M’).
22
Some markets, such as art, wine, children and domestic services are obviously strategic for studying these
switches and framings. In these markets we find a constant entanglement of regimes. It could be interesting to draw
a parallel between the concept of earmarking and that of affordance (Gibson 1977 and 1986) (Norman 1988).
Affordance indicates how things, due to their specific characteristics, can both propose (promise) and permit
(permission) some particular courses of actions.
23 To be complete we need to consider all the statuses that can be taken on by objects and the role played by
materialities in the attribution of a particular status.
24 Apart from Zelizer, see (Miller 2001).
20
achieved for a limited period of time.25 “Things can travel and be inalienable” observe Myers
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2001) (REFS to be ADDED, Munn, P. Alexander, Weiner).
Subtle variations between appropriation, possession and ownership can be observed and
analyzed. These questions introduce a new dimension into the study of the contextualization
processes of circulations (Strathern 1998). Furthermore this approach entails a study of the
relationship between regimes of value and the production of subjectivities.26
I. 2.3.4 Contributions and limits
These ground-breaking works place things at the centre of their analyses and study the
modalities of their circulation. Such a shift in focus corresponds to an important turning point
in anthropology. The issue is no longer to distinguish and to contrast regimes like reciprocity,
redistribution and market transactions, or economic activities like production, distribution and
consumption. These anthropologists seek to understand how complex and hybrid social
configurations are constructed by and through circulating material entities (Latour
forthcoming).
First, this anthropological programme highlights both the contributions and the limits
of studies undertaken by certain economists and sociologists who also emphasize the
theoretical importance of the role played by circulating material goods, in the coordination of
economic agents. Examples include studies and analyses on commodities’ chain value or on
industrial organizations/sectors, and the pioneering work of Harrison White (2001) on
networks of producers and consumers. All this research rightly highlights the importance of
interdependencies, and especially of flows of information and material entities between agents
engaged in the production, distribution and consumption of goods. By adopting this point of
view, they help to transcend the substantivists’ overly-static distinctions. But to break entirely
free from substantivism, it is not enough to reduce the effects of the circulation of goods to the
connections and interdependencies which it produces.27 One has to agree to consider – at least
as a working hypothesis – that the very categories of production, distribution and consumption
of goods are (sometimes) used as a convenient classification for describing a complex (on
going) process of circulation. But one must keep in mind that here is no circulation without
transformation, without a remodelling of the things that circulate, and without what we have
proposed to call their (re)qualifications. Changes are minute during certain stages of the
circulation and increase during others; they are rarely entirely absent and when they are, it is at
the cost of huge investments.
Second, the contribution of the anthropology of regimes of value is also evident in the
highly original link that it introduces between circulation, transformation and valuation. 28
Nothing moves on its own and determines or finds itself alone on its path. If a good is
produced it is because it has a value for its producer; if it is distributed it is because it is a
source of value for its distributor; and if it is consumed it is because it has a value in its
consumer’s eyes. The forces which explain the circulation-transformation of things are the
same ones that give things value. Things circulate because they are valued and it is because
25
We will see in the third part that such situations as inalienability require huge investments. Counter-programmes,
which destroy those investments, are always liable to happen.
26 On these questions, see also Simmel and in particular his description of possession as action (Simmel 1990
{1907}).
27 The same critics might be made to the so-called commodity chain approach. For a presentation of this approch
and of some variants see amongst aothers : (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994) (Wallerstein and Hopkins 2000)
(Daviron and Gibbon 2002). (Gibbon 2003). (Cox 2002) (Raikes, Jensen et al. 2000) (Pietrobelli and Sverrisson
2003) (Skov 2005) (Fine and Leopold 1993) (Fine 2002).
28
This is the approach that one of us (Callon and al. 2002) followed by proposing the establishment of an
equivalence between processes of production and processes of (re)qualification, and between processes of
(re)qualification and those of valuation. These equivalences are produced by the circulation and transformations
without which this circulation is impossible.
21
they are valued that they become goods (Dewey 1915). Circulation cannot be summed up
simply as a form of networking that could formally be described in the language of
connectionism. It consists essentially in a dual process of transformation and valuation. This
explains why the materiality of things matters in this approach: no valuation without
circulation; no circulation without material transformation and requalification.
This approach opens new research perspectives for the analysis of economization. But
to see the programme through to the end, one should not be afraid to challenge one of the
founding hypotheses these anthropologists do not dare to get rid of. In their pioneering studies,
the emphasis on the circulation of things and on the decisive character of their materiality was
generally complemented, and also contradicted, by the assertion of the importance attached to
humans' cognitive capacities and, in particular, their faculty for giving meaning to meaningless
situations. Appadurai articulated such a tension by arguing that “from a theoretical point of
view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is
the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (Appadurai 1986). This is
the most concise way of simultaneously arguing against the ontological asymmetry between
humans and things and … supporting it! This novelty in anthropology gives back to things the
attention they warrant, yet at the same time stops short of discussing the asymmetry between
things and human beings. It is on the origin and modalities of this asymmetry that we have to
focus if we wish to break further ground in the anthropology of economization and, in
particular, of marketization.
I. 2.4 What has been achieved and what remains to be done
There seems to be little in common between the prescriptive and interventionist will of
economics in the economy, the stubbornness of the sociology of economy in wanting to embed
the economy in society (and consequently economics in sociology), and anthropology's
interest in the regime of values and the circulation-transformation of things and persons. Yet
we argue that these three approaches provide us with strong vantage points to study processes
of economization and especially of marketization.
Economics, as a diversified discipline, recognizes the innovative activity of human
agencies and incidentally the role of the social sciences in designing institutions. In that sense,
institutions can be seen as socio-cognitive prostheses that endow agents with extended
abilities. Without appropriately designed institutions, individuals are not able to engage in
economic activities sensu stricto: the process of economization and especially of construction
of economic markets, as well as their extension, requires suitable institutions. To offset agents’
limits – mainly cognitive and somatic – economists may need to play a part in the design and
establishment of those institutions.
Economic sociologists (or, more precisely: the NES focus on this tricky question of
coordination of agents and consequently enrich the description of institutions: socio-cognitive
prostheses are much more complicated and diversified than those imagined by economists. By
shifting the centre of gravity of the analysis of markets a little more towards the institutions in
which they are embedded, and by showing that the former are not necessarily the effects of an
adequate configuration of the latter, economic sociologists make the importance of processes
of economicization (and dis-economicization) even more explicit. Any economy, whether
western or non-western, can be deciphered as a series of effects produced by institutional
arrangements. The economic sociologist tries to deconstruct these arrangements in order to
show that there is nothing non-social about the forces explaining their constitution. The
programme of the new sociology of economy is a deconstructionist programme whose
strength is to show the existence of contingent historical processes. But it shares the
weaknesses and limits of deconstructionism in general: a) it shows only a marginal interest in
the production of sustainable asymmetries and the obtaining of specific coherences which
become robust and sometimes irreversible (Hacking 1999) because b) by focusing on the
social dimension of this (de)construction, it underplays the role of things and materialities in
the setting up of gradients of resistance. The economy is just a human affair configured by
social processes.
22
Anthropologists bring things back into the picture. The most daring have
unhesitatingly gone so far as to overturn the perspective: to study the economy, one must start
not with human beings’ activities but with the circulation of the things and especially the
material processes that give them value and thus transform them into ‘economic’ goods going
from hand to hand. As we have seen, the limit of their approach is that they assume, at least at
a theoretical level, an ontological asymmetry between things and humans. These authors have
nevertheless paved the way to a version of anthropology in which the hypothesis of an
ontological asymmetry between humans and non-humans, between valuating subjects/agents
and valuated things/objects/goods could be dropped.
These three approaches provide the outlines and research avenues of a new field of
investigation. The efforts of economists, sociologists of economy and anthropologists of
valuation have successfully contributed towards showing the necessity to move on from the
notion of economy to that of economization and dis-economization. Their work simply needs
to be completed, first by linking up their (still quite disconnected) contributions and
discoveries and second by pursuing the analysis of the complex relations between humans and
non-humans, via the concept of socio-technical agencement.
II. A Research Programme on Economization: New Directions in the Social Study of
Markets
We use the term economization to denote the processes of constitution of the behaviours,
organizations, institutions and, more generally, objects which, in a particular society, are
tentatively and often controversially qualified by scholars and/or lay people as economic. In
diverse and changing ways, these processes contribute towards shaping what is called the
human being: his/her agency, subjectivity, and modes of socialization. That is why the
research programme which we are arguing for might legitimately be called the anthropology
of economization. Not being anthropologists ourselves, and aware that our masterly of this
discipline is weak, we prefer to talk of a (pluridisciplinary) programme for the study of
processes of economization.
This programme encompasses a vast field of investigation, the presentation of which
would exceed the scope of an article or even a book. We therefore focus, in this part, on a
particular form of economization, the one corresponding to the constitution, reproduction,
development, transformations and objectification of markets. The subject of this programme is
not markets themselves but the on-going processes shaping them, guaranteeing their
functioning and guiding their development or their being aborted.
The forces engaged in processes of marketization are multiple. First, there are
obviously all those related to theoretical and practical knowledge. Depending on the historical
circumstances, philosophy, religious doctrines and, increasingly, the social and human
sciences, with economics and related disciplines, have contributed to this process that applies
not only to the societies concerned but also to the way they write and constantly rewrite their
history. As Foucault pointed out, there is indeed no reason not to include the practical
knowledge elaborated and mobilized by agents, in this reflection and orientation of action: "A
currency reform, a banking practice or a commercial practice can be rationalized, developed,
maintained or disappear in its own form; it is always based on a certain knowledge …"
(Foucault, 1966: 179).29 As for contemporary economies, we should mention firms,
government, banks, international bodies, consumers, salaried employees, etc., as well as the
various actors who are (or feel) concerned for one reason or another by markets, their
organization and the missions entrusted to them (NGOs, patient organizations, etc.). Second,
as noted in Part 2, we also need to include material technologies, which contribute towards
shaping markets and their functioning, as well as social technologies like law.
29
This reference to Foucault enables us to highlight the main difference from the position he argues (at least in Les
mots et les choses). He uses the federating concept of épistemè to assert that all knowledge (whether practical or
speculative) has the 'same archaeological base', that is, it shares the same epistemological categories and
orientations. We, by contrast, emphasize the diversity constituting this knowledge and leave the question of its
possible convergence and coherence open.
23
Given the complexity and variability of the marketization process, it may seem
unrealistic to conceive of its study in any other way than as the juxtaposition of partial studies
devoted to its various aspects. In this article we would like to suggest that a broader ambition
can be envisaged. For reasons which are yet to be analyzed in detail, and in all likelihood are
historical, the markets surrounding us share what Wittgenstein would have called a "family
resemblance".30 This does not mean that they are all identical; on the contrary, we have
stressed their diversity. But, owing to the coherence of the overall process of economization, it
is not irrelevant to assume that the notion of a market encompasses a set of significations,
realities and practices, the list and content of which are a matter of widespread agreement. The
longstanding contribution of economics and economists to the construction of this agreement
has surely been decisive.
Based on the hypothesis of a common view of markets (the so-called ‘family
resemblance’), which is both scholarly and lay and which contributes in addition to the
marketization process that we wish to study, we define a market as a sociotechnical
agencement (arrangement), characterized as follows:31
a) As a sociotechnical agencement (AST), it can be described and analysed as an
arrangement or assemblage of heterogeneous elements which include, in particular: rules and
conventions; technical devices; metrological systems; logistical infrastructures; texts,
discourses and narratives (e.g. on the pros and cons of competition); technical and scientific
knowledge (especially in social science: law, economics, marketing, etc.); and competencies
and skills embodied in living beings.
b) On a regular basis it organizes the conception, production and circulation of goods,
as well as the voluntary transfer of the property rights attached to them; these transfers
produce a monetary compensation which seals the goods' attachment to their new owners.
c) It delimits and constructs a space of confrontation where various contradictory
valuations of goods oppose each other until the terms of the transaction are peacefully
determined by pricing mechanisms. These valuations are based on calculations which are both
qualitative and quantitative, which is why, following Cochoy, we refer to a space of
qualculation (2002).
We define the anthropology of marketization as all the work aimed at describing,
analysing and making intelligible the shaping and dynamics of market sociotechnical
agencements.
Our definition (especially points b) and c)) extends and completes those in the
literature.32 It is intended to clarify the existence of a convergence between scholarly and lay
definitions – a convergence that reflects both the role of theory (especially economic) in this
process and the dynamics of objectification of markets (to which we revert below). 33 We will
therefore simply emphasize two points here. First, even if our insistence on materialities is
certainly nothing new (Weber, for one, puts it at the centre of his conception of the market
economy), it does contrast with the standard definitions of economists and sociologists.
Second, taking into account the social sciences, as well as knowledge and skills elaborated by
agents, is less common and draws attention to mechanisms seldom studied until now.
30
This reference to Wittgenstein enables us to point towards a different answer to the one proposed by Foucault,
who puts forward the notion of épistemè to account for a fact which he assumes but does not really prove: the
homogenization of conceptions and practices.
31
For a more precise definition of the notion of socio-technical agencement, see Section 3.2 below.
32 (Ménard 1995:170) (Aspers 2005a, 2005b) Weber ({1922} 1978:635) (Polanyi 1957) (Swedberg 1994) (Fligstein
2001) (White 1987) (MacMillan 2002) (Guesnerie 1996) (Coriat and Weinstein 2004)
33 This means that this definition implies the recognition of an asymmetry between market economic agencements
and non-market agencements. But we maintain that the two types of agencement, as well as their asymmetry, have
to be explained with the same analytical tools.
24
Some may think and say that we are simply giving a new name to a well-known and
extensively-studied process: the social construction of markets. Therefore, before embarking
on a more detailed presentation of the research programme that we wish to propose, we need
to remove any possible ambiguity. The anthropology of marketization programme differs from
the latter approach on several crucial points.
Those who talk of the social construction of markets share three hypotheses that the
anthropology of marketization has jettisoned. First, they tend to focus on the mechanisms
usually described by sociology. As seen in Section I. 2.2, in concrete terms this means that
markets, as singular forms of organization, are analysed as a particular case of systems of
interpersonal relations (social networks), institutions, conventions, rules, legal arrangements or
norms. Hence, markets are socially constructed, in the precise sense that they may be
sociologically deconstructed. One of the limits of this approach is that with the notion of social
construction, which applies in the same terms to any object in the social sciences, the taking
into account and explication of the specificity of the analysed agencements tends to be pushed
into the background. Whether it is talking about science, law or economics, sociology
mobilizes the same founding concepts (power, institutions, etc.) that erase differences instead
of highlighting them and transforming them into problems to solve. The result and second
drawback is that even when the deconstructionist approach is complemented by an analysis of
the mechanisms of market construction (as in the case of Fligstein or Bourdieu), the
explanation of the soundness of markets and consequently of their objective reality brackets
off the material dimension and technicalities (or reduces it to abstract and general notions such
as resources or capital). Third, the reflexive or theoretical activity increasingly involved in
market design (by what Callon has called economics at large) is generally underrated or
devalued by a sociological approach: sociological reductionism is attended by an
epistemological ambition which, in the process, grants itself the monopoly on true discourse
and sees orthodox economics (and even more economics in the wild) as nothing but a false
science.
The
definition
of
the
process
of
marketization
as
one
of
design/implementation/maintenance/reproduction of sociotechnical agencements raises a list
of original research questions, each of which concerns one of the dimensions of these
agencements and an aspect of their functioning. In the rest of this text we focus on some of the
operations of framing that shape markets and ensure their sustainability. To function a market
has to be based on a strict delimitation of passive goods carefully disentangled from human
agencies (II.1); it necessitates an enframing of the encounterings between supplies, demands
and goods (II.2); it organizes the transformation of valuation into pricing (II.3); it has to be
‘architectured’ (II.4); and, finally, in certain cases the systematic and organized networking of
markets can go so far as to transform them into an objectified reality which becomes
autonomous and can be considered as ‘the economy’ (II.5).
For each of these operations we will try to provide a brief state of the art, as well as
the list of research questions to explore, sometimes indicating the most fertile empirical sites.34
II.1. Enframing passive goods and disentangling them from active human agencies
There is no economic market in the sense defined above, without the production and
reproduction of the distinction/divide between the things to be valued and the agencies capable
of valuing them. This divide produces a distinction between entities without agency, or rather
confined to a form of agency known as passivity35, and entities which are able to engage in
operations of calculation and judgement, and which can consequently be considered as
active.36 The valuation process involves the confrontation of diverse agencies, while the
34
For a first presentation of this approach, see Callon and Muniesa (2005).
On passivity as a form of agency (to be related to passion) see Gomard and Hennion (1999).
36 As seen further, there is no valuation without transformation and production of meaningful differences.
35
25
entities which have been rendered passive are transformed into (economic) goods (or bads)
ready to be engaged in property transfers.
This ontological divide ensures the (relative) passivity of the things to be valued. It is
essential to the regular functioning of markets. Could we conceive of goods being authorized
to destroy this asymmetry on their own initiative, and participating in their own valuation or
that of the agencies trading them? The answer is no37, for it is owing to the passivity of things
which can be transformed into goods that agencies can form expectations, elaborate action
programmes, stabilize their preferences, undertake calculations and possibly enter into
cooperative or competitive relationships. By ensuring that their qualities evolve (fairly)
predictably, the passivity of goods creates an environment whose (relative) stability and
predictability favour organized action.
Another way of characterizing and precising the work required to perform this divide
is in terms of disentanglement. As we have seen, Thomas contrasts the gift regime with market
exchange by showing that, to be transformed into merchandize and to be the object of a
transfer of ownership, the thing has to be disentangled from its context of conception and
production. In the case of a gift, by contrast, the donor remains present in the given thing,
which "transports" his/her agency and ensures his/her presence in the vicinity of the receiver..
The disentanglement necessary for commodification is surer when that
commodification has undergone specific standardization transforming it into an entity that can
be described in abstract and precise terms (the description can be certified and guaranteed by a
series of textual and material devices). High-quality empirical studies on this process of
standardization/certification are available, in particular the seminal work of Cronon on the
Chicago grain market (1991). To develop and change into a futures market, the grain must
progressively be disentangled from its growers and become what Cronon calls "homogeneous
abstractions" (p. 132) which are classified into various perfectly defined and controlled grades.
This standardization assumes the existence of texts and regulations, inspectors responsible for
ensuring that they are applied, and material devices adjusted to the production and
manipulation of the various families of goods (here we should refer to the so-called economics
of convention, and in particular to Eymard Duverney’s work (1986 and 1994); see also Didier
(2007)). De jure and de facto standardization is the most complete form of framing entities as
things which have explicitly defined and recognized qualities and are profiled to be valued and
exchanged. 38
Furthermore, the mechanisms through which this ontological divide is produced
constitute an ideal research subject. Petter Holm recently made a penetrating analysis of this
process of ontological reconfiguration. He showed that the transformation of traditional
fishermen into "selfish individual economic agencies" first required immense scientific,
material, technical and institutional investment in order to transform the sea into an aquarium
and the wild fish into cyborgs. There is nothing mysterious about this ontological
metamorphosis. The world has been shaped by squads of scientists, engineers, jurists and
international bodies to host this novel remaking of the encounter between non-human and
human species. Thanks to the cyborg fish, the fisherman-homo-economicus could survive and,
in some cases, even live well. But the establishment of this world requires many investments,
especially of a legal and material nature. The inventory and analysis of investments that are
required for transforming entities into things and then into "objects" which are passive and
predictable is a key issue for the anthropology of marketization. To give a taste of the type of
investigation that needs to be developed, two interesting topics can be considered here.
37
There are borderline cases which are interesting, like that of slavery and its unending history.
For an interesting case of organized detachment see: (Millo et al. 2005). Furthermore the process of
qualification/requalification is a central subject of research for the anthropology of economization. Amongst a
growing number of studies see: (Cochoy 2002)(Grandlément 2004 and 2006 a,b) (Hayden 2007) (Millo
forthcoming). For an intriguing analysis on how the qualification of financial product takes into account theological
constraints see Maurer (2005).
38
26
The first corresponds to the commodification of living beings. This problem is not
new. The construction of a labour market which separates the "labour force" from the person
executing the work, and then the creation of the wage as the result of the valuation of that
labour force, necessitate not only complicated metrological systems (the framing of what is
called work time and the material devices used to measure it in the least ambiguous way
possible), but also laws and conventions which enact that objectification and ensure that the
boundary between the person (endowed with an active agency) and the labour force
(considered as a passive entity39) is not too ambiguous or blurred.40
The proliferation of "living" entities (genes, proteins, embryonic cells, GMOs, etc.)
currently produced in laboratories by biotechnologies raise difficult problems of framing. By
nature, these entities tend to follow trends and to take courses of action that are often difficult
to predict and stabilize.41 Their domestication takes time; it sometimes even proves to be
impossible (see Callon (1986) for a case that combines human and non-human living entities).
This difficult control is nothing new, as the history of livestock attests.42 Yet the expanding
industrialization of the life sciences contributes powerfully to the proliferation of these
entities, their dissemination and the emergence of the haunting question of their possible …
marketization.
• The importance of the work of objectification required for an entity to be
transformed into a thing and then into a good is also evident in the case of service activities,
the intangible nature of which is often emphasized. Service provision consists in the
performance of a set of operations that have been designed to provide a solution to a problem
or an answer to the beneficiary's demand. To be accomplished, it requires the implementation
of specific sociotechnical arrangements (Akrich 1992, 1995) (Akrich and Rabeharisoa 1989)
(Callon, Muniesa and Millo, forthcoming). Car rental as a service implies a network of
agencies, reparation and maintenance units, contracts and legal services, all of which are
mobilized to satisfy the customer. The framing of services, with a view to objectifying them
and transforming them into things which can be valued (into a bundle of qualities which are
explicitly established: the car has such-and-such a capacity, is available at such-and-such a
place, has to be returned at such-and-such a time, any damage is covered by such-and-such an
insurance company, and so on), implies the framing of sociotechnical arrangements that make
the services describable and predictable, and warn of unexpected overflowings. It is at the
price of these investments that "renting a car" (defined as a documented series of possible
courses of action) becomes a thing and then a good like the car that could be bought to do
those same journeys. The gradual change from a material good economy to a service economy
(which itself includes many material elements) also highlights the importance of the
controversies generated by the objectification of entities which, at any point in time, can turn
into unpredictable courses of action that are difficult to frame.43
For the market to function, this framing of entities as (rather) passive and objectified
things has to be compatible with the attachment of property rights, that is, with the possibility
of assigning the thing to its owner(s) in an unambiguous and unchallenged way. All the
devices and procedures guiding the disentanglement process to attain this (possible)
appropriation constitute another favourite subject of investigation for the anthropology of
marketization. For instance, depending on patent law, which differs substantially from one
country to the next,44 certain goods are less easy to appropriate than others. Obvious examples
are living and especially genetic material, as are software and basic scientific knowledge.
39
Passive because being formatted to be instrumentalized.
The social history of labour relations is a key component of the anthropology of the construction of the great
divide between passive and active agencies .
41 For a superb analysis of how sheeps are enacted see Law and Mol (2007)
42 For an example of how taking care of domestic animals might structure social relations see: (Evans-Pritchard
1937).
43 The specialists insist on the multidimensional character of the service and the problems that it poses for the
integration and coordination of the multiple entities mobilized (Gallouj 2002).
44 Roman law and common law.
40
27
Often, as in the case of embryonic stem cells, legal and material problems are compounded by
ethical or political considerations. Irrespective of the outcome of debates and controversies
generated by these difficulties, the association of property rights to things is the result of the
establishment of specific technical, material, textual and legal devices which allow the
owner(s) to be identified without ambiguity and which define the nature of the rights thus
attached to their enforcement.45
From an empirical point of view, several strategies exist to develop analysis of the
process through which entities are framed as passive and valuable, and arranged to be able to
be attached to their owners and detached from their designer-producers. The first is to study
the debates and legal, ethical, scientific or economic controversies triggered by these actions
of enframing and assigning, as in the case of cell stems, genes or software. The directions
taken by the marketization process depend on these controversies and on the way in which
they are solved. A second point of entry is the one provided by what Callon has proposed to
call overflowing mechanisms. Any framing is incomplete and imperfect. We can even assert
that framing is in itself the source of overflowing. These overflowings, that economics often
presents as market failures, have the advantage of making material, legal or other framing
devices visible, while highlighting their shortcomings and generating debates on ways of
remedying them. They include but are not limited to what economists call externalities (Callon
1998): an action causes an externality if it affects people other than the decision-makers,
without compensation. Those overflows that stem from problems in framing goods fit this
definition. Traffic jams, chemical pollution of a river by industrial waste, air pollution, noise
pollution near an airport, greenhouse gases that trigger climate change threatening entire
countries, the consumption of alcohol and tobacco that burden the accounts of social security,
prions that escape the animal feed production industry to transform peaceful cows into mad
beasts and then skip the species barrier without warning, genes administered to "bubble"
babies that unexpectedly cause cancer cells to proliferate.
II.2 Enframing and qualifying active calculating (valuing) agencies
Enframing passive things and making them ready to be valued is one of the basic components
of a process of economization and consequently of marketization. It creates a world inhabited
by (sufficiently) predictable entities ready for valuation by active agencies who correspond to
what are usually called economic agents.
With the divide between passive (destined to be valued) things and active agencies
(prone to produce valuation), another problem appears for the analyst: the qualification of the
modalities of active agencies, their description and their analysis. There is nothing new about
this question; it has been central for all the social sciences and philosophy. And although it
may seem problematic to venture onto this ground and run the risk of reinventing the wheel,
we believe that our approach protects us from such a risk. Our aim is not to propose another
definition of human agency and of its specificity, and to engage in battles between disciplines
to know what the right version is (homo sociologicus, oeconomicus or anthropologicus?). We
start with the assumption that there are many (virtual or actual) versions and forms of agency
and that their universe has to be mapped empirically before addressing questions regarding the
limits and meaning of agency. Only after such preliminary work can we address the conditions
under which different modalities of agency emerge, develop and disappear, and identify which
ones actually do so. Let's first carry out empirical research on the nature of agency.
There is fortunately a growing body of literature in anthropology that directly and
indirectly contributes to this emergent research programme. From a theoretical point of view,
we need to mention work concerning distributed action and cognition (Hutchins 1995)
45
The ownership may be collective, as in the commons whose modernity is illustrated by the success of free
softwares. The FLOSS (Freee/Libre/Open Source Software) example shows how collective and individual property
systems can be efficiently combined (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003)).
28
(Bowker and Star 1999) (Clark 1997) (Giere 2002) (Garud and Karnoe 2003) (Garud and
Karnoe 2004).46 The contributions of the anthropology of science and technology, especially
ANT with its insistence on assemblages of humans and non-humans, are equally valuable
(Callon 1994) (Latour 2005) (Law 2004) (Mol 2002) (Law and Mol 2007).47 Recent research
associated with the developments of a socio/anthropology of disability, attentive to relations
between sociotechnical arrangements and the courses of action they allow (Moser and Law
1999; Moser 2003) (Law 1998) (Winance 1999 and 2001) (Callon 2005) are also highly
relevant.
These studies have already produced a complete change in our conceptions of relations
between individuals and groups, as well as our views of collectives and society. Those who
pursue this line of research argue that agency as a capacity to act and give meaning to action
can neither be contained in a human being nor localized in institutions, norms, values, and
discursive-symbolic systems. Action, including its reflexive dimension that produces meaning,
takes place in hybrid collectives, thereafter call socio-technical agencements, comprising
human beings (bodies) as well as material and technical devices.
Agencements
The study of these collectives has reached important yet tentative conclusions which
require further exploration.
• It is ethnographically shown that action is a collective (distributed) property. In that
sense, agencies, like Hobbes' Leviathan, are made up not only of human bodies but also of
prostheses, tools, equipment, technical devices, algorithms, etc. The notion of cyborg aptly
describes these agencements. 48 The term agencement is a French word that has no exact
English counterpart. In French its meaning is very close to "arrangement" (or "assemblage"). It
conveys the idea of a combination of heterogeneous elements that have been carefully adjusted
to one another. But arrangements (as well as assemblages) could imply a sort of divide
between human agents (those who arrange or assemble) and things that have been arranged.
This is why Deleuze and Guattari (1998) proposed the notion of agencement. Agencement has
the same root as agency: agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity to act in
different ways, depending on their configuration. This means that there is nothing left outside
agencements: there is no need for further explanation, because the (eventual) construction of
its meaning is part of an agencement.49
• The making of agencies never ends. (Re)configuring an agency means
(re)configuring the sociotechnical agencements constituting it. Such work requires material,
textual and other investments. Everything in these agencements that makes it possible to locate
sources of action (in individuals or collectives), establish origins, assign responsibilities, and
46
Studies on situated knowledge (Suchman 1987) (Lave 1988) and their extension with the notions of epistemic
communities or communities of practice are also a valuable source of inspiration (Lave and Wenger 1991) (KnorrCetina 1999) (Amin and Cohendet 2004). For a series of case studies on economic organizations, see: (Czarniawska
and Hernes 2005)
47 These approaches are connected to notions such as the socio-technical diagramme (Deleuze and Guatarri 1998)
(Barry 2001), cyborgs (Harraway 1997), hybrid collectives (Callon and Law 1995) (Latour 2005) or devices
(Foucault ??). Provided that it is extended to materialities – as its etymology suggests – Bourdieu’s concept of
habitus also corresponds to this approach (Bourdieu 1977).
48 We use the French word agencement, instead of arrangement, to stress the fact that agencies and arrangements
are not separate. Agencements denote socio-technical arrangements when they are considered from the point view
of their capacity to act.
49 Note that this general definition of sociotechnical agencement applies to realities of differing sizes. It can be used
to refer to a market, a firm, individual consumers, etc. This explains why and how a market can be characterized
both as an assemblage and as an entity endowed with agency. The Wall Street bull that Japanese tourists admire and
touch is a good example of the dual nature of markets: financial markets, a part of whose machinery was previously
admired by visits to stock exchanges, are also entities capable of behaving like bulls (when they are bullish) or
bears (when they are bearish). This is also shown by expressions such as: "the oil market is booming". The
anthropology that we propose focuses on the dynamics of these agencements and their mutual shaping. An
agencement is always an arrangement of agencements.
29
account for profits and losses associated with a particular action, plays a strategic role in
shaping agencies (Latour 1984) (Law 1994). In particular, we have in mind (intellectual)
property rights and human rights.
• In such a framework of agency, researchers can observe multiple and diverse forms
of agency. Depending on the configurations of sociotechnical agencements, agencies can have
adaptive behaviour, reflexive competencies, calculative or non-calculative capacity, or
disinterested or selfish subjectivity, whether collective or individual (Callon and Law 1995)
(Gomart and Hennion 1999) (Callon and Law 2005). Invention of new forms of agency is an
open process. Barry, Rose and Miller’s work reveals, for example, the recent invention of new
forms of arrangement such as the interactive diagram (Barry 2001) (Rose and Miller 2005), a
new modality of agencement which differs from the disciplinary diagram described by
Foucault. They emphasize the role of the social sciences in this framing. In the same
perspective, the work of Roitman explains the production of economic subjectivities in terms
of the theorizations of the economy and of politics that prevail and become modes of
regulating relationships in both the global north and the south (Roitman 2005). The
exploration, description and analysis of these different forms of agency (and agencements), as
well as the analysis of their diffusion/transportation, constitute an immense research project
ahead of us.
• Finally, in the same way that sociology has highlighted the fact that an individual can
move from one form of behaviour to another, or be torn between several roles, personalities,
habituses (Lahire 1998) or regimes of action (Thévenot 2006) (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006)
we consider that different agencies can mix or merge with others, as in the case of economic
markets where both calculative and non-calculative agencies can be strongly intertwined.50
This substitution of the sociotechnical agencements to the individual-human-agents embedded
in institutions, conventions, personal relationships or groups sharing identical values, has
important consequences on our understanding of markets. It helps to treat calculative and noncalculative agencies in parallel with one another. To put it bluntly: there is as much artificiality
in the (so-called) pure altruistic gift, in the interpersonal relationship (based on trust, for
instance) as in striving to maximize profits. Both forms of agency imply huge investments.
Neither of the two is more human or anthropologically more authentic than the other (Callon
and Law 2005).51 This applies to all observable forms of agency.
Market agencements: qualculative competencies
The theory of agency as a sociotechnical agencement was developed and studied mainly on
non-economic cases. We think that it is particularly well-suited to the analysis of processes of
marketization, as attested by the first applications by Beunza and Stark (2004), MacKenzie
(forthcoming), Callon and Muniesa (2005), Callon and al. (2002), Kjellberg (2001) Kjellberg
and Helgesson (2006), Cochoy and Granclément (2005). One of the peculiarities of the
agencies populating markets is their (supposed) capacity to engage in calculations which are
both qualitative and quantitative (qualculation), for the purpose of qualifying goods and
attributing them with one or more values (which sometimes end up in the form of a price). For
many reasons which have been thoroughly investigated by the social sciences, a human being
reduced to his or her mind and body alone is incapable, faced with the abundance of
information, the difficulty of obtaining it and the uncertainties as to its quality, to carry out
these qualculations him- or herself (ref to Simon, Hutchins ??). This changes partially as soon
as we consider sociotechnical agencements rather than conventional human agents. Over the
past few years markets have thus become ideal sites for studying the constitution of agencies'
qualculating capacities.
50
See, for instance, the analyses of the blood market (Healy 2000) (Steiner 2001) and more generally of the third
sphere (Adaman and Madra 2002). This approach enables us to understand how agents alternate between different
behaviours (for a striking illustration see: MacKenzie and Millo (2003)).
51 The very idea of altruism in itself has been and still is contested by exercises that demonstrate how one can
always show an altruistic act to be the contrary. As shown by Callon and Law (2005), some agencements can be
devised that make the calculation of interests and even their identification as such impossible. The theoretical point
is that non calculative agencements can be and are actually calculated.
30
In that sense it is worth mentioning the pioneering field work on management and
accounting tools and, more generally, on calculative practices. Research has shown that the
equipment deployed by economic agents does not merely consist of tools that extend and
amplify humans' cognitive capacities. The tools that equip agents and enable (or habilitate)
them to undertake certain types of action are not just instruments used to reach certain ends.
They contribute actively to the making of the realm of possibilities that constitute the action
itself (Hopwood and Miller 1994) (Miller 1994, 1998, 2001) (Rose and Miller 1990) (Elyachar
2002 and 2005) (Callon & Muniesa 2005).52
Recent studies on financial markets and, more generally, electronic markets also
demonstrate the advantages of an approach to tools' performative power (Lépinay and
Rousseau 2000) (Lépinay 2003; (Muniesa 2003) (Zaloom 2003) (Mellet 2006). As shown in
the work of (Knorr and Bruegger 2002) and (Muniesa 2000), the computer screens that are
used to "screen" markets can be the very locations of the markets themselves that make trading
possible. In this example, the screen is shown to be not a mere tool of operation, but the very
location of encounter where the agents act.
Similarly, the formulas used by traders (MacKenzie 2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2006)
(Lépinay 2003), as well as the ticker analysed by Preda (2003), powerfully contribute(d)
towards shaping calculative agencies. The now abundant work on commercial distribution
contributes equally to a better knowledge of these qualculative agencies: in this case the
product presentation, the spatial organization of shelves, the labels, shopping carts and lists
can all be analysed as so many pre-calculated operations constituting agencies' calculative
capacities – whether those agents are consumers or sales professionals (Barrey, Cochoy and
Dubuisson 2002) (Cochoy 2004) (Cochoy and Grandclément 2005) (Barrey, Cochoy et al.
2000) (Grandclément 2004). The quality of existing or on-going research should not conceal
the importance of that which remains to be undertaken.
Market agencements and relations of domination
Marketization as an object of investigation has also furthered understanding of relations of
domination which derive from the unequal power of qualculating agencies and in return
produce these unequalities. Due to these asymmetries, the most powerful agencies are able to
impose their valuations and consequently to impact strongly on the distribution of value
(Bourdieu, 2005). On this point the comparison suggested above, with the anthropology of
disability, could be illuminating. It introduces not only the idea of a prosthesis or habilitation
to describe a strategy of filling the gap between unequal agencies (how to reconfigure an
agency so that its qualculative capacity increases) but also the dimension of exclusion and the
demands it may fuel. The anthropology of disability and "habilitation" should serve as a
strategic research site in providing ethnography with an analytical framework to account for
relations of domination-exclusion between agencies, and to interpret behaviours of resistance
or recalcitrance (Moser 2003) (Winance 2001). The modalities of domination and exclusion
vary, depending on the prevailing models of agencement and on what Callon has identified as
different versions of homo oeconomicus (Callon 2003). Here we find studies on the
construction of a liberal subject – especially through the alliance of psychiatry with genomics
– who should be capable of interacting, defining objectives, calculating his or her interests,
and even entering into sophisticated cooperative games. Health markets are particularly
interesting fields for exploring this new form of agency (Rose 1999) (Lakoff 2005). ICT
contribute to this profiling and equipment of individual responsible agencies (Poon,
forthcoming on credit scoring).
Another fertile field for studying the mechanisms of formatting agencies, the models
enforced and the resulting relations of domination, is the one consisting of relations
established locally between countries of the Global South and those of the North (Mitchell
2002 and 2007) (Elyachar 2002) (Caliskan 2005) (Hibou 2004, 2005, 2006a, 2006b). Of
52
The claims made by Weber (1981: 276), Schumpeter (1950: 123) and Sombart (1967:125-127) concerning the
importance of double entry book-keeping in the raise of capitalism must obviously be mentioned her. For an
overview, see Carruthers and Espeland (1991).
31
particular relevance is Julia Elyachar's rich analysis of the programme for the development of
micro-enterprises and micro-credits in the El-Hirafiyeen neighbourhood of Cairo (Elyachar,
2005). Elyachar shows how this programme, mobilizing the notion of social capital (social
network) borrowed from the social sciences, is designed to produce and maintain economic
agents capable of having projects and responsible for their debts and profits. Households thus
become micro-enterprises whose main assets consist of the webs of relations and solidarity
that they produce. We again recognize the dual theme of the production of subjects and their
subjection, and see the establishment of an economy founded on debt and the obligations it
creates. As Julia Elyachar sums up: the poor person, thus disciplined, is a good borrower! One
of the conditions of this programme to format agencies and sociotechnical agencements is the
short-circuiting of States (assumed to be corrupt and inefficient) by the NGOs that directly
cater for what is called "the civil society". The welfare state makes way for the welfare market
and the economic agencies that it requires.53
These examples show how much the study of the shaping of market agencies is
promising and fertile. It enables us to grasp and to document the sociotechnical diversity of
agencies and of the forms they take, the complexity of their qualculative capacities, the
modalities of the mechanisms for imputing and assigning action (with a focus on property
rights), and relations of domination which develop between agencements.
II. 3 Enframing encountering
For things (first framing) to be valued, it is necessary to have agencies capable of valuing them
or, in other words, of qualculating their value (second framing). But for valuing to take place,
qualculating agencies and goods have to meet. These encounterings are the third framing.
As we have seen, the anthropology of regimes of value (2.3) has emphasized the
necessary link between the valuation of goods, their circulation, and any attachments that such
movements may allow or prevent. Things circulate only if they are valued and these valuations
are enacted only if certain agencies get rid of the things and others attach themselves to them,
thus creating movement. The anthropology of regimes of value has also taught us that the
successive valuations of goods are embedded in their constant reconfigurations and material
transformations. For an agency, valuing means engaging in an operation of qualification so
that new properties and characteristics are attributed to a previously qualified good, thus
transforming it into something desirable (or not) for itself or for other agencies.54 This
(re)qualification results in new relations (which Callon, following Thomas, has called the
process of disentanglement–re-entanglement). A good's career is a long series of
transformations constituting as many steps in its circulation.
This circulation, with the transformations and networking that it involves, is essential
to the constitution of markets. It corresponds to what is usually referred to as the encounter
between supply and demand. But talking of an encounter in the singular is misleading, as is
the assumption that supplies and demands could be formulated without preliminary
intermediation, especially by the marketization professionals. In reality there is a series of
multiple encounters and overlapping qualculations. Not all encounters are possible though
(and consequently not all relationships, concepts or equivalencies are fathomable (Roitman
2005)); contingencies certainly play a part, as do the initiatives taken by agencies, and the
unpredictable movements of goods which overflow and follow unexpected trajectories (see
3.1). Yet encounters are not produced haphazardly. Like goods and agencies, and at the same
time as them, they are framed and formatted by a series of devices which facilitate certain
movements (or make them more probable), while precluding others (or making them less
For interesting comments on Elyachar’ book see (Roelvink 2007).War economies as studied by Janet Roitman
also provide a good example of unusual cases of formatted agencies: fiscal disobedience is not only considered as a
virtue but equally as a condition for the smooth functioning of markets (Roitman 2005).
54 See (DiMaggio and Louch 1998). As (Callon 1998) put it, economic markets multiply entanglements in order to
prepare transactions and facilitate disentanglement. This point, clearly made by Zelizer in various papers, is also
emphasized by (Callon, Méadel et al. 2002) and by (Lapavitsas 2004) who rightly shows that the Marxian notion of
use value implies these entanglements – even if he wrongly defines these activities as non-market. Concrete
markets are made up of both entangling and disentangling practices.
53
32
probable). Sometimes the overall structuring of this multitude of encounters can be summed
up in the form of the economist's famous diagram representing the intersection of two curves.
But in order to be realistic, this simplification, which is possible, requires a long process of
aggregation and abstraction. This can be accomplished only by applying batteries of
metrological and material apparatus.
The existence of encountering devices has been shown for a long time. See, for
instance, the work of Braudel (1985) with his definition of capitalist markets, as opposed to
pre-capitalist ones. Braudel maintains that markets spawned capitalism as soon as the chain of
intermediaries between producers and consumers was lengthened, causing consumers to be
placed in situations in which they were dependent on specific producers. In such situations the
encounters are so closely framed, especially by the intermediaries themselves, that long chains
are formed which prevent free and open competition and facilitate accumulation. Braudel's
approach thus shows that the organization and framing of encountering is the product of the
activity of mediators (we prefer this word to intermediaries since it stresses the fact that it
really does concern a productive activity).55
Economics has almost totally lost interest in the study of these devices and especially
in these chains of mediators. Yet we do need to mention the interesting contribution by
Spulber (1999) who takes a neo-institutionalist approach and introduces the contributions of
studies of financial markets into micro-economics. Spulber has proposed that we analyse firms
and economic agents as active intermediaries in an endless chain of supplies and demands. In
anthropology there is the classic text by Geertz which shows how, thanks to the sociotechnical
organization of the bazaar, different categories of customer follow different paths and end up
at different shops (1978). In economic sociology a large number of studies that use social
networks (especially applied to markets like the labour market, lawyers' markets and financial
markets) also consider this question, yet never directly (Granovetter 1973).
The existence of these active mediators and their strategic role became clearly visible
with the computerization of operations in certain markets. The automation and
computerization of auctions are ideal for raising questions on how things and humans
encounter one another, because they require precise descriptions of the procedures to follow.
For instance, in his study of the automation of the Paris stock exchange, Muniesa highlighted
the problems that the designers and engineers had to solve (Muniesa 2000). The complexity of
tasks that the famous Walrasian auctioneer had to accomplish, especially the multiplicity of
options he had to choose, became evident. First the designers of the new market had to analyse
with precision all the operations and devices that allowed for the encounter between sellers
and buyers before automation. They then had to design and test a computerized system which
semi-automatically carried out the adjustment between the two. Walras' trial and error
(tâtonnement) appeared to be simply a vine leaf to hide our ignorance of the diversity and
complexity of the intermediary chains organizing this so-called tâtonnement. At the end of the
day, a sophisticated mediation device was set up, including networked computers, data flow
systems, and connections providing access to the stock exchange not only to brokers but also,
as was previously the case, to individual clients and banks. Algorithms and software were
designed to define the format and order in which supplies and demands were brought together,
and decisions made to determine the modalities of calculating closing prices. The
sociotechnical arrangements organizing these encounterings consisted of machines, softwares,
material devices and human beings whose activities were entangled and connected to one
another. The existence of these heterogeneous assemblages was nothing new: automation
highlighted the pre-existence of such arrangements and “explicitated” their functioning (on the
key concept of “explicitation”, see Muniesa (2003), Muniesa and Callon (2007)).
With electronic markets in mind, Philip Mirowski helped to make this visible by
discussing the algorithmic dimension of markets (Mirowski and Somefun 1998; see also, fore
more technical argument, Gode and Sunder (1991)). In the case of auctions, for example, it is
55
On theses mediating activities see the pionnering work by Akrich and Rabeharisoa (1989), Hennion and Meadel
(1989) and also:Hennion (1993), Hennion (1997), Hennion (2004), Hennion and Teil (2004), Hennion (2007)
(Meadel and Rabeharisoa 2000) and their subtle analysis of taste.
33
possible to write into a computer program the different steps to follow to fix a price. This
program is an algorithm which describes and imposes a procedure for organizing the
encounter between supplies and demands. The notion of an algorithm can be generalized to
that of a sociotechnical mediating algorithm, to denote the chains of intermediation mentioned
above (Callon and Muniesa 2005). A mall is a sociotechnical mediating algorithm; e-Bay is a
sociotechnical mediating algorithm; the famous Marseilles fish market described by Kirman
(2001) is a sociotechnical mediating algorithm, as are the wine auctions organized by the
Hospices de Beaune in Burgandy where the candle ensures the uncertainty that prevents
certain last-minute strategic combinations.
Sites for studying these sociotechnical mediating algorithms abound, especially with
the upsurge of computer technology and the electronicization of markets. Studies are already
available on financial markets which use computer technology extensively (Muniesa 2003,
MacKenzie and Millo 2003), on the auctions organized on the web, on B2B markets (Lindberg
and Bergström 2005), on labour markets (Mellet 2006) and mass consumption markets
(Licoppe 2001). It is surprising to note that in the labour market certain sociotechnical
algorithms explicitly and systematically reproduce the encountering procedures that
Granovetter pointed out in the seventies: the algorithm is designed to favour personal networks
and weak relations (Mellet, 2006). The notion of a sociotechnical mediating algorithm is
particularly useful for empirically analysing situations of encountering which are less evident
because they result from uncoordinated initiatives and use technologies that are less explicitly
oriented towards the explicit organization of encounters. From this point of view, studies on
mass distribution are a prime example. They show in detail all the material, textual and
corporeal work necessary to make certain encounters highly probable, while others are
rendered impossible (Barrey 2004). The study of these formattings involves a detailed
ethnographic analysis of these arrangements and their functioning, but also an analysis of the
knowledge that has been developed and accumulated by the professionals responsible for
designing and operating these arrangements.
In the structuring of encounters a number of social or material technologies seem to
play an important part (on telecommunication technologies see for example: Mallard (2004)
and Muniesa (forthcoming)). Cochoy has shown the importance of operations of “captation”
and the devices used, which frequently combine random events and pre-structuring of
encounters (Cochoy 2004). He has insisted on the fact that capturing establishes a compromise
which should enable the consumer to feel free not to be captured. Trompette uses this notion
of capturing very convincingly to show how families of recently deceased persons are led to
choose the services of certain undertakers (Trompette forthcoming). A wonderful illustration
of know-how and techniques that enables one to discover “captation” in its simplest form is
the work of Clark and Pinch (1995) on pitchers. Finally, Thrift has identified another form of
technology that is becoming essential for the organization of encounters: addressing.
Encounters (between goods and agencies) mean localization, identification of addresses and
monitoring of movements. These technologies (postal addresses, ZIP codes) have become
extraordinarily efficient and performative with GPS, bar codes, etc. (Thrift 2004).
These various studies indicate the paths to follow. By taking them, anthropology will
rid itself of the strange paralysis that gripped it when it started showing an interest in markets
as such – remember that Polanyi, who contributed so much to the understanding of markets,
strangely repeated the famous definition of abstract markets proposed a century earlier by
(Cournot {1938} 1927) when he considered the market as an area of encounters between two
blocs, that of demand and that of supply (cf. Polanyi 1957). It will also contribute towards
extending and enriching the work of Braudel and those social scientists who studied market
mediations without recognizing the important role of non-humans.
II.4. From valuation to pricing
By studying the formatting of the encounter between agencies and products, and the accent put
on the process of qualification-entanglement, we are prompted to examine the chain of
intermediations and simultaneously to get rid of the usual production, consumption and trade
triptych (Callon et alii, 2002): the three framings (things, agencies and encountering) are
34
closely inter-related and shape the process of marketization in its generality.56 But it is not
enough to define and analyse this process. The existence of a market implies that these
valuations and qualculations that they produce are in the form of prices (see above our
definition of markets).
In our definition of economic markets as an on-going process of economization,
valuation of goods leads to the fixing of a price which is imposed on the various parties
engaged in the transaction. This price fixing implies the existence of ‘valorimeters’ which
quantitatively measure the value(s) attributed to a good, generally in the form of one or several
numbers.
As noted in our definition of markets, fixing a price is always the outcome of a
struggle between agencies trying to impose their value and thus their price. This point was
clearly noted by Weber: "Money prices are the product of conflicts of interest and of
compromises; they thus result from power constellations … (the) price system (is) a struggle
of man against man; and prices are expressions of this struggle; they are instruments of
calculation only as estimated quantifications of relative chances in this struggle of interests"
(Weber, 1922/1978). Weber insists moreover on two points which support the approach that
we have adopted until now: a) prices, he says, are estimated quantifications and therefore (we
add) imply the mobilization of calculation tools, and b) as such, they are at the heart of agents'
(agencies') struggles to produce asymmetries in the distribution of value (on this point see:, J
Guyer, J. Roitman, other REF to be ADDED). Pricing is therefore the continuation of
valuation but in a purely quantitative form which does not exclude confrontations. What
pricing achieves is the transformation of qualculation into numeric calculation, so that in the
end figures do matter (on the role of money in this process see Maurer (2006)). We can agree
to the term “valorimeters” to denote the various tools, procedures, machines, instruments or,
more generally, devices effecting this controversial translation. The agencies which are able to
impose their valorimeters, that is, their numeric calculation tools and algorithms, with their
calculatory modes, have a good chance of simultaneously imposing the prices that those tools
make it possible to calculate, and to spread the definitions of values in line with their interest.
The anthropology of marketization that we propose is keenly interested in these
valorimeters, in their design (by agents and/or by social scientists and especially economists,
marketing professionals, experts in accounting or in the evaluation of costs and in management
control), their implementation and their use.
Until recently it was estimated that the superiority of economics over the other social
sciences derived from its strength to explain the mechanism of price setting better than any
other approach.57 This superiority was supposed to be manifested more particularly in the case
of structured markets in which a plurality of supplies and/or demands encountered one
another. Sociology and anthropology were considered to be better equipped to explain price
setting in the case of bilateral negotiations. Here struggles, more weakly mediated by
collective calculation devices, were supposed to be more intense, and capacities for strategic
improvization and negotiating skills more crucial.
Yet recent research has shown the weakness of this assumption. First, economists
themselves began to realize that the theory they proposed applied only to their own abstract
markets and not to actual market situations. Simply invoking the law of supply and demand
and drawing the famous graph with two intersecting curves, or assuming the existence of
confronting agencies and devising stylized games for describing their strategic interactions, is
hardly convincing. The mechanisms through which prices are set cannot be grasped by these
graphs or calculations: the variety of strategic configurations and the diversity of modalities of
calculation and of instruments, the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actors engaged in these
56
Callon and Muniesa (2005) have proposed an empirical and theoretical analysis of these inter-relations that
construe markets as collective calculative devices.
57 This is reflected mainly in the scarcity of sociological studies and especially of the new economic sociology,
devoted to the topic. The most glaring exceptions are: Baker (1984), Zelizer (1985), Smith (1989), Carruthers
(1996), Akrich and Law (1996) Zuckerman (1999), Velthuis (2003), Zbaracki and Beergen (2007), Uzzi and
Lancaster (2004), Studies on agencies' calculatory practices when they fix prices are even rarer (see, however,
Velthuis (2005) Granovetter, Faulhaber and Baumol (1988), Yakubovitch and (2005), Teil and Muniesa (2005).
35
calculations are such that these simplified representations correspond to reality only when the
actors themselves have organized the struggles in a way adapted to these analyses.58 The
diversity of pricing modalities is reflected in the usual distinctions between posted prices,
bilateral negotiations, auctions, etc. These classifications, as useful as they may be, have to be
discussed and honed. In reality they are as prescriptive as they are descriptive. From the point
of view of the anthropology of marketization, it is preferable to leave them open and to engage
in the ethnographic observation of pricing operations, with close attention to the models and
the analytical and numerical calculation tools imagined and proposed both by economic agents
and by economists.59
A striking fact emerges from the available studies: that of the multiplicity of prices
which, at a given point in time, are available and used (at least for certain agencies and in
certain places). The temptation to celebrate this diversity without any interest in the relations
introduced by the agencies themselves between the different available prices in different
places and times (especially when they launch into the calculation of local compromises)
would lead to denial of the very existence of collective forms of organization which have
specific effects on pricing. The price of any particular transaction is always calculated on the
basis of other prices. This process is a powerful mechanism of unification of markets, by the
singular interdependencies that it creates between a multitude of local (potential or actual)
transactions carried out or envisaged at different times. Recent ethnographical research,
grounded in the assumption that agencies calculate prices on the basis of other prices, opens up
new avenues for understanding pricing (Guyer 2004).
Of note here is the pioneering work of MacKenzie on the Black and Sholes equation
which links the price of certain derivatives to the prices, or rather to the fluctuation of prices,
of the underlying assets. Other significant work is by Muniesa (forthcoming), Beunza, Hardie
and MacKenzie (2006), Beunza and Stark (2004). Some studies undertaken in the framework
of what we have called the NSE (see 2.2) also contribute valuable elements. In particular, we
have in mind the notion of pricing scripts proposed by Velthuis for the art market (2005).
Zbaracki and Bergen detailed empirical study of prices adjustment in a Midwest manufacturer
convincingly shows how (performative) routines can explain how prices are fixed, and
simultaneously how economics intervenes in this process (Zbaracki and Bergen 2007).
Faulhaber’s and Baumol's comment that agents frequently use the gold strategy of marking up,
underscores the fact that the good old formula "sales cost = cost + margins" is the simplest
pricing scripts or more generally speaking the more common way of setting prices on the basis
of existing prices or numbers.
The above-cited article by Yakubovitch and al (2005), the book by Hecht (1998)
provide highly useful information on the models and calculation tools designed by economists
and, more particularly, by economics engineers (on their role, see Faulhaber and Baumol
(1988), Porter (1995), Bidet (2005)) and used at different times and in different places to set
electricity rates.
Caliskan, in his ethnographic study of the world cotton market, has opened new
perspectives by introducing the notion of prosthetic prices that he proposes to distinguish from
actual prices: a price is not prosthetic by nature, it becomes so when an agency uses it as input
into a calculation aimed at imposing an actual price to conclude a given transaction. Observing
the constant proliferation of prices, he shows that this multiplicity is produced by the
calculative work of certain agencies which use it as a price reserve which they transform,
when they can, into prosthetic prices to impose their own calculations (Caliskan 2003). The
more an agency is capable of complicating its own calculation by linking it to a large number
of other prices (thus transformed temporarily and locally into prosthetic prices), the higher its
capacity to determine the terms of the exchange. This observation could also be compared to
the work of the NSE. Baker and Uzzi share an interesting position (Baker 1984) (Uzzi and
Lancaster 2004). Their work on the relations between the shape and the nature of social
58
An interesting case is the recent confrontation in France between consumer unions and mobile telephone
operators around the pricing of services and especially SMS.
59 An interesting question is that of the use of these categories to organize real markets.
36
networks in one hand and prices in the other hand fits quite well with the argument we are
trying to elaborate. Baker for example demonstrated the correlation between the volatility of
prices and the size of traders' social networks (1984). In his introduction to The Laws of the
Markets, Callon showed how networks could be considered as an infra-structural setting
making possible calculation. Being in a network and developing strategies for controlling
some position, implies calculation. When agencies are equipped with tools that make them
aware of the fact that they are parts of networks they can manipulate and mobilize, they could
use some (quasi quantitative) observed characteristics of their networks (length, stability,
shape etc…) as prosthetic prices. Structural properties of networks might influence prices
through the shaping of reputation, whose quasi-quantitative evaluation by actors themselves
could be considered in Caliskan’s terms as a prosthetic price. This « awareness » is not an
attribute of agents, but the outcome of some equipment habilitating agencies. More generally
the calculation algorithm which assumes the networking of prices necessarily matches the
networks of relations in which the information needed for these calculations circulates.
Constructing a network implies building some sort of liquidity or equivalences (Espeland and
Stevens 1998). Caliskan, by showing that pricing is a calculation which mobilizes networks
(of prices and therefore of agents), sheds new light on this result and explains why one can say
that networks calculate. To this approach we can also relate studies which have taken
Chamberlin's intuition further and have endeavoured to understand how, in the name of
competition, certain actors manage to impose bilateral relations in which the imposed price is
calculated on the basis of the prices practiced by other agents (White, 1981) (Lindberg and
Bergström 2005). These approaches should also enhance our understanding of the mechanisms
through which, at certain times and for a certain market, there may be rates which are imposed
on everyone and which may be considered either as fair or as unfair (Muniesa 2003) (Guyer
2004) (Roitman 2005).
II.5 Architecturing markets and maintaining them
The definition of markets as sociotechnical agencements (STA) raises the question of
their design, implementation, management, extension and maintenance – in short, their
dynamics. The topics to explore and the problems to examine are numerous. In the following
we consider only a few aspects of the research fields and the questions concerned.
Economics at large and the co-performation of economy
A first research avenue corresponds to a set of questions that we group together under
the term programme performativity. The aim is to study all the theoretical and practical, expert
and lay knowledge, know-how and skills, developed and mobilized in the process of designing
and managing market STA. Recent works propose the first inventory of objects to investigate
(MacKenzie and al. 2007). In this paper we simply point out the growing contribution of
formal knowledge, often of academic origin, in the making of markets (including the triple
framing and pricing mechanisms) and the need to study it in detail. This engagement is
moreover in the form of a collective investigation that can be qualified as economics at large,
and in which cooperation involves those whom Callon has proposed to call researchers in the
wild and confined researchers. The study of economics at large, its organization, evolution and
implications in the architecturing of markets has produced some remarkable work. Guala and
Mirowski, for instance, have analysed in detail the role of the theoretical economy in
designing auctions (Guala 2007) (Mirowski and al. 2007). Other work worth mentioning is
that of Petter Holm (2007), Donald MacKenzie (forthcoming), and Lohman (2005). The
importance of economics at large is becoming pervasive. It is supported by the upsurge of
ICT, for the creation of electronic markets demands a process of explicitation and abstraction
(Muniesa 2003) which paves the way for the intervention of economics and, more generally,
economics at large. The latter now has its own institutions (state services, user organizations,
international organizations) and professional organizations which constitute as many research
subjects to explore (see Fourcade (2006), for an original approach to the movement of
professionalization of economists, and Babb (2003)).
37
The growing engagement of economics at large produces its own limits. This is where
we need to mention the question of effects produced by framings. Economics at large
contributes (increasingly effectively) to the different operations of framing needed for the
functioning of market STA. In so doing it participates in the creation of issues which are so
many unexpected problems to solve (II.1 and II.2; see also: Callon and Rabeharisoa
(forthcoming) and Callon (forthcoming)). As previously mentioned, the most well-known
example of this tension is provided by so-called externalities and their internalization for
which economics, in its most strictly academic form, is explicitly solicited and provide
different (controversial) solutions. More generally, the taking into consideration of what
Strathern calls proliferation of the social – in this case the one induced by market STA –
provides more frequent opportunities for the engagement of economics (Callon 2008a). The
agencements or institutional and calculatory devices to be designed and implemented, in order
to absorb this proliferation, are ideal objects for the social and human sciences (at large), and a
choice field for the anthropology of economization interested in the role of the social and
human sciences in the process of marketization.60
In this engagement of the social sciences, two phases warrant particular attention, that
of experimentation and that of modeling. The complexity of relations between agencements,
especially when they set prices, means that prior precise modeling is hardly realistic. Models
need to be tested through in vitro or in vivo experimentation. Experimental economics, which
for a long time was conceived of as a strategy for validating theories, has taken this turn; it is
now engaged in a programme closed to social engineering (Guala, 2007). This turn towards
economic experimentation is reflected at the theoretical level primarily in the booming growth
of behavioural economics (Camerer and al. 2003). At the same time experiments on the
ground, previously seen as marginal and peripheral, are sources of reflection and ideas for
economics at large (see Gibson-Graham (2003, 2006) for ‘community economies’ and
Muniesa and Callon (2007) for scale-one experiments).The upsurge of economic
experimentation (both in vitro and in vivo) is strongly related to a transformation of the
modeling itself, which in certain respects becomes closer to simulation. The models are
intended less to stylize and purify reality (Breslau 2003) than to reproduce its complexity and
richness (the same shift can be observed in the natural sciences). The power of computers thus
makes it possible to take into account the singularity of market configurations as well as path
dependency phenomena. This explains why evolutionism and network analysis are starting to
enjoy a competitive advantage over (non evolutionary) game theory, which tends to remain
exclusively attached to the former epistemological frame of modeling (see Kirman (2001) for
a good illustration). Only the future can tell which strategy will prevail: the one that favours
the realism of details or the one that believes in stylization and purification.
Maintaining markets
Until now we have insisted on the design and management of markets as a whole; in
short, on their permanently fragile framing. Yet we should not forget – and this is the second
research avenue that we would like to mention – the work required by the regular functioning
of the market as an agencement whose overall framing is considered to be non-problematical.
For a long time economists have proposed the notion of trust and, more generally, lubrication
(Arrow ??), to characterize the demands related to this everyday life of markets. The
theoretical importance of this concept of lubrication of markets has steadily increased. In the
60
The list of such intervention is yet to be drawn up but some of the most important topics can easily be identified:
internalization of externalities, with metrology to characterize them and to measure, and make debatable, the
effectiveness of the measures taken; the creation of prostheses and palliative devices to deal with the existential
problems related to what Callon (2008b) has called Version 2.0 of homo oeconomicus (defined as an autonomous
subject, capable of defining and conducting products, responsible for his/her acts, etc.); the calculation and
management of risks, as a strategy for dealing with uncertain framings, which applies equally to passive and active
agencies (e.g. credit scoring, evaluation and management of sanitary risks, precautionary principle). In this design
and engineering work, the social sciences are entreated not to withdraw into their ivory tower but rather to interact
with the various actors concerned.
38
anthropology that we propose, it relates to the maintenance (and repair) of sociotechnical
market agencements.61 The concrete practices of everyday market maintenance have
represented another research area that has caught the attention of anthropologists and
sociologists. Maintenance includes many operations that still need to be identified and studied.
Take prices for example. Caliskan's documentation on the circulation of physical commodities
has shown how fragile even a promissory act of price taking is, and how much work is
required to maintain a market (Caliskan 2004, 2005). We have seen how price setting could be
analysed and empirically studied, as the calculation of current prices on the basis of other
prices which are then qualified as prosthetic (3.4). But neither the agencies nor the analysis
stop once the prices have been set. Even after taking an actual price and making the market
deal, the deal itself has to be realized. Accepting a price is a promissory act only. During the
very exchange, that may take months if a trader is shipping thousands of bales of cotton from
California to Turkey, or millions of baseball caps from Beijing to New York and Rotterdam,
the deal may collapse for a variety of reasons. For the transaction to be successful, an enabling
setting, that realizes the promissory act of price taking and concludes the promise made by
taking a price market, has to be construed and maintained. The notion of trust black-boxes
these maintenance operations and devices which have to be studied as such. Moreover, it
covers only a portion of the realm of affects and emotions, without which markets would
collapse (Hirschman 1977) (Rothschild 2001) . Here we need to mention the promising work
of Miyazaki on hope (Miyazaki 2003). In the case studied, hope enables Japanese traders to
take risks and … financial markets to survive. Elyachar in an analysis reminiscent of Adam
Smith’ Theory of Moral Sentiments shows how the devil eye –an avatar of the invisible
spectator- contributes actively to the structuring of markets relations and behaviours (Elyachar
2005). Sloterdijk, in the same vein, emphasizes the connection between the celebration of the
taste for adventure and the modern movement of globalization (2005). It would be useful to
develop further an anthropology of market emotions and that should grant a prime role to
materialities (several studies have shown their importance in the production of trust (Karpik
1996)). This attention to emotions and moral competencies concerns not only so-called
individual agencies and the agencements which make them effective; it applies equally to
collective agencies (like firms): we now talk of the moral responsibility of firms and even of
“citizen enterprises” and the measures they should take to defend human rights (Barry 2004a).
Finally, for a market STA to function smoothly, the relations that it maintains with its
(non-market) environment is a crucial issue.62 In particular, agencies who prove unable to
survive in the market and are excluded have to be taken into consideration, even in the absence
of collective movements and claims to obtain their inclusion. Relying upon the case of the
poor law, K. Polanyi has given us a striking illustration of this tension: in this example
between compassion and justice (aiming at making existing framings bearable) and attempts to
reshape these framings. He interestingly emphasized the role of economics in the management
of this tension. The various compromises reached depend obviously on historical
circumstances. It might worth studying how our contemporary societies formulate this
question (for a sharp analysis of the French situation see: Castel (2003)) and more generally
how the language of politics and even moral philosophy enter into the conception of markets
and are affected by the way they use and enact them.
II.6 Objectifications
In certain circumstances the economization process can lead to the constitution of the
economy as an autonomous object, separated from its environment, on which one can act, the
mechanisms of functioning of which can be analyzed, and which shapes behaviors and
strategies (Ref to Barry, Rose, Miller to add here).
Following Tim Mitchell, let us call 'The Economy' this set of activities, agencies,
circuits of circulation and mechanisms which have been rendered interdependent to the point
61
We carry on borrowing from Goffman a terminology that is complementary to that of the notion of framing.
The study of how markets produce this non market space and in particular what is called informal economy is an
intriguing question (Callon 2008a) (Roitman 2004) (Mitchell 2007) (Elyachar 2005).
62
39
of it being possible to refer to an objectified economy, endowed with its own regulations and
possibly its own laws. Various notions such as sub-system, field or institution have been
proposed in the literature to denote this objectification and the existence of 'The Economy'.
Another way of asserting the autonomization and objectification of the economy, less directly,
is to resort to terms such as self-organization, equilibrium, laws of the market, the invisible
hand or economic regulations. In all cases, it is posited that activities form loops constituting
worlds of their own, surrounded by boundaries making it possible to distinguish between 'The
Economy' and the rest (frequently referred to as 'The Society'). For us it is out of the question
to suspect the possible (relative) autonomization of ‘The Economy’. Our aim is to make it an
object of study: how is it obtained and maintained? The existence of 'The Economy' is a
restless fight, for there is nothing necessary or inevitable about it. It is simply a possible step
on one of the many trajectories that the process of economization is likely to follow.
The elucidation of the mechanisms of objectification of 'The Economy' is a priority for
the programme of the anthropology of economization that we are advocating. Very few studies
have been devoted to this topic. On an exploratory basis, we propose to consider that until now
this process of objectification has taken on two main, co-existing forms. It seems that one first
step in this long-lasting process is the progressive constitution of national economies and, with
them, the establishment of a hierarchically ordered world. The second step might be the
instauration of global interrelated markets which constitute a new form of what we propose to
call 'The Economy', an economy that outlines a flat world rather than a hierarchical one. Here
marketization would prevail as the main form of economization, which would explain why
'The Economy' tends to be confused with markets. To better apprehend this phenomenon it is
worth devoting a few lines to the first objectification of the economy, that which led to the
constitution of national economies and, more broadly, to what can be called "community
economies".
II.6.1 First objectification: (pluri)national economies and the consolidation of a
hierarchical world
According to the pioneering work of Tim Mitchell, the first occurrence in history of
the notion of 'The Economy' – a) designed and constructed as an autonomous, distinctly
separate domain on which it was possible to act and which imposed its regularities and its
laws; and b) distinct from other human activities and particularly from society and politics –
can be situated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It took the form of
objectification of national economies and the advent, associated with it, of macro-economics
to provide states with the instruments of their policies.63
Following an approach which has a great deal in common with the one proposed in
this article, Mitchell shows that ‘The Economy’ is a recent contribution to our modern lives.
The constitution of this object, which coincided with the construction of specific autonomous
agencements, necessitated material, institutional and cognitive investments that were
contemporaneous with colonization and the issues that developed at the time around relations
between colonizing and colonized "nations". Drawing on both Foucault and the anthropology
of science and technology to reconstruct the recent history of that improbable object, the
Egyptian economy, Mitchell argues that: "The Economy must be fixed, boundaries must be
drawn between economy and non-economy, for example between State and economy, between
household and economy" and "Economy does not exist before being named" (Mitchell 2002).
The latter statement, clearly akin to the performativity argument, should not be confused with
nominalism (reality has no other existence than the one conferred on it by words), or the idea
63
This exploration undertaken by Mitchell is worth amplifying, especially to assess that which separates the
conception of the economy as a system that has these two properties, from older representations where the idea is
more to recognize the role and importance of activities qualified as economic within society, than to constitute them
as autonomous systems (as in the case of Physiocrats and their attempts to separate productive activities from
unproductive ones).
40
that reality exists to be named by humans. Mitchell’s argument concerns concrete practices of
performation.
Mitchell’s discussion of the making of the Egyptian economy, for example, chronicles
how the economy was shaped on the ground. Underscoring the importance of agricultural
maps that produce both the object and its representation, Mitchell writes, “The map helped to
constitute and consolidate the new institution of private property and the forms of debt, title,
dispossession and violence on which it depended” (Mitchell 2002). To this cartographic device
one can add the development of metrological networks and the creation of semi-public firms
that become places of economic knowledge production. The idea of socio-technical
agencement discussed above to describe agencies engaged in markets applies to national
economies as a whole:
“If the system of landed property brings into being a topographical
space that defines the extension of economic processes, the cadastral survey
translates this into a paper landscape, cotton production generates a
simplified measure of the production and circulation of commodities, and the
building of the metropoles provides a material expression of the intensity and
expansion of exchange relations, paper currency plays another part in the
formatting of social processes as an economy (Mitchell 2002)”.
This process of objectification of a dominated national economy is moreover informed
by economic theory, its concepts and its tools. Mitchell highlights in particular the role of
econometric models and the variables economists use to describe 'the state of the economy'
(like GNP, growth rate, monetary masses, etc.) as they constitute their objects of research
(Mitchell 1998, 2005, 2007a, 2007b). These objects, like national economy, can be represented
and intervene whenever necessary (see also: Desrosières (1995)). Such a national (performed)
Egyptian economy is then transformed into an object which can be controlled from a distance
and incorporated into a colonial project.
A similar history is proposed by Goswani (2004) who explains how an Indian national
economy, distinct from the British economy, was established on the basis of colonial relations.
In both cases this objectification was powerfully stimulated and structured by a disciplinary
process that resulted in the formation of macro-economics, which in turn became dominant
within the field of economics. Keynes' role, both in the controversy over the existence of the
Indian national economy and in the production of this new scientific object, made him a key
figure in the first objectification. Keynesian conceptualization enables us to think of the
national economy as a whole, a set of circuits, overlapping regulations, induced effects (cf. his
famous multiplier effect) and mechanisms of dynamic equilibrium. The state is conceived of
as an authority participating in the functioning of ‘The Economy’ (owing to knowledge of its
laws of functioning), and remaining at the same time outside the economy to steer it. The
welfare (national) state is the conceptual and institutional innovation that gives substance to
this dual identity: society, represented by the state, acts on and in the economy without for all
that altering its functioning since it respects the laws unveiled by macro-economics.64 The
hierarchy between the welfare national state which is in control and the economy which it
controls (owing to its knowledge of that economy) is established and, along with it, the policy
of national sovereignties. The national and international institutions created at the time to
manage, support and lubricate this ‘Economy’ are all subjects for study – unfortunately
somewhat neglected ones. Preda's current work (??) to account for the construction of a
national financial market in the US in around 1936, which revolved around the controversy on
the public or private nature of stock market transaction prices, illustrates the interest of this
64
Another interesting example is the case of functions of production analysed by (Tryggestad 2005). The author
shows how economists and technologists have cooperated in order to unravel, at the national level, the multiplicity
of connections between the notion of technological efficiency and that of economic optimization. Critique of the
welfare (national) state, based on the second objectification ('The Economy' is equated to markets), denounces this
supposed neutrality of the state. Since the laws of 'The Economy' are those of global interdependent markets and
not of national economies, the welfare state tends to be considered as a potential parasite whose interferences are
judged to be negative.
41
approach: for a financial economy (in the sense of 'The Economy') to exist, it was necessary at
the time to have both a territory and a community (the nation was a good option) and a
technological infrastructure (the system of recording and disseminating prices, studied by
Preda). An examination of the history of national accounting systems – what Fourquet happily
called “Les comptes de la puissance” – fall into this programme (Fourquet, 1980).
The construction of ‘The Economy’ moreover locates an exterior to it. That exterior
contains the economic space itself by guarding the boundaries of encounter. Mitchell argues
that in order to exist as a separate entity the economy is not disembedded from society, but
feeds on it by recycling social elements: “The economy came into being, not by disembedding
market relations from a larger social ground that previously contained them, but by embedding
certain twentieth-century practices of calculation, description and enumeration in new forms of
intellectual, calculative, regulatory, and governmental practice” (Mitchell 2002).
The idea that ‘The Economy’ is a fairly fragile and evolving outcome of processes of
decontextualization and re-contextualization is at the heart of the anthropology of
economization. What Mitchell rightly underscores, and which remains to be developed, is that
economics should be brought back into the picture as a concrete form of representation and
intervention (Hacking 1983) that contributes to the implementation of this process and to its
acceleration. Keynes is an important player but obviously not the only one.65
The establishment of what we propose to call national economies,66 as a first form of
The Economy, is never fully accomplished. The work is permanently under way, for the fixing
process is still on-going. A second objectification has imposed itself to the point of becoming
dominant (see below) but it extends rather than replaces the first. National economies have a
bright future ahead for at least four reasons. First, their content is becoming increasingly rich
and complex, absorbing a whole series of protests, critiques and expectations that boost and
fortify these economies. Suffice it to mention here the scholarly and lay questioning on the
definition and calculation of wealth.67 A first example is provided by controversies around the
definition of activities to take into account in defining the Gross National Product (GNP).
Should domestic work, for example, be included in the GNP? Is cultural production an
economic activity? A second example is controversies around the choice of the GNP to
describe the economy as such. Many economists, social scientists and politicians now
challenge the way in which wealth is calculated. First, they argue for incorporation of other
variables into the larger picture, such as public health, education, quality of life, poverty, size
of prison population, sustainability, domestic labour, child labour, and so on (Sen, 1987)
(Gadrey et al. 2005). Second, the national framework remains politically strategic for the new
It would be useful to write a history of the construction of ‘The Economy’ based on that which is not the
economy and is defined as extra-economic. The importance of the social issue in the late nineteenth century is well
known. It helps to identify a number of matters of concern, such as occupational hazards, poverty and social
exclusion, usually imputed to ‘The Economy’. The Economy is thus constituted as a disjoint object defined
negatively as being at the origin of a number of social problems. Sociology, born at that time, came into conflict
with economics. The question concerns the role of the economy in society. From its origins the concept of The
Economy, as a distinct and specific sphere of activity, has encountered the question of its relationship with this
other distinct and objective sphere, ‘The Society’: inside or outside, enmeshed or autonomous. To be complete, one
would have to include in the analysis the role of disciplines which have helped to strengthen The Economy by
objectifying distinct realities of it, but in relation to it. We could posit that there was co-invention of The Economy
and The Society, with the latter serving as a counter-weight for the former.
66 We know that this term (national economy) could be cause for confusion since national economies, as singular
empirical (and describable) economies, are the object of a longstanding scholarship in several disciplines. This
common meaning eliminates the idea of national economies as a form of objective enactment of ‘the Economy’.
We could say that the economy of France existed before ‘the French Economy’ as an objectified system steered by
Keynesian technocrats, and that it is still and will continue to exist distinctly. Following Mitchell, we use the term
‘national economy’ here in the sense of ‘the French Economy’, a self-sufficient object on which one can act and
which acts on its own. This explains why the type of reality denoted by this concept can include plurinational,
regional or community entities, which define the territories and institutional frames within which ‘the Economy’
can exist as an autonomous system.
67 The notion of wealth is usually indexed to a community or territory, as the title of Smith's book (An Inquiry into
the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations) attests.
65
42
industrialized countries such as Brazil, China or India. For these countries 'The Economy' is
still construed as a national entity or system (historical studies on the formation of now
strongly asserted national singularities are mobilized on this point: see Bai Gao (1998)). Third,
elsewhere the narrowly national frame is gradually replaced by pluri-national entities, as the
endless construction of the European Union amply illustrates. These groupings perpetuate the
grip of the first objectification, are accompanied by the establishment of suitable institutions
(the European Central Bank is a good example of this type of institutional engineering which
helps to make the EU exist as a plurinational economy). In parallel, and this is a fourth
consolidation, regional arrangements are taking on ever-greater importance.
The enlargement and diversification of national economies are associated with new
institutions but also with a revival of some sorts of macro-economic theories. The
anthropology of economization should contribute to the understanding of these coconstruction process. As an illustration, consider the interest that there would be in studying
evolutionary economics which produced a whole body of reflection and political advice on the
organization and dynamics of innovation. A concept such as a national innovation system
(which applies at various territorial levels) would be a good starting point for an
anthropological study of this nature (see Sharif (2006) for a preliminary study). Research on
the standardization of accounting technologies or financial regulations (and the way in which
they are contained or not in certain national or pluri-national limits) would also be worthwhile.
All in all, the historically dated notions of national economy and welfare state could make way
to that, more general, of ‘community economies’ which would prolong the first objectification
and sustain a certain conception of ‘The Economy’ based on the construction of collectives
whose members feel, and act as, interdependent of each other. 68
II.6. 2 Global interdependent markets: flattening the world
A second objectification is established. It competes with and completes the first,
without eliminating it.
Our hypothesis is that the role played by ‘community economies’ (and with them by
the macro-economics of systems, circuits, equilibriums and flows) is increasingly
backgrounded, to the benefit of global interdependent markets and micro-economics. The
Economy, that objective world endowed with its own rules of functioning and regulation, now
consists largely of markets whose extension knows no boundaries (whether national,
plurinational or regional). ‘The Economy’ is enacted as ‘the’ market. This movement redefines
the place of nations, the role of states, the object of theory, the tools of political and
managerial management. It equips itself with the institutions which it needs and which boost
its growth. All this composes a new agencement that constitutes an interesting object for the
study of economization (Thrift 2005).
Certain markets play a key part in weaving interdependencies between markets. From
this point of view, Karl Polanyi's work provides a convenient starting point by highlighting the
importance of financial markets, an object of increasingly keen attention by anthropologists
and sociologists. We have stressed that their analysis is valuable from the point of view of the
study of economization, for they act as magnifying glasses which, in their conception and the
reconfigurations they produce, explicitly pose the question of their multiple framing: for
instance, with the implementation of ICT at stock exchanges, the designers and stakeholders
had to decide which actors could be included, to formalize the sociotechnical algorithms
organizing their encounters, to specify the qualification of the products to be valued, and so on
(Millo, Caliskan, MacKenzie, Muniesa). But most of the work remains to be done. Nothing, or
almost, has been undertaken to study the mechanisms through which financial markets create
interdependency amongst the markets between which they organize the circulation of financial
resources. Some isolated studies nevertheless indicate directions for investigation. Caliskan's
work on the global cotton market shows the links that derivatives weave between financial
markets and the daily transactions concluded at the places of production and
68
Gibson-Graham shows that these communities could invent and implement different forms of governance: the
welfare state and is redistributive politics is but one possibility.
43
commercialization of cotton. Lépinay's thesis goes even further. It lays the foundations of
ananthropology of derivation. By analysing the conception and commercialization of
derivatives, which add an operation of valuation to those which already exist (since derivatives
are valued on the basis of the values of their underlying assets), Lépinay suggests that the key
mechanisms creating interdependence of markets consists in the extension and entanglement
of chains of valuation and pricing (Lépinay, 2003). Derivation probably goes hand in hand
with the second objectification of ‘The Economy’. The professions and institutions that sustain
and feed off these operations of chain or cascading valuations warrant particular attention. An
anthropology of strategies of derivation and their professionals needs to be developed. This
would encompass the design of derivatives, their circulation, the effects of these products on
other financial entities, and their strategic use by various operators such as pension funds and
more generally, in the engineering of mergers and acquisitions (Studies of firms like Price
Waterhouse Cooper, Deloitte & Touche, or the Lazard Bank would be welcome). 69
The second objectification also has its disciplinary investments that can be grouped
under the heading of micro-economics – which is tending to supplant macro-economics
although without causing it to disappear (the movement is comparable to the one developing
between the micro and macro economy). Studies do already exist on the engagement of this
discipline (micro economics) in the conception of markets (earlier on we referred to the case
of Californian auctions and pollution rights markets, or fishing quotas). This effort should be
kept up. Use in the political sphere of concepts and tools designed for markets as well as the
mechanisms of decision-making and valuation, should all be investigated (Babb 2001; Miller;
Power??)). The theory of principal-agent (and of associated incentives) proposes an image of
the state which differs completely from that given by the macro-economics of Keynesian or
neo-Keynesian inspiration. Research by Muniesa and Linhardt on the LOLF illustrates the
interest of this type of approach (reference to be added??). All the reflection and tools
developed by economics at large to equip and adapt individual agencies and turn them into
"purely" market agencies should be included in the research field (Callon, 2003).
II.6.3 Hybridization
We have highlighted the coexistence of the two processes of objectification. The first
produces territorialized entities and integrated communities organized around economies
which have been enacted as autonomous systems, and which those political entities try to
control and orientate. The second fills the world with market sociotechnical agencements
which are self-regulated, interdependent and caught in a perpetual dynamic of extension. The
first objectification creates a hierarchy in which 'The Economy' is transformed into an object
controlled by organizations responsible for managing and steering it. The second produces a
flat world, the one of market agencements, with its load of asymmetries and relations of
domination, but which are built into 'The Economy'. The former creates boundaries, alliances
and confrontations between communities; the latter levels things down, abolishing boundaries.
The two objectifications feed on one another: this is the hypothesis that it would be
interesting to test. The resulting creative tension is visible in various places and on differing
scales. Earlier on we mentioned the new industrialized countries, pluri-national entities,
regional systems; these are movements which produce hierarchies, communities and
populations by erecting borders and building up some sort of welfare governments. Their
establishment is nevertheless closely bound to the extension of interdependent markets and
their embeddedness in this flat world. Institutions have been designed and set up to manage
these tensions adequately. This is the case of the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF, all
institutions that merit in-depth study (Babb 2003). Innovation policies, because they imply a
double reference to market global competition and to national or regional communities, are
another choice field for understanding this tension (Jasanoff 2005). Here again, the analysis
ought to integrate knowledge and know-how, their elaboration and their role. Economics and
the social sciences are powerfully engaged in this movement of hybridization and
69
The same effort should be made to study the role of the organization of labour markets, an particularly of
mobility and flexibility, in the construction of market interdependencies
44
composition, mainly through the efforts made to conceive of a form of coherence between
micro and macro economics. We are inclined to think that evolutionary economics, due to the
constituent link it establishes between the local (role of niches and entrepreneurship) and the
global dynamics of adaptation-selection, will end up playing an active role in this synthesis.
Moreover, it has a distinct competitive advantage in its ability to grasp innovation (as a
process of differentiation-competition), at the heart of the current dynamics of the first and the
second objectifications (Geels and Shot ??) – in sharp contrast with the congenital paralysis of
orthodox economics that makes unrealistic hypotheses on science when it wants to study
processes of invention and innovation (for a critique of science as a public good, see Callon
(1994). We need to analyse in detail the profiles of experts who work around community
economies in the making, to help them to reconcile the two objectifications. If we consider the
EU, which is a perfect example, this assumption seems to be confirmed: the experts who take
pride of place readily combine neo-classical economics and evolutionary economics in a
pragmatic way (Felt and Wynne 2207).
We have discussed the two objectifications of the economy, that of national economies
(gradually transformed into community economies) and that of global interdependent markets.
These objectifications, often associated with the idea of the existence of a modern world,
indirectly produce a third, residual, sector generally called the informal economy or the third
sector or sphere. This construction allows for the maintenance of market framing, the idea of
the existence of something objective, which is called 'The Economy' and is mobilized for the
legitimization of some unpopular and hurting decisions. It also permits the otherwise
impossible elimination of forms that the so-called modern world cannot absorb. The third
sector is thus objectified in the way that Indian reserves were institutionalized in North
American society. It has theoreticians (generally sociologists or anthropologists) who insist on
its specificity and authenticity and who thus support its status as a residual economy. The term
informal economy sounds like the famous vae victis which, to the misfortune of the defeated,
adds a punishment: in this case the public assertion of their status as the losers. The project of
the anthropology of economization is to change this type of thinking by making economization
as a whole the key issue of theoretical and practical confrontation. From this point of view, the
informal economy is seen not as the survival of a primitive economy (authentic because
solidaire) but as the unfortunate consequence of the two objectifications that triumphed
without having been discussed (for a superb analysis of an extreme configuration see Roitman
(2005).)
Conclusion
If the dynamics of economic markets is to be understood, it has to be placed in the
context of the broader movement of economization, of which it currently constitutes a
dominant modality. This is the main message of this article.
Rather than starting from the hypothesis that all societies have activities and/or forms
of behaviour which can be qualified as economic (irrespective of the definition given to the
word), we have explored an alternative route. We consider that the economy, in all its
diversity, depends heavily on often divergent and controversial, scholarly and lay analyses that
define, explain and enact it, both in our societies and in others, distant in time and space. To
clearly show in what way our position is not relativist – we can say that the economy, in its
different forms and manifestations, can be seen as the outcome of a selection’s process in
which conflicting institutional, material and cognitive forces are engaged. Discourses –
whether organized or not, scholarly or not – on what the economy is, what it should be and the
modalities of its organization, are active part of this process and contribute powerfully to its
dynamics. The social sciences and especially economics are naturally at the heart of this
dynamics.
To outline the main orientations of an anthropology of economization and, more
specifically, of marketization, it was therefore appropriate to start with a critical presentation
of a selection of authors and disciplines that in recent decades have worked directly or
45
indirectly on the economy or on what we have called the economic-Xs. This literature review
has enabled us to highlight the strategic importance of the notion of economization. Each of
these authors in their own way, they illuminated the mechanisms that produce economic
behaviours: no economization without economics and institutional assemblages to ensure the
coordination of agents and to act as socio-cognitive prostheses, but no economization either
without taking into account the materiality of the things which circulate and which, by
circulating, 'explicitate' or 'unfold' certain regimes of value. It was on these contributions that
we drew when we undertook to outline what a social study of economization and, more
specifically, of marketization could and should be. This led us to identify certain problems to
solve, sites to explore, and analytical categories to develop and enrich.
At the centre of this programme lies the notion of market sociotechnical agencement,
with its various framings (framing of goods, of agencies and of encountering), its price-setting
mechanisms, and the issue of its design and implementation. Finally, we examined the
question of the objectification of the economy (what we have proposed, following Mitchell, to
call the constitution of 'The Economy') and suggested that this objectification could itself be
considered as an historical process. A first objectification, which corresponded to the
formation of national economies (and, more broadly, 'community economies') supported by
macro-economics, was followed by a second one, that of global interdependent markets as
another construction of 'The Economy', supported by micro-economics. These two
objectifications coexist and merge, shaping hybrid and evolving configurations as they do so –
the EU being a striking example. Evolutionary economics and neo-institutional economics
seem to be well prepared to study the dynamics of these compound configurations.
The emphasis on the notion of market sociotechnical agencements (STA) gives access
to questions on the role of the knowledge – whether academic or not, professional or amateur,
explicit or tacit – that is mobilized to design, elaborate, change, maintain, extend and operate
those agencements. These questions enable us to articulate the study of economization to the
programme of performativity (or, more exactly, of the co-performation of the economy by
economics; see Callon (1998), Mackenzie and al. (2007)). The more the objectification of 'The
Economy' becomes complex and irreversible, the more the intervention of the knowledge and
know-how of economics, in and on the economy, is qualitatively and quantitatively crucial.
The analysis of the mechanisms of this co-performation process is one of the priorities of this
new anthropology.
As we have already stressed, the term ‘economics’ should not be considered in a
limited sense. Disciplinary divisions are certainly essential, and it is important to respect the
boundaries between specialties, such as not confusing accounting with econometrics, game
theory with the analysis of general equilibrium, micro-economics with macro-economics. But
it is even more important to bring these sub-fields, specialties, scientific and technical
communities back into the political geography where markets are made. The concept of a
network, taken in a very general sense Callon 1991), is useful because it does justice to all
kinds of flows linking actors and their competencies, but also because it is open to and
compatible with all possible organizational architectures. Economists and marketing
specialists based in university departments are stakeholders in the markets they study, simply
because they are situated in networks connecting them (directly or through long chains of
mediators including for example political parties, civil servants or consultants) to conventional
market agents like consumers and their organizations, CEOs and sometimes workers and their
trade unions or NGOs and social movements. They are stricto sensu market actors. The way
they interact in markets and their limits, and consequently the dynamics of these networks,
constitute a worthwhile subject of investigation in the anthropology of economics. We can
agree to use the term economics at large to refer to all the activities, whether academic or not,
engaged in these networks and aimed at understanding, analyzing, designing and equipping
markets.
Markets could be seen as co-extensive to economics at large. One of the first task of
the anthropology of economization is therefore to identify the forces that partake to these
networks. They should include usual suspects like firms, banks and consumers but also,
46
amongst others, researchers from private enterprises or government labs (natural or life
sciences), technological engineers, lawyers, accountants, civil servants who draw up
regulations, consultants, politicians, NGOs, international agencies etc. – and … economists.
These different forces confront one another around different programmes and the design and
building of institutions and tools. Which is why, somewhat provocatively, Callon spoke of the
embeddedness of economies in economics. This expression is a short summary of three main
points: economics should not be considered a priori as located outside of its supposed object
of research, that is, actual markets; economic agents, whoever they are, are generally reflexive,
and can be considered as economists in the wild;70 and, finally, the modalities of cooperation
between these different types of economist (academic researchers and researchers in the wild)
constitute a subject of investigation. Another way of defining economization is to say that
there is no economy without economics, that is, without professions, their institutions and their
hierarchical organizations which strive to elaborate, implement and popularize economization
programmes in close cooperation/competition with economists in the wild (Fourcade 2006,
Babb 2003).
These observations highlight the key concept of experimentation. Economization
programmes (and especially marketization) are not linear; they generate what Callon has
proposed to call performation struggles (Callon, 2007). The question is no longer 'Are this
economics and its anthropology true or false?' but 'Are they able to perform and enact a reality
corresponding to what they say?' Answers to this question are increasingly considered as an
outcome of deliberate and controlled organization of experimentation. The conception of such
experimentation is a theoretical, practical and political challenge for the forthcoming
anthropology of economization. It is possible that, through the development of experiments, a
third objectification appears, one in which 'The Economy' is conceived of as an open set of
configurations on which it is possible to act in order to reach negotiated compromises between
different expectations and programmes. In the future the anthropology of economization may
no longer be content simply to explain the world, for it will be able to do so only by
participating in its transformation. Theory and practice would then engage in a collective
strategy of trials and errors oriented towards the debated and controlled production of
differences.71
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