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- Convenors:
-
Daniel Neyland
(Bristol Digital Futures Institute)
Sveta Milyaeva
Send message to Convenors
- Theme:
- Market-making
- Location:
- Economy 46
- Sessions:
- Thursday 18 September, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Long Abstract:
Markets are invoked in discussions of an ever broader variety of what we might term social, political, technological, scientific and economic issues, including healthcare, education, security, environment, and many other areas. These discussions frequently position markets as the basis for resolving (even simplifying and delegating responsibility for) otherwise complex problems. At the same time market-based initiatives are designed to make an intervention - to redistribute resources, cut costs, change working environments, access to services, delivery of formerly public goods, etc. As a result, questions arise regarding: the kinds of devices required to introduce markets; the seductive discourses of markets and their apparent ability to generate value, effectiveness and equality; the consequences of market-based initiatives, how they work, what counts as value, effectiveness or equitability, and to whom; to what extent and through what means market-based initiatives can be said to succeed or fail.
This session seeks to explore the possibility of combining the recent Science and Technology Studies interest in markets (Callon, 1998; MacKenzie, 2008; Muniesa, 2010) with a longer standing interest in the complex entangling of problems and solutions. Abstracts are invited which address: any of the above themes and questions; explore methodologies of market engagement; empirical studies of markets as solutions to problems; new ideas in market-making; the challenges of drawing together STS approaches to markets with ideas from other areas (economic sociology, political, theory, anthropology and others) or which draw together ideas from different areas within STS (market studies and science and technology policy, for example).
The papers will be presented in the order shown and grouped 4-4-4 between sessions
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 September, 2014, -Paper long abstract:
Markets, problems and solutions are entangled in ever more complex ways. This paper focuses on the nascent market for online personal data control products (PDCP) designed by an array of start-ups and big software companies. These firms invoke 'the Big Data market' as an umbrella term within which, it would seem, a PDCP market is evolving. This evolution, market participants argue, is taking place through their own processes of creative invention, financing, development and implementation of technologies and provision of services. These activities are each presented as putting online users in control of their data. So far our study shows that the entrepreneurs' strategy to succeed at securing revenue streams involves revising a privacy-versus-growth juxtaposition by redefining what privacy is and what being in control means, leading to market players identifying what the 'real' problem is and the 'real' solution their product provides. The research draws upon data obtained by conducting 31 semi-structured interviews with key figures in the field (entrepreneurs, researchers at global IT-vendors, regulators, academics, and activists based in the US and Europe) and monitoring policy debates to engage with a market based initiative under development, opening up questions regarding the genesis and development of markets as solutions to problems.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reports on an ethnographic study of neuromarketing practices in academic as well industry settings. Neuromarketing is the study of consumers' brains in response to product and other stimuli through EEG, fMRI technology and/or a range of biometric measures. Commissioners of neuromarketing research studies first and foremost seek an answer to the problem of (increasing, predicting and defending) market share or creating markets for new products. Neuromarketers aim to deliver this answer by 'interviewing the brain' - that is through eschewing consumers' talk and instead 'directly' studying consumers' brain reactions.
Based on our ethnographic research we describe how neuromarketers problematise consumer talk and instead seek answers to consumers' future purchasing behaviour by turning to a range of neurotechnologies. We show how neuromarketers silence the subject by making an object of the subject and thereby propose to finesse the problem of the unreliable consumer. In conclusion we reflect on the intertwined nature of consumer knowledge, markets and technologies, and on the emergence of a new market actor: the brain. Ultimately, we propose that in neuromarketing practice both markets and consumers are problematised and the problems are solved by a neurotechnological transformation of agency.
Paper long abstract:
In animal welfare debate, ever more often, more markets are called upon to heal the market failures experienced in our livestock systems. The quality assurance schemes and certificates should assist in incorporating higher welfare standards to livestock production; whilst simultaneously providing consumers with reliable information for choosing the products. As specific socio-cognitive apparatuses they aim at reconfiguring both supply and demand for higher animal welfare products. In this paper I examine further how certificates may intensify this relation -- and participate in the 'economization' (Çalişkan and Callon) of animal welfare. I draw on my findings from the making of national quality system for pig production in Finland. This particular case draws our attention to how certificates may become practical devices for maintaining current market positions and production standards, rather than differentiating markets for higher welfare standards. The case also calls upon more analytical scrutiny to the mundane work of market maintenance. The results show how economization of animal welfare always needs to relate to knowledges and 'orders of worths' (Boltanski and Thévenot) in the existing, equipped markets. In this paper I elaborate how, in this case, such arranging made possible what pig welfare can and could become of. I also show how the articulation of the qualities set them under a new kind of scrutiny at the same time. The results highlight that this dynamic, overflowing feature is the very essence of any certificate or quality claim in the markets. In this respect, also the maintenance of markets for the Finnish pork may become even more laborious in future.
Paper long abstract:
Climate policy goals increasingly have to be reached through techno-scientific innovation and market coordination. This paper is about this new mode of assembling technology, policy and markets in the field of energy, more specifically in the field of "smart grids".
"Smart grids" are a booming topic of techno-economic development. It refers to a bi-directional grid conveying energy flows and real-time information both in a top-down and a bottom-up manner. While in the conventional electricity grid generation had to follow consumption, in the smart grid consumption could be made to follow generation. This opens up new possibilities of grid management especially on the demand-side of the electricity system where intriguing concepts such as "active demand", "demand-response" and "negawatt" are the topic of on-going market development. In France and elsewhere in Europe, the State promotes the development of smart grids and "active demand" through trials and demonstration projects on which public money is invested.
The paper is about the organizing of those demonstrations and trials. In them we can recognize a mix of ideas originating from the field of science and technology (use of a protected and controlled setting to develop and test a technology) and from the markets (competition will accelerate the development of working technologies and drive down their costs). Following Rosental (2005, 2009), however, I consider that demonstrations are as much about proving and persuading as about constituting and engaging various sorts of publics and of markets. A detailed analysis of how these projects work in practice is conducted in order to understand their performative effects.
Paper short abstract:
A monetary token during wartime occupation is an example how the currency market can be enacted by force and coercion. This paper is an archival research on the circulation of Japanese military yen notes in Hong Kong during World War II.
Paper long abstract:
A monetary token during wartime occupation is an example how the currency market, as the economic side of a battle frontline, can be enacted by force and coercion. This paper is an archival research on the circulation of Japanese military yen notes in Hong Kong during World War II. What happened when the love of money and resentment against a wartime enemy rest upon the same symbolic token? Wartime civilians had to risk brutal violence if they chose to hide away invalidated pre-war Hong Kong dollars, but holding military yens implied high risk of deflation. During the last months of Japanese occupation, the exchange rate of military Japanese yen with commodities and other currencies underwent extreme fluctuations. The printed pledge clause about equivalent exchange for Japanese yens was nullified under most contexts, but occasionally honoured under contingent conditions. One month after Japan surrendered in 1945, the British announced that Hong Kong dollars would become legal tender again on 13 September 1945. The decision literally turned 1.9 billion military yens into waster paper overnight. Japan was exempted from indemnity to civilian holders of military yen notes by the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951, while wartime survivors in Hong Kong weeping upon chests of military yens had become a typical image of war memorial days for decades. Archival sources include three Chinese daily newspapers in HK in 1941-45, archival documents from the HK Public Records Office, government gazettes during the wartime occupation period, plus various biographies and historical titles.
Paper long abstract:
What happens when we think of markets as objects of design? In this paper, I address this question by exploring the possibilities offered by the metaphor of "market design." Inspired by work within the homonymous sub-field of economics that creates tailored-made matching devices for solving specific allocation problems, I argue that the concept of market design calls for a fundamental shift in the conceptualization of markets and their relation to society. In exploring this shift, I draw parallels between the economic literature on auction design and discussions about the role of technology in society, focusing in particular on the visions and promises of the burgeoning literature on synthetic biology.
Paper long abstract:
If finance solves problems, what types of problems does it solve? The proliferation of new financial markets and market devices over the past several decades has often been explained on the grounds that they efficiently solve certain macro-level economic problems, most notably the allocation and sharing of risk between market actors. Yet a classic theme of STS research has been that even the most universal' forms of knowledge tend to reflect the local conditions of their production. Moreover, they are often developed to address highly localised organisational and political conflicts that often bear little resemblance to the 'global' problems that they are eventually employed to solve. Drawing on interview data and an analysis of a large corpus of technical documents, this paper presents a historical sociology of a market device known as the 'credit valuation adjustment' (CVA). A bank's CVA represents a reduction in the market value of its assets to account for changes in the credit worthiness of its trading partners, and its use is now mandated by global accounting standards and enshrined in bank capital rules. While CVA is now used as a technology to monitor and govern the actions of banks, it was originally developed in the 1990s as a market-based solution to 'depoliticise' a set of contentious conflicts between two groups of actors within banks: credit officers and derivatives traders. I trace out why CVA emerged as a solution to these conflicts, and how it eventually came to be used to govern banks themselves.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the recent fall-out of finance, confidence in the market does not seem to be diminishing, but, on the contrary, market mechanisms are becoming key instruments to deal with core contemporary collective concerns, including global warming, education, environmental pollution, supply of energy, quality of education, poverty and health care (Mirowski 2013). Recent research within STS has started to focus on such kind of arrangements and in this presentation we will critically engage with this literature. Our main results are twofold. On the one hand, we recognize there are important conceptual tools already available - such as 'matters of public concern' (Marres 2007) and 'hybrid forums' (Callon et al. 2001; Callon 2009)- that help in framing the particularity of these arrangements. On the other hand, previous STS-market research notions developed mostly in the field of finance studies cannot simply be transposed to study markets for collective concerns. We will suggest three main translations: (i) from studying techno-scientific descriptions produced by financial economists inscribed in 'market devices' to studying markets as 'policy devices' enacted with the help of economists turned market designers; (ii) from the study of sites of knowledge production involved in valuing goods and firms to study the production of knowledge used to evaluate and repair markets for public concerns; and (iii) from the analysis of 'governing through markets' to understanding the 'government of markets' that do not always behave as expected and the proliferation of conceptions of well-functioning markets strategically invoked to initiate such evaluations.
Paper long abstract:
Since the late 1990s there has been a proliferation of 'product development partnerships' (PDPs) in the field of global health in which commercial and philanthropic actors respond to the problem of 'neglected diseases'. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with The Global Tuberculosis Alliance, the main initiative focused on developing new anti-TB medicines that are affordable in the Global South. To this end, it is engaged in complex and highly choreographed practices of 'partnering' with commercial pharmaceutical firms, something all parties narrate as a 'win-win' scenario in which market-driven drug development is harnessed for the benefit of diseases such as TB. Drawing on anthropological gift theory to analyse one specific partnership, the paper unpacks the symbolic and material exchanges of 'good press' and intellectual property that underlie this model. This analysis supports the argument that one of the major functions of the TB Alliance is to carve out markets from tuberculosis, the neglect of which is paradoxically presumed to be the product of 'market failure'. To this end, the partnerships undertaken by the Alliance seek to purify tuberculosis in ways that isolate the more lucrative aspects of the disease, here corresponding to compounds reserved for drug-resistant TB. Yet if one of the major problems in this field is the rise of bacterial resistance to newly developed drugs, here 'win-win' models of drug development are seen to condition investment in ways that are unlikely to result in the new multi-drug regimen needed to halt the cycle of resistance.
Paper long abstract:
New markets and mechanisms for carbon trading are continuing to emerge, in spite - or because of - the failure of a comprehensive global climate treaty (a new 'Kyoto' protocol). These markets operate at regional, national, and local scales, increasingly outside OECD countries. This research focuses on Southeast Asia, which already has a large number of Clean Development Mechanism and voluntary market projects, but is also actively developing national and regional carbon emissions trading schemes, some linked to bilateral or multilateral aid programmes. The proliferation of these newly emerging 'in vivo carbon market experiments' raises a number of theoretical and empirical challenges.
This paper develops a conceptual framework to address some key questions related to the study of these new markets: how are these carbon markets linked to other markets at different scales and to other sectors, such as the energy sector? How can we assess the democratic value of these markets, in particular in a region with strong state-control? And ultimately, can these markets promote more equitable development in a region characterised by rapid growth, environmental degradation, and persistent poverty? To start answering these questions, this paper links STS approaches to insights from political ecology and global environmental governance literature. It specifically discusses three themes: the link between climate and energy governance, the challenges of multi-scale governance and democratic value, and the embeddedness of carbon markets in local institutional contexts. These issues are illustrated with examples from a desk-based study of carbon markets in Southeast Asia and fieldwork in Vietnam.
Paper long abstract:
This paper proposes to consider the way tropical forests are dealt with by climate change negotiations as an empirical lens for the analysis of market engineering and global political action. In the mid 2000s tropical deforestation became a problem relevant to CO2 emissions mitigation. Since then, negotiators discuss how to reduce the phenomenon through the use of economic incentives. Different options are explored. The paper examines three of them: the pantropical perspective where developing countries reducing their deforestation rate would calculate their rewarded performance thanks to remote sensing specialists; the developmental approach that would tackle the institutional causes of deforestation by consolidating fragile governments through incentives associated to the implementation of reforms, programs, and policies; and finally the project-based carbon market where locally decreasing forest loss would be converted into exchangeable commodities used to offset emissions from northern industries. While they are all based on the idea that market-based relationships are the appropriate tools to act collectively, the paper argues that these agencements display different governmental properties. Each of them articulates the objective of reducing deforestation to other aims, such as the supervision of global forest cover, the government of weak governments or the stimulation of technical innovation, and is thus characterized by a certain distribution of agency and of the power to intervene.
Paper long abstract:
Environmental policy increasingly resorts to market-based instruments in order to meet sustainability objectives. The "carbon market" instituted by the European Emissions Trading directive from 2003 is a canonical example, which has been described, and critiqued, as a delegation of policy objectives to market exchanges. We examine the complex ways in which the operationalization of policy objectives and the organization of markets are intertwined, focusing on two other examples of European environmental regulation. The first one is the IPPC directive from 1996, which aimed to curb emissions in air, water and soil by instituting a permit-based system for industrial installations and fostering a market for environmental technologies. The second one is the RED directive from 2009, which set a target share of sustainable energy use by member states, and introduced criteria for the definition of sustainable energy sources, among which biofuels. Through the analysis of the design and implementation of these two directives, we identify a central concern for the coexistence of various objects, and various initiatives undertaken by European institutions, member states and private actors. We use the notion of coexistence to describe a European political and economic ordering that is inherently hybrid, and cannot be reduced to a mere delegation of policy objectives to the market, or a legal constraint imposed on all European actors. It grounds its political legitimacy and economic rationality on the distribution of roles and responsibilities across public and private actors, and on the ability to "keep things different" according to local variabilities.