Paper short abstract:

How do queues constitute markets if they symbolize socialism? The operation of queue management systems in post-socialist banking configure mass service as mundane market order, without customers' visual policing but as rationalized performance control for employees.

Paper long abstract:

What makes a market economy? The queue symbolizes the shortage economy and state power over time in socialism (Verdery 1996). Meanwhile, for ethnomethodologists, queuing is the prime example of how social-moral order is constantly produced by participants of situations. Queues appear out of thin air, a "designed enterprise" of small utterances and bodily gestures, accomplishing ordinariness (Garfinkel and Livingston 2003). We modify this approach by raising three questions. First, if queues also symbolize socialism, how do they constitute markets specifically? Second, automating technologies are deployed to make queues occur. With no visible line to join, what are queues' spatial, temporal, and social properties? Third, how are queues accomplished on the other side of the service (en)counter? Post-socialist queue management systems let us explore these questions empirically, while the notion of formatting market actors (Callon and Muniesa 2005) allows us to see queuing as material pre-trans-acts. Based on the observation of a call number system in Hungarian bank branch services, the paper argues that electronic queuing "funnels" customers to match standardized products. Queue management shows how mundane stuff matters for markets in four ways. First, in post-socialism it re-orders mass banking as a distinctly market-based service, by indexing fair access (non-discrimination and accountability). Second, these systems advocate impersonal markets by displacing the personal-physical work of forming lines. Third, the market-as-automated-allocation system ironically produces an obscure order, as it lacks witnessably fair turn-taking. Fourth, for bank employees, however, queuing becomes a rationalized workflow, and a surveillance and performance measurement device.