Remembering the Winter Workshop
This post is a follow up, adding to a conversation already begun by Daniel Beunza and Peter Erdélyi, in their responses (on Socializing Finance and Peter’s Research File) to the Goldsmiths Winter Workshop in Economic Sociology that took place a couple of weeks ago. This was an event consisting of two workshop days, where a small group of PhD researchers split into two streams, to become involved in some often intensive engagement with each others’ work, as well as attending the central Performance conference, open to others. As one of the organisers of these events, along with Allan Day and Will Davies, I’d like to thank Daniel and Peter for their valuable thoughts, which do I think succeed in capturing the degree of dynamism and productive, constructive engagement by participants across their different areas of research.
I won’t spend time here repeating their summaries of the content of the Performance conference, apart from to dwell on some images that remain vivid in my memory, drawn from Koray Caliskan’s engaging presentation. In particular, his own adroit (re)performances of the performance of cotton trading in Ismir, Turkey. Leaving the lectern, Koray reproduced for us some of the bodily comportments adopted by Turkish cotton traders both prior to, and during a day’s trading. These consisted of intimate moments of self-preparation in the streets leading up to the trading pit, with traders puffing up and steeling themselves outside the pit for the impeding melee, in which fierce competition over prices is matched, or to some extent overshadowed, by the competition to perform as an Izmir cotton trader is supposed to. Hands are frequently locked behind the back, strides purposeful, expressions (if necessary) set and inscrutable, with each display attempting to navigate between neither over or underplaying the trader’s hand.
Koray’s argument was not, however, aimed at highlighting the powerful determining effects of, in this case, the ‘social’ performances of traders on market forces, but their limits: in the context of an apparent academic growth industry surrounding identification of instances of ‘performativity’, in which social scientists have been perhaps too quick to sit back upon ‘revealing’ a particular market as a social (or, perhaps more frequently, socio-technical) construction, Koray argued that it is useful to bear in mind that, in relation to the trades in the pit at least, these bodily performances have their limits, being aimed more at establishing ‘rehearsal’ prices for the later, less visible, higher volume post-pit trading than concluding profitable trades during pit-opening hours.
There is, I’m sure, a longer academic debate to be had here, which might unpack a little more the correspondences and disjunctures between bodily performances and (in particular) recently deployed concepts of economic performativity. However, I think part of the reason this stayed with me, is that it encapsulated for me the desire, across the event as a whole, to push at the boundaries of socio-economic explanations, to be suspicious of becoming overly attached to tried and tested methodological and/or theoretical approaches.
I like to think that our stream (stream A - Daniel and Peter’s have already covered much of stream B), chaired by David Stark, broadly echoed this ethic. Sometimes this was reflected in theoretical debates: Ville-Pekka Sorsa sketched out routes towards bringing together elements of two, on the face of it, oppositional theories of socio-economic life (institutional theories and an Actor Network Theory inspired theory of agencement), while Ignacio Farias attempted to open up a couple of conceptual ‘black boxes’, in looking simultaneously at the opportunities and hazards in naming something (and particularly a market device) an ‘assemblage’ and whether the pursuit of ‘innovation’ in the creative industries needs to be seen as distinct from the pursuit of the much sought after, ephemeral (and assembled) quality of ‘newness’.
Echoing the latter theme, Ann Christina Lange introduced a fascinating object of study: the strategic, material production of innovation at a Danish consultancy. Rather than a nebulous artefact emerging from an equally nebulous cloud of ‘creativity’, the once perhaps elusive emergence of an ‘idea’ is seen as a process that can not only be controlled, but actively stimulated – most memorably, by locking (well, at least confining) willing creative types into rooms stripped of light and temporal cues, to engender a process of ‘artful making’.
Carolin Gerlitz introduced us to American Apparel’s world – encompassing not only the stores, the staff, the factories, the product, but also the consumer as brand collaborator, while Erica Coslor’s presentation focused on the construction of art as a financial investment, with galleries vying with auction houses for a claim on the appropriate way to manage both an artwork and an artist’s career. In each, attempts to manage value come up against their complex contingency, whether in the interventions of anti-American Apparel activists, or the on the face of it paradoxical dependence of galleries on a system (the auction houses’ setting of visible market values) which they denounce.
The construction of the individual as consumer is, in quite different ways at the heart of the work of Chris Payne, Charlotta Bay, Jeanne Lazarus, and my own: Chris is tracing a genealogy of the indebted consumer – a category which we share an interest - unpicking some of the tensions inherent in governing a group of individuals with unprecedented (although now shrinking) access to credit; Charlotta is focusing on the implied logics of financial capability programmes in Sweden; Jeanne on the interpenetration of judgements of economic and moral worth by high street banks in France; and I presented a piece on the centrality of the body to technologies of debt collection. Irrespective of our different approaches, what we clearly all shared is a desire to reassemble the category of the consumer empirically, to focus on some of the varied processes of consumer-making, whether occurring through regulation, pedagogy, or banking/collection practices.
Roxana Bratu and Marc Lenglet gave us rich insights into two very different worlds: the opaque process of obtaining EU funding in Romania and the attempts to ensure transparency in financial markets via the figure of the compliance officer. And finally, to bring the event to a fitting close, Pierre-Marie Chauvin ended with some wine – well, more precisely, an insight into the art of making not only fine but also saleable Bordeaux wine. Robert Parker’s highly influential 100 point quantitative assessment of wine quality is shown not only as affecting prices and sales, but the types of wine producers are striving to create. Mr Parker’s wine-palate apparently gravitates towards fruit and oak. So towards fruit and oak (or at least towards the kinds of oaky fruitness Parker likes) is where many Bordeauxs are increasingly headed (I can’t resist coining the alliterative concept of personal preference performativity…). Although, echoing Koray’s call, Pierre-Marie was circumspect: don’t be too quick to jump into new theoretical straightjackets, he reminded us: ‘economic actors are not passive recipients of categorizations, they play with their ambivalence and their multiplicity’.
A good way to end, I think.
