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1.
A substantial recent literature has examined insurance as a mechanism for economizing uncertain but potentially catastrophic events. Less attention has been paid to how insurantial techniques for economizing catastrophe have been deployed as political technologies. Focusing on discussions of US flood policy in the 1960s, the present article examines how insurance was used to forge new articulations and accommodations between political government and processes of rationalization. On the one hand, insurance provided a technical solution to problems that had long confronted US policy-makers: How to reduce losses from floods? How to fully compensate individuals who suffered losses? On the other hand, insurance was a device for reshaping the aims and objects of government, and for reframing questions that are more frequently situated at the level of political philosophy: What are the respective responsibilities of individual citizens and government in providing security? What tradeoffs must be made between the provision of security and economic rationality? What values are relevant in orienting public policy? In examining these issues, the article raises questions about standard narratives about the changing relations among risk, responsibility, and security in recent decades, particularly as they relate to neoliberalism.  相似文献   

2.
This article examines the politics of calculative devices in one of the most successful areas of finance, the life insurance business. By empirically tracing an insurance applicant's risk trajectory, it analyses how calculative devices perform insurance underwriting through acting on insurance risk decisions. This allows one to document what calculative devices exactly do, and to point out the political effects of what they do. First, it highlights the fact that, contrary to thinking in terms of ‘the insurance logic’, there are multiple ways of calcuting life insurance risks. Second, it underscores the crucial role of calculative devices in that process by demonstrating how they align considerations as divergent as economics and medicine to perform a life insurance market. It then demonstrates the political effects of these calculative devices by making explicit how the latter contribute to the production of inequalities in calculative power in life insurance. In this way, the article links up insights from the performativity approach in the sociology of markets with the broader question of governing economic life. Such an approach, it is argued, provides the opportunity to open up the organization of economic markets and to put classic questions of justice and power struggles in economic markets on the agenda again.  相似文献   

3.
Economic rationality and reciprocal help are values that are often posed as contradictory within exchanges. However, there are instances when these values work in tandem, such as when justifying informal purchases of work, svart arbete, in contemporary Sweden. Svart arbete are omnipresent exchanges in Swedish society, and there are many reasons for performing them. On the one hand, a good deal is part of everyday social life when people help each other. On the other hand, a good deal also reinforces views that economic rationalities are values that do not exclusively adhere to formal markets. This article focuses on the values that construct the ‘good deal’ when getting your car fixed informally. These overlapping and somewhat contradictory values in theory, but commonplace in practice, illustrate how notions of reciprocity and economic calculations interweave and are difficult to entangle one from the other. The ‘good deal’ thus concerns how illegal, yet licit purchases of services are made acceptable when posing them as cheap and simple transactions that simultaneously invoke a realm of closer relations.  相似文献   

4.
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5.
Understanding the matter of insurability as a problem of governing uncertainty has led to thinking ‘the event’ as the object of insurance. How the event is understood and conceptualized determines to a great extent the ways in which its related uncertainty will be rendered. This, in turn, will determine how such uncertainty will be managed. Although this idea has been widely explored with important nuances by various scholars, what has not been discussed in great detail is the problematic idea of temporality and the role time plays in helping constitute the event object of insurance. Such a problem is of great relevance for pushing forward the debate on the limits of insurability. The empirical cases used in this article, Swiss Re's Vita and Kortis, launched and developed during the last decade, relate to hedging the exposure of life and health insurance portfolios to events that would generate excess mortality and excess vitality. The schemes, as explored here, are not simply actuarial, although actuarial practice still figures prominently in their crafting. They involve the strategic articulation of varied forms of knowledge that enshrine particular understandings of time and produce the truth-base of insurable events.  相似文献   

6.
This paper draws upon the history of the funeral market over two centuries to examine three major devices which have played a central role in the funeral economy, both in terms of defining the nature of the ‘goods’ and their attendant value but also in regulating the relations between the Pompes Funèbres and the other institutional actors involved. It highlights the ways in which these devices provide a ‘politics of value’ performing the articulation between the formatting of economic value and the pursuit of political concerns. First, observing the constitutional phase of the private industry, it examines the ‘system of the classes’ as a central device of managing dissonance between conflicting interests. Then, a historical jump leads us to half way through the twentieth century to the market infrastructure formed by the management of ‘care for the deceased’. As a third point, the exponential development of death insurance in recent years appears as an expression of rationalization of funeral arrangement. The analysis of the market devices will highlight an essential property, that is, the incorporation of a ‘calculation formula’ which set up both the profit sharing and the handling of moral and political issues.  相似文献   

7.
Mainstream economics has consistently ignored the iconography of currency, describing money ‘just’ as a commodity. The paper is going to investigate the economic and political significance of the representations of authority and nationality in currency describing how these representation support its acceptability. The aim of the analysis is double: to decipher the visual identity of currency and its contribution to the acceptance of money in day-to-day transactions, as well as to discuss the operational principles of the monetary system as they are uncovered in the iconography of money. By answering these questions, the paper is going to trace the theoretical presuppositions and the cultural stereotypes that inform the representation of economic value and national identity as they are articulated in banknotes and coins with a specific emphasis on the European Monetary Union and the recent financial crisis that is still affecting its periphery.  相似文献   

8.
Money is an ‘instrument of collective memory’ before it is a means of exchange, a unit of account or a store of value. Money's status as a memory technology is particularly significant in light of the role that information and communication technologies now play in economic transactions. Many of the new channels and infrastructures for payments, such as magnetic cards, mobile phones, the wired Internet, social media platforms, and RFID technologies, record detailed transactional data alongside a range of other identifying data. We now have extremely detailed records of the many ways that money circulates, is transferred and is spent. This paper concerns this previously latent transactional data and how it is currently recorded, monetised, and used to inform action. What has been recorded in and about money at different moments in time and how are these categories breaking down? Who has access to and ownership over this collectively produced record and how is it driving new data practices and business models based on the monetisation and application of monetary records? And how might re-engaging with money's mnemonic status help to foreground a politics and ethics of transactional data?  相似文献   

9.
In the last decades of the twentieth century universities in Europe and other OECD countries have undergone a profound transformation. They have evolved from mainly élite institutions for teaching and research to large (public and private) organisations responsible for mass higher education and the production and distribution of new knowledge. Increasingly, new knowledge is produced by universities not only for its own sake but also for potential economic gains.  相似文献   

10.
The purpose of this article is to suggest a model of calculation in art markets based upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and of actor-network theory. It will be argued that Bourdieu's concepts of capitals, economic, symbolic and cultural are useful for the specificity they lend to value making processes in the art market. However, actor-network theory's proposal of a distributed form of agency between humans and non-humans (e.g. calcualtion tools) is favoured here, posing a fundamental challenge to Bourdieu's notion of agency as resting solely at the hands of human agents. In order to understand the performance of calculation, this article explores the role of catalogues as an example of a market device in the Scottish auction market. It will be argued that the performativity of the catalogue cannot be fully understood without taking into account not only how it represents and enacts the value/s of aeshtetic objects, e.g. paintings, but also how this performance is mediated by its role as an aesthetic object.  相似文献   

11.
William James (1919) characterises hypotheses as either live or dead. A hypothesis is live when it is taken into account as a ‘real possibility’. We follow James’ suggestion to not attribute intrinsic properties to hypotheses, but rather investigate how they came into being and look at the effects they generate. Expectations of digital technologies are a topic of vivid debate in the insurance industry. Before these expectations can become ‘live’, they have, in the first place, to be generated by market devices. We investigate how the reinsurance blogpost platform Open Minds functions as an ‘expectation generation device’ on the future of insurance markets. Combining Beckert’s work on the role of fictional expectations with the pragmatist turn in sociology of markets, we propose to study ‘expectation generation devices’, provoking expectations on economic markets. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate the explicit fictional character of the Open Minds contributions, and analyse how a contained space of openness is generated to provoke expectations. We demonstrate how Open Minds can become live through circulation to other expectation generation sites in the insurance industry and beyond. We conclude by reflecting on the importance of expectation generation devices as a particular type of market devices.  相似文献   

12.
This paper develops a theory of rational philanthropyin forming ``cultural capital' and aestheticpreferences. The study maintains that changes incapital market opportunities provide investmentmotives for private and public giving. Theseimplications are examined in a Vector Autoregressive(VAR) model of funding in the arts and humanities inthe United States for the period 1966 to 1997. Theresults suggest private philanthropy increased inresponse to both lower real returns on capital marketassets and cuts in public funding. On the other hand,public funding for the endowments is not explained byany of the variables in the model, including its pasthistory.  相似文献   

13.
Our work pursues a twin aim. Firstly, we explore the influence of organizational size on innovations in museums as well as its impact on museums’ economic, market and social performance. Secondly, we analyse how the (public–private) funding of such organizations impacts innovation and performance. The empirical work is based on information from a survey of 491 museums (British, French, Italian and Spanish). We find that museum size does prove relevant in the commitment to engage in innovation but that public funding of museums does not encourage innovation. We also highlight the importance of the explanatory power of the type of funding on the performance of these cultural organizations. This research also reveals how organizational and technological innovations as well as innovation in value creation in museums enhance economic, market and social performance.  相似文献   

14.
Following recent works that have underlined the increasing search for liquidity in economic exchange, this article studies how illiquid forms of money are converted into liquid forms by corporate finance actors. In the name of ‘shareholder value’, the various forms of value generated by companies (such as ‘trade credit’) tend to be increasingly transformed into liquid forms of money that are easily distributable to shareholders (‘cash flows’). Describing this phenomenon as an example of what anthropologists of money call ‘conversion’, this paper highlights how such a conversion process was necessary for the historical development of ‘shareholder value’ policies in corporate finance. Considering documentary sources and interviews with consultants, auditors, and private equity fund managers involved in ‘cash flow’ optimisation practices, this paper details this conversion phenomenon and shows how it has relied on the historical elaboration of specific metrological, technical, legal, and moral norms.  相似文献   

15.
Drawing on interviews with children’s market researchers, brand managers and other market actors in North America, the UK and Europe, this study analyzes and positions children’s market professionals as knowledge brokers and moral interlocutors who transact between and among clients, colleagues and, at times, parents. The transactions – as understood by practitioners – extend beyond simply seeking to elicit ‘preferences’ for this or that product or experience and suggesting ‘market solutions’ to the immediate business problem at hand. Rather, the cultural labor exerted here resembles a continual sorting process in pursuit of the distinction between the child as a dependent economic actor from the child as a moral being worthy of recognition and commercial deference. They thereby strive to enable the continuity – i.e. erase the boundary – between markets and culture by enacting sympathy, sentiment and even intimacy in the conceptualization and execution of research. Investigating how these market professionals understand, construct and act upon children as economic actors, while situated amidst public, moral discourses to the contrary, opens possibilities to examine how value arises in the cultural practice of making social persons and how social personhood in some ways modulates and informs market exigencies.  相似文献   

16.
This article provides an empirical investigation of the effects of the ownership and organizational structure on the performance of cultural institutions. More specifically, we consider how museums are effective in their function of disseminating culture to audiences and contributing to the local development. By exploiting a unique data set based on the 2011 census of Italian museums, we develop performance indices of accessibility, visitors’ experience, web visibility and promotion of the local cultural context. Using count data models, we regress such measures on the type of organization. We distinguish between governmental museums, public museums whose administration is either outsourced or has financial autonomy and private museums. We control for the most salient characteristics of a museum, competition pressure and some proxies of potential audience. Our evidence shows that private museums, public museums with financial autonomy and outsourced museums outperform public museums run as sub-units of culture departments. This paper contributes to the cultural economics and public policy and administration literature by adding insights into the effect of outsourcing and administrative decentralization in the public cultural sector.  相似文献   

17.
ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of editorial playlists in Spotify’s streaming economy. In particular, it approaches Spotify’s playlists as container technologies – i.e. technical solutions that assemble, preserve, and transport music objects and thereby uphold logistical operations within the music industry. Such an approach seeks to complement previous research concerning playlists, which has often analyzed their emotional and affective dimensions but paid less attention to how playlists enhance calculative, mathematical, and logistical retail flows within the online music economy. On the one hand, the article considers how playlists – like containers in general – materialize principles of modularization and automation in ways that enhance control and remote oversight. On the other hand, it discusses how the playlist is far from a perfected means of measurement and control, and sometimes acts as an unruly transport device. Ultimately, the article shows how the playlist format occupies an uneasy position between order and disorder within the digital music economy which has not yet been fully accounted for in the context of music-oriented media studies.  相似文献   

18.
This paper investigates the dynamic and performative construction of publics in public engagement exercises. In this investigation, we, on the one hand, analyse how public engagement settings as political machineries frame particular kinds of roles and identities for the participating publics in relation to ‘the public at large’. On the other hand, we study how the participating citizens appropriate, resist and transform these roles and identities, and how they construct themselves and the participating group in relation to wider publics. The empirical basis of our argument is a discussion of four different kinds of participation events in Austria. Building on these observations we develop conclusions about the public up-take of public participation in technoscience and the role of public engagement in current techno-political cultures.  相似文献   

19.
Consultants have emerged as significant actors in the assembling of culture after neoliberalism. This paper considers their role in the assemblage of the British subsidised cultural sector as part of the assembling of culture more generally. In particular, it is concerned with the status of consultants as private sector actors, which differentiates them from other forms of expertise that tend to be located in the state apparatus, in that they must earn money to resource their work and remain solvent. By placing their work of assemblage in relation to this imperative, we can understand the difference it makes. Based on a close study of a London cultural consultancy, it is argued that specific governmental and managerial trends send trajectories of value through the assemblage which the networked consultants attempt to control and capture. These economies have seen consultants contribute to the broad shift in the assemblage of culture from something that occupied a distinctive sphere requiring protection from the ravages of the market to a potential contributor to economic and social development.  相似文献   

20.
This article develops a detailed overview of literature on the relationship between monetary organization, understood as currencies and central banks, and issues of national identity and nationalism. It demonstrates how the literature on this subject for the past 20 years has developed into a distinct research field and the article sketches a set of different methodological approaches as well as geographical and thematical variations within the field. In particular, the overview points to a recent shift in focus from a preoccupation with the identity-cultivating qualities of monetary organization to an emphasis on how collective identities legitimize monetary organization. Based on the literature review, the article points to two underdeveloped themes for future research to investigate: (1) further studies on the interrelation between the legitimacy of monetary organization and national identity, (2) an increased focus on central banks and monetary authorities, as well as the historical development in which monetary organization evolved in concert with ideas of the national identity and nationalism.  相似文献   

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