The organisers of the 23 April 2010 “After Markets: Researching Hybrid Arrangements” workshop at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, have now posted the recordings of the event as well as a report summarising the talks. You could characterise this event as “Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies” (to borrow the subtitle of Pinch and Swedberg’s Living in a Material World book, some of whose contributors were also present), although there were plenty of people there from the wider reaches of sociology and anthropology, as well as business school academics. See photos here. This event followed in the now well-established tradition of stimulating inter- or cross-disciplinary encounters organised by the Oxford STS group (see e.g. Scalography, A Turn to Ontology, and the Does STS Mean Business workshops).
If you want to get to grips with this event, I suggest you start with reading the Provocation Piece [PDF] first, then read the Report [PDF], and then listen to the talks. I found particularly interesting Will Davies’ talk, who used the example of the change of the UK “sick note” form to a “fit note” to illustrate how the boundaries between the “economic” and the “social” get reconstituted; Fabian Muniesa’s talk on how marketplaces can be described in terms of “trials of explicitness”, drawing on Sloterdijk, Deleuze and ANT; Emmanuel Didier’s talk on the mechanics of how assemblages decompose, suggesting that the STS tradition in its focus on innovation neglected the issue of decay; and Linsey McGoey and Noortje Marres’ paper in which – similarly to Didier – they focused on “experimental failure,” presenting a typology of the ways in which experiments can fail.
Those interested in economic sociology, the performativity of markets, and the role of actor-network theory in producing these types of accounts might also be interested in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, a new book edited by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu.
On 7 December 2007 a few members of ANTHEM attended a memorable discussion session on the occasion of the launch of Market Devices, a volume edited by Michel Callon, Yuval Millo and Fabian Muniesa. The book, published in the Sociological Review Monograph Series, is a collection of case studies on the performativity of markets, building on the efforts of Michel Callon to extend actor-network theory into the domain of economic sociology.
ANTHEM 