Introduction
The sociology and anthropology of economic life keep threatening to dissolve a tension that seems both necessary and yet very difficult to sustain: how can we talk about ‘markets’, or ‘the economic’, in any meaningful sense when we have resolved their key elements into processes of social and cultural construction? The problem is, first, one of a double abstraction: there is the false abstraction of economic formalism but there is also the real abstraction of economic processes.
Critique the former and one might miss the latter; formulate the latter wrongly and one is likely to make a return to economic formalism. Second, this tension is refracted through methodological divisions between, on the one hand, an ethnographic particularism that focuses on the diversity, contingency and emergence of local organizations of exchange and therefore treats economic categories, such as ‘markets’ as at best useful abstractions; and, on the other hand, macro-formulations (such as political economy) which accord these categories both reality and explanatory power.The problem (which in many respects is a rerun of the formalism versus substan- tivism debates) is that the critique of economic formalism partly depends on arguing that economic abstraction is not an actual fact of contemporary life. If economic relations really have become abstract, we need to acknowledge that markets have a systemic character that cannot be reduced to the broader social relations in which they may be embedded. Michel Callon’s work - particularly as it has been received in much Anglo-American economic sociology - seems poised at precisely this point. Some would charge that he has already slid too far down the formalist slope, that he concedes far too much to economic models of rational calculation, which appear as the point of departure for the entire analysis as well as the endstate that is to be explained.
The central question Callon poses could be taken to be: ‘how is the formally rational behaviour (“calculativeness”) described by neoclassical economics actually achieved?’, whereas the focal point of economic sociology and anthropology has been a denial that they have ever existed or ever could exist.This chapter is an attempt to negotiate this tension between economy and culture, the abstract and the substantive. The first part of the chapter argues, against more culturalist positions, that it is valid to distinguish markets from other modes of exchange according to a formal property. In order to articulate the more culturalist side of the story, the discussion starts with Daniel Miller’s (2002) critique of Callon, and particularly his hypothetical example of a highly culturally entangled market event. The conclusion of this discussion will be that what is crucial to market exchange is the way in which these increasing entanglements become the objects of instrumental rationality. This is because the fundamental defining feature of a market is a kind of transaction rather than a purified form of calculation: the ‘alienation’ of goods in the form of property, which entails limits on the kind of social relationship formed between transactors. Callon’s framework is most successful when it focuses on the mechanisms through which these limits are established and contested. However, it is less successful when it tries to specify markets in terms of a mode of calculation. Although Callon explicitly emphasizes diversity in the kinds of calculativeness and market structures that emerge, it is arguable that he does not capture sufficient diversity or the right kinds of diversity. Hence the second part of this chapter explores ambiguity and contradiction within and between modes of calculating, partly drawing on Callon’s dialectic of framing and overflowing, and specifically considers cultural calculation in marketing and advertising.