Issues with economic sociology

While Callon’s approach constitutes a fundamental critique and repositioning of conventional economic thinking, it also challenges economic sociology, including its ‘cultural turn’, in several crucial respects.

In this approach, that which is ‘outside’ the economic does not relate to economic processes as a ‘social context’ but rather as a range of heterogeneous actors whose variable roles are registered through acting on the very boundary of the economic sphere or market institution.

In this way, Callon (1998b: 50-1) strongly argues against the ‘two pitfalls’ that economic sociology regularly stumbles into. On the one hand, it constantly tries to enrich homo economicus by giving this agent ‘a bit more soul’ by importing ‘value, culture, rules or passions’; in fact it should be trying to understand ‘his simplicity and poverty’. In effect, it assumes, like the economists it criticises, that calculation is actually asocial and amoral, and these deficiencies need to be corrected. On the other hand, economic sociology adopts the strategy of denunciation, treating economic theory as impoverished, to be replaced (not enriched) by a ‘sociology of real man’, as a totality. Both, argues Callon, avoid the real issue of explaining the emergence of calculative agency:

Yes, homo economicus really does exist... Of course, he exists in the form of many species and his lineage is multiple and ramified. But if he exists he is obviously not to be found in a natural state - this expression has little meaning. He is formatted, framed and equipped with prostheses which help him make his calculations and which are, for the most part, produced by economics.

It is not a matter of giving a soul back to a dehumanized agent, nor of rejecting the very idea of his existence. The objective may be to explore the diversity of calculative agencies, forms and distributions, and hence of organized markets. The market is no longer that cold, implacable and impersonal monster which imposes its laws and procedures while extending them ever further. It is a many-sided, diversified, evolving device which the social sciences as well as the actors themselves contribute to reconfigure.

(Callon 1998b: 51)

However, there is also a third area of contention which appears to place Callon and many economic sociologists and anthropologists on the same side in relation to the other major tradition in this area: political economy. Whatever conclusions he comes to about the reality of markets and economic rationality, Callon derives them from analyses of contingent social arrangements: they are not manifestations of ‘deeper’ processes. Are entities like money and markets to be understood in terms of their multiple molecular forms, or are there (as Marxist realists would have it) processes that - however contradictory - sustain both generalised economic forms and their diverse manifestations? Can the structuring of economic institutions and processes be accounted through the alignment of heterogeneous arrangements rather than by ‘capital’, ‘labour’, and other macro-entities? In the context of such an approach, does the notion of ‘capitalism’ have any meaning or value? Is it possible to knit together an ethnographic view of ‘monies’ as local constructs with a view of ‘money’ as a macro-phenomenon with potentially diverse manifestations (Fine and Lapavitsas 2000; Zelizer 2000)? For Ben Fine, Callon’s ‘bonfire’ of macro­structures is extraordinary. A continuing commitment to a structural account - preferably, political economy - is necessary if social science is to offer a genuine alternative to economics’ imperialism, rather than one which ends up being complicit with some of the main arguments of contemporary economics (Fine 2003: 481-2).

In fact, these debates with political economy revolve around two distinct, if interconnected issues, both of which concern different aspects of the problem of generalising from local and contingent cases. On the one hand, the stress on specific and unstable assemblages may appear to eradicate the entire plane of macro­economics. Callon’s response is to argue that the macro-structures that are customarily treated topographically as a higher level of abstraction can instead be analysed simply as another kind of locality, as a similarly heterogeneous assemblage of agencies. This would not be unfamiliar say to historians of the post-war international financial order. As we have noted, Knorr-Cetina’s analysis of international currency dealing convincingly treats the macro as an interconnected product of local practices.

On the other hand, the focus on micro-level contingency does make it difficult to visualise the replication and transformation of structuring processes over time. Political economy has, of course, traditionally captured these structuring processes through the notion that there are certain economic forms which are intrinsic to capitalism. Capital, labour, and value for example may be manifested in very different, contradictory and changing ways, but there is thought to be an underlying logic that both makes sense of this diversity and actually constrains it. The epistemological and political grounds for refusing this form of ‘realism’ are well rehearsed. The difficulty is to write histories of capitalist economies that do not rely on the notion of capitalism as a unified totality, or the idea of a universal process of development or modernisation. Here, we make three observations. First, peripheral and non-capitalist economic activities should not be thought of simply as a set of residual and resistant forms. Rather, as post-colonial research demonstrates, such activities play a vital part in the development of contemporary forms of economic knowledge and administration (Mitchell 2002; Roitman 2003).

By contrast to classical political economy, anthropological approaches such as those of Gallon and Miller meaningfully use notions such as markets and commodities while simultaneously leading us to question the extent to which we can meaningfully deploy any such analytical categories if the focus is entirely on instability, diversity emergence and specificity. In fact we might use such categories in quite different ways: as underlying forms (within political economy), as the virtualist projections of economic engineers, or as active forms of economic knowledge deployed by economic actors, including the social analyst. What is clear is that each strategy involves a dialectical relationship between ‘our’ categories and ‘theirs’, rather than a radical nominalism or avoidance of all abstraction.

Slater’s chapter in this volume addresses the problem of how to define markets in a way that captures both diversity and generality. The argument proceeds by returning to the previous issue, the question of ‘calculativeness’: Miller is correct that much market behaviour involves more entanglement, more involvement of diverse social values. However, in market systems they enter into economic action in a very specific form, as objects of instrumental calculation. This arises from the more fundamental defining feature of markets - alienation - that also produces more diverse forms of calculation than Gallon considers. In particular, Slater’s paper investigates the kinds of cultural calculation that are found in advertising and marketing, in which the more ‘totalising’ configurations of economic and social values are in fact placed within a market frame.