Market actors: framing and ambiguity

If we shift the focus within Callon’s own work away from ‘calculativeness’ and concentrate instead on his concepts of framing and disentanglement, we can concentrate on the most fundamental framing (property and ownership) without presuming any specific form of calculation.

This would seem a long way from the position that ‘homo economicus really does exist’. The implication of Callon’s notion of market instability is that social actors are as involved in disputing the boundaries and identities of markets as they are in operating within them. If that is the case, then an economic actor has to be seen simultaneously as within and without the market frame, as one who is able to calculate in specific ways, but who is also engaged in the framing process itself. And if actors do not take these market boundaries as given frames, rationally calculating within them, then they cannot be neo-classical economic actors. In Callon’s account, there are two particular features through which this theme might be pursued: ‘overflowing’ and reflexivity. Actors and objects remain connected with networks ‘outside’ the economic frame, therefore remaining potentially open to questions about its boundaries and potentially aware of those boundaries as actively produced and enforced.

I should like to pursue the implications of this aspect of Callon’s work by taking up three issues which particularly concern the relationship between markets and culture: ‘disembeddedness’ and the ambiguity of framings; economics as culture and as ideology; and marketing and cultural calculation. Each issue points to more diverse, contradictory and ambiguous forms of calculation than those which Callon usually cites.

‘Disembedding’ and ‘disentangling’

The first section of this chapter approached the notion of Calculativeness by a different route, that of commodities, alienation and therefore instrumental rationality, the process by which one lifeworld becomes the object of calculation to another, a possibility which is premised on the sharp separation or disentanglement that arises when transactions are framed in terms of limited property rights. What makes markets specific, and different from the moral totalization of other forms of exchange, is that the meanings in which the object is entangled are moral for the other in a transaction, but not for me. As Miller in fact puts it, ‘Much of commerce consists of each player trying to second guess the entanglements of the other. How can we sell the car as though it was already part of the purchaser’s life?’ The transactors and objects come to the transaction absolutely steeped in meaning. They never lose their meanings in the sense of being abstracted formally and quantitatively; but they are framed in a way that is quite different from much of the rest of social life.

It might help here to distinguish sharply between ‘disembedding’ and ‘disentangling’. AsJessop argues, ‘disembedding’ has been bound up with Polanyi’s macro-sociological argument about the relation of economy to culture and the extent to which modern economy can be properly treated as an autonomous object of analysis. Gallon is clearly critical of Polanyi, citing him as an example of a ‘social context’ approach to explaining the emergence of economic forms. In the embedding/disembedding argument, society appears as a container or framework that assigns a particular location to the economic, and is therefore capable of separating out culture and economy in a global way. ‘Disentanglement’ is quite different. It is frankly dialectical, and this dialectic is played out, with only temporary stabilization, without cease: framing ‘extricates’ (Gallon 1998: 253) agents and entities from the networks of interaction in which they have achieved some kind of social existence, in order to ‘push them onto a clearly demarcated “stage” ’. However, like a prop or actor placed on a theatrical stage, these entities retain their links with the outside world (as do all the actors, or audiences); indeed, to continue the theatrical metaphor, it is hard to see how any entity could continue to be meaningful on the stage or in the market without continuing to draw on its ‘cultural’ meanings. This goes for the objects that are transacted as well as the transactors who, Gallon argues, never cease to be simultaneously involved in other worlds, outside the frame.

Disentanglement, therefore, does not signify the disembedding of economy in the sense of a separation of economy from culture; it is rather a reframing of culturally meaningful items that never cease to draw on their ‘external’ meanings. Indeed, as argued further below, acts of framing and disentanglement necessarily involve cultural knowledge, and actually bring cultural issues into the heart of economic action. Gallon explores the ways in which this dialectic renders market boundaries permanently unstable.

At the same time, we can put this more strongly: the impurity of actors, objects and calculations is a crucial strategic tool for market actors themselves, all of whom have as much interest in destabilizing markets as in stabilizing them (Slater 2003). Framings are political and strategic battlelines - over liabilities, profits, ethical and political interests. Gallon’s examples of technical disputes, in which knowledge claims can be adjudicated by identifying and quantifying causal relations, are only a special case. If we turn instead to advertising and marketing, for example, as we shall below, we find that these entire practices are constituted by the project of destabilizing market boundaries and competitive relationships as the basis of their market behaviour, and they do this on the basis of cultural calculations. These practices operate directly on and across the framing/overflowing process; they therefore exemplify the impurity of kinds of calculation, but they look quite pure if considered as instrumental rationality.

One possible reason why Gallon tends towards an overly objectified and abstract version of calculation is because he does not go far enough with Goffman’s frame analysis.

To return one last time to Sophie and the salesman: Miller’s story makes intuitive sense because we know that in carrying out an economic action these economic actors may not perceive any or many elements of it in economic terms. Certainly, there is no reason to assume that Sophie perceives the presence of a ‘market’ in any meaningful sense, and therefore really does not frame her calculations ‘properly’, although, as stated above, she will simply have to do so when she comes to sign the contract and write her cheque. Her own framings of what is relevant in deciding on a car can be highly personal to her up to the point at which an actual market transaction is accomplished. This hardly gives us a warrant to say that the market does not exist: independently of Sophie’s perceptions, there is a technology of alienation that does indeed individualize exchange and even produces a social mathematics (prices) that seems to add up independently of her perceptions.

At the same time, however, we need to accept that social actors themselves operate with multiple and contradictory framings of market behaviour as well as different concepts of markets. For example, Karen Knorr-Cetina’s (Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger 2000) accounts of financial markets include an analysis of how the same actor can talk about the market as both entirely without form and at the same time as a meaningfully totalized entity; that is to say, they may operate within a permanently split perspective as to what kind of frame contains them, and what holds it together.

Economists and economies

The possibility of ambiguous and multiple framings raises another set of issues, about the role of economics in establishing this peculiar framing. What Callon offers is a vision of markets as a kind of technological accomplishment: alienation and calculability (whether quantitative or instrumental) have to be engineered, and Callon’s example of the strawberry market gives a clear image of this engineering. Division, display, timing, legal and other definitions, are all orchestrated to produce collections of things which may be traded at prices. However, I use the term ‘orchestrated’ quite consciously: there is a sense of both marshalled organiza­tion and governing plan, of uniformity and direction, which is at odds both with Callon’s own sense of the complexity of these accomplishments and with our increasing empirical knowledge of the diversity of markets and market behaviours. This sense of ‘orchestration’ comes to a head in his claim that markets are the product of economists. It is difficult to reconcile this assessment of the power of economists with Callon’s broader contention that the framing of markets is a contested and unstable arrangement established across numerous technologies and agent networks. Even highly planned markets, like the strawberry one, are not only more overdetermined than this, but also do not necessarily behave the way economists planned once they open their doors to real market actors. We also have to recognize that markets successfully emerged long before neo-classical economists were invented.

At certain points in Callon’s argument the claim that economists construct markets is supported by a much broadened definition of economics. The claim makes greater sense if one treats ‘economics’ in the same way that Foucauldian perspectives understand ‘government’, a dispersal of discourses and practices that, in this case, involves everything from academic theory and ideology, through policies enunciated across a wide range of agencies, down to the logics informing the most mundane economic practices. Economics is not a set of falsifiable claims about the economy, or an ideological construction of the economy, but rather a participant in its construction. This makes huge sense in terms of the diffusion of neo-liberalism through virtually every social institution over the last twenty years, with very real effects on the marketization, and consequent abstraction, of social relationships. As in governmentality, such economic discourses have some kind of analytical unity (though it is unclear how), yet they are at the same time diffused through countless institutional spaces. They operate not as directives but as reconfigurations of subjectivity as practised.

However, there are at least two problems here. First, the very process of disaggre­gating economics into a broad swathe of embedded knowledges dilutes any sense of what we mean by economics. There is a difference between the formal structures of macro-economic modellers and the practical knowledges of a car salesperson in their showroom. They are not economists in the same sense, although it is true that both can be treated as operating social technologies from which economic structures emerge. Paradoxically, this way of defining economics both understates and overstates the coherence of economics as a social force. On the one hand, it makes it difficult to grasp neo-liberalism as an ideology, which it is, and yet at the very same moment all economic practices appear unified - as if macro-economists and car salesmen are all pushing in the same direction, with the same interests, technologies, understandings and so on. Indeed, if it is pushed too far, the entire argument appears to be circular or even tautological. If one defends the idea that economists construct economies by defining economics as ‘all forms of economic practice and knowledge’, then surely one is simply asserting what needs to be explained.

Second, Gallon seems to take the familiar Foucauldian step of presuming effects from discourses. The relation between theory and practice is an issue that cannot simply be dissolved. Even if we assumed that all ‘economists’ are pushing towards alienated and calculative social transactions and spaces, we cannot read the effects of these practices off their own discourses. We need to take an open-ended and indeed ethnographic approach to the way specific markets are constructed. By the same token, we need to expect the appearance of contradictory and ambiguous forms of calculation.

It is interesting to connect this argument with the notion of virtualism as pro­pounded by Miller and Carrier, which also has a strong affinity with major themes in Strathern’s work. Virtualism argues that central economic models and policies are developed in relation to an idealized or virtual concept of the economy, and by those with the power to make these in some way effective. We might compare Bourdieu’s (1998) recent formulation of neo-liberalism as a ‘strong discourse’, one which has ‘the means of making itself true and empirically viable’ because it orients ‘the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships’ and hence constitutes a ‘scientific programme, converted into a plan of political action’. Miller and Carrier both start from something much closer to the notion of ideology, which has a certain kind of unity and also some relation to issues of truth and falsity. Most importantly, whereas Callon seems to presume that economics is realized in economies, Miller argues that virtualism and capitalism may be quite opposed. This has the advantage of not presuming effects from discourses.

The central problem in the case of relating economics to economies - as in the issues of disentanglement and ambiguous framings - is that we need to make space not only for a diversity of modes of calculation within the overall structure of market exchange, but also for contradictory and multiple framings, some of which might very well approximate to the situation described by Miller, at least in the way market actors understand their situation.