The new economy
As noted, we intend our title - ‘the technological economy’ - to draw together a range of issues connecting technology and economy: economics as a technology; economies as material arrangements of technical devices; but also new approaches to the traditional issue of the place of technology in socio-economic change.
All of these issues have been given a new urgency by contemporary debates about the so-called ‘new economy’ and its many cognate terms - information society, network society, knowledge-based economy, cultural economy, and so on. This diversity of labels and metaphors points not only to confusion but also to seemingly inevitable convergences between technology and economy, technology studies and economic sociology, that develop (and proliferate) the more theoretical convergences discussed above. In particular, according to the new economy theorists, technological innovation (above all in new media and biotechnologies) places information and knowledge at the centre of economic processes (e.g. Leadbetter 1999; Quah 2004). However, partly through extremely broad definitions of information and knowledge, new economy and associated terms point to claims about the increased centrality of cultural and social relations in economic processes, whether through new forms of (networked) economic organisation, or the ‘dematerialisation’ of economic factors (for example, the centrality of branding, consumer culture or the rise of services and ‘non-material’ or less material commodities) (Thrift 2002).As we have noted, Karin Knorr-Cetina’s exploration of the terminal screen in financial trading rooms moves in the opposite direction from Castells’ global account of network society (Castells 1996). Electronic linkages do not lead to a web of social interconnections, or a disaggregation of markets into specific flows of information, but rather to a concentrated yet flowing representation of ‘the market’ that embodies it as a ‘life form’ or ‘greater being’.
The terminal as mediation subsumes Castellian networks but the latter do not provide the metaphors or procedures that constitute the lifeworld of the social actors or the forms of their transactions. This precise attention to the specific instantiation of technology and economy allows Knorr- Cetina to develop a different analytic language, more appropriate to this market and its historical development. The metaphor of the network, so readily embraced by many, is inadequate to the task. As she has argued elsewhere:Networks are sparse social structures and it is difficult to see how they can incorporate the patterns of intense and dynamic interaction, the symbolic improvements, and other specificities that we observe in concrete domains... the emphasis on ties, their character, and what flows through them leaves out the details of how the connections are implemented.
(Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger 2002b: 392)
Second - to return to our opening discussion of economics as technology - terms such as ‘new economy’ and ‘the network society’, are best approached not as a good or bad account of actual transformations, but rather as a way of framing socio-economic processes. In this light, such notions should not be understood as (falsifiable) descriptions of an increasingly dematerialised and networked economy On the contrary, they form part of attempts to establish new material economic arrangements. They are models of the political and economic future (Barry 2001: 87). To take but one of a multitude of contemporary examples, the Ghanaian government’s recently published Information Technology policy document (2003) not only examines the transformation of every area of governance (administration, health, education, etc.) through ICTs but also frames this in terms of an epochal shift in which Ghana, having missed the industrial revolution, will leap from agricultural economy to knowledge-based economy This document - as so many others, including those produced by the development agencies and donors on which Ghana depends - assumes as given and ineluctable an historical narrative as well as a set of techno-economic concepts that also constitute a programme.Jessop’s chapter in this volume directs us to investigate the heterogeneous social agencies that install new economy as a master narrative and the equally heterogeneous apparatuses through which these narratives are to be realised (or not, as in the case of so many Southern countries).
As Jessop argues, the performativity of the ‘new economy’ cannot be grasped by a culturalism that simply addresses these discourses as discourses. In the Ghanaian case, what is salient is not simply the prestige of a new economic narrative but the way in which it is imbricated in the material structures of relationships with development agencies, the practical arrangements of commercial trading partners and financial institutions, the popular practices of local SME entrepreneurs drawn to a local ICT sector that is already formatted in terms of business models and practices that draw on information society metaphors and concepts.We have earlier referred to the breadth of the field of economic knowledges, which not only include economics, accountancy, law, marketing and management theory, but also the knowledge of non-experts such as citizens, workers, and consumers. The significance of these sources of knowledge has been variable and contested, and mediated by other forms of expertise, and through various forms of collective political practice. Historically, political parties, trade unions, intellectuals, political economists, anthropologists, sociologists, ethicists and market researchers have all claimed to be able to re-present the knowledge of social actors, and to speak on behalf of ‘society’ (Rose 1999; Strathern 2004). At the same time, political practices such as strikes, direct actions and consumer boycotts have been used to express the knowledge and demands of non-experts. Rather than draw a clear distinction between the practices of experts and non-experts, one might point to a continuum of different forms of social scientific and political practice through which economic knowledge is demonstrated to others. In this collection, two further chapters make clear the importance of the economic knowledge of non-experts in contemporary economic life.
First, as Clark, Thrift and Tickell’s chapter indicates, an important meaning of ‘new economy’ might be the further proliferation of economics through its mediatisation (or simply popularisation) eroding boundaries between professionalised expertise and general publics, or setting up new dynamics between them.
In their example, different financial consumers and producers are watching the same financial infotainment screens, though often framing them in different ways. Financial experts have always wanted to know which way ‘the common herd’ will move (especially during bubble periods) and therefore want to know what they know. Clark et al., however, are describing a further twist in which the general public and their infotainment pundits are exerting demonstrable force on the decisions of financial experts and in which PR management of financial information is a significant aspect of corporate operations. Moreover - intriguingly akin to Knorr-Cetina’s terminal traders - we are asked to understand economic processes through the power of new representations of the economy made possible by new forms of technological mediation (financial television networks or Reuter’s information ‘pipes’). That is to say, at least in this sector, the ‘new economy’ may have an analytical reality in describing new socio-technical arrangements for representing ‘the economy’ that structure economic practice.Lury’s chapter develops four intersecting arguments. One is an argument about the history of marketing, and the increasingly critical importance of the brand as an object of marketing. As she notes, the notion of the brand is increasingly associated with global companies (Nike, Starbucks, Virgin) rather than specific products. Second, and crucially, the development of brands has come to rely on the knowledge of the consumer, and not just on that of the marketing professional. The relation between marketing and the consumer was “no longer viewed in terms of stimulus response... [but] as an exchange, or perhaps better, an interaction” (this volume). Third, despite this, she notes the continuing reluctance of both marketing and the law (in different ways) to acknowledge the knowledge of the consumer. Fourth, Lury makes a more general argument about how it is possible to understand the brand as an object and global life form (Franklin, Lury and Stacey 2000; Lury, this volume).
For Lury, the brand has to be understood not as a stable entity but as an object which is both dynamic and indeterminate: ‘an abstract machine for product differentiation’. In developing this argument, Lury’s analysis of the brand questions the simplistic oppositions between the materiality of the ‘old’ economy and the immateriality of the ‘new’. Moreover, like Knorr-Cetina, Lury stresses the critical importance of understanding the market as an object which is continually being remade in time. Read together, the chapters by Lury and Clark et al. also point to the growing importance of brands as an object of both financial journalism and collective political action.16We have framed this book in terms of the encounter between science and technology studies and economic sociology. However, the chapters might also be re-read in the context of a developing encounter between media studies and economic sociology. Of course, media studies has had a strong interest in the political economy of the media, as well as in the ideology of media representations of the economy (Garnham 1990). There has also been an increasing interest in the wider economic importance of the media and cultural industries (Negus 2002). However, the chapters here indicate the possibility of a different form of intersection between media studies and economic sociology. Barry’s chapter can be understood as a study of how media events may destabilise the distinction between the economic and the political. And Lury, Knorr-Cetina, Clark, Thrift and Tickell all indicate the need to analyse the mediatisation of what we have termed economic knowledges. Rather than view the economy simply as a context within which the media operate, or view media representations as ideological, these chapters point to the critical importance of mediatised knowledges in the formation of economic actors and markets, as well as their politicisation. As these chapters suggest, there are potentially fruitful convergences between the concerns of sociologists and anthropologists of science and technology and media theorists in the field of economic sociology.