‘The technological economy’ is a pun whose multiple meanings reflect the complexity of new understandings of ‘the economic’.
The many and diverse issues that connect ‘technology’ and ‘economy’ are indicated first by the increasing, and productive, convergences between science and technology studies on the one hand and economic sociology on the other.
This intellectual agenda resonates with a wider range of relations between technology and economy that provide the stuff of contemporary attempts to understand the economic: economics as a technology; economies as material arrangements of technical devices; the nature of technological innovation and its role in socio-economic change; and models of contemporary society which draw on scientific and technological concepts, such as network and complexity.We begin with two commonplace observations regarding contemporary economic life. The first observation is that the production and consumption of knowledge, information and culture have become increasingly central to economic activity. We live in what has variously been described as a knowledge-based economy, a post-industrial society, an information society, a new economy, a cultural economy, an economy of signs or a network society (Bell 1973; Lyotard 1984; Lash and Urry 1994; Castells 1996; Webster 1996; du Gay and Pryke 2002). Within such a society, the generation of new knowledge and other immaterial goods is thought to be increasingly important to economic success. Economic growth over the long term is reckoned to depend on innovation and creativity One sense of the title of this volume refers to the critical part that innovation and new technology have come to play in economic life.
The second observation is that there has been a huge growth in the production of knowledge about economic life. Economic and financial analysts produce assessments of current and future performance of firms, industrial sectors, and national and global economies (Miller and Rose 1990; Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2000;Jessop, this volume).
Political activists, policy makers and social theorists have sought to develop accounts of the globalisation of economic activity and the weaknesses of policies and politics that confine themselves to the level of the nation state. Firms and public institutions are increasingly subject to various forms of audit and monitoring. Campaigners try to make visible the negative effects of economic activity on the environment and the protection of human rights. Writers on business seek to find the key to the generation of successful managers, brands and creative organisations. Market researchers attempt to develop increasingly nuanced accounts of consumer behaviour, using the tools of semiotics, focus groups and ethnography as well as more conventional forms of statistical survey. Funding agencies try to measure the quantity and assess the quality of innovative activity using a variety of techniques and measures. Governments seek to remodel their economies as knowledge economies and information societies. A second sense of the title refers to the way that knowledge of economic life can itself be understood as what we might call, following Foucault, a technology of government (Barry et al. 1996; Rose 1999).What are the possible responses to these observations for economic sociology and, more broadly, for social theory? On the one hand, the increasing importance of new media, knowledge and information in economic life could be understood simply as a further stage in the development of a global capitalist economy. In this view the older form of industrial manufacturing society has become increasingly displaced by a new kind of economy and society organised around the production, consumption and global circulation of knowledge and information. Concepts such as the network society or post-industrial society seem to capture this transformation. On the other hand, from the perspective of academic sociology and anthropology, the forms of knowledge generated by the growing armies of auditors, brand consultants, economic forecasters, and market analysts are generally viewed as quite impoverished especially given the continued power and prestige of neoliberal and neoclassical economic perspectives.
Viewed in this way, the task of social science has been to develop a different, deeper and richer account, which is able to demonstrate the intellectual weakness of such narrowly economic or instrumental forms of reason. Depending on the sociologist, what is thought to be required instead is recognition of the cultural embeddedness of economic activity and/or a critical attention to the changing structural forms of the capitalist economy. In so doing, economic sociology has marginalised or ignored the significance of economic knowledge itself.The chapters in this book question both of these orthodox responses, and point to the need for new approaches to economic sociology and anthropology. Consider the second observation that economic activity is the object of increasing levels of scrutiny and analysis. Our starting point is the recognition that the forms of knowledge produced about economic life are performative, and not just descriptive or analytical. Practices such as financial and economic analysis and market research are not just more or less bad descriptions of social and economic life. They are more than just indicators of the growth of instrumental rationality. They create phenomena (Osborne and Rose 1999).
The idea of the ‘economy’ itself is a good example of this. As Timothy Mitchell argues, ‘the economy’ is an invention of quite a recent date. When Adam Smith, in the nineteenth century, used the idea of economy the word carried the sense of prudence or frugality. The notion that the economy referred to “the structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or region... dates only from the mid-twentieth century” (Mitchell 1998: 84). At this time the contemporary idea of the economy developed, both as popular and political expression (‘the economy is in a mess’, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’) and as a term of social and economic analysis (‘the Egyptian economy’, ‘the global economy’).
To say that the idea of the economy was invented does not mean that it should be thought of merely as a fiction or a social construction. An invention, after all, acquires a reality and a force, depending on how many come to adopt it as a practical tool, and how far it is imitated by others (Tarde 2001). Certainly, in the late twentieth century the idea of ‘the economy’ has come to be extraordinarily powerful, replicated globally (cf. Appadurai 1990). A whole range of efforts are made to measure and compare the performance and future prospects of specific economies within the global economy, and determine the causes of economic success and failure. At the same time, investors, governments, voters and consumers makejudgements and perform actions on the basis of these measurements.Studies of the performative role of various forms of knowledge of economic life have developed from a number of related directions. First, anthropologists and sociologists of science and technology have increasingly focused their attention on economic analysis and financial knowledge, as well as natural science and engineering. The work of Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michel Callon, Donald Mackenzie, John Law, and others has demonstrated the value of science and technology studies to economic sociology (Callon 1998a; Law and Akrich 1994, 2002; Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger 2000, 2002b; Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2000; Mackenzie 2001, 2003; Mackenzie and Millo 2003). We focus, in particular, on the work of Michel Callon, whose approach provided the inspiration for this volume and its concerns, and our own collaboration (Barry and Slater 2002).1
In his book, The Laws of the Markets, Callon argued strongly that sociologists need to rethink radically their relation to economics (Callon 1998a). Rather than denounce economics for its ideological content or its impoverished account of culture, sociologists’ efforts might be better spent examining the role of economics in the constitution of markets.
Instead of viewing economics as bad science it would be better to view it as a set of technical practices that have a stronger relation to real economies than sociologists have often imagined. Seen in these terms the concept of economics has to be understood broadly to include not just academic economic theory, but all the institutions, techniques and professional practices (such as accountancy and audit) that serve to make actions and objects calculable.2 “Social science [including economics] is no more outside the reality it studies than are the natural and life sciences. Like natural science it actively participates in shaping the thing it describes” (Callon 1998b: 29). Callon is less interested in the question of whether economics gives a good or bad representation of markets than in the part played by economics (in a broad sense) in performing markets. His approach demands not just an economic anthropology but also an attention to the history and anthropology of economics.The work of Callon and other sociologists and anthropologists of science, discussed in more detail later, intersects with broadly post-Foucauldian approaches to the study of the economic life (Miller 1994; Miller and Rose 1990; Power 1997; Rose 1992; Burchell 1996). Foucault’s lectures on governmentality, in particular, point to the historical formation of particular forms of economic actor. In this perspective, for example, economic freedom, competitiveness and rationality are conceived as the product of specific forms of technical artifice. Neo-liberalism, as Foucault argued, does not involve the absence of government, but is itself a form of government which is intended to operate through the constitution of particular economic arrangements (Barry, Osborne and Rose 1996). As Graham Burchell notes, “for neo-liberalism, the rational principle for regulating and limiting governmental activity must be determined by reference to artificially arranged or contrived forms of free, entrepreneurial and competitive conduct of economic- rational individuals” (Burchell 1996: 23-4).
Seen in these terms, economics forms part of the technology of neo-liberal government. It helps to constitute the kinds of person and market organisation that make neo-liberal government possible. In a similar way, Nikolas Rose has sought to interrogate the historical formation of what he has termed advanced liberalism:Gradually, a new diagram of the relation between government, expertise and subjectivity would take shape. This would not be a ‘return’ to the liberalism of the nineteenth century, or, finally, government by laissez-faire. It was not a matter of ‘freeing’ an existing set of market relations from their social shackles, but of organizing all features of one’s national policy to enable a market to exist, and to provide what it needs to function.
(Rose 1999: 141)
Much of the literature influenced by the anthropology of science and by Foucault has focused on the importance of quantitative and rational techniques of economic analysis, audit and assessment. This certainly reflects the growing importance of such techniques not just in domains conventionally understood as economic or commercial, but also within public institutions which had often been previously considered as outside the realm of the economy (Law and Akrich1994, 2002; Power 1996; Strathern 2000; Born 2004). Not only is economic activity increasingly subject to analysis and measurement, but also the domain of what is considered economic has widened. In practice, the question of what should be considered economic and what should not be is often contested. A related perspective, virtualism (Carrier and Miller 1998), focuses on the production by economic actors of ‘virtual’ objects of intervention: e.g. ‘the consumer’ as constituted through market research and strategy documents, the ‘developing economy’ as constituted through the machinery of the Washington consensus. Virtualism indexes the capacity of economic powers and technologies to make these hermetic constructions plausible and effective realities.
Callon’s analysis of economics as a technology assumes a very broad definition of what or who counts analytically as economics or as an economist. ‘Economics’, in Callon’s original account, embraces the practices and knowledges instituted well beyond the academy in all forms of governmental and commercial regulation and audit and such professions as accountancy, law and marketing. This plurality indicates that rather than using the specific term ‘economics’, which connotes a fairly narrow domain of activity, it may be better to speak of a broad field of what we shall term ‘economic knowledges’ (cf. Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2000: 31). In many cases the production of economic knowledge may be highly professionalised, or dominated by particular commercial, governmental or academic institutions or regulatory bodies. But it is also important to attend to the variable significance of the forms of economic knowledge developed by non-experts and outside of formal institutions, by consumers, citizens, and political activists (Callon etal. 2001). Viewed more broadly, economic knowledges can destabilise as well as stabilise the formation of economic actors and markets. Economic knowledges can be both a technology of government, and a technology of politicisation (Callon, Barry and Slater, this volume; Jessop, this volume).
We return to the question of the importance of non-expert forms of economic knowledge and the relation between economic sociology and politics later in this chapter. Here, we note that attention to the plurality of economic knowledges is necessary if we are to recognise the significance of non-quantitative approaches to the analysis of economic activity, including cultural analysis and anthropology Nigel Thrift, in particular, has highlighted the critical importance of what he terms the ‘cultural circuit’ of capitalism. Business schools are keen to develop knowledge of, for example, financial risk but also the importance of such matters as games, creativity and disorganisation (Thrift 1997, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003). Likewise, advertising, marketing and brand consultancy have become increasingly central to economic life (Lury, this volume). The economy has come to be known and acted on not just in relation to the values of efficiency and productivity, but in relation to ideas such as corporate social responsibility (Barry 2004a), ethics (Osborne 2004), empowerment, excitement, and fun.
But if economic knowledges should be understood as performative and technological, then what implications does this have for our understanding of the place of knowledge and information in the economy? Here we put forward four claims that emerge from convergences between economic sociology and science and technology approaches.
First, whatever the object of economic knowledge is - ‘the firm’, ‘the market’, ‘capitalism’, ‘the consumer’ - there is always something that is constituted as external to these objects. Outside of the domain of capitalism there always will be a variety of economic or non-economic activities which are generally considered marginal to the development of the capitalist economy (Mitchell 2000: xiii). And outside the domain of any particular market there will be a variety of forms of social and economic activity which are not governed by the laws of that market, and a variety of side-effects which may not be recognised or are ignored by participants in the market. In these circumstances, the object of economic knowledge is never clearly bounded. On the one hand, through a variety of means ‘non-capitalist’ economic activities and non-economic processes infiltrate into the domain of capitalism, and activities which are normally thought of as external to the market enter into the constitution of the market.3 On the other hand, the frame or boundary of a market, or capitalism, or any other economic object, is itself contestable and negotiable. If the objects of economic knowledge are invented, so also can they become contested, politicised and transformed.
Consider, for example, the notion of class. AsJ.K. Gibson-Graham and others have argued, Marx’s analysis of class can itself be understood as a particular system of accounting which makes visible certain relations and processes as essential, while obscuring others (Gibson-Graham et al. 2001: 9). By contrast, many contemporary political movements have sought to draw attention to, and make visible, a range of other phenomena - environmental in particular - which have generally not been taken into account by dominant forms of economic knowledge.4 In this context, rather than view such terms as ‘the capitalist economy’ or ‘the market’ as given objects we should regard them rather as variable products of expert knowledge and political practice. We do not think it makes sense to think of capitalism or the global economy as unified totalities (Mitchell 2002; Thrift 2003; Callon, Barry and Slater, this volume). But we do need to analyse how such generalised notions have been both informed and operationalised through various specific forms of political and governmental practice.
Second, recognition of the importance of innovation and creativity in economic activity points to the path dependency of historical change (Tarde 2001; David 1985; Foucault 1986; Callon 1991; Urry 2002). Sociologists and economists of technology have long pointed to the importance of social and economic forces in driving and shaping the direction of technical change (Mackenzie and Wajcman 1985). Yet although such arguments provide a corrective to technological determinism, it would be a mistake to imagine that the rate and direction of innovative and creative activity can be simply seen as an expression of wider social and economic forces. On the one hand, it is impossible to give a purely ‘social’ explanation of technical or artistic change because technical and artistic objects themselves (facts, objects, devices, infrastructures, performances) form a critical part of what the social is (Latour 1993, 1999). On the other hand, in so far as an invention is an invention it has to be understood as something that creates new objects and opens up new possibilities for thought and action, which cannot simply be seen as an expression of pre-existing social forms (Barry 2001). Rather than understand the social as a context within which invention happens, the social has to be understood as something which is itself transformed through invention. In short, a focus on the social and economic conditions of technical change fails to attend to what is inventive about invention itself.
Third, the importance of innovation and creativity in economic life raises a broader set of questions concerning how the relation between social and material objects is conceived. In the social sciences, it is common to make a clear distinction between social entities (such as institutions, language, knowledge and ‘society’) and material entities (such as buildings and bodies). Yet this distinction is problematic, and arguably increasingly so. In part this is because what were once thought of as purely material objects are never purely material. Their force and effects depend on their relations with other elements, including information. This is clearly the case if we consider the kinds of material entities produced through scientific and technical research. A drug molecule, for example, should not be conceived just as a collection of chemical elements bound together by physical forces. It is a set of chemical elements which has been formed in a complex informational environment. This informational environment is not simply external to the drug: it enters into the changing identity of the object. In this way, it makes sense to understand a drug molecule as an ‘informed material’ (Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers 1996; Barry 2004b). Conversely, information has to be understood as much more than a set of signals. “The constant bombardment by signals, the ads of consumer culture and the like do not constitute information” (Lash 2002: 18). Information only becomes information (rather than mere noise) in so far as it becomes bound into a complex environment, including an environment of material objects.
Fourth, economic transactions increasingly take place through technological mediation, and these technologies are not neutral tools of economic policy or practice. The contemporary prestige of such terms as ‘network society’ and ‘information economy’ point to the role of technologies in conceptualising and reconfiguring economic action. Similarly, contemporary agendas such as ‘globalisation’ rest on core technological presumptions about the impact of transport and communications on the spatio-temporal structure of economic transactions and organisational forms. Contrary to formalist economic theory, constituting markets, regulating markets and conducting market behaviour is inseparable from substantive knowledge of specific technical mediations: the mechanics of computerised trading, the mix of online and offline retail facilities in configuring contemporary consumer markets, the regulation of intellectual property rights and so on (Knorr-Cetina, Lury, Clark, Thrift and Tickell, this volume).
All of these points indicate the possibility of fruitful connections between science and technology studies and economic sociology which we discuss in more detail in the remainder of this introductory chapter. The chapter is organised into two parts. In the first part we focus on the work of Michel Callon and discuss how his approach to economic sociology develops from a broader set of concerns in social theory Since the first publication of the paper reprinted here, Callon’s approach has been the subject of a lively critical debate (Miller 2002; Fine 2003; Holm 2003). It has been criticised for being complicit with mainstream economics (Miller and Fine) and for a failure to analyse ‘structural’ features of economic life. Callon himself both responds to and anticipates some of these criticisms in the interview published in this volume.
In the second part of the chapter, we extend our discussion in two directions. First, we discuss the politics of economic sociology, and the relation of economic sociology to the study of politics. The issue is a critical one, for many of the criticisms of Callon’s work, and related anthropological approaches, are framed as political and ethical ones. The chapters by Strathern and Barry address the question of politics explicitly Second, we examine what has variously been described as the new economy, the knowledge-based economy, or the network society. On the one hand, as we have argued, this involves a recognition of the performative character of these ‘new economy’ discourses. This is an important theme of Jessop’s chapter in this volume.
On the other hand, as Karin Knorr-Cetina has argued, there is a need for empirical analyses of the complexity of current economic transformations, which are attentive to the specificity of different forms of economic knowledge. Knorr-Cetina’s chapter in this volume also points to the critical importance of media in the production of economic knowledge. We also stress the importance of non-expert economic knowledge, an important theme in Celia Lury’s analysis of the brand and Gordon Clark, Nigel Thrift and Adam Tickell’s analysis of financial media.