Callon, Millo and Muniesa on Market Devices

On 7 December 2007 I was fortunate enough to be invited to a fascinating discussion session with the editors of the new volume, Market Devices: Michel Callon, Yuval Millo and Fabian Muniesa. It felt like an historical moment, at least within the relatively short history of actor-network theory (ANT): the discussion took place in the very same Vera Anstey Room of the London School of Economics and Political Science where Michel Callon launched The Laws of the Markets some ten years ago. This event provided an opportunity to reflect on ANT’s extension into economic sociology and to outline possible future directions.

While the occasion for the discussion session was the launch of Market Devices, it became clear at the outset that Do Economists Make Markets?, edited by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu, is something of a sister volume. The former focuses on the materiality of markets, while the latter deals with the performativity of economics. Other recent or forthcoming books that were suggested to form part of this research programme were The Technological Economy, edited by Andrew Barry (who was also present) and Don Slater, Living in a Material World: on Technology, Economy, and Society, edited by Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg, and The Birth of Biopolitics by Michel Foucault.

The central organising notion of the book and the discussion was the notion of the device, as a socio-technical assemblage. To some extent, device is Callon et al’s translation of Foucault’s dispositif with a Deleuzian twist. Their main proposition is that markets are constructed and performed through and by way of heterogeneous assemblages, which they call market devices. To emphasise the fact that the agency enacted in markets is heterogeneous, distributed but at the same time assembled, they propose to use the Callonian term agencement instead of agency, to incorporate the Deleuzian notion of assemblage (or arrangement) as well as to preserve the English meaning of agency. As one would expect, there are some further interesting nuances to this Franco-British hybrid of a word. Hardie and MacKenzie provide an excellent summary of what is included in this word-play in their 2007 article, “Assembling an Economic Actor: the Agencement of a Hedge Fund.”

As Fabian Muniesa put it at the start of the discussion session, the strong hypothesis behind the Market Devices book is that “devices are probably agency itself.” The question within economic sociology then becomes: “How does economisation happen, how are things rendered economic?” Yuval Millo proposed an answer by outlining three critical elements of economisation: (1) exchange (something being exchanged), (2) numerisation (relationships being reproduced in numerical terms), and (3) qualification (qualities being attached to something that is to be identified as a product). Michel Callon emphasised the political aspects of this process, as economisation inevitably produces matters of concern that generate political debates over the nature of these market devices.

While the above description may sound a bit sterile to those unfamiliar with actor-network theory or economic sociology, the book is actually a collection of empirical case studies that examine a wide range of markets from supermarkets to securities markets, and the need for empirical research for the tracing of these market devices was stressed throughout the discussion. Indeed when the three editors were challenged by Michael Power that there was an “enforced empiricism” going on during the discussion, Fabian Muniesa responded in classical ANT fashion by suggesting that “good empirics and good theory are the same.”

Despite this seeming preference for the empirical over the theoretical, it transpired from the discussion that the three authors do not shy away from dealing with the metaphysical and ontological aspects of the subject matter. When Maha Shaikh asked a question about how nonhuman actors can have an affect without some form of cognition or intentionality, a remarkable discussion unfolded that even included references to Christian theology. Nonetheless, it appeared that the type of empirical metaphysics this programme of research espouses has to emerge out of the empirical investigation itself, rather than serve as some kind of an abstract a priori speculation. In response to Niki Panourgias’s question about the results of the experiment to put ANT to the market test, Michel Callon reinforced this point by emphasising the need to focus on how the world is constantly recreated through the functioning of agencements and the associated political controversies, rather than privileging ontological issues in the analysis.

I asked a question about how the performativity perspective can contribute to management education (such as training MBAs) and about its political relevance in general. Yuval Millo referred back to the notion of qualification mentioned earlier which according to him lies at the heart of financial accounting. He suggested that accounting is a highly political activity as “What counts? What should be included in the procedure and what should be left out?” are fundamentally political questions. Fabian Muniesa added that people perform multiple roles and identities as researchers, decision-makers, practitioners and citizens, therefore the dissemination and circulation of for example the findings of the performativity perspective may happen in a number of ways, especially in a business school setting. Michel Callon emphasised the role ANT plays in making the multiplicity and heterogeneity of market participants explicit, thus allowing for a larger network of stakeholders to be considered in the political activities of assembling market devices, which also become strategic issues for managers.

My second question was a bit cheekier: I asked for some specific guidance on how to conduct empirical research in the vein of the performativity perspective. Muniesa offered the classical ANT advice of the need to be attentive to the actors, to stick to empirical evidence, and to focus on controversies. Callon suggested that besides controversies it may also be interesting to study the process of marketisation, i.e. the material actions that make markets exist, as marketisation is not the same as economisation.

The discussion actually went on for two hours, so naturally there were several more interesting issues raised, such as Peter Miller’s question about the place of ideas in agencements (to which Muniesa responded that “ideas are cool”) or Andrew Barry’s comment that the choice of the term ‘device’ has a particular effect, as it makes us focus on particular phenomena as opposed to others. He suggested that the notion of the device focuses attention on “the degree of the autonomy of the history of such devices.”

While my research project, “Organising Competence and e-Commerce Adoption: A Multi-Case Study of Small e-Tailers in the South of England,” draws on the economic theory of the firm as opposed to markets, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the notions of agencement and market devices as promising constructs for the study of organising and strategising as well. Indeed, in the case of sole traders and micro companies (of less than 10 employees) it is particularly difficult to delineate where something that could be called a firm ends and a market begins, which further suggests that tracing the market devices involved may give a richer account of a small firm’s organisation and survival.

Tags: accounting, agencement, ANT, Fabian Muniesa, market devices, Michel Callon, performativity, Yuval Millo