Entrepreneurship and economic sociology at Goldsmiths

My head is still spinning thanks to a superb workshop/conference I attended last week: the Goldsmiths Winter Workshop in Economic Sociology that took place between 13-15 January 2009.  It was organised by David Stark and Daniel Beunza from Columbia, and Will Davis, Allan Day and Joe Deville from Goldsmiths. The organisers struck a unique balance between a variety of tensions that characterise the research world and set the stage for some highly stimulating contributions and discussions. (See photos of the event here.)

First, there was balance in terms of the experience of the participants. Practically every stage of the academic research process was represented, from early stage doctoral students to post docs, junior researchers, all the way to internationally celebrated academics. It was invaluable to see the whole spectrum of research experience and the transformation of the nature of the research process over a research career. One interesting manifestation of this transformation was the emerging clarity and economy of words: the more advanced one was in the research process, the less words seemed to be necessary to describe increasingly complex ideas, and the more poignant the chosen empirical material was.

Another form of balance emerged between presentations that dealt with highly empirical situations (pretty much all of the doctoral presentations, as well as the talks by David Stark, Daniel Beunza, Koray Caliskan, Jean-Pascal Gond, and Peter Miller) and those that engaged with some very subtle (and even sublime) theoretical (Nigel Thrift, Laurent Thévenot) and political (Michael Power, Will Davies) issues. In addition, the two intensive days of doctoral presentations were cleverly separated by a conference on “Performance,” which again featured both leaders of the field (Thévenot, Power, Thrift, Stark) and the emerging generation of scholars (Caliskan, Gond, Davies).

Speaking of the field of economic sociology, there was similarly a good balance in the way both focus and scope were accommodated in the composition of the participants. The workshop/conference had a sufficiently narrow focus on three main inter-related traditions that enabled all the participants to relate to each others’ work. These three traditions were the following: (1) the research programme represented by Michel Callon (actor-network theory in economic sociology); (2) the French economics of convention school (especially the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot); and (3) social network analysis (David Stark). At the same time, there was a great variety in terms of disciplinary affiliations and empirical objects studied, from sociology to management and organisation studies, from accounting to compliance, from vinyl record collectors to megachurches.

But what I found most remarkable was the curious correspondence between the theoretical and empirical content of the talks on the one hand, and the actual format and effect of the event as a whole, on the other. Three fundamental ideas dominated the discussions that cut across all three approaches mentioned above: (1) the idea that social and economic action is co-ordinated by way of complex heterogeneous devices; (2) that socio-economic arrangements are kept stable (justified) by way of repetitive tests or trials of strength; and (3) that conflict, friction, and dissonance are productive. Indeed, that’s what the whole workshop/ conference itself amounted to and accomplished: it served as a co-ordinating device for bringing all these people and ideas together, in order to allow for testing and justification (of research questions, interpretations, positionings etc.) and for serving as a platform for creative friction between adherents and synthesisers of the above three intellectual traditions.

I was in the group of presenters chaired by Daniel Beunza, who has written a very nice reflection on the event at the socializing finance blog. I started the presentations with my talk entitled “The Qualification of e-Commerce Business Services for Small Firms,” in which I was drawing on the work of Michel Callon and colleagues to articulate the processes in which services appear to be articulated as goods in the regional e-commerce market that I am currently studying. I was followed by Laure Cabantous, who discussed her practice-orientated study of the manufacture of rationality in the decision-analysis industry, making the counter-intuitive observation that the application of decision-analysis methodologies in practice is anything but bureaucratic. If I remember correctly,  this work was done in collaboration with Jean-Pascal Gond, who also gave a very interesting talk during the Performance conference on the next day, on the social construction of the positive link between corporate social and financial performance.

Martin Giraudeau looked at business plans as part of an economy of virtuality, studying how the funding of the form leads to the founding of the firm, to cite his clever pun. It was interesting to consider the text of the business plan as the site of an entrepreneurial gathering, as the device that takes part in the co-ordination of Schumpeterian recombinations. Will Davis outlined his study of two rival modes of neo-liberal knowledge. I was particularly interested in his analysis of the discourse of competitiveness, which is so pervasive in much of contemporary EU and UK innovation and enterprise policy.

Benjamin Taupin spoke about the murky world of credit rating agencies and ways in which compromise is reached and broken in the course of market co-ordination and competition. Gábor Vályi took us on a journey into a similarly mysterious world of vinyl record collectors, illustrating vividly the ways in which worth is accomplished through building expertise over time. Jose Ossandon was dissecting some complex issues about the positioning of his research on private health insurance vis-a-vis a number of related controversies in social theory.

Jacques Olivier Charron focussed on the role of sell-side analysts in the qualification of information as it relates to prices of financial securities. Allan Day told us about his research into the complexities of distributed version control of open source software. Juliane Reinecke walked us through a highly nuanced study of what she called the “tightrope walk between transnational justice and market acceptance” in the making of the markets for Fairtrade products. Laura Centemeri’s presentation ended the workshop on a high note, with a sophisticated argument about the need for a reconsideration of the treatment of externalities in economic sociology.

As for the Performance conference presentations and the master classes, there were some extremely rich and challenging papers presented, so I can’t possibly do justice to them in a couple of paragraphs. As I was already familiar with some of the cases, papers or books that have been presented  (such as Peter Miller and Ted O’Leary’s important work on Moore’s Law or David Stark’s forthcoming book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, a major reconceptualisation of the nature of entrepreneurship), let me focus here on the content that was new to me.

David Stark’s opening lecture about his collaborative work with Balázs Vedres (“Opening Closure: Intercohesion and Entrepreneurial Dynamics in Business Groups”) was the account of what seemed like a monumental effort to develop a historical network analysis of entrepreneurship, by way of tracing the evolution of group formation across time among Hungary’s top corporations.  Stark’s closing lecture couldn’t have been more different in terms of theme and method: a fascinating ethnographic account of the inner workings of American megachurches. Stark showed convincingly how these megachurches were not businesses masquerading as places of worship but quite the opposite: churches camouflaged as businesses (although I may have missed the punchline as I had to leave before the talk was over to catch my train).

Having just recently read Boltanski and Thévenot’s book On Justification (which left a profound impression on me), I was looking forward with great anticipation to Laurent Thévenot’s lecture. I found most interesting his conceptualisation of “capacity,” which he described as “personal ease” that comes with engaging with a familiar environment. Capacity emerged as something that is dispersed over a functionally arranged environment, where agents need to shift between different arrangements (orders of worth). Thévenot was also developing a complex notion of engagement, an interplay between quietude and inquietude in making moral judgements, which to some extent reminded me of Heidegger’s distinction between the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand.

Nigel Thrift cast his eyes “Towards a Political Economy of Propensity.” He defined propensity as ‘innate inclination,’ and used it as a guiding notion in his fusion of social theory with recent advances in neuroscience. It was an effort to develop a political economy that takes the body and emotions seriously, which in the context of the current financial and economic crisis (think fear and greed) looks very timely. But Thrift didn’t stop at the financial markets; he moved from a discussion of neuroeconomics to neuromarketing in order to show how capitalism has been tracking social theory (using the work of Gabriel Tarde as an example).

As for the empirically driven discussions, two presentations stand out as particularly memorable. Koray Caliskan gave an inspiring and entertaining talk about performance and performativity in market theory, using some captivating examples from his fieldwork at the Izmir cotton exchange in Turkey. Daniel Beunza’s presentation (based on Beunza, D. and D. Stark (2008). “Reflexive Modeling: The Social Calculus of the Arbitrageur.”) took us to a rather different but equally exotic context, a merger arbitrage trading desk on Wall Street. Beunza discussed in vivid ethnographic detail the fascinating story of a single day and a single merger transaction, in order to develop a sophisticated argument about social devices of dissonance in the calculative practices of these traders.

Tags: Daniel Beunza, David Stark, Koray Caliskan, Laurent Thévenot, Nigel Thrift, performance, performativity, Peter Miller