Just a quick announcement of my forthcoming talks in the next few weeks. On 10 February 2009 I’ll be giving my annual presentation at the IS554 research seminar at ISIG, Department of Management, LSE. The talk, entitled “Framing, Qualification, and Reflexivity: Reporting from the Field,” is an interim report about my field research. I will be drawing on economic sociology to describe the data I have so far collected on entrepreneurial learning in the online retail industry. Specifically I will be reflecting on the curious ‘double hermeneutic’ at work in my interpretation: Michel Callon et al.’s notions of framing and qualification and Daniel Beunza and David Stark’s notion of entrepreneurial reflexivity emerge as operative concepts that are apt not only for the characterisation of the empirical situation but also for the very nature of the research process itself.
On 25 February 2009 I’ll be presenting a collaborative paper with Peter Lugosi, based on his fascinating case study of the ruin bars of Budapest, at the Centre for Research in Management (CRiM), the Business School, Bournemouth University. “Ruin bars” are a unique category of hospitality spaces in Budapest that incorporate their dilapidated surroundings into their own service concept. Taking our cue from a recent special issue of Marketing Theory, we take up the call of Araujo, Kjellberg et al. (2008) to shift our attention from marketing to the practices and artefacts that take part in the making of markets. Our talk is entitled “From Marketing to Market Practices: Assembling the Ruin Bars of Budapest.”
On 9 March 2009 I’ll be giving a talk on “Actor-Network Theory and the Technological Economy” at the Business and Society Research Group seminar series, CRASSH, University of Cambridge. I’ll be describing the ways in which I’m deploying actor-network theory in my research project. While I’m studying the relationship between entrepreneurial learning and the economisation and marketisation of e-commerce services for small firms, the practices and arrangements that emerge can be also understood as constitutive of what Barry and Slater describe as the “technological economy.” I will attempt to tease out the ways in which such an actor-network theory approach can allow us to talk about the “moral economy.”
Relevant references
- Araujo, L., H. Kjellberg, et al. (2008). “Market Practices and Forms: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Marketing Theory 8(1): 5-14.
- Barry, A. (2001). Political Machines : Governing a Technological Society. London, Athlone.
- Barry, A. and D. Slater (2005). The Technological Economy. Abingdon; New York, Routledge.
- Beunza, D. and D. Stark (2008). “Reflexive Modeling: The Social Calculus of the Arbitrageur,” SSRN.
- Boltanski, L. and L. Thévenot (2006). On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
- Callon, M. (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford, Blackwell.
- Callon, M., C. Méadel, et al. (2002). “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy & Society 31(2): 194.
- Callon, M. and F. Muniesa (2005). “Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices.” Organization Studies (after Jan 1, 2003) 26(8): 1229-50.
- Stark, D. (Forthcoming). The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
