An interesting suggestion from Trevor Pinch, co-author of Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology and Technology Studies:
Let’s have a special Nobel Prize Clawback committee that tests all Nobel Prize winning research, say at ten yearly intervals. If the research doesn’t stand the test of time, they have to give back their Nobel prize!
The socializing finance blog has a very informative summary of the “Performativity as Politics: Unlocking economic sociology” conference that took place in Toulouse in October. The conference explored the political dimensions of the actor-network theory approach to performativity that has developed within economic sociology, by bringing it together with alternative conceptualisations of performativity and politics from other fields. A 10-page document with the abstracts (PDF) of the talks is also available.
An all-day conference (9am-6:30pm) on performance in economic sociology will take place at Goldsmiths in London on Wednesday 14 January 2009. Speakers include: Laurent Thevenot, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; Michael Power, LSE; Nigel Thrift, Warwick; David Stark, Columbia; Koray Caliskan, Boðazçi; Martha Poon, Columbia; Jean-Pascal Gond, Nottingham; and William Davies, Goldsmiths. Places are limited and registration is required. Please see the full announcement below.
The title of the 2010 EGOS call for sub-theme proposals sounds remarkably Deleuzian. Could it be just a co-incidence that this year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition? The call for proposals speaks of repetition and difference, the emerge of new organisational forms, the problem of the micro and the macro, globalisation, and the role of technology. The deadline for the submission of sub-theme proposals is 15 January 2009.
It would be interesting to have a track or two with specifically Deleuzian themes, e.g. with a focus on repetition and difference vis-a-vis routines and innovation, or on the Deleuzian notion of the assemblage in organising. The similarities and differences between the Deleuzian assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda and the evocation of assemblages in Science and Technology Studies and economic sociology could make another interesting platform for discussion. We reproduce the call below in full, in case the link gets broken during the current overhaul of the EGOS website.
The most recent issue of Economic Sociology - The European Electronic Newsletter (Vol. 10, No. 1, November 2008) is out. The contents include “Accounting for Economic Sociology” by Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller, and Rita Samiolo; “Talking Numbers - Governing Immaterial Labour” by Uwe Vormbusch; “Accounting at the Heart of the Performativity of Economics” by Eve Chiapello; “Global or Local? Travelling Management Accounting Ideas” by Albrecht Becker; and an interview with Anthony Hopwood. Go to the Economic Sociology website or download the PDF directly from here.
The thing things (to cite Heidegger) and objects matter. The 2009 CRESC annual conference, Objects - What Matters? Technology, Value and Social Change, will review the object turn in social theory by focusing on the relationship between objects and value. The conference will take place in Manchester between 2-4 September 2009. Read the full call for papers and panel proposals here. According to the socializing finance blog keynote speakers will include Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara), Graham Harman (American University Cairo), Annemarie Mol (University of Twente), and Kathleen Stewart (University of Texas, Austin).
A very interesting call for papers started making the rounds yesterday on various blogs and mailing lists, emanating from the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy (CPPE) at the University of Leicester. “The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts” conference is to take place between 29 April and 1 May 2009 at Leicester. It brings together the concerns of modern and classical forms of political economy regarding the nature of the capitalist mode of production with recent object-orientated inquiries into economic ordering that draw on actor-network theory, especially within economic sociology and science and technology studies. The deadline for proposals is 28 November 2008. The full call for papers is reproduced below.
Update [18 July 2008]: A nice PDF flyer is now also available.
Those interested in economic sociology, the performativity of markets, and the role of actor-network theory in producing these types of accounts might also be interested in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, a new book edited by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu.
On 7 December 2007 a few members of ANTHEM attended a memorable discussion session on the occasion of the launch of Market Devices, a volume edited by Michel Callon, Yuval Millo and Fabian Muniesa. The book, published in the Sociological Review Monograph Series, is a collection of case studies on the performativity of markets, building on the efforts of Michel Callon to extend actor-network theory into the domain of economic sociology.