Editorial: Economic Sociology
Karin Knorr Cetina: From Pipes to Scopes: The Flow Architecture of Financial Markets<
This article introduces a distinction between two types of markets and market coordination: those based on social networks and those based on a flow architecture. Flow architectures involve potentially global 'scopic' reflex systems (GRSs) that project market reality while at the same time carrying it forward and allowing it to flow. The argument is that some financial markets have undergone a transition from a pre-reflexive network market to a reflexively coordinated flow market manifest in the different organization of trading floors, changes in trading patterns and the emergence of a moving market that gets transferred from time-zone to time-zone with the sun. To understand these markets temporal concepts are needed in addition to the social structural (relational) concepts with which we commonly work. Networks emerge from this analysis as historically specific, relationship-based forms of market coordination which in some markets are in the process of being replaced by more reflexive temporal forms of coordination.
Keywords:financial markets, foreign exchange market, networks, global reflex systems, coordination, flow, market architecture
Harrison C. White: Markets as Mobilizers of Firms: Models for Capital Valuations From Economic Sociology
Guidance to how capital values of firms change comes from a model of performance in which firms cue on peer producers in their particular market. My model lays out a two-dimensional map of market varieties, each dimension being a ratio assessing sensitivity upstream to sensitivity downstream in valuations for a representative firm. The projections examine market viabilities and invoke substitutabilities and boundary mechanisms of markets. They point to the importance of discontinuities and switches. The paper goes on to probe the network phenomenology which underlies this model of firms in markets, and thereby it suggests new 'takes' on 'network firms' and 'new economy'.
Keywords: valuation, cumulate-capitialization, embed, quality, upstream/downstream, critic-observer, expectation<
Richard Swedberg: Two Issues for Economic Sociologists to Think About
Even though economic sociology is currently seen as a highly successful and dynamic subfield of sociology, there still exist a number of issues for economic sociologists to address. In this brief essay I point to two of these: the role of reflexivity in economic sociology and the question of whether economic sociology can also be a policy science. As to the former issue, I note that economic sociologists rarely ask questions about reflexivity, that is, to what extent their own understanding of the economy is related to the fact that they themselves are part of the reality that they analyze. The issue of reflexivity, I also argue, should preferably be understood in a broad sense and include the production of economic knowledge and economic theory more generally. Few economic sociologists have discussed whether economic sociology should be a policy science, with a few exceptions. One of these is Pierre Bourdieu, who also has many interesting ideas about economic suffering and the role of theodicy in the economy (why is there suffering in the world, and why do some people suffer more than others?).
Keywords: economic sociology, Max Weber, reflexivity, objectivity, theodicy, policy aspects, Pierre Bourdieu
Ute Tellmann: The Truth of the Market
This article argues for a discourse-analytical approach to the market. Using the archaeological method developed by Michel Foucault, it presents an analysis of the figure of the market within the publications of the International Monetary Fund. The market is deciphered as a discursive strategy to monopolize the representation of economic reality. Governed by a 'will to truth', contemporary economic discourse establishes the market as the subject of knowledge, which is authorized to speak the truth about the economy. This truth-regime effectively hides its own hierarchical structures and denounces alternative political choices about the organization of socio-economic order as untruthful, thereby shielding economic discourse from political contestation. The findings of this archaeological analysis are embedded in a critical discussion of the view of the market in the governmentality approach. This approach, commenced by Foucault, is committed to an anti-essentialist perspective on the market. While this paper shares the basic theoretical outlook, it contends that there is a tendency within this literature to understand the market one-sidedly as an internal resource for the reflexive critique of liberal governmental practices. In the light of the archaeological findings, this view is criticized and a more thorough and extended archaeology and genealogy of the market is proposed to supplement the current approach.
Keywords: archaeology, discourse, Foucault, governmentality, IMF, market, Mexican crisis, truth-regime
Ole Thyssen: Organisationens usynlighed (in Danish)
The systems theoretical hypothesis that organizations are social systems, consisting of communication, has as a consequence that organizations are invisible for both internal and external observers. The communication of the organization is invisible, not just because of its ephemeral nature or its overwhelming quantity, but because communication itself is invisible. Nevertheless, it seems possible to observe and describe organizations. In a consecutive analysis it is shown how organizations make themselves accessible in spite of their invisibility. Based on the analysis of Marcel Proust in A la Recherche du Temps perdu, the name is presented as a simplified token of unity, followed by the text, the narrative and management as means of representations of unity. As management is a symbol for the organization as a whole, its function is to coordinate the 'directing distinctions', which are used to observe and evaluate an organization. Therefore, management is a political function and must make use of rhetorical effects.
Keywords: communication, invisibility, observation, Niklas Luhmann, Marcel Proust, names, organizational rhetorics, narrative
Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg: Kaldet til selvrealisering - mod en ny arbejdsetik (in Danish)
In this article, I examine the use of personal development programs in the world of business. In recent decades, there has been an increasing interest in the cultivation of the Self and this tendency has found expression in the New Age movement and modern management. I suggest a rethinking of Max Weber's analysis of the connection between the upcoming of a new religious behavior, such as the New Age movement, and a new way of thinking about the work expressed in New Human Resources Management. The French philosopher Marcel Gauchet's interpretation of the modern religious practices bound to the believer's inner life is central to my analysis. The ideal employee is in a permanent state of reflection, learning and experience; he sees himself in a state of growth. The focus here is directed towards the individual's potential and is based on the notion that the individual has resources hidden in the subconscious, waiting to be accessed through the development of the Self. My argument is that personal development programs in the business community seek to nurture a particular attitude towards work. Through personal development courses the employee should obtain a pleasurable relationship to his/her work, which ideally should be experienced as a vocation. The ideal employee no longer sees his/her work from a perspective of duty but work done con amore - as a way to self-realization. The cultivation of the individual's emotional inner life emphasizes extroverted practices, whereby modern management and the New Age movement overlap in the establishment of the ethics of sensitivity.
Keywords: New Age, Marcel Gauchet, Max Weber, modern management, work ethic, self-management, personal development, subconscious resources
Jørgen Grønnegård Christensen: Normer og incitamenter i offentlig virksomhed (in Danish)
For several years, salary reforms, management contracts, contract management, and value based management, reform and innovation with the private firm as the preferred model have formed the headlines for public sector reforms. These headlines have their parallels in social science theory. On the one hand, we have rational theories with their focus on managers and staff as self-interest seeking individuals, who react on changes that strengthen economic incentives. On the other hand, we see an organizational sociology which focuses on managers and staff as norm followers. The paper takes a closer look at these developments.
Keywords: self-interest, herding, norms, policy preferences, rationality, salary reforms, values
Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen & Gert Tinggaard Svendsen: Social kapital og økonomisk sociologi (in Danish)
What is social capital? We try to answer this question by using an interdisciplinary approach that combines economics and sociology in three steps. First, we introduce the general economic starting point from New Institutional Economics (NIE) focusing on asymmetrical information and transaction costs. Next, we incorporate the capital theory of Pierre Bourdieu, demonstrating how cultural values may generally compensate for the presence of asymmetrical information. Finally, we introduce the concept of social capital as a more specific version of Bourdieu's capital approach. Overall, we suggest that social capital can be operationalized as a matter of trust. This would solve the fundamental problem in NIE, namely by compensating for asymmetrical information and thereby reducing the size of transaction costs following social and economic interaction. Thus, social capital may be viewed as a new production factor that may help explain differences in the economic welfare of nations.
Keywords: social capital, new institutional economics, asymmetrical information, transaction costs, informal institutions, Pierre Bourdieu, trust, economic growth
Chantal MouffePolitik og lidenskaber: Hvad er på spil i demokratiet? (in Danish)
The article asserts that we have become unable to envisage the problems facing our societies in political terms and that this has very negative consequences for the future of democracy. Examining the reasons for such a situation, it shows how current trends in political theory and in sociology have contributed to the displacement of politics by morality and to the disappearance of a properly political perspective. Bringing to the fore the shortcomings of the 'consensus' approach dominant today, it argues for an 'agonistic' model of democracy as the way to allow for the constitution of collective identities through which political passions could be mobilized toward democratic designs.
Keywords: democratic public sphere, deliberative democracy, agonistic pluralism, antagonism versus agonism, political identities, us/them discrimination, reflexive modernity, sub-politics, right-wing populism
Andreas Føllesdal: Er normativ politisk teori død i Norden? Diagnose og prognose under Europeiseringen (in Norwegian)
There are at least three reasons to expect little attention to normative political philosophy in the Nordic countries. Politically, they have been egalitarian social democratic welfare states; culturally, the citizens have regarded themselves as homogenous; and theoretically, Scandinavian Legal Realism dismissed the possibility of normative arguments about values. The article points to some weaknesses of traditional Scandinavian Legal Realism, and argues that Europeanization serves to diminish the impact of all three factors.
Keywords: philosophy, welfare state, Scandinavian legal realism, Alf Ross, Max Weber, John Rawls
Per Mouritsen: Mellem politologien og John Rawls: En politisk teori, der er normativ og empirisk, historisk og politisk (in Danish)
What kind of political theory should be practiced at a department of political science, and why? It should be one which is normative, empirical, historical, and indeed, most of all, political. Whereas the 'empirically' minded political scientist too often ignores normative elements of theories and concepts, the 'philosophical' Rawlsian rarely considers the empirical-causal specification of (new) universes and conflicts of value, or the preconditions for realising specific values. Neither the political scientist nor the Rawlsian appreciates the value of a historical approach to the study of political theory, except in the form of traditional history of ideologies, as galleries of standard political science exemplars, or as an ahistorical conversation of mankind. Historical-contextual studies of concepts, values, and arguments may create a valuable distance and a possibility for reflection in relation to the contingencies of the present, the plurality of things political - but also as regards certain marked continuities. Theories only become properly politicalin the field of tension between a critical concern with value, empirical relevance, and historical sensitivity.
Keywords: political theory, political science, history of ideas, Rawlsianism, value, political concepts
Thomas WallgrenGeorg Henrik von Wright (in Swedish)
(14.6. 1916 - 16.6. 2003)