| 1. |
- Ashton, Philip, et al.
(författare)
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On arbitration, arbitrage and arbitrariness in financial markets and their governance : Unpacking LIBOR and the LIBOR scandal
- 2015
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Ingår i: Economy and Society. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0308-5147 .- 1469-5766. ; 44:2, s. 188-217
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Amongst a series of scandals to hit international financial markets in recent years, that surrounding the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) – a highly influential interest rate benchmark – has attracted particularly intense media scrutiny. This paper seeks to push beyond conventional understandings to unpack critically both LIBOR itself and the scandal involving its manipulation by major international banks. Envisioning LIBOR as a commodity beset by inherent contradictions, the paper mobilizes the tropes of arbitration, arbitrage and arbitrariness to illuminate, respectively: the market-making work performed by LIBOR; its role in enabling the transfer of financial risk, most notably when fraudulently manipulated; and the nature of the regulatory prosecution of such manipulation.
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| 2. |
- Chaput, Mathieu, et al.
(författare)
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Bypassing the animal : Plant-based meat and the communicative constitution of a moral market
- 2023
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Ingår i: Economy and Society. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0308-5147 .- 1469-5766. ; 52:2, s. 274-297
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The food industry occupies a large portion of the plate in the study of moral markets. Moral markets for food include fair trade goods, organic products, family farmers initiatives, as well as plant-based meat alternatives, the focus of this paper. Driven by a growing concern for animal welfare, sustainability and the responsible use of resources, various companies launched products that successfully duplicate the taste, look and overall experience of meat eating, without the dire impacts of the meat industry on human, animal and environmental health. In this paper, we explore the formation of a market for plant-based meat as a communicative accomplishment. To do so, we analyse the rhetoric of one of its leading companies: Beyond Meat. By tracing the development of this food-tech company, we show that Beyond Meat’s activist-like rhetoric has contributed to the formation of a market based on the moral criterion of efficiency, which is achieved by bypassing the animal in meat production and by creating a transcending collective identity for meat-eaters of all sorts. Contrary to the more common process where moralized products move from social movement to market, we here theorize the formation of a moralized market that is depicted as a movement.
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| 3. |
- Christophers, Brett
(författare)
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Making finance productive
- 2011
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Ingår i: Economy and Society. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0308-5147 .- 1469-5766. ; 40:1, s. 112-140
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Western governments' response to ongoing economic crisis has demonstrated that the financial services sector is seen to perform a critical and productive function in today's capitalist economies. This paper explores how this politically potent perception of productiveness has come to achieve the hegemony that it now enjoys. A principal forum for the 'making' of finance sector productiveness, it shows, has been the tradition of national accounting and its reporting of key economic metrics such as gross domestic product. By placing different activities on different sides of a pivotal 'production boundary', national income statisticians effectively dictate what counts as productive - as adding value to the economy - and what does not. Finance's contemporary representation as productive is predicated, the paper shows, on a long and contested history of boundary negotiation.
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| 4. |
- Christophers, Brett, 1971-
(författare)
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The allusive market : insurance of flood risk in neoliberal Britain
- 2019
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Ingår i: Economy and Society. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0308-5147 .- 1469-5766. ; 48:1, s. 1-29
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Launched in 2016, Flood Re is a government-supported scheme for flood-risk insurance in Britain that is intended to pave the way towards an eventual 'free' market featuring risk-reflective pricing. This paper introduces the concept of 'the allusive market' to denote the figurative work that the market vision performs in this context. Alluding to the merits of what is in reality a highly implausible market-based future for flood insurance releases the government from having to substantively address intractable problems associated with the financial risk of flooding in the present: the market will come to the rescue. A risk-management crutch, the allusive market engenders contemporary policy paralysis, occasioning in turn the worsening of the very problems that the market is being relied upon, eventually, to resolve.
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| 5. |
- Cochoy, Franck, 1964, et al.
(författare)
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The technologies of price display: mundane retail price governance in the early twentieth century
- 2018
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Ingår i: Economy and Society. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0308-5147 .- 1469-5766. ; 47:4, s. 572-606
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How is everyday retail pricing practices and devices linked to large-scale, market-wide movements in retail prices? This paper investigates how the development and spread of seemingly insignificant price display technologies in US grocery retailing related to the development of US food prices at large during the interwar years (1918–1939). We find that the development of these new technologies (e.g. preprinted price cards, price tags and price mouldings) afforded new retail pricing practices (e.g. price cutting, specials and bundles). This development both fed off and contributed to the periods of intense price competition that marked the development of US food prices in the studied period. We conclude that price formation mechanisms are historically situated socio-technical phenomena rather than the product of abstract and historically constant market forces. As such, well-working markets hinge on the efforts of a wide range of market actors to continuously test the contextualization of particular price mechanisms and develop alternative solutions to overcome the shortcomings that such reflexive efforts are able to establish.
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| 6. |
- Dobeson, Alexander, 1985-
(författare)
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Scopic valuations : how digital tracking technologies shape economic value
- 2016
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Ingår i: Economy and Society. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0308-5147 .- 1469-5766. ; 45:3-4, s. 454-478
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How do market actors in the contemporary economy make decisions when they are uncertain of the value of what is being traded? To answer this question, this paper analyses the changing temporal and spatial orientation of economic valuations in increasingly digitalized economies, in which markets can no longer be understood as locally bound and closed sites of valuation and exchange. Drawing on ethnographic material from the fishing industry, the paper shows how digital tracking technologies link and synchronize auction markets with real-time information on fishing activities. Hence, 'scopic media' such as chart plotters and computer screens are not only deployed by skippers to monitor one another, but are also used as valuation devices that recontextualize local knowledge for the purpose of coping with economic uncertainty. As a consequence of this panoptic valuation regime, fishermen control their virtual identities by disciplining harvesting practices according to their buyers' expectations.
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| 7. |
- Langley, Paul, et al.
(författare)
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Decarbonizing capital : Investment, divestment and the qualification of carbon assets
- 2021
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Ingår i: Economy and Society. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 0308-5147 .- 1469-5766. ; 50:3, s. 494-516
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Private investment capital is now widely regarded as strategically significant to the governance of climate change. A dedicated and dynamic carbon finance sector has emerged that features techniques and practices for decarbonizing capital, facilitating investment in low-carbon projects and enterprises or enabling divestment from high-carbon firms and sectors. We bring together and develop the concepts of 'qualification' and 'assetization' to analyse how decarbonizing capital is proceeding. With specific reference to green bonds and the equities of fossil fuel corporations, we show how investment and divestment entail the qualification of things as assets with more-or-less specific carbon properties. But the qualification of assets as `low-' or 'high-carbon' is also shown to be contingent, contested and compromised, featuring contrasting modalities of qualification that are decarbonizing capital in uncertain and incomplete ways.
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| 8. |
- Larsson, Bengt, 1966-
(författare)
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Neo-liberalism and polycontextuality : banking crisis and re-regulation in Sweden
- 2003
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Ingår i: Economy and Society. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 0308-5147 .- 1469-5766. ; 32:3, s. 428-448
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article gives an account of the interpretative conflicts and re-regulative initiatives that followed the Swedish banking crisis in the 1990s. The analysis is based on systems theory and theories of governance conceptualizing steering and self-regulation. It shows the polycontextuality of the conflicts over the crisis, and how the re-regulation articulated central aspects of neo-liberal government, as conceptualized in terms of governance. The conclusion discusses two paradoxes. The first is that the enforced self-regulation of the re-regulative process 'frees' market actors by embedding them in new webs of governance. The second paradox is that every solution to a problematic event of this kind is at the same time seen as a new problem when observed with distinctions other than the one reduced by the solution.
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| 9. |
- Martinez, Lucio M., et al.
(författare)
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’Unstable boundaries?’ Evaluating the ’new regulation’ within employment relations
- 2004
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Ingår i: Economy and Society. - : Routledge. - 0308-5147 .- 1469-5766. ; 33:1, s. 77-97
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The ’emergence’ of the ’market’ as the basis of economic and political decision-making has become a main focus of debate within the social sciences since the late 1970s. Even while those opposing the growing centrality of neo-classical economics and market-oriented political discourses remain a significant academic constituency, within their ranks there has been a growing realization that regulatory mechanisms, and in particular the role of the state, have nevertheless been the subject of extensive changes. Alternative schools of thought have argued in terms of the way in which such mechanisms have been refashioned. Regulation has become, in the words of Regini and Majone, ’transferred’ and the ’boundaries’ between regulator and regulated ’changed’: the regulatory process has been seen to shift at the macro/national level and at the micro/enterprise level. While supporting the general argument that it is the boundaries of regulation which are to be discussed, not its presence, we shall nevertheless argue that these changes are, if anything, more contentious and that a set of ironies emerges which politicize regulation even further. © 2004 Taylor and Francis Ltd.
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| 10. |
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