| 1. |
- Björklund Larsen, Lotta, 1960-
(författare)
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Mind the (tax) gap : an ethnography of a number
- 2017
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Economy. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 1753-0350 .- 1753-0369. ; 10:5, s. 419-433
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article looks carefully at the making of the tax gap as a calculative practice at the Swedish Tax Agency. It points to the challenges with assessing tax gap numbers and reveals examples of its careless usage by various stakeholders in Swedish society in order to impact the discourse on tax compliance. Based on an ethnographic study of documents, it is an example of a number that performs a dual function: on the one hand mobilizing people’s morals and subsequent commitments and on the other hand measuring such commitments. On a more general level, the tax gap is an example of how a number that describes a complicated reality is calculated with many caveats attached to it, yet used with certainty in society. I thus challenge the metaphor of the ubiquitous ‘black box’. The Swedish tax gap number is a calculated device and can be unpacked as a specific number. But if we think about what a tax gap ought to contain, we have to think outside the box and beyond: what was not included in the published tax gap number and why there was no room for it.
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| 2. |
- Björklund Larsen, Lotta, 1960-
(författare)
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The making of a ‘good deal’ : dealing with conflicting and complementary values when getting the car repaired informally in Sweden
- 2013
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Economy. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 1753-0350 .- 1753-0369. ; 6:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Economic rationality and reciprocal help are values that are often posed as contradictory within exchanges. However, there are instances when these values work in tandem, such as when justifying informal purchases of work, svart arbete, in contemporary Sweden. Svart arbete are omnipresent exchanges in Swedish society, and there are many reasons for performing them. On the one hand, a good deal is part of everyday social life when people help each other. On the other hand, a good deal also reinforces views that economic rationalities are values that do not exclusively adhere to formal markets. This article focuses on the values that construct the ‘good deal’ when getting your car fixed informally. These overlapping and somewhat contradictory values in theory, but commonplace in practice, illustrate how notions of reciprocity and economic calculations interweave and are difficult to entangle one from the other. The ‘good deal’ thus concerns how illegal, yet licit purchases of services are made acceptable when posing them as cheap and simple transactions that simultaneously invoke a realm of closer relations.
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| 3. |
- Blomberg, Jesper
(författare)
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The multiple worlds of equity analysts : valuation, volume, and volatility
- 2016
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Economy. - : Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles. - 1753-0350 .- 1753-0369. ; 9:3, s. 277-295
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper contributes to the increasing research on how experts within financial institutions co-produce and organize financial markets, and in particular how equity analysts enact stock markets characterized by high volume and volatility. The 20 equity analysts studied give qualitatively different accounts of what, from an outsider's perspective, appear to be very similar work. The analysts understand investment objects, equity markets, and what constitutes good analytical work in qualitatively different ways. This heterogeneity, or multiplicity, could be one source of the, unexplained by orthodox financial theory, ‘excess’ volatility and ‘excess’ trading volume on financial markets. Therefore, the paper complements accounts within heterodox finance theory and sociology-based studies of financial market activities.
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| 4. |
- Bolin, Göran
(författare)
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Symbolic Production and Value in Media Industries
- 2009
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Economy. - : Routledge. - 1753-0350 .- 1753-0369. ; 2:3, s. 345-361
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article discusses value creation within the fields of cultural production. It departs from Bourdieu's field model, and seeks to develop it to fit unrestricted cultural production, for example television production. Bourdieu for the most part discussed the production of value (or forms of capital) in relation to fields of restricted cultural production, that is, within the fine arts (e.g. art, literature). Although one of his best known works dealt with television, one cannot say that he used the possibilities inherent in his own theory thoroughly enough to analyse this field of mass production. This article builds on recent discussions on the role of field theory in media studies, and seeks to contribute to the development of a theory of value production in fields of large-scale or unrestricted cultural production. It is argued that the conflation of commercial value with other kinds of value is more intense in the subfield of unrestricted cultural production, as production in this part of the field needs to obey outer demand in a way that production at the pole of restricted production does not.
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| 5. |
- Braun, Veit, et al.
(författare)
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The mutability of economic things
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Economy. - : Routledge. - 1753-0350 .- 1753-0369. ; 14:3, s. 271-279
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How can we understand the relations between economic things and different forms of exchange – commodities, assets, gifts and singularities – in the contemporary economy? The decline of industrial capitalism and the emergence of new types of intangible valuables challenge our understanding of what economic life is about. Analysing economies through one dominant form of exchange risks overlooking the interplay between different types of valuables, their materiality and interactions that form the basis of value creation and exchange. In contrast, this special issue highlights the mutability of things – their capacity to take on and abandon different forms – as a precondition for economic activity. Drawing on a variety of empirical case studies of markets for seeds, grains, fish, carbon emissions and cattle, the contributions set out to trace the social biographies of economic things in, between and beyond multiple economic forms. We argue that it is the very ability of economic things to shift in and out of particular forms of exchange that enables the complex globalised economies of our time.
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| 6. |
- Christophers, Brett
(författare)
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The Law's Markets : Envisioning and effecting the boundaries of competition
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Economy. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1753-0350 .- 1753-0369. ; 8:2, s. 125-143
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent research has suggested that one of the key ways in which economics and cognate calculative discourses and practices ‘perform’ the economy is through the drawing of conceptual boundaries between economic activities and entities of various sorts. One such boundary is the boundary between markets. This article shows that a critical contemporary arena for the differentiation of one product or service market from another is competition (or antitrust) law, which, through its work of market definition, seeks to identify the boundaries of competition: the location of the borders between meaningful economic spaces within which buyers and sellers encounter one another and establish prices. The article argues that in envisioning markets (‘the law's markets’), competition law simultaneously constitutes markets, and it demonstrates this through an empirical examination of the exercise of such law in three economic sectors: insurance, grocery retailing, and pay-television. It also shows, however, that competition law is perennially dogged by conflict – both over the placement of such conceptual boundaries, and over the very process of placement and the status of the market boundary itself – and that its application and effects can only be understood in this light.
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| 7. |
- Christophers, Brett
(författare)
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The performativity of the yield curve
- 2017
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Economy. - : ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD. - 1753-0350 .- 1753-0369. ; 10:1, s. 63-80
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores the wide-ranging influence of the yield curve -a diagrammatic device for representing the term structure of effective interest rates on market-traded debt instruments -in contemporary monetary, financial and economic life. Drawing on the expanding literature on financial performativity, including within the field of cultural economy, the article submits that by virtue of its centrality to multiple, closely interconnected and often highly recursive sets of relations between economies, financial markets and central banks, the yield curve is performative at a range of different levels; and, parsing various different extant understandings of performativity, the article theorizes the particular nature of such performativity in the yield curve context. Against the grain of the bulk of the literature on financial performativity, however, the article also endeavors to connect the yield curve's performativity explicitly to questions of privilege (the privileges of representation) and power (the power to perform) and their unequal distribution. That is to say, the article argues that to understand the multidimensional performativity of the yield curve, we need to draw out its political as well as cultural economy.
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| 8. |
- Cochoy, Franck, et al.
(författare)
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Digitalizing consumer society : equipment and devices of digital consumption
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Economy. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1753-0350 .- 1753-0369. ; 13:1, SI, s. 1-11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy focuses on the digitalization of consumption and its social, cultural, ethical, political, and gendered implications. It thus answers the call for more research on how digital devices spread from the purely personal domain to multiple sociocultural domains. Through their use, new cultural practices have emerged between consumers and these devices, and devices and markets, that lead to change, in terms of consumer demand, consumption norms, and issues of ethics, culture, and power. Closely examining the role that devices play in consumption behavior enables us to address the supposed manipulative power of hi-tech companies, infrastructures, and systems at the global level, and the view ordinary market actors hold of digital appliances as empowering tools at the local level. The papers in this volume bridge ‘actor network theory’ and ‘consumer culture theory’ from the perspective of market ‘agencements.’ Ruckenstein-Granroth and Beauvisage-Mellet, and Arriagada-Concha focus on the device-mediated relationship between large digital market infrastructures and consumer behavior; Petersson McIntyre and Licoppe unveil the societal and cultural underpinnings of digitalized markets. Last but not least, Sorum and Soujtis address the political dimensions and implications of our new digital consumer equipment and society.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Dobeson, Alexander, 1985-
(författare)
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The politics of value revisited : commodities, assets, and the gifts of nature
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Economy. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1753-0350 .- 1753-0369. ; 14:3, s. 344-356
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- What links the value and exchange of everyday commodities with the production of new wealth in contemporary capitalism? By taking the reader on an ethnographic stroll through a potlatch-like community festival sponsored by the Icelandic fishing industry, this article sheds light on a new liberal politics of value that is rooted in the redirection of societal wealth through the privatisation of access rights to former common pool resources. While this politics of value has created a new, highly valuable asset class by neatly separating the right to fish from the fish in the sea, it has caused moral outrage and controversy over the ownership of the nation’s most valuable export commodity. To reunite what has been divided, asset-rich companies return the gifts of nature by handing out generous donations of free fish, while valuable fishing rights remain the de facto inalienable assets of societal influence and intangible wealth.
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