In light of the spread of markets across the globe and deeper into daily life, this paper argues for a more robust analysis and application of Karl Polanyi's conception of (dis)embedded markets coupled with the performativity thesis authored mainly by Michel Callon. It suggests that while disembeddedness as a concept is necessary for an analysis of contemporary financial markets that are increasingly self-referential, it is not sufficient. Despite the suggestion of a gulf between Polanyian and Callonian economics, there are important similarities in the two frameworks. The similarities are considered along with the considerable difference, all in an attempt to develop a more robust methodological framework for analyzing financial markets. Performativity, it is argued, can help fill the gaps in Polanyi's embeddedness framework, albeit only when that concept's tendency to produce aspatial and apolitical arguments are taken seriously. The paper uses an abbreviated case study of the development of US financial derivative markets in the 1970s and 1980s to argue that markets must be considered in light of both their institutional and geographic entanglements as well as their (dis)embeddedness in systems of calculativeness and mathematical modeling. Specifically the paper analyzes the tension between the derivative origin story authored by Donald MacKenzie, which focuses on neoclassical pricing models like the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing formula, and my own empirical research, which suggests the urban-economic geography of Chicago played a key role in the development of these instruments.
Digital technologies have made access to and profit from scientific publications hotly contested issues. Debates over Open Access (OA), however, rarely extend from questions of distribution into questions of how OA is transforming the politics of academic knowledge production. We argue that the movement towards OA rests on a relatively stable moral episteme that positions different actors involved in the economy of OA (authors, publishers, the general public), and most importantly, knowledge itself. Our analysis disentangles the ontological and moral side of these claims, showing how OA changes the meaning of knowledge from a good in the economic, to good in the moral sense. This means OA can be theorised as the moral economy of digital knowledge production. Ultimately, using Boltanski and Thévenot's work on justification, we reflect on how this moral economy frames political subjectivity of actors and institutions involved in academic knowledge production.
This paper examines the 2001 dislocation of the headquarters of the iconic U.S. aerospace company, Boeing, out of the Puget Sound region of the State of Washington, its ancestral manufacturing base. It argues the rationale for the exit was the desire on the part of Boeing's increasingly financefocused executives to detach and disembed the "brains" of the company from the product-focused, engineering based corporate culture embedded in Puget Sound. The paper attempts to ground the logic of financialization by examining how it emerged at, and was shaped by one particular company. I employ economic geographers' conceptions of place-based corporate culture and societal, territorial and network embeddedness (Hess 2004) to explain how financialization and corporate dislocation can enable each other. The paper also briefly discusses Boeing's eventual decision to reembed its headquarters in downtown Chicago, Illinois.
The social infrastructures that constitute both public and private administration are increasingly entangled with digital code, big data, and algorithms. While some argue these technologies have blown apart the strictures of bureaucratic order, we see more subtle changes at work. We suggest that far from a radical rupture, in today's digitizing society, there are strong traces of the logic and techniques of Max Weber's bureau; a foundational concept in his account of the symbiotic relationship between modernity, capitalism, and social order. We suggest the manner through which these techniques have shaped contemporary systems of social administration helps explain the remarkable legitimacy digital governance has acquired. We do this by exploring how digital technologies draw from, and give new substance to, the three key principles of Weber's theory of the bureau-efficiency, objectivity, and rationality. We argue that neoliberalism, or the widespread economization of politics, has conditioned the digital versions of these principles, not least by subordinating social ends to technical means. At the same time we argue that digitalism engenders the privatization of authority, not least through its "elective affinity" with market logics. I. NEW ORDERAt the heart of our digitally mediated world is a social paradox that arcs between order and emancipation. On the one hand, digital technologies appear to have contributed to a new era of Acknowledgements: We are grateful to European Union's FP7 Marie Curie Actions via the Universities in the Knowledge Economy (UNIKE) Initial Training Network for funding parts of this research. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the University of Illinois at Chicago's April 2015 symposium on "The Crowd, The Cloud, and Urban Governance," as well as the 4 th Institutional Transformation in European Political Economy Conference at the Copenhagen Business School in December of 2015. We thank the organizers and participants of both events for engaging reactions and discussion. We also thank Eva Hartmann, Poul Kjaer, David Bassens, and David Clarke for helpful suggestions on previous drafts. Any remaining errors or omissions are the authors' responsibility. ** Chris Muellerleile is an Assistant Professorof Urban and Economic Geography at Swansea University in the United Kingdom. He holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Chris's research focuses on the intersection of the political economy of finance with information and knowledge economies.
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