Beyond performativity: Material futures of finance

Reflexive expectations in innovation financing: An analysis of venture capital as a mode of valuation

“…While an exit is, by definition, a future event, the informant's decisions reflect a durational approach (e.g. multiple investments at different stages) in their effort to reach a particular inflection point (Tellmann, 2020). They finish by saying:…”

“…Social actors understand the future, seek to enact or contest it, and understand it as a construct of their visions, enactments, and contestations. Analysing how they reflexively bring the future ‘into being’ necessitates what Tellmann (2020) theorizes as a ‘durational’ analytic, requiring us to examine the practices, processes, and discourses that stretch from now into the future – and not simply to analyse how the future is enacted in the present. Stories are an important part of these durational modes, and not just or primarily a form of collective meaning-making that enables certain actors to enrol others in their visions.…”

“…However, the analytic focus on how the future is enacted in the present, which is evident in much of the expectations and futures literature (e.g. Beckert, 2013 ; Borup et al, 2006 ; Brown & Michael, 2003 ), does not address the important issue that the future is not only enacted in the present, but that bringing the future ‘into being’ necessitates a durational analysis that unpacks how temporal expectations are reflexively bound to particular practices and processes running temporally from the future to the present ( Tellmann, 2020 ). As one informant commented, ‘you’ve got to start with what you want at the end and build the foundation back to it’ (ex-VC Investor N).…”

“…My approach is to draw on the existing analytical perspectives in this literature – characterized by an appreciation of the performative nature of such stories – and to draw on emerging research on reflexivity in social studies of finance (e.g. Muniesa & Doganova, 2020 ; Tellmann, 2020 ). The empirical information in this article is derived from a long-running project on the implications of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis for innovation financing, specifically in the life sciences sector.…”

The time that money requires: Use of the future and critique of the present in financial valuation

“…This allows us to formulate a manner of critique in line with recent work in sociology, anthropology, and critical political economy that has started to question the temporal categories of finance and shed light on their problematic use by the social critique of finance. Tellmann (2016) effectively showed how the notions of 'uncertainty' that populate the interpretation of financial phenomena -such as financial 'crisis' -form in fact the prime epistemic vehicle for an intrinsically financial view of time, one in which the future is seen from the viewpoint of a particular economic subjectivity that has to seize it and secure it (see also Tellmann, 2017Tellmann, , 2020. Similarly, Konings (2018a) perceptively uncovered the dead-end that notions of 'speculation' represent for both vernacular financial thought and the social critique of finance, relying as they do on a fundamentalist epistemology of value that is simply at odds with the actual functioning of money in capitalist times (see also Cooper and Konings, 2015; Konings, 2018b; La Berge, 2018; Muniesa, 2018.…”