Engineers versus managers: experts, market-making and state-building in Putin's Russia

Wengle, Susanne A.

doi:10.1080/03085147.2012.661623

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…This doesn’t mean that governments relinquish authority. Financialization has served to strengthen the state by using electricity markets to centralize authority in Russia (Wengle, 2012), and by providing the state with a ready source of potential revenue in Australia (O’Neill, 2013). Here, the relevance of the ‘growth machine’ approach becomes clear, as it looks beyond specific infrastructures to broader processes linking public and private sector actors and geographies of the state (Kirkpatrick and Smith, 2011; Hall and Jonas, 2014).…”

Section: Hype or Happening?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of infrastructure 1: Economies

Furlong

2019

Progress in Human Geography

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This progress report explores economies of infrastructure, concentrating on questions of financialization. Interest in infrastructure financialization has grown with concern about financialization more broadly, coming to dominate discussions on economies of infrastructure. Below, I engage with research that explores what infrastructure financialization entails, its scope, as well as the mathematical infrastructures that support it. Questioning the common presentation of financialization as a complete break with past economies of infrastructure, I bookend this report with its links to – and continuities with – debt-led infrastructure development, which prevailed in the post-war period and remains of great importance in contemporary economies of infrastructure.

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Section: Hype or Happening?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of infrastructure 1: Economies

Furlong

2019

Progress in Human Geography

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“…In responding thus to the increasing institutional diversity of capitalist developmental paths, the paper contributes to the emerging literature in comparative capitalisms that sees 'illiberal' variants of capitalist development not as a perennial contest between state and market actors, but rather as a dynamic interpenetration of private and public sector actors (see also Wengle, 2012). As I have argued here, this interpenetration is embedded in historical lineages, residual patterns of socio-cultural relations and existing institutional arrangements that determine how the uncertain nexus of state and market comes to be filled in with stable, uncertainty-reducing expectations.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The social order of Chinese capitalism: socio-economic uncertainty, communist party rule and economic development, 1990–2000

Gruin

2016

Economy and Society

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China's financially repressed economy remains characterized by a distinctly resilient political structure (the Chinese Communist Party, CCP) that penetrates both increasingly rational 'private' (market) and 'public' (state) organizations. How are we to understand the financial system's role in this persistently illiberal yet marketizing political economy? This paper develops a theory of China's financial reform as the management of socio-economic uncertainty by the CCP. Since the early 1990s, the financial system has formed a locus of the CCP's capacity both to manage and to propagate socio-economic uncertainty through the path of reform. The unique path of financial reform in China should thus not be viewed solely in terms of 'partial' or 'failed' free-market reform, but rather as the product of a more concerted vision of how the financial system enabled a mode of economic growth that combined the drive for accumulation of capital with the distinctive legacies of China's post-1989 socio-political circumstances.

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“…Following Koray Çalıșkan and Michel Callon ( a ; b ), I understand future‐making in terms of an interplay of institutions, material entities, socialization practices, and ways of seeing and speaking that serve to establish authority (see also Boyer ; Carr ). Susanne Wengle (), for instance, also frames this interplay in terms of market‐shaping phenomena by describing shifts in the Russian power sector which have contributed to a transnational process of cultural evaluation constructed and configured by agents engaged in valuation practices.…”

Section: Of Quantities and Qualitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consulting virtue: from judgement to decision‐making in the natural gas industry

Mason

2019

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Shifts in the terrain of energy politics have given rise to consultant experts who produce and distribute knowledge of energy futures. Drawing on fieldwork at executive roundtables in global cities across North America, this essay examines the consolidation of this form of expertise and the opulent settings in which it is distributed. By exploring the role of aesthetic judgement in market‐orientated decision‐making, it contributes to anthropological work on elites, expertise, and energy ethics by highlighting the relationship between credibility and luxury. The essay also considers the enrolment of the expert in a kind of virtue ethics, whereby adherence to neoclassical economic principles is taken to be a character trait worthy of emulation. While clients may not look to consultants for advice coded in terms of ethics, I argue that they regard the person‐based qualities of consultants as proxies for their ability to recommend a judicious course of action. By adopting this analytic, the essay sheds new light on the confidence that clients place in consultants by drawing out the relationship between depersonalized, quantitative approaches to energy markets and the virtue of the persons who propose them.

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Engineers versus managers: experts, market-making and state-building in Putin's Russia

Cited by 9 publications

References 22 publications

Geographies of infrastructure 1: Economies

Geographies of infrastructure 1: Economies

The social order of Chinese capitalism: socio-economic uncertainty, communist party rule and economic development, 1990–2000

Consulting virtue: from judgement to decision‐making in the natural gas industry

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