The market as lived experience: on the knowledge of markets in antitrust analysis

Abstract

This article describes some of the reported thoughts, anecdotal observations and analytic practices of advisors and commissioners working at the Brazilian antitrust body (CADE) regarding the markets, industries, sectors - i.e. the economic world - which they aim to understand and regulate. The activity of these professionals primarily requires an evaluation of certain market characteristics in order to establish strategies for the investigation of allegations of anti-competitive market practice and for passing judgment on administrative cases filed before the antitrust tribunal. Based on interviews with these professionals and participant observation of their analytical work, this article seeks to describe modes of knowing and conceiving markets which are parallel to the modes officially and more explicitly relied upon by antitrust bureaucrats. We present these lateral modes of knowing as a set of personal lived experiences and compare them to ethnographic practices of knowledge production, in order to reflect on the importance of lived experience in the anthropological and sociological literature on markets.

Los Caminos De La Informalidad

“…4 La relación entre ideas económicas eruditas y ordinarias es uno de los ejes de investigación del Núcleo de Pesquisas em Cultura e Economia (NuCEC) del PPGAS/Museu Nacional y del PPGSA /IFCS de la Universidad Federal de Rio de Janeiro. Ver, por ejemplo, Pantaleón, 2004;Neiburg, 2006;Braum 2009;Motta, 2010Motta, y 2019Onto, 2014Onto, y 2016Rabossi, 2018. El interés en este eje de investigación tiene diversas inspiraciones. En mi caso, deriva de la conf luencia de los estudios sobre dispositivos y artes de gobierno (Foucault, 2006), sobre cuantificación (Desrosières, 1993;Porter, 1995) y, en particular, sobre la relación entre conocimiento económico y economía (Callon, 1998;Mitchel, 2005).…”

Knowledge-production in journalism: Translation, mediation and authorship in Brazil

“…This article seeks to investigate knowledge-production in journalism. In line with recent ethnographic research concerned with knowledge-production in advertising agencies (Ariztía, 2015), regulatory bodies (Onto, 2014) and news agencies (Boyer, 2013), the article examines the newsroom as a knowledge site. In particular, it examines how journalists mediate knowledge claims made by experts, policy makers and the lay public, and how they negotiate with sources from other fields in the process of newsmaking.…”

O direito em última instância: uma etnografia do Supremo Tribunal Federal

“…E existem aqui, segundo Riles (idem) dois tipos de objetificação 34 : aquela que opera tornando a realidade objeto da técnica e, portanto objetificando a realidade a partir de modelos racionalizados (Samuel, 2004), e outra, que ao invés de produzir uma separação entre a lei e o mundo, por meio da criação de significados, se torna ela mesma um objeto no mundo. Conforme Onto (2014): "Essas duas formas de tornar-se objeto dão ao conhecimento jurídico a característica de ser ao mesmo tempo um reflexo do mundo e uma coisa no mundo" (p.10)…”