The matter of market devices: Economic transformation in a southwest Alaskan salmon fishery

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThe past few decades have witnessed the reconfiguration of a sweep of industries and sectors to more closely mirror economic models, often interpreted as a hallmark of neoliberal reordering in the growing body of scholarship on the topic. Analyses have emphasized not simply the primacy of market designs in these transformations, but also their performative force: the degree to which they bring into being the phenomena they would seem to merely describe. While studies have begun to probe how transformations are effected through market devices, less attention has been directed toward understanding the conditions under which performative properties take hold, or are confounded. This article outlines recent shifts in the operations of a commercial salmon fishery in southwest Alaska in order to examine how broader modes of industry restructuring are accomplished, at least in part, through the material reworking of everyday objects and actions, such as market goods and the practices through which they are produced and consumed. It demonstrates that the abstract designs that inform fishery change, including rationalization and niche-marketing efforts, emerge not merely from the minds of economic analysts but also, and perhaps even more consequentially, through the material reconfiguration of fish flesh. At the same time, ethnographic evidence from southwest Alaska reveals the limits of performative reordering as well: Salmon fishers and their products are never very smoothly remade in the image of market models. The article argues that market materialities thus constitute both vehicles for and disruptions to the worldly realizations of neoliberal designs.

Neoliberalism and the politics of enclosure in North American small-scale fisheries

“…For example, neoliberal policies of international lending agencies have been strongly influential in spurring the rapid spread of aquaculture around the world in recent decades [100]. Because this enterprise involved the raising of wild fish in pens or designated beach areas, it lent itself easily to privatization and marketization of marine space, and could be framed as the solution to unsustainable harvesting of wild species [101][102][103][104][105]. Clausen and Longo [106] see aquaculture as meeting the need of capitalist markets to "continually increase the economic efficiency of commodity production to meet the ever-present need for growth and profit accumulation."…”

Inscription: Taxi Work Relations, the Ficha, and the Political Economy of a Market Device

“…I argue here that the ficha works as an archetypal market device, a “material and discursive assemblage that intervenes in the construction of markets,” organizing the relations to which it gives life (Muniesa et al 2007, 2; see also Callon 2010; Hébert 2014; Mackenzie 2006). Economically speaking an index, mathematically speaking a multiplier, the ficha is written into the equations of several accounting and legal frameworks that create and streamline labor relations in the taxi market, its efficacy fueled by the transportability of numbers’ arithmetical properties.…”

“…Founded by Muniesa et al (2007), the market devices approach helps explain how abstract economic principles come to life through “agencements” (Muniesa et al 2007, 3), associations between actants and their properties, such that “items such as the shopping cart, a financial pricing model, or the stock ticker” become economic (Hébert 2014, 21). Following from studies situating these agencements in historical, cultural, geographical, and structural circumstances (Hébert 2014; MacKenzie 2006), this article examines the ficha as a market device in the tradition of political economy (see Di Leonardo 1993; Gregory 1982). This approach examines not economics as exchange or consumer preferences, but the conditions of production, reproduction, and accumulation that surround and qualify the moment of exchange.…”

Circling the economy: resource‐making and marketization in EU electronic waste policy

“…; MacKenzie ). By contrast, the study of European e‐waste makes it possible to explain the interaction between materials and market‐making as complex and mutually constitutive, while avoiding the dualistic tendency in political economy to equate resource materiality with the biophysical qualities or vital energies inherent to the things undergoing commodification (see also Hébert ; Kama ).…”