Socio-technical Agencements Research Articles

Stacked economization: a research program for the study of platforms

ABSTRACT Conceived as a sequel to our papers on economization and marketization (Caliskan and Callon 2009; 2010), This article presents a research program for analyzing platforms. Caliskan and Callon (2009) have defined economization as the design and qualification of devices, agencies, representations, networks, and their distributed relations as ‘economic’ by social scientists and market actors. The second installment has presented marketization as a mode of economization that facilitates transactions with money within a socio-technical agencement on a space of power (Caliskan and Callon 2010). Updating our previous definitions and literature review, we turn our attention in this installment to platforms and propose an alternative approach. Critiquing two hegemonic perspectives on platforms – Platform Anachronism (platforms as mere markets with multiple sides) and Platform Reductionism (platforms as mere surveillance systems) – we define a platform as (1) a stacked economization process bringing together a variety of agencements such as gift, barter, and market, (2) which provides actors with tools of redefining their needs within an exploration space, (3) entailing layered relations of power. We argue that the program of platform study we describe in this paper provides researchers, economic actors, and policymakers with agile and effective tools of analysis, economization, and regulation.

The contronymity of project accounting for performing the relevance of project outcomes

PurposeThis paper aims to advance recent literature on the performativity of accounting by examining how project accounting affects a project organization’s ability to deliver a relevant project outcome, such as a product or a building, for a receiving client organization.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on a longitudinal case study of a 41.4-billion-kroner (5.5-billion-euro) Danish project of constructing 16 new public hospitals. Its objective was to reduce the average unit costs and improve the quality of patient care. Each hospital construction was managed by a separate project organization and handed over to a separate receiving hospital organization. The project organizations applied a common approach to project accounting. The paper relies on Michel Callon’s concepts of performativity and sociotechnical agencement – approaching project accounting as an arrangement of devices.FindingsThe paper shows that the project-accounting agencement simultaneously supported and undermined the project organizations’ ability to deliver hospitals relevant to the receiving hospital organizations. The agencement performed hospital designs, disciplined project actors and guided decision-making, thus supporting the overall work of the project organizations. It also, however, compelled the project organizations to compromise on hospital designs when unexpected events occurred. These compromises led to the delivery of hospitals, which largely prevented the receiving hospital organizations from achieving the project’s objective.Originality/valueThis paper advances our limited understanding of the dynamic and complex relationship between project accounting and the relevance of project outcomes. It introduces the concept of a “contronymity device” to capture the way project accounting simultaneously produces two opposing consequences, both supporting and undermining the enactment of a particular reality. The paper lastly enriches our understanding of how project-accounting devices impact hospital organizations’ operating cost structures and challenge patient care capabilities.

A break in the cloud: the local sociotechnical affordances underlying global internet infrastructures

How did an enterprising rural community establish Internet infrastructure that later attracted Google's flagship global data center in The Dalles, Oregon? Leveraging a sociotechnical affordance perspective and a descriptive case study approach, this article examines the policies and infrastructures leading to the organizational development of a publicly-owned Internet network - QLife Network - from 2002 to 2005 that directly created the local sociotechnical affordances for Google's first data center in the world. The conceptualization and implementation of QLife Network draw on three central mechanisms that structure and reflect local sociotechnical affordances: cultivating community dialogue, prioritizing public ownership, and harnessing institutional anchors. Broadly, this article contributes to calls for localized sociotechnical agency, especially in underserved rural areas, and creates analytical room for a more multivalent story of local power and community-led stakes in the global distribution of Internet infrastructure.

Introducing the lens of markets-in-the-making to transition studies: The case of the Danish wind power market agencement

This paper contributes to a renewed understanding of markets in transition studies by focusing on how unknown things must be ‘framed’ and pacified in order to be attributed some ‘value’ that makes them ‘matter’. We empirically analyze the making of a market agencement for wind power deployment in Denmark. Using an analytical framework of framing and pacifying, we trace three entangled ‘domains of action’ associated with the employment of (a) sociopolitical devices to enable the discursive valuation of wind power, (b) economic devices to develop price-setting models for investors, and (c) technical devices to facilitate grid integration, thereby framing wind power as socio-politically, economically, and techno-scientifically ‘valuable’, respectively. This market agencement has consistently produced concerns (i.e., overflows) requiring constant re-framing. We discuss how the lens of markets-in-the-making can contribute to transition studies. By showing how the domains of action entangle and ‘overflow’ onto each other, this study demonstrates that the relational lens of socio-technical agencements can help shed additional light on the dynamics and agency of markets in transition.

Financially engineering a “self-generative” political economy of creditworthiness: Expertocratic exemption problems for sustainable debt and democracy

Repeated crises have proven credit rating agency (CRA) models/methods erroneous and “business-as-usual” unsustainable. Nevertheless, considerable dubious “default risk” management and technoscientific capitalist expertise remain unchanged. Unpacking sovereign ratings, we appreciate how “debt sustainability analysis” (DSA) distortions underpin expertocratic CRA (default) anomaly. Their neoliberal “politics of limits” performance helps market (shareholder) imperatives trump those of democratic (stakeholder) politics. Given surging inflation and debt (distress) to remedy Covid-19-induced shocks, ratings aid constitute and (re)validate the subjectivities/affinities and organizational conditions advancing a “self-equilibrating,” “self-generative” agencement political economy of creditworthiness (PEC). Antagonizing sustainable budgetary government’s programmatic/expertocratic and operational/democratic asymmetry, econophysics ratings diminish fiscal sovereignty. Universal PEC management through hybrid credit risk/uncertainty qualculation mitigates negative externality contestation shielding CRAs from serious reform. Ratings procyclicality and contagion reinforce this precarious sociotechnical agencement PEC as the status quo.

Stakeholder analysis to improve the national control program of cystic echinococcosis in Morocco

Cystic echinococcosis (CE) is a major zoonosis in Morocco. Despite a national hydatidosis control programme (NHCP) established in 2005, CE burden is still high nationwide. The aim of this study was to carry out an NHCP stakeholders’ analysis to identify weak points and propose improvement strategies. In total, 164 semi-structured interviews were carried out with national and local stakeholder representatives, and one stakeholders’ workshop was organized. Classical categories of stakeholder analysis (i.e. involvement, interest, importance, influence, priority, and power) were semi-quantified. Based on these categories, an analytical framework was proposed, by selecting elements from the stakeholder analysis, to structure the assessment around three criteria: measure appropriation, political agency, and socio-technical agency. Besides specific weak points of the NHCP, the analysis highlighted the complexity of implementing a zoonotic disease control programme due to the involvement of many different stakeholders. Finally, this study provides a simplified stakeholder analysis method that could be used to assess other health programmes targeting zoonotic diseases, in Morocco and in similar countries.

A care-infused market tale: on (not) maintaining relationships of trust in energy retrofit products

ABSTRACT Issues of maintenance offer exceptional opportunities for advancing our understanding of how market-driven innovation can meet societal objectives for energy transitions. In this article, I present a case study of ongoing attempts by two spin-outs and one start-up to stabilise innovative socio-technical agencements – ‘customer journeys’ – designed to catalyse economic exchange of certain singular goods – energy retrofit products – in the Netherlands. This market-driven innovation relies on sustaining carefully crafted relationships of trust among supply-chain actants and homeowners. I mobilise the analytical lens of ‘care’ to show how the multiplicity of connections that form through socio-technical agencements – and function as a market – are tentative, contested, and unpredictable. Trust relationships are in a constant process of becoming through contestation and convergence among supply-chain actants. In doing so, I expose the precarious and arduous work involved in maintaining a market for singular public goods. This implies a knowledge politics as well: in a call to sensitise us, market scholars, to processes of maintenance integral to market-driven innovation for energy transitions I propose to advance Callon’s call to civilise markets by sharing troubled, though encouraging, care-infused market tales in an effort to counteract the storification of energy transitions as innovation fairy tales.

Contingency and Potential

Unsatisfied with an intellectual history that divides the philosophy of technology into classical and empirical approaches, the following paper suggests a renewed attention to dialectical philosophies of technology. Drawing on the work of Andrew Feenberg, I argue that dialectical philosophies of technology are not essentialist holdovers from the past, but are empirically grounded approaches that direct researchers to ask why we have the technologies we do. From this, dialectical philosophies of technology open up ways to think about technology that prioritize the tension between the sociotechnical world as it is and concrete potentials of what it could be. Contrasting this against postphenomenology, I argue that avoiding these moments of potential can lead to a conservative and paternalistic philosophy of technology that fixes sociotechnical agency to a professional class of designers, engineers, and policy makers. I conclude by suggesting that Feenberg's dialectical philosophy of technology presents a modest alternative to the design imperatives that now guide the trajectory of postphenomenology.

The Cascading Metrologies of SwedishCultural Policy

The commencement of cultural policy in Sweden is analysed as part of global and networked socio-technical agencements, beginning with the transformation of the political rationalities underlying st ...

Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City: Exteriorization, Individuation, Reinvention

Accounts by geographers of the ways in which urban spaces are digitally mediated have proliferated in the last few years. This significant body of work pays particular attention to the production of urban space by software and digital hardware, and geographers have drawn on various kinds of posthumanist philosophies to theorize the agency of the technological nonhuman. The agency of the human, however, has been left undertheorized in this work, often appearing in the form of excessive resistance to the agency granted to the digital. This article contributes to understanding the digital mediation of cities by theorizing a specifically posthuman agency; that is, a human agency both mediated through technics and diverse. Drawing on the philosophy of Stiegler as well as a range of feminist digital scholarship, the article conceptualizes posthuman agency as always already coconstituted with technologies. Posthumans are simultaneously individuated and exteriorized in that coconstitution, and this permits agency understood as reinvention. The article also insists that such sociotechnical agency is differentiated, particularly in terms of the spatialities and temporalities through which it is organized. It concludes by arguing that geographers must reconfigure their understanding of digitally mediated cities and acknowledge the inventiveness and diversity of urban posthuman agency.

Making Banks on a Global Scale: Management-Based Regulation as Agencement

This article seeks to provide a theoretical account of how management-based regulation (MBR), a new regulatory style used by many global regulators, affects its targets. The article centers on a case study. It introduces agencement theory as the theoretical heuristic to inform the analysis of a global, large-scale MBR scheme, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Internal Capital Adequacy Assessment Program (ICAAP). In agencement theory, agency is understood in a neomaterialist frame. The core idea is that an actor’s actions are determined by the material assemblage that constitutes her. The agencement heuristic allows ICAAP to be conceptualized as a regulatory agencement scheme. The scheme seeks to affect its targets—banks—by choreographing and shaping the socio-technical agencement processes under which the banks emerge as actors capable of cognizing and acting on risks. Consequently, the impact of MBR is mediated through actor construction. Regulation fosters actors whose socio-technical makeup leads them to have particular behavioral proclivities. The article also discusses the philosophical implications of moving to regulatory agencement and the schemes relationship to neoliberal regulation.

From performativity to political economy: index investing, ETFs and asset manager capitalism

ABSTRACTAs a discipline, political economy has often been reluctant to engage with the details of market devices and practices. This weakens the microfoundations of its analysis of capitalist macro-dynamics and cedes unnecessarily large stretches of intellectual territory to economics. The performativity approach developed by Michel Callon offers a theoretical way out of this dual dilemma. It allows political economists to study ‘the economy’ directly by investigating the links between the diversity of market devices and the diversity of capitalism. The argument is illustrated by an analysis of the gradual, performative evolution of the investment intermediation market, where the traditional high-cost model of active asset management has been challenged by the emergence of a low-cost alternative in the form of index-tracking investment funds. Highlighting the distributive implications of this development, the current article shows that the financial innovation of exchange-traded funds played a crucial part in the completion of the socio-technical agencement of the ‘passive investor’. In contrast to the recently resurgent notion that the two approaches are incompatible, this article insists that the micro-sociological study of market devices fosters the analytical capacity of political economy by opening up new perspectives on the macro-dynamics of contemporary capitalism. In the case at hand, it brings into sharp relief the contours of the emerging constellation of ‘asset manager capitalism’.

Economic circuits in Madagascar: “Agencing” the circulation of goods, accounts and money

Recent economic sociology literature has focused on the circulation of goods along discontinuous economic spaces as a widespread modality of value creation. This paper explores how these “in-between” spaces are open to stabilized chains of transactions that maintain resilience against disruptions and uncertainties. It argues that the day-to-day circulation of actors, goods, and money in and between markets leads to an “economic circuit.” We define an economic circuit as a socio-technical and spatialized chain, which organizes on a regular and continuous basis the circulation of goods and payments between “kinship” partnerships. Exchanges are circular, assembling heterogeneous media and transfers, and relying on financial arrangements as a crucial mode for ensuring transaction continuity. To develop this idea, the paper draws upon the case of the small-scale fishing trading networks in Madagascar. It aims to explore the mundane arrangements and the “socio-technical agencements” operating across the whole chain of goods circulation.

Promissories and pharmaceutical patents: agencing markets through public narratives

We investigate a body of data emanating from the 2008/2009 EU Pharmaceutical Sector Inquiry, interpreting the collection of submissions to it as a concerted attempt at market innovation that becomes fraught with challenge and contest. In the pharmaceutical market, interests associated with patient concerns, government budgets, global “Big Pharma,” and local “small pharma” coalesce and compete with patent law, technological innovation and drug lifecycles. Our research question is: What role do market narratives play in shaping the market's socio-technical agencements? By introducing market narratives, we focus on the performative effects of temporality and iteration. Our argument is that by acting as (contested) promissories, market narratives contribute to “agencing” a market, such that actors are engaged continually in juxtaposing and adjusting their representations of it and putting in place those socio-technical agencements that make the markets resemble those narratives. Narrating a market becomes a collective and iterative task of equipping actors to shape the markets that they desire.

How newness affects the apps markets? A socio-technical agencement perspective

The markets of mobile applications (aka apps) have grown into an unprecedented socio-economic phenomenon in the digital economy. It has fundamentally changed the ways mobile app platforms interact with complementors from a lock-in to an open logic. Yet it is unclear how firms can leverage on give-away assets where openness has not only weakened the traditional appropriability regimes but also introduced a degree uncertainty of which direction innovation will take. This paper extends the notion of agencements from Callon’s anthropology of markets to account for the creation and operations of the apps markets. We conceptualise the apps markets as collectives of socio-technical agencements through which newness is introduced to reconfigure the on-going surrounds and exchanges for platforms and complementors. We test our model using a panel dataset of the ways apps are created using multiple platforms between 2005 and 2011. The empirical findings show 90% of newness comes from 12.4% of the complementors, and is unevenly distributed and concentrated on the top 20 most popular platforms. Platforms, which belong to these new socio-technical agencements, further attract new complementors to join

Agencing markets: Actualizing ongoing market innovation

This paper explores what it takes to actualize market innovation. It traces the ongoing efforts instigated by an exporter to bring about, and transform a mainstream market into, a new sustainability market; a market designed to advance ecological and social sustainability goals. We draw attention to the diverse and heterogeneous composite – a socio-technical agencement – whose transformative connections collectively reconfigure and transform the mainstream market into a sustainability market. This paper draws on evidence from an ethnographic study of a newly established sustainability coffee market in Uganda to discuss how market innovation unfolds. It illustrates the ongoing character of market innovation and reveals the agencing work involved in bringing about the agencement and capacitating agencies to realize market innovation.

Valuing health technology – habilitating and prosthetic strategies in personal health systems

This paper explores the tensions in ICT-driven personal health systems innovation and the impact of these tensions on valuing health innovation for older people. We regard personal health systems (PHS) as configurational technologies and information infrastructures that need to strike a balance between offering standardized health and care packages on the one hand, and providing options for localization and personalization on the other. We use insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to conceptualize the configurational dynamics of PHS innovation and emphasize ‘generification work’ as an important arena for the development, assessment and adoption of personal health innovations. We explore two research and development projects of PHS service-robot platforms and build on Callon's concepts of ‘prosthesis’ and ‘habilitation’ to identify two ideal-typical generification strategies in the projects. A prosthetic generification strategy positions the robot as part of a socio-technical agencement that configures older persons into disciplined agency, while a habilitating strategy speaks to them as active actors in the innovation process. We demonstrate how the designers in both projects were often unconsciously led into a prosthetic strategy despite initial intentions to the contrary. We explain this by mechanisms of personalization, needs capturing and othering. However, elements of habilitating strategies were also present, although in a less articulated form. We identify these elements and argue that in aging societies, health innovations need to pursue prosthesis and habilitation simultaneously. We conclude our paper with implications for innovation policy and health technology assessment.

Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the materialities of colonial government by considering the changing relations between practices of data collecting, styles of anthropological knowing and modes of governing which target the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations. Drawing on comparative studies from Australia; the Australian administered territory of Papua; France; French Indo-China; New Zealand; North America and the UK; the papers consider the implications of different forms of knowledge associated with practices of collecting—anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, demography—in apparatuses of rule in various late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. This introduction outlines the rationale for the volume and elaborates the concept of “anthropological assemblage” which helps focus the authors' explorations of the socio-technical agencements which connected museum, field, metropolis and colony during this period. In doing so, it points towards a series of broader themes—the relationship between pastoral power and ethnographic expertise; the Antipodean career of the Americanist culture concept; and the role of colonial centres of calculation in the circulation of knowledge, practices of collecting and regimes of governing—which suggest productive future lines of inquiry for “practical histories” of anthropology.

READING THE TICKER TAPE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN MARKET

This article analyses popular accounts of financial innovations such as the stock ticker in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Recent social studies of finance (e.g. Preda 2009) have drawn attention to the socio-technical performative agency of such new modes of disseminating economic knowledge that do not merely provide a more accurate representation of ‘the market’ as a coherent entity but in fact help create it. However, where Preda focuses more on the modes of rational calculability and the mechanisation of trust that were encouraged by the numerical abstractions of the ticker tape and subsequent charts of the fledgling technical analysts, this article discovers a residual attraction to rhetorical forms that humanized the impersonality of the financial markets, but which, in so doing, were more in tune with occult than modern understandings of finance.

Assembling an Economic Actor: TheAgencementof a Hedge Fund

Michel Callon has conceptualised economic actors as made up of socio-technical agencements: collectives of human beings, technical devices, algorithms, and so on. This article reports a pilot, partially observational study of a hedge fund, a category of actor in financial markets that is of growing importance but that has so far attracted little attention in economic sociology. It draws on that study, and on interviews with other financial market practitioners, to delineate what is involved in viewing such an actor as made up of an agencement, and discusses the merits of doing so.