Christian Frankel

The Multiple-markets Problem

Only few studies in the field of new new economic sociology deal with a simultaneity of multiple markets in the analysis. One central explanation of this situation is limitations inherent in the new new economic sociology. In this review essay I address such limitations as a way to develop research further.

The Political Standardizer

Our aim in this article is to demonstrate that corporate technical activity and corporate political activity can overlap substantially or intertwine in ways quite difficult to tease apart analytically. Theories of corporate political activity must therefore be modified to include technical standardization as potentially part of such activity. The article proposes a conceptual framework for studying such situations and argues for the existence of a “political standardizer,” defined as a company that works for or through technical standardization as a political strategy. Such a firm pursues political objectives in its technical standardization practices. The article illustrates this argument with a case study of the toy producer LEGO®. The case study provides support for existence of a political standardizer and illustrates concretely how technical and political activities are combined by a particular company.

Markets, standardization and innovation: reflections on the European Single Market

In the perspective of political governance, technical standardization is often seen as offering a practical compromise between political regulation and innovation in the market. On one hand, legal regulation is a precondition for markets as regulation provides market actors with relatively stable and calculable conditions. On the other hand, regulation may become a barrier to innovation in the market. A closer look at the history of technical standardization in the European Union (EU) Single Market framework shows that European governance in recent decades has invented modes of regulation that are intended specifically to use technical standardization to spur innovation. This chapter traces this development in policy documents from the EU and from the European technical standardization organizations. The authors conclude that the contradiction of between regulation and innovation has not been removed. Instead, they find a future-orientation of governance that to some degree contradicts the normative function of legal regulation, and they find indications that sometimes the general legal requirements become abstract to a degree that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether they have been fulfilled or not.

¿Dentro o fuera? O: ¿Dejarías a un luhmanniano invertir tu dinero?

La presente contribucion a la discusion sobre el texto de Esposito “Circularidades economicas y observacion de segundo orden” sostiene que ambas nociones, observacion de segundo orden y mercado, son usadas con varias definiciones y sugiere que el trabajo futuro con estos conceptos puede ayudar al debate para una mejor comprension de, no solamente las finanzas, sino tambien de los mercados de una manera mas general.

EUROPEAN MARKET MAKING AND POLICY DUPLICATION

ABSTRACT This paper argues that private regulation has been essential to the making of the common European market. The distinction between negative and positive integration, usually used to understand the making of the common European market, only gives us part of the picture, as it focuses on public authorities and the regulation issued by them, and tends to ignore private authorities. A focus on private regulation is suggested to enlarge the focus on positive and negative integration, and this is used in an analysis of EUs removal of barriers to trade from 1958 to 2000. The paper shows that private regulation in the form of technical standardisation has become essential to European market making.

Book Review: The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society

Time is enigmatic. So is finance. The Future of Futures is about both and it argues that a social theory of time is needed to make finance organization and management less clumsy. With the development of this theory, the book is an important contribution for both scholars of the growing field of finance studies and those that are interested in better understanding issues such as temporarily and uncertainty in organizations. Esposito focuses her attention on derivatives (futures and options) but, instead of a new thick description of ‘traders’ (Zaloom, 2006), ‘trading rooms’ (Beunza & Stark, 2004), ‘screen-human interaction’ (Knorr Cetina & Bruegger, 2002), ‘pricing algorithms’ (Muniesa, 2007) or ‘clusters of evaluation’ (MacKenzie, 2011), she takes us through a conceptual reconstruction of notions such as money, markets and needs and how all of these rest on self-referential circuits of expectations. To do so, Esposito draws heavily from social systems theory and, particularly, the influential work of Niklas Luhmann. This approach, as Esposito explains, fits nicely with the very influential story of Black-Scholes described by MacKenzie (2006). Financial theories are not external to markets but perform them. However, and this seems to be the main message of this book, to understand the dynamics of finance we need not only in-depth ethnographic accounts or sophisticated models, but also a proper theory of time. In this sense, this book complements recent work addressing the temporality of contemporary finance (Arnoldi, 2004; Kalthoff, 2005; Lash, 2007; de Goede, 2004), but with a more pragmatic tone. Esposito seems more interested in grasping the main challenges that economics at large should tackle in order to better deal with finance, rather than in building a sophisticated theory. The book consists of three parts. In part I, ‘The time of money’, basic economic concepts are reconstructed with a specific view towards time. Following Luhmann, and also, loosely, Harrison White, markets are understood as the outcome of self-referential systems of expectations: actors infer possible outcomes from other market agents, which in turn feed the expectations of further actors, and so on. In this context, coordination is certainly unlikely, but what money does is to make itself acceptable (e.g. despite my intentions my coins will be taken). However, money not only increases the chance of economic exchange, but has a central temporal dimension. ‘Money ... is a tool that deals with the uncertainty of the future in the present.’ Money binds time: it is a promise, a form of bringing possible futures into the present, and, by doing so, money creates its own world: scarcity, not of goods, but of money. 454492OSS34210.1177/0170840612454492Organization StudiesBook Review 2013

Market as a political future

Market forces, the idea that the market is present in a way that can disrupt, sustain and build up order, is so common that often we do not even give it a thought. It is as if we know the presence of market forces too well: prices rise, customers may choose to go elsewhere, they ‘vote with their feet’, and, forced by the market, shops may have to close, production may move to other parts of the world, people may lose their jobs, and political decision-makers feel forced to make drastic cuts. But markets are not only a force present. It is also a force of the future, as it were. Take the example of the European Union: for more than 50 years the future of a market common to the member states has been a political priority. The future market has had, as it were, a force to shape and invigorate politics in Europe and also elsewhere.

Management as a Temporal Hybrid

In this chapter we develop the idea of management as a temporal hybrid. What is to be gained from this perspective is displayed in an initial analysis of how management in a Danish municipality adheres to the methods of goal steering. The analysis shows that management makes self-transformation possible by processes of suspensions enabling an oscillation between two temporal logics of change. To this end, the chapter relies on the systems theory concept of technology and its timebinding effects. This contribution is not meant to be conclusive. It is an attempt at the articulation of a strong hypothesis which is valuable for understanding management more generally.