José Ossandón

Sowing consumers in the garden of mass retailing in Chile

It is known that some key elements of modern consumer credit were originally developed in department stores. However, almost no attention has been given to new developments in this area. This paper studies the case of retail credit in Chile. Special attention is given to a particular technique known as “to sow” (or issuing small loans to risky consumers that are made to grow by carefully following and classifying purchase and debt behaviour), whose success has been enabled by the development of a wide quantitative datascape. Following the practice of “sowing” helps to understand not only how consumer credit is mediated by market devices, but how it practically works as a device of marketing on its own.

Testing the provoked economy

Chapter 5 of Fabian Muniesa’s new book The Provoked Economy draws on an ethnographic study of consumer testing in the perfume industry. Through the chapter, we learn how potential consumers, equipped with their noses and surveys, partake in carefully orchestrated situations in which new fragrances are weight in relation to others. Economic objects such as perfume, we were told years ago (Callon & Muniesa 2005), are not pre-qualified entities, but are singularized in the specific tests and calculative spaces in which they are located. Similarly, the simulacrum of perfume testing, Muniesa explains, does not measure the inherent preferences of the participants, nor the perfumes’ essence, but it turns the former into measuring devices that subsequently allow the singularization of the latter. A new book, such as The Provoked Economy, obviously is not a new fragrance. And, as Muniesa reminds us in the last paragraphs of chapter 7, academic research should not be confused with a new commodity. But, we could say, now using Karpik’s (2010) terminology, a new book is a singularity; a unique academic and economic object that is made comparable to other results of academic production with the help of different ‘judgment devices’. In the academic publishing industry, most monographs are hardly advertised – or advertising is left in the hands of the authors. But, and beside book reviews, of course, a book’s main singularizing device is its own content; it is on the book’s pages that we normally learn about the author’s quarrels and differences with earlier academic publications as well as what the author believes to be the ground-breaking ideas that make the new publication unique within its own field. This book, however, does not do much of that. Perhaps because of its empiricist stance, The Provoked Economy is written in a sober tone that avoids grand declarations and noisy quarrels. Or, perhaps, like certain luxurious goods such as perfume, the author tried to make this book singular by avoiding any explicit comparison with existing publications. What is the correct answer? We do not know. And it does not really matter. What does matter though is that because of its lack of explicit polemic and self-aggrandizing statements this book might leave the reader wondering about its ambitions. What is this book trying to accomplish? Or, to respect its pragmatism, what is it that this book does? In this review, we rehearse a method to find out. Inspired – or should we say provoked – by the content and style of The Provoked Economy, we have devised three tests that can help us to figure out the singularity of this book. In each of these tests, the reviewed book is placed in a delimited calculative (in the sense given by Callon and Muniesa, and not Karpik) space, together with other existing academic books that we – organizers and subjects of the experiment (we apologize for that, but one calculates better in a calculative space of one’s own configuration, as Muniesa also reminds us) – found suitable for comparison.

Enmarcando las redes de observaciones en la reciente sociología de las finanzas

Este breve articulo contextualiza en la sociologia economica reciente el giro a la observacion sugerido por Elena Esposito y David Stark. Por lo mismo, podra ser utilizado tanto como texto de apoyo que facilite la lectura de los articulos principales de este numero como para apuntar a conexiones y preguntas aun no indicadas en esta discusion.

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