Liz McFall

PERFORMATIVITY, ECONOMICS AND POLITICS

Presenting the theme of performativity in a journal named the Journal of Cultural Economy makes the role performativity plays in the economy a logical place to start and the debt to Michel Callon (1998) an obvious one to acknowledge. Callon’s idea was that ‘economics does not describe an existing external ‘‘economy’’, but brings that economy into being: economics performs the economy, creating the phenomena it describes’ (MacKenzie & Millo 2003, p. 108). This idea is now recognized by many authors as one of the major contributions to economic sociology (see, e.g., Barry & Slater 2002; Holm 2007; MacKenzie & Millo 2003; MacKenzie 2004, 2007) and has been accompanied by vivid debates across the social sciences about the actual influence of economics and economists over economic practices (e.g. Miller 2000; Callon 2005, 2007; Ferraro et al. 2005; Ghoshal 2005; MacKenzie et al. 2007 and more generally over society and political processes (see, e.g., Bazerman & Malhotra 2006; Fourcade 2001, 2006).

WHAT ABOUT THE OLD CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES? AN HISTORICAL REVIEW OF ADVERTISING PRODUCERS

Critical work on advertising is underscored by a teleological conception of its object. This often emerges in the form of an emphasis on advertising as an evolving, hybrid institutions that increasingly mixes the ‘economic’ with the ‘cultural’. It is in this vein that advertising practitioners have been characterized as ‘new cultural intermediaries’ deploying distinctive aesthetic sensibilities. Similar patterns of knowledge and behaviour, however, can be traced amongst early producers of advertising suggesting a generation of ‘old’ cultural intermediaries. This unexpected phenomenon, it is argued, arises for two reasons. The first is that much critical work addressing the nature of contemporary advertising lacks historical context. The second is that culture and economy are normatively conceptualized as separate spheres. This separation underplays the multiple interconnections between the cultural and the economic in instances of material practice. Accordingly it is proposed that advertising be reformulated as a constituent practice that has historically relied upon the juxtaposition of ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ knowledges.

Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending

The book explores the vital role played by the financial service industries in enabling the poor to consume over the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requires means, but these industries offered something else as well – they offered practical marketing devices that captured, captivated and enticed poor consumers. Consumption and consumer markets depend on such devices but their role has been poorly understood both in the social sciences and in business studies and marketing. While the analysis of consumption and markets has been carved up between academics and practitioners who have been interested in either their social and cultural life or their economic and commercial organization, consumption continues to be driven by their combination. Devising consumption requires practical mixtures of commerce and art whether the product is an insurance policy or the latest release iPad. By advancing the case for a more pragmatic understanding of how ordinary, dull, everyday consumption is arranged, the book offers an alternative to orthodox approaches, which will appeal to broader interdisciplinary audiences interested in questions about how, and why, consumer markets work.

THE AGENCEMENT OF INDUSTRIAL BRANCH LIFE ASSURANCE

Agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending upon how they are configured. In advocating the term ‘agencement’ Callons aim is to signal the close interweaving of words and actions and thus jettison the more Austinian associations of performativity. Agencement calls attention to the various processes by which economic actors, both human and non-human, are endowed with the fixtures, fittings and devices necessary to conduct themselves in particular ways. Thus depending upon how things are arranged or configured, disinterested or selfish, calculative or non-calculative, individual or collective agencies become possible. This model works well to describe the emergence of markets for industrial branch life assurance in the UK from the nineteenth century. Companies like the Prudential and the Pearl reacted to the conflicts, crises and controversies in the commercial market and the competition between socialized and privatized or prudentialist insurance models with Industrial Branch Assurance. This claimed to provide security for the thrifty poor by employing an army of agents whose weekly premium collections helped impose the discipline of thrift and security. Through the notion of agencement, the effect of hybrid combinations of human bodies, material equipment, technical devices and cognitive processes in creating a sustainable market for a peculiarly expensive financial savings product targeted at working class thrift is exposed.

The Language of the Walls: Putting Promotional Saturation in Historical Context

The view that we live in an age where commercial promotion pervades everyday life to an unprecedented extent is so widely accepted that there have been few attempts to test it empirically. This paper makes an attempt to rectify this by looking closely at ideas and evidence concerning escalating commercial promotion. This involves three main tasks. First, some of the arguments that have been made about promotion are briefly reviewed to help establish the extent to which judgements about its contemporary significance are “dehistoricised”. Second, consideration is given to the ambiguous status of historical evidence in questioning critical thought. History, it is argued cannot offer a straight, objective means of comparison but it can offer an insight into the contingency of pervasiveness upon the available media, techniques and technologies of promotion. Third, a glimpse into how these media, techniques and technologies have historically been marshalled to ensure commercial saturation is provided through evidence of the use of promotion in coffeehouses, outdoor environments and corporate culture.

A ‘good, average man’: calculation and the limits of statistics in enrolling insurance customers

Drawing upon the historical relationship between statistics, probabilistic reasoning and life insurance, the article argues that mathematical calculation played a necessary but limited role in making markets for life insurance. Insuring publics have been fairly consistently cautious in the use of probabilistic and statistical reasoning to inform investment in life insurance. In this they follow a pattern set by early insurance companies who themselves were slow to alter their commercial practices in line with emerging knowledge. I examine some of the reasons for this glacial pace and some of the ambiguities on which statistical ‘certainties’ were built as part of an argument that the role of statistics and mathematics in market calculation is both less and more than it seems. This is manifest in the history of industrial life assurance, an industry with a phenomenally successful track record in the mass enrolment of consumers. Unlike their predecessors, industrial companies disdained swamping their target markets with probabilistic arguments in favour of a very different sort of argument that, nevertheless, carried a trace of statistical thinking with it. This trace came in the form of ‘good, average men’, the agents who became industrial insurances core marketing device and who translated the essentials of a statistically informed product into a more palatable, more calculable form.

EDITORIAL: Culture/economy/social

Intriguing ground has opened over recent years as result of multidisciplinary efforts to unsettle the partitioning off of the ‘economy’ and the ‘economic’ from those working outside the discipline of economics. It is now increasingly clear that economists are just one of a multitude of agents involved in ‘preparing and repairing’ markets as well as being generally active in many areas associated with economic life: organisations, markets, economies. These three are not pre-formed objects: they are given shape and meaning by a host of socio-cultural-technical practices that aid what has been called the ‘performation’ or performative action of economics (Callon 1998; Cochoy 1998; Mackenzie et al. 2007; Muniesa et al. 2007). Recent empirical and theoretical work in this vein together with a longer heritage of anthropological and historical work targeted at uncovering the conditions of emergence of distinct areas of economic life have progressively called the notion of a settled divide between ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ into question (see Appadurai 1986; Buck-Morss 1995; Dumont 1977; Miller & Rose 1990; Sahlins 1976). This questioning has led the way toward new theoretical and methodological terrain for research into economic and organisational life. The Journal of Cultural Economy seeks to act as an intellectual space for the expansion of work in this new terrain. While promise and intrigue abound in this new area there is nevertheless more than a little risk that a journal that brings together the two terms ‘cultural’ and ‘economy’ might generate a number of misunderstandings regarding the ground it wishes to claim and, just as important, how it aims to position itself in relation to that ground. One such misunderstanding would be to interpret its ambition as that of establishing itself as a journal of ‘the cultural economy’ understood as a distinctive, seemingly newly invented, economic realm whose borders conceptual and empirical overlap with those of ‘the knowledge economy’, ‘the cultural sector’ or the ‘creative industries’. The inclusion of the definite article limits rather than clarifies the aim of what is meant by the term cultural economy. For those who are engaged in debates about the culture industries, for instance, there is a need to be alert to the respects in which the practices and relations which might be brought under this heading the consequences of different intellectual property regimes for the status of the copy in the music industry, say, or the organisation of the relations between different agents in the literary and art fields are to be approached from a more general perspective that is attuned to the cultural aspects that intervene in economic and organizational life more generally. While papers that engage with this sense of cultural economy would of course be welcome, the scope of the Journal of Cultural Economy is much wider and reflects a desire to encourage exploration of the more general processes and practices that prepare and maintain what,

The disinterested self: the idealized subject of life assurance

In naming his satirical version of a life assurance company The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company Dickens was aiming at an already well-established tendency for life assurance companies to stress in their promotional enterprises the altruistic character of their business. So disinterested was the Anglo-Bengalee that ‘nobody can run any risk by the transaction except the office, which, in its great liberality is pretty sure to lose’ (1994, p. 419). While few life assurance companies would have pushed the claim that far it is certainly the case that the idea of ‘disinterestedness’ played a peculiar role in the nineteenth century life assurance industry. This paper explores how life assurance companies sought to overcome concerns about the safety and propriety of their business by promulgating particular ideas about life assurance as a pious, self-‘disinterested’ form of conduct. Throughout the nineteenth century life assurance operated as an exemplary technique of liberal government by offering a means of market-based self-rule that depended heavily on an emergent form of knowledge which blended together impartiality, self-interest and disinterestedness (Poovey 1998).

A mediating institution?: Using an historical study of advertising practice to rethink culture and economy

Abstract This paper sets out to review the role accorded to advertising in recent critical work. This work, I suggest, has been underscored by an ‘epochalist’ concern to map distinctions in the form of the culture/ economy relationship between the contemporary era and earlier periods. Significance has been accorded to the particular transformative potential of advertising and this is often related to research which emphasises the increasingly symbolic, persuasive and pervasive nature of advertising. In what follows, I make three central propositions. Firstly, I argue that writers on advertising share a number of concerns particularly about the effect the evolving nature of advertising has on the relationship between people and objects and between culture and economy. Secondly I suggest that these writers share with certain other critical theorists a very particular approach to the definition of key entities like meaning, culture and economy. These very particular definitions are pivotal to the epochalist explanation of advertisings role in the transformation of the culture/ economy relation. Finally, I attempt to show, through a brief look at historical uses of persuasion in advertising, that the problem with epochalist theory lies in a tendency to overgeneralise a wide range of specific forces.

What's changing cultural economy?

In September 2014, editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy (JCE) gathered for the last Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) conference at the Friends Meeting House in Manchester. As regular readers will have noticed, the JCE has been closely associated with CRESC since the beginning. What few will know is that what would eventually become the JCE was first imagined when CRESC began its formal funded existence in 2004, as one of the outcomes that a major Economic and Social Research Council funded centre was expected to produce. This made for a peculiar dependence between two things that shared a beginning but would set after different ends. Research centres, certainly those benefitting from government funding, have clear and bounded research programmes, are tied to the achievement of certain goals and are expected to be of limited duration. The funding imposes some of these limits, because, of course, it is finite. Other limits are imposed by the practicalities of academic life as key personnel move on and host institutions engage in those increasingly regular and discomforting shifts in priorities. Others still are about an inchoate need to somehow complete the research programme. Even if some questions remain unsettled (by definition, a centre for research on sociocultural change was not going to exhaust its object since things just keep on going on), most researchers will reach the end of what they want to find out, or say, about certain questions. As Karel Williams (2014), one of CRESC’s three founding directors, put it: CRESC has to end, if it doesn’t it risks becoming an institution and who wants to build an institution? Well us, the journal’s editors sitting in the gallery, coughed, we do. From the start, the JCE was like and unlike CRESC. It shared CRESC’s founding concern with how the relations between culture, economy and the social, the three main organising concepts of the social and cultural sciences, were being reinterpreted. While CRESC organised itself into four substantive themes to coordinate programmes of research into cultural economy, the media and social change, cultural values and politics, and culture, governance and citizenship, the JCE was to offer an editorially independent means of probing further into these areas, examining and showcasing the connections between them. It would publish empirical and theoretical work that engaged with the interfaces between culture, economy and the social and challenged any taken-for-granted ontological separation. CRESC, through its own programmes and extended networks, would provide some of the source material for this but it was always clear that this had to be a restricted and diminishing intersection. An in-house journal soon risks draining its own supply and demand. The JCE had to reach beyond CRESC for content and, since a serial should not have to have its own end in sight, for an institution-like lifespan. Anticipating an indeterminate lifespan has consequences for the content of content as well as the source. The JCE editors had to mark out some territory but not specify what might be written there. This, as any publication proposer knows, is initially an exercise in