Academic Identity
I am assistant professor of Sociology at Barnard College. My book (and my dissertation research) is a comparative study of technology and futures trading, an ethnography of open outcry and electronic traders. My current research is on how art specialists price cultural commodities, particularly how categories and commensuration work in the secondary/resale fine arts market. I teach courses in economic sociology, organizations, and gender.
Professional Identity
I occasionally consult, focusing on organizational change, the future of technology and financial markets, and environmental markets. I do strategic assessments of markets, technology and organizational design, with qualitative and quantitative components. If you are interested, please email me.
Personal Identity
I grew up outside Chicago, and went to school(s) at Wesleyan University, USC, and Northwestern University. I currently live in New York, with a partner who is a marketing manager for an educational nonprofit. I love movies, like to cook, and I can do a mean lindy swing out. I am INTP.
December 12, 2006
Engine, Camera
Filed under: Daily — Peter @ 7:27 pm
There are two ways to approach MacKenzie’s book. One is to play well with others, get in the spirit of the seminar, and tackle the thorny questions of performativity, the application of the social studies of science to finance, and the relationship between economics and sociology. The second way is to approach the problem in a slightly more Howard Becker-ish fashion, investigating the organization of derivatives trading. This second way, perhaps unfairly, sidesteps the theoretical problems raised in MacKenzie even as it gets us closer to what is really going on in the world. Positive versus normative, indeed. Let me take the first way first.
Comments (0)Thoughts on entanglement
Filed under: Art — Peter @ 7:54 am
A conversation with a student got me thinking about ‘entanglements’ and the role of specialists in dis-entangling art world participants. Michel Callon has done work looking at the theoretical role of economics (as a discipline) on the creation of markets (as real-world instances of economic theory). He argues, with examples, that one of the things that needs to happen is that normal people have to be transformed into economic actors, just as commodities have to be formed from things-in-the-ground to discrete commodities. He argues that one of the main ways economics affects markets is to make more possible these ‘calculative agencies’ - two good examples are cost-benefit analysis and William Cronon’s chapter from Nature’s Metropolis on the making of wheat futures.
As I said to the student, the presentation last week on embeddedness made me think about the creation of market actors in our case. In the Art world, museums have to be made from places-where-we-appreciate-Art to publicity/provenance makers; buyers from appreciators to either patrons or speculators or collectors; etc. All these actors have to have the pieces of them that think about Art (temporarily) downplayed, and the pieces that are part of the market-making machinery foregrounded. Specialists link all these pieces of buyers, advisors, galleries, museums, and consignors together. It only appears as though they are just estimating prices.
This is just first-pass speculation…
Comments (2)This site is hand-woven, and heavily borrows from the wonderful blueprint framwork. Rock on, grids!
Not quite
, but getting there..