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.
August 22, 2007
Culture and markets
Filed under: Daily — Peter @ 12:24 am
I’m working on a paper on culture and economic sociology - a sort-of review article of how culture gets used in the field. My main argument is that the field has until most recently been effectively split in its use of culture. Some markets have culture, while other markets are culture. The former, particularly in the literature on embeddedness, treat culture as a kind of independent variable, which has important implications for performance outcomes for those markets. The latter, by contrast, treats the market itself as problematic, and culture becomes something to be transformed into market.
This may parallel a bit Ann Swidler’s argument about culture during ’settled’ and ‘unsettled’ times, though here it’s not entirely clear what a settled market really is - art markets have been around forever, are quite stable, it’s hard to think of them as settled. Contested vs. uncontested is closer, but I’m still trying to manage the distinctions.
The danger here, is the theoretical blindness vis-a-vis the opposite quadrants of the box. More recent work (Kieran, some of the STS) is moving towards trying to understand the way settled markets are also culture, and unsettled markets also have a culture. Shifting from continuum to a more orthgonal theoretical conception is where the innovation is at the moment.
My two examples are pollution and commodities markets, where I’ve done work. We’ll see how this turns out..
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