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.
February 22, 2008
A two-by-two on markets and culture
Filed under: Culture, Markets — Peter @ 9:38 pm
With Brayden upping the ante, Lena suggests a table, but I feel that this may confuse more than illuminate. Welp, only one way to find out:
| Markets Are Culture | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | No | ||
| Markets Have Culture | Yes | The missing synthesis! | Complementary View of Culture |
| No | Constitutive View of Culture | Neo-classical Economics | |
I also realize it’s tacky to stick neo-classical economics in the low/low box. And the yes/no doesn’t quite work - I originally went with ‘low’ and ‘high’, or ’settled’ and ‘unsettled’. But you get the gist, I hope..
2 Responses to “A two-by-two on markets and culture”
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This site is hand-woven, and heavily borrows from the wonderful blueprint framwork. Rock on, grids!
Not quite
, but getting there..
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:47 pm
It’s a bit confusing. It’s tricky to understand what it means to say A has x and A is x at the same time. Instead of a cross-classification, maybe think about branches on a tree: either markets have culture or they don’t. If they have culture, either culture is all they have, or it isn’t. On this view, “markets have culture” and “markets are culture” are not two theses awaiting a missing synthesis. Rather, the latter claim is the strongest version of the former. This would still be consistent with your earlier point that people at different points on the tree tend to cherry-pick cases that suit them.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:16 am
Interesting point, but tricky doesn’t mean flat-out wrong (unless you’re just being sweet) so perhaps there’s room to convince. There are two problems, though I don’t know if those problems are in my description or in the phenomenon: 1) culture is not well-specified yet- when the constitutive folks talk about culture, they mean things like calculative agencies, commoditization, cognitive schema. And when complementary people talk about culture, they mean something more extrinsic to markets, like parts of Biggart and Hamilton, though it’s not a great example. Maybe Portes and Sensenbrenner, where you get the sense that markets make sense once you adjust for the cultural winds.
2) I do think that there are claims of strength by the SSF crowd, that this is a more damning critique of economics where it lives, and that embeddedness at its most interesting replaces interests and actors with networks and structures of networks but in its more well-used sense it leaves the economic market stuff untouched while adding sociological value to it (I share Greta Krippner’s critique here).
Maybe it’s just a lack of consensus about what the aim of econ soc should be, but I think that’s insufficient. I mean, part of what’s innovative about the blood and organs work you do is to demonstrate compelling interaction effects between how you constitute the commodity and how it will ultimately be allocated. Or in my own opinion, not interaction effects but rather inseparability.
There’s a parallel to race literature, with a split between those studying race and those studying its effects, but little synthesis between them. So yes, as Jenn Lena in our conversations keeps wanting to know more about the payoff - why shouldn’t we just do a division of labor and call it a weekend? I’ve not given a great answer to that yet, but I’m working on it.
Incidentally, the paper was directed to be a state of the field kind of thing: how is economic sociology dealing with culture today?