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
More on Markets, culture, markets
Filed under: Culture, Markets — Peter @ 6:26 pm
I still haven’t addressed the payoff question, but here’s more of my thinking about culture and economic sociology, in pictorial:
The constitutive group, which does in fact tend to study the ’settlement’ (a loaded term, yes, but think of it more like a butterfly alighting temporarily than obdurate institutions) of markets, treats the market itself as the dependent variable: how does a market become something that looks like a market?
The second group, what I think of as complementary (as in, it complements economic studies of markets, doesn’t challenge the idea of markets as such), is more like:
From a paper I’m working on, here’s the problem:
The dichotomy between the constitutive and complementary approaches has resulted in a theoretical limitation for the field. The central problem is not necessarily the lack of conversation between these two groups, as they often do build on one another. It is the either/or conception of culture. Culture acts as either something that affects how markets are built, or else it affects how markets operate. Constitutive activities are necessary to stabilize market actors, objects, and actions, enough so that ‘normal’ market forces – now with cultural variables added as key determinants – can operate. And once these activities occur, markets are seen as acquiring a kind of permanent stability which allows us to then gauge their operation. As a result, we end up with analyses of how creativity and highly contextualized knowledge of fashion is transformed into a commodity for consumer sale (like Patrik Aspers’ work), and studies of how social ties affect performance among garment industry firms (eg, Uzzi’s awesome study of the garment industry in NYC). But very little on the interactions across these processes.
I’m ready to start getting on to these kinds of interactions.
Photo credits, various but all from Flickr, w/Creative Commons licenses:
Apple
Apple pie
Baked apple
Apple preserves
Apple opened
3 Responses to “More on Markets, culture, markets”
Leave a Reply
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 9:03 pm
You’re a true New Yorker, you. …Apples…!!
Show them the 2×2 table…I liked that.
And you saw Brayden’s post over at orgtheory, right? He “got” you immediately. It took me the better part of a BLT.
But I am still wondering: is “together” “better” than “separate”? How come? For which problems? Because I think the last figure told me the distinction between constitutive and complementary is fine, as long as each sticks to the ‘correct’ cases.
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Gosh, it sounds so romantic - that Brayden, he gets me. He had me at constitutive. He. had. me. at. constitutive.
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:52 pm
You complete him.
How ’bout them apples?
har har har har