Workshop: Markets for Collective Concerns

Markets for Collective Concerns?

Confirmed speakers:

Daniel Breslau, Virginia Tech
Liliana Doganova & Brice Laurent, MINES ParisTech
Nicholas Gane, University of Warwick
Peter Karnøe, University of Aalborg
Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame
Daniel Neyland, Goldsmiths, University of London
Annelise Riles, Cornell University

Rationale

Despite the recent fall-out of finance, confidence in the market does not seem to be diminishing, but on the contrary, market mechanisms are becoming key instruments to deal with core contemporary collective concerns, including global warming and education (Mirowski 2013). This workshop will be devoted to discuss the proliferation of markets that have been devised – not only to work economically – but also to solve collective issues in areas such as environmental pollution, security of supply of energy, quality of education, poverty and health care.

The workshop ‘Markets for Collective Concern?’ expects to gather and bridge a growing but dispersed community of researchers studying markets for collective concerns coming from at least three following branches. Anthropologists, geographers and post-colonial scholars tracing the practical enactment of markets devised to deal with collective concerns in areas such as housing (Mitchell 2005), micro-finance (Elyachar 2012) and financial regulation (Riles 2011, Cooper 2011) around the globe. Post-performativity research in social studies of markets wondering about the practical work and knowledge deployed in evaluating and repairing arrangements that are simultaneously markets and policy (Breslau 2013, Farías 2014, Neyland & Simakova 2012). Historians of social theory and economics that have found that the notion of “solving collective problems with markets” implies an important displacement in the hegemonic discourse in economics (Mirowski & Plehwe 2009, Mirowski 2013) renewing the interest in reappraising the interactions and conflicts between sociology, history and economics in the early 20th century (Gane 2014, Peck 2010).

Some of the issues that might be discussed in this workshop are: Do markets devised as “policy instruments” (Lascoumes & Le Gales 2007) have a civilizing potential to open new forms of technical democracy (Callon 2009)? What are the consequences of the diagnosed move in economics conception of markets for the dialogue between researchers from different social scientific disciplines studying markets? Are markets for collective concerns irreversible?
 

Program

Day 1: Thursday 11th December

Day 2: Friday 12th December

For more details about abstracts and speakers, please see this more detailed program: market_for_public_concerns_program_3_12_2014.pdf

Registration
This workshop is organized by Christian Frankel, José Ossandón and Trine Pallesen and is a culmination of two years of activities carried out by CBS’s Markets and Valuation Cluster (former ‘Copenhagen Market and Valuation group’). The workshop is co-sponsored by the Danish Society for Education and Business (DSEB), the Public-Private Platform and the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. For attendance (and questions) please sign up via publicprivateplatform@cbs.dk. There are only limited places available and it is encouraged that participants stay for the entire duration of the workshop.

References:

Breslau, D. (2013), ‘Designing a market-like entity: Economics in the politics of market formation’, Social Studies of Science, 43(6): 829-851.

Callon, M. (2009), ‘Civilizing markets: Carbon trading between in vitro and in vivo experiments’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(3): 535-548.

Cooper, M. (2011), ‘Complexity theory after the financial crisis: The death of neoliberalism or the triumph of Hayek?’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 4(4): 371-385.

Elyachar, J. (2012), ‘Next practices: Knowledge, infrastructure, and public goods at the bottom of the pyramid’, Public Culture 24(1): 109-129.

Farías, I. (2014), ‘Improvising a market, making a model: social housing policy in Chile’, Economy and Society, online first.

Gane, N. (2014). ‘The emergence of neoliberalism: Thinking through and beyond Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics’, Theory, Culture & Society 31(4): 3-27.

Mirowski, P. (2013), Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso.

Mirowski, P. & Plehwe, D. (Eds.). (2009). The Road from Mont Pelerin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Mitchell, T. (2005), ‘The work of economics: how a discipline makes its world’, European Journal of Sociology, 46 (2): 297-320.

Neyland, D. & Simakova, E. (2012), ‘Managing electronic waste: a study of market failure’, New Technology, Work and Employment 27(1): 36-51.

Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of neoliberal reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.                 

Riles, A. (2011) Collateral knowledge: legal reasoning in the global financial markets, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.