The latest issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy is devoted to “The Device”. The special issue, edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert, explores a number of aspects of performativity and materiality in social-scientific methods. The concerns explored in PERFORMABUSINESS are indirectly present in the special issue through “Provocative containment and the drift of social-scientific realism”, a piece in which Javier Lezaun, Fabian Muniesa and Signe Vikkelsø develop some insights from their conversation on the methodologies of realization — a conversation that played an inspirational role in the establishment of PERFORMABUSINESS’s research agenda.

There was a quite successful and competitive response to the call for contributions to the AOS Workshop on “Performing business and social innovation through accounting inscriptions”, Galway, Ireland, 22-24 September 2013, a workshop sponsored by Accounting, Organizations and Society, organized by Cristiano Busco (NUI Galway), Paolo Quattrone (University of Edinburgh) and Fabian Muniesa (Mines ParisTech) — see a previous post here.

The organizers had the chance to read quite some excellent submitted papers, but had to make some difficult choices in order to accommodate the unfortunately limited conditions of the workshop (some proposals had to be put aside). The workshop will take place at the School of Business and Economics of the National University of Ireland in Galway. Participants are looking forward to what looks like an excellent opportunity to renew the social-scientific repertoire of performativity in and of business.

The PERFORMABUSINESS project has just reached the middle of its official lifespan (this four-years project started in April 2011). The brief Mid-Term Report that has been transmitted to the European Research Council recaps on the main investigative directions that have been elaborated so far. The report is available here.

The role of business schools in the formation of business reality is today an acknowledged topic in the social-scientific exploration of the cultural elements of entrepreneurial capitalism (see, for example, the work of Rakesh Khurana, in particular his book From Higher Aims to Hired Hands). It’s also part of our project’s agenda. One particularly relevant fieldwork site is of course the Harvard Business School. Part of my current research activities include fleshing out a few directions that were already exposed in “A flank movement in the understanding of valuation”.

Among the treasures of the Baker Library are a few collections with materials from faculty members from the early days (the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s): people that played a pivotal role in the development of both the case method (a very experiential method for the formation of the business mind, quite performative in a theatrical sense of the word) and the crafts of financial valuation (a critical set of capitalization techniques, with potentially performative effects in the repertoires of valuation in business conduct). My preference goes to Arthur Stone Dewing, professor of finance at Harvard, author of widely-read manuals, philosopher and fervent advocate of case-based business education. The papers of Cecil E. Fraser, which I had the chance to examine in April 2012, contain very interesting materials on the methods, sources and ideas of Fraser himself but also on other faculty members, Dewing in particular. Analysis of these, in combination with more contemporary sources, should translate shortly into something readable.

Are artifacts such as the consultancy slide-show, the valuation formula or the consumer test representations of an external reality? Or do they rather constitute, in a performative fashion, what they refer to? One of the official objectives of PERFORMABUSINESS (as stated in the project’s official “Description of Work”) is “to provide an empirically-grounded theorizing on the problem of the performativity of business”: not an easy task, given the wide array of manners in which the notion of performativity has been put to work in social-scientific literature (starting with the seminal work of Jean-François Lyotard), and given also the overwhelming variety of business sites and business-oriented forms of knowledge that feature performative elements (definitely not only finance). If things go well, however, 2013 will be the year in which The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn, a book that attempts at fulfilling this task, will see the light.

The book is an extensive elaboration of the materials that were submitted for my Habilitation Thesis. The proposed theoretical vocabulary draws from a pragmatist, process-oriented tradition in philosophy and concentrates on four specific problems: the problem of description (what kind of thing does a description produce?), the problem of the simulacrum (what are its truth and effects?), the problem of provocation (what does it mean to say that reality is really real when it is provoked, and hence realized?) and the problem of explicitness (what it is for reality to be bound to explication?). The empirical illustrations are based on original research on back-office operations in the financial industry, the automation of stock exchanges, consumer testing in market research, the pedagogy of financial valuation and the implementation of performance indicators in public management. The final manuscript is near completion and a contract with a publisher is in preparation. News on the finalization of this work (a crucial PERFORMABUSINESS deliverable) will be posted here soon.

Update (June 2014): the book is out!

A few further hints on the anthropology of capitalization (see earlier references to this research action here and here) were delivered last week at the FIAC, the international art fair in Paris (24-27 October 2012). That was part of “Something You Should Know”, an EHESS Seminar Series curated by Patricia Falguières, Élisabeth Lebovici, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, that joined forces with FIAC for a discussion on “the question of value”. The discussion featured, among other interesting contributions, an intervention inspired by the research endeavors discussed in PERFORMABUSINESS: video footage of the talk is available here and here (in French).

PERFORMABUSINESS is an ERC-funded independent research project, but also a piece in a global conversation on the renewal of the social-scientific repertoire of the study of business, capital, markets and value. It links in that sense to initiatives such as the launch of Valuation Studies, a new academic journal that welcomes contributions on the study of the performative features of valuation practices.

The editorial office of the journal is based at Linköping University, CF Helgesson and Fabian Muniesa are the editors, together with an active community of researchers that sit at the editorial and advisory boards.

A project-related call for papers for an AOS Workshop on “Performing business and social innovation through accounting inscriptions ” (Galway, Ireland, 22-24 September 2013) is available here. The topic of the workshop connects with a number of research concerns that are at the center of the PERFORMABUSINESS research project.

Considering the use of PowerPoint in management consulting as some sort of a performance is now perhaps a lieu commun, both in the social-scientific literature and among practitioners. How can the efficacy of such practice be analyzed, then? What does it mean to consider its pragmatic effects? In a recent working paper titled “Making a consultancy slideshow ‘rock solid’: a study of pragmatic efficacy”, Alaric Bourgoin, a PhD candidate at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation, and Fabian Muniesa, present an ethnography of the preparation of a PowerPoint diagram in a consultancy firm, and show how the consultants attempt at considering effects, layout and accuracy as criteria for the solidity of their diagrammatic rendering of the client’s problems. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 2nd Workshop on Imagining Business (EIASM, IE Business School, Segovia, 19-20 May 2011). The research materials and theoretical insights are based on Alaric’s PhD project, Valuing management consulting: ethnography of an entangled practice, now near completion. The thesis stands, in part, as a contribution to the understanding of the problem of performativity in management consulting.

Investigation on performativity in entrepreneurial finance carried out within the context of the PERFORMABUSINESS research project draws in part from the insights accumulated by team members in previous research. This is particularly the case for Liliana Doganova’s recent book, Valoriser la Science: Les Partenariats des Start-Up Technologiques [Valuing Science: The Partnerships of High-Tech Start-Ups], which just got out from Presses des Mines. Liliana tackles there the case of academic spin-offs from an openly pragmatist angle.

Academic spin-offs are new ventures stemming from universities and other public research organizations. The creation of such spin-offs has been greatly encouraged in Europe in the last ten years, in order to enhance the “transfer” and “valorization” of science. The results of such policies now appear to be disappointing, because spin-offs have not generated the hoped-for new jobs and success stories. This book hence starts with the following question: what are spin-offs worth? How can one conceive of their role and capture their impact?

Addressing these questions, the book operates several shifts, one of which is of particular interest for PERFORMABUSINESS. To understand what spin-offs are worth, suggests Liliana, let us take a look at how the actors with whom they come to cooperate value them. The how in question refers in particular to the valuation devices that start-ups and their (would-be) partners devise and mobilize in their endeavors to construct explorative partnerships, make them hold, and coordinate collective action. The last chapter of this book embarks on the investigation of three types of valuation devices – models, demonstrations, and formulae – and sheds light on their performative action. It thus opens a path that Liliana has decided to pursue as part of her research in PERFORMABUSINESS.