Chile can be considered as one of the main laboratories of neoliberalism. Many colleagues have developed an interest in this, scrutinizing the social and economic impacts, the political system or the conditions of violence established by the “Chicago Boys” (see for instance the many blog posts at Estudios de la Economía about these issues, for example here). This is also part of PERFORMABUSINESS’s agenda.

As part of the PERFOMABUSINESS team, I initiated fieldwork in Chile in three different areas. The first, in collaboration with the ICSO at the Universidad Diego Portales, is a study of the networks of the Chilean inter-organizational business groups. We examine the dynamics and the evolution of these groups both at the level of the organizations and at an individual level. The second empirical site concerns the consulting firm Tironi Asociados. This company is at the heart of the renewal of thinking on post-dictatorial entrepreneurship. It is therefore an interesting place to explore how the culture of business builds and deploys in the Chilean context. Finally, I study business schools, especially at the Adolfo Ibañez and Diego Portales universities. My focus is on the way economic knowledge is taught, disseminated to and received by different student populations. A first part of the fieldwork was conducted in 2012, a second one is in preparation for 2013. I am using an approach which pays particular attention to the performative work carried out by actors. The objective of this research is to feed reflection on what has Chile been turned into and what it is becoming.

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.

I participated in a conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in August 20-21. Under the title “Finanças e Consumo”, it gathered sociologists and anthropologists from Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. The last two countries have experienced a period of high levels of GDP growth, with policies oriented towards sustaining internal demand. Financing low- and low middle-class consumption through credit has been part of this strategy. This raises questions about the sustainability of indebtedness, and about the political uses of the categories of “middle class” or “popular consumption”, which are often used by the economic and political actors involved in the process (be it celebrating or criticizing it), but which may be too broad to be used by social sciences to describe the concrete credit and consumption practices taking place.

On June 28-30, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics held its annual meeting at the Sloan Business School of the MIT, in Boston. The event gathered several hundred of contributors from all over the world. It was a fantastic concentration of researchers coming from the fields of political science, economics, sociology, anthropology and history, and attempting to grasp economic processes in an interdisciplinary dialogue.

My contribution had to do with the notion of “risk free” interest rate (Session on “The Concept of Prudence in Economic Life and Regulation”, organized by Sabine Montagne and Yuri Biondi). This notion is overwhelmingly assumed in financial formulas, but is being explicitly challenged by the IMF and the BIS, as they grapple with sovereign debt crisis in Europe and take into account the impact this has in financial regulation. After the collapse of AAA rated ABS and CDOs, the assumption that AAA rated notes are “risk free” is understandably questioned. This remark may seem historically obvious, but it undermines the concept of there being something “risk free”, in a way that still needs to be explored by regulators and the financial industry. This also challenges the idea that rich states will always pay their debts and be able to bail out financial institutions, i.e. it redefines what is understood by “sovereignty”, in financial matters, but also probably beyond them.

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.

So what is capitalization about? And what would a social inquiry into capitalization look like? In a recent post, it was suggested that a social inquiry into capitalization requires “understanding capital not as a thing in itself — something that one has or has not — but rather as a form of action, a form of grip, a form of power, an act of configuration, an operation, a situation”. Where such an inquiry can draw inspiration from? Karl Marx’s analysis of capital as a “social relation” appears as an obvious place to start with.
In a chapter of Capital entitled “The Modern Theory of Colonisation”, Marx took up the story of Thomas Peel, a colonial promoter and early settler at Swan River, whose misfortunate venture had earlier been described by Edward Gibbon Wakefield in his book England and America (1833):

“Mr. Peel, [Wakefield] moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.”” (Marx, Capital, chapter XXXIII)

Wakefield had used Mr. Peel’s story to develop his theory of “systematic colonization”, arguing in particular that the price of land should be made high enough to ensure the availability of labour — otherwise, the labourers whom capitalists brought with them to the new settlements would do as those who came with Mr. Peel did: leave, to find their own piece of land. Marx, instead, used Mr. Peel’s story to depict capital as a social relation, rather than “a thing”. Mr. Peel’s problem, Marx wrote, was that he had “provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River”. And Wakefield’s real finding, Marx claimed, did not have to do with colonies and their management, but with the nature of capital: what Wakefield discovered, through Mr. Peel’s story, was that capital “is not a thing, but a social relation between persons [the capitalist and the wage-worker], established by the instrumentality of things”.

Marx reiterated this point in a chapter of Wage Labour and Capital entitled “The Nature and Growth of Capital”:

“Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labour, and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are employed in producing new raw materials, new instruments, and new means of subsistence. All these components of capital are created by labour, products of labour, accumulated labour. Accumulated labour that serves as a means to new production is capital.
So say the economists.
What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is worthy of the other.
A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.” (Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, chapter 5)

It is precisely in this process through which something “becomes capital” — i.e., capitalization — that we are interested. And there are two insights that we can draw from here. The first one has to do with conditions. For Marx, things become capital “only under certain conditions”, and these conditions are of a socio-material texture, they are made of “social relations … established by the instrumentality of things”. Studying the capitalization of a molecule today, for example, would entail describing the encounter between an investor and a scientist-entrepreneur and their interactions mediated by tools like business plans, Powerpoint presentations and valuation formulae. The second insight has to do with consequences. For Marx, while things become capital, “they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer” (Capital, chapter XXXIII). In a certainly less critical take, turning molecules into capital, to continue the example, goes hand in hand with turning scientists into entrepreneurs. A social inquiry into capitalization would thus involve an exploration of the kinds of objects and subjects that are produced in the contemporary settings of capitalization.

‘Cousin Thomas, or the Swan River Job’, an 1829 caricature of Thomas Peel by Robert Seymour. Source: National Library of Australia.

Thomas is exclaiming “Cousin Bob’s letter did the job I shall feather my nest however.”

On the left is a sign post “The best parts of the Swan River Settlement only to be got at through the hands of Mr. Thos P–l!!”