Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donald MacKenzie is a professor of sociology at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent book is An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Fabian Muniesa is a researcher and teacher at the École des Mines de Paris and a member of the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation. Lucia Siu is a teaching fellow at Hong Kong's Lingnan University.

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"This excellent collection gathers the very best work on the fascinating topic of performativity in economics. The book offers articulate presentations of a wide range of different views--not only pro and con, but various pros and cons. It is as important as it is likely to be controversial."--Wade Hands, University of Puget Sound

"Do Economists Make Markets? contains a number of truly excellent and thought-provoking studies, including the most important statement in English on economic performativity by the theory's inventor, Michel Callon."--Richard Swedberg, Cornell University

"This is an absolutely terrific volume. Built on a rich and varied set of empirical studies of how economic technologies 'perform the world,' Do Economists Make Markets? establishes the 'science studies' approach to markets as a valid alternative, and in some cases as a complement, to more conventional approaches in economic sociology. It breathes new life into the study of economics by offering a stimulating account of the complex ways in which economists, economic machines, and society co-constitute one another."--Marion Fourcade, University of California, Berkeley

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Do Economists Make Markets?

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

DONALD MACKENZIE, FABIAN MUNIESA, AND LUCIA SIU

Monetary Theory at Thirteen Thousand Feet

La Paz, January 1986. The young Harvard economist who arrives at the airport has visited twice before, so he knows what to expect: the thin air of Bolivia's capital, three and a half kilometers above sea level, which will leave him short of breath throughout his visit; the extreme poverty; the beauty of the mountains; the hyperinflation that is beginning. He goes from the airport directly to the Banco Central de Bolivia, where he discovers that the money supply had sharply increased in December.

The economist, Jeffrey Sachs, goes on to deliver his advice to Bolivia's planning minister and then its president. The advice may seem dangerous-Sachs was to be summoned by the International Monetary Fund to explain himself-but for Sachs it was a straightforward implication of what his discipline teaches about the theory of money. If inflation is to be brought under control, the pesos that are flooding the economy must be taken out of circulation, even at the cost of spending Bolivia's precious, limited reserves of foreign currency to buy them up.

Later, Sachs was to muse on his meager understanding of the country to whose leaders he gave his crucial advice. It was only in a conversation a couple of years after his 1986 visit that he realized that Bolivia's physical geography was a fundamental feature of its economic situation, not merely an incidental fact. "Of course I knew that Bolivia was landlocked and mountainous.... Yet I had not reflected on how these conditions were key geographical factors, perhaps the overriding factors, in Bolivia's chronic poverty.... Almost all the international commentary and academic economic writing about Bolivia neglected this very basic point. It bothered me greatly that the most basic and central features of economic reality could be overlooked by academic economists spinning their theories from thousands of miles away" (Sachs 2005, p. 105).

Nevertheless, commented Sachs, a meager knowledge of the context had not stopped his advice on monetary policy being successful. Bolivia's hyperinflation did come to an end. "Monetary theory, thank goodness, still worked at thirteen thousand feet" (Sachs 2005, p. 105).

The Question of Performativity

Sachs's advice to the government of Bolivia is unusual in that it marked the beginning of an exceptional degree of individual influence. Sachs and his former student David Lipton went on to draw up what became the plan of first Solidarity and then the Polish government to shape the economic structure of postcommunist Poland; they attempted, much less successfully, to repeat the exercise in Yeltsin's Russia; Sachs now advises the United Nations and world leaders on how to end poverty in Africa. In other respects, however, Sachs's Bolivian trips were simply one manifestation of a far more general phenomenon: the move of economics from the journals, textbooks, and lecture theaters into "the real economy." In Chile, for example, the "Chicago boys"-Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago-were reshaping Chile in the 1970s and 1980s in a fashion more fundamental than Sachs's influence on Bolivia (Valds 1995). The phenomenon is not restricted to Latin America, to the former Soviet bloc, or to matters of government policy: economics is built into the modern world far more pervasively than that.

The shaping of economies by economics can be viewed as a triumph for the truths discovered by the discipline, or it can be condemned as the damaging imposition of an abstract and unrealistic worldview; such matters remain fiercely controversial. At a minimum, however, what is made clear by the cases of Bolivia, Poland, Russia, and Chile, as well as by those discussed in the chapters that follow, is that economics is at work within economies in a way that is at odds with the widespread conception of science as an activity whose sole purpose is to observe and study, that is to "know" the world.

The issue that needs to be tackled in relation to economies and economics is not just about "knowing" the world, accurately or not. It is also about producing it. It is not (only) about economics being "right" or "wrong" but (also, and perhaps more important) about it being "able" or "unable" to transform the world. Economics swings between representation and action, between science and policy, between academic inquiry and political intervention, both as a discipline and in the careers of many individual economists; Sachs is far from alone in this respect. Economics often seems abstract (to some of its proponents, as well as to its critics), yet it also articulates with, influences, is deployed in, and restructures concrete economies in all their messy materiality and their complex sociality. How can we confront such a cumbersome object? In this volume, we discuss the potential of the notion of performativity.

For the philosopher J. L. Austin, a performative utterance was a specific kind of statement or expression that establishes its referent through the very act of uttering (Austin 1962). In saying, for instance, "I apologize," I am not reporting on an already existing state of affairs. I am bringing that state of affairs into being: to say "I apologize" is to make an apology. "I apologize" is, thus, a performative utterance.

Although (as far as we are aware) it was Austin who coined the term "performative," the notion partakes of a long pragmatist tradition (nourished by the work of authors such as Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Charles W. Morris, and more recently John R. Searle) for which a central issue is the way in which actions, entities, and representations are intertwined. Performativity is not achieved by words alone. Even in the case of a simple utterance such as "I apologize," the speaker can undermine the performative effect by adopting a sarcastic tone of voice or sneering facial expression. Then the words no longer constitute an apology: they do not bring into being that of which they apparently speak. More generally, the "conditions of felicity" that make an utterance successfully performative are social as well as linguistic and bodily, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed out (Bourdieu 1991). In the Middle Ages, a monarch could make someone an "outlaw" by declaring that person to be such, but only if his right to do so was accepted sufficiently widely.

Although the origins of the notion of performativity lie in philosophy, the concept has been taken up in the social sciences and humanities more widely. Judith Butler, for example, has taken it into the mainstream of feminist theory (1990, 1997). The diverse fields that have adopted Robert K. Merton's (1949) notion of the "self-fulfilling prophecy"-in which the release and social circulation of a description or prediction enhances its validity-can be seen as investigating a version of performativity.

One area in which the notion has been particularly widely drawn upon is science studies. Historians, sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists of science have used performativity or similar intuitions to understand the nature of scientific claims and practices. For instance, Ian Hacking (1983) showed how the sciences' representations of the world can be understood only in their close entanglement with intervention in that world. Andrew Pickering (1995) suggested that a "performative...