Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies

413 Pages·2008·1.75 MB·English

by  Trevor Pinch, Richard Swedberg

Living in a Material World
Inside Technology
edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor Pinch
For a list of the series, see pp. 401–403.
Living in a Material World
Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies
edited by Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
( 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec-
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Contents
Introduction 1
I General Concerns: Economy, Materiality, Power
1 Economic Markets and the Rise of Interactive Agencements: From
Prosthetic Agencies to Habilitated Agencies 29
Michel Callon
2 The Centrality of Materiality: Economic Theorizing from Xenophon to
Home Economics and Beyond 57
Richard Swedberg
3 Command Performance: Exploring What STS Thinks It Takes to Build a
Market 89
Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah
II Infrastructure
4 The Finitist Accountant 131
David Hatherly, David Leung, and Donald MacKenzie
5 Global Financial Technologies: Scoping Systems That Raise the
World 161
Karin Knorr Cetina and Barbara Grimpe
6 The Politics of Patent Law and Its Material Effects: The Changing
Relationship between Universities and the Marketplace 191
Elizabeth Popp Berman
vi Contents
III Technology and the Material Arrangements of the Market
7 Technology, Agency, and Financial Price Data 217
Alex Preda
8 Tools of the Trade: The Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street
Trading Room 253
Daniel Beunza and David Stark
9 Trading-Room Telephones and the Identification of Counterparts 291
Fabian Muniesa
IV Technology, Economy, Use
10 Understanding and Reframing the Electronic Consumption
Experience: The Interactional Ambiguities of Mediated Coordination 317
Christian Licoppe
11 Six Degrees of Reputation: The Use and Abuse of Online Review and
Recommendation Systems 341
Shay David and Trevor Pinch
12 Transfer Troubles: Outsourcing Information Technology in Higher
Education 375
Nicholas J. Rowland and Thomas F. Gieryn
About the Authors 393
Index 395
Living in a Material World
Introduction
Although it is generally agreed in the social sciences that technology plays
an important role in the economy, it is also recognized that it is difficult
to understand what this role is and how to conceptualize it. Economists
have traditionally treated technology as an exogenous factor and a black
box. So-called growth theory has succeeded in endogenizing technology
but has made little progress in developing a concrete and empirical type
of analysis. Though economists inspired by Joseph Schumpeter have, in
recent decades, developed the influential ‘‘economics of innovation’’
(Rosenberg 1994; Dosi 2000; Freeman 1982; Nelson and Winter 1982;
McKelvey 2000), this approach does not, by and large, open the black box
of technology, and it fails to engage with the increasingly sophisticated
analyses of technology coming from history and sociology of technology.
Bringing economy and technology together in one coherent analysis that
is both analytically interesting and empirically oriented is, therefore, still
very much on the agenda of the social sciences.
In this book, an attempt is made to reconceptualize the meeting between
the economy and technology with the help of Science and Technology
1
Studies (STS) and economic sociology. Both of these approaches are rela-
tively young and have developed new sets of ideas and concepts that have
2
not yet been assimilated into mainstream social science. The theoretical
point at which we suggest that economic and technological analysis may
come together is in the idea of materiality, or the notion that social exis-
tence involves not only actors and social relations but also objects. This is
an approach that has been developed in STS and which we think consti-
3
tutes a useful point of departure. We have titled the volume Living in a
Material World because the word ‘material’ also has another meaning than
objects and materia, as the 1984 song by Madonna reminds us: it can also
4
refer to something economic.