Enacting Dismal Science

In this book, sociologists, philosophers, and economists investigate the conceptual issues around the performativity of economics over a variety of disciplinary contexts and provide new case studies illuminating this phenomenon. In featuring the latest contributions to the performativity debate the book revives discussion of the fundamental questions: What precise meaning can we attribute to the notion of performativity? What empirical evidence can help us recognize economics as performative? And what consequences does performativity have for contemporary societies? The contributions demonstrate how performativity can serve as a powerful conceptual resource in dealing with economic knowledge, as an inspiring framework for investigating performative practices, and as an engine of discovery for thinking of the economic proper.

Develops the concept of performativity formulated by Callon and MacKenzie Contributors present a strongly interdisciplinary perspective Enhances the relevance of performativity to current economic and social theory

Autorentext
Ivan Boldyrev is Associate Professor at the Higher School of Economics, Russia, and Research Associate at the Witten Institute for Institutional Change at the University of Witten/Herdecke, Germany. His books include Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries and Hegel, Institutions and Economics (with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath). He has authored many articles focusing on the intellectual history of economics, philosophy of the social sciences, and German Idealism. Ekaterina Svetlova is a Senior Lecturer of Accounting and Finance at the University of Leicester's School of Management, UK. Previously, she has been a Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Constance, Germany; Zeppelin University, Germany; and University of Basel, Switzerland. She also worked as a Portfolio Manager and Financial Analyst at a big investment company in Frankfurt, Germany, for six years. Svetlova has published on themes such as economic sociology, social studies of finance, and economic philosophy in journals that include Economy and Society, Culture and Organization, Science in Context, Synthese and International Studies in the Philosophy of Science.

Inhalt

1. After the Turn: How the Performativity of Economics Matters (Ivan Boldyrev and Ekaterina Svetlova).- 2. Performativity Rationalized (Francesco Guala).- 3. Performative Mechanisms (Carsten Hermann-Pillath).- 4. 'Doing' Laboratory Experiments: An Ethnomethodological Study of the Performative Practice of Behavioral Economic Research (Juliane Böhme).- 5. The Problem with Economics: Naturalism, Critique, and Performativity (Fabian Muniesa).- 6. Performativity Matters: Economic Description as a Moral Problem (Philip Roscoe).- 7. The IS-LMization of the General Theory and the Construction of Hydraulic Governability in Postwar Keynesian Macroeconomics (Hanno Pahl and Jan Sparsam).- 8. Performativity and the Emergence of Institutions (Ekaterina Svetlova).