A care-infused market tale: on (not) maintaining relationships of trust in energy retrofit products

ABSTRACT

Issues of maintenance offer exceptional opportunities for advancing our understanding of how market-driven innovation can meet societal objectives for energy transitions. In this article, I present a case study of ongoing attempts by two spin-outs and one start-up to stabilise innovative socio-technical agencements – ‘customer journeys’ – designed to catalyse economic exchange of certain singular goods – energy retrofit products – in the Netherlands. This market-driven innovation relies on sustaining carefully crafted relationships of trust among supply-chain actants and homeowners. I mobilise the analytical lens of ‘care’ to show how the multiplicity of connections that form through socio-technical agencements – and function as a market – are tentative, contested, and unpredictable. Trust relationships are in a constant process of becoming through contestation and convergence among supply-chain actants. In doing so, I expose the precarious and arduous work involved in maintaining a market for singular public goods. This implies a knowledge politics as well: in a call to sensitise us, market scholars, to processes of maintenance integral to market-driven innovation for energy transitions I propose to advance Callon’s call to civilise markets by sharing troubled, though encouraging, care-infused market tales in an effort to counteract the storification of energy transitions as innovation fairy tales.     

Learning-by-Consuming and the Dynamics of the Demand and Prices of Cultural Goods

The major distinctive feature of cultural goods is that consumers must learn how to consume them, implying that preferences should be modelled as intertemporally dependent. The canonical model in the literature uses a habit formation analogy. In this paper, we discuss in detail, though in the simplest setup, a consistent preference structure for that model. Then, we derive the implications for the dynamics of two aggregate equilibrium models, a fixed price model and a flexible price model. The learning-by-consuming behaviour is characterised by a preference structure displaying bounded adjacent complementarity in the demand for the cultural good. This implies that there will be short run complementarity between the stocks of culture and financial wealth and that the adjustment of the demand for cultural goods, or of their relative price, will have some inertia. In the exogenous price model, we find that increases in income will raise the long run demand for cultural goods while increases in the relative price will decrease it. In the endogenous price model, an increase in the supply of cultural goods will imply an initial undershooting of the price of cultural goods followed by an upward transition process. Our results seem to be consistent with the empirical results on the demand for cultural goods and seem to offer an explanation for the Baumol and Bowen paradox.JEL Classification: Z1, E21Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the 1st Conference of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Investigação em Economia (SPiE, 1997) and at the Xth Conference of the Association for Cultural Economics International, 1998, Barcelona.     

Disturbance and destruction: the aetiology of trauma

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine Catherine Malabou’s concept of trauma, and argue that her replacement of the Freudian unconscious with the cerebral unconscious might fit adequately into a different framework from the one she proposes. Comparing her view of pathology to that of Georges Canguilhem, I propose a dimensional reading of pathology. Building on this – and by reference to metaplasticity – I ask whether one can explain the mechanisation characteristic of the new wounded mechanistically. I then look at her exchange with Slavoj ?i?ek to get at Malabou’s understanding of psychoanalysis. She seeks to realign Freud and neuroscience to resolve issues with both. As part of this shift, she introduces the term ‘the Material’ – linked to the cerebral unconscious – as an alternative to the Lacanian triad of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. She does, however, leave it underdeveloped, and I argue that this points to tensions in her theory. While her concept of plasticity runs against ideas of an isolated transcendental subject exempt from the outside, Malabou seems to literalise (or ‘corporealise’) trauma. If this is correct, then how radical is her concept of trauma, and are there ways of describing trauma that are equally compatible with her concept of plasticity?     

Comparing cultural heritage values in South East Asia – Possibilities and difficulties in cross-country transfers of economic values

Benefit transfer refers to the transfer of economic values from a primary valuation study (study site) to a site where we need to conduct policy analysis (policy site). Due to the considerable costs and time required to conduct primary valuation studies, using benefit transfers to estimate the values for sites not yet valued is likely to attract policy interest. While benefit transfer is being increasingly applied in studies on environmental goods, its application in the field of cultural heritage resources is rare. The unique nature of these public goods, and differences in the size and demographic characteristics of the affected populations lead to a significant risk of benefit transfer providing irrelevant estimates for cultural heritage. In this study, we compared the results of two contingent valuation (CV) studies involving historic temples in Thailand and Vietnam, tested the validity and reliability of benefit transfers between the two sites, and explored the possibilities and difficulties in such transfers. We found that the error in transferring unadjusted mean willingness-to-pay (WTP) ranged from 46% to 129%. Adjustments for differences in purchasing power parity (PPP), income level and income elasticity between the sites substantially increased rather than decreased transfer errors in many instances. Function transfers did not perform better than unadjusted unit transfers. These results suggest that there are other important factors – possibly physical, cultural and institutional variables – that need to be taken into account in explaining the differences in WTP for cultural heritage aside from the usual income and socio-economic variables captured in CV studies. Until we are able to identify these other factors and measure their impacts, the potential policy use of benefit transfer in the case of cultural heritage goods remains limited.     

Centrifugal Logics: Eagleton and Spivak on the Place of 'Place' in Postcolonial Theory

In this paper, I contest the analytic relevance of the term ‘eurocentrism’ to the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation by examining a distinction between ‘place’ and ‘space’. The clash of these two concepts is explored in a controversial review of Gayatri Spivak's latest book by Terry Eagleton. I argue that Eagleton's understanding of Marxist theory implies an intellectual placed at the centre of a sphere of cognitive sovereignty, and that his critique of Spivak consists in suggesting that, by removing herself from this centre, she has rendered her own discourse unintelligible. In contrast, Spivak, as (in part) a poststructuralist, emphasises space over place. I discuss the gains and losses – as well as the dangers – involved in such an emphasis, and conclude by insisting that poststructuralism cannot be a universally applicable meta-theory, but is in fact ideally suited to attesting to the place in which it finds itself.     

Milk,Modernity and the Making of the Human

Branding is an economic and cultural process. Branding endows goods and services with value which corporations protect as their intellectual property, enabling brands to support share prices and be traded as assets in takeovers and mergers, at the same time as they serve to differentiate products competitively in the marketplace. Yet this ‘brand value’ depends on cultural perceptions of the meaning and worth of a brand. More than the unique image or positioning of a brand being maintained relative to others of its kind, such perceptions may involve the expressive and emotional attachment of consumers, and this may be very widely shared. This paper argues that, with certain brands, such shared attachment can occur on a national basis, so that they become symbols of national belonging. Whereas consumers attribute a putative foreign national origin to some global brands – for example, Harley-Davidson is unequivocally ‘American’ – they relate to other brands as expressive of their own national origin. This identification often persists even when national brands are taken over by global corporations, since the brand's association with the nation is a major dimension of its value, or the ‘brand equity’ which the new global owner has paid for, and intends to capitalise upon. The paper examines instances in which this has happened in Australia, such as the traditional brand Vegemite, long ago acquired by Kraft, and also cases where the Australian associations of a brand have been exploited in establishing its global identity, notably Foster's Lager.     

THE PROPER COPY

Efforts to make (and keep) knowledge public have provided a powerful counter-model to the recent expansion of exclusive intellectual property rights in such arenas as information technology, digital media, biological research, and pharmaceutical access. While sympathetic to the impulse to counteract the new ‘enclosures’ with knowledge made public, this essay critically interrogates some of the constitutive limits – in fact, the constitutive outsides – to these counter formulations. Paying particular attention to how public domain initiatives, like their strict intellectual property counterparts, also police the line between the proper and the improper copy, I argue that mechanisms for keeping knowledge public do not just circle the wagons against the predations of the Monsantos and Microsofts of the world. In their rhetorical and normative commitments to the proper copy, they also risk reproducing some of the same constrictions and exclusions that we tend to associate with (privatized) acts of enclosure itself. I explore this argument first in reference to creative commons and copyright, which can reproduce a strong ideological commitment to improvement – ‘innovation’ or ‘creativity’ – against the mere copy. What is the cost, I ask, of making the idea of improvement the price of admission not just to intellectual property claims, but to participation in newly ‘democratic’ public and common spaces of knowledge production? Second, I look to global pharmaceutical politics – specifically, regulatory efforts to improve access to cheaper copied and generic drugs in Argentina – to raise questions about the public domain's normative place in the continued expansion and harmonization of intellectual property regimes in the so-called global South. Together, these discussions suggest how the public domain and the commons, like their IP counterparts, can rhetorically and normatively expand and be secured against the improper copy.     

Research Prioritization and the Potential Pitfall of Path Dependencies in Coral Reef Science

Studies of how scientists select research problems suggest the process involves weighing a number of factors, including funding availability, likelihood of success versus failure, and perceived publishability of likely results, among others. In some fields, a strong personal interest in conducting science to bring about particular social and environmental outcomes plays an important role. Conservation biologists are frequently motivated by a desire that their research will contribute to improved conservation outcomes, which introduces a pair of challenging questions for managers of science and scholars of policies governing science: 1) How do scientists integrate that goal into their processes of research priority evaluation, and 2) How can managers and funders of science utilize that knowledge in designing and administering funding programs? I use Q method to uncover four distinct schools of thought amongst researchers and knowledge-users about the merits of possible research priorities for coral reefs; one of the axes along which these schools of thought differ is in their interpretation of how science can and should interact with policy. The results reveal that perceived severity of reef stressors plays a role for some participants. Disciplinary training does not appear to be a major influence on research priority evaluation, but individual participants indicated professional expediency does prevent some researchers from pursuing or advocating that others pursue topics outside of that disciplinary specialty. Influences on and processes in research prioritization uncovered in this study have the potential to lead to counter-productive disciplinary path dependencies. From these results and building on outside literature, I conclude that better coordination and communication about research priorities across disciplines and with broader stakeholders – including knowledge users – could improve the research enterprise’s ability to contribute to meaningful societal and conservation goals. These findings are relevant to researchers and research administrators across disciplines that seek to conduct or fund science that is useful in addressing specific goals.     

Communities of Ruin: Humanitarian Violence and the Amazon's Uncontacted Tribes

This essay investigates portrayals of ‘uncontacted tribes’ of the Amazon by the humanitarian organisations and the popular texts that aim to study and save them. These portrayals rely upon a convergence of figures of racial, gender and sexual deviance recuperated from the age of high imperialism, with newer configurations of the human which emerged in the wake of the Second World War. How might we account for the fact that these objects of preservation are presented – save for a few crucial exceptions – as degraded, almost dead or simply not there? By way of addressing this question, I offer the production of the ‘uncontacted’ as one site for examining the imbrication of humanitarianism and violence.     

When socialists marketize: the case of China’s wind power market sector

This paper analyzes China’s attempt at maintaining and stabilizing the market framing of wind power development as ‘sustainable.’ Drawing on mixed data and new directions in the social studies of marketization, the analysis focuses on the Chinese government’s responses to the ‘quality crisis’ in the wind turbine industry. Employing five types of framing – goods, marketizing agencies, market encounters, price-setting, and market design and maintenance – the paper sheds light on flexible government interventions to steer the socio-technical assemblage around wind power towards a ‘turn to quality.’ In essence, this is a study of market construction in the context of Chinese wind power experiments. The paper contributes to new directions in market studies by (1) demonstrating the importance of attending to the contested algorithmic transformation of wind resources to wind power; (2) taking market studies to a transitional and developmental context, which renders marketization prone to constant overflowing; and (3) elucidating a particular Chinese model of experimental market construction ‘through embracing overflowing.’ The paper proposes new trajectories for future market studies with a focus on non-Western contexts, to reveal the wide variety of how marketization unfolds.     

Valuation struggles over pricing – determining the worth of wind power

Public policies such as feed-in tariffs have been widely introduced to stimulate the development of renewable energies, and sustain a decarbonisation of the electricity sector. Proponents argue that these governance instruments safeguard public goods such as the climate – yet they are accused of creating political markets, and political prices, here understood as market distortion. This paper studies the ‘politics’ of pricing by following the adoption of the first feed-in tariff in France. Pricing as a way of achieving non-economic ends, such as climate mitigation, brings the values of several public goods into play, all the while prompting a translation of these values into a single price. Following the struggles over the pricing of wind power in the early 2000s, the study illustrates that rather than a pollution of the market sphere by that of politics, a politics of pricing can be observed in four distinct struggles: namely the framing of the public interest; valuation as the articulation of the future; the possible agencies of governance; and role of valuation methods and calculations.     

The nature of markets: on the affinity between masculinity and (neo)liberalism

ABSTRACT

The relationship between masculinity, neoliberalism, and capitalist economy is difficult to analyse. This is apparent when we consider recent studies of neoliberal capitalism, which are almost entirely books about men, and yet this feature consistently escapes critical attention. In contrast, this article brings this relation into focus, and suggests that the critique of hegemonic masculinities is an important feature of the critique of neoliberalism. The article first reviews existing literature on the intersection of masculinity and capitalism, which is increasingly being drawn towards the analysis of neoliberalism. It then briefly takes up Michel Foucault’s study of neoliberalism, especially his contention that classical liberalism’s concern with the nature of markets maintains an ambiguous persistence within the neoliberal project, in order to consider what it may have to offer to an analysis of masculinity and neoliberalism. Finally, I turn to one of the key thinkers in the intellectual development of neoliberalism – Ludwig von Mises – and provide a critical rereading of his 1944 book Bureaucracy. I argue that, beneath its veneer of economic rationality, the text mobilizes masculinity as a technology that is crucial to managing both the affective and economic insecurities generated by neoliberal conceptions of freedom in market-based societies.     

The Empire Writes Back…Back: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Autogenic War

This essay attempts to disclose a uniquely volatile nexus that implicates – and perhaps, reinvigorates – a postcolonial analytics of insurgency. This nexus includes three strands of inquiry: the first is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which really is – albeit in a qualified sense – revolutionary. War is doing new things with time and space through culture, media, and data technology, and in the process is mutating not only what it means to be a part of this or that national group but is also changing what it means to be human. The second strand of inquiry focuses on the legacy of postcolonial studies, particularly the notion of ‘writing back’ which, I contend, is an apposite starting point for writing critically about the RMA. Apposite though it is, there are limits to postcolonial studies in the contemporary war context. This is so because while the divisions of individual difference are shifting, the coherence of the nation state itself is undergoing radical change. Moving outward in scope to a planetary scale, the human being per se is no longer a primary category by and for which war is happening today. Thus the third strand of inquiry is focused on the residual anthropomorphic tendencies within postcolonial studies that too narrowly limit discussions of violence and collective belonging. The concept of the human being per se remains reliant on early models of technology and media (namely, writing and literature, usually novels). Therefore, in the context of an ever-expanding global war machine, ‘writing back’ is a concept that requires fine-tuning and revision.     

Logics of onshoring: brand geographies,corporate tax responsibility and common sense

ABSTRACT

Since the global financial crisis of 2008 the issue of corporate tax avoidance has gained considerable political salience and public attention. This article explores the frameworks of meaning available for citizen-consumers to evaluate and form views on corporate tax behaviour. Building on research on the spatiality of taxation, I argue that brands and their spatial associations afford significant resources for making sense of the taxpaying responsibilities of multinational enterprises. Through the identification and analysis of three different forms of geographical entanglement – national origination, imbrication in the public domain, and territorialization of economic activity – I draw out the responsibilities that are inferred by these spatial associations. I propose that brands’ geographical entanglements tend to support a particular ‘logic of onshoring’, or common sense explanation concerning where corporations ought to pay tax, and I discuss the implications that the dominance of this logic may hold for the global politics of taxation. In drawing attention to the relationship between geographies of brands and geographies of taxation, the article furthers critical understanding of the role of space and place in everyday taxation imaginaries, and proposes an agenda for future research.     

Redefining Resistance: Seeking Fanon's Subject Between ‘the Unified’ and ‘the Dispersed’

Abstract

This essay reads two differing conceptions of subjectivity in Frantz Fanon's work as corresponding to a shift in subjective orientation in certain moments of crisis, from what I term a unified individual – the subject of psychoanalysis – to a dispersed subject, the frenzied participant in collective activity. I believe that such a potential duality within the subject is best adopted when analysing Fanon's oeuvre, as well as when examining a subject's behaviour as participant in forms of unstructured collective protest such as rioting. Whereas the unified subject of psychoanalysis best expresses the consciously self-reflective individual in society, the dispersed subject expresses a subjectivity operating in excess of individualism. This dispersed subject acts collectively, as an object moving in tandem with other objects, without individual reflection. I argue that this shift comprises the initial spark of insurrection suggested in Fanon's work, the moment in which he sees the people pitched ‘in a single direction, from which there is no turning back’; and what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the explosive moment of ‘conflagration’. The two subject positions between which the subject shifts exist as two potential sides of every subject and comprise the ‘Manichean’ world in which Fanon's subject is entrenched.     

Analysis of the consumption of artistic-cultural goods and services in Brazil

This work aims to evaluate the determinants of the consumption of artistic-cultural goods and services in Brazil, conceiving this consumption as an activity with positive effects on the consumer and on the society as a whole. Using the human capital approach, we estimate a model in which the expenditures on artistic-cultural goods and services depend on socio-economic, educational and socio-demographic characteristics of the head of the household, and on variables that indicate the location of the household. The results indicate that artistic-cultural expenditures are strongly determined by income and by the education of the consumer. Furthermore, the expenditure differs regionally, which may occur due to supply variations or historic-cultural distinctions.     

Design as Power: Paul Virilio and the Governmentality of Design Expertise

Abstract

Using sources from popular media, and ethnographic data collected from a university‐based urban design studio, I challenge Paul Virilio’s assertion that the modern human condition is dominated by a process of emotional synchronisation based on fear (the result, according to Virilio, of a collusion of technology and speed), and offer the analogous idea that contemporary consumer capitalism works toward a synchronisation of desire, operating, at least in part, through the ideologies and machinations of the idea of design. To do this, I analyse designerly approaches to problem‐solving as potential disciplining forces, or technologies of governmentality, which help to create order by manufacturing certain subjectivities like consumer, community member, or sense‐of‐place – subjectivities that are amenable to neo‐liberal notions of civil society in consumer‐capitalism. Ultimately, I argue that Virilio’s ‘art criticism of technology’, but also common critiques thereof, both depoliticise aesthetic judgement and work together toward the obfuscation of power within the symbolic economy of neo‐liberal consumer capitalism.     

Reputational capital in ‘the PR University’: public relations and market rationalities

Drawing on empirical data, this article identifies the emergence of the ‘PR University’ as an assemblage. Using a case study of university press officers’ work, I analyse how this form of media relations PR stages competition between UK universities through the media. A key form of this competition centres on the accumulation and circulation of what I term ‘reputational capital’. I focus on one core element of reputational capital – media stories about HE research and the circulation of research metrics. I argue that the assemblage of the public relations (PR) University pulls the HE sector into dialogue with PR principles and practices in the context of recent shifts towards market rationalities. But this relationship is not a simple cause and effect model in which increasing HE ‘marketisation’ creates a boom in universities’ PR practices, or intensifying investment in PR by universities merely amplifies or legitimises existing market tendencies in the sector. I argue that the PR University as assemblage starts generating its own logics around which actors in the field must orient themselves. More broadly, the PR University operates not only to promote an individual university’s market position, but also acts upon public debates about the social role, legitimacy and financing of UK Higher Education.