performativity and finance
Teppo
Yuval Millo sent me a note about an upcoming workshop he is co-organizing with Daniel Beunza at Columbia Business School —- “From Bodies to Black Scholes: A Workshop on Performativity and the Social Studies of Finance.” Looks very interesting. And, this is a timely conference as performativity is getting lots of attention in journals and more generally in extant organizational discourse.
More details about the conference here, or, click below.
From Bodies to Black-Scholes: A Two-day Workshop on Performativity and the Social Studies of Finance
Organized by Daniel Beunza (Columbia U.) and Yuval Millo (LSE); Columbia Business School, New York, 28-29, April 2008
The Social Studies of Finance (SSF) is one of the fastest-growing and most intriguing new fields in the social sciences today. Born from the intersection of sociology of science, economic sociology, management and critical accounting, SSF offers a new vantage point for the analysis of financial markets and their dynamics.
This intensive two-day workshop is convened by Daniel Beunza from Columbia Business School and Yuval Millo from the London School of Economics. It is aimed at presenting the field to newcomers, and is directed at research students and early-career researchers in accounting, finance, management, political science and sociology.
To allow effective discussion, the group size is limited to 12 participants. The workshop’s fee is US$ 200. To apply for the workshop, please send by February 29th a CV and a one-page description of your research and how it relates to SSF to y.millo@lse.ac.uk
For more details see: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/millo/SSFworkshop.htm
“From Bodies to Black-Scholes”
Forgot to mention —- thats a rather ominous, though perhaps appropriately descriptive, title.
tf
February 11, 2008 at 12:35 am
Teppo, do you know, according to Nicolai Foss, this is the 1,207th performativity post on this blog?
fabiorojas
February 11, 2008 at 12:36 am
Hmm, we’ve inadvertently become a hub for performativity.
tf
February 11, 2008 at 12:37 am
I think we predicted that, didn’t we?
fabiorojas
February 11, 2008 at 12:39 am
In retrospect, yes!
tf
February 11, 2008 at 12:40 am
Was our centrality in performativity blog discussion Barnesian or not?
fabiorojas
February 11, 2008 at 12:41 am
Fabio:
Yes.
[Well, the fine-grained distinctions between different 'types' of performativity/self-fulfilling prophecy/reflexivity, etc have not really made sense to me, the arguments still appear highly similar. That is, though most books in the performativity space, including MacKenzie's An Engine Not A Camera [specifically, see chapter 1], try to make distinctions between Barnesian etc performativity, the differences seem semantic at best. And, even if fine-grained differences exist, the real question still is whether performativity exists in the first place and how it relates to social reality. That is, as a metatheoretical tool, performativity ought to, somehow, go beyond simply labeling something as performative, post hoc (or “counter”-performative for that matter); this type of retrospective storytelling seems problematic. Folks in the space undoubtedly are working on these issues..
All the above said, I still find all the discussion and debate of the socio-political-technological machinery of theory and science interesting and critically important.]
tf
February 11, 2008 at 1:00 am
OK, while on vacation I missed this twin post at O&M…(which references our past performativity posts and also advertises this conference).
tf
February 11, 2008 at 3:26 am
[...] performativity andfinance [...]
Money In Life » Corporatefinance, innovation, and strategic competition…
February 11, 2008 at 12:41 pm
I agree with Teppo. The discussion about Barnsian types vs. Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy, for example, is important as it states the distinctive features of the performativity concept (e.g. the non-arbitrariness of theories-agents that become performative). But, ultimately, the more important message coming from performativity is about the repertoire of mechanisms that it introduces. I hope that with more empirical working, it will be able to offer a richer understanding of how institutionalisation takes place.
yuvalmillo
February 11, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Yuval: Despite my scepticism about performativity (or perhaps, key aspects of it), I think I like your characterization: performativity may provide a “richer understanding of how institutionalization takes place.” Institutional theory seems to indeed take the existence of institutions (practices etc) for granted, while performativity then perhaps can help explicate the (process-related) origins of these institutions; again, rather than ‘merely’ highlighting the diffusion of institutions.
tf
February 12, 2008 at 12:38 am