The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn (CRESC)

Do things such as performance indicators, valuation formulas, consumer tests, stock prices or financial contracts represent an external reality? Or do they rather constitute, in a performative fashion, what they refer to?   The Provoked Economy tackles this question from a pragmatist angle, considering economic reality as a ceaselessly provoked reality. It takes the reader through a series of diverse empirical sites – from public administrations to stock exchanges, from investment banks to marketing facilities and business schools – in order to explore what can be seen from such a demanding standpoint. It demonstrates that descriptions of economic objects do actually produce economic objects and that the simulacrum of an economic act is indeed a form of realization. It also shows that provoking economic reality means facing practical tests in which what ought to be economic or not is subject to elaboration and controversy.   This book opens paths for empirical investigation in the social sciences, but also for the philosophical renewal of the critique of economic reality. It will be useful for students and scholars in social theory, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and economics.

The Provoked Economy (CRESC)

Politics & Social Sciences

Muniesa, Fabian

Social Sciences

Routledge

Paranoid Finance (Theory Redux)

There is a link between finance and paranoia, and that link may well be inescapable. At the core of financial imagination lies a notion of value - of 'value creation' - that is loaded with trouble. This is the trouble of a fragile metaphor: a metaphor of fecund money and future return, of true value and false value, of true value that should be protected from the perils of dilapidation, expropriation and speculation, but whose substance is in fact nowhere to be found. Contemporary conspiratorial, millennialist discourse on money, banking and wealth does not embody a delirious misrepresentation of the logic of finance: rather, it exacerbates the paranoid potentials inherent in mainstream financial imagination. This is the radical hypothesis developed in this book: that of paranoid finance as a sedimentation of the demons that haunt the conventional categories of financial value. Tutorials abound today that guarantee access to secret knowledge about the financial system, to magical currencies that release eternal returns, to legal schemes conducive to personal sovereignty, and to a way out of economic enslavement. They often combine disparate elements of esotericism, conspiratorialism, antisemitism, populism, libertarianism or spiritualism. But as Muniesa shows, they also provide a testbed for a critique of the limits of financial imagination.

Business & Money

Finance

Polity

Capitalization: a Cultural Guide

Ortiz, Horacio

Ehrenstein, Véra

Doganova, Liliana

Pina-Stranger, Alvaro

Paterson, Florence

Bourgoin, Alaric

Juven, Pierre-André

Pontille, David

Saraç-Lesavre, Basak

Yon, Guillaume

ECOLE DES MINES

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Books by Muniesa, Fabian