School of Social and Political Science

Description

Meandering Forth: on the orchestration of sentiment and technique in the sociology of markets.

There is a moment at the centre of every exchange between people and things in ordinary market situations that some economic sociologists call attachment. It is a good enough word for it, calling to mind the rich history of psychosocial theory exploring how love and the bonds between people arise and fail in embodied practice. Even so, its jarring for some to find the social studies of markets trifling with the vocabulary of love and relationships – didn’t we learn already that markets are the profane opposite, the antithesis of the social?

I could hedge this by saying that sociologists in my small world mean something different when we talk about market attachment. We mean the technical and social accomplishment of temporary, partial and fragile ties, ties that endure just long enough to complete a transaction. But this would be a fudge. In this lecture I want to push this further by showcasing the tangle of relationships and relations, crossing technical and social, cultural and economic, poetic and political lines, that are at play in market situations.

The usual outcome of market propositions, whether addressing public or private problems, is failure. Failure could mean the proposition’s call to action flops, is miscalculated or creates the unintended, unbearably grave, consequences that economists call externalities. When a proposition doesn’t fail, an intriguing kind of sociological puzzle has temporarily been solved. The puzzle is sociological because it concerns purposeful intervention in future action, whether a change of heart, direction, policy, consumption or acquisition. This is what the orchestration of technique and sentiment involves: a collective, dynamic, roughly harmonious set of arrangements calculated to move people and things. All this becomes observable by meandering around cases and places from industrial life assurance marketing, to projecting a future city like Milton Keynes, financing hyperscale AI or opening a Futures Institute.