ABSTRACT In the UK, individuals are increasingly responsible for achieving an adequate retirement income, yet many people are not saving enough for later life. While we understand some of the structures that lead to differential pensions, we know very little about how people make decisions about their workplace pensions. This is a crucial question as an increasingly financialised landscape means that

ABSTRACT The key measurement standard used by the private sector to measure the carbon emission impact of an organization is the corporate carbon footprint. Known as the GHG Protocol, this standard was created in 2001 through a multi-stakeholder collaboration and is now used by thousands of companies globally. This article discusses the origins of the Protocol to better illuminate the politics surrounding

ABSTRACT This article proposes a general framework within which to analyze the new environmental intangibles that have been proliferating over the last decades in order to address environmental problems on a market basis. We pay attention to different possible states of environmental intangibles according to the degree of commodification of the impact they are based on. The impact is measured, then

ABSTRACT India’s post-GFC digital financial inclusion project has been conveyed by an officially constructed polysemic narrative that connotes three distinctive semantic fields: (a) post-colonial Indian developmental policies; (b) post-GFC financialising neoliberal financial inclusion programmes; and (c) traditional Hindu religious values of money and wealth. By assembling a semiological conceptual

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present an ethnographic account of the quasi-religious romanticism of the crypto-community towards blockchain technologies. To do so, we explore the cultural significance of phenomena such as myth, faith, and ritual, without excluding both the realms of technological practices and techno-scientific narrative. Drawing on a comparison with the legend of King Arthur, we analyse

(2021). How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help organizations become more innovative by reconfiguring them in ways that can facilitate the unimpeded flow of information between as many of their employees as possible. They are thus a prime example of phatic experts, inasmuch as they present themselves as people whose expertise turns on establishing

ABSTRACT How can we understand the relations between economic things and different forms of exchange – commodities, assets, gifts and singularities – in the contemporary economy? The decline of industrial capitalism and the emergence of new types of intangible valuables challenge our understanding of what economic life is about. Analysing economies through one dominant form of exchange risks overlooking

ABSTRACT This article analyses how a pair of nineteenth century commodity exchanges—in Chicago and New Orleans—shaped the sociotechnical infrastructures underlying two key types of market information—price quotations and crop statistics. Specifically, the paper investigates why these exchanges saw divergent outcomes, each successfully developing one information infrastructure but not the other. Prior

ABSTRACT This article discusses central bank forward guidance as a performative (Austin) and conative (Jakobson) practice – hence, as a form of audience-centred communication that intends to transform their behaviour when deployed by a narrator who is simultaneously also a character in the story. Taking the European Central Bank (ECB) as its primary example, the article conveys how the double role

ABSTRACT Tackling climate change has provided a key focus for the creation of what the editors of this special issue have termed ‘environmental intangibles.’ This paper focuses on the European Union Emissions Trading System (EUETS), a climate policy that revolves around the issuance and trading of environmental intangibles called emissions allowances. Set up in the mid-2000s, the cap and trade system

ABSTRACT By mediating everyday activities, social interactions, and economic transactions, digital platforms play an increasingly dominant role in contemporary capitalism. These platforms have excelled at extracting value from assets and labour that have been deemed un(der)productive. While the burgeoning literature on platform capitalism and digital labour has focused on these systems of value extraction

(2021). Capitalism, Institutions and Social Orders: The Case of Contemporary Spain. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

(2021). A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT The rapid growth of online consumer review (OCR) systems such as Tripadvisor has greatly reconfigured the operating environment for numerous businesses and organizations. As OCRs become a crucial source of information for consumer decision-making, we pose a twofold question: how do restaurants perceive OCRs and how do they respond to being evaluated on them? In answering this question, we

ABSTRACT The Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) community consists of individuals each personally dedicated to reducing consumption, so as to build up financial surpluses that are eventually adequate to live off. While it shares certain features in common with other ‘financial independence’ ideologies and self-help communities, one thing that distinguishes it is the emphasis on frugality. Freedom

ABSTRACT This essay takes the 50th anniversary of Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States as an opportunity to revisit this important book. It asks how Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, a book that came out five decades ago as a contribution to development economics, connects to recent debates in economic sociology and how this can help us think

(2021). Digital entrepreneurship in Africa: how a continent is escaping Silicon Valley’s long shadow. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT We introduce the concept of 'debt trails', a methodological and conceptual term to study debt relations across different sites and over time. Recent theories in the interdisciplinary Social Studies of Finance, political economy and economic and human geography have theorised debt in relational terms, although with a distinct and often disconnected theoretical and empirical focus. We propose

(2021). Oracular power and the architects of the future. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, The Mutability of Economic Forms, pp. 368-371.

(2021). Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 512-515.

ABSTRACT The idea of gamification, or implementation of game-like elements and mechanisms in non-game contexts, has, throughout the past decade, swept the fields of healthcare and fitness as well as education. More recently, various tech writers, bloggers, and consultants have begun proposing gamification as a solution also in financial services, where gamification has already made headway, for instance

ABSTRACT This paper argues that material valuation devices used in consumer research rely on moralized cultural techniques. The paper focuses in detail on one such valuation device, namely audience simulators, and recovers the deeply ascetic and disciplinary nature of this set of techniques. Audience simulation, and in particular the Continuous Response Measurement of media audiences (CRM) allows estimating

(2021). The will to ignorance. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, The Mutability of Economic Forms, pp. 359-361.

(2021). Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 506-509.

(2021). Knowing The Unknowers. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, The Mutability of Economic Forms, pp. 364-367.

(2021). The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 509-512.

ABSTRACT Due to their perceived role in making content visible, engagement metrics are core concerns for people and businesses that generate revenue on social media platforms. While scholars have focused on the ways that social media users manipulate their own visibility, we investigate not only how social media users’ understandings of metrics shape the content they produce but also how this content

ABSTRACT Due to their perceived role in making content visible, engagement metrics are core concerns for people and businesses that generate revenue on social media platforms. While scholars have focused on the ways that social media users manipulate their own visibility, we investigate not only how social media users’ understandings of metrics shape the content they produce but also how this content

ABSTRACT Financial contagion is often defined as the propagation of shocks among actors in markets, while excessive correlation and interconnectivity of markets, actors or investment strategies are seen as reasons for its spread. In this article, I examine uses of the concept of contagion across academic, practical and popular discourses on financial markets and speculation from the late nineteenth

ABSTRACT Carbon offsets were designed to be a universal good for a global market, tradable with any form of carbon emission anywhere in the world. This paper shows that emission rights, designed as perfect commodities, do not pass their envisioned markets all too easily. After multiple market failures, producers and traders needed to add something to their offsets that define their value by exceeding

ABSTRACT Carbon offsets were designed to be a universal good for a global market, tradable with any form of carbon emission anywhere in the world. This paper shows that emission rights, designed as perfect commodities, do not pass their envisioned markets all too easily. After multiple market failures, producers and traders needed to add something to their offsets that define their value by exceeding

ABSTRACT Social studies of science have for many years analyzed and demonstrated the key role of experiments to science and the making of facts. But what is the role of experiments in market work? And what, if anything, can we learn from them about markets and commodities? It is perhaps tempting to say that we can learn very little. This paper investigates a series of market research experiments investigating

ABSTRACT Social studies of science have for many years analyzed and demonstrated the key role of experiments to science and the making of facts. But what is the role of experiments in market work? And what, if anything, can we learn from them about markets and commodities? It is perhaps tempting to say that we can learn very little. This paper investigates a series of market research experiments investigating

(2021). Doing economics otherwise, from one crisis to the next. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 1-8.

(2021). Bubbles and Machines: Gender, Information and Financial Crises. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 121-123.

(2021). Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 123-125.

ABSTRACT Since 2010, social impact bonds (SIBs) have invited investors to ‘do well by doing good’: injecting capital into social welfare projects, and gaining returns based on successful attainment of impacts. A foregrounded interest in behavioral change typifies much of this market (with SIBs aiming to reduce recidivism, truancy, and addiction, for example). Commentators have situated these behavioral

(2021). The power to ignore and the power to hide. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, The Mutability of Economic Forms, pp. 361-363.

ABSTRACT This special issue brings together ethnographic scholarship to explore the interlinking of diverse personal, social and larger institutional forms in and through which artistic value emerges. Rather than being inherent in the formal features of art objects or merely a discursive construct, value as craft signifies an arena in which beliefs, ideologies, and histories interweave with art practices

ABSTRACT The Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) is a multi-stakeholder organization that has set as its aim to improve the environmental, social and economic conditions of soy production. To do so, it relies on a certification scheme whose standards seek to regulate the practices of producers. Unlike most certifications, however, RTRS allows for the detachment of ‘sustainability’ from physical commodities

ABSTRACT In the USA, endangered species are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act. Yet they can be harmed under the condition that impacts on their habitats are mitigated. This is known as the no-net loss principle. To do so, public regulators acknowledge conservation banks and endangered species credit production as the most robust policy instruments, as they allow for ecological restoration

ABSTRACT In Senegal, various development pilot projects experimented with agricultural index insurance to make drought insurable. These interventions produced ‘rainfall deficit’ as an environmental problem suited for such market-based solutions. Investigating the materiality of this index insurance scheme, I explore the environmental market infrastructure, which produces risk conventions, articulates

ABSTRACT In the insurance industry, digital technologies have been harnessed in pursuit of three goals: personalising services for customers, obtaining information about them and nudging them towards behaviour that diminishes their risks. This article examines two Finnish companies that use self-tracking practices and sensor-generated data in life insurance products. It investigates the knowledges

ABSTRACT Speculation has become a normalized occupational strategy and quotidian economic rationality that extends throughout society. Although there are many contemporary articulations of speculation, this article focuses on contract labor as a domain of financialization. Seen through this lens, contract labor can be understood as a speculative investment strategy wherein individuals leverage whatever

(2021). Black Market: The Slave’s Value in National Culture after 1865. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, Debt trails, pp. 263-266.

ABSTRACT What links the value and exchange of everyday commodities with the production of new wealth in contemporary capitalism? By taking the reader on an ethnographic stroll through a potlatch-like community festival sponsored by the Icelandic fishing industry, this article sheds light on a new liberal politics of value that is rooted in the redirection of societal wealth through the privatisation

(2021). On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, Debt trails, pp. 261-263.

(2021). The Smart City in a Digital World. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, Debt trails, pp. 258-261.

(2021). Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, Debt trails, pp. 266-269.

(2021). The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, The Mutability of Economic Forms, pp. 357-359.

ABSTRACT The financialization literature focuses on how people become docile neoliberal subjects and pays less attention to debt resistance. This article focuses on this less explored dimension. The article draws on the case of Chile to explore the way in which the financialization of higher education leads to the politicization of debt. It makes the case that social mobilization around student debt

ABSTRACT Drawing upon ethnographic moments recorded at two of the most prominent art world institutions, the Venice Biennale and the auction house Christie's at its New York headquarters, this article reflects on what it means to investigate the global art world ethnographically and interrogates some of the current trends within the anthropology of art. In particular, the article shows the potential

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the reframing of German seed as a market good. In the late nineteenth century, seed was sold on dedicated transregional markets for the first time. These emerging seed markets faced several problems, among them unpredictability, ill-adapted products, and the proliferation of reproduced seed on the market, which made it difficult for breeders to alienate their product and

ABSTRACT The trading of cattle across England poses challenges to the control and eradication of the cattle disease bovine Tuberculosis (bTB). To encourage the consideration of risk in the practice of cattle trading in England, Cattle Health Certification Standards (CHeCS) were introduced in 2016 to associate cattle commodities with bTB. However, CHeCS has only been adopted by approximately 60 farmers

ABSTRACT Responsibilities across generations are at the forefront of policy agenda; whether this is climate change, remains of the nuclear age, care for the vulnerable, plastics pollution, public debt, or pension schemes. This provokes scholarly debates about where the moral cursor of action should be set in time to be qualified as ‘responsible’. Instead of adopting a normative stance, based on archival

ABSTRACT Economic, cultural, social, and political life is being increasingly shaped by digital platforms including social networking sites (Facebook), streaming services (Netflix) and sharing platforms (AirBnB). While social scientists have tracked the rapid emergence of platforms and developed useful conceptualisations about what they are and how they operate, surprisingly little attention has been

(2021). Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 117-121.

ABSTRACT This paper draws upon research in the UK debt advice sector to consider the role played by the credit referencing sector in shaping how UK society is ‘governed by debt.’ In response to existing literature within cultural economy on the ‘governmentality of the credit file,’ the paper draws upon two images of the ‘debt trails’ concept to foreground the hopeful futures, shaped by and mediated