(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 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

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

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

(2021). Oracular power and the architects of the future. 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). Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

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. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Knowing The Unknowers. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

(2021). The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

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 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 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

(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

(2020). The power to ignore and the power to hide. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

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 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

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 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

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

(2020). The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

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

(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.

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

ABSTRACT In this essay, I consider the ways in which gold acts and is perceived as a reserve in the El Cubo mine in Guanajuato, Mexico, and in some European central banks. Following Gustav Peebles’ essay ‘Rehabilitating the Hoard’ (2014), I consider the ways in which gold’s movement from mine to vault helps to express a dialectic of sequestration and display that enables its operation as hoard, providing

(2020). Waiting on Retirement: Aging and Economic Insecurity in Low-Wage Work. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 13, Crafting Values: Economies, Ethics and Aesthetics of Artistic Valuation, pp. 779-782.

ABSTRACT Starting from a theoretical model of the generation of value in a knowledge-based economy, we explore the local management of immaterial resources in a post-industrial economy. To address this question, we analyse the management of immaterial commons in four representative locations of the artisanal fishing space of southern Chile, specifically the production of two marine species: sea urchins

ABSTRACT This article looks at the controversy which emerged between the Bank of England and a number of external actors over various proposals to modify the printing of the Bank’s paper-money during the Bank restriction period of 1797–1821. As a result of this controversy, the debate over the best method to prevent the forgery of the Bank’s paper-money became increasingly technical and specialised

(2020). Anti-Crisis: thinking with and against crisis excerpt from interview with Janet Roitman. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 13, Crafting Values: Economies, Ethics and Aesthetics of Artistic Valuation, pp. 772-778.

(2020). Correction. Journal of Cultural Economy. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT The Cultural and Creative Industries have great potential for providing employment and economic development, as has been demonstrated by a number of international studies. However, cultural firms tend to be small and employment is precarious, with a high level of informality and freelance work. This study investigates the characteristics of micro-enterprises who sew bespoke garments for individual

ABSTRACT To cure Covid-19 on a medical, political, economic, and societal level, there is a need to ‘curate’ between science and politics in such a way that decision-makers and societies can address the practical requirements at hand. This commentary introduces and discusses ‘curating’ as a socio-material practice mediating between science and decision-making. It reflects on the current Covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This article raises the issue of why the idea of a ‘deal’ has become so prevalent in the discussion of political matters and policy proposals associated with future economic developments. It does this by linking the deal with several features of market design. Principal amongst these are game theory and matching algorithms. The Barker-Thompson Rule is presented as an example of a particular

ABSTRACT The paper mobilises the distinctive notion of ‘sites of qualification’ as a means of providing an expansive understanding of how innovative products are designed, produced and brought to consumer markets. We focus on the development of a new safety product for motorcyclists, the rider airbag, in which inflatable body protection is either incorporated into, or worn underneath, textile jackets

(2020). Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 13, Mapping the Intermediate: Lived Technologies of Money and Value, pp. 502-504.

(2020). Social avalanche: crowds, cities and financial markets. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 13, Mapping the Intermediate: Lived Technologies of Money and Value, pp. 504-507.

ABSTRACT This article explores the notion of ‘epistemic distances,’ which are operationalised by acts of showing as well as omitting. It is investigated through practices of market research where researchers aim to overcome a perceived lack or absence of market knowledge. However, such work relies on keeping clients and respondents away from many details of how the research is undertaken. Based on

ABSTRACT As financial transactions are increasingly digitized, old and new kinds of intermediaries are only expanding in importance. Intermediaries, mediators and brokers sit at critical junctures and operate between diverse financial arenas and pathways. We argue that mapping the intermediate entails identifying how different kinds of actors—human and non-human, objects and interfaces, institutions

(2020). Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy. Journal of Cultural Economy: Vol. 13, Mapping the Intermediate: Lived Technologies of Money and Value, pp. 507-510.