Performativity, Economics and Politics

Presenting the theme of performativity in a journal named the “Journal of cultural economy” makes the role performativity plays in the economy a logical place to start and the debt to Michel Callon (1998) an obvious one to acknowledge. Callon’s idea was that “economics does not describe an existing external ‘economy’, but brings that economy into being: economics performs the economy, creating the phenomena it describes” (MacKenzie & Millo, 2003, p.108). This idea is now recognized by many authors as one of the major contributions to economic sociology (see, e.g., Barry & Slater, 2002; Holm, 2007; MacKenzie & Millo,2003; MacKenzie, 2004; MacKenzie, 2007) and has been accompanied by vivid debates across the social sciences about the actual influence of economics and economists over economic practices (e.g. Miller, 2000; Callon, 2005; Ferraro, Pfeffer and Sutton, 2005; Ghoshal, 2005; MacKenzie, Muniesa & Siu, 2007; Callon, 2007) and more generally over society and political processes (see, e.g., Bazerman & Malhotra, 2006; Fourcade, 2001, 2006). (premières lignes)