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Enacting Dismal Science pp 1–27Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

After the Turn: How the Performativity of Economics Matters

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Abstract

We bet notable macroeconomists, Alan Blinder and Charles Wyplosz, never heard of the ‘performativity of economics’ when they stated that ‘the main purpose of central bank talk is to help markets “think like the central bank”’ (2004, 7). It is, however, striking, that so many different aspects of what is commonly called ‘performativity’ are entangled in discussing central bank communication—a theme which is currently at the heart of macroeconomic debates. All our intuitive notions—to be explained below—are here: the context of economic governance, the inherent sociality of language, the role of explicitness, the importance of signification, and the enactment of ideas and theories. For successful performance of a central bank, successful communication is crucial. To govern, one has to use the resources of language, to create a community of those who comprehend one’s message, to make explicit one’s commitments, and, finally, in and through communication, to enact the very economic theory stating that central bank communication is essential for channeling economic agents’ expectations and eventually for the proper functioning of this institution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For more on Austin, see Guala’s contribution.

  2. 2.

    Importantly, adherents of performativity are not alone in claiming that (economic) knowledge matters. There are various literatures which deal with very similar issues—ranging from the ideational approach in political economy that explores the role of ideas in shaping economic policy (Blyth 2002; Béland and Cox 2011; Henriksen 2013a; Rodrik 2014; overview in Hirschman and Popp Berman 2014) to the authors who emphasize rhetorical shifts and intellectual change as key factors of modern economic development (Mokyr 2003; McCloskey 2010).

  3. 3.

    For example, Mäki (2013) reproaches MacKenzie for misinterpreting Austin’s idea of performativity, while MacKenzie explicitly refers to Barnes (1983).

  4. 4.

    In 2009, there was a debate between Ferraro et al. (2005, 2009) and Felin and Foss (2009) about ex ante truthfulness of economic and social theories: While Ferraro et al. claimed that theories affect behavior and become self-fulfilling, Felin and Foss argued that this view implies significant arbitrariness and impossibility to differentiate between true and false theories.

  5. 5.

    In fact, as a subset of cultural, or ‘epistemic things,’ as Rheinberger (1997) would put it.

  6. 6.

    For an ‘ontological turn’ in STS, see specifically Woolgar and Lezaun (2013a, b) and a recent critique by Aspers (2015).

  7. 7.

    Callon’s interpretation of institutions as ‘socio-cognitive prostheses’ is of particular relevance here.

  8. 8.

    Indeed, Law (2008) prefers to talk of ANT as ‘material semiotics’—in some ways following Latour’s earlier preoccupations.

  9. 9.

    See the recent study on the performativity of social network theory (Healy 2015) demonstrating how it promotes reciprocity and more communitarian attitudes.

  10. 10.

    This is an important issue behind understanding the perseverance of particular practices (e.g., rational decision-making in Cabantous and Gond (2011)).

  11. 11.

    Mirowski (2015) recently reiterated his critique claiming that performativity theorists ‘retailed economists’ own stories about their purported close coherence of theory and empiricism as if it were a ‘radical’ thesis, when in fact the target economic theory had rarely described how the constructed markets actually functioned ‘in the wild’ (108). This latter kind of response to performativity is sometimes plagued by internal inconsistency, for it ‘has to claim, first, that economics does not matter … and, second, that it needs to be criticized anyway. But why should we waste time criticizing something that does not matter?’ (Muniesa 2014, 38). See more general political critiques of ANT in e.g., Fine (2003), Whittle and Spicer (2008) and Roberts (2012), and a response by Vosselman (2014).

  12. 12.

    That is why it is not enough to claim that, say, economy is ‘expressed,’ rather than performed (Didier 2007), for the economy itself should be conceived as depended of this ‘expression,’ and the stability of the ‘expressed’ should be questioned. For the Hegelian perspective on performativity, see Boldyrev and Herrmann-Pillath (2013); Herrmann-Pillath and Boldyrev (2014).

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  1. Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Ivan Boldyrev

  2. Witten Institute for Institutional Change, University of Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany

    Ivan Boldyrev

  3. School of Management, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Ekaterina Svetlova

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    Ivan Boldyrev

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Boldyrev, I., Svetlova, E. (2016). After the Turn: How the Performativity of Economics Matters. In: Boldyrev, I., Svetlova, E. (eds) Enacting Dismal Science. Perspectives from Social Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48876-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48876-3_1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-48876-3

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