This chapter explores the performative power of research methods, and specifically the power of audio-visual technologies – the video camera - in capturing and re-presenting data concerning markets, their innovation and transformation. Our claim is that cameras and their research outputs, are engines of change. They act as market-making devices that not only inform but additionally perform markets. After reflecting on the Market Studies conceptualization of markets and the role of the camera as a market-making device, we show how the camera provides new perspectives, generates a deeper understanding of context and opens-up new opportunities for the reflexive action that has the power to transform both our understandings of markets and how they are performed. We draw on our own experiences and extant research to consider how the camera acts as a socio-technical and sentimental device to shake up existing practices, generating opportunities for new data collection, analysis and new ways of seeing, representing and expressing the politics of markets – transforming them in the process. We argue that i) zooming-out, ii) zooming-in, iii) refocusing, iv) slowing-down action and motion, and v) editing, have the capacity to generate and reveal different constitutive components of a market’s sociomaterial realities by drawing attention to actors, objects and emotions, and their relations with their wider social setting. We conclude that cameras can constitute different realities, breaking down taken for granted binaries, between society and nature, opening opportunities to build moral markets in new and innovative ways.

Marketographies – market ethnographies – are rooted in the actor-network theory tradition of ‘following the actor’, emphasizing descriptive methods that should be carried out like ‘a fly on the wall’ (Latour 2005, 136). By understanding the valuation and social life of methods in Market Studies, this chapter uncovers how Market Studies can require scholars to re-evaluate and switch gears from being ‘a fly on the wall’ to enacting different methods ‘on the fly.’ Extant Market Studies have been slow to acknowledge the dynamics of methods. In calling for such acknowledgments in Market Studies writing, I conceptualise methods ‘on the fly’ to highlight how methods contest, and are contested by the field, theory, and research questions. In doing so, I highlight the value of adapting Market Studies methods to capture elusive market practices in a messy and ever-changing world and its impact on producing relevant questions, theories, and market action.

Traditional economics served as the model case of most early performativity theory. In recent years, however, behavioural economics and particularly nudging has become increasingly popular; both as a policy instrument to design markets and as a behaviour change tool used by for-profit organizations. This chapter unpacks the implications of this shift in economic discourse for performativity theory, examining to what extent the performative process of behavioural economics overlaps with standard performativity and how it differs from that of traditional economics across policy and business domains. We focus on four aspects of the shift: (1) the nature of the economic subjects – consumers, workers, market actors – being performed, (2) the changes in the underlying normative standpoints and the politics of performativity, (3) the technologies of knowing adopted, and (4) the performative actions and socio-technical assemblages facilitated by traditional versus behavioural economics. The chapter concludes by offering a theoretical extension of performativity theory and a critical account of the potential impacts of behavioural economics and by laying the groundwork for future research.

Simulated markets are a fascinating paradox for Market Studies. They are markets organized around nothing. No real property rights get exchanged when markets are “only” simulated. They are unproductive in the sense that simulated markets produce no surplus for anyone. They are markets that do not actually exist. Yet, simulations of market processes play an increasingly important role in market practices as well as in wider business pedagogy. This chapter uses historical and contemporary evidence on the development and uses of market simulations in various settings – ranging from business schools to Wall Street – to test the post-performativity paradigm in Market Studies. The chapter shows that real-world market arrangements are changed not with the help of economic models, economic theories or economists themselves, but rather through business school teachers, family accountants, software tinkerers and designs that emerged completely outside the sphere of economic theory and modelling. By studying the early uses of electronic spreadsheets for market simulations, we can see that market arrangements require calculative communities rather than economists.

It is no longer news to argue that economics is performative, that it does not only describe markets, but takes part in producing or manufacturing them. Once accepted as close to a matter of fact, the performativity argument risks becoming too much of a general statement. So, what’s next for performativity? This chapter turns the performativity into an empirical research agenda which moves from demonstrating the existence of performativity to putting the performativity argument to the test and investigate sites and modes of performativity. We need to distinguish between the performativity of research as constitutive, that is how knowledge production has an effect on the world; while simultaneously being aware that this is not by itself enough to effectively shape actual markets. To find empirical and analytical ways to observe performativity in action, we go back to one of the original sites from where the performativity of economics argument was developed: economic and marketing experiments. We find that both much more is made in these settings than the making of actual markets, for instance the making of economics as a discipline and so also knowledge of markets, and much less, as the markets produced in these settings do not always move out of them.

Gender remains absent from the agenda of Market Studies. This chapter asks (1) why gender is absent, (2) why Market Studies should bother with gender, and (3) how Market Studies scholars might go about incorporating questions of gender in their research. The chapter traces the roots of the field’s avoidance of gender issues to the idea that gender is either a problematic or an unnecessary concept. The chapter further suggests that studying the co-performation of markets and gender promises to lead to an improved understanding of both gender and markets. Imagining avenues for future research, the chapter seeks inspiration in ethnomethodological theories of gender and Butler’s theory of gender performativity as well as proposes the strategy of seeking constructivist answers to feminist questions.

How might researchers begin to tackle markets that are constructed through digital texts, and how might they do so within the richly descriptive tradition of Market Studies? This chapter introduces semantic network analysis (SMA) of digital texts. It discusses the use of SMA to map the rhizomic structures of discourse, to extract mental models of participants, and draw a shared cognitive map from dispersed discourses. Through the example of an empirical study, focusing on an art investment consultancy, it examines how these methods can contribute to Market Studies and other related fields. It concludes with reflections on the relationship between theory, research practice, and the performative work of market texts

The design and implementation of the French energy efficiency certificate provides an opportunity to test the hypothesis of the performativity of the economic theory associated with the cap-and-trade market-based instrument. The empirical study of its design and implementation, through interviews and regulatory analysis, reveals a progressive dynamic of decoupling from its initial principles, in particular the equivalence between the quantity of energy saved and the allocation of certificates. Recent adaptations of the instrument attempt to integrate an alternative definition of efficiency based on cost estimation and subsidy allocation. By focusing on calculation practices, this chapter contributes to the understanding of performative struggles and theory-practice decoupling associated with market-based instruments. The chapter identifies four conditions for theory-practice decoupling: competing theories of efficiency, attachment to the instrument, a new principle of action, and weak checks on conformity to theory.

This book explores how the language of sexuality was codified in English dictionaries from 1604 to 1933, surveying the centuries before the coining of identity terms such as queer and heterosexual and then the decades when they had just begun entering wider currency. The introduction explains the temporal and spatial scope of the book and its understanding of sexuality and dictionary. It places the ideological histories of these two concepts in parallel, tracing how both became subject to the scientific spirit of the late nineteenth century—sexuality under the medical lens of sexology, lexicography under the empirical principles of the Oxford English Dictionary. Though prior studies that bring together lexicography and sexuality have been conducted within a range of disciplines, these have often occurred in isolation from each other. In an effort to bridge the divide between dictionary scholarship and queer linguistics in particular, the introduction puts forward an analytical framework which builds on the strengths of both research traditions. This is followed by an outline of how the discussion will be structured across the rest of the book.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship to Richard Wagner and his music was complex, contradictory, even paradoxical. Neither Nietzsche’s emphatic allegiance to Wagner in his early years nor his later rejection should be taken literally. The revaluation of the performative moment in cultural analysis is part of a core of thoughts that Nietzsche chewed over again and again from his first years in Basel until his collapse in Turin. His conception of the Attic tragedy is based on the assumption that the tragedy must be considered in the original context, with its cultic background and performative outcome, as opposed to the reduction of the drama to a written text, as introduced by Aristotle and continued by the Alexandrian philologists. It is here that Nietzsche demonstrates the most in common with Wagner. Yet for Nietzsche, performativity becomes a type of thinking and writing through which he ultimately distances himself from metaphysical thinking and from Wagner.

The author seeks to unpack five of the main discursive moves witnessed in the literature and case law pertaining to the question of consent to international law. He argues that these five specific discursive moves are performed by almost anyone engaging with the question of consent to international law, be such engagement on the more orthodox side or on the more critical side of the argumentative spectrum. The author claims that these five discursive moves correspond to the reproduction of a very modernist understanding of authority, the constitution of the very subject that is consenting, the anonymization of the author of consent, the reversal of the temporality of the legal discourse on consent and the adoption of very binary patterns of thought. This chapter shows that discursive moves made by international lawyers around the idea of consent bears heavily upon the type of political legitimacy, the type of geography, the type of responsibility, the type of temporality, and the type of hermeneutics that international law is serving.