"Reviews of Michel Callon’s Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation, In Journal of Cultural Economy

 Here's a set of brief reactions to Michel Callon's book Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation. The reactions are by a diverse set of authors (as an economist I added a good deal to the diversity:)

"Review Symposium: Michel Callon’s Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation. Zone Books,"  by Michel Callon, Paul Langley, Bill Maurer, Timothy Mitchell , Alvin Roth & Koray Caliskan, Journal of Cultural Economy  Published online: 28 Oct 2024

 The symposium collects the following comments:

Introduction to the symposium  by Koray Caliskan

Markets in the making by Paul Langley

The anthropologist at the end of the world? Salvaging anthropology for alternative value propositions by Bill Maurer 

Special and highly artificial processes by Timothy Mitchell 

Markets in the making  by Alvin E. Roth 

Discussion and commentary by Michel Callon

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Here is the beginning of my comment:

"Markets in the making
Alvin E. Roth
It is a pleasure to read Michel Callon’s completed book, after a lengthy pandemic correspondence, abridged in Callon and Roth (2021). Callon appreciates that markets are complex, dynamic, and an essential part of society, which itself is constantly changing, not least in response to changes in technology (such as computers and the internet). The book itself is testimony to the speed of change: speaking of gambling addicts, Callon writes “One day it will be possible to reach him at home through an app.” In the U.S. this has happened already, particularly for betting on sporting events while they are underway.

Much of what he says will be very agreeable to both sociologists and economists, although there is room to disagree about how some previous work is interpreted.

The book is not easy reading: the complexities that Callon considers prompt him to develop new words to describe them. He speaks of market “agencements” (which are constantly “reagencing,”) and, “passiva(c)tion” (which requires new punctuation and word formation, as markets help goods become “pass(act)ive”).

Callon also redefines familiar terms such as “competition” and “innovation.”

In market agencements, perfect competition … has nothing to do with that of neoclassical economics. Its only goal is to make bilateral transactions proliferate … 

and
Without innovation, there is no competition, and as a consequence, there is no market activity. … As we will see throughout this book, th[is] rule brooks no exceptions.

Rules that brook no exceptions worry me.

Notwithstanding these quibbles, Callon’s aim is to alert us to how markets, marketplaces, their participants, and the transactions they foster, all interact with one another and the larger economy in intricate ways that shape the society that also shapes them ... "

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Here is the beginning of Callon's response to all the remarks in the Symposium:

"Discussion and commentary
Michel Callon
What better way to express my gratitude to the colleagues invited by the JCE than to confess that, thanks to them and their demanding reading, I have a better understanding of what I was trying to do.

When you decide to write a book you have to start with a simple question and try, whatever happens, to take it (develop it) to the end. If you don't succeed, if difficulties and contradictions pile up along the way, it's because the question was badly formulated, or worse, it was uninteresting.

The question I began with is both fundamental and undeniably ambitious: What are the felicity conditions of a commercial transaction, understood as the exchange of property rights for monetary payment? This question, though simple in words, encompasses a vast and intricate world. It involves a specific environment where particular agents engage in relationships, where certain property rights are assigned to entities, where valuation mechanisms are in place, and where currencies circulate. This book focuses on the organization and architecture of this world.

Neologisms
It is difficult to grasp the peculiarities and characteristics of this world without making a detour into economic anthropology, which is one of the fields that studies it. I could have avoided the challenge, given the richness and complexity of this literature, but doing so would have meant abandoning the question. What kept me from giving up was a phrase from Nietzsche that Bruno Latour liked to quote: “For I approach deep problems such as I do cold baths: fast in, fast out.” (Nietzsche Citation2001, 231). Don't be afraid of the cold, but don't let it paralyze you! I tried to follow the advice as best I could, but maybe I didn’t get out of the bath quickly enough! The book is long—probably too long. But that’s not all. Not only does it lack illustrations (mea culpa), but it also introduces neologisms that are almost impossible to pronounce.

Take, for example, the notion of passivaction. When Koray Caliskan and I were looking for a word to describe the curious process that frames an entity's actions, whatever it may be, without limiting the entity’s ability to take unexpected actions, we first thought of “passivation.” We soon realized, however, that this term was quite rightly giving rise to complete misunderstandings. Few had read Antoine Hennion and Emilie Gomard's seminal article on people addicted to hard drugs, which showed that: a) becoming passive required complex and costly efforts, and b) passivity was a form of action in itself. To avoid creating new words, we settled on “pacifying.” While it was a better choice, it didn't fully capture the reality of the process.

When words are lacking, the only solution is to come up with new ones, in the hope that they will capture what we are trying to grasp. Whether we are talking about human beings, technical objects or non-human living beings and the services they provide, there is a balance to be struck between programmed behavior and the ability to deal with the unexpected. What would be the value of a worker with no sense of initiative? What would be the value of a technical object incapable of adapting (being adapted) to new circumstances? What would be the value of a draught horse that, through extreme domestication, had lost all ability to improvise?

No framing can completely stop overflows, and if it could, it would block any chance for adaptation and change. When a process is this universal, continuing to misname it would be a mistake. As Albert Camus said, “To misname things is to add to the misery of the world.” Passivaction may be a barbaric word, but it highlights the dual movement that transforms an entity into something that both acts and is acted on, both configured and configures, both passive, and thus active, or passivacted!"

 

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Earlier:

Thursday, January 6, 2022 The design and performation of markets: a discussion, by Michel Callon and Alvin Roth in the AMS Review

 

And if you are meeting Callon for the first time, here's an interview he gave last year:

From Innovation to Markets and Back. A Conversation with Michel Callon  by Alexandre Mallard — 

Here's a snippet from that interview:

"I can count on one hand the collaborations I’ve since had with economists: an edited volume on the concept of network with Patrick Cohendet, Dominique Foray, and François Eymard-Duvernay (Foray et al., 1999), and a recent article cosigned by Alvin Roth on the role of economics in formatting the economy (Callon & Roth, 2021). I enjoyed working with these colleagues because they were open and respectful, and I tried to be too. They understood my efforts to be in dialogue with their discipline. Their attitude was in stark contrast with the majority of their colleagues who were arrogant, bordering on dismissive. Every time I’ve had to share a flight with economists someone has snarked, “Michel, I hope the plane you’re boarding isn’t a social construction!” Economics is by no means a dismal science, but too often economists make it one.

...

"Through these encounters, so filled with incomprehension, it hit me that the very definition of economics was in play. There were so many things to question that went beyond pounding on homo oeconomicus, his unrealism or his vices and virtues. For instance, in contrast to evolutionary economics, mainstream economics was entirely based on an unrealistic definition of goods that was strikingly limited when applied to scientific knowledge. In asserting that scientific knowledge was intrinsically (by nature) non-rival and non-excludable, mainstream economists implicitly recognized that they were completely uninterested in the associated milieu of goods, that is to say in everything that gives them the capacity to be useful and consequently to be used. Economists did not realize that without an associated milieu a good is not a good. A scientific statement airlifted over the Gobi desert has no other fate than to dissipate into the sands because it is deprived of the socio-technical environment that gives it meaning and utility. Likewise, without the infrastructure that allows it to take off, navigate, and land, without the fuel supply contracts, control towers, and air traffic controllers, without the insurance companies, international regulations, and the legal agreements, an Airbus 380 remains grounded. A Nespresso capsule in the palm of George Clooney’s hand, without its dedicated machine or a supply of running water, is as useless as a car on an uninhabited island lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A thing is not born a good, it becomes one; a thing is not born a public good, it must become one too."