Technological Economy by Slater Don; Barry Andrew;

Author:Slater, Don; Barry, Andrew; [ANDREW BARRY & DON SLATER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

5 Technology, politics and the

market

An interview with Michel Callon

Interview conducted by Andrew Barry and

Don Slater1

Andrew Barry: One way to start would be to think about the relation between your work on markets and your earlier work on the anthropology of science and technology. There is a movement: a generalisation from some of the earlier work you’ve done on science and technology. How do you see the relation to the earlier work?

Michel Callon: I think that there are three main relations between this work on markets and the work on science and technology. The first is that the way we are now studying social sciences is only an extension of the work done on the natural sciences. It’s simply the continuation of anthropology of science, but an anthropology of science which is concerned with economics in the broadest sense of the term, including, for example, marketing and accountancy. The second reason is the role of technologies in the structuring of economic markets. It is impossible to think of markets and their dynamics without taking into account the materiality of markets and the role of technological devices. The anthropology of technology might be very helpful if we want to understand better how markets are stabilised and organised. And the third reason is the work we have done on the links between scientific research, academic research and the function of economic markets. I have been very interested in explaining the exchanges between academic research and economic markets. And I’ve been struck by the fact that economists have been playing, although not alone, a very important role in designing institutions for the organisation of the exchanges between scientific research and economic markets. For example, if you take this very usual linear model, with the flow of knowledge going from the scientific laboratory to the end consumer via the industry or enterprise, you can recognise the role of economic theory in justifying this model. The work done by Arrow and Nelson at the end of the 1950s and the theory of science as a public good, has contributed strongly to perform this idea of an autonomous scientific sphere that was disconnected from economic markets. Moreover if you were to trace the genealogy from the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush to Arrow and Nelson this would provide a good explanation of the institutional configuration of science and economic activities in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. So in trying to understand how science and economy were co-ordinated, I was struck by the role of what I call framing by economic theories. So for these three reasons – because economics as such is a science and demands to be studied by anthropology of science, because of the role of material and technical devices in the functioning of markets, and because of the obvious performing role of economic theories in explaining how science and economic markets interrelate – it was impossible to avoid considering markets as constructed, and necessary to emphasise the importance of technologies, including economics, in this very process of construction.

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