Economic sociology these days seems preoccupied with “performativity.” That attention is well-deserved because the notion that the use of a model can improve its predictive fit is a powerful idea. (For a graphic representation of the concept, see the excerpt by Brooke Harrington.) But perhaps it’s time for a corrective look.
Graduate seminars are a useful barometer of when a concept starts to run past its purposes. Some decades ago it was “socially constructed,” next “embeddedness” took its turn, and then for a brief while “boundary object.” (I can’t begin to list all the things that students told me were boundary objects.) Today it’s “performativity.” The problem was not just that the terms were used, but that instead of being asked as a question (“how is it socially constructed and why does that matter?”) reference to the concept becomes the quick answer to almost any kind of question regardless of how far away from the original idea. People who have experience leading graduate seminars will recognize what I’m talking about. There’s a pretty good discussion going on, and just when things are getting perplexing and difficult (i.e. good, as in potentially productive), someone voices the solution (“It’s a clear case of performativity, right?) and it suddenly seems to close the conversation.
With all the talk about economists performing the economy and models performing markets, perhaps we are losing site of skilled performance. Charlie Smith addresses such skilled performances in a recent paper, “Coping with Contingencies in Equity Option Markets” (forthcoming in The Worth of Goods:Valuation and Pricing in the Economy, edited by Patrik Aspers and Jens Beckert, Oxford University Press). Smith distinguishes among three strategies for confronting uncertainties. The first, “Making Sense” entails imposing some kind of narrative account on events initially experienced as chaotic. “Routines,” the second strategy imposes some sort of behavioral order. The third, “Acting Sensibly,” the least common but the most interesting, doesn’t seek to impose an overall order. It is a method for handling the contingent and the disorderly. In this rich study of option traders, Smith analyzes the practices of juggling multiple rules of thumb in managing option positions.
Daniel Beunza and I take a similar analytic approach when moving from how models make markets to understanding how traders actually use models. We conduct an ethnographic account of merger arbitrage as a reflexively skilled performance, with reflexivity socially distributed inside and outside the trading room. “Models, reflexivity, and systemic risk: a critique of behavioral finance,” available here, is a paper with a twist. When the system lacks requisite diversity (or dissonance), the unintended outcome of the attempt to deal with the fallibility of financial models is systemic risk.
I’ve also been exploring these themes in a presentation called simply Performance. It’s one of several ‘silent lectures’ — a genre I’ve been working on for my undergraduate teaching. They’re intended to evoke the multiple, intertwined meanings of some basic concepts. As I’ve discovered in my teaching, sometimes silence on my part is the best way to stimulate students to become active in the process of making associations. Each silent lecture is a PowerPoint slide show, typically with about 100 images and few words. The presentations are self-timed. Load the PowerPoint, click ‘view slide show,’ and it runs itself, usually under 10 minutes.
I’ve found silent lectures to be a very effective way to stimulate discussion, even in a relatively large lecture course with as many as 80 students. There’s clearly no “right answer” (a dagger that kills good discussion) and the students get that right away. One can sense that there’s lots of energy in the room, people really want to talk, and so I just get out of the way and listen in amazement at the connections they’re making.
Silent lectures are available for download on my website here. Please feel free to use them in your teaching. I ask only that you credit the source and that you send me an email to let me know that you’ve used one. Of course, I’d appreciate feedback: I continue revising and tweaking them. But I know that folks are busy. It’s enough just to drop me a one line note (“used your slide show in my course”) so I can track usage.
Performance opens with musicians, dancers, and actors performing. Then athletes. Audiences applaud. We see judges, report cards, stock tickers, measurements, Top Ten lists, and online ratings of restaurants, movies, politicians, and professors. Various performance venues, material and virtual — from stadiums and lecture halls to surgeries and Second Life. Students get it that the images of the CEOs of the big automakers and investment banks testifying before Congress refer to a kind of performance about performance.
The slide show explores the interplay of the real-time skilled achievement of effective performance and the evaluative principles of measurement. From the bedroom to the boardroom, pharmaceutical companies and management consultants promise enhanced performance. We live in an age of performance anxiety.
