Welcome! It is our great pleasure to invite you to the 7th Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop (#IMSW2023). In 2023, IMSW comes to the University of Edinburgh and will be hosted for the first time in collaboration with the Journal of Cultural Economy.

The abstract submission period for IMSW 2023 has now closed.

Background

The concept of 'futures' is often mobilised as an interdisciplinary frame for the urgent, stubborn, or 'wicked' problems surrounding, for example, global public health, climate emergency, geopolitical instability, rising wealth inequalities, technopopulism and more, that are characteristic of the 21st century. In the academy, 'futures' indexes a range of critical, empirical, methodological, and institutional responses to these problems. The University of Edinburgh recently launched the Edinburgh Futures Institute, which in 2023 will take up residence in the comprehensively renovated, Scottish baronial pile that formerly housed the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. We draw on this broad conceptual, material, and administrative architecture of futures thinking to invite reflections on the role the future plays in planning, projecting, modelling, imagining, designing, making, maintaining, promising, casting, and forecasting markets.

The future is often an implicit theme in the study of markets. Empirically, markets are devised, designed, and organised with the purposive orchestration of future action in mind (McFall, 2014). The devices of markets are performative only if they produce intended outcomes (Callon, 2021; Muniesa, Millo and Callon, 2007). When Michel Callon and Koray Caliskan (2010) remarked that "markets have a history but they also have a future that cannot be reduced simply to an extrapolation of the past", they meant to signal the scholarly responsibility to not only observe, but participate in, the design and transformation of future markets, economies, and societies. As Mouritsen and Kreiner (2016) aptly put it, this shift in emphasis towards the future is not to suggest that we live in a "future perfect where the future would be in the present", but "because the future inspires or obliges current action".

There has also been an emphasis on theorising the role played by 'imagination' and 'promissory' rhetorics in modern marketplaces. Scholars have noted 'the promissory character of contemporary capitalism' and the 'political economy of hope' (Martin, 2015). Beckert (2016) contends that the future—and 'fictional expectations'—are crucial to the dynamism of contemporary capitalist economies. In the face of (Knightian) uncertainties, where the usual calculative processes are stymied, it is these fictional expectations that motivate actors like investors and entrepreneurs by provoking 'animal spirits'. Similarly, Zaloom (2009) argues that all 'contemporary economic knowledge' is organised around the interplay of 'perturbation or excitement' about the future.

In parallel, scholars have described the 'feverish anticipation, expectations and hope' that surround the '(over)investment' in markets (Geiger and Gross, 2017) that have characterised many governmental efforts to solve social and collective problems (Neyland, Ehrenstein and Milyaeva, 2019). Understanding and addressing how markets 'see' the future is urgent in an era where the dominance of big data and giant tech companies has upended the historical and spatial logics of urban life (Fourcade and Healy, 2017; Burrell and Fourcade, 2021; Zukin, 2021). Cities across the globe stake their futures on the design of 'innovation complexes' composed of elaborate public-private partnership mechanisms working across 'discursive, organisational, and geographical spaces' (Zukin, 2020). Accelerated by the pandemic, the spatial patterns of retail, finance, work, and leisure have dramatically altered in the last decade, creating new challenges of planning, projecting, and financing the future.

IMSW was founded in 2010 and is now the primary gathering place for academics interested in the social studies of markets from fields as diverse as science and technology studies, sociology, organisation studies, marketing, information systems, political science, history, anthropology and geography. Previous events have been hosted in Sigtuna (Sweden, 2010), Dublin (Ireland, 2012), Saint-Maximin (France, 2014), St Andrews (Scotland, 2016), Copenhagen (Denmark, 2018), and virtually in Grenoble (France, 2021).

The Journal of Cultural Economy (JCE) was established in 2008 to provide an interdisciplinary forum for work exploring the role material cultural practices play in organising economies, markets, and societies. JCE began as a kind of market experiment itself and has become an essential platform for inter, cross, and transdisciplinary studies of all things economic. The constituencies of IMSW and the JCE have always naturally overlapped and in 2023, we are delighted to join forces and invite you to our first ever IMSW/JCE event in Edinburgh.

Described by Hugh MacDiarmid as a mad god's dream, Edinburgh is an ideal backdrop for an interdisciplinary conference. It has been a "city of money" (Perman, 2018), of science, medicine, and technology, and of arts and letters (until recently, it was also a city of brewing, which may be the origin of its 'auld reekie' nickname on account of the distinctive smell). In recent years, Edinburgh has cultivated new, future-facing associations as the 'data capital of Europe' aiming to capitalise on the success of companies like Rockstar Games and Skyscanner, and its profile in data-driven innovation, AI, and robotics. In this, the city is an enthusiastic participant in the business of futures thinking and design that inspired our themes.

Submission topics

We warmly invite submissions that address or are related to any of the following topics:

Much future-oriented knowledge will fail to live up to expectations. Are actors held to future account for the claims they make? Who checks? How is this knowledge evaluated? Some forecasters make claims about future events that are checked and evaluated as a matter of occupational routine (Fine 2007), but not all future-oriented claims are subject to any evaluation. In trading markets, actors may have little incentive to rake over old claims (Knorr Cetina, 2010) and not all future-oriented knowledge is accountable in the same way. Longer-term predictons, for instance, may project too far into the future and be couched in too many techno-industry uncertainties for any group to be held responsible for their non-materialisation. Conversely, there may be other shorter-term assessments that subject predictions to more stringent scrutiny (and possibly sanction).

One thing that interdisciplinary scholars and economists agree upon is that markets overflow, they create externalities, and they entangle objects that should have been kept out of the frame. 'Matters of concern' (Callon, 2007) proliferate, with consequences that exceed corporations' willingness to acknowledge their responsibilities through Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies. As Geiger et al. (2014) note, "when political, social, technological and economic interests, values, and perspectives interact, market order and performance become contentious issues of debate" characterised by "complexity, messiness, and power-laden value struggles" (Roscoe and Townley, 2016). We invite contributions that link through the urgent, collective concerns surrounding climate emergencies, sustainability, geo-political instability and inequality, and apply empirically grounded insights (Cholez and Trompette, 2019; Frankel et al., 2019; Roscoe and Lozza, 2019).

Market Studies' scholars across the social sciences and humanities tend to think with concepts that are intangible material, descriptive, and relational. We observe with our eyes and methods, and describe with words and concepts, perhaps incorporate some illustrations or visualisations, and then move on. But what if we also deployed design and tried to think with things? Agile, service, user-centred and speculative design methodologies have sprung up everywhere, offering at worst, a means of importing Silicon Valley technological solutionism to public service delivery, but at best pragmatic methods for managing the future (Moats and McFall, 2018). What if we followed the lead of polymath scholars and planners like Patrick Geddes and Patrick Abercrombie in making things to help us model our pasts, presents and futures? Latour and Weibel’s Making Things Public (2005), JK Graham-Gibson’s Community Economies Project and Dunne and Raby’s Speculative Everything, Design, Fiction and Social Everything (2013) all offer manifestos for imagining societies as collectives of things, humans, and other species.

In high finance 'futures' are a trading object in themselves—derivative financial contracts that obligate parties to buy or sell an asset at a predetermined future date and price. But futures are all over all forms of finance. Financial products are configured to intervene in the time-value of money whether in 'Buy Now Pay Later' credit mechanisms, the anticipatory financing elements of Catastrophe bonds or the presently attractive, future unaffordability of subprime mortgage properties. More broadly the meme-stock disruptions of 2021 index a generation of investors who came of age around the 2008 financial crisis and have little chance of accumulating wealth through traditional means and have accordingly turned to speculating in the riskier corners of financial markets (Swartz, 2021; c.f. Swartz, 2020).

Because entrepreneurial capitalism is characterised by the increasing intensity of “hyperbolic expectations of future promise” (Borup et al., 2006), it is argued that we live in a “bubble economy” where there are constant hype or “boom and bust cycles” (Pontikes and Barratt, 2017). Hype cycles are shaped by “promise entrepreneurs” (Joyly, 2021) and “narrative accelerators” (Goldfarb and Kirsch, 2019) engaged in processes of “projective storytelling” (Garud et al., 2014), leading to a consequent increase in “contagious stories” (Shiller, 2019). Equally significant are the roles of various market actors—consultancies, universities, advertising agencies, credit rating agencies, trade associations, market research firms, financial analysts, accounting firms and so on—in routinely and systematically producing future expectations either to be shared publicly or offered as a service to other businesses as ‘promissory products’ (Pollock and Williams, 2010; Beckert 2020). We welcome research exploring how hype and promissory organisations can function as “engines of imagination” that shape “competition, cooperation and valuation” in the broader economy.

What do future market spaces look like? How are they produced? The spaces in which market practices are performed are changing fast. Retail, work, financial, health, education, leisure, and transport infrastructures have all been ‘disrupted’ by what Zukin calls the "planetary urbanisation of Silicon Valley culture" (2021). Big tech and big data alter proximities with enduring consequences on the character of place. Places rebranded as silicon savannahs, glens, wadi, and corridors sit alongside global ‘rust belts’, forgotten towns, ghost malls and collapsing high streets as traffic on ecommerce platforms grows unremittingly. This opens up old questions about the relationship between markets and place. Are markets places, regions, spaces or something else entirely (Alvarez León, Yu, and Christophers, 2018)? Instead of treating space as a mere backdrop or context, should markets not be researched as spatial formations and market making a spatial process (Holmes et al. 2021)? The ‘spatial turn’ in market studies has been slow to arrive despite the significance of space to tackling market asymmetries (Cochoy, 2014, Cochoy et al., 2016) surrounding poverty, accessibility, inclusivity and environmental harm.

The list of market sectors with their own tech prefixes keeps growing. We now have the messily convergent, wilfully overpromising, sectors of fintech, adtech, mediatech, healthtech, insurtech, traveltech and more (Mackenzie, 2022; Maurer and Swartz, 2017; Moor, 2021; McFall and Moor, 2018). Markets have always required technology but since Customer Relationship Management tools were turbo-charged by ‘big data’, the ‘future’ is made synonymous with the next generation of disruptive innovations and technologies and symbolically located in Palo Alto. But not all market technologies are ‘techy’. Mundane sociomaterial devices and techniques of all sorts are enrolled in future-market-making. Market technologies also have histories and geographies and we welcome submissions that explore their pasts and presents, the spaces and places that are rising and those that are falling (Ertürk, Ghosh, and Shah 2022; Kedir and Kouame, 2022; Langley and Leyshon, 2022).

Contact

If you have any questions, please contact us:

Email the Conference Administrator

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  • Beckert, J. 2020. 'The exhausted futures of neoliberalism: from promissory legitimacy to social anomy', Journal of Cultural Economy, 13:3, 318-330.
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