Economy and Society Volume 31 Number 2 May 2002: 234249

From calculation to
alienation: disentangling
economic abstractions

Don Slater

Abstract

This article uses a debate between Michel Callon and Daniel Miller to explore
tensions within economic sociology and anthropology. The tension is between charac-
terizations of markets and economic rationality that seem to dissolve them into a
generalized notion of culture and those which seem to abstract them as speci c social
forms. The paper argues that markets are best de ned in terms of a form of trans-
action rather than a speci c mode of calculation: market transactions involve the
alienation of goods in the form of property. Such transactions require the kinds of
socio-technical apparatuses that Callon describes, in order to establish both alien-
ability and its limits; on the other hand, and drawing on Callons own concepts of
framing and over owing, such transactions allow for more diverse, ambiguous and
contradictory forms of calculation than Callon seems to allow. The latter point is
developed particularly in relation to cultural calculation, typi ed by marketing and
advertising.

Keywords: markets; rationality; calculation; advertising; marketing; property;

exchange.

Introduction

The sociology and anthropology of economic life keep threatening to dissolve a

tension that seems both necessary and yet very difficult to sustain: how can we
talk about markets, or the economic, in any meaningful sense when we have
resolved their key elements into processes of social and cultural construction?
After trust or embeddedness, what can economic rationality actually mean?
The problem is, rst, one of a double abstraction: there is the false abstraction
Don Slater, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London
WC 2. E-mail: d.slater@lse.ac.uk

Copyright 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085140220123144
 Don Slater: From calculation to alienation 235

of economic formalism but there is also the real abstraction of economic pro-
cesses. Critique the former and one might miss the latter; formulate the latter
wrongly and one is likely to make a return to economic formalism. Second, this
tension is refracted through methodological divisions between, on the one hand,
an ethnographic particularism that focuses on the diversity, contingency and
emergence of local organizations of exchange and therefore treats economic
categories, such as markets as at best useful ctions; and, on the other hand,
macro-formulations (such as political economy) which accord these categories
both reality and explanatory power. Finally, we have to contend with claims
about a new economy, which seem to dissolve all economic process into
culture, communications and information.
The problem (which in many respects is a rerun of the formalism versus sub-
stantivism debates) is that the critique of economic formalism partly depends
on arguing that economic abstraction is not an actual fact of contemporary life.
If economic relations really have become abstract, we need to acknowledge that
markets have a systemic character that cannot be reduced to the broader social
relations in which they may be embedded. That is to say, economies may be
instituted processes, to use Polanyis term, but that does not mean denying the
speci c, emergent properties of the social spaces that are instituted.
Michel Callons work particularly as it has been received in much Anglo-
American economic sociology seems poised at precisely this point. Some
would charge that he has already slid too far down the formalist slope, that he
concedes far too much to economic models of rational calculation, which appear
as the point of departure for the entire analysis as well as the end-state that is
to be explained. The central question Callon poses could be taken to be: how is
the formally rational behaviour (calculativeness) described by neo-classical
economics actually achieved?, whereas the focal point of economic sociology
and anthropology has been a denial that they have ever existed or ever could
exist.
This paper is an attempt to negotiate this tension between economy and
culture, the abstract and the substantive. The rst part of the paper argues,
against more culturalist positions, that it is valid to distinguish markets from
other modes of exchange according to a formal property. In order to articulate
the more culturalist side of the story, the discussion starts with Millers critique
of Callon (in this issue), and particularly his hypothetical example of a highly
culturally entangled market event. The conclusion of this discussion will be that
what is crucial to market exchange is the way in which these increasing en-
tanglements become the objects of instrumental rationality. This is because the
fundamental de ning feature of a market is a kind of transaction rather than a
puri ed form of calculation. The essential market transaction is the alienation
of goods in the form of property, which entails limits on the kind of social
relationship formed between transactors. Callons framework is most successful
when it focuses on the mechanisms through which these limits are established
and contested. However, it is less successful when it tries to specify markets in
terms of a mode of calculation. Although Callon explicitly emphasizes diversity
236 Economy and Society

in the kinds of calculativeness and market structures that emerge, it is arguable

that he does not capture sufficient diversity or the right kinds of diversity. Hence
the second part of this paper explores ambiguity and contradiction within and
between modes of calculating, partly drawing on Callons dialectic of framing
and over owing, and speci cally considers cultural calculation in marketing and
advertising.

Sophie and the salesman

Let us start with the powerful image of Sophie and the salesman that Miller
develops in his paper in this volume. Sophie is buying a car, and Miller asks if
Sophies process of choosing a car, and the salesmans actions in selling to her,
can be regarded in terms of disentanglement. Miller builds up a very plausible
picture of the entanglement of both object and transaction in a broad material
culture and social context: the appearance, function, price and every other
attribute of the car mean something to Sophie in terms of such things as her
recent divorce, single motherhood, being a professional woman and so on. Far
from being a moment of disentanglement, Miller describes the car purchase as
a moment of aesthetic totalization a wide range of values are brought into
correlation with each other so that Sophie comes to her decision through a
process of increasing entanglement.
At the same time, the other market actor the salesman equally pushes
towards totalization rather than disentanglement. For a start, his economic
behaviour is embedded in his own complex world of family, colleagues and cor-
poration. But, more than this, he aims at an increasing entanglement of the car
in the meanings that make up Sophies world. Both he and the huge corporate
sales drive that stands behind him aim to produce a car (in the widest cultural
sense of the term) that is already so entangled in her aesthetic, functional, rela-
tional, rational world that it is in some sense already Sophies car. The most
telling line: The problem is whether business could ever be entangled enough
to re ect the totalizing acts of the purchase. There could be nothing less
abstract than market behaviour.
The disagreement between Callon and Miller is not over whether there is a
diversity of forms of markets and of calculation. Callon is very clear that,
although homo economicus really does exist (1998: 51), this gure takes many
forms and the task is to nd the different devices that produce them. However,
while Callon and Miller agree on diversity, for Callon it is a diversity of forms
of calculativeness, a kind of performance that emerges from different mechan-
isms of disentanglement, all of which Miller denies. Callons market diversity
is produced by contention over the institutional delineation of frames which
mark out what is relevant or not to speci cally economic calculation; the speci c
character of that calculation however various its content in particular cases
involves actors who pursue their interests, resolved through prices, by assess-
ing and ranking resources and goals. For Miller, this disentangled notion of
 Don Slater: From calculation to alienation 237

calculation owes more to the economists than to the real diversity of economic
life. Miller assumes in agreement with Callon that, conceptually, markets
are distinguished from other modes and systems of exchange by a speci c form
of calculation; however, on proper ethnographic investigation, any actual piece
of market behaviour dissolves the separations that economists (and Callon) are
focused upon; the result is a diversity of calculation, but certainly not a diver-
sity of speci cally economic calculation. Moreover, Miller seems willing to accept
the consequence of this line of thought, that if disentanglement does not
actually occur, then markets as a generic social type simply do not exist, or we
cannot identify them in any analytically useful way.
At one level, which has been particularly well explored within anthropology,
Miller is correct: attempts to characterize either modern markets or a modern
economic order (capitalism) in terms of a puri ed mode of calculation have
largely failed. Supposedly non-market forms of exchange such as gifting involve
highly complex modes of calculation, including abstracting quanti cations such
as the timing of events and the interpretation of relative magnitudes (Bourdieu
1989). Commodity exchange is always intermixed or hybrid. Second, we cannot
distinguish socio-historical formations by the complete dominance of particu-
lar modes of exchange. It is untenable to argue that in contemporary life, as
opposed to something called traditional society, all forms of exchange other than
a pure market type have been either eradicated or subordinated. In the course
of a single day we enter into an immensely wide variety of exchange relation-
ships, with complex relations between them (Carrier 1994; Carrier and Miller
1998; Slater and Tonkiss 2001).
Let us accept for the moment that, rst, Millers hypothetical example is a
plausible one, which Callon needs to accommodate; and, second, that it suggests
that Callon is employing an overly restrictive notion of calculation. Is there a
way of reformulating Callons position that retains its analysis of markets as for-
matting economic behaviour but without identifying markets with a particular
form of calculation? Indeed, there is an earlier step in Callons argument that
identi es contemporary exchange and distinguishes it from gift exchange as
many anthropologists would in terms of a kind of transaction rather than any
one kind of calculation. Callon begins with the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas
(1991), who originally provided the terminology of entanglement and disen-
tanglement. In this formulation, what distinguishes market transactions from
non-market transactions is alienation, rather than calculation. Market exchange
is commodity exchange. It presumes a form of property right in which a transfer
of ownership ends all claims of the previous owner: the object is thoroughly
alienated. When we nish the transaction, we are quits. As opposed to gifting,
commodity exchange does not aim to perpetuate a social bond between buyer
and seller but, indeed, to get it over with as quickly and cheaply as possible. It
certainly aims to repeat the procedure in large aggregate numbers (repeat sales,
customers who come back for more and are described as loyal) but not in
order to sustain some broader social connection beyond the immediate market
transaction.
238 Economy and Society

Let us go back to Sophie and the salesman. Millers description is completely

plausible. Her market calculations can include as relevant a vast range of con-
siderations and entanglements that are officially excluded both by economic
theory and indeed by the devices described by Callon (policy, law, architecture,
metrologies). Moreover, as Miller has explored elsewhere (1998), her market
behaviour may appear more like gifting in that her shopping and buying behav-
iour is constructed to reproduce substantive social relationships (she may enact
love and care for her family through an act of shopping as through an act of
giving, and, conversely, acts of shopping need to be contextualized through con-
sumption into a meaningful social life). But this is not what de nes the act of
exchange. When the shop assistant hands over the goods, the shop has no further
claim on them. It cannot go back on the sale, and cannot appeal to any wider
context of obligation save that which has been internalized through contract or
law. In fact, the whole history of consumer rights, for example, is about writing
some longer obligation and hence relationship into the transaction: internaliz-
ing what is otherwise external, stretching the moment of exchange across a
longer temporal statute of limitations.
If we take this step backwards from calculativeness to alienated transactions,
we might want to understand the market situation in terms of Weberian
rationalization rather the existence or not of homo economicus. The individual-
ization of objects, actors and exchanges establishes a stable and reliable context
in which objects and obligations are clearly mapped out and can be intersubjec-
tively recognized. The stability of legal entities and frameworks allows for
reliable and predictable encounters, and in this much broader sense allows
calculation: if I go to court over a contract, I want to believe that the upshot
will be non-arbitrary and impersonal, hence calculable in the sense that I can
assess my chances of success. The issue, then, is broader than the question of
formal price rationality. This kind of transaction clearly requires the kind of
separative technology that Callon describes: it presumes individual objects that
can be materially and conceptually disentangled from their context as discrete
and transactable things, items that can be passed from one context to another as
property. It presumes buyers and sellers as individual socio-legal entities, such
that property has a clear initial and nal owner. And it presumes that each trans-
action is separated from others, not in terms of its consequences but in terms
of the obligations of the transactors. This has to be accomplished through a
social technology of framing and individuating, but it does not necessarily
presume that the upshot is pristine formal calculation, and it need not identify
calculation with quantitative calculation. Most importantly it does not assume
that for the actors the object loses its meaning or cultural connection in the
process of exchange, only that this particular piece of matter can indeed be
transferred to someone elses ownership.
Callons externality argument is about one aspect and consequence of this
individuating technology. The concepts of framing and externality identify the
limits of a transaction by identifying consequences and liabilities. What
responsibilities or consequences should be registered within individual
 Don Slater: From calculation to alienation 239

exchanges? Where should the obligations incurred in that exchange end? This
involves identifying and measuring agents and processes, and therefore involves
forms of knowledge, among which Callon is particularly concerned with tech-
nical expertise (but there are many others that we need to consider). This entire
issue arises solely because private property detaches parties to an individual
exchange from any sense of obligation beyond the immediate transaction. It is
through the cut-off represented by externality, the limits that are imposed on
obligation, that what we recognize as the economic is accomplished. What
Callon has really helped us see is that these limits, this cut-off, is a matter of
considerable negotiation, and that to understand the boundaries of markets and
market behaviours we need to attend to the fuzziness, instability, negotiability of
these limits. Market exchange might be characterized by the fact that at the end
of a transaction we are quits, but the externalities argument indicates how diffi-
cult it can be to agree on when we are quits.

Transacting strangers

However, there is another aspect of alienation which Callon tends to summar-

ize in terms of market exchange as transactions between strangers. This way
of putting things apparently contradicts much that contemporary economic
sociology and anthropology has tried to establish: that modern markets are
embedded in enduring networks, moral frameworks and chains of transaction.
These factors belie the notion that economies can be understood in terms of
individual exchanges between individual strangers. However, although the term
strangers is not entirely helpful (simply because transactors might know each
other very well over time), Callons underlying point is crucial: in gifting, the
act of exchange is inseparably the reproduction of the social relationship in
which it is embedded. In the mundane process of putting food on the table, I
am reproducing family relationships, roles and obligations. Sophie and the
salesman, on the other hand, insofar as they are engaged in a market trans-
action, reproduce no social roles other than that of buyer and seller. Sophie will
very de nitely reproduce far more aspects of her life through the process of con-
sumption, and that will have informed her process of shopping precisely as
Miller depicts it. But not in the exchange itself. It is in this sense that Sophie
and the salesman are strangers.
This has huge consequences for the way in which Sophies and the salesmans
entanglements relate to the transaction. It may well be the case that the salesman
needs to understand Sophies world in great detail, and even that he is a better
salesman to the extent that his understanding is more profound. This may even
result in signi cant gains to Sophie (for example, a better choice of car) as well
as to company pro ts and his own commissions. But there is no sense in which
the salesman in order to complete the transaction must share Sophies
world, or agree with it, respect it, treat it as an end in itself. It is merely a con-
dition of sale; Marx would have said that it was the presence of use-value that
240 Economy and Society

is necessary in order to realize exchange value. The relationship between Sophie

and the salesman is an instrumental one, and it is technical rationality rather
than quanti cation that needs to be at the centre of de ning calculativeness
in markets. The structure of the transaction involves an instrumentality which
can take very wide and blurred forms and which allows for the market to be the
site of quite mixed calculations.
This objecti cation of the lifeworld of the other is quite compatible with core
claims of economic sociology. As market transactors, Sophie and the salesman
are involved in reproducing their buyer and seller roles, and these require a
moral framework, a non-contractual basis for contract (e.g. a sense of just price
or of ethical obligations). Therefore, Sophie and the salesman do share an ethical
order, but they need share only one that applies to the transaction; the trans-
action as such does not require any wider moral bond, or one that links the
market transaction to other ways in which they might be socially connected to
each other. Except that, as Callon argues, the limits of each transaction (and
therefore the limits of their shared ethical framework) involves ethical, political
and cognitive contestation. These limits are not only fuzzy, but establishing
them involves reaching ever outwards from the market to wider social tech-
nologies and institutions. This is precisely where framing and externality come
in: decisions have to be taken and institutionalized as to what is formally to be
included within the notion of a market transaction. For example, consumer laws
that enforce after-sales service, or return of goods, or corporate liability are pre-
cisely points at which the ethical framework which Sophie and the salesman
share speci cally as market actors is negotiated in ethico-legal terms. The entire
point of this kind of framing is that it is completely compatible with (and neces-
sary to) an essentially instrumental relationship between strangers rather than
the reproduction of other social identities. They are the object of technologies
which isolate them and their world as strangers within a strategic relationship.
Moreover, this is quite compatible with seeing market exchange as having
blurred boundaries with networks and more enduring trade relationships over
time: in such cases, a key issue is precisely the relationship between individual
transactions and longer-term commitment, and how this to be consensually
framed and formalized.
Miller would like to dissolve the market into broader social entanglements on
the grounds that the puri ed modes of calculability that Callon describes simply
do not exist. I want to argue rather that there really is such a thing as a market
(however multi-form) because there is such a thing as commodity exchange
which is characterized by speci c forms of property right. This form of contract
means that exchange is disembedded in seriously consequential ways. It does not
mean that objects and people become formal and abstract as in homo economicus,
but it does mean that their substantive nature, their embeddedness or entangled-
ness, becomes the object of instrumental calculation rather than of entangle-
ment. Sophie and her salesman are certainly entangled in complex social worlds;
they just are not the same worlds, and each wants to get the most out of the
others.
 Don Slater: From calculation to alienation 241

Market actors: framing and ambiguity

If we shift the focus within Callons own work away from calculativeness and
concentrate instead on his concepts of framing and disentanglement, the latter
can be treated as general operations with more indeterminate endpoints. This
in itself is a good reason to de ne markets in terms of alienation rather than
calculation: it moves the argument back to the most fundamental framing
(property and ownership) without presuming any speci c form of calculation.
This would seem to be in accord with the underlying thrust of Callons own
notion of framing. It concerns the structure of a type of transaction, how it is
individualized (insulated and limited) as an event, and what is formally to be
included in any individual transaction. At the same time, it characterizes that
type of transaction in terms of a process (disentanglement) which does not cut
economy from society, but renders understandings of social relationships central
to the way in which market borders are identi ed. By the very same token, it
renders them unstable, negotiable, sites of con ict.
This would seem a long way from the position that homo economicus really
does exist. The implication of Callons notion of market instability is that social
actors are as involved in disputing the boundaries and identities of markets as
they are in operating within them. If that is the case, then an economic actor has
to be seen simultaneously as within and without the market frame, as one who
is able to calculate in speci c ways, but who is also engaged in the framing
process itself. And if actors do not take these market boundaries as given frames,
rationally calculating within them, then they cannot be neo-classical economic
actors. In Callons account, there are two particular features through which this
theme might be pursued: over owing and re exivity. Actors and objects remain
connected with networks outside the economic frame, therefore remaining
potentially open to questions about its boundaries and potentially aware of those
boundaries as actively produced and enforced. Callon tends to explore these
features in relation to hot con icts (and largely in order to assess the role of
scienti c and social scienti c expertise in constructing markets). In the present
discussion, however, they might lead us to think about mundane, ordinary
market experiences: perhaps calculativeness is more various and ambiguous in
everyday market behaviour than is allowed by the notion that networks con-
gure ontologies; perhaps some of the totalization described by Miller can be
accommodated within Callons framework.
I should like to pursue the implications of this aspect of Callons work by
taking up three issues which particularly concern the relationship between
markets and culture: disembeddedness and the ambiguity of framings; econ-
omics as culture and as ideology; and marketing and cultural calculation. Each
issue points to more diverse, contradictory and ambiguous forms of calculation
that those which Callon usually cites.
242 Economy and Society

Disembedding and disentangling

The rst section of this paper attempted to approach the notion of calculative-
ness by a different route, that of commodities, alienation and therefore instru-
mental rationality, the process by which one lifeworld becomes the object of
calculation to another, a possibility which is premised on the sharp separation
or disentanglement that arises when transactions are framed in terms of limited
property rights. What makes markets speci c, and different from the moral
totalization of other forms of exchange, is that the meanings in which the object
is entangled are moral for the other in a transaction, but not for me. As Miller in
fact puts it, Much of commerce consists of each player trying to second guess
the entanglements of the other. How can we sell the car as though it was already
part of the purchasers life. The transactors and objects come to the transaction
absolutely steeped in meaning. They never lose their meanings in the sense of
being abstracted formally and quantitatively; but they are framed in a way that
is quite different from much of the rest of social life.
It might help here to distinguish sharply between disembedding and dis-
entangling. As Jessop argues, disembedding has been bound up with Polanyis
macro-sociological argument about the relation of economy to culture and the
extent to which modern economy can be properly treated as an autonomous
object of analysis. Callon is clearly critical of Polanyi, citing him as an example
of a social context approach to explaining the emergence of economic forms.
In the embedding/disembedding argument, society appears as a container or
framework that assigns a particular location to the economic, and is therefore
capable of separating out culture and economy in a global way. Disentangle-
ment is quite different. It is frankly dialectical, and this dialectic is played out,
with only temporary stabilization, without cease: framing extricates (1998: 253)
agents and entities from the networks of interaction in which they have achieved
some kind of social existence, in order to push them onto a clearly demarcated
stage. However, like a prop or actor placed on a theatrical stage, these entities
retain their links with the outside world (as do all the actors, or audiences);
indeed, to continue the theatrical metaphor, it is hard to see how any entity could
continue to be meaningful on the stage or in the market without continuing to
draw on its cultural meanings. This goes for the objects that are transacted as
well as the transactors who, Callon argues, never cease to be simultaneously
involved in other worlds, outside the frame.
Disentanglement, therefore, does not signify the disembedding of economy
in the sense of a separation of economy from culture; it is rather a reframing
of culturally meaningful items that never cease to draw on their external
meanings. Indeed, as argued further below, acts of framing and disentangle-
ment necessarily involve cultural knowledge, and actually bring cultural issues
into the heart of economic action. Callon explores the ways in which this
dialectic renders market boundaries permanently unstable. However, it would
seem that this entire analysis is also an argument for the impurity of market
calculation, rather than its purity and abstraction. We might expect to nd
 Don Slater: From calculation to alienation 243

quite heterogeneous and contradictory considerations brought to bear within

the market frame, as individual actors and objects operate across its borders.
Hence, on the one hand, the market frame looks more like a set of official and
unofficial rules and regulations as to what is admissible in interactions, and less
like a uniform patterning of what cognitive resources and considerations people
actually bring to bear when they are, say, shopping or buying. I know that there
is no point in haggling with the cashier at the supermarket (I know enough about
the regulatory structure of modern retailing to know that there is no point), but
that does not stop me from importing such notions as just price in to my own
calculations.
At the same time, we can put this more strongly: the impurity of actors,
objects and calculations is a crucial strategic tool for market actors themselves,
all of whom have as much interest in destabilizing markets as in stabilizing them
(Slater 2002b). Framings are political and strategic battle-lines over liabilities,
pro ts, ethical and political interests. Callons examples of technical disputes, in
which knowledge claims can be adjudicated by identifying and quantifying
causal relations, are only a special case. If we turn instead to advertising and
marketing, for example, as we shall below, we nd that these entire practices are
constituted by the project of destabilizing market boundaries and competitive
relationships as the basis of their market behaviour, and they do this on the basis
of cultural calculations. These practices operate directly on and across the
framing/over owing process; they therefore exemplify the impurity of kinds of
calculation, but they look quite pure if considered as instrumental rationality.
One possible reason why Callon tends towards an overly objecti ed and
abstract version of calculation is because he does not go far enough with
Goffmans frame analysis. Callon rightly emphasizes the Durkheimian aspect of
Goffman, which sociologists often ignore when they interpret him as simply a
variety of symbolic interactionist. Goffmans dramaturgical metaphor, however,
is very literally about social technologies of staging, about social rituals with an
objective character that make for an ethical order. At the same time, Callon
largely ignores the interactionist Goffman, who is concerned with the cognitive,
interpretative character of peoples engagement with these rituals.
To return one last time to Sophie and the salesman: Millers story makes
intuitive sense because we know that in carrying out an economic action these
economic actors may not perceive any, or many elements of it in economic terms.
Certainly, there is no reason to assume that Sophie perceives the presence of a
market in any meaningful sense, and therefore really does not frame her calcu-
lations properly, although, as stated above, she will simply have to do so when
she comes to sign the contract and write her cheque. Her own framings of what
is relevant in deciding on a car can be highly personal to her up to the point at
which an actual market transaction is accomplished. This hardly gives us a
warrant to say that the market does not exist: independently of Sophies per-
ceptions, there is a technology of alienation that does indeed individualize
exchange and even produces a social mathematics (prices) that seems to add up
independently of her perceptions.
244 Economy and Society

At the same time, however, we need to accept that social actors themselves
operate with multiple and contradictory framings of market behaviour as well
as different concepts of markets. Hence, there is some aspect of agency that is
not con gured by networks in a narrow sense. For example, Karen Knorr
Cetinas (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2000) accounts of nancial markets
include an analysis of how the same actor can talk about the market as both
entirely without form and at the same time as a meaningfully totalized entity;
that is to say, they may operate within a permanently split perspective as to what
kind of frame contains them, and what holds it together. Similarly, Nicholas
Thomas (1991) gives a suggestive example of an exchange of goods between
Europeans and Indonesians in which the two parties to the exchange each see
the same transaction entirely differently. One perceives it as a market trans-
action, the other more in the mode of gifting. One party is astounded by the low
price, the other by the presence of any price. But price was produced and a trans-
action concluded despite utterly different understandings. This ambiguity of
framing, or even multiple framing, surely has consequences for the idea that
agency is entirely con gured by the network, partly because we may be dealing
with intersecting networks, but also because people do indeed transfer under-
standings across social locations: there is an interpretative moment to the
arrangement, as well as emergent objective structures.

Economists and economies

The possibility of ambiguous and multiple framings raises another set of issues,
about the role of economics in establishing this peculiar framing. What Callon
offers is a vision of markets as a kind of technological accomplishment: alien-
ation and calculability (whether quantitative or instrumental) have to be engi-
neered, and Callons example of the strawberry market gives a clear image of
this engineering. Division, display, timing, legal and other de nitions, are all
orchestrated to produce collections of things which may be traded at prices.
However, I use the term orchestrated quite consciously: there is a sense of both
marshalled organization and governing plan, of uniformity and direction, which
is at odds both with Callons own sense of the complexity of these accomplish-
ments and with our increasing empirical knowledge of the diversity of markets
and market behaviours. This sense of orchestration comes to a head in his claim
that markets are the product of economists. It is difficult to reconcile this assess-
ment of the power of economists with Callons broader contention that the
framing of markets is a contested and unstable arrangement established across
numerous technologies and agent networks. Even highly planned markets, like
the strawberry one, are not only more overdetermined than this, but also do not
necessarily behave the way economists planned once they open their doors to
real market actors. We also have to recognize that markets successfully emerged
long before neo-classical economists were invented.
At certain points in Callons argument the claim that economists construct
 Don Slater: From calculation to alienation 245

markets is supported by a much broadened de nition of economics. The claim

makes greater sense if one treats economics in the same way that Foucauldian
perspectives understand government, a dispersal of discourses and practices
that, in this case, involves everything from academic theory and ideology,
through policies enunciated across a wide range of agencies, down to the logics
informing the most mundane economic practices. Economics is not a set of
falsi able claims about the economy, or an ideological construction of the
economy, but rather a participant in its construction. This makes huge sense in
terms of the diffusion of neo-liberalism through virtually every social insti-
tution over the last twenty years, with very real effects on the marketization, and
consequent abstraction, of social relationships. As in governmentality, such
economic discourses have some kind of analytical unity (though it is unclear
how), yet they are at the same time diffused through countless institutional
spaces. They operate not as directives but as recon gurations of subjectivity as
practised.
However, there are at least two problems here. First, the very process of dis-
aggregating economics into a broad swathe of embedded knowledges dilutes any
sense of what we mean by economics. There is a difference between the formal
structures of macro-economic modellers and the practical knowledges of a car
salesperson in their showroom. They are not economists in the same sense,
although it is true that both can be treated as operating social technologies from
which economic structures emerge. Paradoxically, this way of de ning econ-
omics both understates and overstates the coherence of economics as a social
force. On the one hand, it makes it difficult to grasp neo-liberalism as an
ideology, which it is, and yet at the very same moment all economic practices
appear uni ed as if macro-economists and car salesmen are all pushing in the
same direction, with the same interests, technologies, understandings and so on.
Indeed, if it is pushed too far, the entire argument appears to be circular or even
tautological. If one defends the idea that economists construct economies by
de ning economics as all forms of economic practice and knowledge, then
surely one is simply asserting what needs to be explained.
Second, Callon seems to take the familiar Foucauldian step of presuming
effects from discourses. The relation between theory and practice is an issue that
cannot simply be dissolved. Even if we assumed that all economists are pushing
towards alienated and calculative social transactions and spaces, we cannot read
the effects of these practices off their own discourses. We need to take an open-
ended and indeed ethnographic approach to the way speci c markets are con-
structed. By the same token, we need to expect the appearance of contradictory
and ambiguous forms of calculation.
It is interesting to connect this argument with the notion of virtualism as pro-
pounded by Miller and Carrier, which also has a strong affinity with major
themes in Stratherns work. Virtualism argues that central economic models and
policies are developed in relation to an idealized or virtual concept of the
economy, and by those with the power to make these in some way effective. We
might compare Bourdieus (1998) recent formulation of neo-liberalism as a
246 Economy and Society

strong discourse, one which has the means of making itself true and empiri-
cally viable because it orients the economic choices of those who dominate
economic relationships and hence constitutes a scienti c programme, con-
verted into a plan of political action. Miller and Carrier both start from some-
thing much closer to the notion of ideology, which has a certain kind of unity
and also some relation to issues of truth and falsity. Most importantly, whereas
Callon seems to presume that economics is realized in economies, Miller argues
that virtualism and capitalism may be quite opposed. This has the advantage of
not presuming effects from discourses.
The central problem in the case of relating economics to economies as in
the issues of disentanglement and ambiguous framings is that we need to make
space not only for a diversity of modes of calculation within the overall struc-
ture of market exchange, but also for contradictory and multiple framings, some
of which might very well approximate to the situation described by Miller, at
least in the way market actors understand their situation.

Markets and marketing

While Sophie may have no reason to look at what she is doing in terms of
markets and isolated moments of exchange, the salesman certainly does, and so
does the corporation that stands behind him. I want to focus on one particular
actor, or aspect, of the corporation, which Miller also discusses: the marketing
and advertising functions and departments. They make an interesting test case
for my line of discussion because they differ from the kinds of disentanglements
that Callon is talking about. Callons examples are largely technocratic: there are
experts who become strategic at certain moments of framing because they can
produce knowledges of what events in the world should properly be linked
(causally, as consequences) to events within market frames.
Marketing, I want to argue, is a framing process, and one that involves
strategic disentanglements, but it is based on quite other kinds of knowledges.
These are interpretative, cultural knowledges that should look and behave more
as in Millers examples, yet also have to be understood within a framework of
instrumental rationality. My example is about marketing strategies (Slater
2002a, 2002b). When advertising and marketing agents devise marketing
strategies they aim to produce de nitions of objects that simultaneously accom-
plish two inter-linked goals: they must make sense in terms of relations of con-
sumption and they must look capable of achieving pro table positions in relation
to other products (relations of competition, the marketplace). The object has to
be produced conceptually before the various branches of the sales effort are
deployed to try and produce it socially. A product concept is therefore the basis
for strategic action. In this conceptual production, it is very hard to separate out
cultural and economic issues; indeed, marketers spend a lot of their time explic-
itly connecting them. In global terms, this is simply because culture becomes
the object of technical rationality. The marketer treats relations of consumption
 Don Slater: From calculation to alienation 247

the embeddedness of the object in a world as the object of pro table inter-
vention: can this object be made meaningful and desirable within speci c social
relations. The calculative, disentangling question is: can this object be culturally
entangled? Can it be de ned and represented in terms of consumer lifeworlds?
And this requires deep cultural knowledges of the objecti ed other. It is not
necessarily empirically correct knowledge (advertisers may be wrong, and in-
famously can never really know when they are wrong), but it must be knowledge
that make sense to the marketers as a cultural embedding of the product, and
which therefore make sense as a strategy for marketing (it makes sense in terms
of uses, users and the materiality of the object itself).
However, this is only part of the story. Cultural and economic thinking are
inseparable in a deeper sense: they are analytically opposite sides of the same
coin in a way that marketers are aware of at every moment. When I de ne an
object in cultural terms I am also de ning it competitively and vice versa. To
use an example from a previous paper: to de ne Johnsons baby oil (this was a
strategy exercise) as an eye make-up remover rather than a facial cleanser means
to relate different aspects of the same object to different social practices (cos-
metics versus health care) enacted by different social actors (in this case younger
versus older women). At the very same moment, to be selling a make-up remover
rather than a cleanser is also to enter into different markets, because each object
is competitive with different products. Any de nition of the product makes it
more or less substitutable for another product. This is conventionally what we
mean by a particular market. The boundaries of a market are de ned by what
is perceived as substitutable for what, and by whom. It is an act of social
categorization, but one in which the categories as well as assignments are con-
stantly renegotiated, rede ned and intensively battled over. This is basically
what marketing is: de ne the product in such a way as to position it within the
competitively optimum de nition of a market as well as the most culturally
entangled relations of consumption.
That is to say, marketing is not only about competition within markets,
within given structures. It is a competition over the structures of markets and
market relations themselves. The cultural calculations of marketers are
attempts to frame and stabilize objects as given individual items, which then
compete with other objects in rationalizable ways. They are, if you will, dis-
entangled from the broad range of social relations to be isolated as individual,
transactable entities. This attempt (more often than not a failure from any indi-
vidual rms point of view) is strategic: every rm wants to rede ne the bound-
aries of markets by reframing goods. That is how they compete. They aim at
a pro table stabilization of the market, but they do this by persistently
destabilizing it. Finally, the disentanglements they attempt to effect are pre-
cisely not a disembedding, in the sense of a separation of economy from
culture. Rather, it is a speci c instrumentalizing of culture in order to pro t
by a very speci c form of transaction.
In fact, one can think of marketing as playing another, more complex
framing role, something beyond even the framing of objects, hence of market
248 Economy and Society

structures. Marketing is not just one of the many framing technologies through
which markets are de ned. It also tries to act as something like a meta-tech-
nology, a technology that tries to manage or orchestrate the technologies of
cultural framing. It orchestrates such commercial technologies as pricing,
design, packaging, consumer education and so on in such a way as to manage
peoples framing of goods in relation to commerce. As noted earlier, in the act
of buying and consuming, I may think of myself as only minimally engaged
with markets or commodities at all; I may largely frame my actions in terms of
the meaningful constitution of everyday life. Marketing employs a range of
technologies that individually and together establish commercial frames in the
rst place; it not only tries to produce speci c market structures, but also to
impose the very idea of a market and of commerce in relation to other object
relations.

Conclusion: are there any markets out there?

Economic sociology seems to face two impossible alternatives: either the

market is absolutized as abstraction or it is dissolved into culture; economic
rationality approximates to neo-classical calculations or it merges with life.
We seem to miss the turning into a critical space in which markets are neither
uniform nor dominant yet are still identi able. In order to map out this space
we have to do something which Callon is pointing to: we have to nd some of
the parameters and border disputes through which markets take endlessly con-
tingent and unstable shapes. Externality is probably only one line of
analysis/de nition. It is a fruitful one if you are interested in following the
relationship between technical knowledges and market boundaries. It might not
be quite so useful in thinking about cultural matters where the inside and
outside of the market are not de ned by issues of cause and effect or empiri-
cal consequences but rather by the cultural stability of the entities themselves
(actors, commodities, relationships): markets de ne themselves to the extent
that they can stabilize objects, but every attempt to do so invokes meanings and
processes that threaten to re-open the market structure. The power of the
notions of disentanglement, framing and over owing (and their real gain over
simple disembedding) is that they focus us on the impurity of market behav-
iour including the mixture of economic and cultural calculation involved in
constituting economic action while at the same time being able to acknow-
ledge its basic structural forms. This conceptual apparatus is most useful
however when it is not inextricably aimed at accounting for an expected and
presumed form of calculation. Instead, such concepts give us a clearer grasp
of the one feature that seems to be reliably useful in analytically delineating
markets the alienation of objects in the form of property that can be detached
from the networks in which they originate and which allows for diverse,
unpredictable and contradictory modes of calculation.
 Don Slater: From calculation to alienation
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