The Limits of Performativity

The economy is commonly described either as the apolitical realm of calculation or as the fully political one of domination. This book scrutinizes the ways in which the economy is performed, in order to situate where precisely politics is located with regard to economic matters. Politics, the book demonstrates, thus appears at the turning point, in the place where the efficiency of economics is negotiated and where the need to forward it, reshape it, and complement it emerges.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Martin Giraudeau is a Lecturer in Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His research focuses on the historical role of accounting and management devices, starting with business plans, in the making of modern economies.

Liz McFall is Head of Sociology at the Open University, UK. Her work explores how markets are made especially for dull products like insurance that people don't really want to buy. She is working on Devising Consumption a book that argues that it takes all sorts of technical, material, artistic and metaphysical know-how to make people want to spend. She is author of Advertising: a cultural economy, co-editor of Conduct: sociology and social worlds and co-editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Franck Cochoy is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toulouse, France. He has published extensively on the market mediations between producers and consumers, from marketing to packaging, via advertising and other curiosity devices.