Liz McFall | University of Edinburgh (original) (raw)

Big data, digital markets, insuretech by Liz McFall

Big Data & Society

As Big Data, the Internet of Things and insurance collide, so too, do the best and the worst of o... more As Big Data, the Internet of Things and insurance collide, so too, do the best and the worst of our futures. Insurance is summoned as an example of the interference in our private lives that is already underway everywhere. In this paper, we pause to reflect on this argument. Can changes in the way insurance measures the value of behaviour really serve as an example of the individual and social harms of datafication? How do we know? Insurance is a mathematical relationship staged between individuals and groups, between risk and uncertainty, between distribution and assessment, between the value of sharing and the sharing of value. We use the case study of Discovery International, owner of Vitality, the market leading brand in behavioural insurance to consider how behaviour is being branded and how the brand behaves.

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2018

There is a long history in science and technology studies (STS) of tracking problematic objects, ... more There is a long history in science and technology studies (STS) of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying “problems” in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. When a data sharing agreement called care.data was announced in 2013, nearly 1.5 million citizens chose to opt out. Yet, in subsequent years, there has been little evidence of a robust public mobilising around data sharing. We will attempt to track this elusive ‘non problem’ using some digital tools developed in STS for the purpose of mapping issues and problem definitions within science. Although we find these digital tools are unable to capture the “problem,” the process of searching helps us map the terrain of the ...

Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

Big Data & Society

The adoption of Big Data analytics (BDA) in insurance has proved controversial but there has been... more The adoption of Big Data analytics (BDA) in insurance has proved controversial but there has been little analysis specifying how insurance practices are changing. Is insurance passively subject to the forces of disruptive innovation, moving away from the pooling of risk towards its personalisation or individualisation, and what might that mean in practice? This special theme situates disruptive innovations, particularly the experimental practices of behaviour-based personalisation, in the context of the practice and regulation of contemporary insurance. Our contributors argue that behaviour-based personalisation in insurance has different and broader implications than have yet been appreciated. BDAs are changing how insurance governs risk; how it knows, classifies, manages, prices and sells it, in ways that are more opaque and more extensive than the black boxes of in-car telematics.

This paper reflects back on an immersive installation called Are We Data? produced for the Tate E... more This paper reflects back on an immersive installation called Are We Data? produced for the Tate Exchange exhibition 'Who are we?' at the Tate Modern in London in May 2018. The installation was conceived of, and executed by AWED, a research collective comprising academics Liz McFall, David Moats and Darren Umney and the artist-filmmaker Sapphire Goss,

Draft chapter, 2021

Introduction: Bubbles, bricks and brands Towards the end of The Street, Zed Nelson’s 2019 film tr... more Introduction: Bubbles, bricks and brands
Towards the end of The Street, Zed Nelson’s 2019 film tracking the remorseless gentrification of Hoxton in the East End of London, attention turns to the building at 33-35 Hoxton Square. This, the sign outside announces, is The Garage and it is immediately clear that it is no longer a garage. The Garage is the UK insurer Aviva’s Digital Garage, opened in 2015, in an effort to foster in-house, the kind of technological disruption traditional insurers fear coming from outside. It is no accident that Aviva called their new office The Garage, the building had functioned for many years as a commercial garage, and Aviva held on to more than the name. They also retained much of the appearance and fittings of its past functions - whitewashed brickwork, exposed services, even the garage turntable. This was all part of an effort to create the kind of edgy, industrial warehouse look favoured by tech industry start-ups, environments designed to encourage people to ‘think differently.’

I want us to go for that insurance policy. - Ed: What insurance policy? The double indemnity. Th... more I want us to go for that insurance policy.
- Ed: What insurance policy?
The double indemnity. The one Jill's selling. She's, um, convinced me.
- Ed: You saw her? -
We had coffee together.
- Ed: When?
Well, you were so unfriendly to her, I thought I should make up for it.
- Ed: What did she say? -
Oh, just stuff. About the policy. About her. I like her.
- Ed: She's just a Jill hard-selling insurance.
Oh, I think she's more than that, Ed. Don't you?
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=philip-k-dicks-electric-dreams-2017&episode=s01e04

Introduction
Double indemnity, as all noir devotees know, is a clause - rich in moral hazard - whereby a life insurer promises to pay out double in the case of accidental death. The extract above is from a 2017 dramatization of the Philip K Dick short story 'Crazy Diamond' . The script twists another loop into the noir premise because Jill, the femme fatale character, is not just any old Jill, she is a Jill, a non-human endowed with a limited life-force 'Quantum Consciousness'. Jill's ruse is to tempt Ed to steal a Quantum Consciousness to re-endow her failing one while getting his wife to sign up for a contract that will double indemnify his life, a life that will soon be threatened by the existence of the contract. The plot describes a world of cold technology entangled with warm sentiment confronting fragile, contingent futures. The resulting dystopian Philip K Dick pastiche is nearly indecipherable, but peer at it long enough, with soft, half-closed eyes, and the strangest thing in it is the arrangement of persons and objects in the insurance contract.
Insurance history is replete with such strange arrangements. The objects insured - ships, houses, plate-glass, elevators, mobile phones, Cyd Charisse's legs - are a cypher of value. What is it, that at the present time, has such value that the prospect of its future loss cannot be borne without some restorative mechanism? It is this question that brings the insurance mechanism into being.

One story sociologists and political economists tell about marketing is that it manufactures desi... more One story sociologists and political economists tell about marketing is that it manufactures desire for things that people would not otherwise want. As Karl Marx (1980) famously explained, products get their finishing touches only in consumption. Marketing is an integral part of the distribution of action that defines production and consumption by orchestrating markets. As practiced in the wild marketing also concerns the build, design, pricing and placing of the thing itself. This means that markets and marketing are in it together and that people are in their products from the start. In this Introduction we outline what we mean by the ‘arts of market attachment’ using the motif of the Apple Watch before introducing how our various contributors make sense of the arts and devices of markets.

Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health i... more Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health insurance prices? The emergence of self-tracking technologies and their adoption and promotion in health insurance products has been characterized as a threat to solidaristic models of healthcare provision. If individual behaviour rather than group membership were to become the basis of risk assessment, the social, economic and political consequences would be far-reaching. It would disrupt the distributive, solidaristic character that is expressed within all health insurance schemes, even in those nominally designated as private or commercial. Personalized risk pricing is at odds with the infrastructures that presently define, regulate and deliver health insurance. Self-tracking can be readily imagined as an element in an ongoing bio-political redistribution of the burden of responsibility from the state to citizens but it not clear that such a scenario could be delivered within existing individual private health insurance operational and regulatory infrastructures. In what can be gleaned from publicly available sources discussing pricing experience in the individual markets established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 (ACA), widely known as ‘Obamacare,’ it appears unlikely that can provide the means to personalized price. Using the case of Oscar Health, a technology driven start-up trading in the ACA marketplaces, I explore the concepts, politics and infrastructures at work in health insurance markets.
Keywords: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 (ACA), Obamacare, Oscar Health, solidarity, risk, self-tracking.

In April 2015, the New York Times reported that Oscar, a New York based health insurance company ... more In April 2015, the New York Times reported that Oscar, a New York based health insurance company usually located in the compound adjective category ‘hipster start-up’, had joined another elite group, that of the ‘unicorn start-up’ , just sixteen months after going live. Oscar was valued at 1.5billionafterraising1.5 billion after raising 1.5billionafterraising145 million to enable it to expand outside of New York and New Jersey where by Spring 2015 it had around 40,000 customers. Start-ups are relatively rare in health insurance - the field is dominated by companies like Anthem, Cigna, United Health and Humana, giants that are nonetheless in the process of a chain of mega consolidations. Compared to the competition, Oscar’s valuation figures and customer numbers are small, but the company has been generating attention disproportionate with its size. One of the reasons for this is that Oscar stands as a bellwether marking the disruption that the combined effects of digital technology and legislative change are bringing to the insurance and healthcare industries and to the people they serve.
Oscar is a digital company, started by entrepreneurs whose backgrounds in industries like social gaming and hedge funds provide the platform for its particular mode of integrating technology, data and design. Together with freedom from the interoperability challenges of the legacy infrastructures within traditional insurance companies, this has given Oscar an advantage in presenting a more ‘human’ user experience for people buying individual policies on Obamacare’s new exchanges. Oscar offers a number of key ‘digital healthcare’ signals including remote access to primary care and downloadable health records, but it is their Misfit fitness tracker scheme in particular that drives attention. In promising policyholders financial rewards for achieving fitness goals the Misfit scheme is a textbook behavioural ‘nudge’ but also an emblematic case of the digital individualisation and gamification of value. It is this that makes the company almost a real time case study in what might happen to insurance in a digital world. This short paper consider how technological disruptions are acting together with recent legislative interventions in the US and the UK to devise new systems and practices of risk within both private and social health insurance. These disruptions could go to the very heart of what insurance means.

What can it possibly mean to say that the market will have you? Accustomed as we are to hearing a... more What can it possibly mean to say that the market will have you? Accustomed as we are to hearing about the havoc markets wreak upon social institutions, communities and individuals, it could perhaps signal the thuggishness of markets as in ‘h’ dropped, the market “is gonna ‘ave you” . There is of course a whole tradition in economic sociology and anthropology from Polanyi onwards of seeing what markets do this way. But since in this collection we are concerned with seeing how market exchange produces, rather than dissolves or proceeds from, social ties (see Cochoy in this volume), that is not the path we are taking.

Insurance, credit, markets and policy by Liz McFall

Devising Consumption explores the vital role played by the financial service industries in enabli... more Devising Consumption explores the vital role played by the
financial service industries in enabling the poor to consume
over the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requires
means, but these industries also offered practical marketing
devices that captured, captivated and enticed poor
consumers. The role of these devices has been poorly
understood both in the social sciences and in business
studies and marketing. The book advances the case for a more
pragmatic understanding of how ordinary, dull, everyday
consumption is arranged, and offers an alternative to
orthodox approaches.

Cultural Studies, 2007

n naming his satirical version of a life assurance company The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan ... more n naming his satirical version of a life assurance company The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company Dickens was aiming at an already well-established tendency for life assurance companies to stress in their promotional enterprises the altruistic character of their business. So disinterested was the Anglo- Bengalee that ‘nobody can run any risk by the transaction except the office, which, in its great liberality is pretty sure to lose’ (1994, p. 419). While few life assurance companies would have pushed the claim that far it is certainly the case that the idea of ‘disinterestedness’ played a peculiar role in the nineteenth century life assurance industry. This paper explores how life assurance companies sought to overcome concerns about the safety and propriety of their business by promulgating particular ideas about life assurance as a pious, self-‘disinterested’ form of conduct. Throughout the nineteenth century life assurance operated as an exemplary technique of liberal government by offering a means of market-based self-rule that depended heavily on an emergent form of knowledge which blended together impartiality, self-interest and disinterestedness (Poovey 1998).

Journal of Historical Sociology, 2009

The market for life assurance did not emerge 'naturally' from a particular problem of the allocat... more The market for life assurance did not emerge 'naturally' from a particular problem of the allocation of resources, it had to be made. Life insurance had to appear desirable and reliable.

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2009

Agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending upon... more Agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending upon how they are configured. In advocating the term 'agencement' Callon's aim is to signal the close interweaving of words and actions and thus jettison the more Austinian associations of performativity. Agencement calls attention to the various processes by which economic actors, both human and non-human, are endowed with the fixtures, fittings and devices necessary to conduct themselves in particular ways. Thus depending upon how things are arranged or configured, disinterested or selfish, calculative or non-calculative, individual or collective agencies become possible. This model works well to describe the emergence of markets for industrial branch life assurance in the UK from the nineteenth century. Companies like the Prudential and the Pearl reacted to the conflicts, crises and controversies in the commercial market and the competition between socialised and privatised or prudentialist insurance models with Industrial Branch Assurance. This claimed to provide security for the thrifty poor by employing an army of agents whose weekly premium collections helped impose the discipline of thrift and security. Through the notion of agencement, the effect of hybrid combinations of human bodies, material equipment, technical devices and cognitive processes in creating a sustainable market for a peculiarly expensive financial savings product targeted at the working classes thrift is exposed.

The Sociological Review, 2011

Drawing upon the historical relationship between statistics, probabilistic reasoning and life ins... more Drawing upon the historical relationship between statistics, probabilistic reasoning and life insurance, the article argues that mathematical calculation played a neces- sary but limited role in making markets for life insurance. Insuring publics have been fairly consistently cautious in the use of probabilistic and statistical reasoning to inform investment in life insurance. In this they follow a pattern set by early insurance companies who themselves were slow to alter their commercial practices in line with emerging knowledge. I examine some of the reasons for this glacial pace and some of the ambiguities on which statistical ‘certainties’ were built as part of an argument that the role of statistics and mathematics in market calculation is both less and more than it seems. This is manifest in the history of industrial life assur- ance, an industry with a phenomenally successful track record in the mass enrolment of consumers. Unlike their predecessors, industrial companies disdained swamping their target markets with probabilistic arguments in favour of a very different sort of argument that, nevertheless, carried a trace of statistical thinking with it. This trace came in the form of ‘good, average men’, the agents who became industrial insur- ance’s core marketing device and who translated the essentials of a statistically informed product into a more palatable, more calculable form.

This paper sets out to explore the ways in which life assurance, as a specific form of financial ... more This paper sets out to explore the ways in which life assurance, as a specific form of financial conduct, was mobilized and shaped by the political rationality of liberal government. At a fundamental level, liberal modes of government are all about economic government. The political philosophy of liberalism informed the development of an assemblage of institutions and agencies in the nineteenth century which acted, with relative autonomy, to realise the liberal project of government at a distance. Life assurance institutions were part of a diverse range of institutions which provided the means of defining and promoting the duties and virtues associated with liberal, economic subjectivity. The political rationality of prudentialism as a particular way of conducting oneself as a liberal subject , the chapter will argue, informed the missionary zeal with which life assurance institutions pursued the project of equipping their publics with the skills and habits of prudence and thrift integral to the practice of insuring. The paper will investigate the material tools and practices that were deployed in the pursuit of this project.

Considering nineteenth century British life assurance from the perspective of its appeal opens up... more Considering nineteenth century British life assurance from the perspective of its appeal opens up a variety of questions. Most obviously, it calls attention to how the life assurance industry 1 sought to attract customers through its promotional work. This was no easy matter. Life assurance was never going to sell itself. It was (and still is) a technically complex product, it sought to gain a foothold in a market saturated with competing savings and investment products, there were doubts about the financial safety and probity of a number of the companies trading in it and if this were not enough it provoked disquiet in some quarters on moral and religious grounds. The promotional strategies life assurance companies developed to overcome such objections, and form an enduring appeal to the public, are fascinating in their own right. They make more historical sense however when the question of appeal is considered more broadly.

The front cover of the October 15 1965 issue of The Investors Chronicle featured an illustration ... more The front cover of the October 15 1965 issue of The Investors Chronicle featured an illustration of a family standing on a document rendered, with the help of fringed edges and some graphic licence, as a magic carpet. The family - husband, wife, two children, one girl, one boy - look comfortable in that conspicuously modern 1960s style adopted by so much commercial imagery of the period. The magic carpet they are standing on is a Provident Check, a form of documentary credit that the issuing company, Provident Clothing and Supply, had then been trading in for just under 90 years. The cover referred to a featured article, ‘Provident’s New Image’, that was prompted by the investment potential offered by the company since it listed on the stock exchange in 1962. In its short history as a public company Provident had performed well and, as the article counselled, had made certain adjustments that were poised to help it perform even better. ...
For a company that had built its business in supplying the means to buy ‘clothes, boots and coal’ to those with very limited resources, this was quite a shake-up. It signalled the start of an era in which the business model, the products offered, the means of delivery and the corporate image would change frequently and substantially alongside the identity the company was striving to name. If Stuart Hall’s lesson that identity is always ‘a process of becoming rather than being’ (Hall, 1996: 4) is attended to and extended from questions of cultural to those of corporate identity, Provident, by the early 1960s, had started trying to become something both like, and unlike, what it had been. Identity however is neither a fixed essence nor a free for all and the resources of history, language and regulation bear down upon it. It was ultimately the latter that thwarted the company’s attempt to name itself what it meant to become: the People’s Bank. In the firm’s long history, regulation had rarely acted so decisively but it was nevertheless always at work, in negotiation with practice and language to shape, motivate, enable and constrain. Regulation, as Bill Maurer (2012) has argued, offers a selective ethnography of past practice in the way that it highlights the problems it’s attempting to solve. Some of these problems arise when companies attempt to have, that is to acquire, things, properties, shares, names and identities that mark out contested forms, descriptions or rights of practice. At the same time as addressing these problems, regulation creates spaces and opportunities for forms of practice that fall outside its retrospective gaze to emerge and to thrive. Provident’s identity as a company and market leader and the fate of its later attempts to establish a new ‘brand’ identity as the People’s Bank were, in some substantial part, outcomes of regulation.

Big Data & Society

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2018

Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

Big Data & Society

Draft chapter, 2021

Cultural Studies, 2007

Journal of Historical Sociology, 2009

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2009

The Sociological Review, 2011

In Spring 2020, in the throes of the first and most severe of the UK’s Covid lockdowns , the prop... more In Spring 2020, in the throes of the first and most severe of the UK’s Covid lockdowns , the proprietor of an independent Edinburgh coffee shop called Black Medicine Coffee Company began taking regular working walks with their in-house illustrator. These walks, outdoors and physically distanced in compliance with the rules restricting indoor mixing set out (if not adhered to) by Boris Johnson’s administration on March 16th, might have seemed an indulgence at a time when hospitality businesses were scrabbling to work out whether and how they could continue trading at all. Yet their outcome, a series of comic reflections on pandemic life along the lines shown in Figure 1, would prove a vital component of the adaptations that helped Black Medicine sustain relationships with customers while navigating the most restrictive phase of these regulations. In the period when Black Medicine, like thousands of other cafés and restaurants, was forced to completely shut down, this comic strip series provided a way of maintaining rapport with locked out (and locked-in) customers. To understand how this worked, we suggest, requires tuning in to the various ways that independent retailers have become entangled with, and dependent upon, Instagram as a communicative and promotional partner.

Advertising is often used to illustrate popular and academic debates about cultural and economic ... more Advertising is often used to illustrate popular and academic debates about cultural and economic life. This book reviews cultural and sociological approaches to advertising and, using historical evidence, demonstrates that a rethink of the analysis of advertising is long overdue. Liz ...

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2017

Journal of Cultural Economy

At the start of this year, we raised the question of whether the global rise of populist national... more At the start of this year, we raised the question of whether the global rise of populist nationalist sentiment, including the shock of Brexit/Trump to staid liberalisms around the world, meant we should think harder about the role of culture in how political and economic events unfold (Cooper and McFall 2017). As the year ends, Trump is still President, Marine le Pen is not, whatever Brexit means remains opaqueand we are witnessing culture (or what, at certain moments, to certain ends, gets called 'culture') being drawn into a proliferating range of brutalities. As we write, the headlines tell us about the thousands drowned in the Mediterranean every year amid the ongoing global refugee crisis; the genocidal treatment of Muslim Rohingya people in Myanmar; the announcement of an extended and indefinite, patently xenophobic United States travel ban, buried within an escalating exchange of nuclear taunts between the leaders of the US and North Korea; the entire island of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated US territoryoh let us just call it what it is, colonyhas been left without power following Hurricane Maria, while the US President is preoccupied spinning professional athletes' protests of police violence into nativist offense. If it is true that culture has succumbed to the 'derivative logic' of contemporary economies of circulation, deprived of essential attributes and working to scramble and undermine the very premise of culture as essence, the word nevertheless continues to be used to explain things that are politically difficult, intractable, and yes, undeniably brutal. Throughout 2017, alt-right white supremacists have doubled down on the idea of culture as a foundational value, a unique heritage that has the right not only to be displayed, but celebrated and protectedsheltered. In the US, the rumbling controversy over Trump's failure to condemn white supremacist violence at Charlottesville in August has played out as bizarre semiotic algebra. The President's attribution of responsibility to 'many sides' was soon elaborated into a Twitter defence of the protests against the removal of a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee, on the grounds that the monument recorded an immutable history (Figure 1). This semiotic equivalencing where statues=history=truth is a form of cultural foundationalism that would be as comical as this Twitter correspondent makes it, if only its consequences were not so real and so bloody. Cultural foundationalism seems to be thriving dangerously even amidst an economy of cultural derivatives and a derivative culture. But perhaps that is to miss the point about the motility of 'the cultural'. Hall (1960, p. 1) argued that the experience of culture in all its forms was 'directly relevant to the imaginative resistance of people who have to live within capitalismthe growing points of social discontent, the projections of deeply felt needs'. But it was not the pact struck between anti-capitalist critique and cultural

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2009

Journal of Consumer Culture, 2003

Identity in the Age of the New Economy, 2004

Each of us is aware, emotionally and intellectually, that we are potentially unemployed, potentia... more Each of us is aware, emotionally and intellectually, that we are potentially unemployed, potentially underemployed, potentially insecure or temporary workers, potential ‘part-timers’. … the central figure of our society – and the ‘normal’ condition within that society – is no longer (or is tending no longer to be) that of the ‘worker’. It is becoming rather the figure of the insecure worker… (Gorz, 1999: 53)

Gorz’s measured summation of what is happening to work and working identities in the ‘new’ – that is to say, knowledge or information based – economy, resonates with much that has been written on the subject. The scenarios that different authors describe range from the wildly optimistic to the cataclysmically bleak, deploying styles and evidence ranging from apocalyptic hyperbole to dense, statistically informed projection. Perhaps the only point on which there is widespread agreement is that substantive restructuring of the economy at a global level, occasioned by an increasing dependence on knowledge or information resources, is underway that will, in fact has already begun to, irretrievably transform the character of work. The scale and scope of economic restructuring mean that its effects are to be felt not just upon employment and work but on the entire ‘social landscape of human life’ (Castells, 2000: 1). This transformation is too profound to put down to simple historical change, rather a sense of a complete break or rupture with the past pervades much of the literature in references to both endings and new ages, new beginnings (eg Rifkin, 1995; Castells, 2000; Beck 2000). A new epoch, in which no aspect of social life will be quite as it was, is thought to be upon us. If the character of economy, production and work is to be permanently transfigured this is to be matched by equally tenacious changes in culture, consumption and leisure.

Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, 2011

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2015

The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. Eds. J.S. Maguire & J. Matthews, 2014

This passage in Marx’s outline for his critique of political economy is famous for its provocative framing of the systemic, contingent links between production and consumption. It rather neatly introduces intermediation without labouring the theoretical problem raised by its status as a necessary movement between spheres that are simultaneous, unified, and identical. The idea that some form of mediation between production and consumption has to take place for either to exist has a long history but interest in modelling how this mediation works in practice has been uneven. Bourdieu’s (1984) formulation of the cultural intermediary occupations of the new petit bourgeoisie has acted as probably the single biggest impetus to research exploring the practical mediating function of work in professions like advertising, design, retailing, branding and marketing .

Sociology Compass, 2009

This article explores the usefulness of recent economic sociology literature for understanding pr... more This article explores the usefulness of recent economic sociology literature for understanding processes of market attachment. It focuses particularly on concepts like agencement and market devices proposed by authors like Michel Callon, Fabian Muniesa and Franck Cochoy and to their application to mass consumer markets. The article addresses critical responses which have been levelled at this literature to argue that despite what some regard as an overly descriptive and apolitical banality, this may in fact be a prime and necessary virtue.

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2010

Using the case of industrial assurance, this paper argues that a focused concern with the pragmat... more Using the case of industrial assurance, this paper argues that a focused concern with the pragmatics of market devices can offer a particularist politics of analysis by uncovering the material, technical and social conditions through which economic objects and persons are constituted. Industrial assurance grew exponentially in the UK after 1880 to become, through a series of political and economic twists and turns, by the 1910s the key commercial institution offering to 'foster and protect' the savings of the poor. Deploying a business model -based on door-to-door agents' collection of small weekly premiums -unchanged in its key particulars for more than a century, industrial assurance was extraordinarily successful. The paper argues that pragmatic description of industrial assurance as an agencement reveals how entangled emerging industrial assurance markets were with political theorising, government and law

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2010

This chapter considers what two sociologies of markets have got to do with Organisation Studies. ... more This chapter considers what two sociologies of markets have got to do with Organisation Studies. Special attention is paid to two main strands. First, an overview is given of how economic organisations were understood in the new economic sociology developed (mostly) in the US after M. Granovetter's essay on embeddedness drew attention to the role played by social networks in economic action. The chapter then turns to how the 'new new economic sociology' produced (mostly) in Europe after the performative turn initiated by Callon´s Laws of the Markets (1998) challenged this account by pointing instead to the role played by devices or agencements in processes like calculation, and

L'instrumentation de l'action publique: Controverses, résistances, effets

ABSTRACT The economy is commonly described either as the apolitical realm of calculation or as th... more ABSTRACT 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.

The view that we live in an age where commercial promotion pervades everyday life to an unprecede... more The view that we live in an age where commercial promotion pervades everyday life to an unprecedented extent is so widely accepted that there have been few attempts to test it empirically. This paper makes an attempt to rectify this by looking closely at ideas and evidence concerning escalating commercial promotion. This involves three main tasks. First, some of the arguments that have been made about promotion are briefly reviewed to help establish the extent to which judgements about its contemporary significance are “dehistoricised”. Second, consideration is given to the ambiguous status of historical evidence in questioning critical thought. History, it is argued cannot offer a straight, objec- tive means of comparison but it can offer an insight into the contingency of pervasiveness upon the available media, techniques and technologies of promotion. Third, a glimpse into how these media, techniques and technologies have historically been marshalled to ensure commercial saturation is provided through evidence of the use of promotion in coffee- houses, outdoor environments and corporate culture.

Cultural Studies, 2002

Critical work on advertising is underscored by a teleological conception of its object. This ofte... more Critical work on advertising is underscored by a teleological conception of its object. This often emerges in the form of an emphasis on advertising as an evolving, hybrid institution that increasingly mixes the 'economic' with the 'cultural'. It is in this vein that advertising practitioners have been characterised as 'new cultural intermediaries' deploying distinctive aesthetic sensibilities. Similar patterns of knowledge and behaviour however can be traced amongst early producers of advertising suggesting a generation of 'old' cultural intermediaries. This unexpected phenomenon, it is argued, arises for two reasons. The first is that much critical work addressing the nature of contemporary advertising lacks historical context. The second is that culture and economy are normatively conceptualised as separate spheres. This separation underplays the multiple interconnections between the cultural and the economic in instances of material practice. Accordingly it is proposed that advertising be reformulated as a constituent practice that has historically relied upon the juxtaposition of 'cultural' and 'economic' knowledges.

Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life Cultural economy: Cultural analysis and commercial life, 2002

Cultural Values, 2000

This paper sets out to review the role accorded to advertising in recent critical work. This work... more This paper sets out to review the role accorded to advertising in recent critical work. This work, I suggest, has been underscored by an 'epochalist' concern to map distinctions in the form of the culture/ economy relationship between the contemporary era and earlier periods. Significance has been accorded to the particular transformative potential of advertising and this is often related to research which emphasises the increasingly symbolic, persuasive and pervasive nature of advertising. In what follows, I make three central propositions. Firstly, I argue that writers on advertising share a number of concerns particularly about the effect the evolving nature of advertising has on the relationship between people and objects and between culture and economy. Secondly I suggest that these writers share with certain other critical theorists a very particular approach to the definition of key entities like meaning, culture and economy. These very particular definitions are pivotal to the epochalist explanation of advertising's role in the transformation of the culture/ economy relation. Finally, I attempt to show, through a brief look at historical uses of persuasion in advertising, that the problem with epochalist theory lies in a tendency to overgeneralise a wide range of specific forces.

ABSTRACT About the book: Marketing is still widely perceived as simply the creator of wants and n... more ABSTRACT About the book: Marketing is still widely perceived as simply the creator of wants and needs through selling and advertising and marketing theory has been criticized for not taking a more critical approach to the subject. This is because most conventional marketing thinking takes a broadly managerial perspective without reflecting on the wider societal implications of the effects of marketing activities. In response this important new book is the first text designed to raise awareness of the critical, ethical, social and methodological issues facing contemporary marketing. Uniquely it provides: – The latest knowledge based on a series of major seminars in the field – The insights of a leading team of international contributors with an interdisciplinary perspective . A clear map of the domain of critical marketing – A rigorous analysis of the implications for future thinking and research. For faculty and upper level students and practitioners in Marketing, and those in the related areas of cultural studies and media Critical Marketing will be a major addition to the literature and the development of the subject.

Presses universitaires du Midi eBooks, 2012

This paper addresses the role of the ‘good, average man’ or the ‘man at the door’ in marketing li... more This paper addresses the role of the ‘good, average man’ or the ‘man at the door’ in marketing life assurance and industrial life assurance in particular. While older commercial life assurance companies struggled to establish and expand their markets in the nineteenth century, the industrial life offices saw exponential growth selling a form of life assurance targeted at the poor. The paper explores the role of door to door agents in securing this growth. Almost by accident, industrial assurance agents emerged as the salve to widespread concerns about the complexity, propriety and safety of life assurance. As the familiar ‘man at the door’, agents helped foster the trust at a distance that large financial institutions depended upon and they also helped, through their weekly visits, to impose the discipline of thrift on the often precarious cash economies of working class households. It was through entanglement in the social lives of their policyholders that agents helped establish and reproduce industrial assurance markets. But the social ties that linked agents to their policyholders were a delicate matter. Industrial assurance offices had sprung up initially as a means of providing death benefits and came increasingly to provide life, endowment and other forms of cover to poorer communities. It was thus by definition a business transacted on intimate personal and social turf. But this social entanglement just added to the controversies aroused by a product reliant on an expensive business model of weekly door to door collection. Government and regulatory bodies feared that industrial assurance not only offered low financial returns but that it might damage traditional social bonds in sometimes dramatic ways – by for instance giving poor parents a pecuniary motive for neglecting their offspring or even hastening their deaths. The offices and their customers meanwhile defended agents on the grounds of their ties and their value to their communities. While offices may have sometimes exaggerated the goodwill customers felt towards their agents as ‘philosophers, guides and friends’; these agents were profoundly linked to their communities and policyholders through a variety of overlapping market, social and personal relations. The chapter will explore the way these varied ties arise as an inevitable component of the commerce or traffic of everyday life

What might it mean to say that the market will have you? This chapter tackles this question by us... more What might it mean to say that the market will have you? This chapter tackles this question by using Gabriel Tarde’s central provocation that what we are, our identities, are not matters of ‘being’ but of ‘having’. The art of markets lies in how this having – of data, relations, associations, ties, ‘us’ – is practically accomplished. We test this idea by looking at how marketing conversations have been conducted in two consumer finance product cases: the industrial life assurance company Prudential Assurance and the payday loan company Wonga. These two cases, we argue, shed new light both on how we understand market attachment and what this might mean in a rapidly evolving digital economy

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2008

Climate, Society and Elemental Insurance

I realised on a business that old we had to build it outside the company. So we bought some thing... more I realised on a business that old we had to build it outside the company. So we bought some things in Hoxton Square-I think we own about half Hoxton Square now.

The International Encyclopedia of Communication, 2008

Journal of Cultural Economy, Mar 12, 2008

Intriguing ground has opened over recent years as result of multidisciplinary efforts to unsettle... more Intriguing ground has opened over recent years as result of multidisciplinary efforts to unsettle the partitioning off of the ‘economy’ and the ‘economic’ from those working outside the discipline of economics. It is now increasingly clear that economists are just one of a multitude of agents involved in ‘preparing and repairing’ markets as well as being generally active in many areas associated with economic life: organisations, markets, economies. These three are not pre-formed objects: they are given shape and meaning by a host of socio-cultural-technical practices that aid what has been called the ‘performation’ or performative action of economics (Callon 1998; Cochoy 1998; Mackenzie et al. 2007; Muniesa et al. 2007). Recent empirical and theoretical work in this vein together with a longer heritage of anthropological and historical work targeted at uncovering the conditions of emergence of distinct areas of economic life have progressively called the notion of a settled divide between ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ into question (see Appadurai 1986; Buck-Morss 1995; Dumont 1977; Miller & Rose 1990; Sahlins 1976). This questioning has led the way toward new theoretical and methodological terrain for research into economic and organisational life. The Journal of Cultural Economy seeks to act as an intellectual space for the expansion of work in this new terrain. While promise and intrigue abound in this new area there is nevertheless more than a little risk that a journal that brings together the two terms ‘cultural’ and ‘economy’ might generate a number of misunderstandings regarding the ground it wishes to claim and, just as important, how it aims to position itself in relation to that ground. One such misunderstanding would be to interpret its ambition as that of establishing itself as a journal of ‘the cultural economy’ understood as a distinctive, seemingly newly invented, economic realm whose borders conceptual and empirical overlap with those of ‘the knowledge economy’, ‘the cultural sector’ or the ‘creative industries’. The inclusion of the definite article limits rather than clarifies the aim of what is meant by the term cultural economy. For those who are engaged in debates about the culture industries, for instance, there is a need to be alert to the respects in which the practices and relations which might be brought under this heading the consequences of different intellectual property regimes for the status of the copy in the music industry, say, or the organisation of the relations between different agents in the literary and art fields are to be approached from a more general perspective that is attuned to the cultural aspects that intervene in economic and organizational life more generally. While papers that engage with this sense of cultural economy would of course be welcome, the scope of the Journal of Cultural Economy is much wider and reflects a desire to encourage exploration of the more general processes and practices that prepare and maintain what,

The Cultural Intermediaries Reader

Production is … at the same time consumption, and consumption is at the same time production. Eac... more Production is … at the same time consumption, and consumption is at the same time production. Each is directly its own counterpart. But at the same time an intermediary movement goes on between the two. Production furthers consumption by creating the material for the latter which otherwise would lack its object. But consumption in its turn furthers production, by providing for the products the individual for whom they are products. The product receives its last finishing touches in consumption. (Marx, 1980/1857-8: 24) This passage in Marx’s outline for his critique of political economy is famous for its provocative framing of the systemic, contingent links between production and consumption. It rather neatly introduces intermediation without labouring the theoretical problem raised by its status as a necessary movement between spheres that are simultaneous, unified, and identical. The idea that some form of mediation between production and consumption has to take place for either to exist has a long history but interest in modelling how this mediation works in practice has been uneven. Bourdieu’s (1984) formulation of the cultural intermediary occupations of the new petit bourgeoisie has acted as probably the single biggest impetus to research exploring the practical mediating function of work in professions like advertising, design, retailing, branding and marketing . This research almost endorses Bourdieu’s concept while making it clear that the idea raises as many problems as it solves. These problems are already looming in Marx’s framing of the production-consumption relation and they continue to resist neat resolution. As I’ll try to indicate in this short chapter, the attempt to understand better how the connection between production and consumption is realised in concrete market settings through the idea of cultural intermediaries has had some success, but of a limited kind.

Markets and the Arts of Attachment, 2017

Economy and Society, 2019

Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health i... more Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health insurance prices? The emergence of self-tracking technologies and their adoption and promotion in health insurance products has been characterized as a threat to solidaristic models of healthcare provision. If individual behaviour rather than group membership were to become the basis of risk assessment, the social, economic and political consequences would be far-reaching. It would disrupt the distributive, solidaristic character that is expressed within all health insurance schemes, even in those nominally designated as private or commercial. Personalized risk pricing is at odds with the infrastructures that presently define, regulate and deliver health insurance. Self-tracking can be readily imagined as an element in an ongoing bio-political redistribution of the burden of responsibility from the state to citizens but it is not clear that such a scenario could be delivered within existing individual private health insurance operational and regulatory infrastructures. In what can be gleaned from publicly available sources discussing pricing experience in the individual markets established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 (ACA), widely known as 'Obamacare', it appears unlikely that it can provide the means to personalize price. Using the case of Oscar Health, a technology driven start-up trading in the ACA marketplaces, I explore the concepts, politics and infrastructures at work in health insurance markets.

Cultural Studies, 2007

In naming his satirical version of a life assurance company The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan... more In naming his satirical version of a life assurance company The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company Dickens was aiming at an already well-established tendency for life assurance companies to stress in their promotional enterprises the altruistic character of their business. So disinterested was the Anglo-Bengalee that 'nobody can run any risk by the transaction except the office, which, in its great liberality is pretty sure to lose' (1994: 419). While few life assurance companies would have pushed the claim that far it is certainly the case that the idea of 'disinterestedness' played a peculiar role in the nineteenth century life assurance industry. This paper explores how life assurance companies sought to overcome concerns about the safety and propriety of their business by promulgating particular ideas about life assurance as a pious, self-'disinterested' form of conduct. Throughout the nineteenth century life assurance operated as an exemplary technique of liberal government by offering a means of market-based self-rule that depended heavily on an emergent form of knowledge which blended together impartiality, self-interest and disinterestedness (Poovey, 1998).

and other research outputs Fabricating the market: The promotion of life assurance in the long ni... more and other research outputs Fabricating the market: The promotion of life assurance in the long nineteenth-century Journal Article

Shifting Solidarities

, the United Nations Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston... more , the United Nations Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, published a damning report on the consequences of the social protection policy pursued by the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK. It might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nineteenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens, rather than seeking to respond creatively and compassionately to the real needs of those facing widespread economic insecurity in an age of deep and rapid transformation brought about by automation, zero-hour contracts and rapidly growing inequality. (UNSR, 2019: 5) The term 'digital workhouse' is an evocative description of some of the worst outcomes that have been associated with the adoption of datadriven innovations for the provision of social protection and health

Journal of Australian Political Economy, 2011

Opening paragraph: By addressing the ‘practical heart’ of markets, my aim in this article is to e... more Opening paragraph: By addressing the ‘practical heart’ of markets, my aim in this article is to explore the way markets carry on despite the peculiar, mathematically limited and opportunistically versatile, character of human calculation. The abstract theorems of economics may be unreal to practical ‘men’ but the curious thing is they calculate still. In any social world there are vast unknowns compensated by routine, practice and habit, but also by faith, piety and fundamentalisms of all sorts, including religious, market and even liberal secular (see Block, 2010; Thompson, 2006). Viewed from a pragmatist perspective, knowledge is always partial, always shifting and always social. An admission of deficits, of course, is not the same as an admission of complete ignorance. While critics from Thorstein Veblen (1898) through J.K. Galbraith (1954/1975; 1958) to Mark Granovetter (1985) and the 2001 Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, have lined up to dismiss even the possibility of the p...

This paper sets out to explore the ways in which life assurance, as a specific form of financial ... more This paper sets out to explore the ways in which life assurance, as a specific form of financial conduct, was mobilized and shaped by the political rationality of liberal government. At a fundamental level, liberal modes of government are all about economic government. The political philosophy of liberalism informed the development of an assemblage of institutions and agencies in the nineteenth century which acted, with relative autonomy, to realise the liberal project of government at a distance. Life assurance institutions were part of a diverse range of institutions which provided the means of defining and promoting the duties and virtues associated with liberal, economic subjectivity. The political rationality of prudentialism as a particular way of conducting oneself as a liberal subject (O’Malley, 1996), the chapter will argue, informed the missionary zeal with which life assurance institutions pursued the project of equipping their publics with the skills and habits of pruden...

There is a long history in science and technology studies (STS) of tracking problematic objects, ... more There is a long history in science and technology studies (STS) of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying " problems " in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. When a data sharing agreement called care.data was announced in 2013, nearly 1.5 million citizens chose to opt out. Yet, in subsequent years, there has been little evidence of a robust public mobilising around data sharing. We will attempt to track this elusive 'non problem' using some digital tools developed in STS for the purpose of mapping issues and problem definitions within science. Although we find these digital tools are unable to capture the " problem, " the process of searching ...

Journal of Cultural Economy

This lightly edited transcript records the discussion at the opening roundtable of the What Was C... more This lightly edited transcript records the discussion at the opening roundtable of the What Was Cultural Economy? symposium at City, University of London in January 2020. In it, Don Slater, Sean Nixon and Liz McFall, all participants in the original 'Workshop on Cultural Economy' reflect on the conceptual and institutional history of 'cultural economy' and how it intersected with their shared interests in advertising and consumer culture. Their individual reflections are followed by a shared discussion, with contributions from the floor. The transcript has been edited for clarity.