Re: PEN-L Digest - 17 Jun 2007 to 18 Jun 2007 (#2007-172)

[ann li <ann_z_li@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On channeling Walras and a strawberry alarm clock:

I have some of my usual confusion, so I will apologize in advance for 
asking a stupid question...

Michael, how Walrasian is that idea when Callon is positive, yet 
cautious, regarding the use of ANT since its use does allow for “the 
variety of possible configurations of the action” despite some 
potentially essentialized or dichotomized premises on what constitutes 
voluntary action? What would this mean for proposing non- or 
post-walrasian concepts?

For example, Callon (1997) says further in a similar writing: “ANT 
enables one to go further than do traditional socio-economics or 
analyses in terms of networks proposed by people like Granovetter. 
Markets are not embedded in networks. In other words, there is no point 
in adding social, interpersonal, or informal relations in order to 
understand their functioning. A concrete market is the result of 
operations of disentanglement, framing, internalization and 
externalization. To understand a market it is necessary first to agree 
to take what it does seriously; that is to say, the construction of 
calculative actors who consider themselves to be quits once the 
transaction has been concluded. This does not mean that everything has 
been framed and internalized and that no relations other than market 
relations exist. I have suggested that complete disentanglement is 
impossible; framing can function and survive only if there are 
overflowing and connections which have not been internalized. But it is 
one thing to see these links and relations as having been voluntarily 
and actively rejected from the framework of market relations, with the 
precise aim of locally and temporarily purifying market relations; it is 
quite another thing to say that the market is possible and functions 
only because these relations are present and form, in a sense, the 
substratum of market exchange.” (p.8, 
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/papers/callon-market-test.pdf)

Ann