Abstract
The new economic sociology claims to have adopted the notion of performativity from J.L Austin, has put it in new uses, and has given it new meanings. This is now spreading and has created another vogue term in the social and human sciences. The term is taken to cover all sorts of aspects in the ways in which the use of social scientific theories have consequences for the social world. The paper argues that the expansive use of ‘performativity’ obscures the Austinian idea and thereby impoverishes the conceptual resources available for analyzing the nuances in the complex theory/world connections. Importantly, it blurs the difference between constitutive and causal relationships, both of which actually are involved. Instead of economics performs the economy as the sociologists say, it would make more sense to say, the economy performs economics – but even this would be undermotivated.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Austin, J.L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon.
Callon, M. (2007). What does it mean to say that economics is performative? In D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, & L. Siu (Eds.), Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics (pp. 310–357). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Didier, D. (2007). Do statistics ‘perform’ the economy? In D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, & L. Siu (Eds.), Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics (pp. 276–310). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Guala, F. (2007). How to do things with experimental economics. In D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, & L. Siu (Eds.), Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics (pp. 128–162). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
MacKenzie, D. (2004). The big, bad wolf and the rational market: Portfolio insurance, the 1987 crash and the performativity of economics. Economy and Society, 33, 303–334.
MacKenzie, D. (2006a). Is economics performative? Option theory and the construction of derivatives markets. Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 28, 29–55.
MacKenzie, D. (2006b). An engine, not a camera. How financial models shape markets. Cambridge: MIT Press.
MacKenzie, D. (2007). Is economics performative? Option theory and the construction of derivatives markets. In D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, & L. Siu (Eds.), Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics (pp. 54–86). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
MacKenzie, D., & Millo, Y. (2003). Constructing a market, performing theory: The historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 109, 107–145.
MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F., & Siu, L. (Eds.). (2007). Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mäki, U. (2002). Some non-reasons for non-realism about economics. In U. Mäki (Ed.), Fact and fiction in economics. Realism, models, and social construction (pp. 90–104). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mäki, U. (2008). Scientific realism and ontology. In S. N. Durlauf & L. E. Blume (Eds.), The new Palgrave dictionary of economics (2nd ed., Vol. 7, pp. 334–341). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mäki, U. (2012). Realism and antirealism about economics. In U. Mäki (Ed.), Handbook of the philosophy of economics (pp. 3–24). San Diego: Elsevier.
Roth, A. (2002). The economist as engineer: Game theory, experimentation, and computation as tools for design economics. Econometrica, 70, 1341–1378.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mäki, U. (2013). Performativity: Saving Austin from MacKenzie. In: Karakostas, V., Dieks, D. (eds) EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science. The European Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01306-0_36
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01306-0_36
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01305-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01306-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)