Markets for Collective Concerns

Despite the recent fall-out of finance, confidence in the market does not seem to be diminishing, but, on the contrary, market mechanisms are becoming key instruments to deal with core contemporary collective concerns, including global warming, education, environmental pollution, supply of energy, quality of education, poverty and health care (Mirowski 2013). Recent research within STS has started to focus on such kind of arrangements and in this presentation we will critically engage with this literature. Our main results are twofold. On the one hand, we recognize there are important conceptual tools already available - such as 'matters of public concern' (Marres 2007) and 'hybrid forums' (Callon et al. 2001; Callon 2009)- that help in framing the particularity of these arrangements. On the other hand, previous STS-market research notions developed mostly in the field of finance studies cannot simply be transposed to study markets for collective concerns. We will suggest three main translations: (i) from studying techno-scientific descriptions produced by financial economists inscribed in 'market devices' to studying markets as 'policy devices' enacted with the help of economists turned market designers; (ii) from the study of sites of knowledge production involved in valuing goods and firms to study the production of knowledge used to evaluate and repair markets for public concerns; and (iii) from the analysis of 'governing through markets' to understanding the 'government of markets' that do not always behave as expected and the proliferation of conceptions of well-functioning markets strategically invoked to initiate such evaluations.