Anthropology with Business: Plural Programs and Future Financial Worlds

How can we imagine and perform an anthropological practice with business, that is, not from a distanced perspective but through a mutual infolding and engagement? How might such an arrangement then be exemplary for novel economic experiments of the kind anthropologists often describe? Reflecting on several years' of collaborations with each other, the authors recount their relationship as an experiment in novel engagements with economic things (money, corporations, universities, accounting principles, computers, etc.) in an industrial and university site. The paper puts forward a theoretical argument about exaptive and nonadaptive plurality that opens new pathways for alternative and sometimes quite conventional values. The context is a specific set of projects around money and payment. The intellectual background is the anthropology of finance and alternative economies

Valuation Studies? Our Collective Two Cents

This article presents the results of a poll made among the members of the editorial and advisory boards of Valuation Studies. The purpose is to overview the topic that is the remit of the new journal. The poll focused on three questions: 1. Why is the study of valuation topical? 2. What specific issues related to valuation are the most pressing ones to explore? 3. What sites and methods would be interesting for studying valuation? The answers to these questions provided by sixteen board members form the basis of the article. Based on these answers, it identifies a number of themes concerning the study of valuation, elaborating on the rationale for attending to valuation, the conceptual challenges linked to this, and the specific issues and sites that deserve further attention

David Graeber's Wunderkammer, Debt: The First 5 000 Years

Graeber's Debt: The First 5 000 Years has generated extensive commentary in the popular press and has captured the imagination of both activists at the barricades and investment fund managers in the City of London. Everyone is captivated by his critique of the myth of primitive barter. Yet it is a puzzle that a core element of his argument-the myth of primordial debt-has been largely overlooked. This review seeks to redress this oversight and in the process to suggest that Graeber's emphasis on violence and enslavement, while compelling, is limited by his quest for origins. Feminist anthropology taught us to set aside the question, 'when did "it" begin' and instead open up to other questions, beyond the limits and biases the quest for origins presupposes. One wishes Graeber had entered the wonder cabinet he constructed in this book, rather than use it to ground a teleology. © 2013 Copyright Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia

Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space

This article explores the emerging field of 'mobile money': mobile phone-enabled systems for value transfer and storage, primarily in the developing world, which are heralded as signal interventions in the effort to broaden financial inclusion and bank the 'unbanked.' Focusing on the stories that circulate in the emergent network of expertise that is calling 'mobile money' into being, it discusses how economic techniques and social narratives about markets - specifically, narratives about the opportunities for profit and financial inclusion in the 'payments space' - format a consumer market for mobile money. Furthermore, it asks whether end-users' repurposing of mobile money - and the use of airtime as currency - heralds a new means of exchange or store of value, potentially remaking money in the process. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Finance as ‘bizarre bazaar’: using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge

Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity - opaque, secretive, and increasingly placeless – precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this paper we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geertz’s work on the bazaar by taking an indire ct route to access the field site – Collateral Debt Obligations – through documents. In reading these documents, we assume the position of investors who, in the absence of alternative publicly available information, are dependent on the documentary accounts made available to them by the sellers. These media act in ways that are similar to tourist guidebooks, a comparison we use to reframe the exchange as one that builds upon sociocultural relations rather than the abstract market relationships described by m ainstream economists. We propose that these documents are not merely representational artefacts of the organisation, but serve to establish and maintain social relationships between buyers and sellers through the management, standardisation and ritualisati on of information disclosed to the investor

An Empirical Comparison of Consumer Innovation Adoption Models: Implications for Subsistence Marketplaces

So called “pro-poor” innovations may improve consumer wellbeing in subsistence marketplaces. However, there is little research that integrates the area with the vast literature on innovation adoption. Using a questionnaire where respondents were asked to provide their evaluations about a mobile banking innovation, this research fills this gap by providing empirical evidence of the applicability of existing innovation adoption models in subsistence marketplaces. The study was conducted in Bangladesh among a geographically dispersed sample. The data collected allowed an empirical comparison of models in a subsistence context. The research reveals the most useful models in this context to be the Value Based Adoption Model and the Consumer Acceptance of Technology model. In light of these findings and further examination of the model comparison results the research also shows that consumers in subsistence marketplaces are not just motivated by functionality and economic needs. If organizations cannot enhance the hedonic attributes of a pro-poor innovation, and reduce the internal/external constraints related to adoption of that pro-poor innovation, then adoption intention by consumers will be lower

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements