Fabricating the market: The promotion of life assurance in the long nineteenth-century

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. This involved the circulation of a variety of advertising media, one aspect of which was the fabrication of grand offices as headquarters for life assurance companies. These buildings and their widely-circulated images were part of a process of making life assurance appear prudent and proper, but more importantly secure. Through this fabrication of the liberal market, the City of London was transformed into a centre of commerce and finance

Performativity, economics and politics: an overview

Presenting the theme of performativity in a journal named the Journal of Cultural Economy makes the role performativity plays in the economy a logical place to start and the debt to Michel Callon (1998) an obvious one to acknowledge. Callon’s idea was that ‘economics does not describe an existing external ‘‘economy’’, but brings that economy into being: economics performs the economy, creating the phenomena it describes’ (MacKenzie & Millo 2003, p. 108). This idea is now recognized by many authors as one of the major contributions to economic sociology (see, e.g., Barry & Slater 2002; Holm 2007; MacKenzie & Millo 2003; MacKenzie 2004, 2007) and has been accompanied by vivid debates across the social sciences about the actual influence of economics and economists over economic practices (e.g. Miller 2000; Callon 2005, 2007; Ferraro et al. 2005; Ghoshal 2005; MacKenzie et al. 2007 and more generally over society and political processes (see, e.g., Bazerman & Malhotra 2006; Fourcade 2001, 2006)

Strategic ambiguity:A roundtable on cultural economy and consumer culture

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

The personalisation of insurance:Data, behaviour and innovation

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