Economic under-determination: industrial competitiveness and free allowances in the European carbon market

Tackling climate change has provided a key focus for the creation of what the editors of this special issue have termed ‘environmental intangibles.’ This paper focuses on the European Union Emissions Trading System (EUETS), a climate policy that revolves around the issuance and trading of environmental intangibles called emissions allowances. Set up in the mid-2000s, the cap and trade system has experienced many complications. We propose here to explore a particularly contentious issue: the allocation of free allowances. We will see that deciding on allocation rules leads to vivid debates about whether energy-intensive industries in Europe, such as the manufacturing of cement, can remain competitive in the global economy if climate policy is unilaterally enforced. These debates are focused on a phenomenon referred to as the risk of carbon leakage due to loss of competitiveness. Drawing on an empirical enquiry into the workings of policy-making, the paper examines the ways, in which this risk is framed and questioned through lobbying and evidential work. We suggest that the threat to competitiveness posed by the EUETS can neither be established, nor dismissed; a form of under-determination is maintained and carbon leakage as a never-quite-tangible possibility becomes a battleground for protecting European industry over the environment

On scale work: evidential practices and global health interventions

Scalability can be understood as the ability to expand without changing. Yet, expanding an intervention to a global scale, we suggest, is a significant and difficult accomplishment. In this paper we propose to explore the kind of evidential exigencies that this accomplishment involves. To do so, we focus on the field of global health and examine how child immunization against the pneumococcus bacterium has been scaled up in low-income countries. The paper first attends to initial epidemiological scrutiny that revealed the existence of a large-scale public health problem and the possibility of an expandable solution (vaccination). It then describes the set-up of a funding arrangement using overseas aid to purchase vaccine doses manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, before paying attention to various frictions that affect the widespread use of pneumococcal vaccines. In these different moments through which scalability is accomplished, always partially and temporarily, we show that a dual activity can be witnessed, a pivoting between referential work and forward projection. To conclude, we suggest that scalability is more usefully approached as a form of expansion that is always attentive to the possibilities of change

On the difficulties of addressing collective concerns through markets: from market devices to accountability devices

In recent years market-based interventions have been positioned as the basis for addressing what the editors of this special issue have termed ‘collective concerns’ in fields as diverse as healthcare, the environment and crime. This paper considers the terms of such interventions and the market-like relations these terms pre-suppose. It does so through a comparison of two interventions: a market-based scheme to address concerns regarding electronic waste and a Social Impact Bond for children at-risk of going into care. Ideas from Science and Technology Studies are drawn on to explore the composition of market-based interventions, the terms established through accountability devices which decide on who and what gets to participate, and the consequences that follow

The Everyday Life of an Algorithm

This open access book begins with an algorithm–a set of IF…THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the algorithm over three years, charting its everyday life. Questions of ethics, transparency, accountability and market value must be grasped by the algorithm in a series of ever more demanding forms of experimentation. Here the algorithm must prove its ability to get a grip on everyday life if it is to become an ordinary feature of the settings where it is being put to work. Through investigating the everyday life of the algorithm, the book opens a conversation with existing social science research that tends to focus on the power and opacity of algorithms. In this book we have unique access to the algorithm’s design, development and testing, but can also bear witness to its fragility and dependency on others

Algorithmic IF … THEN rules and the conditions and consequences of power

The introduction to this special issue suggests we need to develop ‘a greater understanding of what might be thought of as the social power of algorithms'. In this paper, ‘social power’ will be critically scrutinised through a study of the entanglement of algorithmic rules with contemporary video-based surveillance technologies. The paper will begin with an analysis of algorithmic ‘IF … THEN’ rules and the conditions (IF) and consequences (THEN) that need to be accomplished for an algorithm to be said to succeed. The work of achieving conditions and consequences demonstrates that the form of ‘power’ in focus is not solely attributable to the algorithm as such, but operates through distributed agency and can be noted as a network effect. That is, the conditions and consequences of algorithmic rules only come into being through the careful plaiting of relatively unstable associations of people, things, processes, documents and resources. From this we can say that power is not primarily social in the sense that algorithms alone create an impact on society, but social in the sense of power being derived through algorithmic associations. The paper argues that this kind of power is most clearly visible in moments of breakdown, failure or other forms of trouble, whereby algorithmic conditions and consequences are not met and the careful plaiting of associations has to be brought to the fore and examined. It is through such examinations that the associational dependencies more than the social power of algorithms are made apparent

Market innovation as framing, productive friction and bricolage: an exploration of the personal data market

This paper explores the possibilities offered by recent Science and Technology Studies (STS) research on markets for engaging with market innovation. Although there exist few reflections on how innovation happens in markets, market innovation has not been singularly theorized in STS-inspired market studies. In this paper, we explore the potential analytic utility of different sets of ideas in the field of market studies, such as ‘framing’ [Callon, M. (1998) ‘Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics’, in The Laws of Markets, ed. M. Callon, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–57; Callon, M. (2007) ‘An essay on the growing contribution of economic markets to the proliferation of the social’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 7–8, pp. 136–163], ‘productive friction’ [Stark, D. (2009) The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ] and ‘bricolage’ [MacKenzie, D. & Pardo-Guerra, J. P. (2014) ‘Insurgent capitalism: Island, bricolage and the re-making of finance’, Economy and Society, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 153–182]. Drawing on our research into the online personal data industry and start-ups developing personal data control products, we put together five sensibilities that we think are of use for broader considerations of market innovation