Bases teóricas del proyecto

The idea of performativity, a concept associated with ANT, points to a heterogeneity of actors (both humans and nonhumans), or what Latour (1996) calls

‘actants’, that gather to perform a reality. The use of the term ‘actant’ is to distinguish from the term ‘actor’ often associated with an individual human actor. The term, therefore, extends ‘actor’ to nonhuman and non-individual entities, which through their connections account for the essence of social phenomena. It is the ‘summing up’ (Latour, 1999a: 17) of these actants’ interactions and connectedness that agencements

are formed and ‘endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending on their configuration’ (Callon, 2007: 320). In performing the economy, for example, an economic theory or model is only one of the actants that intervenes or performs to make that which the theory seeks to describe. It fulfills both ‘representation and action’ (MacKenzie, Muniesa & Siu, 2007: 2) as it engages with other actants. Callon (2007), referring to the Black and Scholes formula, makes it clear that “it is not the formula itself that can cause that world, a sociotechnical agencement, to exist. Other forces, other interests, are involved” (p. 323). He further claims that the success or failure of a formula is not dependent on people’s belief in it, as the notion of self- fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1948) tends to suggest. Rather, a formula’s success is dependent on ‘a world’; that is, the social and material elements, as well as the conditions necessary to make the formula act. Without this ‘world’, the formula fails to perform and the world it seeks to describe is not realized. A failed formula suggests that certain conditions were not met, triggering behaviors that compromise or

undermine the integrity of the formula and make it ‘counterperformative’ (MacKenzie, 2007: 76).

MacKenzie (2007) provides a good example using the theory of options in financial economics that helped make or transform the financial market (in particular, market for derivatives) as it is known today. MacKenzie demonstrates how the Black- Scholes-Merton model of option pricing has shaped the financial market through market participants’ application of the model. Although a market of options existed even as early as the seventeenth century, pricing practices were on a ‘rule of thumb’ basis and did not have a theory to describe it. The 1970s Black-Scholes-Merton model was an attempt to establish a theory of price determination using sophisticated

34 mathematical equations. Using the model to calculate the theoretical estimate of the price of options, however, required some level of knowledge and skills that no average person could be expected to perform. Thus, to facilitate the generation of options prices based on the model, computers inscribed with the model’s equation performed the calculation and spewed sheets of paper of computer-generated prices (e.g. Black’s sheets) that traders purchased and carried at trading floors to execute their ‘buying and selling’. These ‘material mediators’ (p. 70) of carefully crafted sheets of paper (of the right size, with readable figures, etc.) displayed only the relevant information that traders needed to know, as defined by the model, to carry out their work. The model’s representation of the phenomenon at work (i.e. option pricing) helped coordinate trading activities, ultimately changing economic processes and legitimizing the market that was once criticized for its resemblance to gambling. The model, therefore, served as a guide to traders and taught them how to participate in the market that the model helped shape and maintain. Hence, MacKenzie’s analysis of the performativity of option theory showed how the theory described a legitimate options market and enabled or fulfilled it by creating an effect on economic processes and practices, on market participants and their devices.

Indeed, an important feature of the performativity thesis is the centrality of humans and devices in the production of social phenomena. It is humans’ interaction with the material and technical devices, and vice versa, that enable a phenomenon to thrive. The theoretical statements or models inscribed in the devices ‘are made to act by many other actants… in concrete-contingent socio-material networks’ (Vosselman, 2014: 187). In MacKenzie’s (2007) account of the Black-Scholes-Merton model, this aspect of performativity is quite evident. The traders’ interaction with the sheets of paper not only facilitated their trading activities, but also allowed options prices to be determined. In a sense, traders’ reliance on the model gave meaning to the prices within the boundaries in which they were determined, requiring the coordination of activities between the trading floors and the offices where options prices were generated to assist their choice of action (i.e. buy or sell). What is interesting about MacKenzie’s account is the mobilization of the model as an articulation of the market it seeks to represent. As demonstrated in his account, the model’s accuracy in

generating theoretical options prices becomes secondary, at least initially. Its significance is rooted in its instrumental characteristics connecting and enabling

35 humans and their devices to perform their calculations and their trading. As Preda

(2007) puts it, ‘we can encounter situations where a theory describes the reference x. At the same time, the uses for this theory are part of x. In this case, the theory appears both as a description (or interpretation) of the users’ actions and an intrinsic feature of these actions’ (p. 45). Hence, the constitutiveness of the theory in the trading practice and the diffusion of the sociotechnical agencements resulting from and supporting this constitutiveness shape and format the options market according to the specifications of the relationships established through these agencements. In essence, for a model or theory to be performative, it demands a sociotechnical agencement that can articulate the narrative about a ‘world’ it wants to produce. It is this articulation in and through the agencement that such ‘world’ exists.

Considering scientific statements or formulas as constitutive elements of social phenomena extends to accounting and accounting techniques (Skærbæk & Tryggestad, 2010; Vosselman, 2014; Miller & Power, 2013; Porter, 1995; Power, 1996). As an operative mode of writing (Kalthoff, 2005), accounting techniques are engaged in representing and manufacturing performance of economic activities; that is, accounting symbols represent objects as well as the operations performed on them. Instead of simply looking at accounting as a passive tool that ‘turns absence into presence’ (Vosselman, 2014), the performativity thesis invites an observer to consider its operative role in formatting the capacity and modality (Callon, 2009) of the

accounting activities. As Vosselman (2014) points out, in its passive mode, accounting tools attempt to capture through accounting records the ‘objects and flows’ that are happening in the world. These recordings, apart from their efficient storage of information, facilitate the transportation of the representation of reality across time and space. In an organization, for example, accounting as a

representational and storage device of recorded activities can serve as a monitoring instrument to a manager who aims to mitigate irregularities. But, as Vosselman (2014) suggests, this functionalist view of accounting fails to recognize the operative

dimension of the instrument. The numbers and figures that are recorded do not only represent reality but are the result of an operational activity that enables and enacts the connections between the objects and flows they represent. Their deployment shapes the connections between the objects and flows, thus producing and enabling the recording of ‘reality’. This ‘manufacturing’ of reality is what makes accounting

36 performative. The ‘truthfulness’ or validity of the manufactured reality is not based on what is ‘out there’ but on the formula and rules governing its representation; in this case, accounting’s ‘internal plausibility’ (Kalthoff, 2005: 83). Hence, accounting techniques do not just serve as tools but as mediating instruments or mechanisms (Miller & Power, 2013) that establish the objects and flows, the social and the

material, and the boundaries or spaces (Callon, 1998b) within which calculations and accounting activities are carried out.