Money and Calculation: Economic and Sociological Perspectives

230 Pages·2010·1.421 MB·English

by  Massimo Amato, Luigi Doria, Luca Fantacci (eds.)

Money and Calculation
Bocconi on Management Series
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Titles include:
Massimo Amato, Luigi Doria and Luca Fantacci (editors)
MONEY AND CALCULATION
Economic and Sociological Perspectives
Vittorio Coda
ENTREPRENEURIAL VALUES AND STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Essays in Management Theory
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Money and Calculation
Economic and Sociological Perspectives
Edited by
Massimo Amato
Bocconi University, Italy
and
Luigi Doria
Bocconi University, Italy
and
Luca Fantacci
Bocconi University, Italy
Palgrave
macmillan
Selection and editorial matter © Massimo Amato, Luigi Doria and
Luca Fantacci 2010.
Individual chapters © their respective authors 2010
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-27777-9
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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First published 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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ISBN 978-1-349-32569-6 ISBN 978-0-230-29801-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230298019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Money and calculation : economic and sociological perspectives /
edited by Massimo Amato, Luigi Doria, Luca Fantacci.
p. cm.—(Bocconi on management series)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Money. 2. Finance. 3. Management. 4. Economics. I. Amato,
Massimo. II. Doria, Luigi, 1969– III. Fantacci, Luca, 1971–
HG221.M81556 2010
332.4—dc22 2010027486
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Contents
Notes on the Contributors vi
1 Introduction 1
Massimo Amato, Luigi Doria and Luca Fantacci
2 Money Is the Scribe of a Market Economy 16
Jean Cartelier
3 Money without Value, Accounting without Measure:
How Economic Theory Can Better Fit the Economic
and Monetary System We Live in 34
Yuri Biondi
4 Silence Is Gold: Some Preliminary Notes on Money,
Speech and Calculation 63
Massimo Amato
5 What Kind of Calculation Is Implied in
the Money Rate of Interest? 79
Luca Fantacci
6 A Time and a Place for Everything:
Foundations of Commodity Money 101
Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty
7 Calculating Life and Money as Resources 122
Luigi Doria
8 Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives’
Theological Unconscious 148
Bill Maurer
9 Representing and Modelling:
The Case of Portfolio Management 174
Herbert Kalthoff and Uwe Vormbusch
10 Brief Encounters: Calculation and the Interaction Order
of Anonymous Electronic Markets 189
Alex Preda
Index 215
v
Contributors
Massimo Amato is tenured researcher at Bocconi University, Milan, and
Fellow of the Institute of Advances Studies, Nantes. His fields of inter-
est range from economic history and the history of economic thought
to phenomenology. He is the author of Il bivio della moneta (The Money
Junction, Egea, 1999), Le radici di una fede. Per una storia del rapporto fra
moneta e credito in Occidente (The Roots of a Faith. Outline of a History of
the Helationship between Money and Credit in the West, Bruno Mondadori,
2008) and L’enigma della moneta e l’inizio dell’economia (The Enigma of
Money and the Inception of the Economy, to be published in 2010). He is
co-author with L. Fantacci of The End of Finance. Where the Crisis Comes
from and How we can Conceive a Way Out, Polity, to be published in
2011.
Yuri Biondi is Research Fellow for the French Institute of Research (www.
cnrs.fr) at the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris (www.polytechnique.fr) and
affiliated Professor of Corporate Governance and Social Responsibility at
CNAM (www.cnam.fr). He is promoter and main editor of The Firm as an
Entity: Implications for Economics, Accounting, and Law (Routledge, 2007)
and co-editor, with Tomo Suzuki, of The Socio-Economics of Accounting
(Socio-Economic Review special issue, October 2007). His current research
interests are the interdisciplinary connections of firms, money and
accounting, at the theoretical and applied levels.
Dick Bryan is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.
He has for a number of years researched Marxian value theory and
international capital movement. For the past decade his specific focus
has been financial markets, and especially financial derivatives. With
Michael Rafferty, he is the author of Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political
Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class (Palgrave 2006).
Jean Cartelier is Emeritus Professor at Paris X-Nanterre University.
His main fields of research are general economic theory, the theory of
money and the history of economic thought. He has published many
articles and books in defence of the ‘monetary approach’.
Luigi Doria carries out research at Bocconi University, Milan. He has
been Fellow of the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies. He has done
vi
Contributors vii
research at the University IUAV of Venice. He has co-edited (together
with Valeria Fedeli and Carla Tedesco) Rethinking European Spatial Policy
as a Hologram: Actions, Institutions, Discourses, Ashgate, 2006. His most
recent research interest is economic sociology, focusing on the relation
between quality and calculation.
Luca Fantacci is Assistant Professor of Economic History at Bocconi
University. He is the author of La moneta. Storia di un’istituzione man-
cata (Money. History of a Failed Institution, Marsilio, 2005), and co-author
with Massimo Amato of the End of Finance. Where the Crisis Comes From
and How we can Conceive a Way Out, Polity, forthcoming 2011), in addi-
tion to several articles on monetary and financial history and, more
recently, on the thought and activities of J. M. Keynes.
Herbert Kalthoff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Mainz,
Department of Sociology, in Germany. His research interests are the soci-
ology of knowledge and practices in the field of finance, banking and
teaching, focusing on qualitative methods. He is co-editor of Facts and
Figures (Metropolis, 2000) and Theoretische Empirie (Suhrkamp, 2008),
and author of ‘Practices of Calculation’ (Theory, Culture and Society 22,
2005) and ‘The Launch of Banking Instruments and the Figuration of
Markets’ (Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36, 2006).
Bill Maurer is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute
for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of
California, Irvine. He is the editor of several collections, as well as
the author of Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in
the British Virgin Islands (University of Michigan Press, 1997), Pious
Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States (Russell Sage Foundation,
2006) and Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies,
Lateral Reason (Princeton University Press, 2005), which was awarded
the Victor Turner Prize in 2005.
Alex Preda is Reader in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh,
UK. He is the author of Framing Finance. The Boundaries of Markets and
Modern Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Information,
Knowledge, and Economic Life. An Introduction to the Sociology of Markets
(Oxford University Press, 2009), in addition to several articles. His cur-
rent research focuses on anonymous transactions in online financial
markets and on the activities of non-professional traders.
Michael Rafferty is Senior Researcher at the Workplace Research Centre,
University of Sydney. His research is at the interface of international
viii Contributors
capital and labour markets, and most recently he has been research-
ing the operation and performance of pension funds. He also works
extensively on financial innovation. With Dick Bryan, he is the author
of Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives,
Capital and Class (Palgrave, 2006).
Uwe Vormbusch is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of
Sociology, Mainz University. He received his PhD from Frankfurt
University in 2002 and finished his Habilitation at Jena University in
2008. He teaches economic sociology, the sociology of accounting and
the sociology of technology. His most recent book is about govern-
ing by numbers in contemporary capitalism: Herrschaft der Zahlen. Zur
Kalkulation des Sozialen in der kapitalistischen Moderne (Campus, 2010).
He has also written ‘Talking Numbers – Governing Immaterial Labour’
(Economic Sociology Newsletter 10, 2008) and ‘Accounting. Die Macht der
Zahlen im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus’ (Berliner Journal für Soziologie 14,
2004).
1
Introduction
Massimo Amato, Luigi Doria and Luca Fantacci
Emotions, identity, values, happiness – all different aspects of life are
pervaded by a growing complex of calculative practices. Calculation,
ubiquitous and multifarious, is driven not merely by an extension
of the scope of exchange, but by a deeper urge towards generalized
equalization and totalization. Money is the measure of exchange.
As a unit of account and a means of payment, it serves the purpose
of exchange. Yet, money increasingly has become itself an object of
exchange and calculation on financial markets that tend less to the
production and exchange of actual goods, and more to the elimina-
tion of all uncertainty by means of universal exchangeability. How is
it that, in this overwhelming plethora of money and calculation, the
economy seems to have lost its measure? The essays collected here
investigate, from various viewpoints, how calculation and money, in
their nature, relations and transformations, bear upon the meaning of
measure in economic life.
The volume does not merely intend to present an array of various
scholarly positions concerning money and calculation. Nor does it
intend to be a systematic treatise on the notions of money and calcula-
tion, on their historical forms or their current embodiments.
The guiding idea of the book is that questions on the nature of
money and the nature of economic calculation are bound by a con-
stitutive co-belonging. The central assumption is, in other words,
that the understanding of key dimensions of economic life continu-
ously involves interpretations of the relationship between money and
calculation.
Despite its importance, this relationship tends to remain unex-
plored or implicit. The interrogation of how money calculates and
is calculated tends in fact to remain on a different plane than the
1