IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jculte/v7y2014i3p334-352.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On the Politics of Calculative Devices

Author

Listed:
  • Ine Van Hoyweghen

Abstract

This article examines the politics of calculative devices in one of the most successful areas of finance, the life insurance business. By empirically tracing an insurance applicant's risk trajectory, it analyses how calculative devices perform insurance underwriting through acting on insurance risk decisions. This allows one to document what calculative devices exactly do, and to point out the political effects of what they do. First, it highlights the fact that, contrary to thinking in terms of 'the insurance logic', there are multiple ways of calcuting life insurance risks. Second, it underscores the crucial role of calculative devices in that process by demonstrating how they align considerations as divergent as economics and medicine to perform a life insurance market. It then demonstrates the political effects of these calculative devices by making explicit how the latter contribute to the production of inequalities in calculative power in life insurance. In this way, the article links up insights from the performativity approach in the sociology of markets with the broader question of governing economic life. Such an approach, it is argued, provides the opportunity to open up the organization of economic markets and to put classic questions of justice and power struggles in economic markets on the agenda again.

Suggested Citation

  • Ine Van Hoyweghen, 2014. "On the Politics of Calculative Devices," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(3), pages 334-352, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:7:y:2014:i:3:p:334-352
    DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2013.858062
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2013.858062
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/17530350.2013.858062?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Donald Mackenzie & Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu, 2007. "Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics," Post-Print halshs-00149145, HAL.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. McFall, Liz, 2015. "Is digital disruption the end of health insurance? Some thoughts on the devising of risk," economic sociology. perspectives and conversations, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, vol. 17(1), pages 32-44.
    2. Niskanen, Johan & Rohracher, Harald, 2022. "A politics of calculation: Negotiating pathways to zero-energy buildings in Sweden," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 179(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lilian Muchimba & Alexis Stenfors, 2021. "Beyond LIBOR: Money Markets and the Illusion of Representativeness," Journal of Economic Issues, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 55(2), pages 565-573, April.
    2. Leigh Johnson, 2013. "Index Insurance and the Articulation of Risk-Bearing Subjects," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(11), pages 2663-2681, November.
    3. Monia Niero & Charlotte L. Jensen & Chiara Farné Fratini & Jens Dorland & Michael S. Jørgensen & Susse Georg, 2021. "Is life cycle assessment enough to address unintended side effects from Circular Economy initiatives?," Journal of Industrial Ecology, Yale University, vol. 25(5), pages 1111-1120, October.
    4. Saurabh Arora & Naomi Baan Hofman & Vinod Koshti & Tommaso Ciarli, 2013. "Cultivating Compliance: Governance of North Indian Organic Basmati Smallholders in a Global Value Chain," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(8), pages 1912-1928, August.
    5. Leon Wansleben, 2013. "Dreaming with BRICs," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(4), pages 453-471, November.
    6. Loconto, Allison & Rajão, Raoni, 2020. "Governing by models: Exploring the technopolitics of the (in)visilibities of land," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    7. Peter Miller, 2008. "Calculating Economic Life," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 1(1), pages 51-64, March.
    8. Aleksandra Kuzior & Aleksy Kwilinski & Ihor Hroznyi, 2021. "The Factorial-Reflexive Approach to Diagnosing the Executors’ and Contractors’ Attitude to Achieving the Objectives by Energy Supplying Companies," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(9), pages 1-16, April.
    9. Dawn Thilmany & Lilian Brislen & Hailey Edmondson & Mackenzie Gill & Becca B. R. Jablonski & Jairus Rossi & Tim Woods & Samantha Schaffstall, 2021. "Novel methods for an interesting time: Exploring U.S. local food systems’ impacts and initiatives to respond to COVID," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 65(4), pages 848-877, October.
    10. François-Xavier de Vaujany & Sabine Carton & Carine Dominguez-Perry & Emmanuelle Vaast, 2012. "Performativity and Information Technologies: An inter-organizational perspective," Post-Print halshs-00851315, HAL.
    11. Mélodie Cartel & Franck Aggeri, 2013. "Exploring low carbon futures," Post-Print hal-01117309, HAL.
    12. Pierpaolo Andriani & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, 2015. "Transactional innovation as performative action: transforming comparative advantage in the global coffee business," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 25(2), pages 371-400, April.
    13. Hervé Dumez, 2010. "Le Libellio d'Aegis," Post-Print hal-00546720, HAL.
    14. Horacio Ortiz, 2012. "Anthropology – of the Financial Crisis," Chapters, in: James G. Carrier (ed.), A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, Second Edition, chapter 35, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    15. Loconto, Allison & Desquilbet, Marion & Moreau, Théo & Couvet, Denis & Dorin, Bruno, 2020. "The land sparing – land sharing controversy: Tracing the politics of knowledge," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    16. Franck Cochoy & Martin Giraudeau & Liz McFall, 2010. "Performativity, Economics And Politics," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(2), pages 139-146, July.
    17. Heidi Østbø Haugen, 2018. "The unmaking of a commodity: Intermediation and the entanglement of power cables in Nigeria," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 50(6), pages 1295-1313, September.
    18. Walter, Timo, 2019. "Janus Face of Inflation Targeting_Walter_PrePrint," OSF Preprints 9fmhe, Center for Open Science.
    19. Iain White, 2020. "Rigour and rigour mortis? Planning, calculative rationality, and forces of stability and change," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(14), pages 2885-2900, November.
    20. Okamoto, Noriaki, 2022. "Financialisation in the context of cross-shareholding in Japan: the performative pursuit of better corporate governance," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 117994, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:7:y:2014:i:3:p:334-352. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJCE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.