Data and Markets: Devices, Practices and Representations - II

Abstract

STS scholars have long been interested in the assorted and diverse devices that equip markets, from market infrastructures to mundane marketing tools like shopping carts, knowledge devices, and measuring instruments. As markets are digitized, data are a key element in the operation of markets in a variety of forms: consumer records, scoring and targeting instruments, customization engines, algorithmic pricing, vending and trading machines. Hence, data act as a versatile, yet vital, apparatus for markets, through the construction of data as a device, a valuation tool, an infrastructure, or an asset. This panel aims to explore these various facets of data, and how these help to achieve markets. We particularly – though not exclusively – welcome contributions on three aspects of market ‘datafication’. First, emergent data-based “images” of the consumer enhance classic customer representations produced by marketing, through data innovations in CRM databases, data brokers’ segments, cookie-based data pools, and social media data. What lies behind these data doubles, and what are their lived and experiential effects on consumers? Secondly, with big data technologies, marketing knowledge is increasingly produced from the analysis of large databases that combine a diverse array of information on consumers, products, firms, and market operations. These data are then stabilized through metrics, dashboards and standards. How do these new knowledge devices reconfigure practices? Third, data fuels market automation mechanisms, such as algorithmic pricing, recommendation engines, programmatic advertising, high-frequency trading. How do algorithmic markets and digital platforms take place in practice, and how do they reconfigure market agencements?

Individual Presentations

• A Maussian Bargain: The Give and Take of the Personal Data Economy - Marion Fourcade, University of California, Berkeley Dept. of Sociology; Daniel N Kluttz, University of California, Berkeley

• Shadow Cultures: The Precarious Agency of Data Subjects between Compliance and Resistance - Malte Ziewitz, Cornell University

• Who Are We? Data, Audiences and Markets - Elizabeth Rose McFall, University of Edinburgh; David Moats, Linköping University, Tema-T (Tema Technology and Social Change)

• An Ethnography of Advertising Categories in the Age of Big Data - Kevin Mellet, Orange Labs; Thomas Beauvisage, Orange Labs; Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Orange Labs; Samuel Coavoux, Orange Labs

Session Organizer

• Mary Ebeling, Drexel University