Communication and Economic Life

Liz Moor

• Éditeur: Polity
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745687056
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Medienwissenschaften

When we talk about media and the economy, 'the economy' is usually understood as the macro economy or GDP, while 'the media' usually refers to television and print news, or the digital output of mainstream news providers. But communication about money and the economy in everyday life is far more wide-ranging than this. It is also changing: opportunities to discuss economic matters – whether public or personal – have proliferated online, while new payment systems and shopping platforms embed economic behaviour more deeply into communications infrastructures.

Challenging earlier narrow definitions, this ambitious book offers a new framework for thinking about the role of communication in our economic lives. Foregrounding the broader category of communicative practices, the book understands economic life not only in terms of the macro economy, but more sociologically as a set of processes of providing for material wants and needs. How we talk about these wants and needs, and our means for meeting them, is how we come to understand our economic lives as meaningful. The book explores how our economic lives are constructed communicatively in a variety of modes that move through, but also exceed, mass media – from the symbolism of credit cards to the language used by economists, and from social media promotion to debates in online forums.

Communication and Economic Life is a vital resource for students and scholars in media and communications and sociology, and for anyone interested in how we talk about economic lives.

Part I
Economic action is communicative

This first part of the book, comprising two chapters, explores the communicative constitution of economic life by focusing on the ways economic actions and practices can themselves be seen as communicative. Chapter 1 considers how this idea has been advanced – mostly implicitly – in economic theory, while chapter 2 uses sociological and anthropological perspectives to draw attention to the symbolic communication associated with money, payment and price.

The two chapters provide contrasting accounts of communication in economic life, highlighting how different this term can look, depending on one’s disciplinary perspective. Chapter 1 considers the way that market behaviours (typically, buying or not buying goods at particular price points) are construed as communicating information about consumers’ preferences. It also looks at the way communication itself has been understood as quantities of information that can be acquired or transferred. Chapter 2 shows that the symbolism of monetary media (such as coins and tokens, but also prices) has historically allowed them to communicate various affiliations and solidarities, and how these are being remade in the light of changes to the infrastructure of payments. But these two chapters also differ quite markedly from what one might term ‘mainstream’ accounts of economic communication offered by media and communication studies. Instead of focusing on media coverage of established economic topics, they offer a way of thinking about economic communication as something much more ubiquitous, embedded both in the organization of economic infrastructures and activities, and in the day-to-day practices of ordinary citizens.

Chapter 1
Does homo economicus talk? Communication in economic theory

In 1994, the US communications scholar James Carey claimed that after four decades, efforts to create a rapprochement between the disciplines of communications and economics must be deemed to have failed. It was clear, he said, that ‘communications and economics constitute contradictory frameworks’, and that they provide ‘incommensurably alternative pictures of human action and social life’. Whereas economics is the theory and practice of allocating scarce resources, communication, he claimed, is ‘the process of producing meaning, a resource that is anything but scarce’. As a result, the two disciplines inevitably ‘confront one another blankly’ and their only possible relation would be a countervailing one, in which communications ‘establishes the challenge to the self-regarding preferences that undergird economic thinking’.

Carey laid the blame for this failure squarely at the door of economics, a discipline that, in its neoclassical formulation, could only engage with communication insofar as it could be reduced to a narrow, instrumental ‘transmission’ model. Like many human endeavours, communications had been ‘so transformed by the theory and practice of economics that the former (communications as a practice, meaning as a resource) can hardly be recognized given the dominance of the latter’ (1997 [1994]: 64). In this world of economics imperialism, any understanding of communication would be based on ‘an evacuation of the resources of meaning in the service of profit and power’. Economics, in this view, can only conceive of communication as a commodity (‘information’) or an industry, and cannot accommodate its role as a qualitative, meaning-generating dimension of human behaviour or social life. The only option for the discipline of communications, in the face of this, would be to adopt a stance that emphasized the true, ‘collective’ spirit of communication whose work was the creation of a common and shared world.

Was Carey right to characterize economics in this way, and to draw these conclusions? His argument made it clear that he considered communications and economics to be ‘historically’ rather than ‘ontologically’ exclusive; he seemed to have in mind the possibility of a different understanding of economics based not simply on competition over scarce resources, but rather on something more akin to the substantivist notion of collective provisioning that I have sketched out in the introduction. What is less clear is whether Carey could also imagine an alternative account of communication. Any instance of communication as ‘transmission … for purposes of manipulation and control’ seems, in Carey’s slightly romanticized view, to be an aberration caused by the warping processes of late capitalism, rather than a possibility latent in all forms of human interaction.

This chapter does not seek to resolve Carey’s question about the compatibility or otherwise of two disciplines. But it does share his view that communications scholars ought to be curious about how economists understand communication: if we are interested in the way communication shapes economic experience then we need to engage with the way economists think about communication. This matters because economic theory is often consequential for economic practice. As Donald MacKenzie and colleagues (2008) have shown, economic models are not simply abstract representations that stay in the academy, but often shape action in the real world. Economics can also shape how we think about the meaningfulness of economic events. It is the dominant social science, and the one most likely to be given the authority of a ‘natural’ science. Members of the civil service and government are more likely than ever before to have undergraduate degrees in economics or related subjects like business and accounting (Davis 2017: 598–9). News and other media also draw heavily on those with a background in economics – particularly economists from banks – in commenting on and contextualizing economic news. Thus, even if we know nothing about economics, our understanding of markets and of what we are doing when we participate in economic transactions is at least partly filtered through dominant narratives about what market exchange is and is not. This includes the extent to which it is a communicative, and therefore social, activity.

Economic theory seems at first glance to have little to say about communication. If hypothetical market actors are beings that discuss, argue, complain or persuade, such qualities remain mostly hidden in economic texts. The methodological individualism that underpins economic theory and modelling depends for its effectiveness on excluding those more complex interrelationships that make up much of social life. As Timothy Mitchell (2008) has observed, this is a problem if you think the task of economics is to represent an external world accurately, but much less so if you imagine its role is to organize markets or provide calculative tools and instruments. Indeed, most economists – as well as many other social scientists – would be happy to admit that their models are reductive, but would see the omission of complex ties as a worthwhile trade-off (e.g., Bénabou et al. 2018). My point in this chapter, however, is that a closer examination of economic texts reveals that, just like other social scientists, economists in fact do have implicit ideas about human nature and its typical forms of contact and association. Economic research and theorizing may be concerned with understanding how markets work, but in doing this it unavoidably also proposes implicit accounts of economic being together in the world, and thus of communication.

In the rest of the chapter I outline – in a necessarily selective way – some of what mainstream twentieth and early twenty-first-century economists have had to say (often implicitly rather than explicitly) about the interactional and informational basis of economic life. I focus on these mainstream approaches – rather than more critical or heterodox voices – because these are the ones that are most influential in business, government and the media, and which, rightly or wrongly, have come to speak for the discipline. Before this, however, I examine the idea – found in Adam Smith, but most developed in the notion of ‘revealed preferences’ – that economic action is itself a form of communication. This is in many ways the classic economic view (although as the next chapter shows, a version of it is shared by other disciplines). I then explore economists’ understandings of the term ‘information’. These, I think, are what Carey had in mind when he accused economists of reductionism. I outline key elements of contemporary information economics and show that while it places a substantive ‘communicative’ concept (i.e., information) at its heart, it remains within a broader tradition that sees communication in quantitative terms, and understands it as a series of discrete observable actions, rather than as dialogue or relationship. I briefly discuss the diversions from this found in some forms of game theory, before turning, in the final section, to some of the ways in which economics is changing. Drawing particularly on the growing empirical movement in the discipline, and on areas such as economic geography where the discipline has begun to have more contact with its neighbours, I show that some important work is being done that makes economics potentially more sensitive to the nature and consequences of human and mediated communication than it has been in the past.

Economic action is a form of communication

Perhaps the most obvious way in which economists bring communication and economic action together is in the principle – mostly implicit but occasionally explicit – that economic action is itself a form of communication. This idea has been expressed most fluently in Albert Hirschman’s (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, but its antecedents can be found in Adam Smith’s observations about the parallels between trading and conversation, as well as in the concept of revealed preferences developed by Paul Samuelson and others. References to the parallels between linguistic interaction and market exchange can be found across Smith’s work. In The Wealth of Nations (1991 [1776]), he posits a causal connection between a primary urge to trade and exchange and forms of human contact and sociability centred on the marketplace. The recognition of interdependence that results from this contact – the sense that my self-interest depends upon some degree of contact and cooperation with you – is what drives social harmony and solidarity. The ‘exchanges’ that occur in the marketplace are inevitably not only of goods, but also of words and information, but these latter are presumed to have been driven in the first instance by self-interest. Given this, the account of communication offered here is limited to the transmission of information; whatever happens in practice in market encounters, in theoretical terms it remains at the level of what Peters (1999: 6) describes as ‘the successful linkage of two separate termini’. In Smith’s earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published in 1759), by contrast, a wider canvas is drawn, and human motivation is theorized not only in terms of the seeking out of others for self-interested purposes, but also in terms of the desire for ‘mutual sympathy of sentiments’. Indeed, the desire for mutual sympathy is considered by Smith to be one of the two basic motivations in life (Otteson 2002: 5). The capacity to ‘imaginatively change places’ with others, to understand the world from their point of view, and to seek this out as an end in itself points towards a more profound understanding of communication, involving greater reciprocity, fellow feeling and a sense of ‘contact between interiorities’ (Peters 1999: 6–7).

Which of these is the ‘real’ Smith? The ‘Adam Smith problem’ (Tribe 2008) has often been settled by assuming that the desire to better our position is what drives our economic actions, while the desire for mutual sympathy motivates all the other, presumably non-economic, actions. And yet the history and anthropology of markets suggests that things are not so clear: people routinely blend their economic and their intimate encounters (Zelizer 2005) and markets are key sites of social and civic interaction. It is not always clear where our economic actions end and our non-economic actions begin. Indeed, the doux commerce thesis (the idea that commerce softens and refines otherwise ‘barbarian’ passions) with which Smith and others were associated comes from an earlier non-commercial meaning of the term ‘commerce’: ‘besides trade, the word long denoted animated and repeated conversation and other forms of polite social intercourse and dealings among persons (frequently between two persons of the opposite sex)’ (Hirschman 1977: 61). In this account, the development of commerce involves extending a pre-existing communicative world motivated by non-economic concerns into new realms. In fact, the order of precedence between the urge to trade and the urge to communicate is hard to untangle. David Graeber suggests that for Smith, ‘logic and conversation are really just forms of trading’ (2011: 25), and thus that trade is the original form of, and reason for, contact and communication. And yet in the Lectures on Jurisprudence from which this claim is taken, Smith also talks of the ‘natural inclination every one has to persuade’ (offering a shilling is really ‘offering an argument’) (2011: 394). From this perspective, it is equally plausible to argue that trade is really just a form of conversation or a socially elaborated version of the impulse to persuade.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that Smith’s idea that markets are sites of spontaneous order itself derives from his earlier work on language. Smith’s short essay ‘Considerations co...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Economic action is communicative
• 1. Does homo economicus talk? Communication in economic theory
• 2. The symbolism of money, payment and price
• Part II: Communication constructs economic life
• 3. Promotion
• 4. Information
• 5. Narrative
• 6. Discussion
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement