Since the late 1990s, a growing group of scholars writing at the intersection of science studies and economic sociology have explored the creation and transformation of economic things through the metaphor of performance. The first clear statement of this perspective came from Michel Callon [Reference Callon1998a, Reference Callon1998b, Reference Callon1999] in a trio of essays which turned to economics to help address a problem in actor-network theory: where do different kinds of agents come from? How do actors know how to act? Callon argued that economic knowledge (broadly construed to include marketing, accounting, management, and economics proper) created economic subjectivities (ways of calculating) and economic objects (framed bits of the world that could be treated as if they were purely economic, bracketing their complex ties to other domains).

This theoretical programme made a huge splash beyond the confines of science studies in the 2000s, in part as a result of Donald MacKenzie’s work on financial markets. MacKenzie showed how certain calculations made by financial economists helped to shape the options markets whose behavior they purported to describe. The markets converged to the model’s predictions in part because options traders used the model to make their trades [MacKenzie and Millo Reference MacKenzie and Millo2003, MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2006]. Financial economics did not simply offer a (more or less accurate) representation of financial markets but rather helped to bring those markets into line with its image. In 2007, performativity hit its stride with the publication of two edited volumes, Do Economists Make Markets? and Market Devices (both co-edited by Fabian Muniesa). These collections brought together the leading proponents of the approach with its most vocal critics [e.g. Mirowski and Nik-Khah Reference Mirowski and Nik-Khah2007], and helped to concretize performativity of economics as a research agenda.

Now performativity is undergoing a bit of an awkward adolescence. Its two foundational figures (Callon and MacKenzie) have moved on to other, albeit closely related, concepts—“economicization” [Çalişkan and Callon Reference Çalışkan and Callon2009] and “evaluation cultures” [MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2011]. Now, it is not clear whether there is much energy left in performativity. For one thing, recognizing economists as market designers has become even more mainstream than it was a decade ago; the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded for “the practice of market design,” a branch of applied game theory that has been used to create market-like allocation systems for everything from kidneys to medical school admissions. And as economists have increasingly embraced their performative role, criticisms like Mirowski’s seem even more relevant: is there anything critical left in performativity? Fabian Muniesa is ideally positioned to write an agenda-setting book to help shepherd performativity into its next phase.

The Provoked Economy is not an easy book. Readers unfamiliar with existing research on performativity would do best to start with one of the volumes above. Instead, The Provoked Economy offers a nuanced grounding for further research on performativity. The relatively short book is divided into two parts. The first part contains two chapters that provide a comprehensive theoretical overview. The second part offers a collection of empirical vignettes designed to show the reach of performativity.

Chapter one is probably the most useful part of the book. Here, Muniesa surveys the theoretical roots of performativity. If you have ever wondered how the performativity of economics connects to the work of Baudrillard, Derrida, or Foucault (to name just a few), this chapter will be useful. But it also creates a relatively high barrier to entry: readers not already deeply immersed in, and largely sympathetic to, the literature on performativity may find the discussion confusing. Chapter two surveys the existing empirical research, again in a “big tent” style that emphasizes the variety of empirical contexts that have already been usefully analyzed with the concept of performativity. On the whole, part one is a useful corrective very much in the spirit of Callon’s original essays. Performativity, Muniesa argues, is not exclusively, or even primarily, about finance, nor the activities of professional economists. Rather, performativity is about how economic things must be described, provoked, simulated, and made explicit in order to function as such.

Part two contains five short chapters that illustrate aspects of performativity in diverse contexts: the back office of an investment bank, price discovery algorithms in stock exchanges, perfume marketing focus groups, Harvard Business School’s famous case method for management education, and quantitative indicators of research productivity. Performativity is not just about finance, but about marketing, corporate strategy, and governance. Within finance, performativity is useful for thinking about the work of clearing transactions just as much as it for thinking about the stock market itself. This reminder is itself useful, given how much of the debate has been driven by MacKenzie’s work on finance. But the short empirical chapters fail to do much more than illustrate the breadth of the concept. There is not a strong sense of building to something bigger, either a more detailed, better-specified argument about how performativity works, or about its implications for other phenomena of interest. In other words, there is little here to convince a skeptic of the value of performativity.

One reason for this flatness—a problem common to many works focused on the technical aspects of economic exchanges—is the lack of engagement with political economy. Muniesa nicely illustrates the work that has to be performed in order to bring derivative transactions or perfume marketing into existence. But we are not given a sense of how these performances fit into larger contexts. We live in an era of financialization [Krippner Reference Krippner2011], where market metaphors dominate our understandings of everything from our homes [Davis Reference Davis2009] to our universities [Berman Reference Berman2012]. What can a better understanding of the performative character of derivatives or marketing offer scholars interested in the big questions of political economy? I believe the performative turn offers something unique and essential to our understanding of these broader movements, but those connections remain frustratingly implicit.

Making the links between the performativity of economics and political economy explicit will require going beyond descriptions of how economic things are provoked and connecting the technical details to some set of consequences. Here, MacKenzie [Reference MacKenzie2011] offers a useful example—the distinct practices used to evaluate asset-backed securities and synthetic derivatives made possible a productive miscommunication about risks that facilitated the housing bubble and eventual financial crisis. This account requires highlighting an important friction—in this case, between two different ways of describing transactions and simulating their performance. We can imagine other kinds of frictions, counterfactuals, and contrasts that would underscore the importance of the particular way the economic is provoked.

In their absence, Muniesa’s cases end up reading like disconnected descriptive accounts. Perfume marketers have to work to train focus group participants to make sense of smells, but in so doing they transform those participants into something other than the typical consumer. Interesting enough on its own, but what alternative forms of expertise are written out? What can we learn about the perfume industry as a whole from the dominance of these focus groups? Do these practices somehow explain something about gendered bodily performances? A good, performative account would address one or all of these concerns, and in so doing make itself essential to other accounts, other concerns.