European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 133

European Policy Analysis

2014). This is not the path we want to
follow in this article. Rather, we would
like demonstrate the importance of the
other function of academic accounts: as
performative for and in practice.

The Three Basic Approaches in the
Performative Mode
Studying the Performative Mode of Policy
Sciences

I

n his well-known How To Do Things
With Words, Austin (1962) coined
the notion of the performativity of
particular speech acts. These are utterances
that say something and actually do what
they express simultaneously. A wedding
officer in an official wedding ceremony
uttering the words: “Hereby I declare
you husband and wife” to a designated
couple, thereby simultaneously changes
the legal-marital status of the man and
the woman involved. From this linguistic
category, Callon (2007, 311–357) derived
the concept of “performation” to denote
how economics as academic discipline
is involved in (co-)“performing” the
economy, for example, by creating new
product markets in line with the idea of
a perfect market, new ways to improve
calculative agencies and calculated
contracts as the quintessential economic
transaction, or new ideas for econometric
modeling to better predict the future
value of a firm’s investments or a nation’s
Gross Domestic Product, and so on.

How do the selective affinities
between disciplinary knowledge and
“real-world” practices come about?
The performation of the discipline of
economics in and on the world of markets
and the economy is not a self-executing

process, but relentless and continuous
hard work. It involves discursive struggles,
self-fulfilling prophecies, expression of
roles as performances in institutional
designs, and prescription. Holm (2007,
235), describing the introduction of
Individual Transferable Quotas in
Norwegian fisheries, observes:

“In order for market actors to
calculate the probable outcomes of their
choices buyer and seller must be produced
as fairly separate and autonomous
agencies. The object to be traded must
be constructed as reasonably stable and
thing-like. A minimum agreement as to
the nature of property rights and how they
can change hands must be negotiated.
These things do not lie in wait…but need
to be constructed, often with tremendous
amounts of hard work (italics by rh&hc).
...The more institutionalized, naturalized,
technological, and thing-like they
become, the better they will work in disembedding agents and objects from their
social, cultural, and technological contexts
(italics by rh&hc), setting them free to
realize—put into reality—the market
model invented by the economist.”

Thus, theory impacts on practice
by “dis-embedding” agents and objects
from their life worlds and action contexts.
Practitioners are nudged to disregard
their habits and tacit knowledge, and
heed, and adapt to their situation,
precepts inspired by the abstract and
more widely distributed formal insights
from economics. Even stronger, if actors
are unwilling to do so, they are either
seduced into compliance by means of
new incentive systems or simply replaced
by other actors who are more willing to be
enrolled in the new network and its rules
of the game. A complementary, more
neo-pragmatist route to performativity,

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