Journal of Economic Literature
Book Reviews
2026-09-01
David Colander of Middlebury College reviews “Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics” by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, Lucia Siu,. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Ten papers, most originally presented at a workshop held at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris in August 2004, explore the potential of the notion of performativity in economics. Papers discuss the social construction of a perfect market--the strawberry auction at Fontaines-et-Sologne (Marie-France Garcia-Parpet); whether economics is performative--option theory and the construction of derivatives markets (Donald MacKenzie); decoding finance--articulation and liquidity around a trading room (Vincent-Antonin Lepinay); how to do things with experimental economics (Francesco Guala); economic experiments and the construction of markets (Fabian Muniesa and Michel Callon); markets made flesh--performativity, and a problem in science studies, augmented with consideration of the Federal Communications Commission auctions (Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah); which way is up on Callon (Petter Holm); the properties of markets (Timothy Mitchell); whether statistics “perform” the economy (Emmanuel Didier); and what it means to say that economics is performative (Callon). MacKenzie is Professor of Sociology, and Siu is a doctoral student in sociology, at the University of Edinburgh. Muniesa is Researcher and Teacher at the Ecole des Mines de Paris. Index.”