Convenors
Daromir Rudnyckyj, University of Victoria
daromir@uvic.ca
Coco Kanters, Utrecht University
c.l.kanters@uu.nl
In recent years social scientists have increasingly conducted fieldwork among economic agents and on practices that would have seemed foreign to our predecessors of just a generation ago. This work can be broadly categorized under «expert capitalism»: the knowledge-intensive, abstract, and often technical pursuit of profit (Thrift, 1999; Boyer, 2008; Riles, 2010). This work has produced germinal insights regarding the contingent factors that make up expert capitalism, the key role of representations and narrative in constituting the object referred to as an economy, and the unstated assumptions that frame the actions of expert capitalists (Mitchell, 2005; Holmes, 2014; Chong, 2018; Calvão, 2019; Soules, 2019). However, there have been few systematic reflections regarding what strategies are adequate to the empirical, qualitative analysis of expert capitalism (Rudnyckyj, 2024).
This panel seeks to open a conversation about the social scientific methods suited to expert capitalism by bringing together a range of scholars in anthropology and allied fields, such as sociology, geography, and science and technology studies, who are collectively pursuing these goals. Papers addressing fieldwork among expert capitalist interlocutors may include (but is not limited to) lawyers, scientists, engineers, accountants, designers, financiers, bankers, managers and consultants. They also include experts on logistics, real estate, and bankruptcy. The goal is to identify the advantages and limits of classic ethnography as well as to exchange ideas about strategies for conducting fieldwork on expert capitalism.
Open questions
Empirical
- What should be considered expertise in contemporary capitalism? What is expert knowledge?
- What insights do qualitative studies offer in the study of expert capitalism or of capitalism more generally?
- How do qualitative studies of expert capitalism enhance our understanding of political economy today?
- What are the salient changes in fields such as technology, law, and finance that have created the capitalism of today? How have these changes transformed contemporary capitalism?
Methodological
- What examples of fieldwork on expert capitalism have qualitative social scientists pursued? What strategies have social scientists deployed when conducting fieldwork on expert capitalism?
- What are the similarities and differences between classic ethnographic fieldwork and fieldwork on expert capitalism?
- What are the advantages and limitations of a qualitative perspective on expert capitalism compared to the sort of knowledge deployed in other fields, such as economics, law, or finance?
Keywords
ethnography; capitalism; expertise; qualitative methods; fieldwork; knowledge.
Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
political anthropology; economic anthropology; legal anthropology; anthropology of science; anthropology of technology; science and technology studies.
References
Boyer, D.
2008 «Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts», in Anthropology in Action, 15, 2, pp. 38-46.
Calvão, F.
2019 «Crypto‐Miners: Digital Labor and the Power of Blockchain Technology», in Economic Anthropology, 6, 1, pp. 123-134.
Chong, K.
2018 Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China. Durham: Duke University Press.
Holmes, D. R.
2014 Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leins, S.
2018 Stories of Capitalism: Inside the Role of Financial Analysts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, T.
2005 «The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World», in European Journal of Sociology, 46, 2, pp. 297-320.
Riles, A.
2010 «Collateral Expertise: Legal Knowledge in the Global Financial Markets», in Current Anthropology, 51, 6, pp. 795-806.
Rudnyckyj, D.
2024 «Econography: Observing Expert Capitalism», in Current Anthropology, 65, 4, pp. 674-700.
Soules, D. S.
2019 Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Thrift, N.
1999 «The Globalisation of the System of Business Knowledge», in Olds K., Dicken P., Kelly P. F., Kong L., Yeung H. W. (Eds.) Globalisation and the Asia Pacific: Contested Territories. London: Routledge.
Convenors’ bios
Daromir Rudnyckyj is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. He is Past President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (2021-2023). His research addresses globalization, money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state. His current research examines the techno-politics of money, with a focus on experiments in producing complementary monetary forms. He is the author of Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (Chicago 2019) and Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Cornell 2010), which was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society. He is the co-editor, with Filippo Osella, of the volume Religion and the Morality of the Market (Cambridge 2017). Orcid ID: 0000-0003-3940-4881
Coco Kanters is assistant professor at the interdisciplinary School of Liberal Arts. She co-organizes the Contesting Governance research platform at Utrecht University. Her work focuses on entanglements of economies, politics, and expertise. Both her research at University College London and her PhD at Leiden University (2021) examine alternatives to the contemporary monetary system and the professionalisation of local currencies in Europe. She is currently devising a research project on the role of external expertise in policymaking, particularly how bought-in knowledge from consultancies interacts with the expertise of civil servants, organisational cultures, and bureaucratic procedures within the Dutch government. Orcid ID: 0000-0001-9859-2814.