This article is an attempt to classify the creature known as <italic>Homo economicus</italic>. Despite its name, <italic>Homo economicus</italic>' line of descent through classical and neoclassical economics indicates that it is barely an evolutionary relative of <italic>Homo sapiens</italic> at all -- that, in fact, it has been traditionally...

This paper investigates the device of scraping, a technique for the automated capture of online data, and its application in social research. We ask how this 'medium-specific' technique for data collection may be rendered analytically productive for social research. We argue that, as a technique...

<title>Abstract</title> This article explores the homology between states of affect as represented in literary texts by Emerson, Poe, and Alcott, and the stages of the business cycle of 1832--1842. It argues that recurrent cycles of mania, panic, and depression served to habituate Americans to the business...

In a capitalist epoch of separation, disintegration, analysis, and individualizing the social order had to be reconstituted. That order needed to base itself on the same fluid, individualistic values that drove the market. This essay argues that a group of new nervous disorders in the nineteenth...

This paper uses empirical work on a piece of performance art to think through the relation between ‘work’ and ‘art’, and by implication, ‘culture’ and ‘economy’. Beginning with the idea that the intelligibility of both is produced through similar forms of rule following and rule...

This article analyses popular accounts of financial innovations such as the stock ticker in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Recent social studies of finance (e.g. Preda 2009) have drawn attention to the socio-technical performative agency of such new modes of disseminating...

The website ‘Punternet’ contains customer service reviews (‘field reports’) of commercial sex encounters in the UK's indoor sex market. Treating Punternet as a calculative device shows how ordinary understandings of morality underpin consumer markets, as field reports qualify commercial...

The cultural worker is a key figure in social networks, producing the vast amounts of data which are integral to the profits sites of sites such as Facebook. This paper develops a conceptual framework that accounts for the contradictory ways in which user-generated data both extends networks of...