Cantitate/Preț
Produs
Total produse
Vezi coșul
Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculation in the Economy de Jens Beckert

Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculation in the Economy

Editat de Jens Beckert, Richard Bronk
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 9 sep 2019
Uncertain Futures considers how economic actors visualize the future and decide how to act in conditions of radical uncertainty. It starts from the premise that dynamic capitalist economies are characterized by relentless innovation and novelty and hence exhibit an indeterminacy that cannot be reduced to measurable risk. The organizing question then becomes how economic actors form expectations and make decisions despite the uncertainty they face. This edited volume lays the foundations for a new model of economic reasoning by showing how, in conditions of uncertainty, economic actors combine calculation with imaginaries and narratives to form fictional expectations that coordinate action and provide the confidence to act. It draws on groundbreaking research in economic sociology, economics, anthropology, and psychology to present theoretically grounded empirical case studies. These demonstrate how grand narratives, central bank forward guidance, economic forecasts, finance models, business plans, visions of technological futures, and new era stories influence behaviour and become instruments of power in markets and societies. The market impact of shared calculative devices, social narratives, and contingent imaginaries underlines the rationale for a new form of narrative economics.
Citește tot Restrânge

Toate formatele și edițiile

Toate formatele și edițiile Preț Express
Paperback (1) 24847 lei  31-37 zile
  OUP OXFORD – 9 sep 2019 24847 lei  31-37 zile
Hardback (1) 57783 lei  10-16 zile
  OUP OXFORD – aug 2018 57783 lei  10-16 zile

Preț: 24847 lei

Nou

Puncte Express: 373
Preț estimativ în valută:
4755€ • 4939$ • 3950£

Carte tipărită la comandă

Livrare economică 22-28 ianuarie 25

 Adaugă în coș

Wish list
Gift list
Am citit!
Adaugă în listă
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76

Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780198846802
ISBN-10: 0198846800
Pagini: 352
Dimensiuni: 156 x 234 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.53 kg
Editura: OUP OXFORD
Colecția OUP Oxford
Locul publicării:Oxford, United Kingdom

Recenzii

By making the reader enter the complex worlds of uncertainty management in the economy, Uncertain Futures demonstrates the richness of the contemporary field of research about "futures" in the social sciences....This book offers great insights for any social scientist interested in future management and social action.
Uncertain Futures is a stimulating and diverse collection of papers about the consequences of radical uncertainty and how they are managed in practice. As the clear and comprehensive introduction by the editors explains, devices such as narratives, stories, conversations and 'imaginaries' give shape to expectations of the future... Radical uncertainty is not a new concept, but it nevertheless receives less attention than it really deserves. Uncertain Futures is a very welcome and interesting antidote. It left this reader with an enhanced understanding of the expedients that are customarily used as means of either overcoming or else tacitly ignoring radical uncertainty, and of the dangers that a flawed but superficially persuasive narrative can wreak. Mindless positivity is just as dangerous as mindless negativity. For that alone, Uncertain Futures is well worth reading.
Economic theory is built on how people make decisions, and in real life all decisions are made under some degree of fundamental uncertainty - people simply do not know what future they face. Uncertain Futures shows that people use works of imagination, or they use narratives, or calculative practices such as business plans, to act in spite of uncertainty. Economics - thanks to Beckert and Bronk - can build upon a much more realistic human foundation than before. A first-rate contribution to the field.
Especially when uncertainties produced by innovation are compounded by second-order uncertainties about the reactions of others, what should one do when rational calculation of probabilities based on past data is ineffective in predicting the future? From a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives, the essays in this collection creatively explore the role of imagination - long studied as a source of innovation, but until now neglected as a response to uncertainty.
We all have to take decisions with long-term consequences, with little knowledge of what the future may bring. The future is inherently uncertain, so we cannot even estimate probabilities in most cases. The editors of this book have put together a collection of papers by economic sociologists, economists, a psychologist, and an anthropologist to explore the various calculative techniques, narratives, and imaginaries that we use in practice. It is all a far cry from the precise mathematical techniques of the rational expectation world of mainstream DSGE modelling, but none the worse for that.
How do people make sense of the unknown - perhaps unknowable - future? It is becoming increasingly clear that this question is central to our understanding of economic life. The fine collection of studies in this book is a crucial contribution to this vital debate.
I commend this perspective to economists. This is exciting intellectual territory and seems to me rather important at a time when the future seems more uncertain than ever.
Beckert and Bronk suggest that economic actors strongly anchor their expectations in narratives that are akin to literary fictions. The point is that literary narratives are read because they are convincing, not because they are true...Uncertain Futures is a thought-provoking and analytically helpful book. It corrects some established assumptions in economics and sociology and proposes directions for further research in such important fields as decision-making under uncertainty, economic microfoundations, and sociology of expectati
Collectively, the essential introduction and the selected chapters form a powerful and well-developed contribution to current knowledge about the economy in the social sciences. Indeed, what is most striking in this volume is that it successfully offers 'an unashamedly interdisciplinary' (ix) outlook towards economic action under conditions of uncertainty, bringing together several disciplines, from sociology, political economy and anthropology, to social psychology and economics...Whatever the uncertain future may hold for it, Beckert's and Bronk's Uncertain Futures is highly recommended for a wide range of readers, being able to speak to economic sociologists, anthropologists, political economists, psychologists and, why not, economists, too.
An edited volume is usually less than the sum of its parts. It is the other way round in the case of the volume edited by Jens Beckert and Richard Bronk. The intellectual heavyweight of an introduction frames the other, conceptual and empirical, chapters. It gives the reader an elaborate language for describing the phenomena that constitute uncertain futures and distils what the chapters find out about the ways agents deal with fundamental uncertainty . . . The real point about uncertain futures is that what generates uncertainty is not out there but generated inside the system to which it refers.
"Questions about how best to characterise the practical grounds of economic agency and the epistemic tools for interpreting it, remain absolutely wide open. They are posed throughout Uncertain Futures in a variety of interesting forms, making this edited volume by Jens Beckert and Richard Bronk an important contribution to current debates on these fundamental economic issues that deserves to be widely read and constructively criticised." - Samuel Sadian, University of Barcelona

Notă biografică

Jens Beckert is director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. In 2018 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his work reinvigorating the social sciences with an interdisciplinary perspective, especially at the intersection of sociology and economics. His research focuses on the fields of economic sociology, sociology of inheritance, organization theory, and social theory.Richard Bronk is a Visiting Senior Fellow in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He spent seventeen years working in the City of London and the Bank of England before teaching political economy at LSE from 2000-2007. His research now focuses on the role of imagination and language in economics, the dangers of analytical and regulatory monocultures, and the epistemology of markets.