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Performativity and Emergence of Institutions

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Enacting Dismal Science

Part of the book series: Perspectives from Social Economics ((PSE))

Abstract

The article argues that performativity theory can shed light on the process of emergence of institutions. This process is not strictly constitutive: Institutions such as a new state, a new political party, or a firm do not appear at the very moment when somebody declares them as existent. There is always a time lag between the words (declaration) and an emergence of a social fact. In between, processes of persuasion, becoming accepted, that is, processes of formation of common beliefs and expectations, take place. Those processes refer to the perlocutionary aspects of speech acts and are theatrical in nature. Performativity is always about performance (theatricality of language). At the heart of performativity is not the question of how economists form economy but the question of how economic phenomena come into being in the processes of joint staging of fictions and making believe.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was first presented at the European Society for the History of Economic Thoughts (ESHET) conference in St. Petersburg in 2012. I thank all participants for the very productive discussion. I also am grateful to Ivan Boldyrev and Birger Priddat for valuable comments and helpful references.

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  1. School of Management, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Ekaterina Svetlova

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  1. Ekaterina Svetlova
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  1. Berlin, Germany

    Ivan Boldyrev

  2. Leicester, United Kingdom

    Ekaterina Svetlova

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Svetlova, E. (2016). Performativity and Emergence of Institutions. In: Boldyrev, I., Svetlova, E. (eds) Enacting Dismal Science. Perspectives from Social Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48876-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48876-3_8

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