Leaky data: How Wonga makes lending decisions

[Como parte de nuestra colaboración inter-redes publicamos este post conjuntamente con Charisma-Network. Joe Deville investiga el controversial uso que hace la empresa prestamista Wonga de las huellas que dejamos involuntariamente en internet para evaluar a sus potenciales clientes. Como siempre, comentarios - en español o inglés - son muy bienvenidos]

Wonga.com is not only the most high profile and controversial payday lender in the UK, it is also the most technologically advanced. By automatically sorting through 8,000 different data points, it claims to be particularly good at sorting borrowers who will repay from those who will not, based on its distinctive method of credit assessment. But, apart from Wonga insiders, no-one quite knows how this is done. I’m going to look at what you can learn from what is publically available – once you know how to look – and what the implications might be, as these practices spread. 

Policy Entrepreneurs, Think Tanks y Trabajo Académico: Debates en torno a la ‘práctica intelectual’ y la construcción de la Política Pública.

Durante el mes de abril, uno de los temas que ocupó la agenda pública en Chile fue la destitución del Ministro de Educación Harald Beyer por parte del poder legislativo, hecho que se concretó el día 17 de abril de este año. Alrededor de este proceso fluyó de un modo más subterráneo una muy interesante discusión acerca de la calidad de académico e intelectual del mencionado Ministro. Por una parte el oficialismo, así como otros actores, a través de diversas alocuciones o cartas publicadas en medios de comunicación, declararon su abierto apoyo describiéndolo como un académico de larga trayectoria, un ‘intelectual latinoamericano’ (como la carta “Intelectuales de américa latina apoyan a harald beyer”). Sin embargo, por otra parte otros actores cuestionaron su identidad intelectual y/o académica,  aludiendo a que su currículum no cumpliría las exigencias propias que se imponen al actual trabajo académico, dando cuenta del mismo personaje como un mero operador proveniente de un Think Tank ligado a poderosos grupos empresariales. El interés de este debate para el presente post tiene que ver con cómo, a través de éste, se desenvuelve un dilema en torno a la naturaleza del trabajo académico y su relación con el desarrollo de políticas públicas.  Particularmente me interesa contribuir y estimular una conversación en torno a cómo nosotros, como actores de esto que denominamos trabajo académico, estamos participando de una suerte de fragmentación de nuestro propio trabajo académico ligado al espacio universitario, en el contexto de la emergencia cada vez más evidente de un nuevo actor, desplegado como actor ‘intelectual’, que ha tomado una creciente relevancia en los en la construcción de una política pública supuestamente inspiradas en argumentos técnicos y evidencia empírica. Este nuevo actor ha sido señalado por algunos autores (ver, por ejemplo Kingdom, 1995; y Mintrom y Norman, 2009)  como un emprendedor político (Policy Entrepreneurs).

Assembling the Transactions Archive

Taylor Nelms nos cuenta de un muy interesante post y excelente invitación que comienza así:

“Debt seems to be all around us—in monthly credit card statements, newspaper headlines and debates about predatory lending, student loans, austerity and stimulus—and is again at the forefront of popular consciousness and the anthropological imagination. After the recent financial crisis, anthropologists have begun to question what we can contribute to this newly urgent consideration of debt and money. In this short commentary we introduce a potentially fruitful line of inquiry into debt as a set of material practices yielding its own artifacts, lasting and ephemeral. Our call for attention to the material cultures of debt and money is issued in conjunction with the announcement of a new online forum dedicated to documenting and reflecting upon transactions artifacts past, present and future.

Cfp: Exploring the Performativity of Marketing

JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT SPECIAL ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS, Exploring the Performativity of Marketing: Theories, Practices and Devices. Guest Editors: Dr. Katy Mason, Lancaster University Management School, UK; Dr. Hans Kjellberg, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden; Dr. Johan Hagberg, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. All manuscripts submitted must strictly follow the guidelines for the Journal of Marketing Management. The closing date for submission is 29 November 2013 for publication in 2015.

On valuing networks and dissonance. An interview with David Stark

David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. His most recent book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, was published by Princeton University Press in 2009. In this interview, we talked about epistemology, economic sociology, music and dissonance at the European University Institute, where David spent some time as Fernand Braudel Fellow in May 2012. Here I reproduce some highlights of that conversation.

Are markets matching Callon and Roth?

[Como parte de nuestra colaboración inter-redes este post es publicado conjuntamente con Charisma-Network]

The last meeting of our “Copenhagen market group”[i] was devoted to an increasingly influential stream within current economics, namely “market design”. The discussion left me with the somehow perplexing puzzle I am trying to unfold in this post: isn’t this type of economics almost too close to the ‘markets as calculative collective devices’[ii] approach developed by Michel Callon and colleagues so influential among us -non-economists market researchers- in the last years?

Cfp: Money, Credit, Value: Devices, Practices… and Making the ‘Economic’

Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), October
9 – 12, 2013 San Diego, California, Town and Country Resort and Convention Center (http://www.4sonline.org/meeting). Money, Credit, Value: Devices, Practices and Modes of Knowing, Sensing and Making the ‘Economic’ (Open Panel 33.). Abstracts can be submitted electronically at http://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s13/, the deadline is March 17, 2013. Contact andras.novoszath@open.ac.uk

On Risk, Devices and Responsible Financial Innovation. An Interview with Yuval Millo

Yuval Millo has the position of Professor of Social Studies of Finance and Management Accounting at the School of Management of Leicester University. He is a leading contributor to the emerging field of Social Studies of finance (SSF), which develops a unified analytical framework that includes elements from accounting, financial economics and sociology and analyses dynamics in and around financial markets. SSF pays particular attention to the technological and organizational infrastructure that affect price formation. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, Yuval’s current research includes the emergence of electronic trading in financial exchanges (with Daniel Beunza and Juan-Pablo Pardo-Guerra, LSE), the evolution of accounting standards for testing the impairment of assets (with Andrea Mennicken, LSE) and the rise of the Social Return On Investment methodology (with Emily Barman, Boston University and Matt Hall, LSE).

Elites económicas y políticas: llamado a contribuciones

X Jornadas de Sociología de la UBA. 20 años de pensar y repensar la sociología. Nuevos desafíos académicos, científicos y políticos para el siglo XXI. 1 al 6 de julio de 2013. Llamado a presentar contribuciones a la sesión “Sociología de las elites”, cuya responsable es Mariana Heredia. Co-organizadores: Ana Castellani, Paula Canelo y Gastón Beltrán. Mail de contacto: heredia.mar@gmail.com y gabibenza@yahoo.com.ar. Recepción de resúmenes hasta 31 de marzo.

Seminar Review: Making things valuable – CBS (first part)

[Como parte de nuestra colaboración inter-redes este post es publicado conjuntamente con Charisma-Network]

Pricing cell phone numbers in Beirut. Photo: Sidsel Nelund

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend an excellent two-day workshop “Making things valuable” held at the Copenhagen Business School. The final program had eight presenters – Peter Miller, Paulo Quattrone, Wendy Espeland, David Stark, Martha Poon, Lucien Karpik, Celia Lury and Vicent Lépinay – each with an hour for presentation and Q&A. Unsurprisingly, these very rich two days left me thinking about many different things and my thoughts went in many directions. In this post (and hopefully in a second one too), I am going to try and organize what I heard. However, more than giving a full account of the event, I am going to focus mostly on one main issue, which, as expected, was central in at least half of the presentations, namely: quantification in the form of rankings and scores. Considering that the lineup of the workshop included some of the most influential authors of these topics today, in the next paragraphs I am going to use their work to illustrate what I understand is the state of the art in this domain (follow this link for my slightly longer summary of the previous literature), to finish with a short remark about an issue I believe has somehow been left aside: how to stop rankings.