Performativity in economics

Abstract

Introducing the theme of performativity and placing it within the field of cultural economics makes the role that performativity plays in economics a logical place to start and acknowledge. The idea that economics does not describe an existing external "economy" but brings that economy into being: economics realizes economics, creating the phenomena it describes. This idea is now recognized by many authors as one of the major contributions to economic sociology and has been accompanied by heated debates in the social sciences about the actual influence of economics and economists on economic practices and, more generally, on society and political processes. But when one considers the 'cultural' dimension - that is: when one moves beyond economic sociology to the wider intellectual domain of the social sciences and humanities in general - then an interest in performativity has developed as a way of approaching issues whose importance it goes far beyond the pure processes of language. Since some authors have outlined the philosophical proposition that speech is not primarily or exclusively "constative", that is, it does not just "state" facts, but, under certain happy conditions, "acts" or "realizes" certain realities, the idea of performativity has attracted theorists involved in political and social science, philosophy and economic theory.