[Air-L] CfP: 4S 2021 - "Markets as Data: Knowledge, Automation, Governance"

[Kevin MELLET]

Dear colleagues,

We invite your submissions to an Open Panel dedicated to “Markets as Data”
at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting which will
be held in Toronto (and online), 6-9 October 2021.

STS scholars have long been interested in the diverse devices that equip
markets, from market infrastructures to mundane marketing tools such as
shopping carts, knowledge devices, and measuring instruments. As markets
are digitized, consumer records, scoring and targeting instruments, trading
machines, and so on are key to how markets operate. Data act as a
versatile, yet vital, apparatus for markets, playing crucial roles in the
form of devices, valuation tools, infrastructures, and assets.

This panel will explore these various facets of data, and how they help to
bring markets into being. We welcome empirical and theoretical
investigations of markets as data. First, with big data technologies,
marketing knowledge is increasingly produced from the analysis of large
databases that combine heterogeneous arrays of information on consumers,
products, firms, and market operations. These data are then stabilized
through metrics, dashboards and standards. How do these new “data objects”
and knowledge devices reconfigure practices? Second, data streams are
fueling automation or decision-making systems: matching algorithms, trade
desks, recommendation engines, smart contracts, market screening
mechanisms, dashboards. How does automation reconfigure firms’ practices in
markets? Third, data are increasingly marketized themselves, harvested from
public-facing services such as social media. How do markets for data impact
“conventional” markets? Finally, data practices are increasingly subject to
specific governance that is often the object of fierce contestation: from
regulation such as GDPR in Europe, industry-level self-regulation and
labelling processes, to local framing within firms. How does the governance
of data, and its contestation shape markets and marketization practices?

Convenors:

–          Thomas Beauvisage, Orange Labs

–          Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh

–          Kevin Mellet, Sciences Po

–          Zsuzsanna Vargha, ESCP

The deadline for submitting proposals is March 8, 2021.

Open panel link:
https://www.4sonline.org/120-markets-as-data-knowledge-automation-governance/

Submission link:  https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/call-for-submissions/