How do social imaginaries impact market systems?
Location: Bedford Square Room 1-01
Speaker: Dr Thomas Robinson, Cass Business School
Abstract: Market systems research focuses on how discursive negotiations among market stakeholders spur change according to specific social logics. However, less is known about how the social imaginary structures market stakeholders’ moral assessment of change towards the future and how this impacts market speeds. Based on a comparative discourse analysis of news media coverage on robots in Britain (3,023 articles) and the United States (2,104 articles), we therefore ask: How do social imaginaries impact market systems? Our empirical model captures three discursive causations that appear from social imaginaries: 1)'Embedding’ which establishes the technology as a social function; 2) 'Prediction' establishes imagined future outcomes to assess the moral (in-)validation of the technology; and 3)"market speed calibration" provides discourses about optimal rate of change brought about by market offering going into the future, i.e. as too fast or too slow. From our empirical analysis we introduce the scale from permissive to restrictive moral regimes as a new dimension in Market Systems Dynamics.
Biography of speaker: Thomas Derek Robinson is a Lecturer at Cass Business School. He did his PhD on Time and Culture in Consumer Behaviour at the University of Southern Denmark. Thomas’ current research draws on philosophical, sociological and anthropological theories to engage with nostalgia, mobility, non-western material culture, robotics, friendship, food and sleep.