10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17487
application/pdf
2038-3460
17487
2
en
Chris Ivory
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
David Neyland, Vera Ehrenstein and Sveta Milyaeva, Can Markets Solve Problems? An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberalism in Action, MIT Press, 2019
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
11
Book Reviews
2021-03-09
2023-06-27
2021-03-09
2023-10-16
154-158
TS
Chris Ivory
2020
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17487
154
Anglia Ruskin University
2038-3460
2
en
158
David Neyland, Vera Ehrenstein and Sveta Milyaeva, Can Markets Solve Problems? An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberalism in Action, MIT Press, 2019
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17487/16334
11
154                                                             Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

       access, use and attitudes to technology in Europe’s schools, Brussels, Euro-
       pean Union.
Fenwick, T. and Edwards, R. (2010) Actor-network Theory in Education, London,
      Routledge.
Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. and Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging Approaches to Edu-
      cational Research: Tracing the Socio-Material, London, Routledge.
Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society, New York, Harper and Row.
MIUR (2015) Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale, URL http://www.istru-
     zione.it/scuola_digitale/allegati/Materiali/pnsd-layout-30.10-WEB.pdf,
     [Accessed 2019-04-30].
Postman, N. (1995) The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, New
      York, Vintage.
Selwyn, N. and Jandrić, P. (2020) Postdigital Living in the Age of Covid-19: Unset-
       tling What We See as Possible, in “Postdigital Science and Education”,
       2(3), pp. 989-1005.



                                       ***
    David Neyland, Vera Ehrenstein and Sveta Milyaeva
Can Markets Solve Problems? An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberalism in
Action, Cambridge, MA, the MIT Press, 2019, pp. 336

Chris Ivory Anglia Ruskin University

    Neyland, Ehrenstein and Milyaeva’s monograph poses the question of
whether or not markets solve problems. Although ultimately the authors
leave the reader to answer this question for themselves, they do provide
more than enough empirical detail to allow them to do so. After a ground-
ing in the fundaments of neoliberalism (e.g. Harvey 2005) and the issues
associated with markets being introduced to areas from which the public
sector wishes to withdraw, the reader is introduced to the sensibilities of
social Studies of Science and Technology through the work of Callon
(1998; 2007) and others. Through these works, the reader is alerted to the
fact that markets are created – through disentangling relations between ac-
tors before re-entangling them into new configurations. Such work, draw-
ing as it does on ANT, also draws attention both to important non-human
actors – non-human actors form the network linkages the make possible
these new configurations - and to the fact that markets are performative,
the result of the work done by the many public and private organizations
who undertake to create them. This introductory chapter is clear to note
Book Review                                                                 155
also the negative consequences of creating markets – primarily through the
mechanism of externalizing unwanted costs. Thus, such issues as living
wages, working conditions, environmental degradation and loss of rights
are seen as outside of the strategic and legal purview of the organizations
involved. Yet, as the authors note, externalizing costs is precisely the rea-
son that markets are made to appear more “efficient” than managed public
services burdened with broader social responsibilities.
    The book then goes on, through subsequent chapters, to lay out the
detail of their own original empirical work. The chapters comprise a num-
ber of examples of attempts to instigate working markets in previously
publicly funded arenas and in one instance, a new market where the exist-
ing one was failing. The examples covered include using markets to regu-
late carbon emissions through carbon trading, persuading pharmaceutical
companies to make low-cost vaccines for the third world by guaranteeing
sales, using competitive pressures (ranking) to determine the allocation of
funding for university research in the UK, transforming private data into a
market where citizens can secure ownership over and then rent their data,
bringing private actors in to deliver services for vulnerable children and
the privatization of UK student maintenance through a loans system and
saleable student debt.
    These empirical accounts are really the heart of the book. They provide
an extensive and detailed resource for academics, students and policy mak-
ers interested in precisely how markets are created. The accounts build
only loosely on the work of ANT authors in showing how markets are lit-
erally brought into being through accounting techniques, contract negoti-
ations, demand guarantees and return calculations. The authors unpack
how markets are negotiated and re-negotiated over time to meet the needs
of its defined stakeholders and beneficiaries. The journeys from public
good and prevention of harm, to markets and investment opportunities,
we find, are hard fought, complex and expensive.
    Throughout these chapters there is a great deal of constraint on the part
of the authors. We are walked through even-handed and pluralistic ac-
counts of the minutia of how and what it is that forms and holds markets
together. In many respects the accounts function as mini-histories of the
work of market builders. While the focus is upon how markets are achieved
there are still plenty of examples of how this work can produce poor out-
comes. We learn, for example, that the system of “carbon trading” put in
place to replace pollution regulation, gave poor results because EU nego-
tiators, keen to placate industry, set pollution limits too high. These were
then easily met by normal technology change. Because of the difficulty of
arriving at the first set of agreements, there was little appetite to go through
the process again to adjust the limit on more than an irregular basis. We
find a similar story for the UK governments’ decision that University’s
should compete with one another for public research support. We learn
156                                                        Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

about the huge effort and cost required to set up the scheme and the enor-
mous efforts gone to ensure the credibility of the results. What we learn
from the examples is that markets take huge amounts of administrative ef-
fort to set up, meaning that once in place they resist adjustment – unlike
the imaged free-markets of neoliberal advocates – real markets are complex
socio-material, behemoth and quasi-bureaucratic entanglements.
    Social care provides a more disturbing example of what it really means
to turn a public service into a market. Here private agencies were brought
in to work with/for local authorities in social care, using what is termed
Social Impact Bonds. In the example provided private agencies where of-
fered the opportunity to work with children at risk of being taken into care
– investors would be paid by results, numbers of children kept out of care,
ensuring their best effort through market discipline but also showing a
clear path toward profit. In effect, disadvantaged children were trans-
formed into an investment opportunity. The scheme, a pilot and skewed
heavily in favour of investors, was scrapped after a change in government
policy. Government withdrawal from responsibility for financially sup-
porting students in the UK through government grants created a similar
“investment opportunity” – this time in the form of packaged up student
debt that was then sold to investors. Here, government increasingly wor-
ried that it would not be able to “sell” the debt, was forced to offer it on
increasingly advantageous terms. Concerns on both sides of the Atlantic
over the use of personal data reflects the different political hues of how
markets are deployed. While in the US individuals are assumed to own
their data and are therefore taken to be in a position to seek economic rent
from it as responsible economic actors. In the EU, GDPR rules reflected a
quite different assumption, that citizens should be protected from preda-
tory data-monetizing enterprises.
    The accounts themselves as I say are highly restrained and to an extent
this is frustrating. They are detailed, but not made to work very hard in
terms of new theoretical insights or critical analysis. So much more could
have been said, for example, about the huge con that student loans were
(Mason 2016). The book would have felt richer if the reader where given a
sense of this historical roots of this shift, the economic chaos that has re-
sulted from it and the social and growing political disenchantment in it. It
was also surprising, but perhaps in keeping the restrained tenor of the
book, that the authors avoided the more scandalous examples of private
investment in public goods in the UK, US and elsewhere – such as public-
private partnerships in building schools and hospitals in the UK (e.g. Plim-
mer 2016) or privatized water supply where under-investment has led to
crumbling infrastructure and to attempts by some municipalities to pull
ownership back into public hands (e.g. McDonald and Swyngedouw
2019). Or for that matter, the deaths that have occurred on British railways
as a direct result of under-resourced privatized maintenance (Murray
2002). Moreover, given the empirical detail of this book, I think there was
Book Review                                                                    157
an opportunity to talk more about precisely why market entanglements end
up producing such poor results. STS theory in markets, such as Callon’s,
is not further developed across the chapters.
     The final chapter returns once again to theory and is more analytical in
approach. Here, again, rather than building on the ANT introduced in the
first chapter, we are introduced instead to Kuhn’s concept of scientific par-
adigms and in particular his idea of problem-solution coupling. The depar-
ture into quite different theory is odd, but the subsequent discussion is
actually a very useful way to frame how market dogma operates. Problems
are defined in such a way as to align with marketisation-as-solution. Fur-
ther problems, stemming from the attempt to marketize, are coupled to
further solutions (standards, contracts, participation) as means to move
forward, while remaining within a market solution frame. Many aspects of
the cases are then re-described in this framing to good effect. As a reader I
was a little unsure why this concept was not a shaping narrative throughout
the accounts. There are some links here back to more contemporary STS
thinking, but largely by way of analogy with what is already evident from
the empirical evidence collected.
     The book’s strength ultimately is in its empirical detail rather than in
its theoretical or critical contribution. Readers of this book will gain excel-
lent insights into the minutia of, in particular, the detailed contract negoti-
ations that bring markets into reality, as well as useful insights into how to
create vehicles to attract private investment to existing public services. The
book is a must for policy makers who may still be thinking of heading down
this road (or indeed who need to understand where they are presently, in
order to more easily reverse out of it). What the book is not is an attempt
to move STS theory on or to provide a thoroughgoing critique of market-
ization. Students of neoliberal-inspired policy making will find plenty of
detail. The book offers valuable insight into how markets are made to
work, while ultimately sidestepping the question of whether they do or not.
Spoiler alert, they don’t – but we knew that already.

References
Callon, M. (1998) The Laws of Markets, Oxford, Blackwell.
Callon, M. (2007) An Essay on the Contribution of Markets to the Growing Pro-
        liferation of the Social, in “Theory, Culture and Society”, 24, pp. 139-63.
Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, Oxford University
       Press.
Mason, P. (2016) PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, UK, Penguin Random
      House.
McDonald, D. A. and Swyngedouw, E. (2019) The New Water Wars: Struggles for
     Remunicipalisation, in “Water Alternatives”, 12 (2), pp. 322-333.
Murray, A. (2002) Off the Rails: The Crisis on Britain's Railways (Britain's Great
158                                                             Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

       Rail Crisis – Cause, Consequences and Cure), London, Verso.
Plimmer, G. (2016) Rising NHS trust deficits spark investor concerns, in “Financial
      Times”, June 20th.



                                       ***
   Tom Nichols
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and
Why It Matters, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 252

Paolo Volonté Politecnico di Milano

    According to Wiebe Bijker, Roland Bal and Ruud Hendriks (2009) we
live in paradoxical times. Scientific advice is asked for all serious problems,
but as soon as it is given, citizens, politicians and organizations comment
on and criticize it. This paradox of scientific authority is at the origins of
what has been called a crisis of expertise, a widespread trend which is
grounded not only in socio-technical developments, such as the spread of
social media, but also in cultural and political changes related to new vi-
sions of democracy and the democratization of science.
    The crisis of expertise is a topic that is currently in vogue, and has been
widely discussed in the field of science and technology studies and other
academic communities (Collins and Evans 2007; see issue 3/2003 of “So-
cial Studies of Science”). This area of research is also linked to a more re-
cent, broader debate about the so-called “post-truth era” (see issue 4/2017
of “Social Studies of Science”), which highlights the development of an
“epistemic turn” in Western democracies that produced a less critical re-
lationship with deception (Keyes 2004). Under the aegis of the post-truth
thesis, scholars have shown how a plurality of “truth markets” coexist
within the new post-truth regime (Harsin 2015).
    In this context, it is disappointing that an established scholar such as
Tom Nichols does not feel the need to address the studies and opinions of
his fellow experts, even in a text with pretensions to popular appeal. There
is something paradoxical in describing and stigmatizing the end of exper-
tise without drawing upon the knowledge of experts on the end of exper-
tise. A typical failure on the part of experts that has contributed to the crisis
of expertise is, according to Nichols, cross-expertise violations, that is, the
overconfidence that leads experts to make pronouncements on matters far
beyond their general area of competence and use their own epistemic au-
thority to lend weight to hastily constructed opinions. This book is a bla-
tant example of a political scientist overreaching into a field in which he
lacks competence.
