Economic phenomena are shaped by performative models – WERK can incorporate the performative queer rupturing of heteronormative ideals into the everyday and spill up to change economic outcomes.

Our findings have implications for the study of ‘statements’ in their broadest sense and their performativity in the economy (Callon, 2007). This includes those that come from people’s everyday

thinking and acting in the economy (Swedberg, 2018), something the social science literature has

overlooked from a performativity perspective. Our findings show that such statements do not seem

to be ‘incorporated in the heads of economic actors’ as mere ‘precarious’ beliefs (MacKenzie,

2006). As we have shown, folk theories can shape how economic work is done through organisational routines and material arrangements with performative effects.

As MacKenzie (2004) reminds us, unlike the ‘simple performatives’ of Austin in reference to

speech acts, the model-like statements on financial markets are not uttered by a ‘centralised authority’ thus their performativity would hardly be like that of Austin’s performatives. Instead, it is the

widespread performation of a model that endows it with performative effects. This applies to folk

theories like the American Spirit too. Our findings therefore open up the way to explore the performation and performativity of belief-like statements that originate from the types of everyday thinking and acting that Swedberg (2018) explains as generative of folk economics. These statements

may take the shape of ‘macro level’ stories (Rebonato, 2013) or even a viral narrative phenomenon

(Shiller, 2017).

Drawing on social psychology, Swedberg (2018) argues that people’s thinking about the

economy has an ‘independent quality and existence [not reducible to] material interests, social

structure, [or] ignorance’. While we agree with this, especially given the salience of the narrative

mode of thinking, we also observe that the similarities in thinking and acting in primary doxic communities may partly be down to actors’ awareness of other communities with which they share a

domain of action. Just like in the performation of scientific theories (Beunza and Stark, 2012), sociality matters in the way folk economics and its theories are performed. For our interlocutors in professional investment and brokerage, the performation of the American Spirit was mainly to account

for thinking and acting of an anonymous yet a well-known collective to them, i.e., the average

Turkish retail investor. This finding also underlines the importance of an overlooked aspect in the performativity research, that is, ‘power relations’ and how they ‘enable and constrain […] performative practices’ (Lansing, 2012) in specific ‘institutional and geographical entanglements’

(Muellerleile, 2013). In the case of financial markets, market liquidity and who provides it is an

integral aspect of these relations and entanglements.

Nonetheless, as we have shown in this paper, folk economics is more than this type of reflexive

modelling or socially ‘habilitated’ calculation and exchange (Callon, 2008 cited in Beunza and

Stark, 2012). As such, folk economics is generative of statements that can explain and thus

perform any economic phenomenon. People’s tendency to think in narrative mode (Bruner,

1986) and the substantive organisational and institutional efforts required to create the right perlocutionary effects for the performativity of ‘confined [theoretical]’ or ‘wild [applied]’ economics

- not to mention the overflows on them (Callon, 2007) constitute the social-psychological and

organisational underpinnings for folk economics’ potential permeance and performativity in

parts or the whole of the economy.

Our argument also addresses the question of whether the study of folk economics should be confined to lay people only and exclude market professionals and experts. This is not unlike the question of whether performativity research should be limited to expert economists who are involved ‘in

the analysis, transformation [and] configuration of the markets’ (Callon, 2007). Interestingly,

Swedberg (2018), despite identifying work ‘as the centre of primary doxa’ also seems to imply

that folk economics is about lay people’s thinking about and acting in the economy as his discussion

of experts is limited to academics. In our exploration of brokerage and investment work, we have

shown how market professionals with expert knowledge still formulate and perform folk theories.

This is not unlike how Swedberg (2018) and others (e.g., Mirowski, 2015, Rip, 2006) show how

even experts, including scientists and academic economists themselves engage in theorisations

that can be considered folk-like, sometimes with contestable standards of scientific rigour.

As we argued before, the desire for such conceptual fencing in favour of studying only experts

and scientific theories configuring markets may arise because of a perceived disconnect between

economics and real life (MacKenzie, 2006). A related case against studying folk economics with

performativity could be made as folk theories such as the American Spirit are inferred from

people’s actions, including discursive ones like market chatter. As such, these theories do not

exist outside market practices. This implies that folk theories are essentially performative in

generic and even other senses although this argument seems to be confusing performation with illocutionary effects.

Butler’s (2010) take on performativity in which discourses are not privileged or excluded on the basis

of their origins (e.g., economists) and function (e.g., transformation/configuration) (see also Lansing,

2012) but taken to be involved ‘in the processes that performatively bring about the market’ provides

further conceptual purchase for the use of performativity to study folk economics. This is similar to

what we observe in Caliskan and Callon’s (2010) advocacy to include ‘lay knowledge’ in the exploration of performativity in ‘market design and maintenance’, which can be extended to other types of

market framing that they identify such as ‘price-setting’. Performativity studies on technical analysis

(e.g., Roscoe, 2015) and investment valuation tools (e.g., Kish and Fairbairn, 2018) show how performation of marketing and investment discourses perhaps matter more in mobilising investors than the

maths and science that underpin these tools. These findings and our paper resonate with Caliskan and

Callon’s (2010: 22) argument that texts, discourses and narratives matter as much as scientific knowledge and associated devices in markets. Of course, such a broad take on performativity and folk economics, just as we have taken in this paper, still has to show how folk statements are performed and whether

they have illocutionary effects in parts or the whole of the economy.

To wit, if the performativity thesis is taken too narrowly to include only scientific theories that

analyse, transform and configure markets, then a great number of phenomena are left out in our

understanding of how economies and markets are performed. Of course, performativity is not the only conceptual framework to study folk economics. Nonetheless, its focus on performation

makes it better suited to explore folk economics’ material and organisational incorporation into

people’s everyday practices in households, workplaces, markets and economies in developed

and developing countries alike.