My name is Dan Hirschman and I am a (budding) Sociologist. My interests range over a variety of topics but lately I have been very interested in Economics (both as a way of understanding the world and as a social phenomenon). I have some mostly dormant interests in the Free Software/Open Source movement, Fair Trade coffee, and other examples of ‘ethical consumption’. My earlier work (of which there is very little) focused on immigration from Latin America to the United States. I am also interested in the rhetoric of research, and in particular quantitative methodology. Lately, I’ve also spent a lot of time learning about “financialization” and the changes in corporate governance associated with the end of the capital-labor accord (1975-1985, roughly).
My current (2009) research project is on the emergence of the macroeconomy as an object of knowledge in the first half of the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1950, governments begin to calculate things like national incomes (GNP/GDP), inflation rates, unemployment rates, etc. in an official, standardized, routinized way. At the same time, economists begin talking about something called “the economy” which transitions over into popular and political discourse in the 1930s or 1940s. Before that, no one talked about “the economy” per se. I think that’s fascinating, but don’t yet know what it means or what to make of it, although I think it has a lot to do with what we consider as an economic relationship vs. not (“in the economy” vs. “out of the economy”). Also, by creating “the economy” as an object of discourse (in Foucault’s sense), new calculative agencies are made possible (in Callon’s sense) including things like an “economic stimulus package” a la Keynes, or inflation targeting, etc.
The idea of a commonplace book came to me from the delightful A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket. This blog will hopefully serve as a sort of commonplace book for my thoughts on the above subjects. In particular, I hope to use it to motivate myself to read a bit more carefully, and post little book and article reviews as reminders to myself at least.
You can contact me at asociologist at umich dot edu or just leave a comment.
