| Abstract: |
While there is a wealth of research on the history, philosophy and
epistemology of economics, few studies approach economics as a practical and
material endeavour in the way STS and ethnographies of science have approached
natural sciences. To explore how objectivity is practically accomplished in
laboratory economic experiments, we focus on a, at the face of it, modest and
mundane thing: the written instructions that guide experimental subjects in
the lab. In a material-semiotic perspective, these instructions can be
understood as text-devices. We follow this text-device 'on the move' from its
very writing, through the lab, the review process and out into the journal
article. To do so, we analyse "text-author ensembles": journal articles
together with practice-oriented interviews with their authors. We show that
the instructions act not simply as a text, but as an experimental instrument
that also performs the procedure of experimental economics. They draw together
the procedural, material and rhetorical dimensions of experimental work in
economics, and link the lab setting to collective validation procedures within
the discipline of economics. To achieve this, experimental economists rely on
qualitative writing skills refined in collective writing and reviewing
practices. This particular text-device 'on the move' alert us not only to the
role of writing and writing skills in the production of scientific knowledge,
but to the role of texts as material and semiotic objects that can produce not
only facts, but labs and disciplines too, and that are key to the
accomplishment of objectivity in experimental economics. |