Simone Polillo
Biographic Data
| ID | 104398 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simone Polillo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simone |
| FAMILY NAME | Polillo |
| SIGNATURE | POLILLO S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7873-7075 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 161 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Representation and performativity, distributed: A response to Curran
This contribution responds to Curran’s critique of our meta-theoretical account of performativity. Developing a distributed account of representation within the DARN framework, which systematizes the performativity literature through four interconnected modes (devices, actors, representations, and networks), we argue that representation retains a genuine dimension of ‘aboutness’, but that this aboutness is achieved and sustained through socio-tec…
The economic exception: How the Bank of Italy framed crisis to govern, 1960–1984
The modes of performativity: A meta-theoretical review
Over the past 25 years, performativity has emerged as a salient focus in social sciences, yet its meta-theoretical analysis remains limited. What is performativity? How is it located empirically and treated theoretically across disciplines? Analyzing 6,741 published articles and books deploying the term performativity, this paper proposes a framework to explore performativity and reviews the transdisciplinary literature that employs the term in a…
Economic emergencies: Exception, Government and the Management of the Economy
Crisis: Sovereign or Distributed
In the face of a proliferation of texts framing ongoing events and experiences in terms of crisis, a new critical literature has emerged to interrogate the political, moral, and epistemological assumptions and blind spots of this way of understanding the modern world. In this special issue, we engage with this new body of work on crisis by distinguishing between two models-sovereign and distributed. While the sovereign model of crisis fleshes out…
Crisis, reputation, and the politics of expertise: Fictional performativity at the Bank of Italy
Since the early twentieth century, scholarly interest in the intersection between knowledge and political rationality in advanced liberal democracies has drawn attention to two general and contradictory processes: first, the rise of technocracy, and of the institutions, and experts, who use technical knowledge as a lever of power; second, the democratization of expertise – the emergence of lay audiences as stake-holders and competent participants…
From collateral to money: Social Meaning, Security Devices and the Law in the Depersonalization of Monetary Relationships
A new sociology of money has emerged over the past three decades. Unlike conventional accounts, it is attentive to the social conditions of money-making and circulation: social relationships, authority, and impersonal trust. Yet, the problem of how money is at once ‘special’ – invested with meaning, personalized, and often physically earmarked in everyday transactions – and generalized, used across social boundaries, remains unsolved. Building on…
Solving the paradox of mass investment: Expertise, financial inclusion and inequality in the politics of credit
The Ownership Society of the late twentieth century was grounded on the promise that the opening of new investment opportunities would lead to financial expansion and inclusion. It resulted, instead, in mass dispossession. In this paper, I analyze the politics of credit in order to theorize the nexus between finance and inequality, and specifically to understand whether financial inclusion can create opportunities for what we might call ‘financia…
Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason
Central Banks, Democratic States and Financial Power
Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina
Market efficiency as a revolution in data analysis
Why did random walk models and market efficiency become central to financial economics, when other approaches did not? Attention to the terms of the debate that surrounded efficiency at a formative stage for the discipline reveals an emerging consensus about best practices in assembling data, framed in a mode of argumentation that emphasizes "reasonableness" over other standards. Changes in the scripts, and the broader styles, or "modes," within …
Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works
Power in Organizational Society: Macro, Meso and Micro
Theorizing Efficient Markets: A Sociology of Financial Ideas
In this paper, I use the case of financial economics to show how an innovative idea can shape a research agenda. I focus on why the efficient-market hypothesis, crystallized in Eugene Fama's research, acquired core theoretical status in the discipline of financial economics, whereas the Capital Asset Pricing Model, championed by, among others, Fischer Black, did not. I draw attention both to differences in the networks propagating these models, i…
Globalization: Civilizing or destructive? An empirical test of the international determinants of generalized trust
Does globalization encourage and facilitate the development of generalized trust, or does it, on the contrary, foster mutual suspicion and distrust? This question preoccupied intellectual elites during the early phases of expansion of world markets, and it has become once again relevant in the context of contemporary globalization. This article proposes a sociological redefinition of this question by distinguishing between different aspects of gl…
Money, Moral Authority, and the Politics of Creditworthiness
This article moves beyond current controversies on the nature of money by suggesting that a general social process allows different kinds of organizations and networks-from states to banks to local communities-to produce currencies: that is, the articulation of criteria of creditworthiness, or what I call the exercise of moral authority. Bankers specialize in moral authority, but when that authority is contested, challenging groups must articulat…
Guest Editors' Introduction: After the Crash, Beyond Liquidity
Wildcats in banking fields: The Politics of Financial Inclusion
Into the Red: The Birth of the Credit Card Market in Postcommunist Russia
Globalization Pressures and the State: The Worldwide Spread of Central Bank Independence
The authors examine the impact of globalization on state structures in the specific instance of the central bank. Following the world‐system, world‐society, and neoinstitutional perspectives in sociology, they assume that states are in cultural, political, and economic competition with each other, thereby seeking to maintain their position and status, frequently by adopting organizational forms or practices that make them isomorphic with their en…
Globalization Pressures and the State: The Worldwide Spread of Central Bank Independence
The authors examine the impact of globalization on state structures in the specific instance of the central bank. Following the world‐system, world‐society, and neoinstitutional perspectives in sociology, they assume that states are in cultural, political, and economic competition with each other, thereby seeking to maintain their position and status, frequently by adopting organizational forms or practices that make them isomorphic with their en…
Money, Moral Authority, and the Politics of Creditworthiness
This article moves beyond current controversies on the nature of money by suggesting that a general social process allows different kinds of organizations and networks-from states to banks to local communities-to produce currencies: that is, the articulation of criteria of creditworthiness, or what I call the exercise of moral authority. Bankers specialize in moral authority, but when that authority is contested, challenging groups must articulat…
Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina
Wildcats in banking fields: The Politics of Financial Inclusion
Guest Editors' Introduction: After the Crash, Beyond Liquidity
Globalization: Civilizing or destructive? An empirical test of the international determinants of generalized trust
Does globalization encourage and facilitate the development of generalized trust, or does it, on the contrary, foster mutual suspicion and distrust? This question preoccupied intellectual elites during the early phases of expansion of world markets, and it has become once again relevant in the context of contemporary globalization. This article proposes a sociological redefinition of this question by distinguishing between different aspects of gl…
From collateral to money: Social Meaning, Security Devices and the Law in the Depersonalization of Monetary Relationships
A new sociology of money has emerged over the past three decades. Unlike conventional accounts, it is attentive to the social conditions of money-making and circulation: social relationships, authority, and impersonal trust. Yet, the problem of how money is at once ‘special’ – invested with meaning, personalized, and often physically earmarked in everyday transactions – and generalized, used across social boundaries, remains unsolved. Building on…
Crisis, reputation, and the politics of expertise: Fictional performativity at the Bank of Italy
Since the early twentieth century, scholarly interest in the intersection between knowledge and political rationality in advanced liberal democracies has drawn attention to two general and contradictory processes: first, the rise of technocracy, and of the institutions, and experts, who use technical knowledge as a lever of power; second, the democratization of expertise – the emergence of lay audiences as stake-holders and competent participants…
Theorizing Efficient Markets: A Sociology of Financial Ideas
In this paper, I use the case of financial economics to show how an innovative idea can shape a research agenda. I focus on why the efficient-market hypothesis, crystallized in Eugene Fama's research, acquired core theoretical status in the discipline of financial economics, whereas the Capital Asset Pricing Model, championed by, among others, Fischer Black, did not. I draw attention both to differences in the networks propagating these models, i…
Economic emergencies: Exception, Government and the Management of the Economy
Market efficiency as a revolution in data analysis
Why did random walk models and market efficiency become central to financial economics, when other approaches did not? Attention to the terms of the debate that surrounded efficiency at a formative stage for the discipline reveals an emerging consensus about best practices in assembling data, framed in a mode of argumentation that emphasizes "reasonableness" over other standards. Changes in the scripts, and the broader styles, or "modes," within …
Globalization Pressures and the State: The Worldwide Spread of Central Bank Independence
The authors examine the impact of globalization on state structures in the specific instance of the central bank. Following the world‐system, world‐society, and neoinstitutional perspectives in sociology, they assume that states are in cultural, political, and economic competition with each other, thereby seeking to maintain their position and status, frequently by adopting organizational forms or practices that make them isomorphic with their en…
Into the Red: The Birth of the Credit Card Market in Postcommunist Russia
Money, Moral Authority, and the Politics of Creditworthiness
This article moves beyond current controversies on the nature of money by suggesting that a general social process allows different kinds of organizations and networks-from states to banks to local communities-to produce currencies: that is, the articulation of criteria of creditworthiness, or what I call the exercise of moral authority. Bankers specialize in moral authority, but when that authority is contested, challenging groups must articulat…
Guest Editors' Introduction: After the Crash, Beyond Liquidity
Wildcats in banking fields: The Politics of Financial Inclusion
Globalization: Civilizing or destructive? An empirical test of the international determinants of generalized trust
Does globalization encourage and facilitate the development of generalized trust, or does it, on the contrary, foster mutual suspicion and distrust? This question preoccupied intellectual elites during the early phases of expansion of world markets, and it has become once again relevant in the context of contemporary globalization. This article proposes a sociological redefinition of this question by distinguishing between different aspects of gl…
Theorizing Efficient Markets: A Sociology of Financial Ideas
In this paper, I use the case of financial economics to show how an innovative idea can shape a research agenda. I focus on why the efficient-market hypothesis, crystallized in Eugene Fama's research, acquired core theoretical status in the discipline of financial economics, whereas the Capital Asset Pricing Model, championed by, among others, Fischer Black, did not. I draw attention both to differences in the networks propagating these models, i…
Power in Organizational Society: Macro, Meso and Micro
Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works
Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina
Market efficiency as a revolution in data analysis
Why did random walk models and market efficiency become central to financial economics, when other approaches did not? Attention to the terms of the debate that surrounded efficiency at a formative stage for the discipline reveals an emerging consensus about best practices in assembling data, framed in a mode of argumentation that emphasizes "reasonableness" over other standards. Changes in the scripts, and the broader styles, or "modes," within …
Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason
Central Banks, Democratic States and Financial Power
Solving the paradox of mass investment: Expertise, financial inclusion and inequality in the politics of credit
The Ownership Society of the late twentieth century was grounded on the promise that the opening of new investment opportunities would lead to financial expansion and inclusion. It resulted, instead, in mass dispossession. In this paper, I analyze the politics of credit in order to theorize the nexus between finance and inequality, and specifically to understand whether financial inclusion can create opportunities for what we might call ‘financia…
From collateral to money: Social Meaning, Security Devices and the Law in the Depersonalization of Monetary Relationships
A new sociology of money has emerged over the past three decades. Unlike conventional accounts, it is attentive to the social conditions of money-making and circulation: social relationships, authority, and impersonal trust. Yet, the problem of how money is at once ‘special’ – invested with meaning, personalized, and often physically earmarked in everyday transactions – and generalized, used across social boundaries, remains unsolved. Building on…
Crisis, reputation, and the politics of expertise: Fictional performativity at the Bank of Italy
Since the early twentieth century, scholarly interest in the intersection between knowledge and political rationality in advanced liberal democracies has drawn attention to two general and contradictory processes: first, the rise of technocracy, and of the institutions, and experts, who use technical knowledge as a lever of power; second, the democratization of expertise – the emergence of lay audiences as stake-holders and competent participants…
Crisis: Sovereign or Distributed
In the face of a proliferation of texts framing ongoing events and experiences in terms of crisis, a new critical literature has emerged to interrogate the political, moral, and epistemological assumptions and blind spots of this way of understanding the modern world. In this special issue, we engage with this new body of work on crisis by distinguishing between two models-sovereign and distributed. While the sovereign model of crisis fleshes out…
The modes of performativity: A meta-theoretical review
Over the past 25 years, performativity has emerged as a salient focus in social sciences, yet its meta-theoretical analysis remains limited. What is performativity? How is it located empirically and treated theoretically across disciplines? Analyzing 6,741 published articles and books deploying the term performativity, this paper proposes a framework to explore performativity and reviews the transdisciplinary literature that employs the term in a…
Economic emergencies: Exception, Government and the Management of the Economy
Representation and performativity, distributed: A response to Curran
This contribution responds to Curran’s critique of our meta-theoretical account of performativity. Developing a distributed account of representation within the DARN framework, which systematizes the performativity literature through four interconnected modes (devices, actors, representations, and networks), we argue that representation retains a genuine dimension of ‘aboutness’, but that this aboutness is achieved and sustained through socio-tec…
The economic exception: How the Bank of Italy framed crisis to govern, 1960–1984
Political science (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · Finance (8 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Finance (6 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Business (4 works)