Liz Mcfall
Biographic Data
| ID | 83610 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Liz Mcfall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Liz |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcfall |
| SIGNATURE | MCFALL L |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8681-2576 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 355 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Description, Articulation and Limitations in the Social Theory of Insurance
There have been surprisingly few sustained efforts to explain or theorise the role insurance plays in society. Even the most theoretically inflected insurance scholarship, emanating from governmentality and Actor Network Theory scholarship, tends to be grounded in empirical cases, set in particular periods and places, and it is often ambivalent toward the label of theory. It is surprising both because of the foundationally social character of ins…
Market Studies: Mapping, Theorizing and Impacting Market Action
Market studies is a newly emerging field dedicated to understanding the origins, core concepts, theories and methods currently being used and developed to examine markets in the making. Providing a unique overview that introduces, positions and develops this highly fertile area of research, Market Studies is the first book to consolidate its themes, tools and methods in a single, comprehensive volume. Topics covered include: market organization a…
Life funds, urban development, and the experimental practices of financial sociology
How did the Norwich Union, a life and general insurance company, come to see itself as a 'local developer with people always at the centre of our planning'? This article explores how a small number of insurance companies, capitalising on their long history of property investment, used their investment funds, or 'life funds', to transform the built environment of UK in the twentieth century. In the postwar period life funds were contracted by loca…
Strategic ambiguity: A Roundtable on Cultural Economy and Consumer Culture
This lightly edited transcript records the discussion at the opening roundtable of the What Was Cultural Economy? symposium at City, University of London in January 2020. In it, Don Slater, Sean Nixon and Liz McFall, all participants in the original ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy' reflect on the conceptual and institutional history of ‘cultural economy’ and how it intersected with their shared interests in advertising and consumer culture. Their i…
The value of sharing: Branding and behaviour in a life and health insurance company
As Big Data, the Internet of Things and insurance collide, so too, do the best and the worst of our futures. Insurance is summoned as an example of the interference in our private lives that is already underway everywhere. In this paper, we pause to reflect on this argument. Can changes in the way insurance measures the value of behaviour really serve as an example of the individual and social harms of datafication? How do we know? Insurance is a…
Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending
Devising Consumption explores the vital role played by thefinancial service industries in enabling the poor to consumeover the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requiresmeans, but these industries also offered practical marketingdevices that captured, captivated and enticed poorconsumers. The role of these devices has been poorlyunderstood both in the social sciences and in businessstudies and marketing. The book advances the case for a more…
In Search of a Problem: Mapping Controversies over NHS (England) Patient Data with Digital Tools
There is a long history in science and technology studies (STS) of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying "problems" in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service…
Personalizing solidarity? The role of self-tracking in health insurance pricing
Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health insurance prices? The emergence of self-tracking technologies and their adoption and promotion in health insurance products has been characterized as a threat to solidaristic models of healthcare provision. If individual behaviour rather than group membership were to become the basis of risk assessment, the social, economic and political consequences w…
Who, or what, is insurtech personalizing: Persons, prices and the historical classifications of risk
This paper examines the promises and pitfalls associated with Insurtech – the anticipated innovations in the insurance industry associated with social media marketing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics and more – and focuses in particular on the new methods of pricing and premium setting that are claimed to follow from the availability of self-tracking technologies and new volumes of customer data. Using the examples of telematics data …
Markets and the Arts of Attachment
International audience
On brutal culture
International audience
Ten years after: It's the Economyandculture, Stupid
The Limits of Performativity
The economy is commonly described either as the apolitical realm of calculation or as the fully political one of domination. This book scrutinizes the ways in which the economy is performed, in order to situate where precisely politics is located with regard to economic matters. Politics, the book demonstrates, thus appears at the turning point, in the place where the efficiency of economics is negotiated and where the need to forward it, reshape…
Limits of Performativity: Politics of the Modern Economy
What's changing cultural economy
In September 2014, editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy (JCE) gathered for the last Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) conference at the Friends Meeting House in Manchester. 2 As regular readers will have noticed, the JCE has been closely associated with CRESC since the beginning.What few will know is that what would eventually become the JCE was first imagined when CRESC began its formal funded existence in 2004, as one o…
Devising Consumption: Cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending
The book explores the vital role played by the financial service industries in enabling the poor to consume over the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requires means, but these industries offered something else as well – they offered practical marketing devices that captured, captivated and enticed poor consumers. Consumption and consumer markets depend on such devices but their role has been poorly understood both in the social sciences and…
The Problem of Cultural Intermediaries in the Economy of Qualities
iProduction is ... at the same time consumption, and consumption is at the same time production. Each is directly its own counterpart. But at the same time an intermediary movement goes on between the two. Production furthers consumption by creating the material for the latter which otherwise would lack its object. But consumption in its turn furthers production, by providing for the products the individual for whom they are products. The product…
A 'Good, Average Man: Calculation and the Limits of Statistics in Enrolling Insurance Customers
Drawing upon the historical relationship between statistics, probabilistic reasoning and life insurance, the article argues that mathematical calculation played a necessary but limited role in making markets for life insurance. Insuring publics have been fairly consistently cautious in the use of probabilistic and statistical reasoning to inform investment in life insurance. In this they follow a pattern set by early insurance companies who thems…
Pragmatics and Politics: The case of industrial assurance in the UK
Using the case of industrial assurance, this paper argues that a focused concern with the pragmatics of market devices can offer a particularist politics of analysis by uncovering the material, technical and social conditions through which economic objects and persons are constituted. Industrial assurance grew exponentially in the UK after 1880 to become, through a series of political and economic twists and turns, by the 1910s the key commercial…
Performativity, Economics and Politics: An Overview
Devices and Desires: How Useful Is the 'New' New Economic Sociology for Understanding Market Attachment
This article explores the usefulness of recent economic sociology literature for understanding processes of market attachment. It focuses particularly on concepts like agencement and market devices proposed by authors like Michel Callon, Fabian Muniesa and Franck Cochoy and their application to mass consumer markets. The article addresses critical responses which have been levelled at this literature to argue that despite what some regard as an o…
Fabricating the Market: The Promotion of Life Assurance in the Long Nineteenth-Century
The market for life assurance did not emerge "naturally" from a particular problem of the allocation of resources, it had to be made. Life insurance had to appear desirable and reliable. This involved the circulation of a variety of advertising media, one aspect of which was the fabrication of grand offices as headquarters for life assurance companies. These buildings and their widely-circulated images were part of a process of making life assura…
Theagencementof Industrial Branch Life Assurance
Agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending upon how they are configured. In advocating the term ‘agencement’ Callon's aim is to signal the close interweaving of words and actions and thus jettison the more Austinian associations of performativity. Agencement calls attention to the various processes by which economic actors, both human and non-human, are endowed with the fixtures, fittings and devi…
Commentary: Rethinking cultural economy: pragmatics and politics
The Disinterested Self: The Idealized Subject of Life Assurance
In naming his satirical version of a life assurance company The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company Dickens was aiming at an already well-established tendency for life assurance companies to stress in their promotional enterprises the altruistic character of their business. So disinterested was the Anglo-Bengalee that 'nobody can run any risk by the transaction except the office, which, in its great liberality is pretty s…
Performativity, Economics and Politics: An Overview
Devices and Desires: How Useful Is the 'New' New Economic Sociology for Understanding Market Attachment
This article explores the usefulness of recent economic sociology literature for understanding processes of market attachment. It focuses particularly on concepts like agencement and market devices proposed by authors like Michel Callon, Fabian Muniesa and Franck Cochoy and their application to mass consumer markets. The article addresses critical responses which have been levelled at this literature to argue that despite what some regard as an o…
Personalizing solidarity? The role of self-tracking in health insurance pricing
Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health insurance prices? The emergence of self-tracking technologies and their adoption and promotion in health insurance products has been characterized as a threat to solidaristic models of healthcare provision. If individual behaviour rather than group membership were to become the basis of risk assessment, the social, economic and political consequences w…
What About the Old Cultural Intermediaries? An Historical Review of Advertising Producers
Critical work on advertising is underscored by a teleological conception of its object. This often emerges in the form of an emphasis on advertising as an evolving, hybrid institutions that increasingly mixes the 'economic' with the 'cultural'. It is in this vein that advertising practitioners have been characterized as 'new cultural intermediaries' deploying distinctive aesthetic sensibilities. Similar patterns of knowledge and behaviour, howeve…
A 'Good, Average Man: Calculation and the Limits of Statistics in Enrolling Insurance Customers
Drawing upon the historical relationship between statistics, probabilistic reasoning and life insurance, the article argues that mathematical calculation played a necessary but limited role in making markets for life insurance. Insuring publics have been fairly consistently cautious in the use of probabilistic and statistical reasoning to inform investment in life insurance. In this they follow a pattern set by early insurance companies who thems…
Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending
Devising Consumption explores the vital role played by thefinancial service industries in enabling the poor to consumeover the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requiresmeans, but these industries also offered practical marketingdevices that captured, captivated and enticed poorconsumers. The role of these devices has been poorlyunderstood both in the social sciences and in businessstudies and marketing. The book advances the case for a more…
Ten years after: It's the Economyandculture, Stupid
Who, or what, is insurtech personalizing: Persons, prices and the historical classifications of risk
This paper examines the promises and pitfalls associated with Insurtech – the anticipated innovations in the insurance industry associated with social media marketing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics and more – and focuses in particular on the new methods of pricing and premium setting that are claimed to follow from the availability of self-tracking technologies and new volumes of customer data. Using the examples of telematics data …
The value of sharing: Branding and behaviour in a life and health insurance company
As Big Data, the Internet of Things and insurance collide, so too, do the best and the worst of our futures. Insurance is summoned as an example of the interference in our private lives that is already underway everywhere. In this paper, we pause to reflect on this argument. Can changes in the way insurance measures the value of behaviour really serve as an example of the individual and social harms of datafication? How do we know? Insurance is a…
Fabricating the Market: The Promotion of Life Assurance in the Long Nineteenth-Century
The market for life assurance did not emerge "naturally" from a particular problem of the allocation of resources, it had to be made. Life insurance had to appear desirable and reliable. This involved the circulation of a variety of advertising media, one aspect of which was the fabrication of grand offices as headquarters for life assurance companies. These buildings and their widely-circulated images were part of a process of making life assura…
Theagencementof Industrial Branch Life Assurance
Agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending upon how they are configured. In advocating the term ‘agencement’ Callon's aim is to signal the close interweaving of words and actions and thus jettison the more Austinian associations of performativity. Agencement calls attention to the various processes by which economic actors, both human and non-human, are endowed with the fixtures, fittings and devi…
Pragmatics and Politics: The case of industrial assurance in the UK
Using the case of industrial assurance, this paper argues that a focused concern with the pragmatics of market devices can offer a particularist politics of analysis by uncovering the material, technical and social conditions through which economic objects and persons are constituted. Industrial assurance grew exponentially in the UK after 1880 to become, through a series of political and economic twists and turns, by the 1910s the key commercial…
The Disinterested Self: The Idealized Subject of Life Assurance
In naming his satirical version of a life assurance company The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company Dickens was aiming at an already well-established tendency for life assurance companies to stress in their promotional enterprises the altruistic character of their business. So disinterested was the Anglo-Bengalee that 'nobody can run any risk by the transaction except the office, which, in its great liberality is pretty s…
The Language of the Walls: Putting Promotional Saturation in Historical Context
The view that we live in an age where commercial promotion pervades everyday life to an unprecedented extent is so widely accepted that there have been few attempts to test it empirically. This paper makes an attempt to rectify this by looking closely at ideas and evidence concerning escalating commercial promotion. This involves three main tasks. First, some of the arguments that have been made about promotion are briefly reviewed to help establ…
What's changing cultural economy
In September 2014, editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy (JCE) gathered for the last Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) conference at the Friends Meeting House in Manchester. 2 As regular readers will have noticed, the JCE has been closely associated with CRESC since the beginning.What few will know is that what would eventually become the JCE was first imagined when CRESC began its formal funded existence in 2004, as one o…
Commentary: Rethinking cultural economy: pragmatics and politics
Life funds, urban development, and the experimental practices of financial sociology
How did the Norwich Union, a life and general insurance company, come to see itself as a 'local developer with people always at the centre of our planning'? This article explores how a small number of insurance companies, capitalising on their long history of property investment, used their investment funds, or 'life funds', to transform the built environment of UK in the twentieth century. In the postwar period life funds were contracted by loca…
In Search of a Problem: Mapping Controversies over NHS (England) Patient Data with Digital Tools
There is a long history in science and technology studies (STS) of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying "problems" in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service…
Strategic ambiguity: A Roundtable on Cultural Economy and Consumer Culture
This lightly edited transcript records the discussion at the opening roundtable of the What Was Cultural Economy? symposium at City, University of London in January 2020. In it, Don Slater, Sean Nixon and Liz McFall, all participants in the original ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy' reflect on the conceptual and institutional history of ‘cultural economy’ and how it intersected with their shared interests in advertising and consumer culture. Their i…
On brutal culture
International audience
Advertising, Persuasion and the Culture/Economy Dualism
What About the Old Cultural Intermediaries? An Historical Review of Advertising Producers
Critical work on advertising is underscored by a teleological conception of its object. This often emerges in the form of an emphasis on advertising as an evolving, hybrid institutions that increasingly mixes the 'economic' with the 'cultural'. It is in this vein that advertising practitioners have been characterized as 'new cultural intermediaries' deploying distinctive aesthetic sensibilities. Similar patterns of knowledge and behaviour, howeve…
Advertising: A Cultural Economy
Colonising of the Real
The Language of the Walls: Putting Promotional Saturation in Historical Context
The view that we live in an age where commercial promotion pervades everyday life to an unprecedented extent is so widely accepted that there have been few attempts to test it empirically. This paper makes an attempt to rectify this by looking closely at ideas and evidence concerning escalating commercial promotion. This involves three main tasks. First, some of the arguments that have been made about promotion are briefly reviewed to help establ…
The Disinterested Self: The Idealized Subject of Life Assurance
In naming his satirical version of a life assurance company The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company Dickens was aiming at an already well-established tendency for life assurance companies to stress in their promotional enterprises the altruistic character of their business. So disinterested was the Anglo-Bengalee that 'nobody can run any risk by the transaction except the office, which, in its great liberality is pretty s…
Commentary: Rethinking cultural economy: pragmatics and politics
Devices and Desires: How Useful Is the 'New' New Economic Sociology for Understanding Market Attachment
This article explores the usefulness of recent economic sociology literature for understanding processes of market attachment. It focuses particularly on concepts like agencement and market devices proposed by authors like Michel Callon, Fabian Muniesa and Franck Cochoy and their application to mass consumer markets. The article addresses critical responses which have been levelled at this literature to argue that despite what some regard as an o…
Fabricating the Market: The Promotion of Life Assurance in the Long Nineteenth-Century
The market for life assurance did not emerge "naturally" from a particular problem of the allocation of resources, it had to be made. Life insurance had to appear desirable and reliable. This involved the circulation of a variety of advertising media, one aspect of which was the fabrication of grand offices as headquarters for life assurance companies. These buildings and their widely-circulated images were part of a process of making life assura…
Theagencementof Industrial Branch Life Assurance
Agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending upon how they are configured. In advocating the term ‘agencement’ Callon's aim is to signal the close interweaving of words and actions and thus jettison the more Austinian associations of performativity. Agencement calls attention to the various processes by which economic actors, both human and non-human, are endowed with the fixtures, fittings and devi…
Pragmatics and Politics: The case of industrial assurance in the UK
Using the case of industrial assurance, this paper argues that a focused concern with the pragmatics of market devices can offer a particularist politics of analysis by uncovering the material, technical and social conditions through which economic objects and persons are constituted. Industrial assurance grew exponentially in the UK after 1880 to become, through a series of political and economic twists and turns, by the 1910s the key commercial…
Performativity, Economics and Politics: An Overview
A 'Good, Average Man: Calculation and the Limits of Statistics in Enrolling Insurance Customers
Drawing upon the historical relationship between statistics, probabilistic reasoning and life insurance, the article argues that mathematical calculation played a necessary but limited role in making markets for life insurance. Insuring publics have been fairly consistently cautious in the use of probabilistic and statistical reasoning to inform investment in life insurance. In this they follow a pattern set by early insurance companies who thems…
Devising Consumption: Cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending
The book explores the vital role played by the financial service industries in enabling the poor to consume over the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requires means, but these industries offered something else as well – they offered practical marketing devices that captured, captivated and enticed poor consumers. Consumption and consumer markets depend on such devices but their role has been poorly understood both in the social sciences and…
The Problem of Cultural Intermediaries in the Economy of Qualities
iProduction is ... at the same time consumption, and consumption is at the same time production. Each is directly its own counterpart. But at the same time an intermediary movement goes on between the two. Production furthers consumption by creating the material for the latter which otherwise would lack its object. But consumption in its turn furthers production, by providing for the products the individual for whom they are products. The product…
The Limits of Performativity
The economy is commonly described either as the apolitical realm of calculation or as the fully political one of domination. This book scrutinizes the ways in which the economy is performed, in order to situate where precisely politics is located with regard to economic matters. Politics, the book demonstrates, thus appears at the turning point, in the place where the efficiency of economics is negotiated and where the need to forward it, reshape…
Limits of Performativity: Politics of the Modern Economy
What's changing cultural economy
In September 2014, editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy (JCE) gathered for the last Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) conference at the Friends Meeting House in Manchester. 2 As regular readers will have noticed, the JCE has been closely associated with CRESC since the beginning.What few will know is that what would eventually become the JCE was first imagined when CRESC began its formal funded existence in 2004, as one o…
Markets and the Arts of Attachment
International audience
On brutal culture
International audience
Ten years after: It's the Economyandculture, Stupid
Who, or what, is insurtech personalizing: Persons, prices and the historical classifications of risk
This paper examines the promises and pitfalls associated with Insurtech – the anticipated innovations in the insurance industry associated with social media marketing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics and more – and focuses in particular on the new methods of pricing and premium setting that are claimed to follow from the availability of self-tracking technologies and new volumes of customer data. Using the examples of telematics data …
Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending
Devising Consumption explores the vital role played by thefinancial service industries in enabling the poor to consumeover the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requiresmeans, but these industries also offered practical marketingdevices that captured, captivated and enticed poorconsumers. The role of these devices has been poorlyunderstood both in the social sciences and in businessstudies and marketing. The book advances the case for a more…
In Search of a Problem: Mapping Controversies over NHS (England) Patient Data with Digital Tools
There is a long history in science and technology studies (STS) of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying "problems" in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service…
Personalizing solidarity? The role of self-tracking in health insurance pricing
Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health insurance prices? The emergence of self-tracking technologies and their adoption and promotion in health insurance products has been characterized as a threat to solidaristic models of healthcare provision. If individual behaviour rather than group membership were to become the basis of risk assessment, the social, economic and political consequences w…
Political science (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Business (14 works) · Economics (14 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (11 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Actuarial science (6 works) · Law (6 works)