Abstract
This thesis investigates market practices and builds on the insight that markets are shaped and performed through multiple calculative agencies. It studies how the introduction of category management as part of a socio-technical agencement contributes to shaping goods, market place, configuration of buyers and sellers and their encounter in the fuel retail industry. After offering a critical analysis of four research strands (a practice based approach to markets, the Foucauldian study of governmentality, the sociology of translation and the sociology of socio-technical agencements) that take a performative view to the study of the economy and markets, I develop an approach that proposes to study markets rather than marketing through the analyses of bundles of practices. The identification of socio-technical agencements (STAs), the exploration of calculative practices and the study of how calculation is linked to agency, frame the way we understand how particular calculative practices make operable the assemblage of ideas, artefacts, practices, people, etc. that form and shape mundane markets. The thesis uses empirical data derived from a longitudinal ethnography of the petrol retailing arm of a multinational oil company. My analysis highlights the role of category management, a fuzzy theory, that helps glue market constituents together. It argues that valuation necessarily combines metrological practices and practical judgement resulting from experience, experimentation and equilibration. I identify two types of contexts involved in calculative practices, heuristic and algorithmic situations, and four type of practices involved in creating desirable and intelligible futures: realisation, potentialisation, virtualisation and actualisation practices.