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Revisiting the central concerns of this book, the chapter asks whether the current portrayal of the ‘performativity’ of markets as (partially or fully) built around financial/economic theories—is useful for analyzing business contexts. The chapter rejects the dichotomy in existing literature between implausibly ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ readings of the performativity of such expertise. The (strong) performativity thesis that portrays economic theory as ‘doing things to people’ seems less appropriate in a business setting in which cognitive authority is distributed amongst an array of sceptical and reflexive players. What may be at stake is less the performativity of knowledge than its performance i.e. its generation, circulation, validation, and consumption across a closely interacting network. The chapter argues for more systematic exploration of the epistemic systems of different types of business knowledge as pointers towards a Sociology of Business Knowledge.

This chapter critically examines the European Commission’s work of governing. Taking the policy programme of Gender Mainstreaming (GM) as an example, Rosalind Cavaghan shows how officials in different units within DG Research interpreted their policy work and the consequences these interpretations subsequently had on governing practices. Her starting point is to argue that existing analyses of EU gender equality policy which focus on legal norms or on formalist accounts of Europeanisation have missed important practices of interpretation. Drawing upon gender theory, Interpretive Policy Analysis and Sociology of Knowledge literatures, she argues that we cannot understand how EU GM policy really works unless we un-pack the spaces, processes and actors involved in the constant renegotiation of the EU. Overall, her findings highlight how European Commission policy is re-made and experienced through interactions between documents and persons which vary across different locations and between sub-units within the same DG. By contrast, an understanding of DG Research as a uniform space would gloss over these processes of contestation and the different mechanisms observable across them.

This chapter reveals the dazzling strategy underlying the content and presentation of Darwin’s 1837 Geological Society paper on the formation of coral reefs. While the paper might appear in retrospect to have been a mere precursor to Darwin’s 1842 book on the same topic, its arguments were distinct from earlier and later renditions of Darwin’s coral reef theory. This paper was remarkably ambitious: in it Darwin not only explained the formation of barrier reefs and atolls and argued that such reefs in turn were the key to interpreting the geological history of vast regions of the earth’s crust, he also forecasted that his new theory of reef formation might reveal the internal composition of the globe and explain the origin of species. The paper was also a sustained tribute to Lyell’s geological system. Nevertheless, attendees were shocked when Lyell responded by immediately disavowing his own published theory of reef formation in favor of Darwin’s new one. Sponsel demonstrates that Lyell and Darwin had planned this strategic retreat beforehand, and he argues that both men stood to benefit from Darwin’s emergence as a theoretical author who used Lyell’s general approach to supersede him on the topic of coral reefs.