Clare's research blog
This mini animation, with sound, asks what the reintegration of the economic, legal and social might look like and sound like.
This is relevant for each and every interaction that occurs – there are always legal and economic aspects to every interaction, but we tend to forget that talking about the legal and economic in isolation from the social is a metaphor, or fiction.
How could frames or lenses like ESL help us to remember the social basis for any legal or economic aspects of interactions?
The first GIF here imagines what interaction patterns might look like if we use yellow for economic phenomena, red for legal phenomena, and green for social, political and/or power-oriented phenomena. They are presented separately, performed between actors represented by the red dots.
The following GIF asks what this might look like when these phenomena occur simultaneously.
The colours show the various phenomena as they are simultaneously performed through interactions.
It is worth noting though that by using colour to separate out the economic, legal, and social phenomena, we are using “embeddedness-based” ESL lenses. In other words, we are accepting that legal, economic and social phenomena are separate.
As I argue elsewhere on this blog, if we really want to talk about, think about, and do the econolegal better, we need to move beyond embeddedness.
Future posts will explore what this might look like.
I’ve recently started using ProCreate on the iPad to explore visual representations of econo-socio-legal interactions. My portfolio has always relied on the good, old-fashioned pen and paper approach, so it’s been really exciting trying out different technologies. I’ve been updating my portfolio and recreating the pieces digitally, which I’ll discuss in this post – with pictures!
I’ve found the app to be really responsive and a fun and easy way to get creative. The Apple Pencil can be a bit frustrating to use as it has that “drawing on glass” feel, and runs out of battery at crucial moments. But the feedback and pressure sensitivity works really well and makes drawing on the iPad a really enjoyable experience.
But on to the content! Here is a first attempt using Procreate at recreating the social fabric of interactions, weaving together three layers. Here, they are legal, economic, and “other” aspects of social interactions. This recalls the goals of Economic Sociology of Law-based approaches that want to recombine legal, economic and social phenomena, as well as recognising the importance of others aspects of interactions. In this, we can refer back to Max Weber’s four interaction ideal-types (instrumental, affective, belief-based, and a traditional); all of which fit into the “other” layer here.
In case there’s any doubt about the three layers, we can add some colour. For me, law is best represented in red, economics in yellow, and social otherness in green.
Then, adding in economic aspects of interactions…
And then, the social “other”, completing the woven fabric of interactions as seen through an econo-socio-legal lens…
The really cool thing about Procreate is that is can record everything you do on a particular canvas, and can reply the progress of the piece as a time lapse video. If you want to see the steps involved in creating this piece, it’s on my YouTube channel here.
I’ve also started redrawing representations of orthodox economics, economic sociology, and economic sociology of law. The idea is that the main stream, orthodox economic theory relies on assumptions and models that provide a straight jacket and that sociological and econo-socio-legal framers can moderate this and make the approach more flexible and more reflective of real life.
So, in the first image, neoclassical economics is drawn as straight lines, with little flexibility outside of the predetermined categories built into the models. In this sense, it fails to capture the complexity and unpredictability of real world interactions.
By incorporating more insights from sociology and from focusing on interactions rather than actors, we can capture the full extent of how complex, dynamic, and unpredictable real world interactions can be, and what this might look like…
All that’s needed now is a roadmap from the orthodox to the heterodox… a visualisation of which I’ll post as an update!
I’ve been experimenting with Procreate on the iPad, which is an amazing app for drawing digitally. Seriously – check it out.
I’m using an iPad Air 3 with first generation Apple Pencil, which is great for digital calligraphy as well as designing and drawing complex interactions, networks, and social phenomena in general. The app also exports GIFs and MP4s as well as the standard visual media. I’m really excited to share my progress here with digital visualisations of economic and legal phenomena, and tackling questions like “how can we think about economics differently”?
Here’s an example: In the following diagram, each red dot is an actor – you or me. We interact with lots of different people every day, and these interactions are the black lines between each red dot. Over time, these interactions build up in complex patterns. This diagram is one way of visualising the way that patterns of interactions can develop in complexity, so that when we zoom out, we begin to see larger patterns.
What happens if we imagine that these black lines represent the economic aspects of interactions? What can we say about macroeconomics? And can this be scaled up further?
Clare's research blog 