IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/22500.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

‘On a mission' with mutable mobiles

Author

Listed:
  • Morgan, Mary S.

Abstract

The task of economic planning in the new nation of Nigeria in the early 1960s tested the limits of economic technologies: its recipes for development, its possibilities of measurement, and from differences in political economy. These dimensions of the problem beset not only the Nigerian politicians and civil servants but an array of international experts: each on their own mission to make the new economy. This story of mutable mobiles is revealed in the detailed diary entries of the economist Wolfgang Stolper - a man “on a mission”, for he was charged with making “the plan”. This first Nigerian economic plan was a mobile document that cycled around a changing circle of civil servants and politicians and only gathered powerful allies amongst them because of the mutability its elements. This mutability rested on a combination of decentralized knowledge and on regional democratic preferences. And, to make a plan that would gain acceptance outside the centre of calculation, these local facts and choices had to be made consistent with each other and with the projected future of the economy as a whole. This is where economic theory came in: it created a consistency between the current and future economy so that future facts - fictions - and current facts made good travelling companions for each other in their circulations around the political and economic community.

Suggested Citation

  • Morgan, Mary S., 2008. "‘On a mission' with mutable mobiles," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 22500, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:22500
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22500/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:ehl:wpaper:22501 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Dudley Seers, 1979. "The Birth, Life and Death of Development Economics," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 10(4), pages 707-719, October.
    3. Donald MacKenzie, 2006. "An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262134608, December.
    4. Speich, Daniel, 2008. "Travelling with the GDP through early development economics’ history," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 22501, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. repec:ehl:wpaper:22500 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Matthew Zook & Michael H Grote, 2017. "The microgeographies of global finance: High-frequency trading and the construction of information inequality," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(1), pages 121-140, January.
    3. Luis Suarez‐Villa, 2009. "The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community – By Stephen A. Marglin," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(3), pages 533-541, September.
    4. Leonard Goke & Jens Weibezahn & Christian von Hirschhausen, 2021. "A collective blueprint, not a crystal ball: How expectations and participation shape long-term energy scenarios," Papers 2112.04821, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.
    5. Johnstone, David & Havyatt, David, 2022. "Sophistry and high electricity prices in Australia," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    6. Möllering, Guido, 2009. "Market constitution analysis: A new framework applied to solar power technology markets," MPIfG Working Paper 09/7, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    7. Pierpaolo Andriani & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, 2015. "Transactional innovation as performative action: transforming comparative advantage in the global coffee business," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 25(2), pages 371-400, April.
    8. Philipp Heimberger & Jakob Kapeller, 2017. "The performativity of potential output: pro-cyclicality and path dependency in coordinating European fiscal policies," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(5), pages 904-928, September.
    9. Aspers, Patrik & Darr, Asaf & Kohl, Sebastian, 2007. "An economic sociological look at economic anthropology," economic sociology. perspectives and conversations, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, vol. 9(1), pages 3-10.
    10. Brett Christophers, 2017. "The performativity of the yield curve," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(1), pages 63-80, January.
    11. Schinckus, Christophe, 2018. "Pataphysics of finance: An essay of visual epistemology," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 57-68.
    12. Nick Bernards, 2019. "Tracing mutations of neoliberal development governance: ‘Fintech’, failure and the politics of marketization," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 51(7), pages 1442-1459, October.
    13. Pollock, Neil & D’Adderio, Luciana, 2012. "Give me a two-by-two matrix and I will create the market: Rankings, graphic visualisations and sociomateriality," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 37(8), pages 565-586.
    14. Elena Battaglini & Nicoletta Masiero, 2015. "Sviluppo locale e resilienza territoriale. Un?introduzione," ECONOMIA E SOCIET? REGIONALE, FrancoAngeli Editore, vol. 0(3), pages 5-22.
    15. Christian Walter, 2018. "The leptokurtic crisis and the discontinuous turn in financial modelling," Post-Print hal-04560385, HAL.
    16. Stewart Russell & Nils Markusson & Vivian Scott, 2012. "What will CCS demonstrations demonstrate?," Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Springer, vol. 17(6), pages 651-668, August.
    17. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/f5vtl5h9a73d5ls976m3igpqi is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Keith Breckenridge, 2020. "Capitalism without Surveillance?," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 51(3), pages 921-935, May.
    19. M. Fourcade & E. Ollion & Y. Algan, 2015. "The Superiority of Economists," Voprosy Ekonomiki, NP Voprosy Ekonomiki, issue 7.
    20. Emre Tarim & Arie Gozluklu & Gulnur Muradoglu, 2023. "The American spirit: The performativity of folk economics in global financial markets," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 55(8), pages 1906-1927, November.
    21. Katrin Hirte, 2020. "Das doppelte Reflexionsproblem in der Oekonomik," ICAE Working Papers 115, Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy.
    22. Llerena Guiu Searle, 2014. "Conflict and Commensuration: Contested Market Making in India's Private Real Estate Development Sector," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(1), pages 60-78, January.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N0 - Economic History - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:22500. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.