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How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent?Talking Pricesis the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of art from commerce. Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may indicate not only the quality of a work but also the identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's reputation was established. Such meanings are far from unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud. Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to language.

This inaugural address presents a theory of gift exchange within market societies. Social scientists tend to see the market and the gift as two mutually opposed spheres of exchange. Market exchange is anonymous and businesslike; the economic value of goods and services is measured explicitly in a market transaction and needs to be compensated right away by means of a monetary equivalent. Gift exchange, by contrast, is associated with relatively intimate relations like friendships or family ties. The value of gifts is usually not measured explicitly, although the expectation exists that the gift is reciprocated in the future.Instead I argue that both exchange system should not be seen as mutually exclusive. Within markets, a variety of gifts is permanently being exchanged between business partners. In four different ways, this rich gift exchange serves to stabilize inherently instable markets. They contribute to creating trust relationships as well as loyalty between transaction partners, which remedies uncertainty and tames uncontrolled competition; they assist consumers in valuing new goods; moreover they can make disreputable exchange in goods with a strong symbolic or ethical value more legitimate.

This article develops a sociological analysis of the price mechanism on the market for contemporary art. On the basis of in-depth interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, I address two pricing norms: one norm inhibits art dealers from decreasing prices; the other induces them to set prices according to size. To account for these pricing norms, I argue that price setting is not just an economic but also a signifying act: despite their impersonal, businesslike connotations, actors on markets manage to express a range of cognitive and cultural meanings through prices. Previously, meanings of prices have been recognized in signaling theories within economics. However, these meanings are restricted to profit opportunities. Within the humanities, by contrast, meanings of prices are restricted to contaminating or corrosive meanings. The sociological perspective I develop claims that prices, price differences, and price changes convey multiple meanings related to the reputation of artists, the social status of dealers, and the quality of the artworks that are traded.

This inaugural address presents a theory of gift exchange within market societies. Social scientists tend to see the market and the gift as two mutually opposed spheres of exchange. Market exchange is anonymous and businesslike; the economic value of goods and services is measured explicitly in a market transaction and needs to be compensated right away by means of a monetary equivalent. Gift exchange, by contrast, is associated with relatively intimate relations like friendships or family ties. The value of gifts is usually not measured explicitly, although the expectation exists that the gift is reciprocated in the future. Instead I argue that both exchange system should not be seen as mutually exclusive. Within markets, a variety of gifts is permanently being exchanged between business partners. In four different ways, this rich gift exchange serves to stabilize inherently instable markets. They contribute to creating trust relationships as well as loyalty between transaction partners, which remedies uncertainty and tames uncontrolled competition; they assist consumers in valuing new goods; moreover they can make disreputable exchange in goods with a strong symbolic or ethical value more legitimate.

In veel statistieken is fitness de meest beoefende sport in Nederland. De dominante verklaring hiervoor is dat mensen in een geïndividualiseerde cultuur meer gericht raken op het uiterlijk en de gezondheid. Met behulp van fitness kan het lichaam worden getraind en in de gewenste vorm gebracht. Ten tweede past fitness in een rationele en doelgerichte samenleving. Fitness kan worden gezien als efficiënt middel om te bewegen, net als fastfood een relatief snelle en efficiënte manier is om de honger te stillen. Op grond van empirisch onderzoek blijken deze verklaringen niet voldoende. Met behulp van de theorie van Max Weber over de protestantse ethiek en het kapitalisme laat dit artikel zien dat de motivatie om te blijven fitnessen dorgaans te simpel wordt fgespiegeld. Fitness moet niet alleen worden begrepen in het licht van een postmoderne consumptiesamenleving, maar ook in het licht van een moderne puriteinse fitnessethiek waar hard werken een doel op zich is.

This article provides an ethnographic account of newspaper coverage of a trade summit which took place in Geneva in the last days of July 2004. One problematic aspect of covering news events at international economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization is the phenomenon of mediated mediation: whereas the role of journalists is to mediate between news events and the public, access to these events is restricted. As a result, the media are dependent on mediation by key actors, press officers, spokespersons, NGOs and other parties with an interest in the way events are represented. Given the highly technical nature of these events, and the limited expertise of journalists, interested parties have many opportunities to 'spin' the coverage.

In the year World War II started, R. L. Hall and C. J. Hitch, two Oxford economists, published a paper which examined “the way in which business men decide what price to charge for their products and what output to produce” (Hall and Hitch 1939, p. 12). Hall and Hitch collected the empirical data for the paper by means of interviews and questionnaires that were, even in those days, unconventional methods for economists. Their findings were no less controversial. The interviews indicated that the applicability of economic theory was limited, since entrepreneurs were unaware of the entities, functions, and data