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Geiger, Susi
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Geiger, Susi
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Geiger, Susi
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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
- PublicationDoes hype create irreversibilities? Affective circulation and market investments in digital healthThis paper draws from two conceptual lenses - the sociology of expectations and market studies - to investigate the relationship between technology hype and market investments: which promises and expectations surround hype and how they come together to shape actors' investments in an emerging market. We address this question through analysing a contemporary hype in a technology marketing context: digital healthcare. Our aim is to trace: how market actors create, support and evaluate a market hype; how hype and market investments are related, and whether hype contributes to irreversibilities in shaping emerging market forms and categories. Our study indicates that hypes contribute tangibly to producing the market, not least by channelling financial, symbolic and material market investments. Further, by highlighting how socio-economic, technological and policy promises become affectively loaded through circulation, we add a novel dimension to existing insights into the socio-cognitive construction of markets. We caution technology marketers, policy makers and investors against blindly following technology hype, especially when it encourages companies to engage in market investment that is unhinged from broader systems and societal, ethical or economic concerns.
413 - PublicationTech sharing, not tech hoarding: Covid-19, global solidarity, and the failed responsibility of the pharmaceutical industryThe Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of health technologies to mitigate the spread of the disease and improve care, including through life-saving vaccines. But the pandemic has also highlighted the vast inequalities in healthcare globally that the current biopharmaceutical business model engenders, based on the patent enclosure of these technologies and on the immense capital accumulation that this system creates. We believe that it is imperative on the pharmaceutical industry to enable and enact global solidarity through tech sharing instead of tech hoarding, but judging by current technology transfer practices we question their willingness to carry costs in organizing healthcare markets through solidaristic principles. While ample opportunities have existed during the Covid-19 pandemic for firms to work towards global healthcare sustainability and equity, these practices have remained fragmented acts of charity at best and mere publicity stunts at worst. In the absence of the voluntary adoption of solidaristic organizational practices by biopharmaceutical firms, the institutionalization of global solidarity as a fundamental organizing principle for healthcare markets by public bodies, chiefly the WHO, is necessary to strengthen resilience and know-how globally.
108Scopus© Citations 4 - PublicationMarket failures and market framings: Can a market be transformed from the inside?How do actors innovate markets in cases of perceived market failures? This paper’s aim is to examine what happens when a market is innovated or, as we call it, ‘redevised’ in situations where public and commercial interests significantly diverge. Market devices can serve an important function in such attempts to innovate markets: they are material and/or social arrangements that are put into place to shape the market in question in certain ways. But can such devices really transform a market from within? To examine this question we trace the history of the Geneva Medicines Patent Pool, a civil society initiative introduced to change pharmaceutical firms’ licensing and collaboration practices in the market for HIV/AIDS medicines. Our empirical results indicate that redevising a market in response to market failures can shift the market’s frames and contribute to altering its practices, but that this is a pragmatic and often lengthy process that is never fully predictable in advance. By attending to the intended and unintended consequences - or misfires - of redevising a market, our study raises important questions around acting in and on the market, market innovation’s’ ontological impact, zooming in and zooming out when studying redevising, and attending to the temporality of market innovation.
836Scopus© Citations 36 - PublicationLeaning in or falling over? Epistemological liminality and the knowledges that make a marketThis article describes the experiences of two market studies scholars who became involved in an Applied Research Centre aimed at developing a societally valuable market in digital health–an experience that ended in failure. We introduce the concept of epistemological liminality as a theoretical tool to problematise our own positionality as ‘market experts’ in this failed academic-industry-government collaboration around a concerned market. Liminality involved entering a transitional space–time in which our academic knowledge as market studies scholars was suspended, but where we failed to successfully move into a new epistemic space of ‘applied market studies’. This state of suspension–and frustration–is a cautionary tale for the difficulties of linking different (and often contradictory) epistemic communities that meet in applied research. We stop short of providing a moral to this market (non)performance tale, but we do highlight the need for openness and debate on the knowledges that come together to make a market in such collaborations.
57Scopus© Citations 2 - PublicationA Tidal Wave of Inevitable Data? Assetization in the Consumer Genomics Testing IndustryWe bring together recent discussions on data capitalism and bio-capitalization by studying value flows in consumer genomics firms – an industry at the intersection between healthcare and technology realms. Consumer genomics companies market genomic testing services to consumers as a source of fun, altruism, belonging and knowledge. But by maintaining a multisided or platform business model, these firms also engage in digital capitalism, creating financial profit from data brokerage. This is a precarious balance to strike: If these companies’ business models consist of assetizing the pool of genomic data that they assemble, then part of their work has to revolve around obscuring to consumers any uncertainties that would potentially impinge on these processes of assembly. We reflect on the nature of these practices and the market relationships that enable them, and we relate this reflection to debates around alternative market arrangements that would potentially mitigate the extractive tendencies of these and other digital health firms.
981Scopus© Citations 22