This dissertation describes the historical origins, design, implementation, and implications of the Chinese social credit system (SCS) and the data-driven governance it embodies. The SCS presents itself as a consumer credit system in name and structure, but it operates under the political logic of governing social life, facilitated by emerging technologies. Its promise lies in its ability to govern all aspects of "trustworthiness" through simple numerical values. On the surface, the state aims and can attain a clearer view of society and regulate citizens' behavior through the metric. Yet my investigation shows neither the goal nor the capacity led to increased legibility. The governed behavior is not directly available to the state, nor do those being governed simply adopt new systems imposed upon them. For the state to govern everything, it must establish connections throughout society, encompassing every individual and aspect within its network. Drawing on original ethnographic research, interviews, and archival data, this study follows the trajectory of an SCS in Meritown, a Northern Chinese city, examining how credit data is defined, collected, translated, represented, and interpreted within various social contexts. The formal state relies on diverse semi-state and social actors to operate the system, each bringing their own interests, interpretations, and practices that reshape the system across different social contexts and stages. The data produced by the system strays from its original purpose of surveilling and documenting reality as a foundation for improved governance. Instead, it is shaped by the demands for evidence of effective governance by state actors, while also being constrained by social forces. Stretching out the bureaucratic capacity, state and semi-state agencies only generate data from specific groups for selective purposes. Overreaching the state’s symbolic power, the meaning and the system and scores are constantly challenged. In other words, the data produced by the system represents a controlled environment, akin to a zoo, rather than capturing the complexity of the wild. Consequently, governing with the MSCS carries the risk of governing through simulacra, where the representation of reality precedes and suspends actual reality.

Derivative financial instruments figure prominently in the modern global economy, but their modern origins date back to the use of agricultural futures contracts in the mid-19th century. This dissertation analyzes the construction of markets in futures contracts during this period on two exchanges—the Chicago Board of Trade and New Orleans Cotton Exchange. Building these markets posed a unique problem. Unlike extant markets, which could operate autonomously, futures markets had to be constitutively linked with a second underlying market in order to work (e.g., a market in cotton futures linked with an underlying market in cotton itself). Making this linkage required creating infrastructural connections—with institutional, material, and cognitive components—that would allow the two markets to work in concert. Infrastructures had to support an environment in which traders on the futures market could incorporate spot market information into intentionally rational decisions.

The Chicago Board of Trade and New Orleans Cotton Exchange built their infrastructures differently. This dissertation asks two questions about this divergence: What factors caused the infrastructure on each exchange to take the shape it did? And, what consequences did these infrastructures have for market behavior? I answer these questions through analyzing the construction and impact of three critical infrastructural features: (1) the classification schemes by which spot commodities were assigned grades ; (2) the material means of gathering and disseminating data, both statistics on the growth and movement of the spot crop, as well as price quotations from global markets; (3) the economic and cultural theories by which traders understood the nature of speculation in futures and its effect on spot markets. I find that the characteristics of these infrastructural elements were shaped less by any uniform concern with efficiency or fairness and more by the distinct economic, cultural, political, and organizational environments on each exchange. Additionally, I suggest that these distinct infrastructures promoted different types of trading on each market—high-risk speculation in Chicago and low-risk hedging in New Orleans—which contributed to the divergent price volatility on these markets during the period of my research.

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography of the valuation of used clothing in Poland and the United Kingdom (UK), along one of the world’s major value chains of used clothing. The central question guiding this research is: How is used clothing made valuable? Economic sociology has long been concerned with understanding the workings of cultural logics of exchange and the social mechanisms that make economic valuation possible. Studies of valuation in economic sociology and neighboring disciplines are increasingly pragmatic and situated in concrete material contexts, focusing on the constitutive use of material devices and infrastructures in the production of value. This dissertation focuses on the objects of exchange, how they are produced, and what role those material-semiotic objects play in relations of exchange, evaluation, and value production. Data are drawn from participant observation, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key informants, and informal interviews in sites of collection, sorting, and retail in the UK and Poland. Analysis is informed by theoretical approaches to commodities, gifts, and waste from economic sociology, anthropology, human geography and Science and Technology studies. Four empirical chapters trace the movement of used clothing from donation through resale. In UK charity shops, commodities and gifts are produced alongside each other in competing assemblages. The wholesale market for collected textiles produces commodities by balancing value production with concerns of waste production. In the Polish retail market, sellers must produce knowable and desirable commodities from heterogeneous things. Polish consumers judge the quality and value of used clothing in material encounters. In each of these spaces, used clothing is made valuable through its material and symbolic production as gifts, commodities, and waste. This dissertation contributes to economic sociological studies of commodification and valuation with a discussion of the valuation of heterogeneous, non-standardized goods. This is the first research carried out on the global used clothing industry in an Eastern European country and in a country that is a major re-exporter of used clothing.