Devising consumption: The question of "private fact"

This paper starts from the proposition that devising consumption involves getting into the mess, or dirt, of private fact. What all consumer marketing devices share is an attempt to reach into and connect with the private mixtures of beliefs, facts and ideas which shape consumer calculation. Despite more than a decade of research in the sociology of markets rejuvenated by Callon et al.’s (1998) reappraisals of calculation and subsequent analyses of the role of market devices (Callon, Muniesa & Millo, 2007) there remains a thick, and quite understandable, haze around private consumer calculation. Muniesa, Millo and Callon (2007) insisted that devices viz objects should not be split from, but taken together with, dispositions viz humans as the compound ‘agencements’ of economic action and yet, as much as marketing objects, tools, devices come into focus, the private business of calculation sketches only a very faint outline.
There are  good reasons why the sociology of markets has disdained private fact. For the rationalists, this is territory irrelevant to the formalist logic underpinning markets until converted into the action (or wisdom) of crowds, while for empiricists this is territory  inaccessible to a tradition dedicated to externally observable evidence. The sociology of consumption meanwhile has had plenty to say about how consumption has been devised through the harnessing, manipulation and transformation of private beliefs, needs, longings and desires but comparatively little to say on the formal structure or empirical functioning of markets.
The paper suggests that despite the application of the badge ‘pragmatic’ to recent work pragmatism means more than technical or empirical description. It also means loosening the boundaries of research projects to allow the full significance of connections to come to the fore; as in the connections between devices and private dispositions or between the study of markets and the study of consumption.