by Koray Caliskan*

Over the past few decades, the idea of performativity has quietly reshaped how many of us think about markets, identities, technologies, and institutions. The basic intuition is simple but powerful: descriptions and representations (scientific or not) do not merely reflect the world; under the right conditions, they help bring it into being. Price theories shape markets, rankings reshape organizations, categories remake gender, and models reorganize networks. Words, numbers, and diagrams do not just represent reality; they help build it. And this is even more important at the age of AI.
Yet as performativity spread across disciplines—from gender studies to economic sociology, from education to finance—it also became increasingly diffuse. The term started to mean many things at once. Sometimes everything appeared “performative,” which risked turning a sharp analytical concept into a vague slogan. Our paper steps back from this situation and asks a grounding question: when performativity happens, what exactly is being changed?
Together with Sevde Nur Unal, Simone Polillo, and Donald MacKenzie, we conducted the most comprehensive review of the performativity literature to date. We examined 3,532 scholarly works with “performativity” in their titles, alongside a broader corpus of more than 6,700 books and articles that deploy the concept across the social sciences and humanities. Combining computational text analysis with close interpretive reading, we mapped citation patterns, key terms, and influential authors to visualize how performativity has consolidated into identifiable research trajectories, even as it risks losing coherence through disciplinary expansion. We then systematically read and classified the full titled corpus across fields such as philosophy, economic sociology, gender studies, and science and technology studies, discussing representative works collectively to capture the diverse ways performativity has been theorized and applied. We published the results as an open access article in Finance and Society: “The Modes of Performativity: A Meta-Theoretical Review” (2025, 11(3): 319–342). https://doi.org/10.1017/fas.2025.11
What does performativity really do? This question emerged from an unusually extensive act of collective reading. For this project, we worked through almost everything written with “performativity” in the title across the social sciences and humanities over more than sixty years. That meant reading work from sociology, economics, anthropology, geography, gender and queer studies, education, management, science and technology studies, political theory, law, and adjacent fields, as well as scholarship produced in several languages beyond English. We approached this literature not as a canon to be defended or reduced, but as a living archive of intellectual experiments. Some texts were careful and precise, others expansive and exploratory; some treated performativity as a central analytic, others as a passing gesture. Immersing ourselves in this diversity made one thing clear: what often looks like conceptual confusion is better understood as variation in analytical focus. Different disciplines were, in effect, studying different ways performativity works, without having a shared language to name those differences. The framework we propose grew directly out of this immersion, as an attempt to respect the richness of this literature while giving it a clearer common grammar.
Our answer is deliberately modest and practical. Performativity always works through representational interventions: theories, metrics, models, rankings, narratives, categories, and classifications that intervene in ongoing social arrangements. These interventions can succeed or fail, stabilize or destabilize, enable or constrain. What matters is not whether something is performative in the abstract, but how a representation reshapes the world it enters.
To make this visible, we propose a simple framework that focuses on four things representations can change: devices, actors, representations themselves, and networks. Together, these form what we call the DARN framework. This is not a claim about what the world ultimately consists of. It is a way of seeing how change happens in socio-technical systems, and of comparing very different studies without forcing them into a single mold.
Sometimes performativity works by changing devices. Prices, indicators, algorithms, rankings, and calculative tools are not neutral instruments. They are built through specific assumptions and representations, and once deployed, they organize behavior. A pricing formula does not merely describe value; it structures how traders negotiate. A university ranking does not just measure quality; it reshapes institutional priorities. In these cases, performativity operates by embedding representations into devices that people then use, often routinely and without much reflection.
In other cases, performativity works by shaping actors. This is where research on gender, race, professionalism, and identity has been especially influential. People do not simply express pre-existing identities; they become certain kinds of actors through repeated norms, judgments, and expectations. At the same time, these processes are never complete or final. They can be resisted, reworked, and subverted. Performativity here is not about theatrical performance, but about how agency itself is gradually formed within social arrangements that are always contested.
A third mode operates at the level of representations themselves. Some of the most consequential performative effects come from naming, framing, and categorizing reality. The emergence of “the economy” as a measurable object, the invention of GDP, or the declaration of “crisis” are not neutral descriptive moves. They reorganize governance, justify interventions, and shape future possibilities. Representations, in this sense, are material forces. They circulate, stabilize, and acquire authority, often far beyond their original contexts.
Finally, performativity can work by reconfiguring networks. Shared models, standards, and representations allow actors, devices, and institutions to coordinate. Financial markets, platforms, governance systems, and even built environments are assembled through such processes. A representation becomes performative when it helps align relationships—when it allows actors to act together, talk together, and recognize each other as part of the same system.
These modes are not separate boxes. They overlap, cascade, and interact. A single intervention can reshape devices, actors, representations, and networks at once. The value of distinguishing them is not to divide the world neatly, but to sharpen analytical attention and avoid the temptation to say that everything is performative in the same way.
Why does this matter now? Because we are entering a moment in which performativity is no longer driven primarily by economists, policymakers, or institutional elites alone. Increasingly, it is driven by AI systems and agentic assistants that generate representations at scale, embed them into devices, coordinate networks, and shape action in real time. These systems do not merely induce performativity by reinforcing existing models; they actively participate in producing new ones. Are they becoming autonomous agents of performativity?
AI-generated scores, predictions, recommendations, and classifications already shape markets, labor, visibility, and access. Agentic systems increasingly decide what counts as relevant, risky, valuable, or actionable. In doing so, they are not just describing the world; they are continuously helping to remake it. This is performativity accelerated, automated, and distributed.

This raises a crucial challenge for economic sociology and its sister fields. Critique remains essential. We must continue to expose how performative systems reproduce inequality, extract value, and externalize harm. But critique alone is no longer enough. We also need to learn how to design performativity more carefully and more deliberately. If representations make worlds, then the task is not only to diagnose their effects, but to imagine and build better ones.
The stakes could not be higher. Performativity unfolds unevenly across space, following deep geographies of injustice shaped by colonial histories, infrastructural asymmetries, and economic extraction. At the same time, planetary collapse is not a distant scenario but an ongoing condition. Economic representations that once seemed abstract now have material consequences for climate, biodiversity, and collective survival.
AI and agentic assistants could just as easily intensify domination as help stabilize alternative futures. The difference will not lie in intelligence alone, but in how performativity is understood, designed, and governed. Performativity has always been about making realities, not merely interpreting them. The question now is whether we can learn to make realities that are more just, more livable, and more attuned to the fragile conditions of the planet we share.
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* Koray Caliskan is an economic sociologist and organizational designer, and a tenured professor at Parsons School of Design, The New School. He examines how markets, platforms, and economies are made, governed, and redesigned, with a focus on digital advertising and AI. He is the author of Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies, Their Communities, Markets, and Blockchains (Columbia, 2023) and Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity (Princeton, 2010), and co-author of Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics (with Donald MacKenzie, Polity, 2025) and Economization (with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie, Columbia, forthcoming,).

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