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The thesis that economics is "performative" (Callon 1998) has provoked much interest but also some puzzlement and not a little confusion. The purpose of this article is to examine from the viewpoint of performativity one of the most successful areas of modern economics, the theory of options, and in so doing hopefully to clarify some of the issues at stake. To claim that economics is performative is to argue that it does things, rather than simply describing (with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy) an external reality that is not affected by economics. But what does economics do, and what are the effects of it doing what it does?That the theory of options is an appropriate place around which to look for performativity is suggested by two roughly concurrent developments. Since the 1950s, the academic study of finance has been transformed from a low-status, primarily descriptive activity to a high-status, analytical, mathematical, Nobel-prize-winning enterprise. At the core of that enterprise is a theoretical account of options dating from the start of the 1970s. Around option theory there has developed a large array of sophisticated mathematical analyses of financial derivatives. (A "derivative" is a contract or security, such as an option, the value of which depends upon the price of another asset or upon the level of an index or interest rate.)

This article argues that modern finance should be an important object of attention. Particularly worthy of study are three demarcations: the changing disciplinary boundary of economics, the distinction between private and public knowledge, and the legal and cultural demarcation between legitimate trading and gambling. The balance between what Barnes calls N-type (natural kind) and S-type (social kind) terms in finance is different from, for example, that in physics, but that is no criticism of finance theory: the activities of those who disbelieve finance theory's efficient market hypothesis probably make the hypothesis more true. The case of Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing theory is drawn on to argue that the loops of self-reference intrinsic to S-terms seem predominantly performative: they increase the truth of finance theory's typical assumptions. S-loops in the financial markets do not always promote stability, however, as is shown here by a case study of the fate of the hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management.

Dans cet article, je défendrai l'argument selon lequel la sociologie de la connaissance devrait jouer un rôle important dans la recherche en histoire et dans les études sociales des techniques. La sociologie de la connaissance a pour origine l'étude des sources sociales des religions et des idéologies politiques. C'est dans les années 70 que des sociologues ont entrepris d'étudier la connaissance scientifique (auparavant la recherche sociologique sur la science s'était consacrée à des questions comme l'ethos de la science et ses systèmes de gratifications, et non au contenu de la connaissance produite). Un ensemble d'études portant sur l'histoire des sciences montre comment la connaissance scientifique est modelée par les circonstances sociales dans lesquelles elle se développe.