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AbstractThe Dutch institutional configuration is unique in its hybrid character. The specific mixture of a strong welfare state and an Anglo‐American‐oriented economy, which is even more pronounced in the case of Amsterdam, creates a buffering capacity. However, this capacity is expected to be insufficient to absorb the entire impact of the current financial and economic crises. The Amsterdam economy, segments of the housing market and urban development in general will be hard hit by the crises. The state will be reasserting itself, but will soon suffer from a lack of investment capital.Résumé La configuration institutionnelle néerlandaise est unique par son caractère hybride. La combinaison singulière d'une protection sociale forte et d'une économie d'orientation anglo‐américaine – encore plus flagrante dans le cas d'Amsterdam – crée une capacité d'amortissement. Celle‐ci devrait toutefois ne pas suffire pour absorber tout l'impact des crises financière et économique actuelles. À Amsterdam, ces dernières vont gravement affecter à la fois l'économie, certains segments du marché du logement et l'urbanisme en général. L'État se rétablira, mais ne tardera pas à souffrir d'un manque de capitaux d'investissement.

Abstract
The article scrutinizes the Dutch healthcare market system to provide empirical grounding to the debates around the extent to which rationally constructed markets can develop as originally planned. Focusing on one specific pricing device, we document how the perceived economic 'rationalities' embedded in its design are challenged by the unforeseen and unanticipated 'irrationalities' of daily practices. We trace how healthcare professionals developed informal ways to adapt to the rules and expectations embedded in that device, resulting in forms of 'counter performativity' that threaten the quality and accessibility of Dutch healthcare. The main theoretical contribution of the article is to bridge the gap between 'Actor Network Theory-based economic sociology' and its emphasis on (counter-) performativity and the agency of devices with the older European continental inflections building on Weber, Durkheim and Bourdieu, by drawing attention to the distinct epistemologies of different professions, using insights from James Scott and the sociology of the professions.

ABSTRACT  The turn of the twenty‐first century saw the re‐emergence of debates about the reconfiguration of European financial geographies and the role of stock exchange mergers in this process. There has been, however, no systematic attempt to date to analyse such changes. This paper proposes a specific conceptual framework to explore these issues. It uses a product‐based analysis to examine, in the context of recent stock exchange mergers, the factors affecting the competitiveness of a financial centre. It argues that it is important to understand three intertwined influences—product complementarities, the nature of local epistemic communities, and regulation—and their contingent effects on change. This is exemplified by a tentative application of the framework to the case of Amsterdam in order to better understand its recent decline in competitiveness as a European financial centre.

This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frames the crisis differently as an elite political debacle. Political and technocratic elites were hubristically detached from the process of financial innovation as it took the form of 'bricolage', which put finance beyond technical control or management. The paper raises fundamental questions about the politicized role of technocrats after the 1980s and emphasizes the need to bring private finance and its public regulators under democratic political control whose technical precondition is a dramatic simplification of finance. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.