Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime © 2023 the Authors Published version Kurunmäki, Liisa; Mennicken, Andrea; Miller, Peter Kurunmäki, L., Mennicken, A., & Miller, P. (2023). Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime. In A. Mica, M. Pawlak, A. Horolets, & P. Kubicki (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Failure (pp. 160-176). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429355950-15 2023 Routledge International Handbook of Failure Edited by Adriana Mica, Mikołaj Pawlak, Anna Horolets, and Paweł Kubicki First published 2023 ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 40404- 8 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 1- 032- 37104- 7 (pbk) ISBN: 978- 0- 429- 35595- 0 (ebk) 12 Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime Liisa Kurunmäki, Andrea Mennicken, and Peter Miller CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DOI: 10.4324/9780429355950-15 The funders: University of Jyväskylä, Finland. 160 DOI: 10.4324/9780429355950-15 12 Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime 1 Liisa Kurunm ä ki , Andrea Mennicken, and Peter Miller Introduction Sociologists have largely neglected the topic of failure, and particularly the economising of failure. Likewise, they have paid insuffi cient attention to the increasingly elaborate failure regimes that assess failing and pronounce on failure, and the ways in which such regimes support the social relations and institutions that structure economic behaviour within modern markets ( Halliday and Carruthers 1996 ). This is notwithstanding the many adjacent literatures that have developed in recent years. These include the substantial sociological literature on economising (e.g. Ç al ış kan and Callon 2009 ; 2010 ; MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007 ; Miller and Power 2013 ; Muniesa et al. 2017 ), the “New Public Management” and “Audit Society” literatures ( Hood 1991 ; Humphrey, Miller, and Scapens 1993 ; Pollitt 1993 ; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011 ; Power 1994 ; 1997 ), as well as those writings that have highlighted the ways in which economic ideas and instruments facilitate the “governing” of economic life ( Cutler, Hindess, Hirst, and Hussain 1978 ; Hopwood and Miller 1994 ; Miller and O’Leary 1987 ; Miller and Rose 1990 ; Thompson 1986 ). Our aim, in line with the volume overall, is to redress a neglected aspect of failure in the sociological literature – namely the economising of failure – and to do so in three stages. First, we consider the neglect of the topic of failure in sociology, and articulate the distinction between failure and failing, as well as the dynamic process of the economising of failure. Second, we examine briefl y the economising of the economy through the economising of failure, the assembling of a failure regime for the corporate world across more or less the whole of the nineteenth century and the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Third, we examine the economising of the public sphere, the way in which the notion of failure as an economic event in the corporate world came to travel into the public sphere, and particularly the domain of hospitalbased healthcare in England, across the fi rst two decades of the twentyfi rst century. For during the past two decades or so, a particular idea of failure together with its associated calculative infrastructure have been proposed not just for hospitals but also for schools, social work, prisons, universities, and much more. Attending to the category of failure focuses our attention on the calculative infrastructure and ideas on which they depend. It also directs our attention to the coconstruction of the entities to be regulated and the bodies that are to regulate them to avert Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime 161 underperformance or failure. We consider in the next section the neglect of the topic of failure in sociology and outline the features of our approach. Failure Regimes, Failing, and the Economising of Failure This neglect of the economising of failure is all the more puzzling as an economised category of failure now saturates public life. The defi cit is more than empirical, for failure defi ned as exit from the market game takes us to the heart of economising and the phenomenon that has been dubbed neoliberalism ( Brown 2015 ; Dardot and Laval 2013 ; Davies 2014 ). Failure defi ned as fi nancial failure, leading to system exit, has come to be viewed by its proponents as not only inevitable but desirable, insofar as it is held to promote both competition and accountability. As the reach of marketbased principles is expanded, so too is the scope of government through a vast apparatus of regulatory intervention, often and ironically in the name of increasing competition. This tension is critical, for without a relatively orderly regime for exit, market principles are ultimately unable to operate. Yet allowing or facilitating the possibility of exit for service providers in the public sphere typically goes hand in hand with the imperative to maintain services. Attending to the category of failure thus focuses our attention on the often overlooked “how” of economising ( Ç al ış kan and Callon 2009 ; Kurunm ä ki, Mennicken, and Miller 2016 ; Miller and Power 2013 ). Malpas and Wickham (1995) have commented on this curious sociological lacuna, which is all the more puzzling given the extent to which failure is intrinsic to the larger “projects” within which they argue social life takes place ( Malpas and Wickham 1995 , 39). Consistent with the arguments of Hunt and Wickham (1994) , they have called for a Foucauldian sociology of failure that views attempts at control, including control through market mechanisms and other processes of economising which are constitutive of social life, as always failing, always falling short of their targets. Rose and Miller argued in very similar terms, depicting government, including the governing of economic life, as a “congenitally failing” operation ( Miller and Rose 1990 ; Rose and Miller 1992 , 190). Government, they suggested, is a problematising activity, for the ideals of government are intrinsically linked to the problems around which it circulates, the failings it seeks to rectify. It is around these diffi culties and failures that “programmes” of government are elaborated, which are fuelled by the constant registration of failure, the discrepancy between aspiration and outcome ( Rose and Miller 1992 , 190). There are of course exceptions to this neglect, but these tend to be relatively discrete contributions rather than a cumulative body of sociological literature focusing on the economising of failure. Halliday and Carruthers (1996 ; 2007 ; 2009 ) have provided what is perhaps the most sustained contribution in this respect, off ering a sociolegal approach to bankruptcy lawmaking. Accounting researchers have also addressed the topic, and in so doing have highlighted the links between economising and the regimes that seek to identify and regulate both failing and failure, in the corporate sphere and in the public sphere more broadly (Kurunm ä ki, Mennicken, and Miller 2018 ; 2019 ; Kurunm ä ki and Miller 2013 ; Miller and Power 1995 ). Earlier contributions from organisational scholars identifi ed this important topic, although there was little followup subsequently from that fi eld (see for instance Meyer and Zucker 1989 ; Whetten 1980 ). Historians of bankruptcy, particularly with regard to the United States, have off ered detailed descriptions of the emergence of bankruptcy law. The early work of Warren (1935) charted the development of bankruptcy legislation in the United States, from the late eighteenth century until the Bankruptcy Act of 1898, based primarily on congressional debates. Several decades later, Coleman (1974) provided a careful study of state lawmaking on issues relating to insolvency. Jackson (1986) and Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook (1989) off ered diff ering yet similarly Liisa Kurunmäki, Andrea Mennicken, and Peter Miller 162 normative assessments of bankruptcy law. More recently, Balleisen (2001) considered the economic and social meanings of bankruptcy in Antebellum America, with particular attention to the 1841 Federal Bankruptcy Act and its place within the shifting character of American capitalism, while Skeel (2001) charted the birth of US insolvency law across most of the nineteenth century, culminating in the enactment of the Bankruptcy Act of 1898 and subsequent transformations over the following century or so. 2 It fell to a pair of sociologists to undertake a more analytic study of how and why American bankruptcy law took its distinctive shape ( Carruthers and Halliday 1998 ). Focusing on the process that led to the 1978 Bankruptcy Code in the United States, together with corporate law reforms enacted in England in 1986, they combined neoinstitutional insights with an emphasis on the recursive relation between law and organisations, and the role that professions play in the process. But it is Sandage’s Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2005) that comes closest to the analysis proposed here of the economising of failure. We consider this in more detail in the following section, with particular attention to what it tells us about the economising of the economy over the course of the nineteenth century. For now, we turn our attention to the broad parameters of our approach. Our approach to the economising of failure is consistent with the calls noted above for a Foucauldian approach to the analysis of failure, although rather than focusing on the generic characteristics of projects or programmes, the inevitable gaps that arise between aspirations and outcomes, we focus on the emergence and assembling of specifi c failure regimes, and their intrinsic links with the phenomenon that has been dubbed neoliberalism ( Brown 2015 ; Dardot and Laval 2013 ; Davies 2014 ). We draw attention to the fundamental tension between expanding the scope of marketbased principles while also expanding the reach of government through regulatory intervention. And we highlight the challenges faced in devising failure regimes, whether across the nineteenth century for the corporate sphere or the last two decades for the public sphere. A number of features defi ne our approach. First, we argue that failure has none of the objectivity or inevitability often attributed to it. This is the case equally in the corporate sphere and the public sphere. One can of course chart the volume of corporate failures, and such failures can clearly have devastating consequences for individuals, families, and even entire towns or regions. But, important as such aspects are, failure is much more than a statistical event or personal experience. And it is also much more than a matter of profi tability or asset strength, or indeed the inverse. The moment of failure is much more complex than “realist” appeals to underlying economic reality suggest. The calculative technologies of accounting that are so central to such assessments are themselves enmeshed in an assemblage of expert claims, modes of judgement, fi nancial norms, political negotiations, and much more ( Miller and Power 1995 ). The moment of actual failure only exists within this assemblage of actors, instruments, ideas, and interventions, even if the form that the assemblage takes varies from country to country, particularly with regard to the diff ering territorial demarcations between lawyers and accountants. Second, and notwithstanding the importance of avoiding “realist” narratives of failure, it is equally important to avoid juxtaposing realists and constructivists as if this all too convenient dichotomy advanced our understanding of failure (Kurunm ä ki and Miller 2013 ; Latour 1993 ). Consistent with the previous point, we need a language that helps us understand the variations in the stability of all those practices and entities that emerge out of the assemblage of actors, instruments, ideas, and interventions that seek to operationalise failure. To put this diff erently, we view failure as an archetypical variable ontology object. If the actual moment of failure emerges within and through an assemblage of calculative practices, expert claims and pronouncements, legal procedures, fi nancial norms and risk assessments, political judgements, and so forth, we Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime 163 need to be much more attentive to the gradations of possibility, the gradations in the stability of entities, and the varying degrees of possibility in the ability of an agent or network of agents to bring about the moment of failure. To view failure as a variable ontology object means attending to the multitude of interactions among all the components of the failure assemblage, and their gradual stabilisation. A whole host of actors and instruments have to be brought into play and have to achieve a signifi cant degree of stability before the moment of failure can be pronounced. Before that can happen, there is an openended yet not limitless set of negotiations and interpretations (on the “dialectic of failure,” see Power 1997 ). The more these are stabilised, the more real the possibility of failure becomes, until the moment that failure is pronounced. That moment is the outcome of this multiplicity of components interacting rather than a brute reality that somehow imposes itself upon us in an unmediated form. Third, we argue that the analysis of failure regimes requires consideration of both the ideas and instruments that make them possible. We use the term “calculative infrastructures” to designate how such assemblages intertwine the operational and ideational dimensions of governing failure, how they transform the very concept of failure, and how it is to be acted upon (Kurunm ä ki, Mennicken, and Miller 2019 ). Such infrastructures not only make ideas about markets and economic rationality operable, but they also animate and shape economic thinking itself, including the ideas of actorhood that are involved. Calculative infrastructures are inherently relational phenomena, for it is not a matter of starting from the study of a given object such as “failure,” but of analysing the sets of practices that form and fashion the idea of failure itself, and in such a way that it can become the correlate of a historically specifi c set of practices for acting upon it. And here our emphasis on the variable ontological status of such phenomena deserves reemphasis, insofar as it is the stabilising of a chain of calculative instruments and ideas that makes it possible for failure to be acted upon by those entities given responsibility for such matters. Fourth, and fi nally, we argue that it is important to distinguish between failure and failing (Kurunm ä ki and Miller 2013 ). Again, we emphasise that “failing” is not a given or objective state of the world, but is a status that is internal to regulatory and policy discourses, and is itself subject to multiple processes of interpretation, judgement, and intervention. Failing can be a protracted process with no inevitable outcome, and certainly no inevitability that actual failure will ensue. Interventions directed at those entities deemed to be failing may delay further decline and avert actual failure. Whether in the corporate sphere or the public sphere, the notion of failing goes together with a whole set of instruments for assessing performance, comparing it with that of others, deciding what problems exist, and evaluating the interventions that may be possible. Failing is about prediction rather than pronouncement; it is about the future rather than the past. In contrast to actual failure, failing has a residually optimistic dimension, insofar as it allows for the possibility of cure. Economising the Economy Economising the public sphere has a long prehistory. Economising the economy through the category and calculation of failure was an even more protracted process. For even in the corporate sphere, the economising of failure required a fundamental shift in how failure was understood, how it could be “forgiven,” and how the act of forgiving could be made operable through a relatively stabilised failure regime, as Sandage and others have so perceptively shown ( Balleisen 2001 ; Mann 2002 ; Sandage 2005 ). In the early and midnineteenth century, failure was deeply personal, encapsulated in the term “loser” and other associated terms ( Sandage 2005 , 11 ff .). This notion of failure brought together the economics of capitalism and the economics of personhood. The various attempts on both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century to fi gure Liisa Kurunmäki, Andrea Mennicken, and Peter Miller 164 out whether and how to forgive failure were not only economic and legal matters but also profoundly cultural ( Mann 2002 ). The redefi nition of insolvency as arising from risk rather than sin entailed an acknowledgement that the vicissitudes of capitalism could lead to personal failure even despite hard work ( Sandage 2005 , 15). This redefi nition of failure as economic rather than moral was a key part in the forming of a liberal economy. At its heart was a new economics of selfhood, which over time would come to tally with the economics of capitalism ( Sandage 2005 , 12). In the United States, the passing on the same day in 1867 of the Bankruptcy Act and the Reconstruction Act felicitously paired the birth of failure with the birth of freedom. 3 Or, as Sandage (2005 , 223) puts it, “liberty and slavery” gave way to a new measure of human worth: “success and failure.” With this step, the economic domain was fully constituted qua economic domain. This required more than a transformation of the idea of failure. It required the forming of an entire calculative infrastructure, a complex chain of calculative practices and their associated rationales for predicting and pronouncing failure. This economising of the idea of failure, and the forming of a reciprocally related chain of calculations including fi nancial statements, ratio analysis, risk indexes, and credit ratings made failure calculable in the decades following the 1867 Bankruptcy Act. Corporate failure defi ned as an economic event emerged within and through an assemblage of calculative practices, fi nancial norms, legal procedures, expert claims, and modes of judgement. With this transformation of failure went the correlate that, if failure could be forgiven, then reentry into the market game could be permitted, a positive step according to the proponents of bankruptcy legislation. This assembling of a failure regime for the corporate sphere across the nineteenth century entailed an important distinction between failure and failing, the latter an often protracted process with no necessary end point. Failing today is often paired with interventions directed at the entities in question, so as to delay further decline and avert failure. Despite its negative connotations, there is a residual optimism inherent in the notion of failing. A large array of devices makes it operable, including comparisons with the performance of others, assessments of the severity of the problems, and a range of options for attempting to mitigate or avert the problems, including refi nancing, forced disposals, closure of segments of the entity, government support, and so on. The above, together with our own research (Kurunm ä ki and Miller 2013 ), leads us to identify three distinct steps in the assembling of a failure regime for the corporate sphere in the United Kingdom and the United States across the nineteenth century and the fi rst half of the twentieth century. First, the forgiving of failure through repeated attempts to enact enduring bankruptcy legislation across much of the nineteenth century. Second, the emergence and growth of credit rating agencies from the 1840s onwards, whose work largely consisted for the rest of the century in accumulating narrative accounts of the character of individuals. Third, the development in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the fi rst half of the twentieth century of a calculative infrastructure for seeking to forecast failure , using fi nancial ratios and risk indexes. The fi rst step in the economising of failure and the assembling of a failure regime for the corporate sphere was the “forgiving” of failure through bankruptcy legislation. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, a remarkably protracted and faltering series of legislative moves resulted in more or less stabilised bankruptcy legislation at around the same time. In the United States, the shortlived Bankruptcy Act of 1800 began the process, even if it was repealed after only three years. There was regular debate about replacing it over the following decades, but it was not until the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 that further federal legislation was passed. Importantly, this Act introduced for the fi rst time the principle of voluntary bankruptcy, and covered all individuals, not just merchants and traders. This Act lasted little more than a year, and had been under attack even before it came into force. Following this, there was a gap of a quarter of a century Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime 165 before Congress enacted another bankruptcy law. The 1867 Bankruptcy Act, which lasted just over a decade, was a further important step in the economising of failure and the assembling of a failure regime, for it meant that economic failure no longer deprived individuals of their capacity to transact. Failure was no longer indelibly inscribed in the character of an individual, but was a more circumscribed economic phenomenon. The relatively enduring Bankruptcy Act of 1898 reaffi rmed the economising of failure, ensuring that success and failure could be viewed as two sides of the liberal ideal ( Sandage 2005 , 223). In England, the trajectory was broadly similar, even though the exact chronology and resulting systems were somewhat diff erent. The Bankruptcy Act 1831 established a Court of Bankruptcy in London and created a new fi gure, the offi cial assignee, which radically altered the institutional and legal framework for dealing with insolvency. The Winding- Up Act of 1848 regulated the control of liquidations and made the appointment of a public accountant more or less essential. The Bankruptcy Act of 1861 introduced the important principle of voluntary insolvency, and the Companies Act 1862 – often referred to as the “accountant’s friend” – established the position of “offi cial liquidator,” while the Debtors Act 1869 reduced the ability of the courts to detain those in debt, even though some provisions remained. Henceforth, imprisonment in England was to be reserved for the punishment of crime, and not misfortune in trade ( Di Martino 2005 , 27). The ensuing 1883 Bankruptcy Act remained in place for just over a century and provided the framework for the administration of bankruptcy until the passing of the Insolvency Acts of 1985 and 1986. The second important step in the assembling of a failure regime for the corporate sphere was the rapid growth of credit rating agencies from the 1840s onwards ( Carruthers 2013 ). The forgiving of failure through insolvency legislation was thereby paired with the forecasting of failure through the establishing of a vast information infrastructure for both narrating and rating failing. The formation of Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency began this process in 1841, when it opened its doors in lower Manhattan. In the words of Henry Thoreau, it was to become a “kind of intelligence offi ce for the whole country” (cited in Sandage 2005 , 99). This information infrastructure was to match the recently established physical infrastructures of telegraphy, railroads, and steamboats through a network of local informants who, instead of payment, would receive a portion of any debt collected from local defaulters. Within fi ve years of its opening, the company had enlisted 679 informants, which reached 2,000 by 1851. This kept 30 clerks busy, receiving on an average day 600 new or updated reports and answering 400 enquiries. Much of the time of these credit reporters was spent chatting with traders, bankers, sheriff s, and tavern keepers, as fi nancial statements were rarely obtained and trade information was negligible. Assessments were largely in terms of the character of the individuals concerned, with “bad egg” being typical of the terms used in the credit reports that made failure indelible. As Sandage (2005 , 130) remarks, Americans had not yet learned by the 1860s to think of each other simply as numbers. Initial attempts to standardise such reports began in 1869, with the Bradstreet Company sending instructions to its reporters to itemise length of time in business, amount of own capital in the business, estimated net worth after liabilities, and so forth (Kurunm ä ki and Miller 2013 , 1105– 6). By 1880, R.G. Dun and the Bradstreet Agency had become a clear duopoly in the fi eld of national credit reporting, and by the end of the nineteenth century, most manufacturers and wholesalers used the information they provided. That said, and notwithstanding the fulltime reporters that covered some of the more densely populated areas of the United States, little had changed between 1865 and 1890 in other areas, which continued to rely on the reports of local “informants.” The third step in the assembling of a failure regime for the corporate sphere was the separating of rating and narrating, the calculating of the probability of failure instead of assessing Liisa Kurunmäki, Andrea Mennicken, and Peter Miller 166 it on the basis of rumour and personal intuition ( Cohen and Carruthers 2014 ). The growing institutional distance and impersonality between capital providers and businesses, especially in the United States, paved the way for the development of new analytical knowledge capable of assessing corporate health and the solvency of borrowers. The year 1890 can be taken as a turning point in this respect, for in that year credit man Peter Earling from Chicago published a manual titled Whom to Trust: A Practical Treatise on Mercantile Credits (1890) . Earling (1890 , 13) called for a “better understanding of the ‘Science of Credits’ ” and sought to identify “the causes that lead to success or failure.” Just a few years later, in 1896, a national group called the National Association of Credit Men (NACM) was formed and was incorporated in New York State the following year. It attracted 600 members to begin with, which trebled during the fi rst year and had grown to 33,000 by 1920. The NACM sought to transform the practice of credit assessment by defi ning it as an economic domain susceptible to fi nancial calculations. The NACM called for a standardising and economising of the information on which credit reports were based. Subsequently, they joined forces with the American Bankers Association to support calls for audited fi nancial statements to be made more widely available, and for credit reports to be prepared on the basis of standardised statements. By 1899, they were able to report that 133 fi rms were using these forms. Before long, a chain of calculations was beginning to form that would provide the calculative infrastructure for assessing and seeking to predict failure. It was through this infrastructure that the distinction between failing and failure was solidifi ed. The increased availability and uniformity of fi nancial information that began to occur from the late 1890s allowed a set of “second order” calculations ( Power 2004 ) – accounting ratios – to be produced. The “current ratio” (current assets divided by current liabilities) began to gain acceptance at this time, as it appeared to allow creditors to predict the likelihood that a fi rm would be unable to meet payments and would therefore fail. Banks increasingly began to rely on this ratio as a basis for approving loans, and the “50% rule” was widely recommended, meaning that a borrower’s current liabilities should not exceed 50% of current assets. The NACM’s Bulletin set out similar guidelines in 1902, and ratio analysis gained momentum rapidly. Gradually, across the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century, the notion that failure was calculable and probabilistic began to take hold. In 1905, Cannon, a pioneer of fi nancial statement analysis, spoke of the “rules of the credit science,” and in 1919 Alexander Wall published a highly infl uential study in the Federal Reserve Bulletin titled Study of Credit Barometrics (see Cannon 1905 ; Wall 1919 ). Wall computed seven diff erent ratios for 981 fi rms, stratifi ed by industry and location, and detected signifi cant variation, which was a departure from the thencustomary usage of a single ratio. There was an avalanche of publications on ratio analysis during the 1920s, which continued unabated during the 1930s, notwithstanding criticisms that they did not portray fundamental relationships within the business, and that the pursuit of the perfect set of ratios was futile and absurd (Kurunm ä ki and Miller 2013 , 1108). The continued growth of ratio analysis was no doubt supported by the formation of the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, in response to the stock market crash of 1929, and the increased availability of fi nancial statements. In the early 1930s, a number of studies sought to predict the likelihood of failure by focusing on individual ratios and comparing ratios of failed companies with those of successful fi rms. Several of these claimed to be able to identify predictors of failure some years prior to failure ( Bellovary, Giacomino, and Akers 2007 ). Across the following decades, various bodies continued this quest for making failure quantifi able and probabilistic, including the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime 173 Notes 1 This chapter is based on work conducted as part of the programme of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation, and draws on Kurunm ä ki and Miller (2013); Kurunm ä ki, Mennicken, and Miller (2018 ; 2019 ). The authors wish to thank Mike Power for his encouragement with this project from the outset. We also gratefully acknowledge the fi nancial support provided for this study by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Ref: ES/ N018869/ 1) under the Open Research Area Scheme (Project Title: QUAD – Quantifi cation, Administrative Capacity and Democracy). The QUAD project is an international project cofunded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, France), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Germany), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK), and the Nederlands Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, Netherlands). 2 For the United Kingdom, Hoppitt (1987) examines bankruptcy in eighteenthcentury England, and Lester (1995) charts the circuitous path followed by English insolvency legislation, culminating in the Bankruptcy Act of 1883. This remained the basis for insolvency supervision in England for just over a century, until the passage of the Insolvency Acts of 1985 and 1986. 3 The US Congress approved both the Bankruptcy Act and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 (the fi rst of four major provisions for readmitting former Confederate States) on the same day: 2 March 1867. 4 On the interaction between “lawmaking” at the national level and “norm making” at the global level, see Halliday and Carruthers (2007) . 5 Latour speaks of variable ontologies in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1993 , 85). 6 Pickering speaks similarly of “interactive stabilization” (see Pickering 1995 ). 7 On the aspirations for NHS Foundation Trusts, see Day and Klein (2005) ; see also Klein (2003 ; 2004 ). 8 Monitor Board meeting minutes, 20 April 2004, para 12. 9 King’s College NHS Trust’s response to the consultation document; Addenbrooke’s NHS Trust’s response to the consultation document; see also Department of Health (2004b) . Here, attention was drawn specifi cally to S101 of Part IV of the 1986 Insolvency Act. 10 City of London Law Society’s response to consultation document; see also Department of Health (2004b ). 11 On 9 June 2010, the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley announced a full public enquiry into the “commissioning, supervisory and regulatory bodies in the monitoring of Mid- Staff ordshire NHS Foundation Trust,” to be chaired by Robert Francis QC and to report by March 2011 ( Lansley 2010 ). 12 Put diff erently, “hybridization” has limits in some contexts. On the notion of hybridisation, see Kurunm ä ki (2004 ); Kurunm ä ki and Miller (2011); Miller, Kurunm ä ki, and O’Leary (2008). 13 On the issue of making an accounting entity, see Kurunm ä ki (1999 ). References Balleisen , Edward J . 2001 . Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America . Chapel Hill and London : University of North Carolina Press . 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