Aleksansra Lis-Plesińska, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland
In the paper, I will address the difficulties in negotiating environmental and economic regimes of valuation for European economies by focusing on price predictions of electricity as devices for coordinating future European projects, and the embedding of these devices into different organizational fields. In the time of pan-European inflation, the increase in electricity prices is a timely issue, as costs of energy are part of inflation calculation. Price predictions, I argue, are devices some actors use for the sake of fostering communication of their interests across organizational fields and to coordinate cross-market projects, the EU’s green energy transition being one of them. However, as the analysis unveils, price predictions also allow actors to challenge the proposed projects openly, or direct attention to alternative ones – such as the national economic growth or energy security – and propose alternative imagined futures to override the EU-driven visions. The focus on price predictions of embedded devices for coordinating European futures opens up broader questions regarding the ability of the European Union institutions to successfully carry out moral projects, especially if they touch upon the existing markets and fragile geopolitical positions of particular member states.
The paper is structured as follows. In the following part, I discuss price predictions as market devices and make an argument for studying predictions of electricity prices as devices embedded in various organizational fields. Following in the footsteps of Eloire and Finez, I take on a Durkheimian perspective on prices, which considers them as things, without any preconceptions on the part of the researcher. Prices should be interesting to sociologists as being made in practice by various social actors (see, this issue). From this angle, the law of supply and demand becomes “a maxim of action rather than a generalizable rule” (see, this issue) – a claim that can empirically be supported by a number of historical cases. In the next part, I provide a brief examination of the 2008 ETS reform to develop a historical case about the way in which ETS evolved through various controversies about future electricity prices, especially with the participation of Polish industry and power sector representatives. In the conclusions, I show how these ambivalences and difficulties in reconciling logics of different fields generated difficulties in stabilizing the current discourse about the reasons for the increase in electricity prices.
