Peer Reviewed Articles
Shaw, L. 2021. On Rupture: Establishing the Cognitive Bases of Social Change. Sociological Forum. (Special Issue on “Culture and Cognition: New Approaches and New Applications.”)
Small, Christopher T.; Bjorkegren, Michael; Erkkilä, Timo; Shaw, Lynette and Megill, Colin. 2021. Polis: Scaling Deliberation by Mapping High Dimensional Opinion Spaces. Recerca. (Special Issue on “Democracy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence“).
Shaw, L. 2021. The Inevitable Sociality of Money: the Primacy of Practical Affirmation over Conceptual Consensus in the Construction of Bitcoin’s Value. Socio-Economic Review.
Shaw, L. 2015. Mechanics and dynamics of social construction: Modeling the emergence of culture from individual mental representation. Poetics. 52:75-90
Stovel, K. and Shaw, L. 2012. Brokerage. Annual Review of Sociology. 38:7.1-7.20
Published Conference Proceedings
Shaw, L. 2019. “Social Valuation Dynamics for the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Era.” In Morales, A. (Ed.), IX International Conference on Complex Systems, STEM Academic Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 32 – 43.
Book Chapters
Manuscripts in Preparation
Shaw, L. “Capturing the Bitcoin Imaginary: Cryptocurrency’s Transformation from Radical Money to Financial Technology” (In Preparation)
Abstract
In less than a decade, Bitcoin has gone from being the obscure monetary experiment of a small group of “techno-Libertarians” to becoming the basis of a new multi-billion dollar financial technology industry dominated by the many of the same institutions and actors it was initially intended to subvert. Building upon recent work by Beckert (2017) centering the role of “imagined futures” in economic action, this article argues that this type of trajectory should be understood as being a natural outcome of innovation in capitalist markets, one which arises organically from such systems’ inherent bias toward realizing the visions of those who are best positioned within the existing economic order to direct the flow of investment resources. Leveraging the strong conformance to free market ideals that characterized cryptocurrency’s conception and evolution, this work draws upon an original collection of sources documenting the history of cryptocurrency’s development, automated content analysis of over 7,500 media reports between 2011 through early 2016, and trends in venture capital funding over the same time period in order to demonstrate how this type of “imaginative control” plays out and the impacts it has on bounding the space of products and solutions that are likely to arise from capitalist markets.
Lynette A. Shaw, Ph.D. 