Markets are constantly collapsing: Reconceptualizing ‘the market’ as a quantum social wavefunction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The quantum moment in International Relations theory challenges the taken for granted Newtonian assumptions of conventional theories, while offering a novel physical imaginary grounded in quantum mechanics. As part of the special issue on reconceptualizing markets, this article questions if prior efforts to conceptualize ‘the market’ have been unsuccessful at capturing the paradoxical microfoundational/macrostructural because of the Newtonian worldview within which much social science operates. By developing a new, quantum perspective on the market, taking the physical paradigm of the wavefunction, I seek to explore the connections between entanglement, nonlocality, interference and invisible social structures. To demonstrate the applicability of quantum thinking, I explore how global value chains and open economy politics might be ‘quantized’, through the mobilization of core concepts of quantum social theory, within the broad framework of the market as a quantum social wavefunction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.034 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".