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The purpose of this paper is to briefly explore some recent curious interlocking of the ideology of markets and the practice of policy.

This particular discursive combine has most visibly been apparent in the concatenated birth and death of the US Defense Department's so‐called “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM). Yet PAM is but the most notorious example of a more sustained and pervasive attempt to use the technologies and disciplines of markets to render policy both better informed and more amenable to control through robust and seemingly incontestable systems of accountability. Given its prominence, our way in is through a brief description of PAM's origins and demise.

It is found that PAM and its similar brethren of markets for use in policy formation and judgement are less concerned with the capture of reality and more with the disciplining power of a curious “objectivity”.

Projects such as PAM are thus not easily challengeable on grounds of their veracity. Rather research that seeks to interrogate the use of market technologies in policy must look to their context and effects.

The purpose of this paper is to subject the short lived “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM) – “a Pentagon betting market on terror attacks” – and media and academic reactions to it, to some critical analysis.

The paper engages sustained invocation of the relationship between simulation and representation, for the story of the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) and its demise is replete with the tension between the two. It interrogates a range of accounts of the (un)timely demise of PAM, from the fearful senators and the moralistic media who subsumed and buttressed their position to the market evangelists for whom the failure of this particular market was merely proof of the veracity of markets elsewhere.

It is found that, inter alia, PAM was not really market‐like enough and, indeed, that it duplicated in impoverished form already existing markets that pertain to its objects of interest; that it was too much a market, given that its “goods” are seemingly inappropriate for market trade; and that it exposed too much of the truth of the actual operation of existing markets via the difficulties it confronted with regard to the possibility of insider dealing.

By contextualising PAM within the so‐called war on terror of which it was part, we see in the tension between representation and simulation, tension between a singular and a manifold reality; a set of tensions which make clear the extent of the gap that must exist between cause and effect, truth and prediction. The paper concludes by joining the celebration of PAM's demise whilst yearning for a similar fate to befall the other monologues that brought it to silence.

That which is exchanged in financialised trading extends beyond the moment, being elongated in the rights, responsibilities and liabilities it confers and so liable in nature as to throw into question the very attribute of thingness traditionally associated with exchange. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of these issues for articulation of what actually takes place at the moment of exchange.

This research paper examines key moments in the oral histories that constitute the “City Lives” archive at the British Library, focussing upon interchanges between interviewers and traders in which the gulf between the two and their modes of articulation is exposed by the interviewers' incomprehension of the work of the trader. Here, not only is the disconnection between trading and more routine transactions revealed, but also that between the narrative resources of traders and others.

Whilst there are various reasons identified for a general inability to convey to an outsider the inside of the practice, particular issues are also at play in financial exchange; primarily the sublime aestheticisation of jeopardy that may be seen to lurk at the heart of the taking of risk.

Financialised trading's disconnection requires attention to situation so that the texture of the disconnection itself can be put into context and a theorisation of the moment of exchange that can mediate between those who engage in it and attempt to describe it and those who seek to understand it from the outside.

In this paper, we discuss the production of visions for IT in Danish health care. Visions are not propagated “from above” but are produced through translation processes, in which contents change as they are inscribed in ministerial reports, leaflets or recommendations. This is illustrated by two cases: the electronic patient record at Hvidovre Hospital (HVEPS) and the Digital Doctor Project (DDP). Following STS‐studies we propose to analyse such reports as material agents with distinctive capacities and features. Prominent among those is the ability of such reports to carry “contradictory” messages. We analyse this capacity as a strength as it enables reports to bind together various people in various contexts, rather than as a weakness. We propose the concept of political moment as a tool that can capture the material heterogeneity and the unexpectedness of translations. The concept of moralising moment is introduced to identify accounts in which such processes are glossed or covered.

With this year's Symposium returning to this popular Thames‐side location, the venue, catering and general arrangements were much appreciated and commented upon by delegates attending the event. Regrettably, numbers were low—attributable partly to a clash of dates with other PCB industry activities.