ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The part focuses on a reconstruction of the theory of performativity. It highlights two central elements of this theory: the role given to devices, and the refusal to consider the social world as a set of macro-entities within which markets would be embedded. The sociologists of performativity nevertheless move substantially away from John Austin's linguistic approach. The part presents an opportunity to tell the story from the philosophy of language to the theory of performativity–not as a historian of thought would do, but for the sole purpose of pointing out the fundamental originality of performativist sociology that is the idea of "making to do" by devices. It describes an opportunity to characterise the performativist corpus within the economic and sociological literature.
