Abstract
This book represents a fascinating approach to the study of fine art and antique auctions through its focus on the human interaction through which price is determined, the characteristics of this interaction, and the social organization of auctions. Christian Heath has a laser focus on the “brief and intense episode of social interaction, an episode that rarely lasts for more than a minute and in most cases, significantly less” (p. xii). When one thinks of what a study of auctions might have focused on—sale figures, costs of items, categories of items, kinds of buyers, kinds of sellers, and the like—this is really a brilliant idea, although difficult if not impossible to accomplish without the use of video recording. And Heath does just that. He puts to use innovative visual and conversation analysis techniques to study data collected through video recordings of auctions in Britain, Europe, and North America. As a result, the book makes important contributions to a variety of areas including performance studies, visual studies, economic sociology, and the sociology of art and of organizations, and does so through use of innovative research methods.
Building analysis in the tradition of Erving Goffman (1983), he directs analytic attention toward the “interaction order” of auctions. The book is organized through chapters on auctions as an institutional form, orders of bidding, how trust is maintained, how competition is established, how bidding is pursued, online participation, the consummation of the sale, and the “embodiment” of auctions. Through his highly detailed focus on the human interaction, he pulls back enough of the curtain to reveal the orchestration of performances designed to ensure the legitimacy of the process. But the meat of his inquiry becomes clear when he puts the action in slow motion to reveal the interaction and the script, of sorts, that makes the moment of bidding work.
The foundation of an auction, like all forms of organization, is that the participants understand and agree to basic rules of interaction. I am reminded of the auction scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 movie, North by Northwest, when the character played by Cary Grant purposely disrupts the auction proceedings by underbidding the prevailing price and publicly questioning the authenticity of an object by saying it looks “fake.” Before the police are called to remove the disruptive bidder, the auctioneer implores, “I wonder if I could respectfully ask the gentleman to get into the spirit of the proceedings.” It is indeed this shared understanding of procedure and its orchestration that is necessary for the performance to establish a monetary value for an object leading to the transfer of its ownership.
Heath applies techniques of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to examine the interactional accomplishment of organizational activities. His method includes participant observation in which data on the interaction during these moments of exchange are collected via both live observation and video recordings of auctions. The exchanges, both visual and verbal, between auctioneer and buyers are then translated into a rather complicated script which seeks to capture and code the minute inflections, movement, timing, and words that might affect the sale price. These scripts are at times cryptic, but ingenious nonetheless, and therefore provide new models for qualitative researchers for putting techniques of conversation analysis to use. In his analysis of visual documents, he shares with the reader photos of auction scenes, reproductions of auction sale sheets, illustrations drawn from photos detailing positions of bidders and gestures of the auctioneers, as well as his detailed transcriptions of these highly charged moments, in order to gain a thorough understanding of how bidding is ordered.
It is hard to imagine how anyone could build a book around what amounts to a few intense moments of human interaction. But Heath does so by first isolating how the moment is actually constructed. This moment in which the escalation of price occurs, “a run,” as it is called, is a highly orchestrated moment in which “the auctioneer has to establish competition and deploy an organizational arrangement through which the contributions of multiple participants, many of whom might wish to bid if the price is right, are organized through an orderly sequence of turns, where those turns . . . are ‘valued’ . . . “ (p. 28). So rather than this moment being a disorderly, chaotic fracas of raw competition, as it might appear, the auctioneer sets up competition by accepting bids consecutively by two bidders until one falls out, then looks for and allows another bidder to jump in and contribute. As a result, the process of auctioning off an item may involve the bids of as little as two competitors, and often has no more than four or five bidders when the price is settled.
As the problem of legitimacy and trust is a central concern to both sociology of organizations and of markets, Heath dedicates a chapter to their ongoing accomplishment. Central to this chapter is the discussion of “the ecology of the saleroom,” a public place in which the orders of bidding are transparent. Yet he points out that the performance of the auctioneer has as much to do with orchestrating the flow of activity, such as the movement of objects on stage and the priming of bids through eye contact with potential bidders, as it does with creating drama through animated gestures and voice intonation.
Chapter Six, focusing on the issue of online bids, had a surprisingly limited focus on the presence of remote bidders in the live auction sale, not the practice of online auctions. The finding here was that online bidding did not work very well in the live auction setting, as remote bidders were often behind in the actual flow of the run. The live interaction between auctioneer and bidders coupled with the mediated interaction of remote bidders was clumsy, creating what the author calls “fragile runs.” The integrity of the bidding process was compromised as remote bidders were not visible and at times offered bids below the standing bid, as Cary Grant’s character did; they were at times left out, or were unknowingly overbid. Heath used this chapter to introduce a possible solution to this problem with an experiment using wired “intelligent paddles,” digital avatars in the sale room, and a wired “intelligent gavel.” As he pointed out, this is just one of the many possible solutions to problems inherent in the remote bidding.
From beginning to end, Heath weaves in important histories of the practices of auctions and markets to contemporary practice. For example, he points out that because the form of internet bidding pioneered by eBay and now practiced by many online auctions is staged only on the internet and has a set time for the gavel to drop, this moment of excitement which is the focus of his entire study simply does not exist online. Such innovation in auction design changes competition by allowing for skilled eBay bidders to wait until the final minute to place their bid, thereby limiting competition. This is a book well worth reading for anyone interested in auctions, and it would be useful in sociology courses on methods as well as the substantive areas it covers.