Financial markets have often been seen by economists as efficient mechanisms that fulfill vital functions within economies. But do financial markets really operate in such a straightforward manner?
The Sociology of Financial Markets approaches financial markets from a sociological
perspective. It seeks to provide an adequate sociological coneptualization of financial markets, and examine who the actors within them are, how they operate, within which networks, and how these networks are structured. Patterns of trading, trading room coordination, and global interaction are
studied to help us better understand how markets work and the types of reasoning behind these trends.
Financial markets also have a structural impact on the governance of social and economic institutions. Until now, sociologists have examined issues of governance mostly with respect to
the legal framework of financial transactions. Contributions in this book highlight the ways in which financial markets shape the inner working and structure of corporations and their governance.
Finally the book seeks to investigate the symbolic aspects of financial markets. Financial
markets affect not only economic and social structures but also societal cultural images and frameworks of meaning. Barbara Czarniawska demonstrates how representations of gender relationships are a case in point. Arguing that financial markets are not simply neutral with respect to questions of
gender but enhance certain images and interpretations of men and women.
Addressing many important topics from a sociological perspective for the first time, this book will be key reading for academics, researchers, and advanced students of financial markets in Business, Management,
Economics, Finance, and Sociology.
Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda: Introduction
Section I: Inside Financial Markets
1. Saskia Sassen: The Embeddedness of Electronic Markets: The Case of Global Capital Markets
2. Karin Knorr Cetina: How Are Global Markets Global? The Architecture of a Flow World
3. Donald
MacKenzie: How a Super-Portfolio Emerges: Long Term Capital Management and the Sociology of Arbitrage
4. Daniel Beunza and David Stark: How to Recognize Opportunities: Heterarchical Search in a Trading Room
5. Jean-Pierre Hassoun: Emotions on the Trading Floor: Social and Symbolic
Expressions
6. Barbara Czarniawska: Women in Financial Services: Fiction and More Fiction
Section II: The Age of the Investor
7. Alex Preda: The Investor as a Cultural Figure of Global Capitalism
8. Walter De Bondt: The Values and Beliefs of European Investors
9. Richard
Swedberg: Conflicts of Interest in the US Brokerage Industry
Section III: Finance and Governance
10. Mitchel Y. Abolafia: Interpretive Politics at the Federal Reserve
11. Gordon Clark and Nigel Thrift: The Return of Bureaucracy: Managing Dispersed Knowledge in Global
Finance
12. Michael Power: Enterprise Risk Management and the Organization of Uncertainty in Financial Institutions
13. Dirk Zorn, Frank Dobbin, Julian Dierkes, and Man-shan Kwok: Managing Investors: How Financial Markets Reshaped the American Firm
14. Gerald Davis and Gregory Robbins:
Nothing But Net? Networks and Status in Corporate Governance
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Karin Knorr Cetina is Professor of Sociology at the University of Constance, and member of the Institute for Global Society Studies, University of Bielefeld, Germany. She was Professor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, is a former president of the International Society for Social
Studies of Science, a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a future member of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, CA. She has published many articles in international journals on knowledge, science and financial markets and is the
author of several books, including Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Harvard University Press, 1999), which received the Robert K. Merton Prize and the Ludwig Fleck Prize.
Alex Preda teaches social theory at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His previous positions were at
the universities of Constance and Bielefeld, Germany. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Bielefeld and an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Bucharest. He is the author of AIDS, Rhetoric, and Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2004), among others. His
present research focuses on the transatlantic emergence of investor cultures in the late nineteenth century and on the relationship between vernacular economics and academic financial theories.
