In this essay, I begin with the premise that everyday organizing is inextricably bound up with materiality and contend that this relationship is inadequately reflected in organizational studies that tend to ignore it, take it for granted, or treat it as a special case. The result is an understanding of organizing and its conditions and consequences that is necessarily limited. I then argue for an alternative approach, one that posits the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday life. I draw on some empirical examples to help ground and illustrate this approach in practice and conclude by suggesting that a reconfiguration of our conventional assumptions and considerations of materiality will help us more effectively recognize and understand the multiple, emergent, and shifting sociomaterial assemblages entailed in contemporary organizing.

Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work

In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes. Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities. MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world's financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream -- chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot's model of "wild" randomness. MacKenzie's pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America's financial markets have grown into their current form.

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

Ecological Engineering: Journal of Ecotechnology. Editor-in-chief William J. Mitsch. Elsevier. 4/yr. DFL 361, $195.

Science in action

Financial systems are crucial to the allocation of resources in a modern economy. They channel household savings to the corporate sector and allocate investment funds among firms; they allow intertemporal smoothing of consumption by households and expenditures by firms; and they enable households and firms to share risks. These functions are common to the financial systems of most developed economies. Yet the form of these financial systems varies widely. In the United States and the United Kingdom competitive markets dominate the financial landscape, whereas in France, Germany, and Japan banks have traditionally played the most important role. Why do different countries have such different financial systems? Is one system better than all the others? Do different systems merely represent alternative ways of satisfying similar needs? Is the current trend toward market-based systems desirable? Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale argue that the view that market-based systems are best is simplistic. A more nuanced approach is necessary. For example, financial markets may be bad for risk sharing; competition in banking may be inefficient; financial crises can be good as well as bad; and separation of ownership and control can be optimal. Financial institutions are not simply veils, disguising the allocation mechanism without affecting it, but are crucial to overcoming market imperfections. An optimal financial system relies on both financial markets and financial intermediaries.

比较金融系统 = Comparing financial systems

(Discusses the performativity of economics and proposes theoretical directions to study it from a sociological perspective.)

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00091596/document

What does it mean to say that economics is performative

Michel Callon has conceptualised economic actors as made up of socio-technical agencements: collectives of human beings, technical devices, algorithms, and so on. This article reports a pilot, partially observational study of a hedge fund, a category of actor in financial markets that is of growing importance but that has so far attracted little attention in economic sociology. It draws on that study, and on interviews with other financial market practitioners, to delineate what is involved in viewing such an actor as made up of an agencement, and discusses the merits of doing so.

Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a Hedge Fund

Arbitrage is a form of trading crucial both to the modern theory of finance and to market practice, yet it has seldom been the focus of study outside of economics. This article draws upon four initially separate ethnographic and interview-based studies to sketch a ‘material sociology’ of arbitrage. (The article follows financial market usage in viewing ‘arbitrage’ as trading that exploits discrepancies in relative prices, trading which is seldom the entirely riskless arbitrage posited by finance theory.) Prices are physical entities, and the extent and speed of the mobility of these entities are crucial to arbitrage. Traders' bodies sometimes need to be trained to conduct arbitrage, and the relative placement of different bodies can be crucial. Arbitrage generally involves a theory of the similarity of different assets, and material representations of relative value are often required in order to check the theory's plausibility. Arbitrageurs need to convince themselves and others such as investment-bank m...

A Price is a Social Thing: Towards a Material Sociology of Arbitrage

The wide-ranging varieties of capitalism literature rests on a particular conception of banks and banking that, the authors argue, no longer reflects the reality of modern financial systems. They take advantage of the greater information regarding bank activities revealed by the financial crisis to consider the reality, across eight of the world’s largest developed economies, of the financial power of banks to act as bulwarks against market forces. This article offers a marketbased banking framework that transcends the bank-based/capital market–based dichotomy that dominates comparative political economy’s consideration of financial systems and argues that future cpe research should focus on the activities of banks. By demonstrating how market-based banking increases market influences on the supply of credit, the authors highlight an underappreciated source of financial market pressure on nonfinancial companies (nfc s) that can have a potential impact across the range of issues that the varieties of capitalism (VoC) literature has seen as differentiating national systems. This approach has implications in areas such as labor, welfare, innovation, and flexibility.

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Banks and the False Dichotomy in the Comparative Political Economy of Finance

This article explores what the financial crisis shows about changes in the German and French banking systems, the two largest in continental Europe. In particular, we highlight processes of financialization – defined here as the increased trading of risk. We focus on an apparent contradiction: why did the supposedly more protectionist and conservative German banking system suffer much higher losses than the more liberalized French system? This article also examines the responses of German and French banks and governments to the crisis and speculates how far these responses might limit future financialization and shape national banking systems.

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Die Krise but not La Crise? The Financial Crisis and the Transformation of German and French Banking Systems

1. Introduction: Towards a Political Economy of Banking 2. Framing Market-Based Banking and the Financial Crisis 3. Market-Based Banking as the Worst of All Worlds: Illustrations from the US and UK 4. Belgium and the Netherlands: Impatient Capital 5. A Peculiar Kind of Devastation: German Market-Based Banking 6. State Intervention and Market-Based Banking in France 7. A 'Ship in Trouble'. The Spanish Banking System and the International Financial Crisis 8. Turning the Crisis on its Head: Sovereign Debt Crisis as Banking Crisis in Italy and Greece 9. Cool Canada: A Case of Low Market-Based Banking in the Anglo-Saxon World 10. Market-Based Banking in Japan: From the Avant-Garde to Europe's Future?

Iain Hardie

Papers

Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a Hedge Fund

A Price is a Social Thing: Towards a Material Sociology of Arbitrage

Banks and the False Dichotomy in the Comparative Political Economy of Finance

Die Krise but not La Crise? The Financial Crisis and the Transformation of German and French Banking Systems

Market-Based Banking and the International Financial Crisis