Columbia University
Center on Organizational Innovation
Organizers: David Stark and Daniel Beunza

After a decade of unbridled optimism about the financial markets, it is time to re-consider how we think about them. For ten years, the currency of neoclassical economics and accompanying notions of "market equilibrium" and "market efficiency" have risen with every uptick of the NASDAQ. But the crash of the dot-com bubble and the spectacular bankruptcies of Long Term Capital -- and now of Enron -- call for some new thinking on the financial markets.

The New York Conference on Social Studies of Finance, which took place on May, 2002, gathered a select group of social scientists not typically associated with finance to share new theories on financial markets. The meeting was organized by Professor David Stark, director of Columbia's Center on Organizational Innovation and Daniel Beunza, graduate student at the Stern School of Business of New York University. It is sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, and aims at the developing and emerging field of Social Studies in Finance.

In the past years, a select group of researchers in the United States and Europe have been taking a fresh look at financial markets from fields outside the realm of rational choice such as economic sociology, social studies of science, and anthropology. Their efforts are leading to an emerging field of study that examines socio-technical networks and knowledge claims in financial markets. The emerging field, which calls itself "Social Studies of Finance," offers new and powerful research methodologies that can potentially address questions that lie beyond the reach of traditional economic treatment. Ethnomethodology, network analysis, and the systematic analysis of new digital technologies, for example, promise new insights into the problems of valuation and the dynamics of financial markets.

The conference was held in New York City where discussion of organizational features of financial services figure prominently in public policy debates about the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. Already before September 11th, new information and interactive technologies were reshaping the financial district. The papers, directly or indirectly, yielded insights that illuminate fundamental processes of place and space in the New York City economy.

For more information about the conference and its participants, please contact Daniel Beunza, dbeunza@stern.nyu.edu, Tel. (212) 9980224; David Stark, dcs36@columbia, Tel. (212) 8543972.

The website was created by Balazs Vedres. The architecture of this website was made by Adam L Beckerman. We thank Monique Girard for her assistance and suggestions in the design.