| Abolafia | Beunza-Stark | Callon-Muniesa | Hagglund |
| Cetina-Bruegger | Millo | Lépinay | Muniesa |
| Preda | Riles | Scott-Barrett | Stark-Beunza | Thrift-Clark-Tickell | Zaloom |

Making Sense of Recession: Policy making at the Federal Reserve
Mitchell Abolafia

This paper investigates the efforts of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve's policy making unit, to make sense of indicators of a downturn in the domestic and world economies. It explores the idiosyncratic processes of framing, negotiating, and signaling that policy elites use in coming to a decision. The analysis is based on verbatim transcripts of the regular closed-door meetings at which monetary policy is set.

Risk Management in a World of Uncertainty
Daniel Beunza (joint with David Stark)

The question that every risk manager faces is, when to force a trader to liquidate his or her position? In the academic literature, risk management has often been described in terms of calculation -- checking a reviewing the calculations of subordinates. Modern finance, however, has rendered this approach obsolete. Trading is no longer about being first to access information, but about developing an original interpretation. This shift implies that -- as Frank Knight (1921) famously argued -- economic actors do not live in a world of risk but rather of uncertainty. In this novel context, the usefulness of re-calculative risk management is limited by the judgement calls of the traders. Similarly, profits and losses loose their traditional standing as universal metrics of the truth behind a trade. Instead, money-losing bets can quickly revert to profits if the prevailing interpretation in the market turns around to the trader's -- opening up a measurement of worth problem for trades. We provide an ethnographic account of how the manager of a Wall Street trading room manages risk by making judgement calls about his trades based on time and the spatial context of the trading room. We elaborate the implications of this managerial approach for a sociology of worth in the financial markets.

Making a stable investment object. The importance of having good connections in the stock market
Peter Hagglund

How come the investment objects created at the financial markets are stable? How is stability achieved in this construction? Twenty-three pulp and paper analysts and investors were interviewed on how they communicate with each other, describing how they discussed the listed company. The study suggests that the investment object is constructed through detailed connections to other objects, and both the choice of external object (of which there are numerous) and the properties of the connection are at the center of their discussions. Both investors and analysts have an interest in continuous reconstruction of this object, and this interest adds energy to the investment object and ensures its survival. The mechanisms of stability are thus described as two: First, a stabilizing technology in the form of valuation models and a dense net of connections. Second, an inflow of energy, which make possible recurrent discussions on the properties of the investment object. Paradoxically, stability is therefore achieved through continuous disintegration and reintegration rather than durability.

Inhabiting Technology: the Global Lifeworld of Financial Markets
Karin Knorr Cetina (joint with Urs Bruegger)

This paper focuses on institutional currency transactions as a global lifeform that inhabits technology during waking hours, is distributed across the three major time zones, and is nonetheless centered in and on itself--the lifeform constituted by the respective markets and participants in them. We argue that distribution and centering are not at odds with each other in the lifeform of these markets; that notions of interactions and networks embracing all social domains give short shrift to the actual realization of the networks--as centered post-network spheres at odds with the idea of distantiated units or nodes connected only by business linkages and social relationships. The paper also submits that the notion of technology as an external artifact or infrastructure carrying information flows distracts from the world-constitutive role of a particular component of this technology, the screen, and appresentational work of traders and a secondary information supply economy that create this world.

Finance as Circulating Formulas
Vincent-Antonin Lépinay

Finance as circulating formulas. In this paper, we describe how a financial innovation launched by a French bank has triggered a series of major changes in the financial industry. We have followed the various loci of this innovation, the places where it took shape and where it reshaped the bank itself (the trading of the new product, its accounting and its own economy) , the financial market and even the labor market of the financial operators. As we track this formula along its numerous places of impact, we observe how it slowly transforms into a social form as it stabilizes. We conclude this analysis with a model of changes that links four different degrees form - formalism - formulas - formulation (or formulas in the making)

Safety in Numbers: How Exchanges and Regulators Shaped Index-Based Derivatives
Yuval Millo

A commonly accepted notion assumes that financial regulators take only a reactive role in the development of markets: regulators follow innovations in the markets and react to the innovations (i.e. adapt the regulations) only after those were implemented. The paper presents a historical analysis, based on primary materials, of the approval process of index-based futures (the Shad-Johnson agreement) and shows that in this case regulators took a leading role in the construction and shaping of the new financial markets and even in shaping the specific products that could and could not be traded. The paper describes the events that led to regulatory turf war between the SEC and the CFTC, the discussions that followed it, and the inter-agency agreement (the Shad-Johnson accord). The analysis focuses on two main themes in the shaping process. First, the transformation from 'real' assets to 'abstract ' ones, which enabled the distinction between gambling and index-based contracts' trading, is described. Second, the analysis shows how the two regulators created and maintained a policy of conceptual distinction and the part that this policy took in the shaping of index-based derivatives contracts.

On Ticks and Tapes: Financial Knowledge, Communicative Practices, and Information Technologies on 19th Century Financial Markets
Alex Preda

The present paper shows how the ticker, invented in 1867, changed the cognitive bases of financial markets. I argue that such communications technologies should not be reduced to a mere transparent medium for the rapid, efficient transmission of information. The socio-cognitive changes effected by the ticker were much more profound and not limited to just speeding up price transmission. Using an approach developed in the sociology of science and technology, I analyze here the ticker as a nexus of discursive modes, cognitive rules and operations, and teleo-affective structures. The data I use is provided by investor manuals, brochures, newspaper articles, reports, stockbrokers' correspondence, and investor diaries. I show how the ticker substituted a whole network of social interactions within which securities prices were previously recorded. The ticker (a) introduced new language and representation modes, which made possible the visualization of financial transactions as abstract and dislodged from the particular conditions of the marketplace; (b) it changed the production and processing of financial charts, leading to the institutionalization of a new profession, that of the stock analyst; (c) it required permanent presence and attention from investors, tying them affectively to market events; (d) it led to organizational changes on the trading floor and in the broker's office alike. On these grounds, in the conclusion I argue that the operational principles of the ticker have been continued and developed by financial computer screens in our days.

Real Time: Governing the Market After the Failure of Knowledge
Annelise Riles

This paper presents an ethnographic account of the work of bureaucrats at the Bank of Japan, Japan's central bank, as they engaged in the construction of a "real time" payments system. The paper aims to consider certain shared dimensions of the knowledge practices of late modern anthropologists and economic planners and the special challenges these pose to the study of modern knowledge. In particular, the paper focuses on the effects of the attraction of "self-sustaining systems" consisting of "two sides." It concludes that one central challenge of new ethnographic subjects such as global financial markets is to find ways of ethnographically apprehending dimensions of modern knowledge that do not present themselves as steps or elements in the construction or destruction of systems, or as phenomena that can be seen from two sides.

The Development Of Electronic Trading In The Futures Industry: Strategic Risk Positioning In A Globalising Age
Susan V. Scott (joint with Michael I. Barrett)

Contemporary political, economic and social conditions heighten the demand placed upon organizations to create strategy designed to manage uncertainty. The term 'strategic risk positioning' is introduced in an attempt to support this by drawing together an analysis of the distinctive time-risk dynamics texturing the context of contemporary IT-enabled strategy formulation. This analysis is based upon extensive empirical data from a two-year interpretative research project studying the IT-enabled transformation of key financial services institutions. An innovative theoretical perspective is used to consider the subjective notions of time and risk shaping strategic responses to a competitive landslide toward electronic trading at the major international financial futures exchanges (1998-2000). Multiple strategic agencies are identified ranging from the revision of corporate governance structures and strategic alliances, to situated tactics of 'hedging', 'betting' and reinvention. Inferences of these findings for the financial futures industry, and those that work in it, are then briefly discussed.

Tools of the Trade: The Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room
David Stark (joint with Daniel Beunza)

Our task in this paper is to analyze the organization of trading in the era of quantitative finance. To do so, we conduct an ethnography of arbitrage, the trading strategy that best exemplifies finance in the wake of the quantitative revolution. In contrast to value and momentum investing, we argue, arbitrage involves an art of association - the construction of equivalence (comparability) of properties across different assets. In place of essential or relational characteristics, the peculiar valuation that takes place in arbitrage is based on an operation that makes something the measure of something else - associating securities to each other. The process of recognizing opportunities and the practices of making novel associations are shaped by the specific socio-spatial and socio-technical configurations of the trading room. Calculation is distributed across persons and instruments as the trading room organizes interaction among diverse principles of valuation.

Performing finance: the media and the construction of financial markets
Nigel Thrift (joint with Gordon Clark and Adam Tickell)

The paper is structured in three parts. The first is on the role of the media generally in finance. The second looks at some specific case studies and the third is a very specific empirical study of the impacts of more and more media attention on pension fund managers.

Ambiguous Numbers: Trading and Technologies in Global Financial Markets
Caitlin Zaloom

Anthropologists and others have shown the influence of global financial markets on contemporary culture. However, few studies have examined the internal dynamics that bring these markets to life. This article excavates the economic rationalities of financial futures markets by analyzing the calculative practices of traders. They strategize using the fundamentally multivalent numbers of market data. As digital technologies transform the financial industry, traders must assemble new skills for reading market information. Working in Chicago and London markets, I explore the construction of economic judgment and action in the trading pits and on the dealing screen. While each technology demands particular competencies, traders, across technologies, are informational entrepreneurs who unearth and exploit the indeterminacy of financial data.