This paper considers the adoption of computational analysis within research designs modeled after the extended case method. Echoing calls to augment the power of contemporary researchers through the adoption of computational text analysis methods, we offer a framework for thinking about how such techniques can be integrated into quasi-ethnographic workflows to address structural sociological claims. We focus, in particular, on how this adoption of novel forms of evidence impacts corpus design and interpretation (which we tie to matters of casing), theoretical elaboration (which we associate to moving empirical claims across scales), and verification (which we see as a process of reflexive scaffolding of theoretical claims). We provide an example of the use of this framework through a study of the marketization of social scientific knowledge in the United Kingdom.

Why did financial regulators neglect oversight of rapid technological change in markets, despite the increasingly transformative power of technology? In this paper, I turn to this puzzling omission as an opportunity to consider the conjoined histories of technology, governance, and regulatory imaginaries in finance. For this, I leverage the concept of market ontologies (Lie 1997) as a way of addressing the semantic and cultural constellations that shape attitudes about, and the governance of, the economic world. To understand the relative neglect of technology as an object of regulation, I study the content, constraints, and possibilities implied by the market ontologies of American financial regulators between c. 1930 and 2012. In identifying these loose and nebulous constellations of understanding, I link my exploration of ontologies to their uses in computer science, where they are operationalized as representations of discourse within particular domains that outline meaning as formed by how concepts are classified into larger, interrelated sets (Poli et al 2010). This computational characterization inspires my methods and allows tracing the ontological evolution of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s understanding of technology in relation to markets over much of the twentieth century. To regulate markets, agents must first conceptualize these entities to render them concrete objects for governance. Studying regulators’ market ontologies is thus an opportunity to understand what type of objects they think need governing and which might be glossed over.

In this paper, I study the effects of quantifying knowledge on the organization of disciplinary fields. Using an original dataset of about 44,000 British social scientists and bibliographic information about their published, peer-reviewed articles, I show that the introduction of standardized research evaluations disrupted local academic labor markets in British higher education, leading to patterns of interinstitutional mobility that altered the epistemic diversity of social science disciplines and the organization of their academic fields. Much like market-based interventions, research evaluations lead to a form of epistemic matching that has distinct consequences on how knowledge is generated. In particular, when evaluations affect organizational units (such as academic departments) and stress disciplinary norms, they foster forms of isomorphism that lead to reductions in a discipline’s thematic diversity and a more homogeneous structure for the field. This paper thus advances the sociology of knowledge by showing how epistemic change occurs not only through the individual realignments of quantified scholars but, as importantly, through the mediation of interinstitutional mobility.

Although an old and rare practice, spoofing has re-emerged as a subject ofintense debate within modern financial markets. An activity entailing thefraudulent creation of orders to buy and sell securities with the purposeof manipulating the market, spoofing highlights the multiple and complexmoral valences of contemporary, automated, finance. In this paper, I studyspoofing as an opportunity to understand markets and their relations ofexchange. In particular, by extending Weberian metaphors of markets asmoral and organizational communities, I examine how the courts and marketparticipants distinguish the ‘false’ transactions of spoofing from the‘real’ exchanges of 'normal' market behavior. Combining Marilyn Strathern’stheoretical discussion of the anthropological relation with recentliteratures on infrastructures and markets, I argue that the perceivedreality of transactions is a product of how novel forms of economicknowledge are able to make sense of ‘taken for granted’ behavioral patternswithin digital platforms of market action. The intent that constitutes‘real’ trades is therefore a product of how market participants, economicexperts and the courts interpret the operational underbelly of markets andthe relations that they produce.

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