Assembling an Economic Actor: TheAgencementof a Hedge Fund

Abstract

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.

Insurgent capitalism: Island, bricolage and the re-making of finance

“…It is a distributed form of calculation (Hutchins, 1995), a cognitive system in which pattern recognition and categorization is co-ordinated across and between both multiple human beings and instruments of different sorts (e.g. Hardie & MacKenzie, 2007).…”

Political markets: recycling, economization and marketization

“…In that assay devices are demonstrated here to be both market devices and a critical part of an in vivo experiment in constituting a spatially bounded market in ship recycling, their significance goes beyond the specifics of the empirical case to connect with more fundamental debate about economies as performative (Callon, 1998(Callon, , 2007Callon et al 2007;Mackenzie, 2003Mackenzie, , 2004Mackenzie, , 2006Mackenzie, , 2009Mackenzie et al 2007). Much of the interest here has been in economics' multifarious effects on economies, and particularly how effects are woven into material practices that perform economies into being.…”

“…To cite this article correctly, please reference as: tape, and traders' computer screens (Buenza and Stark, 2004;Preda, 2006;Hardie and Mackenzie, 2007;Muniesa, 2008), to which we wish to add assay devices. Muniesa and Callon (2007), however, go further, to argue that the performative character of economies is at its clearest in experiments that use 'real economies' as their test ground.…”

‘This time it’s different’ . . . and why it matters: the shifting geographies of money, finance and risks

“…The work of Beunza, Hardie and MacKenzie (2006), Callon and Muniesa (2005), MacKenzie (2001MacKenzie ( , 2003aMacKenzie ( , 2003bMacKenzie ( , 2004aMacKenzie ( , 2004b and Hardie and MacKenzie (2007) for example argue that markets are actively made; they insist (in line with Callon's original thesis (1998)) that they are performed and that moreover this performance depends on the materiality of these markets -a materiality that includes finance theory itself (for example Maurer, 2005aMaurer, , 2005bMiyazaki, 2005;MacKenzie, 2009). …”