Finance as ‘bizarre bazaar’: Using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge

Abstract

Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity – opaque, secretive and increasingly placeless – precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, but they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geertz’s work on the bazaar by taking an indirect route to access the field site – collateralised debt obligation – through documents. In reading these documents, we assume the position of investors who, in the absence of alternative publicly available information, are dependent on the documentary accounts made available to them by the sellers. These media act in ways that are similar to tourist guidebooks, a comparison we use to reframe the exchange as one that builds upon sociocultural relations rather than the abstract market relationships described by mainstream economists. We propose that these documents are not merely representational artefacts of the organisation but serve to establish and maintain social relationships between buyers and sellers through the management, standardisation and ritualisation of information disclosed to the investor.

Professional action in global wealth chains

“…Obtaining insights on the inner workings of these wealth chains and the relations between clients, professionals, and regulators relies on investigative work, interviews (Thiemann 2018), and the kinds of financial and legal documentation that provides information on direct relationships (Tischer et al . 2019).…”

“…As noted above, professional action can be understood as incremental and strategic (Quack 2007), and such thinking is useful in distinguishing practices and how professionals interact with other parties. Obtaining insights on the inner workings of these wealth chains and the relations between clients, professionals, and regulators relies on investigative work, interviews (Thiemann 2018), and the kinds of financial and legal documentation that provides information on direct relationships (Tischer et al 2019).…”

How financial products organize spatial networks: Analyzing collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations as “networked products”

“…Patterns of network conformity, as we see in our example of CLOs, can be identified and differentiated from those of transduplication as with European CDOs; or even patterns of divergence as we might expect to see, for example, in the structuration networks of mortgage-backed securities and CDOs over time, as different valuation cultures and different organizations took hold in each (MacKenzie, 2011). As Riles (2006) notes, documents, such as the OCs we use to construct our social and spatial networks, are “artefacts of modern knowledge” which contain rich empirical detail about the contractual relations between on- and off-shore actors that can be difficult to capture through ethnographic or observational research (see also Tischer et al, 2019), and which remain elusive in studies of world city networks (Taylor et al, 2014).…”

“What is Design Worth?” Narrating the Assetization of Design

“…Indeed, narrativity is "the very organizing principle of all discourse, whether narrative (identified in the first instance, as figurative discourse) or non-narrative" (Greimas and Courtés 1982: 209). As ethnographic artifacts, reports offer more than a written record; they encode a world into a text and participate in the constitution of that world by enacting particular relationships (Tischer et al 2019). Crucially, relationships enacted by texts are not simply discursive or symbolic but emphatically material, which is what strands of narrative and semiotic approaches in the social sciences have long foregrounded (Czarniawska-Joerges and Joerges 1988;Akrich and Latour 1992;Law 1996).…”

“…The narrator/seller (McKinsey consultants) is looking to present such an investment opportunity by appealing to the specific interests of the investor; hence the opening question hinting at a promise of capitalization by reference to an increase in revenues and shareholder returns. In this respect, the report itself takes on the character of a "pitchbook," a document that guides the investor's assessment of a particular financial product or asset by providing concise information on its key characteristics and earning potential with the aim of enticing investment (Tischer et al 2019). Importantly, the promise of capitalization implied in the opening question hinges upon an additional mysterious character, one that has yet to be fleshed out: the so-called "design performer.…”