Introducing a cultural approach to technology in financial markets

Hardin, Carolyn; Rottinghaus, Adam Richard

doi:10.1080/17530350.2014.993683

Cited by 23 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Actors involved in these struggles to shape infrastructures draw upon whatever organizational, cultural, economic, political, or material resources they can access from their position within multiple, overlapping fields (Fligstein 2002, Bourdieu 2005, Fourcade 2007). Meso-and macro-level elites utilize their political and economic power to ensure infrastructural advantages, exemplified in the ability of financial firms and lobbyists to mold market infrastructures (Mirowski and Nik-Khah 2007, Erturk 2013, Hardin and Rottinghaus 2015. Regulators, rating agencies, and economists draw upon their expert status to assert legitimate domain over infrastructural issues (Guala 2001, Millo 2007, MacKenzie 2018a).…”

Section: Politics and Power In Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructural power: discretion and the dynamics of infrastructure in action

Pinzur

2021

Journal of Cultural Economy

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This article analyses how a pair of nineteenth century commodity exchanges-in Chicago and New Orleans-shaped the sociotechnical infrastructures underlying two key types of market information-price quotations and crop statistics. Specifically, the paper investigates why these exchanges saw divergent outcomes, each successfully developing one information infrastructure but not the other. Prior scholarship has understood infrastructural development as the result of idiosyncratic, social structural alignments in actors' resources and desires. This paper, by contrast, examines how such structural elements interacted with practical resources available to exchanges based on their roles within infrastructures. Findings demonstrate that the exchanges gained influence in proportion to their discretion over an infrastructure's everyday operations and the market routines these enabled. This 'infrastructural power', or lack thereof, interacted with social structural resources in two distinct forms-'feedback' in New Orleans and 'sacrifice' in Chicago-providing or denying each exchange the ability to shape infrastructures to its advantage. These findings suggest that analysts should pay closer attention to market dynamics as they relate to 'infrastructure in action'.

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Section: Politics and Power In Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructural power: discretion and the dynamics of infrastructure in action

Pinzur

2021

Journal of Cultural Economy

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“…The trading takes place over extremely small intervals in time and can involve buy first or sell first strategies depending on the direction of anticipated price fluctuations. Firms expend considerable resources to be able to trade faster than other firms because this kind of arbitrage provides enormous profit opportunities-though these opportunities are eliminated as other firms catch up (Hardin & Rottinghaus, 2015; see also the chapter by Lange in this Handbook).…”

Section: The Law Of One Pricementioning

confidence: 99%

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies

Borch¹,

Wosnitzer²

2020

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There has been an increasing interest in financial markets across sociology, history, anthropology, cultural studies, and related disciplines over the past decades, with particular intensity since the 2007-2008 crisis which prompted new analyses of the workings of financial markets and how "scandals of Wall Street" might have huge societal ramifications. The sociologically inclined landscape of finance studies is characterized by different more or less wellestablished homogeneous camps, with more micro-empirical, social studies of finance approaches on the one end of the spectrum and more theoretical, often neo-Marxist approaches, on the other.Yet alternative approaches are also gaining traction, including work that emphasizes the cultural homologies and interconnections with finance as well as work that, more broadly, is both empirically rigorous and theoretically ambitious. Importantly, across these various approaches to finance, a growing body of literature is taking shape which engages finance in a critical manner.The term "critical finance studies" nonetheless remains largely unfocused and undefined. Against this backdrop, the key rationales of The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies are firstly to provide a coherent notion of this emergent field and secondly to demonstrate its analytical usefulness across a wide range of central aspects of contemporary finance.As such, the volume will offer a comprehensive guide to students and academics on the field of Finance and Critical Finance Studies, Heterodox Economics, Accounting, and related Management disciplines.

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“…Actor-network inflected economic sociology remains controversial, however. It has been sharply criticized for neglecting issues of what might be called "political economy," such as "the effects of government and law and the role of pre-existing relationships" (Fligstein and Dauter 2007, p. 107; see also, e.g., Hardin and Rottinghaus [2015] and, more polemically, Mirowski and Nik-Khah [2007]). This article's historical sociology of HFT demonstrates effects of exactly the kind that Fligstein and Dauter point to.…”

Section: Classes Of Signals Signalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Material Signals: A Historical Sociology of High-Frequency Trading

MacKenzie

2018

American Journal of Sociology

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Drawing on interviews with 194 market participants (including 54 practitioners of high-frequency trading or HFT), this article first identifies the main classes of "signals" (patterns of data) that influence how HFT algorithms buy and sell shares and interact with each other. Second, it investigates historically the processes that have led to three of the most important categories of these signals, finding that they arise from three features of U.S. share trading that are the result of episodes of meso-level conflict. Third, the article demonstrates the contingency of these features by briefly comparing HFT in share trading to HFT in futures, Treasurys, and foreign exchange. The article thus argues that how HFT algorithms act and interact is a specific, contingent product not just of the current but also of the past interaction of people, organizations, algorithms, and machines. Practices in Financial Markets). I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to my interviewees,

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Introducing a cultural approach to technology in financial markets

Cited by 23 publications

References 25 publications

Infrastructural power: discretion and the dynamics of infrastructure in action

Infrastructural power: discretion and the dynamics of infrastructure in action

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies

Material Signals: A Historical Sociology of High-Frequency Trading

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