Material markets : how economic agents are constructed / Donald MacKenzie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

MacKenzie, Donald A.

Series:

Clarendon lectures in management studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economics--Sociological aspects.

Economics.

Markets--Social aspects.

Markets.

Money market.

Physical Description:

ix, 228 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009.

Summary:

Financial markets, processes, and instruments are often difficult to fathom; the credit crisis highlights both their importance and their fragility. Donald MacKenzie is one of the most perceptive analysts of the workings of the financial world. In this book, he argues that economic agents and markets need to be analyzed in their full materiality: their physicality, their corporeality, their technicality. Markets are populated not by disembodied, abstract agents, but by embodied human beings and technical systems. Concepts and systematic ways of thinking that simplify market processes and make them mentally tractable are essential to how markets function.

In putting forward this material sociology of markets, the book synthesizes and contributes to the new field of social studies of finance: the application to financial markets not just of economics, but of wider social-science disciplines, in particular science and technology studies. The topics covered include the development of financial derivatives exchanges (non-existent in 1970, but now trading products equivalent to $13,000 for every human being on earth); arbitrage; how corporate profit figures are constructed; the crucial new markets in carbon emissions; and a case study of a hedge fund (based, unusually, on direct observaton of its trading).

The book will appeal to research students and academics across the social sciences; the general reader will enjoy the book's explanations and analyses of some of the most important phenomena of today's turbulent markets.

Contents:

Introduction

Ten precepts for the social studies of finance

Assembling an economic actor

Derivatives : the production of virtuality

The material sociology of arbitrage

Measuring profit

Constructing emissions markets

Conclusion : opening the black boxes of finance.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [190]-220) and index.

ISBN:

0199278156

9780199278152

OCLC:

281087796