Karin Knorr Cetina

Global microstructures: The virtual societies of financial markets

Using participant‐observation data, interviews, and trading transcripts drawn from interbank currency trading in global investment banks, this article examines regular patterns of integration that characterize the global social system embedded in economic transactions. To interpret these patterns, which are global in scope but microsocial in character, this article uses the term “global microstructures.” Features of the interaction order, loosely defined, have become constitutive of and implanted in processes that have global breadth. This study draws on Schutz in the development of the concept of temporal coordination as the basis for the level of intersubjectivity discerned in global markets. This article contributes to economic sociology through the analysis of cambist (i.e., trading) markets, which are distinguished from producer markets, and by positing a form of market coordination that supplements relational or network forms of coordination.

Traders’ Engagement with Markets A Postsocial Relationship

This article focuses upon the construction of wants and the embodying of the market in the work routines of workers on the Swiss foreign exchange market. The authors are particularly concerned with the role of the computer screen within the establishment of postsocial relations around a sense of embodied lack. The screen does not provide access to the market but is the market as an exteriorized assemblage of practices brought together in one place. The screen is the (ontologically liquid) market rather than its representation into which traders immerse themselves. Traders engage with this market in their daily work practices through a constructed sense of lack that requires them to act passionately within the market in order to satisfy the self understood as a structure of wanting. While Knorr Cetina and Bruegger draw on a Lacanian understanding of the self as lack, rather than focus on the formation of direct human social relations around this issue, they look instead at the materiality of lack and its position within the postsocial relations constituted through trading online in the foreign exchange market. Desire is constituted and realized here through the object of the computer screen rather than with other people directly. In this way relations between persons are mediated by real objects that constitute persons virtually.

Traders’ Engagement with Markets

This article focuses upon the construction of wants and the embodying of the market in the work routines of workers on the Swiss foreign exchange market. The authors are particularly concerned with the role of the computer screen within the establishment of postsocial relations around a sense of embodied lack. The screen does not provide access to the market but is the market as an exteriorized assemblage of practices brought together in one place. The screen is the (ontologically liquid) market rather than its representation into which traders immerse themselves. Traders engage with this market in their daily work practices through a constructed sense of lack that requires them to act passionately within the market in order to satisfy the self understood as a structure of wanting. While Knorr Cetina and Bruegger draw on a Lacanian understanding of the self as lack, rather than focus on the formation of direct human social relations around this issue, they look instead at the materiality of lack and its position within the postsocial relations constituted through trading online in the foreign exchange market. Desire is constituted and realized here through the object of the computer screen rather than with other people directly. In this way relations between persons are mediated by real objects that constitute persons virtually.

Complex global microstructures : The new terrorist societies

The new terrorism is a major exemplifying case for complexity theory – for example, it exemplifies major disproportionalities between cause and effect, unpredictable outcomes, and self-organizing, emergent structures. It also illustrates, I argue in this article, the emergence of global microstructures: of forms of connectivity and coordination that combine global reach with microstructural mechanisms that instantiate self-organizing principles and patterns. Global systems based on microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (and dispersed) interaction patterns. The analysis of complex global microstructures helps to collect and assess empirical evidence for the architecture of the global structural forms of a world society. It also suggests a theory of microglobalization – the view that the texture of a global world becomes articulated through microstructural patterns that develop in the shadow of (but liberated from) national and local institutional patterns.

From Pipes to Scopes: The Flow Architecture of Financial Markets

This article introduces a distinction between two types of markets and market coordination: those based on social networks and those based on a flow architecture. Flow architectures involve potentially global “scopic” reflex systems (GRSs) that project market reality while at the same time carrying it forward and allowing it to flow. The argument is that some financial markets have undergone a transition from a pre-reflexive network market to a reflexively coordinated flow market manifest in the different organization of trading floors, changes in trading patterns and the emergence of a moving market that gets transferred from time-zone to time-zone with the sun. To understand these markets, temporal concepts are needed in addition to the social structural (relational) concepts with which we commonly work. Networks emerge from this analysis as historically specific, relationship-based forms of market coordination which in some markets are in the process of being replaced by more reflexive temporal forms of coordination.

The Oxford Handbook of The Sociology of Finance

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the workings of financial institutions and financial markets beyond the discipline of economics, which has been accelerated by the financial crisis of the early twenty-first century. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance brings together twenty-nine chapters, written by scholars of international repute from Europe, North America, and Asia, to provide comprehensive coverage on a variety of topics related to the role of finance in a globalized world, and its historical development. Topics include global institutions of modern finance, types of actors involved in financial transactions and supporting technologies, mortgage markets, rating agencies, and the role of financial economics. Particular attention is given to financial crises, which are discussed in a special section, as well as to alternative forms of finance, including Islamic finance and the rise of China. The Handbook will be an indispensable tool for academics, researchers, and students of contemporary finance and economic sociology, and will serve as a reference point for the expanding international community of scholars researching these areas from a broadly-defined sociological perspective. Contributors to this volume - Mitchel Abolafia, SUNY/ Albany Daniel Beunza, LSE Bruce Carruthers, Northwestern University Erica Coslor, University of Chicago Gerald Davis, University of Michigan Frank Dobbin, Harvard University Neil Fligstein, University of California, Berkeley Shaun French, University of Nottingham Bai Gao, Duke University Adam Goldstein, University of California, Berkeley Iain Hardie, University of Edinburgh Brooke Harrington, Max Planck Institute Cologne Mark Jacobs, George Mason University Franck Jovanovic, Universite de Quebec a Montreal Jiwook Jung, Harvard University Karin Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago Bruce Kogut, Columbia University Andrew Leyshon, University of Nottingham Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh Josephine Maltby, York University Bill Maurer, UC Irvine Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, University of Edinburgh Aaron Z. Pitluck, Illinois State University Martha Poon, UCSD Michael Power, LSE Alex Preda, University of Edinburgh Janette Rutterford, Open University Saskia Sassen, Columbia University Lucia Siu, Lingnan University Hong Kong Charles Smith, CUNY David Stark, Columbia University Richard Swedberg, Cornell University Olav Velthuis, University of Amsterdam Leon Wansleben, University of Konstanz Caitlin Zaloom, New York University Ezra Zuckerman, MIT

Das naturwissenschaftliche Labor als Ort der "Verdichtung" von Gesellschaft

Zusammenfassung Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es zu zeigen, daß sich das herrschende „Feindbild“ des Sozialen als dasjenige, das wissenschaftliche Resultate „verunreinigt“ und von außen infiltriert, bei Betrachtung der Forschungspraxis der Naturwissenschaften nicht aufrecht erhalten läßt. Das naturwissenschaftliche Labor zeigt sich vielmehr als ein Ort, an dem gesellschaftliche Praktiken für epistemische Zwecke instrumentalisiert und in Apparaturen der Erkenntnisfabrikation transformiert werden: das Labor ist Ort der Bemächtigung und „Verdichtung“ von Gesellschaft. Laboratorisierungsprozesse stellen die Bedingungen dafür her, daß Laboratorien als soziale Form funktionieren können. Sie werden als Prozesse des Übergangs zu einer Erzeugungslogik beschrieben, die die Einbindung von Naturobjekten in kulturelle Interaktion - und damit z. B. die Beschleunigung von Erkenntnisprozessen - ermöglicht. Objekte und Indikatoren der Erzeugungsprozesse im Labor sind Zeichen, deren Sinn und Referenz etabliert werden muß. Soziale und alltägliche Praktiken dienen der Anbindung dieser Zeichen an Referenzobjekte ebenso wie der Etablierung von Vertrauen bzw. der „Sicherung“ von Wahrheit. Zwei Praktiken werden vorgestellt: die Verwendung des Dialogs als naturwissenschaftliches Verfahren (Gesprächsapparaturen) sowie der Einsatz des Körpers des Wissenschaftlers als Instrument und Garant von Wahrheit (körperliche Meßmethoden).

Zur Unterkomplexität der Differenzierungstheorie

Zusammenfassung Diese empirische Anfrage an die Differenzierungstheorie, insbesondere diejenige Luhmann’scher Prägung, gesteht dieser eine zwar analytisch lose, aber nichts destotrotz treffende Interpretation institutioneller Spezialisierung in modernen Gesellschaften zu. Was sie nicht zugesteht, ist eine adäquate Rekonstruktion der internen Umwelt bzw. des internen Funktionierens der in Frage stehenden Funktionsbereiche. Entgegen Charakterisierungen in den Termini einer endogenen Logik und selbstbezogenen Autopoiesis wird auf die Heterogenität der Sprachspiele und Praktiken hingewiesen, die sich in diesen Bereichen findet. Die Differenzierungstheorie ignoriert, wie spezialisierte Bereiche durch Strukturierungsformen, die Funktionsdifferenzierungsgrenzen unterlaufen, sowohl ermöglicht als auch immer wieder ersetzt werden. Damit verbunden ist eine Kritik der ontologischen’ Realitätskonzeption der Differenzierungstheorie, die zwar Selbstorganisation postuliert, aber nicht zuläßt, daß realzeitliche Bereiche sich sowohl differenziert als auch undifferenziert, sowohl selbst-organisiert als auch nicht selbst-organisiert, oder weder in den einen noch in den anderen Kategorien konstituieren könnten. Alternativen zu dieser Vorgehensweise sind theoretische Reflexivität sowie eine Theorie der Praxis. Die Kritikpunkte werden durch Beispiele aus dem Bereich der Wissenschaft illustriert.

The Epistemics of Information A Consumption Model

This article explores the potential of a consumption model and consumption thinking for conceptualizing the epistemics of financial information. The argument rests on three characteristics of information knowledge. The first pertains to the nature and construction of reality to which information knowledge refers. That reality, this article argues, is not similar to the one most natural sciences assume: it is fluid and ever changing and does not conform to the stable mechanisms and patterns that we perceive to be present in nature. The second characteristic is that knowledge strategies in this area of information tend not to correspond to the representational procedures we are familiar with in natural science. The article illustrates how representation becomes emptied out and proxy measurements and other strategies take its place. The third characteristic of financial information processes is that they creatively destroy knowledge — by absorbing knowledge into other objects, revising it without end, or disseminating it until it loses value. This, too, points to epistemic consumption.

Transparency regimes and management by content in global organizations : the case of institutional currency trading

Argues that informational arrangement may make an organization less of a cumbersome machine by exteriorizing organizational processes on screen, making them transparent, witnessable and (reflexively) self‐changing. The platform organization addresses how some organizations – global investment banks engaged in institutional currency trading and big science collaborations engaged in high energy physics knowledge production – implement a transparency regime of information that extends to local and implicit knowledge. In other words, through being exteriorized, knowledge is kept current, alive and distributed in the respective organizations; to a significant degree, it is effectively precluded from becoming implicit and embodied in places and persons. Corresponds to a form of coordination that is content‐driven rather than social authority based. “Management by contact” is a knowledge‐enhancing, specialist activity closer to mediating and coaching than to “governing” and deciding.