You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
An inside look at a Wall Street trading room and what this reveals about today’s financial system Debates about financial reform have led to the recognition that a healthy financial system doesn’t depend solely on how it is structured—organizational culture matters as well. Based on extensive research in a Wall Street derivatives-trading room, Taking the Floor considers how the culture of financial organizations might change in order for them to remain healthy, even in times of crises. In particular, Daniel Beunza explores how the extensive use of financial models and trading technologies over the recent decades has exerted a far-ranging and troubling influence on Wall Street. How have...
Introduction -- First impressions -- Trading robots and social cues -- Animating the market -- Models and reflexivity -- Managers -- Performative spirals -- Norms -- Resonance -- The global financial crisis -- Scandal -- When all is said and done -- Conclusion.
An inside look at a Wall Street trading room and what this reveals about today’s financial system Debates about financial reform have led to the recognition that a healthy financial system doesn’t depend solely on how it is structured—organizational culture matters as well. Based on extensive research in a Wall Street derivatives-trading room, Taking the Floor considers how the culture of financial organizations might change in order for them to remain healthy, even in times of crises. In particular, Daniel Beunza explores how the extensive use of financial models and trading technologies over the recent decades has exerted a far-ranging and troubling influence on Wall Street. How have...
Alex Preda is an ethnographer, but unlike many of his tribe, his fieldwork was done, not with the dispossessed, but with white-collar entrepreneurs. The result is an ethnography of noise in electronic finance. What this means is not noise as the uproar and commotion of trading pits, nor as something annoying, irrelevant, random, or incomprehensible. Neither the literal nor the mundanely metaphorical are his starting point, although both merit a closer look. Preda s starting point is the conceptual: namely, the notion of noise (and its empirical manifestations) as defined in an American Finance Association presidential address: noise trading provides the essential missing ingredient to the wh...
This book draws on the tools of science and technology studies and economic sociology to reconceptualize the intersection of economy and technology, suggesting materiality - the idea that social existence involves not only actors and social relations but also objects - as the theoretical point of convergence.
Explains how stock markets became automated through the work of invisible technologists, redefining the fabric of finance for the twenty-first century.
The Handbook brings together leading international scholars to provide a comprehensive overview of research and theory on the sociology of finance and the workings of financial institutions and financial markets. It will serve as a reference point for this rapidly expanding discipline.
Financial markets, processes, and instruments are often difficult to fathom; and recent turbulence suggests they may be out of control in some respects. Donald Mackenzie is one of the most perceptive analysts of the workings of the financial world. In this book, MacKenzie 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 ma...
Reinsurance is a market that provides cover for the devastating consequences of unpredictable events such as Hurricane Katrina, or the Tohoku earthquake, underpinning society's capacity to rebuild after the unthinkable happens. This book fleshes out how this important and quirky financial market works.
A remarkable look at how the growth, technology, and politics of high-frequency trading have altered global financial markets In today’s financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions. Trading at the Speed of Light tells the story of this epic transformation. Donald MacKenzie shows how in the 1990s, in what were then the disreputable margins of the US financial system, a new approach to trading—automated high-frequency trading or HFT—began and then spread throughout the world. HFT has brought new efficiency to global...