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Donald MacKenzie
Oxford University Press, USA

Material Markets: How Economic Agents Are Constructed

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AuthorDonald MacKenzie
PublisherOxford University Press, USA
PublishedFeb 26 2019
Book FormatPaperback
ISBN-139780198835301
Dimensions9.1 X 6.1 X 0.6 inches
Weight 0.7 pounds
BISAC
CategoriesBusiness & Economics > Organizational Behavior
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

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 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; 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 observation of its trading).

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

Author Bio

I'm a sociologist of science and technology, and my research aims to throw new light on their role in shaping the modern world. I work on topics such as how financial-market participants use mathematical models, how nuclear weapons systems are designed, and how those involved try to produce high-confidence knowledge of the safety and security of computer systems.

Currently, I'm researching two topics: automated 'high-frequency trading' (HFT project), and AdTech, the technical/economic systems of online advertising (AdTech project).

My book on HFT, Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets (also available as audiobook), was published by Princeton University Press in May; read an early review by Diane Coyle.

Previous books include Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (MIT Press, 1990); An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (MIT Press, 2006); and Chains of Finance: How Investment Management is Shaped (Oxford University Press, 2017), jointly written with Diane-Laure Arjaliès, Philip Grant, Iain Hardie and Ekaterina Svetlova.

Source: The University of Edinburgh

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