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Lecture with Professor Karin Knorr, Universities of Chicago and Bielefeld

The Market as an Object of Attachment: What type of Agent is a
Financial Market?
In this Lecture, I consider the foreign exchange market from a particular perspective: I will not focus on market participants and their activities, but rather on the object in which they are participating—on the market and how it engages participants and ensnares them in its project. What sort of ‘party’ is the market and how can it be understood to be independent of market participants on whom it would seem to depend? How do we have to imagine an engagement with the market works—if we mean more by this than that investors and speculators hold positions in the market and depend on it for profit?
In answering these questions, I will illustrate how traders think of the market and how it is an independent entity. I will also take apart this object, the market, and differentiate between various levels of the presentation of its self. It is through the various pathways for involvement and attachment these levels offer that the engagement process works—and the market becomes more than a medium of profit making, it becomes a captivating being and an object of attachment.
I will also identify some of the agency dimensions of markets. Markets appear to be not only a type of object, but a type of agent—one that is synthetic, cultural, spectacular.
Karin Knorr Cetina is George Wells Beadle Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and a member of the Institute for World Society Studies at the University of Bielefeld. Most of her work is based on observation studies of complex expert settings – including studies of global financial markets conducted on the trading floors of large investment banks and private banks in Zurich, New York, London, and Sydney.
Her recent publications include Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Harvard University Press, 2003), which received two prizes; The Sociology of Financial Markets (edited with Alex Preda; Oxford University Press, 2005); “Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets,” American Journal of Sociology (with Urs Bruegger, winner of the theory prize for best paper, 2006); and “The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World” (Symbolic Interaction 2009). She is currently working on a book on the social and cultural structures of global financial markets.
For registration registration.ioa@cbs.dk. Registration by e-mail before 30 November 2010.
Contact person: Katja Høeg Tingleff kht.ioa@cbs.dk
Blog IOA Public Lecture Series
December 7, 2010

Tid: 07.12 15.00 -16.30


Sted: Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3
2000 Frederiksberg


Lokale: SP201 Danske Bank Auditorium




Sidst opdateret af Katja Høeg Tingleff 10.06.2011