Financial markets have often been seen by economists as efficient mechanisms that fulfill vital functions within economies. But do financial markets really operate in such a straightforward manner? The Sociology of Financial Markets approaches financial markets from a sociological perspective. It seeks to provide an adequate sociological conceptualization of financial markets, and examine who the actors within them are, how they operate within which networks, and under which cognitive and cultural assumptions. Patterns of trading, trading room coordination, cognition and emotions, and global interaction are studied to help us better understand how markets work and the types of reasoning underlying these institutions. Financial markets also have a structural impact on the governance of social and economic institutions. Until now, sociologists have examined issues of governance mostly with respect to the legal framework of financial transactions. Contributions in this book highlight the ways in which financial markets shape the inner working and structure of corporations and their governance. Finally, the book seeks to investigate the symbolic aspects of financial markets. Financial markets affect not only economic and social structures but also societal cultural images and frameworks of meaning. Barbara Czarniawska demonstrates how representations of gender relationships are a case in point. Arguing that financial markets are not simply neutral with respect to questions of gender but enhance certain images and interpretations of men and women. Addressing many important topics from a sociological perspective for the first time, this book will be key reading for academics, researchers, and advanced students of financial markets in Business, Management, Economics, Finance and Sociology.

Financial experts have become ubiquitous on television, radio, and social media. They provide investment advice, interpret market movements, and explain the implications of political events, wielding a great deal of power and influence through their media presence. How do these experts acquire their authority, and what makes displays of financial expertise persuasive to their audiences? Alex Preda provides an ethnographic exploration of how financial expertise is performed and produced in the media, analyzing its features and how audiences react to it. He examines how analysts, anchors, and producers collaborate in manufacturing financial talk that circulates around the world. Preda emphasizes the significance of talk-as opposed to the written word-in finance, as the fabric of many transactions and a means of capturing capital. Analysts and media figures understand financial talk as requiring a skill set distinct from conducting research or representing facts. Preda demonstrates that analysts and media professionals deploy expertise when they engage with audiences in ways that make it difficult to contest the claims conveyed in their talk. The Spectacle of Expertise is based on close observations of TV and radio studios in Hong Kong, a global financial center and a crucial gateway to China, including interviews with audience members and financial analysts who appear as regular guests. It offers new and global perspectives on the relationship between financial expertise and the media, the making of public-expert talk, and how expertise is used to legitimize financialization.

As the banking crisis and its effects on the world economy have made plain, the stock market is of colossal importance to our livelihoods. In "Framing Finance," Alex Preda looks at the history of the market to figure out how we arrived at a point where investing is not only commonplace, but critical, as market fluctuations threaten our plans to send our children to college or retire comfortably.

As Preda discovers through extensive research, the public was once much more skeptical. For investing to become accepted, a deep-seated prejudice against speculation had to be overcome, and Preda reveals that over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries groups associated with stock exchanges in New York, London, and Paris managed to redefine finance as a scientific pursuit grounded in observational technology. But Preda also notes that as the financial data in which they trafficked became ever more difficult to understand, charismatic speculators emerged whose manipulations of the market undermined the benefits of widespread investment. And so, "Framing Finance" ends with an eye on the future, proposing a system of public financial education to counter the irrational elements that still animate the appeal of finance.

This book examines the formation of scientific knowledge about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and shows the broader cultural assumptions which grounded these knowledge. Alex Preda highlights the metaphors, narratives, and classifications which framed scientific hypotheses about the nature of the infectious agent and its transmission ways and compares these arguments with those used in the scientific knowledge about SARS. Through detailed rhetorical analysis of biomedical publications, the author shows how scientific knowledge about epidemics is shaped by cultural narratives and categories of social thought. Preda situates his analysis in the broader frame of the world risk society, where scientific knowledge is called upon to support and shape public policies about prevention and health maintenance, among others. But can these policies avoid the influence of cultural narratives and of social classifications? The book shows how culture matters for prevention and health policies, as well as with respect to how scientific research is organized and funded.

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.

Financial experts have become ubiquitous on television, radio, and social media. They provide investment advice, interpret market movements, and explain the implications of political events, wielding a great deal of power and influence through their media presence. How do these experts acquire their authority, and what makes displays of financial expertise persuasive to their audiences? Alex Preda provides an ethnographic exploration of how financial expertise is performed and produced in the media, analyzing its features and how audiences react to it. He examines how analysts, anchors, and producers collaborate in manufacturing financial talk that circulates around the world. Preda emphasizes the significance of talk-as opposed to the written word-in finance, as the fabric of many transactions and a means of capturing capital. Analysts and media figures understand financial talk as requiring a skill set distinct from conducting research or representing facts. Preda demonstrates that analysts and media professionals deploy expertise when they engage with audiences in ways that make it difficult to contest the claims conveyed in their talk. The Spectacle of Expertise is based on close observations of TV and radio studios in Hong Kong, a global financial center and a crucial gateway to China, including interviews with audience members and financial analysts who appear as regular guests. It offers new and global perspectives on the relationship between financial expertise and the media, the making of public-expert talk, and how expertise is used to legitimize financialization.

We often think of finance as a glamorous world, a place where investment bankers amass huge profits in gleaming downtown skyscrapers. There's another side to finance, though the millions of amateurs who log on to their computers every day to make their own trades. The shocking truth, however, is that less than 2% of these amateur traders make a consistent profit. Why, then, do they do it? In Noise, Alex Preda explores the world of the people who trade even when by all measures they would be better off not trading. Based on firsthand observations, interviews with traders and brokers, and on international direct trading experience, Preda's fascinating ethnography investigates how ordinary people take up financial trading, how they form communities of their own behind their computer screens, and how electronic finance encourages them to trade more and more frequently. Along the way, Preda finds the answer to the paradox of amateur trading the traders aren't so much seeking monetary rewards in the financial markets, rather the trading itself helps them to fulfill their own personal goals and aspirations.

As financial markets have assumed increasing prominence in societies, economic sociology's insights into their operations have provided some of the most cogent explanations of how they affect our world.
The book systematically surveys the most important sociological approaches to markets, taking information as the key concept in the analysis of transactions. It examines the differences between economic and sociological concepts of information, showing how the latter can ground a genuinely sociological research programme in the investigation of markets. This is the first book to bring together and discuss different approaches to markets in contemporary economic sociology with respect to the links between information and transactions.
Structured on a scale which goes from the analysis of economic exchanges as social interactions to the examination of social institutions which support global markets, the book highlights the social and cultural factors shaping the production, diffusion, and uses of economic information. Based on a systematic discussion of the latest research on economic interactions, the book investigates how information is constituted in market transactions; the role played by emotions; the role of shared cognitive frameworks in shaping information. It integrates the analysis of economic groups, networks, and communities with that of forms of economic expertise, technologies, organizations, and institutions which constitute markets.
The book analyzes the social structures supporting market transactions, discussing networks of social relationships, groups, and market communities with respect to information. It shows how newer concepts like performativity, with several versions and applications, contribute to a better understanding of market dynamics. Using examples, the book discusses the increased technological complexity of markets and its consequences with respect to how information is processed in transactions.

As financial markets have assumed increasing prominence in societies, economic sociology's insights into their operations have provided some of the most cogent explanations of how they affect our world.
The book systematically surveys the most important sociological approaches to markets, taking information as the key concept in the analysis of transactions. It examines the differences between economic and sociological concepts of information, showing how the latter can ground a genuinely sociological research programme in the investigation of markets. This is the first book to bring together and discuss different approaches to markets in contemporary economic sociology with respect to the links between information and transactions.
Structured on a scale which goes from the analysis of economic exchanges as social interactions to the examination of social institutions which support global markets, the book highlights the social and cultural factors shaping the production, diffusion, and uses of economic information. Based on a systematic discussion of the latest research on economic interactions, the book investigates how information is constituted in market transactions; the role played by emotions; the role of shared cognitive frameworks in shaping information. It integrates the analysis of economic groups, networks, and communities with that of forms of economic expertise, technologies, organizations, and institutions which constitute markets.
The book analyzes the social structures supporting market transactions, discussing networks of social relationships, groups, and market communities with respect to information. It shows how newer concepts like performativity, with several versions and applications, contribute to a better understanding of market dynamics. Using examples, the book discusses the increased technological complexity of markets and its consequences with respect to how information is processed in transactions.

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.

As the banking crisis and its effects on the world economy have made plain, the stock market is of colossal importance to our livelihoods. In "Framing Finance," Alex Preda looks at the history of the market to figure out how we arrived at a point where investing is not only commonplace, but critical, as market fluctuations threaten our plans to send our children to college or retire comfortably.

As Preda discovers through extensive research, the public was once much more skeptical. For investing to become accepted, a deep-seated prejudice against speculation had to be overcome, and Preda reveals that over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries groups associated with stock exchanges in New York, London, and Paris managed to redefine finance as a scientific pursuit grounded in observational technology. But Preda also notes that as the financial data in which they trafficked became ever more difficult to understand, charismatic speculators emerged whose manipulations of the market undermined the benefits of widespread investment. And so, "Framing Finance" ends with an eye on the future, proposing a system of public financial education to counter the irrational elements that still animate the appeal of finance.

Financial markets have often been seen by economists as efficient mechanisms that fulfill vital functions within economies. But do financial markets really operate in such a straightforward manner? The Sociology of Financial Markets approaches financial markets from a sociological perspective. It seeks to provide an adequate sociological coneptualization of financial markets, and examine who the actors within them are, how they operate, within which networks, and how these networks are structured. Patterns of trading, trading room coordination, and global interaction are studied to help us better understand how markets work and the types of reasoning behind these trends. Financial markets also have a structural impact on the governance of social and economic institutions. Until now, sociologists have examined issues of governance mostly with respect to the legal framework of financial transactions. Contributions in this book highlight the ways in which financial markets shape the inner working and structure of corporations and their governance. Finally the book seeks to investigate the symbolic aspects of financial markets. Financial markets affect not only economic and social structures but also societal cultural images and frameworks of meaning. Barbara Czarniawska demonstrates how representations of gender relationships are a case in point. Arguing that financial markets are not simply neutral with respect to questions of gender but enhance certain images and interpretations of men and women. Addressing many important topics from a sociological perspective for the first time, this book will be key reading for academics, researchers, and advanced students of financial markets in Business, Management, Economics, Finance, and Sociology.