The semiosis and the market: Peirce’s semiotics for economic sociology

Abstract

The importance of signs in the functioning of the contemporary economy has tended to be doubly underestimated by sociologists, by being restricted to the sphere of consumption on one hand, and to instituted signs on the other. Peirce’s concepts, and in particular that which refers to the contextualized evolution of a sign ( semiosis), can remedy this situation by enriching the sociology of markets. Coordination between buyers and sellers is based on a process of transmission and reception of different types of signs: some are stabilized and the interpretation ‘flows naturally’ – these are the conventions well identified by economic sociologists – while others are more ambiguous and leave a great deal of room for indeterminacy. In the latter case, the concept of semiosis makes it possible to finely identify the techniques used by actors to buy or sell in situations of uncertainty. After presenting Peirce’s conceptual architecture, this article illustrates the interest of such an import from a case study centered on the role of stock market indices in the functioning of contemporary financial markets.