Review Essays: Who’s Afraid of Financial Markets?

Abstract

There has recently been an upsurge in social studies of finance, which maintain that economics performs, shapes and formats the economy, and consider the formation and functioning of economic markets. They address market activities as global microstructures that are situated, reflexive accomplishments, focusing on the way in which the models, theories, procedures and techniques shape them. In all, financial sociology can attend to the interplay between actors’ cognitive states and the enactment of financial models as situated, historical processes. This promises to develop a broader social scientific account of financial markets as sequentially achieved global socio-material actions.