The Cultures of Finance Working Group is an interdisciplinary effort to study the historical, technical, and social configurations of finance. Members include scholars from across the social sciences and humanities who are interested in engaging with recent work in the social studies of finance. Alongside technical devices, the group considers the ways in which cultures of finance circulate through ethical, political, social and discursive forms. Through a series of member meetings, public lectures, and special conferences, Cultures of Finance explores innovative research methods and develops research programs to address the complexity of what Arjun Appadurai has termed the global financescape.

While early social scientific work on the economy did not draw a distinction between the social and the economic, a domain called the economy has been gradually cordoned off and subjected to increasingly technical arrangements, modes of calculation, and expert knowledge in the post-War era. One remarkable result of these interventions has been the emergence of vast circuits of financial action. In addition to technological apparatuses, constructed to resolve the smooth flow of capital across space and time, new knowledges, regimes of valuation, laws, and subjectivities have also been generated, accompanying the rise in the global circuits of circulating capital.

Following the unprecedented rate of economic growth through the last 25 years, fueled by the explosive boom of financial forms of capital, we find ourselves in the ubiquitous company of finance. Home mortgages, student loans, credit cards, credit scores, retirement funds, and microfinance, once sequestered in specialized places, these activities and objects of capital markets have seeped into the spaces of everyday life. It is in the history of the evolving financescape (marked by a push towards ever increasing financialization) and its uncertain future (made visible through the contemporary credit crisis) that the Cultures of Finance Working Group finds its terrain.

The Cultures of Finance working group writes a blog located here.

IPK Cultures of Finance/Bruce Initiative for Rethinking Capitalism
Futures of Finance Conference
April 13th – 14th

How is the knowledge about finance that is being produced in so many locations and across so many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities within the academy related to finance as the assemblage of technical...

With special guest Robert Meister, serving as interlocutor

Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as...

Anthropologists & Economists: Market Bazaars & Pricing

Primary Readings:

Geertz, C., (1978) The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing. The American Economic Review, 68 (2), pp. 28-32.

Spence, M. (1973). Time and Communication in Economic and Social Interaction. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 87, pp. 651-660.

Rees, A. (1966). Information Networks in Labor...

TBD

RISK, UNCERTAINTY AND CULTURAL FRAMES
Arjun Appadurai, Ben Lee, and Robert Wosnitzer

There is little reason to belabor the relevance of the ideas of risk and uncertainty to the subject of finance. In most mainstream economic theory, as well as in the financial field dominated by business schools, the classic ideas of Frank Knight have been the foundation for the transformation of risk from...

Mary Poovey and Keven Brine will be presenting an excerpt from their new research. Details to follow...

From our more social perspective: a financial (derivatives) market is the performatively constructed frame for circulation which creates, even as it is created, by a sociospecific habitus of work. This financial habitus is founded subjectively on a speculative ethos and a monetized subjectivity, and objectively on speculative capital and risk driven instruments. And their collective...

Keith and Noam will lead a special workshop section with the Cultures of Finance Working Group and invited guests. The workshop will be organized under the thematic of "History and Genealogy for the Ethnography of Finance" and will engage with Keith Hart's new manuscript, "Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique" and other selected readings that will engage with the historicity of...

Keith Hart will be engaging with the idea that the historical experiment with national monopoly currency was shortlived and only partially realised, but its cultural legacy is profound. Modern identification of society with the nation-state is still strong because of the congruence of five ideas of community -- political, territorial, interest group, ideological and monetary -- in a single...

Cultures of Monetarism

Jane I. Guyer, September 30th 2008

The last quarter of the 20th century saw a rise in theoretical devotion and political commitment to a theory of the place of the state in national economies that is termed “monetarism”. Over the past nine years, I have written eleven papers on aspects of popular economic culture, in West Africa, the United States and...

Please note that this working group session is reserved for members of the group only...

We've added the Austin, Butler, and Benveniste to provide some background to the discussion of performativity by Butler and Callon in the special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy. For those who know Butler's work, it is clear that she chose to 'defer' criticism of the Callon project by calling...

For this year’s first session, we’re working with the theme of ‘financial contrarians’ and read through the popular narratives of Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (TBS) and Larry MacDonald’s A Colossal Failure of Common Sense (CFCS). We’re largely picking up this theme from Arjun’s paper given last year, The Ghost in the Machine, where he provisionally identifies one articulation of a Weberian...

Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street, published in 1873 in the wake of a devastating London bank collapse, explained in clear and straightforward terms why the central bank must serve as the lender of last resort to ensure liquidity in a faltering credit system. Bagehot’s book set down the principles that helped define the role of modern central banks, particularly in times of crisis—but the recent...

CoF Group Member David Stark will be presenting "Backing out, Locking in: Financial Models and the Social Dynamics of Arbitrage Disasters," co-authored with Daniel Beunza.

This study analyzes the opportunities and dangers created by financial models. Through ethnographic observations in the derivatives trading room of a major investment bank, we found that traders use models in reverse to...

For this session, Ben Lee and Ed LiPuma have decided to take a slightly different way of presenting some of their current work by introducing it through the work of others. They've selected a set of quotations to frame some of the issues they have been grappling with over the last several years. These coalesce around the question of how did a “culture of financial speculation," which forms the...

The Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU is pleased to announce its first Cultures of Finance public event, a public discussion with Nobel-laureate Professor Robert C. Merton. The evening will include a talk given by Professor Merton, followed by a public exchange between Professor Merton and NYU Professor Arjun Appadurai....

This session, led by Martha Poon, will focus on the origin of managing the event of consumer default as a quantifiable risk. We will examine two moments of this history in tandem: the first a description of lending practices in the 1940-50’s when consumer loans were made based on controlling cost rather than risk (see abstract below); the second, the technical transition of the investor grade...

The sociologist Olivier Godechot conducts research for the Maurice Halbwachs Center at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and for the Quantitative Sociology Laboratory. His research focuses on wages and bonuses in the Financial Industry. Godechot also conducts research on the hiring processes and networks of the academic world.

He has published "Working Rich: Salaries, Bonus...

This is the first meeting of Cultures of Finance, and it is only open to members of the working group.

For our first meeting, Mary Poovey will lead a discussion centered on her recent work, "Stories We Tell about Liberal Markets: The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Great-Men Histories of Change." An abstract of Mary's paper is...