Financial Risk-taking as a Sociological Gamble: Notes on the Development of a New Social Perspective

1 The Social Constitution of Financial Market Prices

Sociological approaches to price formation have repeatedly problematized the asocial notion that objects have a clear, fundamental, or independent economic value that prices merely and directly reflect. Although writers have adopted divergent theoretical vantage points – focusing on the impact of network structures, institutional arrangements, or culturally anchored frameworks of meaning on the formation of prices (Beckert, 2011; see also Beckert and Aspers, 2011) – their work indicates the extent to which ‘price’ is a shifting social agreement about the significance and value of objects. ³ Evidence of the social constitution and determination of prices has also been assembled in social studies of financial markets of various kinds (e.g. Baker, 1984; Beunza et al., 2006; Carruthers and Stinchcombe, 1999; Preda, 2001a; Rona-Tas and Hiss, 2011; Uzzi, 1999; Zuckerman, 1999).

Interestingly, as far as financial asset prices are concerned, some economists, too, have recognized these prices as deeply social. In Chapter 12 of his General Theory, Keynes discusses the role of ‘precarious’ convention in the stock exchange’s constant ‘revaluations’ (1964: 151) of investments. This convention, he says, ‘is liable to change violently as the result of sudden fluctuation of opinion’, and it subjects the market ‘to waves of optimistic and pessimistic sentiment’ (1964: 154). Contrasting the convention-based valuation to ‘what the investment is really worth’ (1964: 154–5) – a contrast that sociologists generally tend to reject ⁴ – he further states that the ‘expert professionals’ of the market are not concerned with correcting these ‘vagaries’ but rather ‘with foreseeing changes in the conventional basis of valuation a short time ahead of the general public’ (1964: 154). Thus, while insisting that convention-based valuation is often ‘not-real’ economically (a contrast to a concern for ‘real’ worth), he acknowledges it as ‘real’ practically: as describing what actually goes on in the market.

This account has given rise to post-Keynesian calls to further the understanding of the social processes at the basis of economic knowledge and activity (Lawson, 1994). However, the substantial ‘heterodox’ economic literature (Lawson, 2006) that developed on this topic has often been preoccupied with a different task: resolving how, and under what, conditions speculation and investment-behavior could nonetheless be deemed ‘rational’ or ‘economically justified’ (e.g. Carabelli, 2002; Carabelli and De Vecchi, 2001; Lawson, 1985; O’Donnell, 1990). This preoccupation with questions of rationality is also exemplified by Shiller’s famous notion of ‘irrational exuberance’ (2000) in the market: a collective wishful thinking exacerbated by psychological contagion, media practice, herd behavior, and more. ⁵

Generally, the focus of sociologically oriented researchers is not on explaining how economic ‘error’ happens, but how the economic ‘real’ is socially enacted and produced. And, as far as the prices of financial assets are concerned, sociologically oriented accounts tend to emphasize the role of technology in the process. The asset price, like any price, is treated as ‘a social thing’, but the technicality of financial markets plays a dominant role in this sociality (Beunza et al., 2006). Most critically, information and exchange technologies (Buenze and Stark, 2004; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2000, 2002; Lee and LiPuma, 2002; Preda, 2007; Zaloom, 2003), mathematical pricing models (e.g. MacKenzie, 2006, 2011; MacKenzie and Millo, 2003; Muniesa, 2007), and representational techniques (Aitken, 2007; Preda, 2001b; Zaloom, 2009) underpin economic processes, practices, and valuations; they shape the reality they purport to merely measure. In terms of ‘Performativity Theory’ – a dominant stream of thinking in the social studies of finance – economic models and techniques perform the market rather than merely reflect it (e.g. Callon, 1998; Langley, 2010; MacKenzie, 2006). In the case of financial market prices, then, the ‘social’ seems to be profoundly entangled with the technological.

Various studies of finance further indicate that this technicality has the effect of bringing prices’ socially constituted essence to practical awareness. According to Lee and LiPuma, the technological and mathematical structures of finance create a form of ‘“value-free” circulation’ (2002: 206) in the context of which ‘it seems increasingly impossible to see how, even in the final instance, value could determine price’ (2002: 209, original emphases; but see Bryan and Rafferty, 2007). While they (LiPuma and Lee, 2004: 55) also insist that ‘the very process that prices and commodifies also conceals its own social character’, the writings of many other researchers lead to a different conclusion: Namely, despite ‘the hard work of objectification’ inherent in the technological and mathematical pricing efforts (Muniesa, 2007: 390), the ongoing technological and mathematical reconfigurations of financial market prices seem to shatter rather than enhance their objectification, exposing the taken-for-granted to reflective re-examination (e.g. Zaloom, 2009). Apparently, financial actors often see prices not as a representation of (objectified) economic value, but as something else: a barometric measure of, and a means of, articulating and manipulating the constantly shifting social ‘mood’ of the market (e.g. Ailon, 2013; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2000, 2002; Langley, 2010; Zaloom, 2009).

In other words, it is precisely the technological underpinnings of the prices of financial assets that seem to bring their primarily social constitution into view, at times giving rise to a perspective that approaches all governing accounts of mathematical and economic rationality with skepticism (Smith, 2011: 292). Thus, financial involvement entails the increasing de-objectification of prices in the following sense: whereas in Durkheim’s time ( 1947, 1992; see discussion in Beckert, 2011: 1–2) prices were seen as ‘social facts’, with a seemingly external and objective quality to them, the continually shifting, often hype-based prices that are traded in today’s financial markets appear to openly betray, even proclaim, their socially constituted essence.

Various researchers have assembled evidence of this heightened awareness of the social constitution of financial market prices. For example, in a discussion of decision-making by a policymaking body of the US Federal Reserve System, Holmes and Marcus (2006: 37–9) argue that the predicaments of ‘fast capitalism’ – specifically actors’ commitments ‘to a technocratic ethos predicated on the management of vast amounts of quantitative data’ that are often inconclusive in relation to price movements and other economic aspects – entail a reliance on what they term ‘para-ethnography’: the reflexive endowment of information with social perspective and meaning as a means of trying ‘to anticipate the future and capture shifting configurations of expectations and sentiment’. ⁶ Having interviewed some of the founders of the Chicago Board Options Exchange in their study of the historical performativity of Options Pricing Theory, MacKenzie and Millo (2003: 109) similarly underscore the relevance of views of the market as cultures, moral communities, and places of political action, and their data indicate the interviewees’ accounts of markets as such.

Moreover, indications are that this reflective social awareness is an integral part of the practice of financial traders. Although there are different types of trading strategies, each characterized by a different valuation strategy (Beunza and Stark, 2004: 375), studies – especially ethnographic studies – indicate that traders are aware of the importance of the social in the shaping of prices.

For example, in her comparative ethnographic study of two sites of the global futures market – a traditional open-outcry pit and a digital dealing room – Zaloom (2003: 2) argues that the numbers that represent bids and offers for financial contracts are hardly ‘established price facts’ or exacting calculations: given the fluidity, ambiguity, and heightened pace of financial trading, they are ‘momentary markers of approximate valuation’ based on specifically social information and scenarios relating either to a deep knowledge of the local environment (in the case of the pit) or to attempts to ‘construct a digital landscape of social information’ (2003: 4) based on the onscreen numbers (in the case of the digital dealing room). Moreover, traders are well aware of the need for an interpretive agility on the job and are wittingly tuned into, seek to decipher, and sometimes strategically construct the ‘social’ behind the numbers. ‘Social contextualization and interpretation are critical parts of traders’ calculations,’ she reports (2003: 4). Indeed, ‘[t]raders know that market numbers carry social content that cannot be computed. Searching for the hidden values and phantom figures that lurk behind the numbers is the anchor in a global marketplace where the only certainty is instability’ (2003: 12).

There are other examples. In an ethnographic study of the Shanghai stock market, Hertz notes that her informants’ attempts to predict price movement did not rely solely on economic data. Predicting price movements, she argues, was also based on the ability to ‘read the popular mood’ (1998: 142). Moreover, it involved distinctly social senses and sensibilities, including ongoing observations of the behavior of powerful groups, and an awareness of the possibility of the social manipulation of prices (‘cornering’ of the market, 1998: 146) by powerful actors.

Studying arbitrage traders in a major international investment bank, Beunza and Stark (2004: 381), too, show that traders are reflectively attuned to the social reality of the trading room.

In the practice of their trading room laboratories, our arbitrage traders are acutely aware that the reality ‘out there’ is a social construct consisting of other traders and other interconnected instruments continuously reshaping, in feverish innovation, the properties of that recursive world. In this co-production, in which the products of their interventions become a part of the phenomenon they are monitoring, such reflexivity is an invaluable component of their tools of the trade. (2004: 396–7)

Popular economic notions of the need to ‘read’ the ‘mass psychology’ of the ‘trading crowd’ ⁷ offer further evidence of financial actors’ recognition of the importance of the social in price-setting. Though coined in psychological terms, such popular notions nevertheless point to the need for a perspective that is attuned to the collective, interactive, and mass aspects of human thinking and behavior in the realm of market price movements. To successfully speculate on others’ financial strategies and sustain an ‘innovative’ outlook (e.g. Beunza and Stark, 2004), financial actors must, in Keynes’s (1964: 155) words, ‘outwit the crowd’. They must engage in ‘observational activity … with a view to market players’ possible moves and intentions’ (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2002: 925) in order to know when to join a trend and when to abandon it. In this context, the ‘social emotions’ (Pixley, 2004; Zaloom, 2009) ⁸ deemed by some economists as ‘irrational’ in the sense of leading to price distortions – collective fear, euphoria, mania, panic (e.g. Kindleberger, 1989), as well as the aforementioned ‘irrational exuberance’ of market ‘bubbles’ (Shiller, 2000) – seem to be increasingly seen as the prime determinants of prices and have been drawing considerable attention within financial markets.

That being so, financial markets introduce a distinct orientation towards the social. The combination of a technologically intensive and sociologically reflexive price dynamic implies a distinct viewpoint from which social processes are reflected upon, experienced, and made meaningful. On one hand, financial markets are marked by heightened global connectivity: they are electronically enabled ‘global microstructures’ where geographically distant participants are oriented towards each other (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger, 2002: 907), and where financial products and evaluative principles tie together economic events occurring in faraway places (e.g. Beunza and Stark, 2004). On the other hand, this connectivity is accompanied by a perspective marked both by an awareness of the sociality and collectivity of others and by the struggle of individual actors to remain reflexive and socially withdrawn. Acknowledging the price-setting dynamic as socially constituted to a significant degree, they observe the ‘social’ in a way that constantly distances them from the so-called crowds whose inclinations and behavior they technologically and situationally code and follow. Thus, the first element of the social perspective characteristic of financial risk-taking is a reflexive social distancing relating to the collective price-setting processes occurring within financial markets.

I would like, however, to point out an apparent tension: pervasive schemes of social causality about prices – notions of their social determinants – exist alongside underlying notions of finance as a world of indeterminism. If, as the ethnographic and other evidence indeed indicates, financial actors attribute social reasons to price shifts, we must ask how and in what ways are the price moves also deemed intrinsically non-deterministic? How and in what ways are they also seen as stochastic in essence (see e.g. Arnoldi, 2004; Maurer, 2002a; Reddy, 1996)?

2 Social Causes and Mathematical Chance

Studies about the meaning and implications of financial indeterminism have not really explored the question of its discursive links and tensions with concomitant financial causal schemes. ⁹ Their primary focus was different: taking indeterminism for granted, the studies sought to explain how finance was rendered legitimate despite the stigmatizing shadow laid on it by other types of practical infatuations with chance and future uncertainties. Thus, for example, in de Goede’s (2005) genealogical study of finance, she focuses on the way that 19th-century financial markets sought to defend themselves from accusations of gambling. She shows that this defense relied on the establishment of a sense of scientific and professional knowledgeability to financial risk-taking. According to de Goede, the moral distinction between finance and gambling was constructed in the course of prolonged political, cultural, and legal struggles, and became (partly) stabilized only after financial risk was codified as a calculable, manageable entity. The increasing legitimacy attributed to financial risk-taking as ‘high science’ enabled the moral sanitization and naturalization of financial speculation and with it the development of a sense of productive economic purpose to risk-bearing (see also Preda, 2005).

Nevertheless, while to some extent successful, this historical struggle has never really ended. Researchers show that financial speculation has never entirely come out from under gambling’s stigmatizing shadow (e.g. de Goede, 2005; MacKenzie, 2006: 31, 80, 123–5, 158). ¹⁰ Alongside documentations of the increasing sophistication of the financial technologies and discursive practices used to turn the future into an object of expert (and thus respectable and morally sanitized) knowledge (e.g. Arnoldi, 2004; Isquierdo, 2001; MacKenzie, 2006), writers also show the diverse limits of this epistemological endeavor: the doubts and disturbances it gives rise to (Zaloom, 2009); the ‘theological unconscious’ it ‘represses’ (Maurer, 2002a); the varieties of ignorance and ambivalence it sustains (Davies and McGoey, 2012); its ‘spectral enchantments’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000: 310); its conceptual elusiveness and ambiguities (Miyazaki, 2007); its paradoxical narratives (Ailon, 2012); its contradictions, failures, and ambiguities (Langley, 2008a); and so forth. In all these ways, finance’s epistemological anchor of legitimacy – the professionalization project that sets financial agents’ infatuation with future uncertainties apart from that of gamblers – has been problematized and rendered incomplete.

Concomitantly, various authors in the field of International Political Economy (IPE) have followed Susan Strange’s lead in conceptualizing global finance as a giant ‘casino’ (1997; see also e.g. McKenzie, 2011). As Strange argues (1997: 3) in a famous passage, the emergence of ‘Casino Capitalism’ in the mid 1980s ‘has made inveterate, and largely involuntary, gamblers of us all’. Within the structures of the international political economy, this ‘casino’ further turns the weakest and most dependent states into recurring losers who cannot opt out, and it is inherently unstable and prone to crises (see Leander, 2001; McKenzie, 2011). Although focusing on the analysis of finance’s structural implications rather than its epistemological claims, IPE writers, too, have been examining and mapping out the analogies between finance and gambling, thus further problematizing the moral distinction between the two.

Despite their different theoretical vantage points, the accounts discussed thus far treat the unstable distinction from gambling as a problem of legitimacy. I would like, however, to suggest that, as far as legitimacy is concerned, gambling’s acclaimed shadow over financial markets may not be solely a problem for the markets: it also appears to be an achievement. It constructs and helps solidify a sense of financial indeterminism alongside the simultaneous notions of causality discussed in the previous section. Thus, I argue, while it is no doubt important to ask how finance is distinguished from gambling, it is also important to ask how it is not. How is the sense of financial indeterminism and chance constituted and discursively sustained? How are the same price movements, the same objects of speculation, simultaneously cast as the outcome of causality and as occurrences modeled by forces of indeterminism?

To the best of my knowledge, writers have not posed this question as a primary research goal. Nonetheless, existing studies offer at least initial evidence to indicate that the process of imbuing finance with its stochastic aura involves a type of ‘social forgetting’, which occurs through the intensity and abstractness of the financial representational technologies. The endless electronic flow of numbers, graphs, and charts constructs a robust and overwhelming sense of the market as an external stochastic force or being.

One of the most interesting accounts lending support to this proposition is that of Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2000). In their study of the global foreign exchange market, they show how the numerical, constantly changing ‘gestural face’ of the market is electronically screened and constantly monitored by traders, consequently becoming a primary object of ‘postsocial’ relatedness and attachment for them. This ‘postsocial’ object-relation with the electronic ‘face’ of the market, they further argue, challenges and to some extent empties out and replaces social relations. The constantly mutating and changing numerical ‘gestural face’ is experienced as never completely knowable, but forever a source of desire and fascination. It thus becomes to some extent subjectified, in the sense of being increasingly seen by participants as a being that experiences, feels, and remembers; indeed, as the centerpiece of an independent life-form they can sometimes partly influence, but can never completely control or even catch up with.

There are other accounts of this sense of ‘being’ of the market, albeit with different emphases. For example, in an ethnographic study of Wall Street bankers, Ho (2009) shows how ‘the market’ is conjured up as an autonomous, abstract, and external force by even the most privileged and core financial actors, marking a deeply ingrained cultural representation born out of everyday Wall Street work life and its cultural identification with this market. Similarly, Lee and LiPuma (2002: 196) claim that the market is referred to as a third-person agent to which ‘we’ the investors respond, and there are other accounts that offer evidence of the market’s animation as a deified authority (e.g. de Goede, 2005: 114–15), or ‘a sentient being’ administering ‘swift and painful judgments …’ (Zaloom, 2009: 257).

These accounts of how the technologically displayed and enabled flow of numbers is experienced as the ‘gestural face’ of an independent life-form, an autonomous, external force or deity, or a third person, jointly present evidence of a process whereby the referent – the abstract, electronic representation – acquires a life of its own that is thematically independent from, if not completely contradictory to, that which it also claims to reference: the price-setting dynamics that, as argued above, are often perceived as being socially determined. On the one hand, the social price-constituting dynamics are often pictured as mob-like and tending towards irrational panics and euphoria that are to be outsmarted by financial actors. On the other hand, the products of these social processes – the numbers, graphs, charts, and other means of representing the fluctuating price dynamics – are reified as ‘the market’ and seen as an autonomous and external life-form that is thoroughly ‘fraught with risk and uncertainty’ (Lee and LiPuma, 2002: 197). Thus the social is in a sense degraded to the status of a lesser being that is to be outsmarted, while its products – the numerical particles of its ‘gestural face’ – are mystified as an external force; as constituting an uncertain but mathematically ordered cosmology. This social forgetting of the socially constituted foundations of financial numbers, then, is the second element of the social perspective characteristic of financial risk-taking.

3 Connectivity without Care

The heightened financial connectivity referred to earlier not only applies to the relationships between globally dispersed traders, investors, and other financial market participants, but also concerns the relationships between these financial actors and the people whose currencies, corporations, products, and so forth are in various ways the objects or underlying assets of financial trades (e.g. LiPuma and Lee, 2004). Connectivity in this sense is expressed by the fact that through the technologically mediated financial markets, the fates and facts of life of people in one place in the world can lead to profits or losses for financial actors from other countries and cultures, and the actions of financial actors in one place directly impact the lives and livelihoods of those in others.

Existing evidence indicates that this form of heightened connectivity is also accompanied by a form of social dissociation: an underlying social disconnection from the people and relationships that are directly and indirectly affected by financial decisions. While evidence suggests that the price that is speculated upon is increasingly seen as a product of social processes that occur amongst market participants (see above), the relationship between the market participants and those who are affected by their financial trades and decisions seems to be increasingly blocked from view and feeling: it is not experienced as a concrete social relationship (LiPuma and Lee, 2004: 28). ‘[W]hereas the trader is emotionally distant from any particular trade,’ write Beunza and Stark (2004: 371–2) in their ethnographic study of an arbitrage trading room, ‘to be able to take a position the trader must be strongly attached to an evaluative principle and its affiliated instruments.’ This emotional focus on the means rather than the actual content of the trade seems the mark of what LiPuma and Lee (2004: 153) call ‘[a] defining feature of contemporary circulation’: namely, ‘that it has become its own objective, its institutions and mechanisms seemingly independent of, and unconcerned with, the persons and nations affected by it’ (see also e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000).

No doubt, capitalism has always been characterized by justificatory mechanisms (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) for disassociating businessmen from those influenced by their decisions. What does seem unique in the recent history of capitalism, however, is that the unprecedented speed of financial transactions, their sheer volume, and the level of abstraction of the vehicles of calculation have apparently grown to such an extent as to almost completely hide from view the actual fates of those who are influenced by the endless flow of the numbers. Arrangements such as those that allow traders to buy and sell contracts without owning them seem to have a similar effect. ‘Traders joke about the attenuated connection between speculators and the underlying commodities they trade,’ says Zaloom (2004: 370) in her study of futures markets, indicating the even looser connection between speculators and those whom the contracts refer to, relate to, or affect.

The existing literature has assembled examples of these dissociations. For example, various researchers (Beunza and Stark, 2004: 376; Ho, 2009; see also Davis, 2009) have argued that as corporations are perceived in abstract form as stock prices or ‘shareholder values’, or as a part of certain indexes and so forth, financial actors lose any sense of moral or social responsibility for the lives of the employees whose workplaces are frequently restructured as a means of boosting these stock prices in an insatiable stock market. Despite a few activist shareholder movements:

…[m]ost shareholders are so thoroughly alienated from their investments that an awareness of these contradictions [of corporate discourse] never arises, even when the companies invested in are behind the tar balls that wash up on our beaches, closures of local factories, slack federal regulations and enforcement, and media accounts of human rights abuses. (Welker and Wood, 2011: S66)

Similarly, in derivatives markets, those who measure, manage, and manipulate risk reassemble it in detachment from the social contexts in which it is immersed, abstracting it from the intertwined social, economic, and political circumstances that gave rise to it and that it directly influences (LiPuma and Lee, 2004: esp. 121, 151). Not only can the risk of disaster become profitable, but profit seekers can bring disaster down on the heads of those whom abstract definitions of risk relate to; for example those whose national currency is the underlying asset of a derivative (LiPuma and Lee, 2004). In a system built on the transmission and dispersion of risks from one place and time to another (see Pryke and Allen, 2000), financial actors buy and sell these risks as if they are trading mathematical facts rather than the social and economic fates of actual living people.

In other words, the social that is being speculated upon – the price-setting processes unfolding among market participants – seems to dissociate financial actors from what the prices are of, for example, the actual corporations whose shares are being traded or the actual citizens whose national currency is the underlying asset of a derivative. To put it bluntly, the financial engagement displaces social awareness, focusing attention on the relationships that, metaphorically speaking, constitute the perceived roulette, while severing any sense of relationship with the people whose lives may be turned around by it. In sum, social dissociation from those affected by financial transactions is the third element of the social perspective that is characteristic of financial risk-taking.

Discussion: From ‘Financial Risk-Taking’ to ‘Sociological Gambling’

Policy professionals, ideologues, and social leaders, to give just a few examples, all think about and often seek to act upon the social. The social is not merely a so-called etic construct, reserved for academic reflection, but also an object of practical orientation and contemplation. This seems an obvious point in the context of discussions about contemporary ‘reflexivity’ within the economic sphere (e.g. Ailon, 2011) and beyond it (e.g. Beck et al., 1994). And yet, on the face of it, there seems to be an inherent difference between, on the one hand, the practical and epistemological vantage points of socially oriented groups that seek in one way or other to shape the social and, on the other hand, the vantage point of those who routinely speculate on observed social processes as a means of making money.

This review has sought to characterize this latter vantage point. Existing research findings, I argued, indicate that a distinct orientation to the ‘social’ takes root as financial actors make social sense of price shifts through ‘reflexive social distancing’; as they jointly enact and sustain a ‘socially forgetful’ sense of financial indeterminism that feeds upon the same persistent sense of analogy to gambling that is also discursively, epistemologically, and structurally denied; and as the actors become ‘socially dissociated’ from those who are affected by the growing volume and speed of the technologically mediated transactions. On the whole, then, financial markets seem to involve a discontinuous and somewhat paradoxical sociological awareness. This sociological awareness entails being socially ‘smart’ as well as socially forgetful. It recognizes social causes and also insists on a force of indeterminism that mathematically dissolves social causes, responsibility, and association. It allows a person in one place in the world to place a bet on the disaster of someone somewhere else, and thus marks a type of connectivity that is as much binding as it is estranging: a ‘social’ that is in many ways empty of ‘sociality’.

Once financial engagements are examined from the angle of their social perspective, ‘social forgetting’ is reversed. It becomes clear that financialization does not represent a heightened preoccupation with the future per se: what it represents is a heightened preoccupation with the future shape of social agreements on or enactments of value. It rests on an infatuation not merely with risks, but with the risks of price-setting swings in public beliefs, sentiments, or ‘moods’. It is not merely a game of chance, but one that focuses on collective emotions and the decisively social processes that construct and sustain them in the financial world (see Pixley, 2004; Zaloom, 2009). Furthermore, once ‘social forgetting’ is thus reversed, so is the professionalization project that historically sought to distinguish finance from gambling by redefining financial chance in mathematical terms (de Goede, 2005). Financial speculation re-emerges as an infatuation with social chance and uncertainty: with the future outcomes of price-setting processes that are acknowledged as sociologically determined. Hence, a ‘sociological gamble’.

As far as implications for future research are concerned, the most critical point is that it is impossible to separate financial engagements from the social awareness they entail. The fact that, as shown, so many findings relating to the latter have accumulated in studies focusing on the former demonstrates this point quite poignantly. Yet in order to further our understanding of financialization, it seems necessary to focus much more direct attention on this question. Exploring the paradoxical elements of the financial social perspective and the interrelations between these elements could, for example, shed new light on theoretical questions relating to the events and crises that are occasioned by contemporary markets. Moreover, attention to these issues seems of critical value to topics such as the social construction of market morality (Fourcade and Healy, 2007) and market emotionality (e.g. Pixley, 2004), both of which have attracted attention in economic sociology. The discontinuous and paradoxical social awareness of financial actors seems the logical starting point for any discussion on these types of social phenomena within the market.

Thus, while much distance has already been covered, the accumulated findings open up many questions for further analysis and theoretical reflection. Once we realize the importance of sociology – broadly conceived – in financial market undertakings, an entire array of new questions seem to present themselves: for example, what types of ‘para-ethnographic’ (Holmes and Marcus, 2006) practices and viewpoints are there? How are the tensions between the social reflexivity inherent in financial causal schemes and the social forgetting inherent in financial stochastic models contained, and when and how are they exacerbated? What are the mechanisms that sustain dissociation in the context of enhanced connectivity?

Moreover, the theoretical implications of the notion of a financialized social perspective concern not only the study of financial markets, but also the study of society writ large. As Collins and Makowsky (1972: 2–5) imply, the foundations of sociological thinking concern the ‘mystery’ of the content and threshold of our social awareness. Researchers have noted the fact that financialization entails a significant and broad ‘shift in worldviews in which everything is viewed through the prism of investment … [and] more and more things are regarded as capital assets whose fiscal benefits can be reaped by savvy investors’ (Davis, 2010: 79, original emphasis). As financialization spreads and deepens, a distinct social prism apparently takes root along with it. Given the dominance of financial markets, the social perspective they breed has a broad sociological significance.

Yet, as argued, the financial social perspective is discontinuous and to a large extent paradoxical. Accordingly, its broad implications are hardly straightforward. The transition from the Durkheimian ‘social facts’ of prices to sociological gambling on prices has entailed a social perspective that forgets that which it also reflexively discovers, or that connects that which it also dissociates itself from. Technology, this review indicates, plays a central role in enabling such a paradoxical social perspective. The proposition that the heightened speed of financial transactions, their constantly growing volume, and their level of abstraction efficiently block from view their moral and social effects suggests that the same technological means that enhance financial connectivity also enhance ‘social forgetting’ and dissociation. This apparent link between the elements of the financial social perspective and financial technology seems to warrant further research, and, moreover, to touch upon much broader aspects of global, networked society. Indeed, the question of how the financially implicated reflexive distancing, forgetful indeterminism, and dissociative connectivities play themselves out in other spheres of life begs further research, as does the question of the implications of a ‘social’ empty of ‘sociality’ for relationships, solidarity, and political culture. I hope this review is a first step in that direction.