Our task in this paper is to analyze the organization of trading in the era of quantitative finance. To do so, we conduct an ethnography of arbitrage, the trading strategy that best exemplifies finance in the wake of the quantitative revolution. In contrast to value and momentum investing, we...

In this paper we explore the mechanisms that allow securities analysts to value companies in contexts of Knightian uncertainty, that is, in the face of information that is unclear, subject to unforeseeable contingencies or to multiple interpretations. We address this question with a...

In this paper we study the case of a Wall Street investment bank that lost its entire office and trading technology in the terrorist attack of September 11th. The traders survived, but were forced to relocate to a makeshift trading room in New Jersey. During the six months the traders spent...

Our task in this paper is to analyze the organization of trading in the era of quantitative finance. To do so, we conduct an ethnography of arbitrage, the trading strategy that best exemplifies finance in the wake of the quantitative revolution. In contrast to value and momentum investing, we...

What is the organizational basis of responsiveness under conditions of crisis? In this essay we examine a trading room that was damaged in the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. What did the crisis reveal about the social practices and the technological tools of trading? Drawing on...

What is the organizational basis of responsiveness under conditions of crisis? In this essay we examine a trading room that was damaged in the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center (WTC). What did the crisis reveal about the social practices and the technological tools of trading?...

How did companies at the Trade Center respond to the destruction brought about by the attack on September 11th? In this paper we look through the concrete and glass facade of the twin towers into the socio-technical networks of people, machines, and ideas that constituted the trading rooms. We...

Entrepreneurial groups face a twinned challenge: recognizing new ideas and implementing them. Recent research suggests that connectivity reaching outside the group channels new ideas, while closure makes it possible to act on them. By contrast, we argue that entrepreneurship is not about...

This essay contributes to observation theory by commenting on Esposito’s paper, «Economic circularities and second-order observation: the reality of ratings». The key question of that paper is summarized as: How does one calculate in the Keynesian third degree (attempting to ascertain what...

Research on interactions between business and politics indicates that business ties are a predictor of political behavior. This paper redirects attention from the question of how business ties have an impact on politics to the question of how political ties have an impact on business....