Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies (review)

As part of the highly successful Inside Technology series edited by Wiebe Bijker, Bernie Carlson, and Trevor Pinch, this innovative volume applies the analytic tools of STS and economic sociology to highlight the materiality of modern finance, hoping to create a bridge between the study of technology and economy. The volume is organized into four overlapping sections: (1) Economy, Materiality, Power; (2) Infrastructure; (3) Technology and the Material Arrangements of the Market; (4) Technology, Economy, Use.

The introduction provides a useful discussion of the current state of economic theory, deconstructing the black box that encases both materiality and sociality. But because of its focus on actor networks, "performativ-ity," human and non-human relationships, situated action, and especially materiality, STS research understands the entanglement of people and objects and can help economists appreciate how "assemblages of humans and non-humans work together in the choreography of any modern economy" (p. 11). Coeditor Richard Swedberg's historical chapter then explains how an explicit concern with the materiality of household economics, begun in ancient Greece, gave way to increasingly abstract principles of markets and "forces of production" with the writings of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. By the early twentieth century, only women in departments of home economics were making a material science of the home, and by the mid-twentieth century even feminists embraced the hegemony of economic abstraction. Importantly, this is the only chapter of Living in a Material World to mention gender, while race is entirely absent—a glaring problem if STS is to shake up contemporary economic theory.

Two studies explore e-commerce: Christian Licoppe compares the sociotechnology and materiality of the online shopping experience with brick-and-mortar shopping, while Shay David and Pinch explore the "reputation economy" and technological affordances of online-user reviews of books and CDs. The more theoretical chapters underwhelmed me, including those concerning the sociotechnical agency of Homo economicus (Michel Callon); the 1994 FCC communications auction (Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah); the technology transfer troubles when the Indiana University Business School implemented People Soft (Nicholas Rowland and Thomas Gieryn); the infrastructure of patent law protecting academic inventions (Elizabeth Berman); and the "ethnoaccountancy" of financial reporting (David Hatherly, David Leung, Donald MacKenzie).

Four other case studies, however, deserve special mention and are worth the price of the book. Karin Knorr Cetina and Barbara Grimpe analyze two modern financial technologies for managing the economics of globalization. FOREX (used in foreign exchange markets) and DMFAS (a debt-management surveillance system used by the UN and World Bank) are "scoping" technologies displaying vast amounts of visual data on as many as five computer screens simultaneously. As "federations of terminals" on the trading floor they deliver the transglobal lifeworld that mediates what the analyst sees and does with their data. Alex Preda takes us back to the beginnings of streaming, real-time data to follow the materiality of the stock ticker, an "authoritative technology" creating an entirely new rhythm for modern finance on the New York Stock Exchange. Besides providing increasingly detailed financial data in real time (for the first time), the stock ticker led to organizational changes in both brokerage houses and on the trading floor and created entirely new technical competencies (stock analysts).

Daniel Beunza and David Stark provide a riveting account of the built environment, the social proxemics, and the ecology of an arbitrage room in a major international investment bank. The web of entanglements by which human and non-human actors create virtual market realities includes the interconnectivity of computers, mathematical formulae, automated trading "robots," and the physical arrangement of desks as well as distributed cognition and the heterogeneous sociality of arbitrage teams in carefully arranged communities of practice. Fabian Muniesa takes the materiality of the trading room one step further, focusing on the telephone on the trader's desk. In three different (French) trading environments he demonstrates that in spite of...