10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17054




Only two decades ago, finance was mainly the province of economics, a territory into which only few outsiders wandered. Nowadays, finance has be- come a central topic and various social science and humanities disciplines, have made inroads into this territory. Should the social sciences (and STS in particular) just analyse finance, or should they mainly criticize it, or maybe even provide what some have called an alternative narrative to capitalist finance?
Stemming from an ironic and innovative overview of social studies of finance (SSF), the paper presents the core characteristics of such a perspective, taking in- to account also the main critique that SSF attracted. The contribution concentrates then on the three issues where STS investigations of finance promise good yields: (1) agency and robots; (2) epistemic cultures; (3) expertise.




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Alex Preda
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
agency and robots
Pandora’s Box: Opening Up Finance to STS Investigations
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2013-01-06
2023-05-28
2013-01-06
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TS
Alex Preda
2012
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17054
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2038-3460
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agency and robots
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Pandora’s Box: Opening Up Finance to STS Investigations
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17054/15942
3
                                                                                  Lecture
Pandora’s Box: Opening Up Finance to STS
Investigations1


Alex Preda



       Abstract. Only two decades ago, finance was mainly the province of economics,
       a territory into which only few outsiders wandered. Nowadays, finance has be-
       come a central topic and various social science and humanities disciplines, have
       made inroads into this territory. Should the social sciences (and STS in particular)
       just analyse finance, or should they mainly criticize it, or maybe even provide
       what some have called an alternative narrative to capitalist finance?
       Stemming from an ironic and innovative overview of social studies of finance
       (SSF), the paper presents the core characteristics of such a perspective, taking in-
       to account also the main critique that SSF attracted. The contribution concen-
       trates then on the three issues where STS investigations of finance promise good
       yields: (1) agency and robots; (2) epistemic cultures; (3) expertise.

       Keywords social studies of finance; financial crisis; epistemic cultures; expertise;
       agency and robots.




    Only two decades ago, finance was mainly the province of economics, a territo-
ry into which only few outsiders wandered (but see Adler and Adler 1984; Baker
1984; Abolafia 1996). STS scholars didn’t mingle much with the finance crowd.
Nowadays the situation is significantly different. Various social science and hu-
manities disciplines, not least among them science and technology studies, have
made inroads into this territory.
    Research projects have been completed, and PhD dissertations have been
brought to fruition. Books and scholarly articles have been published, and some
have won prizes. It is perhaps time to take a step back and assess the situation,
perhaps even more so since the expectations about how STS should approach fi-
nance have been somewhat complex.


1
 This article is an edited version of the lecture given at the concluding session of the 4th STS Ita-
lia Conference "Emerging Technologies, Social Worlds" (Rovigo, 2012, June 21-23).



TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Volume 3 (2) pp. 23-35 - ISSN 2038-3460
http://www.tecnoscienza.net                       © 2012 TECNOSCIENZA
24   PREDA



         Should the social sciences (and STS in particular) just analyse finance, or should
     they mainly criticize it, or maybe even provide what some have called an alternative
     narrative to capitalist finance? And if yes, how could this narrative look like? It
     seems that finance as an object of investigation has morphed into a veritable Pan-
     dora’s Box, creating more discord than unity.
         Sometimes concerns have been voiced at conferences, in book reviews and in
     more or less polemical articles, that STS is too technical and not critical enough
     with respect to finance. Sometimes, and especially in these times of crisis, it has
     been argued that social studies of finance (SSF) – the offspring of STS – do not of-
     fer an alternative critical project, that they do not provide a much needed broader
     narrative of financial capitalism, focused as they are on small technical details.
     Some have also voiced the concerns that SSF strayed away from the parent disci-
     pline, STS. Akin to a teenager acting against the will of the parents, SSF have
     eloped to Vegas together with finance, whereas they should have remained within
     the solid walls of the parental home.
         All these debates and criticism makes it perhaps even more necessary to take a
     look back at the journey undertaken by SSF scholars and scholarship over the past
     fifteen years or so and review the projects lying ahead. In any enterprise of this
     sort, one which wants to be both retrospective and prospective, a good metaphor
     helps. The one I used above – elopement - does not work so well, unfortunately:
     the road taken by SSF is no journey to Vegas. I might need here to look for a dif-
     ferent metaphor encompassing the notion of journey as well as that of adventure, a
     metaphor which contains the prospect of future, hopefully productive instalments.
         As far as I can see or remember, SSF didn’t start as a thoroughly organized and
     programmatic project, but rather with a more or less ragtag group of PhD students
     who, together with their then supervisors, were embarking on uncertain enterpris-
     es. While some tongue in cheek attempts at formulating a program have been
     made at some point (e.g., Preda 2000), these have remained individual statements
     rather than being embraced at community level.
                                                             TECNOSCIENZA – 3(2)       25



   Many of those who embarked on this enterprise were trained as STS practition-
ers, coming either from a tradition of historical studies or from an ethnographic
one - and indeed, many of the first studies were ethnographic or historical (includ-
ing here contemporary history), as they continue to be today. SSF scholars had to
spruce up their knowledge of finance by a combination of individual study and
ethnographic work - witness here the many internships providing the institutional
format for participant observations.




   What were then and still are now the stakes in this enterprise? Why leave the
safe STS home for an adventure into the unexplored finance? The latter has prov-
en to be a turbulent domain; during its relatively short existence, SSF has wit-
nessed several major crises, and in all probability this will not be the end of it.
26   PREDA



         If we were to apply here the old STS dictum about opening black boxes, what
     is at stake in attempting to open the black box of finance? And, to recycle the met-
     aphor a little, what if this black box is Pandora’s Box? Since SSF have attracted
     enough criticism for not being critical and combative enough, this jump across
     metaphors may be less far fetched than some may think.




        As we are seeing more and more claims that the black box of finance has finally
     been opened, the curiosity is legitimate. What is inside? A code? A formula? What
     else? And if we know what is inside, will we be able to concoct an antidote?
        True, in good academic fashion there have been debates as well (mostly at aca-
     demic conferences). Some have said that the true black box hasn’t been discov-
     ered. Some others have said that it is all about storytelling, about culture, or about
     ethics, or about politics… might it be that everybody is looking for a different
     black box? Nevertheless, we need to ask, what does SSF think that is hidden in the
     black box of finance, and what do they think is the key to opening the box?
        We have then to do with two distinct questions, but which are linked to each
     other. What SSF think that it is in the box is not independent of what SSF think is
     the key to the box.
        What is the key to the box? Until now, the key has been mainly seen as social
     histories of communication technologies and of mathematical models of prices.
     Why mathematical models? Because the starting point has been provided by the
     empire of financial economics itself, namely by the quest to forecast prices of fi-
     nancial securities (e.g., Mehrling 2005; Bernstein 1998). In practice, these forecasts
     are nothing else but trading in financial derivatives—the prices of derivative in-
     struments are public forecasts of the underlying instruments. (Public in the sense
                                                             TECNOSCIENZA – 3(2)       27



of the market public). Forecasts are made with the help of forecasting models,
which in their turn are formulae for calculating the prices of derivative instru-
ments.
   What SSF did in this respect was to take over the key provided by financial
economics and tweak it. While financial economics sees such pricing models as a
benchmark mirroring the rational behavior of market participants, SSF did mostly
historical studies of pricing models, seeing them as social instruments by means of
which participants reach some form of consensus (e.g., MacKenzie and Millo 2003;
MacKenzie 2006). If everybody thinks this is the key to the box, then they will also
think they have opened it. This works well provided that nobody takes a closer
look and then it’s too late. Consensus, however, does not mean mere superficial
agreement or “pretending to agree”. Consensus is reached in a long and complex
process involving procedural and communicational hurdles, a process which is not
devoid of struggles and controversies, as we know only too well from the history of
science.
   Of course, the notion of consensus makes more sense if one associates it with
the notion of dissent. That is, there will always be some market participants who
do not buy into the mainstream models of financial economics, who either ignore
them or develop their own approaches. This is best illustrated by some hedge
funds making a killing in the present crisis by betting against the consensus.




    SSF, with its main emphasis on how social consensus around pricing models
developed historically, has not looked at dissent with the same intensity—and
maybe the time has arrived to do it. But of course, we can recognize in the empha-
sis on how consensus is achieved a classic theme from the Kuhnian sociology of
28   PREDA



     science which has been translated first into STS and then applied to financial mar-
     kets. At the same time, STS has a rich history of investigating scientific controver-
     sies (e.g., Latour 1988; Collins 2004), a history which can be productively used in
     investigating outliers, non-conformists, or contrarians in finance. We should not
     forget that in finance, for every party there is a counterparty as well.
         Oftentimes social studies of finance have been fascinated by the “big guys”—be
     they big investment banks, big stock exchanges, big firms—in short, big money.
     Big money has been seen as where the action is, echoing one more time the stand-
     ard view of financial economics. The advantage of this approach is that it poten-
     tially opens a portal onto the technologically multi-layered world of electronic fi-
     nance where, perhaps more than in other domains, the dictum “time is money”
     becomes true. The drawbacks consist in difficulty of access to the field, of pene-
     trating the field in depth, but also sometimes in ignoring the technological com-
     plexity, diversity and dynamism of the field we call finance.
         It will boost SSF to move from historical studies of mathematical model devel-
     opment—extremely valuable, but not enough—to ethnographic studies of their
     production and use (e.g., Yonay and Breslau 2006; Lepinay 2011; Lepinay and
     Callon 2011). If you want, social studies of finance should follow here the histori-
     cal lead of laboratory studies from thirty years ago and go into the laboratories
     where models are produced.
         True, we have a number of ethnographic studies of trading rooms. Yet, many of
     them, including ones recently published, have been actually conducted ten or
     twelve years ago, more often than not as PhD work, which then—
     understandably—had to wait a while to be processed in book form.




        Having said that, I shall move into the second domain of investigation, namely
     studies of communication technologies. This branch of SSF has taken a different
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 3(2)        29



direction from the historical studies of financial price models, in a double sense,
both theoretical and methodological. Theoretically, studies of communication
technologies in finance—be they trading screens, telephones, or tickers—have not
sought to replicate themes from financial economics, but have been concerned
with observation as a fundamental cognitive process, and with how observation is
socially produced (e.g., Muniesa 2008; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002; Wansleb-
en 2011; Zaloom 2006). If you want, this is another way of questioning rationality
assumptions in financial markets (Knorr Cetina and Preda 2007), which take ob-
servation as an individualized and atomized, unproblematic activity.
    Questioning price observation as a basic cognitive activity in finance has also
opened the door onto investigations of the specific formats of social behavior in
markets. In STS, observation has been long associated with laboratory- or big en-
gine-specific cooperations (e.g., Collins 2004). In finance, we have to do not only
with cooperation, but with combinations of cooperation and competition, and
with forms of strategic behavior where presentation is dissociated from intention.
At the very least, SSF can investigate deeper in this direction and pay more atten-
tion to the complexity of cognitive processes related to strategic behavior, which
can include, but is not reduced to cooperation.
    It is not very difficult to recognize the anthropological and phenomenological
roots of this approach, going back to the work of Alfred Schutz (Schutz and
Luckmann 1972) and Erving Goffman (1970) among others. Methodologically
speaking, investigations of communication technologies in finance have been more
balanced between historical and ethnographic approaches, and we know a deal
more about the uses of contemporary technologies than we do about the uses of
models.
    Yet, even this branch of SSF could have paid more attention to the complexity,
dynamism and diversity of contemporary finance, where changes take place now a
greater speed than that of writing academic articles.
    Going back to the introductory metaphor, we can see that various groups in-
volved in this enterprise have actually taken different approaches about how to
open the box and about what is inside.
    Have they opened it? Do we know what makes finance so agitated? Can SSF
offer solutions for calming it?
    More recently, SSF research has suggested that the origins of the financial crisis
are to be found in models, which are used not for their accuracy, but in order to
establish valuation consensus among market actors, leading to the creation and
trading of deficient financial instruments, with disastrous consequences (MacKen-
zie 2011).
    Critics of SSF have countered that ethical issues are ignored here, that the key
to understanding the crisis lies not in pricing models but in deviant subcultures
which foster greed and risk taking, and which should be curtailed by tougher reg-
ulations. All we need here is more patrol boats, and the hurricanes will recede.
What these critics curiously do not see is the argument formulated by the other
branch of SSF, namely that communication devices bring about global observation
and coordination mechanisms which are very difficult, if not impossible to regulate
30   PREDA



     at local or national level. What critics have also failed to grasp is the extent to
     which dedicated communication technologies continue to spread and evolve glob-
     ally, establishing new centers of finance partly in response to local regulatory
     measures. Finance is indeed about to become a mechanism of global coordination,
     with significant consequences—among others, that apparently minor events in one
     part of the system can trigger system-wide snowballing reactions. This was not the
     case ten to fifteen years ago, when the various Asian, Mexican, Argentinian, or
     Russian crises were more or less contained at a regional level.
         It is precisely the fact that global finance is grafted upon global, dedicated
     technological systems (which are still very little understood), together with the
     widespread use of analytical technologies of varying complexity which should
     make us push the investigation more and more into these systems rather than re-
     sort to calls for more patrol boats.
         Coming back one more time to our main topic: what else should we expect
     from Pandora’s Box? Well, the really interesting things are still to come…
         Here are just three issues where STS investigations of finance promise good
     yields: (1) agency and robots; (2) epistemic cultures; (3) expertise. I shall touch
     very briefly upon each of them.




        Agency has figured prominently on the STS agenda during the past twenty five
     years, and a great deal of papers have dealt with how technologies force human
     agents to take unforeseen paths of action, or with postsocial sociality (e.g., Knorr
     Cetina 1997). What we have witnessed in finance during the past five years or so
     has been the rise of algorithms, robots replacing humans in trading. In some mar-
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 3(2)       31



kets, more than half of the overall trading is now done by algorithms, and this pro-
portion is bound to increase. What is more, regulators have begun using robots for
market surveillance. The flash crash of May 2010 has been linked to algorithm
trading, and it is worth remembering here that previous crashes (October 1987)
have been linked to program trading as well. The trend towards increased market
automation goes hand in hand with an increased technologization, as illustrated
not only by the increased speed of transaction, by deepening technological linkages
among exchanges, but also by the increased presence of science professionals in
finance. We should keep in mind here that finance firms recruit heavily among sci-
ence and engineering graduates.
    Are we looking now at a world where trading will be done exclusively by ro-
bots? And what place do humans have in this world? First, there is the issue of
human-robot interaction on trading screens. In electronic markets, human traders
and robots can be indeed pitched against each other. We have to do with a world
where human agency is confronted on the trading screen with active non-human
agencies, agencies which are different from the more or less passive resistance of
the scallops from twenty five years ago (e.g., Callon 1986). This raises a whole se-
ries of interesting issues for STS research: how do I recognize non-human agency
in action? Can human agency be recognized as such by non-humans, and to what
consequences? What are the consequences for the notion of strategic action?
    Imagine here football teams combining human and non-human players, and
confronting each other. But they do not know from the start who is human and
who is non-human on the other team, and they can find this out only during the
game. The challenge for STS research is to investigate how various types of agen-
cies are configured as accountable and recognizable as such in action. Another
challenge is to investigate how robotic agencies are produced and put to use col-
laboratively by various groups in finance.
    Thirteen years ago, the notion of epistemic cultures was introduced to denote
the variety of ways in which scientific disciplines produce knowledge (e.g., Knorr
Cetina 1999). Recently, SSF studies have begun turning away from the concept of
performativity (e.g., Callon 1998; MacKenzie et al. 2006) to that of epistemic cul-
ture, in an effort to capture the diversity of the ways in which knowledge is pro-
duced and put to use. And by knowledge, I do not mean here any kind of financial
knowledge, but most and foremost theoretically grounded knowledge claiming
predictive power with respect to the prices of financial instruments. It appears that
in this respect finance is way more diverse and rich than the initial criticism of a
dominant model of rationality would have us believe. It also appears that at least
for some types of transactions such a model was never dominant, and that a rich
variety of academically sanctioned theories, and well as non-sanctioned ones, co-
exist side by side, and very often encounter each other in action.
    We need to map therefore the variety of knowledge forms encountered in fi-
nance, in relationship to each other, together with the variety of groups producing
and reproducing them. We need to map their boundaries, as well as their clashes.
In the initial setting where the concept of epistemic cultures was introduced, they
were kept apart by disciplinary boundaries, namely by the fact that these cultures
32   PREDA



     had developed and evolved within distinct scientific disciplines. In finance, things
     are more complicated. While in part epistemic cultures have evolved within differ-
     ent markets—and we could talk here about a foreign exchange culture as different
     from a derivatives culture, they can also overlap organizationally, or develop more
     tense relationships.




         Epistemic cultures can stretch over a wide variety of settings, from the academic
     settings of mathematical finance down to practitioners’ elaboration of mundane
     theories, tools and models of finance. Not all of them have pricing models of the
     core. Some center on tools with the help of which price movements can be moni-
     tored and explained. This would also explain why we do not encounter the same
     intensity of use of the same pricing models everywhere. The notion of performa-
     tivity, launched about fifteen years ago, implied (without stating it as such) that
     some model becomes dominant if not the standard. (And performativity can be
     seen as an extension of the notion of standardization). Meanwhile, the picture has
     become more complicated. We know that competing models can be developed, or
     that models can be ignored by practitioners.
         It would be mistaken to reduce the epistemic cultures of finance to large organ-
     izations, based solely on the grounds that they have the most money and therefore
     the most influence. In order to get a better picture—one which should help under-
     stand why finance is so dominant in contemporary life—we need to pay attention
     to cultures of finance at various levels of professionalization and expertise, and see
     how they correlate with each other. We need to include here institutional formats
     addressing the public, such as brokerage houses, but also regulatory agencies and
     central banking.
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 3(2)       33



    Expertise has been another major STS topic over the past ten years or so (Col-
lins and Evans 2002). In relationship to finance, expertise can be understood at
least as being about how a specific domain of knowledge is locked in by specific
groups which set up mechanisms for controlling access but also instituting a specif-
ic form of knowledge about finance as the legitimate one, while other formats re-
tain a marginal position. This would also mean examining the social mechanisms
through which this form of expertise is reproduced in institutional settings, and
disseminated at various levels. It would also mean looking at how variations are
produced within this form itself—that is, how different groups produce alternative
and competing theories, models, and explanations, all within the dominant format
of expertise. I am thinking here for instance of how different quant groups pro-
duce competing theories and explanations, publish in journals, meet at conferences
etc., while remaining all within the same domain of expertise.




   Lock ins of this kind usually go hand in hand with reproducing a domain of ex-
pertise like finance at different levels and across various institutions, so that we
now have for instance TV experts on finance, but also government experts, aca-
demic experts, bank analysts, and so on. The ongoing crisis has brought afore a
great deal of experts and expertise, and there goes not a single day without various
experts and analysts commenting the ongoing events in the media. This raises at
least a few questions in need of closer examination: first, is the public understand-
ing of finance enhanced by this permanent display of expertise in the media? Se-
cond, and this is perhaps the question to begin with, what is the public under-
standing of finance? To what extent and how do publics understand financial the-
ories and finance? Third, what is the link between this permanent display of exper-
34   PREDA



     tise and the legitimacy of finance? Do we encounter here contestations or alterna-
     tive forms of expertise?
         Where is the expertise on finance situated by rapport with the social sciences,
     but also with the natural sciences? We have to keep in mind here that for quite a
     while finance was not seen as part of economics and the topic was not dealt with
     very much within economics departments (e.g., Jovanovic 2012). Even today, the
     situation is not very clear. While financial economics is now a firmly entrenched
     feature of business schools, institutionally it is often associated with accounting ra-
     ther than with economics. Its disciplinary status is not necessarily very clear, espe-
     cially if we think of the complexity of the discipline itself. We also need to keep in
     mind that disciplinary status can shift according to the background of practition-
     ers, and more and more of the latter have a background in the natural sciences. Is
     finance then a form of social science expertise, or of natural science expertise, or
     are we looking here at a hybrid form, which is not very easy to classify?
         At this point, after having tried to identify a few ways in which finance can be
     made into the object of STS investigations, some may object that all this still does
     not take into account morality, and that it is all about profit making. To which the
     answer should be: haven’t we learned from so many STS studies, and from the
     classics of sociology as well (and I am thinking Durkheim and Weber here), that
     morality cannot be separated from how forms of social knowledge are produced
     and from the specific interaction formats corresponding to this production? And
     doesn’t profit making require the ability to extract rent from specific forms of ex-
     pertise? Investigating the morality of markets cannot be logically seen as a project
     alternative to that of investigating financial knowledge and technology, but as
     something intrinsically related to it.
         Some might say that this approach does not answer the general question, “what
     is finance?” Since this very finance seems to bring about crisis after crisis, since it
     seems to be of such importance for the welfare of entire societies, this question
     may seem legitimate, in the hope that an ultimate answer to it will help us find a
     cure for all the economic and social malaise of our times. So, it might be here that
     some will call for SSF to reach deeper into Pandora’s Box, in the hope that some-
     where, at the very bottom, we’ll find the ultimate answer and with it the ultimate
     cure.
         Shall then SSF try and answer such metaphysical questions? Do answers to
     metaphysical questions provide cures? This is doubtful. This is not to say that SSF
     investigations cannot contribute to shaping policy toward finance—they certainly
     can. SSF investigations definitely can contribute to public debates, and to raising
     public awareness as well. But they cannot offer any cure to the general social ma-
     laise caused by a state of crisis which seems to become semi-permanent. It is
     tempting to try and see SSF as a form of cultural therapy, but in the end this would
     hollow out the very enterprise, which has built its name upon rigorous investiga-
     tions.
         Coming back to the above question, what lies then at the very bottom of Pan-
     dora’s Box, underneath all the questions about agency, expertise, and epistemic
     cultures? This reminds me of the question in the title of Niklas Luhmann’s farewell
                                                             TECNOSCIENZA – 3(2)       35



lecture at the University of Bielefeld twenty years ago, “What Is the Case? What
Lies Behind?” (Luhmann and Fuchs 1994). As a curious and newly arrived PhD
student, I went to the packed auditorium to hear this lecture. Luhmann’s answer
was, “nothing at all!”.


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        Alex Preda King’s College London
        School of Social Science & Public Policy, Department of Management
        Franklin-Wilkins Building, 150 Stamford Street
        London, SE1 9NH
        Email: alexandru.preda@kcl.ac.uk
