Speaker:

Karin Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago
George Wells Beadle Chair Distinguished Service Professor 
Ph.D. University of Vienna, Austria
Habilitation. University of Bielefeld, Germany

The World’s Largest Financial Market: Architecture and Sociology
What sort of organizational form is a financial market? And how did these markets fare with globalization, new technologies, and legal and professional transformations? Financial markets have spearheaded some of these changes, and they also profited from them. But some of the oldest of these markets, which don’t use the “piping” of exchanges, also offer something else—illustrations of new mechanisms and weird institutional structures that require some rethinking and complementing of traditional sociological concepts. In the talk, I examine the world’s largest and most liquid market, focusing on major transitions, the media at the market’s center, and the adapted sociology that goes along with these developments.

Karin Knorr Cetina is interested in financial markets, knowledge and information, as well as in globalization, theory and culture. Her current projects include a book on global foreign exchange markets and on post-social knowledge societies. She continues to do research on the information architecture of financial markets, on their "global microstructures" (the global social and cultural form these markets take) and on trader markets in contrast to producer markets. She also studies globalization from a microsociological perspective, using an ethnographic approach, and she continues to be interested in "laboratory studies," the study of science, technology and information at the site of knowledge production - particularly in the life sciences and in particle physics.