The Making of Finance
Perspectives from the Social Sciences

Using a variety of theoretical frameworks drawn from the social sciences, the contributions in this edited collection offer a critical perspective on the dominant paradigms used in contemporary financial activities. Through a detailed study of the organisation and functioning of financial intermediaries and institutions, the contributors to this volume analyse ?finance in the making?, by shedding light on the structuring of banking and financial systems, on their capacity to prescribe action and control, on their modes of regulation and, more generally, on the process of financialisation.

Contributions presented in this volume have been written by authors working within the ?social studies of finance? tradition, a research programme that emerged twenty years ago, with the aim of addressing a diversity of financial fieldworks and related theoretical questions. This book, therefore, sheds light on different areas that are representative of contemporary financial realities. Specifically, it first studies the work of financial employees: traders, salespeople, investment managers, financial analysts, investment consultants, etc. but also provides an analysis of a range of financial instruments: financial schemes and contracts, financial derivatives, socially responsible investment funds, as well as market rules and regulations. Finally, it puts into perspective the organisations contributing to this financial reality: those developing and selling financial services (retail banks, brokerage houses, asset management firms, private equity firms, etc.), and also those contributing to the regulation of such activities (banking regulators, financial market authorities, credit rating agencies, the State, to name a few).

Each text can be read without any specific knowledge of finance; the book is thus addressed to anyone willing to better understand the intricacies of contemporary financial realities.

INTRODUCTION

Finance as social science

Isabelle Chambost, Marc Lenglet and Yamina Tadjeddine

PART I

Critical analysis of mainstream financial theory and its uses

1. Financial services – a collection of arrangements

Yamina Tadjeddine

2. Taming the risk borne by financial products

Pierre de Larminat

3. The political and moral imaginaries of financial practices

Horacio Ortiz

4. The role of financial analysts in the social construction of financial value

Isabelle Chambost

5. Public–private partnerships (PPP) between financing requirements and micro-economic governance: complementary scientific and real-world justifications

Géry Deffontaines

6. The risk fluctuation: The consequences of avoiding interest rate risk

Anne EA van der Graaf

7. What makes a price a price? Commensuration work on financial markets

Hélène Rainelli-Weiss and Isabelle Huault

8. The leptokurtic crisis and the discontinuous turn in financial modelling

Christian Walter

9. Beyond performativity: How and why American courts should not have used efficient market hypothesis

Franck Jovanovic

PART II

Structural dynamics in the financial industry

10. Sources of risks in financial innovations: Embedded and additional risks in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)

Mohamed Oubenal and Laurent Deville

11. Junior stock markets and SMEs: An ideal relation? The case of the Alternative Investment Market

Valérie Revest

12. Structures and measures for responsible finance

Elise Penalva-Icher

13. Territories of finance – the Parisian case

Yamina Tadjeddine

14. The workforce and professional training in banks

Marnix Dressen

15. Cooperative banking: Finding a place for the social in finance?

Pascale Moulévrier

16. Relationship banking – an ‘endangered species’? Evidence from Germany

Eileen Keller

17. The future of stock exchanges has a long past: What can we learn from financial history?

Paul Lagneau-Ymonet and Angelo Riva

18. Compliance and the regulation of practices: A two-fold paradox

Marc Lenglet

19. Financial regulation: A question of point of view

Jacques-Olivier Charron

PART III

A new system of accumulation

20. Sociological domestication of a financial product. The case of derivatives

David Martin

21. The work of financialisation

Eve Chiapello

22. Circuits of trust and money: The resilience of the Italian Credito Cooperativo

Valentina Moiso

23. Justification and critique in the credit rating system: Reaffirming the power of agencies

Benjamin Taupin

24. The Function of finance: An ethnographic analysis of competing ideas

Alexandra Ouroussoff

25. At the very heart of financial dominance: The case of LBOs

Isabelle Chambost

26. The internationalisation of the mutual fund sector and the origin of the financialisation: A historical process of production rules

Caroline Granier

27. Conceptualising finance within the capital–labour nexus: Asset management as a new zone of social conflict

Sabine Montagne

28. Democracy and the political representation of investors: On French sovereign debt transactions and elections

Benjamin Lemoine

29. Knitting together finance and our daily lives

Jeanne Lazarus

30. Making sense of the economy: A debt network coordinated by currency

Michel Aglietta

Conclusion: What finance manufactures

Olivier Godechot

Isabelle Chambost is Associate Professor in Management at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France.

Marc Lenglet is Associate Professor in the Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at NEOMA Business School, Rouen, France.

Yamina Tadjeddine is Professor of Economics at the Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France.