Economic Sociology of Financial Markets

Economic sociology of financial markets examines how social structures, cultural practices and institutional arrangements shape the functioning and evolution of capital markets. It emphasises the embeddedness of economic action in networks of trust, authority and negotiation, moving beyond models of atomised, rational actors. Central concerns include the performativity of financial models and devices in constructing market realities, the politics of valuation practices, and the material infrastructures that underpin trading, clearing and settlement. Research highlights how innovations—from high-frequency algorithms to exchange-traded funds—reconfigure risk assessment, liquidity provision and power relations among intermediaries. By treating markets as socio-technical assemblages, this perspective reveals how regulatory regimes, professional communities and technological artefacts co-produce market stability and transformation, with profound implications for systemic risk, inequality and global financial governance.

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Economic Sociology of Financial Markets publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in economic sociology of financial markets across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Embeddedness: The degree to which economic activity is influenced by social relations and networks.

Algorithmic trading: The execution of financial transactions using automated, speed-driven algorithms in response to market conditions.

Uncertainty absorption: The process by which predictive models transform market unpredictability into quantifiable risk measures.

Financial infrastructure: The institutional and technological systems—such as exchanges, clearing houses and data networks—that enable market transactions.

Valuation: The collective social and technical processes through which prices and asset values are determined.

References

1. From performativity to political economy: index investing, ETFs and asset manager capitalism. New Political Economy (2015).
2. The Power of Market Intermediaries: From Information to Valuation Processes. Valuation Studies (2013).
3. ‘Making’, ‘taking’ and the material political economy of algorithmic trading. Economy and Society (2018).
4. From National Marketplaces to Global Providers of Financial Infrastructures: Exchanges, Infrastructures and Structural Power in Global Finance. New Political Economy (2020).
5. The absorption and multiplication of uncertainty in machine‐learning‐driven finance. British Journal of Sociology (2021).