If capitalism is being increasingly understood as performative and processual, and if these understandings are being folded into capitalism's production of itself, what place does gender have in performing the commercial world? This article argues that the significance of gender as genre or type has been overlooked in the recent literature on the performance of the market or market relations. While the role of economic theories and management practices in making markets has been examined, and the place of women in (...) organizations has been explored, little attention has been paid to how gender as a productive process marks the creation and maintenance of market relations. Using material from a recent ethnographic study of the advertising industry, I examine how advertising practitioners incorporate vitalist understandings of market relations and of knowledge-producing activities into their practices. Framed as `creativity' and `innovation', these discursive practices perform what practitioners understand as a reproductive function in commercial life. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue for the relevance of certain distinctive features of messaging systems, namely those in which data can be sent and received asynchronously, can be sent to multiple simultaneous recipients and is received as a “potentially infinite” flow of unpredictable events. I will describe the social technology of the stock ticker, a telegraphic device introduced at the New York Stock Exchange in the 1860s, with reference to early twentieth century philosophers of synchronous experience, simultaneous sign interpretations, (...) and flows of discrete events. Then, I will show how the ticker’s data flows developed into the 1990s-era technologies of message queues and message brokers, which distinguished themselves through their asynchronous implementation of ticker-like message feeds sent between otherwise incompatible computers and terminals. These latter systems’ characteristic “publish/subscribe” communication pattern was one in which conceptually centralized flows of messages would be “published,” and for which “subscribers” would be spontaneously notified when events of interest occurred. This paradigm—common to the so-called “message-oriented middleware” systems of the late 1990s—would re-emerge in different asynchronous distributed system contexts over the following decades, from “push media” to Twitter to the Internet of Things. (shrink)

The article discusses the use of algorithmic models in finance (algo or high frequency trading). Algo trading is widespread but also somewhat controversial in modern financial markets. It is a form of automated trading technology, which critics claim can, among other things, lead to market manipulation. Drawing on three cases, this article shows that manipulation also can happen in the reverse way, meaning that human traders attempt to make algorithms ‘make mistakes’ by ‘misleading’ them. These attempts to manipulate are very (...) simple and immediately transparent to humans. Nevertheless, financial regulators increasingly penalize such attempts to manipulate algos. The article explains this as an institutionalization of algo trading, a trading practice which is vulnerable enough to need regulatory protection. (shrink)

In a quiet London office, a software designer muses on the algorithms that will make possible the risk flags to be visualized on the screens of border guards from Heathrow to St Pancras International. There is, he says, ‘real time decision making’ – to detain, to deport, to secondarily question or search – but there is also the ‘offline team who run the analytics and work out the best set of rules’. Writing the code that will decide the association rules (...) between items of data, prosaic and mundane – flight route, payment type, passport – the analysts derive a novel preemptive security measure. This paper proposes the analytic of the data derivative – a visualized risk flag or score drawn from an amalgam of disaggregated fragments of data, inferred from across the gaps between data and projected onto an array of uncertain futures. In contrast to disciplinary and enclosed techniques of collecting data to govern population, the data derivative functions via ‘differential curves of normality’, imagining a range of potential futures through the association rule, thus ‘opening up to let things happen’ ( Foucault 2007 ). In some senses akin to the risk orientation of the financial derivative, itself indifferent to actual underlying people, places or events by virtue of modulated norms, the contemporary security derivative is not centred on who we are, nor even on what our data say about us, but on what can be imagined and inferred about who we might be – on our very proclivities and potentialities. (shrink)

In a talk in 2013, Karin Knorr Cetina referred to ‘the interaction order of algorithms’, a phrase that implicitly invokes Erving Goffman's ‘interaction order’. This paper explores the application of the latter notion to the interaction of automated-trading algorithms, viewing algorithms as material entities (programs running on physical machines) and conceiving of the interaction order of algorithms as the ensemble of their effects on each other. The paper identifies the main way in which trading algorithms interact (via electronic ‘order books’, (...) which algorithms both ‘observe’ and populate) and focuses on two particularly Goffmanesque aspects of algorithmic interaction: queuing and ‘spoofing’, or deliberate deception. Following Goffman's injunction not to ignore the influence on interaction of matters external to it, the paper examines some prominent such matters. Empirically, the paper draws on documentary analysis and 338 interviews conducted by the author with high-frequency traders and others involved in automated trading. (shrink)

This article explores how Anglo-American financial firms since the 1980s have operated and acted in an increasingly deregulated, risky, and uncertain arena. I look at these firms and their actions with a particular focus on “temporality” and requisite “emotion-rules,” where variations in emotion-rules correspond with organizational definitions of uncertainty. Firms impose specific emotion-rules, depending on national policies, official duties, and interpretations of each risk. In finance, caveat emptor (i.e., buyer or lender distrust) is an emotion-rule set in screening policies and (...) data collection for credit risks and risks of fraud by personnel, and it gives rise to actual emotions. I argue that three time-orientations are significant in creating emotion-rules. If a past, present, or a long-term future is deployed to construct a future, that creates and frames an institution’s attempts to manage uncertainty. Looking exclusively at Anglo-American corporate finance policies and strategies (often deemed the international “one best way”), six modes of certainty constructions are presented. Each is assessed against the dispositions and emotional strategies required in highly-skilled careers, in specific organizational settings. The relative influence of individual perspectives, institutional rules and general typologies of social action is assessed and found to comprise one past view, three present views, and one future-oriented perspective towards the future. Implications are outlined for emotion-rules relevant to financial careers and office. (shrink)