Infrastructure, ontology and meaning: The endogenous development of economic ideas

Abstract

In contrast to work showing exogenous social influences on the production of economic ideas, this article asks how a market’s own infrastructure can endogenously shape practitioners’ economic perspectives. It investigates this question by comparing the evolution of opposed views on speculation across two 19th-century American futures markets. The analysis locates the origins of this divergence in features of the grading, receipting and contracting processes that linked these new derivative markets to underlying agricultural markets. This connective infrastructure both made possible new speculative practices and established market ontologies from which traders theorized the economic significance of those practices. These ontologies served as distinct cores around which incompatible constellations of ideas – including beliefs about price relations between spot and futures markets, the character of the global market and the motives and capabilities of speculators – were elaborated.

When transactions turn awry: Infrastructural ambivalence in financial security

“…In a famous phrase, 'a price is a social thing' (Beunza, Hardie, and MacKenzie, 2006: 721): while financial transactions seem to result in prices with mathematical precision, SSF unpacks the social and institutional conditionalities and prerequisites at work in this only seemingly law-like process. This is also the analytical angle of Pinzur's (2021aPinzur's ( , 2021b research, who uncovers quite dissimilar institutional preconditions and roles for transactions in trading procedures at two different stock exchanges in the US (the Chicago Board of Trade and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange).…”

“…In effect, the Task Force articulates security concerns from the perspective of a neoclassical model of fully integrated markets. As Pinzur's (2016Pinzur's ( , 2021aPinzur's ( , 2021b studies remind us, this model is not only varyingly detached from concrete financial market operations (for instance, it is closer to CBOT's historical reality than to that of NOCE), but also does not necessarily reflect participants' viewpoints (who, in the case of NOCE, crucially assumed market fragmentation, not integration, to be in place). However, the demands that the Brady Report confronts the political system with are informed by the conviction of fully integrated markets.…”

“…Against this traditional critique, it is pointed out that, in addition to payment processing and company capitalization and governance, financial markets perform crucial calculative functions, notably the pricing of risks, which are traded on specific markets, and the commensuration of the capital assets of different classes (Muellerleile, 2018). More generally, recent research proposes to use the notion of infrastructure as a conceptual lens (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn, 2019), for instance, to account for current changes in the international financial economy, such as the role of political institutions in international payment and finance transactions (Krarup, 2019;Brandl and Dieterich, 2021;de Goede and Westermeier, 2022) as well as to explain the emergence of specific market structures and processes (Angeli Aguiton, 2021;Mellet and Beauvisage, 2020;Pinzur, 2016Pinzur, , 2021aPinzur, , 2021b, or the interrelation between traditional financial institutions and new 'decentralized' services such as blockchain-based financial technologies (Rella, 2019;Beaumier and Kalomeni, 2022).…”

“…Importantly, the heterogeneous and contradictory reality of infrastructures can be seen as a platform from which to observe power relations in the financial economy. For instance, David Pinzur argues that financial infrastructures ought to be seen as arenas of power struggles between different constituencies (like exchanges, but also storages, telegraph companies, and courts), and develops a notion of 'infrastructural power' that highlights the working of power through the operation of infrastructures (Pinzur, 2016(Pinzur, , 2021a(Pinzur, , 2021b.…”

Traditional Ngaben or Crematorium Ngaben?

“…A social structure also creates an unbalanced constellation of ideas The social structure describes the relationship between "actors" and various institutions. A social structure also creates an unbalanced constellation of ideas (Pinzur, 2021;Smyth, 2021). In the process of creating social structure, there is an interaction between consumption and money.…”