Global markets are assembled through microsocial patterns of relatedness and coordination

Evidence

One way of expressing the forms currently taken by the inextricable interweaving of the “economic” and the “social” is Knorr Cetina and Bruegger’s notion of “global microstructure.” The financial markets are now global in their reach, but interaction within them still takes the form of “patterns of relatedness and coordination that are … microsocial in character and that assemble and link global domains” (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002a, p. 907). — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1086

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces/draws on Knorr Cetina and Bruegger’s term ‘global microstructure’ — a key concept for the performativity literature.
• XREF: Useful framing that connects to the sociology-of-finance literature (Callon, MacKenzie) where markets are treated as social networks. — connects to: Interbank currency traders form a global social system distinct from local exchange brokerages — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 13; Geographically dispersed but mutually oriented actors form global microstructures that bind markets together. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 18; Microsocial interactions have risen to structural equivalence with macroscopic global phenomena. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 18 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Global impersonal markets rest on personal trust and telephone networks #corroborates (0.85)
• Trader sociality persists inside electronic markets and was ethnographically documented #corroborates (0.82)
• Economic transactions are governed by their embeddedness in social networks #expands (0.78) — TOMASZ OLEJNICZAK, Development of Trust in Low-Trust…, 17