Bankwirtschaftliches Wissen und die Fabrikation von Märkten. Eine Fallrekonstruktion am Beispiel des polnischen Bankensektors

Abstract

The paper analyses the fabrication of creditworthiness of enterprises within the context of the introduction of Western banking instruments into the Polish banking industry. By introducing those instruments a big international bank group intends to restructure the interim financing of car dealers in Poland. On a theoretical level the paper critically reviews the perspectives of systems theory and network approaches. It argues against the system-theoretical reduction of banking processes to the binary scheme of payment/non-payment and against the abstraction from knowledge processes undertaken by network analysis. On the basis of ethnographic data the paper unfolds a sociology of knowledge perspective on banking practices with reference to the Social Studies of Finance. It shows that the banking business is constituted by practices and their media of written documentation, calculation and negotiation. The paper analyses the role of the legal framework of the state vehicle registry, the rearrangement of the actors and the financing program, the controversial negotiations within the bank group and the resistance of the local actors.