From Pipes to Scopes: The Flow Architecture of Financial Markets

Abstract

This article introduces a distinction between two types of markets and market coordination: those based on social networks and those based on a flow architecture. Flow architectures involve potentially global “scopic” reflex systems (GRSs) that project market reality while at the same time carrying it forward and allowing it to flow. The argument is that some financial markets have undergone a transition from a pre-reflexive network market to a reflexively coordinated flow market manifest in the different organization of trading floors, changes in trading patterns and the emergence of a moving market that gets transferred from time-zone to time-zone with the sun. To understand these markets, temporal concepts are needed in addition to the social structural (relational) concepts with which we commonly work. Networks emerge from this analysis as historically specific, relationship-based forms of market coordination which in some markets are in the process of being replaced by more reflexive temporal forms of coordination.