Narrative Dynamics of Legitimacy in Financial Markets

Abstract

This article presents a narrative analysis approach to understanding the dynamics of legitimisation in financial markets and applies this to an emerging organized equity market, the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE). I argue that financial markets as realms of meaning and practice are prone to be structurally incoherent. The incoherence stems from the positionality of market actors. By positionality, I refer to the actors’ position in the division of labour in market organisations and to the investors’ place in market-specific investor classifications. The article demonstrates an example of this structural incoherence in the case of the ISE by looking at legitimisation activities of brokerage houses, the media and the regulators.