Reconceiving Financial Markets—From the Economic to the Social

Abstract

The article develops a social conception of financial markets, and draws out some of the implications of that conception for financial regulators. Drawing on bodies of institutionalist theories, social network theories, and the sociology of science and technology, including technical systems, I suggest that we can develop a far more enriched conception of markets than that of the still relatively sparse neoclassical economic model of markets, even as modifi ed by behavioural economics. The move to this social conception of markets provides an alternative cognitive framework for how regulators understand the behaviour of actors within markets, the function of markets, their structure and organisation, the role of calculative devices in price formation and governance processes, the power relations and interconnections between actors within markets, the role of trust and confi dence in markets, the relevance of internal organisational dynamics to understanding behaviour of organisations within markets, and the role that regulators and supervisors themselves have in constituting markets and shaping decisions that market actors make.