Tracing Associations in Global Finance

Abstract

Four decades ago, when financial globalization was attracting widespread attention, the few theoretical frameworks that were available to analyze it were relatively simplistic. Often, it was seen as an unstoppable quasi-natural expression of the expansion of market forces, operating independently of state power, which it was undermining. Today there is a rich variety of frameworks which help us understand the immensely complex entanglements of power, states, markets, and international institutions that constitute and govern global finance, including some insightful uses of actor-network theory (ANT) (for instance, Langley ⇓; Best forthcoming ⇓). In this contribution I highlight a number of unique contributions that ANT makes to our understanding of global finance. Actor-network theory focuses on the importance of micro-level connections among humans and “non-humans” such as other life-forms, technical artifacts, or physical objects. Latour (⇓:5) has advocated studying these types of associations rather than the social: to redefine sociology “not as the ‘science of the social’, but as the tracing of associations .” He argues that the social is too often used as a shorthand that obscures the painstaking and often fragile ways that collectivities are constructed and assembled. The social then can become “invisible, untraceable, ubiquitous, and total … It's only if forces are made of smaller ties, whose resistance can be tested one by one, that you might have a chance to modify a given state of affairs. To put it bluntly: if there is a society, then no politics is possible ” (Latour ⇓:250). ANT's insistence on tracing out associations is a valuable corrective to the common tendency to see global finance as involving large, powerful, unstoppable forces operating independently of humans. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that global finance is heavily dependent on careful, detailed coordination of particular humans and objects, and this …