Investment is no longer a matter of individual savers directly choosing which shares or bonds to buy. Rather, most of their money flows through a 'chain': an often extended sequence of intermediaries. What goes on in that chain is of huge importance: The world's investment managers, who are now almost as well paid as top bankers, control assets equivalent in value to around a year of total global economic output. In Chains of Finance, five social scientists discuss the ways in which the intermediaries in the chain influence each other, channel the flows of savers' money, enhance investment decisions, and form audiences for each other's performances of financially competent selves. The central argument of the book is that investment management is fashioned profoundly by the opportunities and constraints this chain creates. Whether chains constrain or enable, however, they always entangle, tying intermediaries to each other - silently and profoundly shaping the investment management industry. Chains of Finance is a novel analysis that will make students, social scientists, financial professionals, and regulators looking at the workings of financial markets in a new light. A must-read for anyone looking for insights into the decision-making processes of investment managers and those influenced by and working for them.

Chains of Finance: How Investment Management is Shaped

Business & Money

MacKENZIE, Donald

Svetlova, Ekaterina

Grant, Philip

Arjaliès, Diane-Laure

Hardie, Iain

International

Oxford University Press

About the Author\nDonald MacKenzie, Professor of Sociology, University of Edinburgh\nDonald MacKenzie is Professor of Sociology (Personal Chair) at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton University Press, 2008), and An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (MIT Press, 2006).\nFinancial markets, processes, and instruments are often difficult to fathom; the credit crisis highlights both their importance and their fragility. Donald MacKenzie is one of the most perceptive analysts of the workings of the financial world. In this book, he argues that economic agents and markets need to be analyzed in their full materiality: their physicality, their corporeality, their technicality. Markets are populated not by disembodied, abstract agents, but by embodied human beings and technical systems. Concepts and systematic ways of thinking that simplify market processes and make them mentally tractable are essential to how markets function.\nIn putting forward this material sociology of markets, the book synthesizes and contributes to the field of social studies of finance; the application to financial markets not just of economics but of wider social-science disciplines, in particular science and technology studies. The topics covered include the development of financial derivatives exchanges; arbitrage; how corporate profit figures are constructed; the crucial new markets in carbon emissions; and a case-study of a hedge fund (based, unusually, on direct observation of its trading).\nThe book will appeal to research students and academics across the social sciences, and the general reader will enjoy the book's explanations and analyses of some of the most important phenomena of today's turbulent markets.

Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies)

Economics

Financial markets, processes, and instruments are often difficult to fathom; the credit crisis highlights both their importance and their fragility. Donald MacKenzie is one of the most perceptive analysts of the workings of the financial world. In this book, he argues that economic agents and markets need to be analyzed in their full materiality: their physicality, their corporeality, their technicality. Markets are populated not by disembodied, abstract agents, but by embodied human beings and technical systems. Concepts and systematic ways of thinking that simplify market processes and make them mentally tractable are essential to how markets function. In putting forward this material sociology of markets, the book synthesizes and contributes to the field of social studies of finance; the application to financial markets not just of economics but of wider social-science disciplines, in particular science and technology studies. The topics covered include the development of financial derivatives exchanges; arbitrage; how corporate profit figures are constructed; the crucial new markets in carbon emissions; and a case-study of a hedge fund (based, unusually, on direct observation of its trading). The book will appeal to research students and academics across the social sciences, and the general reader will enjoy the book's explanations and analyses of some of the most important phenomena of today's turbulent markets.

Finance

"Mackenzie has achieved a masterful synthesis of engrossing narrative, imaginative concepts, historical perspective, and social concern."Thomas P. Hughes, Mellon Professor of the History and Sociology of Science, The University of Pennsylvania

Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Inside Technology)

History

Military

The MIT Press

Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust (Inside Technology)

This series presents recent research on the effects of taxation and government expenditure programs on economic performance and analyses of the effects of potential tax reforms. The research results appear in a form that is accessible to tax practitioners and policymakers.

Computers & Technology

Computer Science

In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.
Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities.
MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world's financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream―chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot's model of "wild" randomness. MacKenzie's pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America's financial markets have grown into their current form.

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Inside Technology)

When Straun Dunbar and his daughter's boyfriend are murdered in quick succession, Dunbar's daughter turns for help to ex-policeman John Raven, who travels to Prague to unravel the mystery

The Eyes of the Goat

Literature & Fiction

United States

St Martins Pr

Newly extradited to England from California on fraud charges, Philip Page teams up with maverick investigator John Raven to find out who has informed on Page in order to clear Page's name

Loose Cannon (John Raven Mystery)

From the Jacket Flap: "A man who doesn't much like John Raven says: 'I don't want you to get this wrong, John, but from what I hear you've been on the rampage ever since you left the police force.  Striking terror into the hearts of evildoers: a kind of Captain Midnight.' This is quite a good description of Raven, hero of many of Donald MacKenzie's novels, who is here involved with a killing carried out in England but arranged by US Intelligence Services with the connivance to their English equivalents.  It just so happens that a friend of Raven's is maneuvered by these cold, faceless, government agents into carrying out the actual murder...."

Nobody Here By That Name

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Macmillan

The purpose of the series from which this book is taken is to help delineate various critical approaches to specific literary texts. Its authors are from a variety of critical schools and have approached their task in a flexible manner. Their aim is to help the readers come to terms with the variety of criticism and to introduce him or her to further reading on the subject and to a fuller evaluation of a particular text by illustrating the way it has been approached in a number of contexts. In the first part of the book a critical survey is given of some of the major ways the text has been appraised. This has been done sometimes in a thematic manner, sometimes according to various "schools" or "approaches". In the second part the authors provide their own appraisals of the text from their stated critical standpoint, allowing the reader the knowledge of their own particular approaches from which their views may in turn be evaluated. The series hopes to introduce and to elucidate criticism of authors and texts being studied and to encourage participation as the critics debate.

The Metaphysical Poets (Critics Debate)

History & Criticism

MACMILLAN PUB. LTD.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacKENZIE, Donald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by MacKENZIE, Donald

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacKENZIE, Donald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Chains of Finance: How Investment Management is Shaped

Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies)

Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies)

Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Inside Technology)

Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust (Inside Technology)

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Inside Technology)

The Eyes of the Goat

Loose Cannon (John Raven Mystery)

Nobody Here By That Name

The Metaphysical Poets (Critics Debate)