Our Science, Technology and Society list publishes books that examine the social, political and economic implications of developments in science and technology.
Recent highlights have included Data Lives, The Imposter as Social Theory and We Have Always Been Cyborgs. Path-breaking book series include Dis-positions: Troubling Methods and Theory in STS and Contemporary Issues in Science Communication.
Science, Technology and Society
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Why is finance so important? How do stock markets work and what do they really do? Most importantly, what might finance be and what could we expect from it?
Exploring contemporary finance via the development of stock exchanges, markets and the links with states, Roscoe mingles historical and technical detail with humorous anecdotes and lively portraits of market participants.
Deftly combining research and autobiographical vignettes, he offers a cautionary tale about the drive of financial markets towards expropriation, capture and exclusion. Positioning financial markets as central devices in the organisation of the global economy, he includes contemporary concerns over inequality, climate emergency and (de)colonialism and concludes by wondering, in the market’s own angst-filled voice, what the future for finance might be, and how we might get there.
Chapter 3 explores the historical interdependency of market and state, via the early history of London’s stock market. It shows how markets support states, taking the case of London. The London Stock Exchange developed as a mechanism for generating liquidity in the UK’s national debt, allowing the government to fund its colonialist activities. It examines how the occupation of stockjobber (the early market-makers) arose and the contestations, especially in terms of gender, that surrounded it. The chapter then looks at how states support markets, via the dispute between the Chicago Board of Trade and the city’s bucket shops, which eventually led to the legalization of options trading.
Chapter 4 returns to London’s jobbers in the final years of the London Stock Exchange’s face-to-face trading (circa 1960 until October 1986). The stockjobbers practised an ambulatory form of trading, circulating around pitches on the floor of the Old House, and using a system of spoken deals based on ‘my word is my bond’. Conservative social structures made the institution durable but prevented change. This chapter introduces the hierarchical structures of the exchange, the apprenticeships served by new clerks, and the subsequent career progression of its members. These are presented through oral testimonies and archival sources. The chapter characterizes the Exchange as a struggling institution, little able to adapt to difficult economic times. Yet its long-standing traditions and practices were soon to be swept away by the changes of the 1980s.
What is the stock market, and why is it always on the news? Why is finance so important? How do stock markets work, and what do they really do? Financial markets are an inescapable part of the modern world but remain poorly understood. How to Build a Stock Exchange sets out to answer these questions by way of a journey through the histories and narratives of finance, combining meticulous historical-sociological research with anecdotes, reflections on the narratives and ideologies of finance and the author’s autobiographical reminiscences. The book takes the stock exchange both as an institution in its own right and as a rhetorical figure to explore finance more broadly. It focuses on the material and technological drivers of the markets, as well as the social relationships and rituals that keep markets functioning. It identifies exchanges as embedded in specific historical and political trajectories, showing the mutually constitutive relationship of modern nation states and financial markets. It shows how financial institutions are equally constituted by narratives, which work to set rules of participation, identity and conduct. Most of all, it makes the case that stock exchanges – and the other institutions of finance - are products of chance and circumstance. Finance, it argues, is a social technology, a reflection of its makers. While the stock exchange as we know it is central to so many contemporary global problems, it is not, the book suggests, entirely beyond change.
Chapter 9 moves to the dotcom bubble of 1999. It introduces an autobiographical element, reflecting on the author’s own experiences as a financial journalist during this period. It then picks up the story of the founding of OFEX, a small company-focused stock exchange, which emerged from the London Stock Exchange’s own over-the-counter (OTC) rules. It highlights the role of technology in this development, centring on the Stock Exchange’s ‘non-SEAQ’ screen. The chapter concludes with an account of the growing business of financing dotcom start-ups, and the cultural circuit in which the author was active as a journalist, all of it paid for by other people’s money, or OPM.
The Prologue takes the reader to the violence and expropriation at the heart of modern finance, via the massacre on the slave ship Zong and the ensuing legal action against the ship’s insurers. It explains how slave merchants built a transatlantic banking system on the bodies of the enslaved, a mechanism that allowed financial flows to break free from the bodily trade and circulate safely, cleanly and swiftly. It suggests that these patterns exist in modern finance, and that they underpinned the 2008 credit crisis. The Prologue introduces the argument of the book, that stock exchanges are social and material technologies with distinct histories.
What is the stock market, and why is it always on the news? Why is finance so important? How do stock markets work, and what do they really do? Financial markets are an inescapable part of the modern world but remain poorly understood. How to Build a Stock Exchange sets out to answer these questions by way of a journey through the histories and narratives of finance, combining meticulous historical-sociological research with anecdotes, reflections on the narratives and ideologies of finance and the author’s autobiographical reminiscences. The book takes the stock exchange both as an institution in its own right and as a rhetorical figure to explore finance more broadly. It focuses on the material and technological drivers of the markets, as well as the social relationships and rituals that keep markets functioning. It identifies exchanges as embedded in specific historical and political trajectories, showing the mutually constitutive relationship of modern nation states and financial markets. It shows how financial institutions are equally constituted by narratives, which work to set rules of participation, identity and conduct. Most of all, it makes the case that stock exchanges – and the other institutions of finance - are products of chance and circumstance. Finance, it argues, is a social technology, a reflection of its makers. While the stock exchange as we know it is central to so many contemporary global problems, it is not, the book suggests, entirely beyond change.
Answering the question of what we might do differently, Chapter 14 explores two different attempts to set up exchanges – or at least trading facilities for shares. The first is the London Stock Exchange’s AIM, established in 1995 with a distinctive form of market governance. The account emphasizes the social and conversational efforts necessary in establishing a new stock exchange. The second is a business angel network – stimulating investment in start-up companies – set up by an eccentric named Sixtus. The chapter wonders whether these examples might be pointers for a more constructive form of finance. It answers in the negative. Finance, for the author, is beyond saving.
Chapter 7 begins by examining another novel mode of financial operation: the leveraged buyout. Fact and fiction overlap in the discussion of this financial practice, and the chapter moves to consider fictional representations of finance and to explore the narrative construction of finance. It deals with the written underpinnings of finance, from Daniel Defoe onwards, and then examines contemporary financial print culture, epitomized by Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, in more detail. It moves to a focus on gender, both in fiction and practice, and considers the changing performances and representations of gender in finance, exploring how elitism and exclusion can be reproduced in finance.
Chapter 1 introduces the concept of agency theory as a means of exploring the pressures that modern corporations are placed under by the financial sector, leading them to shrink productive capacity and outsource costs. It describes these practices as rent-seeking, and suggests that they are responsible for many of the challenges we face today: environmental, social, inequality. It introduces notions of critique concerning the move from productive to financial activity in the economy, before arguing that these approaches end up reifying the power of finance. It proposes instead a critique based on humour.
