Financial markets, processes, and instruments are often difficult to fathom; the credit crisis highlights both their importance and their fragility. In this book, Donald MacKenzie, one of the most perceptive analysts of the financial world, puts forward a material sociology of markets, rooted in the actors and agents that shape modern finance.

• 1: Introduction


• 2: Ten Precepts for the Social Studies of Finance


• 3: Assembling an Economic Actor


• 4: Derivatives: The Production of Virtuality


• 5: The Material Sociology of Arbitrage


• 6: Measuring Profit


• 7: Constructing Emissions Markets


• 8: Conclusion: Opening the Black Boxes of Finance

Donald 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).