Material Markets

Financial markets, processes, and instruments are often difficult to fathom; and recent turbulence suggests they may be out of control in some respects. Donald Mackenzie is one of the most perceptive analysts of the workings of the financial world. In this book, MacKenzie 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 new 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 hedge funds (the book contains the first social-science study of a hedge fund based on direct observation); the development of financial derivatives exchanges (non-existent in 1970, but now trading products equivalent to $13,000 for every human being on earth); arbitrage; how corporate profit figures are constructed; and the crucial new markets in carbon emissions. 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.

This book addresses the debate usually tagged as being about ’markets in human body parts’ which is antagonistically divided into pro-market and anti-market positions. The author provides a set of propositions about how to approach this and shows a way out of the concrete impasse of it. Assumptions about markets and bodies that characterize this debate are analyzed and described while the author argues that these assumptions are in fact constitutive for exchanges of human bodily material – but in unacknowledged ways. It is concluded that what we need is a different analytical approach to better understand the mechanisms at play when organizations exchange organs, tissues and cells for use in transplantation and fertility medicine. ​

This latest edition of the Survey analyzes current economic and social developments in the region against the background of events in the world economy. It also focuses on the serios problems of growth and transformation of the area's least developed and Pacific Island developing economies.

Writing this book would have been impossible without the help of certain institutions and persons. For a gas-producing and oil-processing country like the Netherlands, there was surprisingly very little, publicly available, research material. Public libraries' collections contained, with a certain degree of inconsistency, little of the more specialised sources. I would therefore like to express my gratitude towards Royal Dutch Shell, and especially the library staff in The Hague, for allowing me to use the company's library, thanking them for their assistance in finding and supplying the required data. I am also grateful for the financial assistance of the 'Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek' (NWO) and the Faculty of Law of the University of Leiden. They provided the financial means to work a (crucial) month in the very well equipped library of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. I am indebted to the staff of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, and particularly to Robert Mabro and Jeremy Turk, for their comments, support, and friendship. After I spent a month in the Institute in July 1989, I was able to return for two five-month periods in 1990 and 1991. For both periods, the Oxford Institute and the Leiden Law Faculty provided me with the necessary means. I would also like to express special gratitude to some people who have been a great support and supplied me with valuable comments at various stages of the study.

This study examines the structural similarities between English mercantile treatises and drama c1600-1642. Bradley D. Ryner analyses the representational conventions of plays and mercantile treatises written between the chartering of the English East India Company in 1600 and the closing of the public playhouses at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642. He shows that playwrights' manipulation of specific elements of theatrical representation - such as metaphor, props, dramatic character, stage space, audience interaction, and genre - exacerbated the tension between the aspects of the world taken into account by a particular representation and those aspects that it neglects.

This book contains plenary papers and selected poster presentations from the AOCS-sponsored World Conference held in Montreux, Switzerland.