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 | | Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street by Mitchel Abolafia ISBN-10: 9780674006881 ISBN-10: 0-674-00688-7 ISBN-13: 9780674006881 ISBN-13: 978-0-674-00688-1 Paperback 2001-10-30 Harvard University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Making Markets, an ethnography of Wall Street culture, offers a fascinating and complex picture of how the market and its denizens work. More than masses of individuals striving independently, markets appear here as socially constructed institutions in which the behavior of traders is suspended in a web of customs, norms, and structures of control. Sociologist Mitchel Abolafia shows us how individuals in the stock, bond, and futures markets negotiate the perpetual tension between short-term self-interest and long-term self-restraint that marks their communities. Making Markets reveals that what propels Wall Street is not a fundamental human drive or instinct, but strategies enacted in the context of social relationships, cultural idioms, and institutions--a cycle that moves between phases of unbridled self-interest and collective self-restraint. "A great must-read. Abolafia's central thesis is that markets cannot be viewed simply as anonymous fora where nameless economic forces work their mysterious ways ... Instead, they are better seen as stages on which diverse groups of actors seek to further their own, often conflicting, interests ... [Abolafia's thesis] is extremely convincing...It is impossibly infuriating that one's assumptions about how the financial world works should be overturned by a mere sociologist." --Ruben Lee, London Financial News | ||
Reviews | ||
Considering Opportunism Mitchel Abolafia considers the role that competition and cooperation plays among players, not only at the New York Stock Exchange, but also among other market makers such as in the commodity markets. He finds that, despite the obvious competitive nature of these markets, players in these markets also find cooperation necessary in order to create orderly markets. It is good overview, but I was hoping for a more in-depth discussion of the role that opportunism plays. It needed to draw more upon the theoretical knowledge on economic opportunism. At the same time, while it does contain a number of personal stories, I felt that the book could have given more of a day-to-day sense of how players in these markets interact and view each other. So in one sense it lacks the academic underpinnings that would have made it more appealing to academics, and on the other hand, it lacks the detailed descriptions of the small interactions among players that would appeal to the more general reader. | ||
Great example of new economic sociology This book discusses the types of control (aka restraint) the author found in three settings of traders ('market makers'): the futures market, the bond market, and the stock exchange. The studies were conducted at different times, and under different conditions in each market, which makes comparing across the settings somewhat difficult. However, Abolafia does a good job of addressing those issues, and does a commendable job of drawing together three otherwise very different studies into a single rubric. His conclusion--that the social context of each market plays a big role in the opportunities and constraints actors in each market face--will come as no surprise to followers of the new economic sociology (since Granovetter's 1985 embeddedness article). But even other readers will find Abolafia's evidence quite convincing on this point. He uses his ethnographic data, collected over a decade, to demonstrate how market actors are embedded in social context. When I used this in an undergraduate Sociology of Work class, most students did not catch the distinctions Abolafia made between the various settings. I tried using this with Simpson's work on types of social control in the workplace (direct, hierarchical, bureaucratic, occupational, etc), and while students saw some connections, they did not get the fine distinctions Abolafia made which I had hoped they would, since his comparison across market settings forms a core element of his argument. Would work well in graduate level courses, or courses specifically on economic sociology. For scholars of the market (economists or sociologists) this is a book not to be missed! | ||