Drawing from advances in Organisation Studies and recent debates within Economic Sociology and the Sociology of Financial Markets, this paper proposes a theoretical framework that characterises the mutual adaptation between formal routines, rules and actual performances as iterative cycles of framing, overflowing and reframing of knowledge inputs and actions. This framework, combined with the ethnographic observation of the ‘engineering freeze ’ process at a leading automotive manufacturer, allows us to advance routines ’ theory by 1- capturing the dynamics of convergence and divergence between procedures and performances; and 2- improving our understanding of the influence of artefacts and distributed agencies on routines’ dynamics.

Paper for presentation and discussion – early stage – criticisms and comments most welcome – please do not cite! 1

Perhaps not surprisingly the 2008 financial crisis has been followed by an impressive number of academic and journalistic accounts. In spite of the variety of explanations proposed, many commentators shared a keen interest on the role that financial models and organizational practices played in triggering the crisis (see especially Tett, 2009). The focus on models (and economists as modelers) went beyond academia and we could read title such as “The formula that killed Wall Street ” on the cover of Wired, and even The Economist admitted that “of all the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself ” (The Economist, 2009). But despite their central role, financial models and the work of economists (and other social scientists) have only recently become a central focus of scholarly work. In sociology and organization theory, the performativity perspective (Callon, 1998), stemming from the social studies of science tradition, provides an interesting starting point to explore this relationship. Callon’s suggestion that economics does not merely describe but performs the economy, creating the

When we sat down to start working on this Progress Report, the most recent crisis of global capitalism had finally spread to Germany. The head of Deutsche Bank, Josef Ackermann, had just made headlines world-wide with his admission that he no longer believed in the market’s self-healing power, demanding a concerted action of governments, central banks and private

Although researchers have been building location-based social services for some time now, sharing one’s location has only recently been introduced to the more general population. This paper examines real-world adoption of and resistance to Google Latitude, a social mobile-device application for people to share their locations. We report findings from an analysis of semistructured interviews with 21 participants using grounded theory. Our research reveals how interviewees perceive the social affordances of location-sharing applications to be conceptually intertwined with the conventions of other social networking and communication technologies; Our findings emphasize that many participants felt pressured to not only adopt social applications such as location-sharing, but also to be responsive and accessible at all times. Participants perceived technology-mediated social interactions (such as “friending ” someone) as highly symbolic, and as problematic if they did not strictly adhere to the established social etiquette. We also found that participants ’ perception of the social norms around using Latitude varied widely, affecting how and whether participants used the system.

Automated market makers are algorithmic agents that price fixed-odds bets with traders. Four key qualities for automated market makers have appeared in the artificial intelligence literature: (1) bounded loss, (2) the ability to make a profit, (3) a vanishing bid/ask spread, and (4) unlimited market depth. Intriguingly, market makers that satisfy any three of these desiderata have appeared in the literature. However, it is an open question as to whether there exist market makers which can simultaneously satisfy all four of these properties; the issue is not simple to resolve because several of the qualities are oppositional, particularly in tandem. In this paper, we answer the open question in the affirmative by constructing market makers that satisfy all four qualities.