Abstract

Michel Callon has conceptualised economic actors as constituted of socio-technical agencements: collectives of human beings, technical devices, algorithms, and so on. This paper reports a pilot, partially observational study of a hedge fund, a category of actor in financial markets that is of growing importance but that has so far attracted little attention in economic sociology. It draws on that study, and on interviews with other financial market practitioners, to delineate what is involved in viewing such an actor as made up of an agencement, and discusses the merits of doing so.2 A fundamental question for any discipline that studies financial markets is how we should theorise actors and action in those markets. 1 Dominant approaches in financial economics – and also, for example, in psychology-based ‘behavioural finance ’ – explicitly or implicitly theorise actors as equivalent to individual human beings, whether rational, as orthodoxy posits, or subject to systematic biases as behavioural finance suggests. Economic sociology rightly contests the construction of the actor as an atomistic individual, and a large and impressive body of literature in ‘new ’ economic sociology, much of it sparked by the work of Mark Granovetter, has demonstrated the ‘embedding ’ of economic action in networks of interpersonal connections and in cultural and political conditions (Granovetter 1985; for an overview, see Swedberg 2003). In recent years, however, a complementary – and to some degree alternative – approach has arisen: Michel Callon’s anthropology of economics and economies (for example, Callon 1998). Callon’s approach is rooted in the ‘actor-network theory ’ that he developed

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