Decision-Making in the Realm of Finance – Interdisciplinary Conversations

Workshop at the Collaborative Research Centre / SFB 1150 “Cultures of Decision-Making“

With the collapse of socialist economies and the emergence of global capitalism, ‘financialisation’ has emerged as a key term engaging not only economists and sociologists but also historians, anthropologists and others. The workings of finance are studied at specific sites such as stock markets and investment banking, while the logic of finance is revealed in its effects upon state policies, debt, labor and expanding social inequalities across the world. Significantly, financialisation in all its ramifications depends on and creates forms of specific social action enacted in decision-making, which, however, is more often taken for granted than made the focus of theoretical scrutiny and analytical elaboration. How are enactments of decision-making through individual behavior or organizational procedures, we ask, related to varying but related regimes of power, knowledge, temporality, rationality, technology, materiality, emotion and subjectivity giving shape to realms of finance? To address such relationships, we suggest to shift the focus from ‘the decision’ as an event to ‘decision-making’ as historically and culturally embedded processes of social action. Decision-making heightens contingent socio-economic trajectories and thus at once creates challenges of future uncertainties and seeks to control them. But decision-making practices, we think, cannot be reduced to the model of Homo Oeconomicus that informs an influential family of theories of decision-making proposed by economists and psychologists; rather, we seek a more nuanced and fresh understanding of decision-making taking into account heterogeneous social and cultural constructions of values, personhood/subjectivity/embodiment and materiality. We seek to promote conversations of decision-making between sociologists, historians and anthropologists working in the field of finance and invite participants to reflect upon and scrutinize models of decision-making that implicitly or explicitly inform scholarly and/or actors’ representations of financial market activities. We specifically seek to explore the frontiers (or possible frontier crossings) between socially and historically grounded approaches to decision-making and economic theories (e.g. rational choice/ game theory) from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Programme