Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the workings of financial institutions and financial markets beyond the discipline of economics, which has been accelerated by the financial crisis of the early twenty-first century. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance brings together twenty-nine chapters, written by scholars of international repute from Europe, North America, and Asia, to provide comprehensive coverage on a variety of topics related to the role of finance in a globalized world, and its historical development. Topics include global institutions of modern finance, types of actors involved in financial transactions and supporting technologies, mortgage markets, rating agencies, and the role of financial economics. Particular attention is given to financial crises, which are discussed in a special section, as well as to alternative forms of finance, including Islamic finance and the rise of China. The Handbook will be an indispensable tool for academics, researchers, and students of contemporary finance and economic sociology, and will serve as a reference point for the expanding international community of scholars researching these areas from a broadly-defined sociological perspective.
Introduction ; PART I. FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND GOVERNANCE ; 1. Global Finance and Its Institutional Spaces ; 2. Politics and Financial Markets ; 3. Finance and Institutional Investors ; 4. Business Groups and Financial Markets as Emergent Phenomena ; 5. Central Banking and the Triumph of Technical Rationality ; PART II. FINANCIAL MARKETS IN ACTION ; 6. What is a Financial Market? Global Markets as Microinstitutional and Post-Traditional Social Forms ; 7. Auctions and Finance ; 8. Interactions and Decisions in Trading Alex Preda ; 9. Traders ; 10. The Material Sociology of Arbitrage ; 11. Seeing Through the Eyes of Others: Dissonance Within and Across Trading Rooms ; PART III. INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND FINANCIAL RISKS ; 12. Market Efficiency: A Sociological Perspective ; 13. Financial Analysts ; 14. Rating Agencies ; 15. Accounting and Finance ; PART IV. CRISES IN FINANCE ; 16. The International Monetary Regime and Domestic Political Economy: the Origin of the Global Financial Crisis ; 17. A Long Strange Trip: The State and Mortgage Securitization, 1968 2010 ; 18. Dead Pledges: Mortgaging Time and Space ; 19. Financial Crises as Symbols and Rituals ; 20. The Sociology of Financial Fraud ; PART V: VARIETIES OF FINANCE ; 21. The Disunity of Finance: Alternative Practices to Western Finance ; 22. Islamic Banking and Finance: Alternative or Facade? ; 23. Geographies of Finance: The State-Enterprise Clusters of China ; 24. The Financialization of Art ; SECTION VI. THE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF FINANCE ; 25. Historical Sociology of Modern Finance ; 26. Gender and Finance ; 27. The Role of Confidence in Finance ; 28. Finance in Modern Economic Thought ; 29. Financial Automation, Past, Present, and Future
