"The Subway Series" A Joint Colloquium Between Harvard History of Science and MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society
The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge Donald Mackenzie, University of Edinburgh Abstract: A number of scholars have recently been applying perspectives from the social studies of science and technology to financial markets (an activity sometimes called "social studies of finance"). Amongst the questions this work throws up is how market participants value financial instruments, an issue which is (amongst other things) a problem in the sociology of knowledge. This talk will examine the role in the current credit crisis of "evaluation cultures" (shared beliefs, practices, ways of calculating, and technical systems that are employed when market participants evaluate financial instruments) and "metadevices" (relatively durable configurations of social relations and technical systems, such as the credit ratings system). Employing documentary sources and a set of 55 predominantly oral-history interviews, the talk will present a historical sociology of the two categories of financial instrument crucial to the crisis (ABSs, asset-backed securities, and CDOs, collateralized debt obligations), and in particular discusses the evaluation of and the role played by a fateful concatenation of the two, ABS CDOs. Monday, November 30, 2009 4pm Located in E51-095 at MIT
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