Agencements

This looks fun –

To be presented at the workshop, “New Actors in a Financialised Economy and
Implications for Varieties of Capitalism,” Institute of Commonwealth Studies,
London, May 11-12, 2006

Assembling an Economic Actor:  The Agencement of a Hedge Fund
Iain Hardie
Donald MacKenzie

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.