Chains of Finance

Diane-Laure Arjaliès is an Assistant Professor at the Ivey Business School, Western University (Canada). Before joining Ivey, Diane-Laure was an Assistant Professor at the Accounting and Management Control Department of HEC Paris. She received her PhD in business administration from ESSEC Business School in Paris and holds an MBA and a M.Sc. in organizational theory. She also has several years of experience in responsible investments at an asset management company. Utilizing qualitative methods, Diane-Laure investigates the introduction of non-financial performance measures in the investment industry. Her work in this area has won her several academic and professional prize.

Philip Grant is a social anthropologist and sociologist who worked for five years as an equity fund manager in London prior to commencing his academic career. Recent research has focused on the investment management industry, but also on wider questions of economic anthropology and sociology, with a view to expanding the insights offered by the social studies of finance to other areas of social life. His doctoral research was a collaborative ethnographic project working with Iranian women's activists in the diaspora, and he is drawing on this material for a future comparative study of civil society in Iran and Tunisia.

Iain Hardie is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. After an 18 year career in investment banking in London and Hong Kong, he completed a PhD in Edinburgh in 2007. He is the author of Financialization and Government Borrowing Capacity in Emerging Markets (2012) and co-editor of Market-Based Banking and the International Financial Crisis (2013) and of articles in journals including World Politics, Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy, Socio Economic Review and Journal of Common Market Studies.

Donald MacKenzie is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He is primarily a sociologist and historian of science and technology. His current research is on the sociology of financial markets, and he is researching in particular the development of automated high-frequency trading and of the electronic markets that make it possible, with a special focus on how trading algorithms predict the future.

Ekaterina Svetlova is Associate Professor in Accounting and Finance at the University of Leicester, School of Business. Previously, she was a researcher and a lecturer at the University of Constance, Germany, Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany, and University of Basel, Switzerland. She also used to work as a portfolio manager and financial analyst at a big investment company in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, for six years. Ekaterina has published on themes such as economic sociology, social studies of finance and economic philosophy.

Investment is no longer a matter of individual savers directly choosing which shares or bonds to buy. Rather, most of their money flows through a 'chain': an often extended sequence of intermediaries. What goes on in that chain is of huge importance: The world's investment managers, who are now almost as well paid as top bankers, control assets equivalent in value to around a year of total global economic output.

In Chains of Finance, five social scientists discuss the ways in which the intermediaries in the chain influence each other, channel the flows of savers' money, enhance investment decisions, and form audiences for each other's performances of financially competent selves. The central argument of the book is that investment management is fashioned profoundly by the opportunities and constraints this chain creates. Whether chains constrain or enable, however, they always entangle, tying intermediaries to each other - silently and profoundly shaping the investment management industry. Chains of Finance is a novel analysis that will make students, social scientists, financial professionals, and regulators looking at the workings of financial markets in a new light. A must-read for anyone looking for insights into the decision-making processes of investment managers and those influenced by and working for them.

This book suggests that investment decisions cannot be understood by focusing on isolated investors. Rather, most of their money flows through a chain: a sequence of intermediaries that 'sit between' savers and companies/governments. It argues that investment management is shaped by the opportunities and constraints that this chain creates.