Pandora’s Box: Opening Up Finance to STS Investigations

Abstract

Only two decades ago, finance was mainly the province of economics, a territory into which only few outsiders wandered. Nowadays, finance has be- come a central topic and various social science and humanities disciplines, have made inroads into this territory. Should the social sciences (and STS in particular) just analyse finance, or should they mainly criticize it, or maybe even provide what some have called an alternative narrative to capitalist finance?

Stemming from an ironic and innovative overview of social studies of finance (SSF), the paper presents the core characteristics of such a perspective, taking in- to account also the main critique that SSF attracted. The contribution concentrates then on the three issues where STS investigations of finance promise good yields: (1) agency and robots; (2) epistemic cultures; (3) expertise.