Description
This article proposes a conceptual framework for analysing financial markets as semiotic systems. My goal is to overcome the inflationary use of the concept of 'performativity' for qualifying financial in distinction to other 'kinds' of markets. I argue that performativity has suffered a fate very similar to that of the concept of 'embeddedness', undergoings various stages of conceptual stretching where it is invoked to explain a wide range of distinct and often contradictory features and dynamics in (financial) markets.
Building on critiques of uses of performativity as largely equivalent with cultural construction or social constitution, I draw on work from relational sociology and cultural studies to provide a more fine-grained conceptual framework that allows us to describe how different forms of performative processes interlock to enact a (financial) market. I build on work on enacted sense-making from organization studies to outline the interpretive infrastructures on which the functioning of markets depends, and how different configurations of infrastructures can explain the (in-)stability and various form of so far theoretically unexplained counterperformativities described in existing research.
