Towards A Critical Sociology of Finance

Evidences pile up to prove that financial markets are sometimes irrational, and contingently much influenced by public speeches like the ones delivered by central bankers and politicians. Since ideologies and discourses matter in the financial sector, and have very tangible impacts on investors’ decisions worldwide, this book argues that we urgently need a new sociology of finance, one equipped with a critical commitment and an innovative, standardized method for argumentation analysis. Accordingly, the new approach is firstly described theoretically and methodologically, in an open, constructive dialogue with potential complementary approaches like cultural political economy and critical discourse analysis. Then, the outcomes of some empirical analyses are displayed and discussed: from the battles of opposite financial ideologies in the decade 2008-2018, through the analysis of “dovish” speeches in monetary policy, to a case-study focused on Bitcoin’s complex ideology. In this way, Towards A Critical Sociology of Finance promises to equip the reader (and eventually the financial investor) with some critical skills to recognize and doubt financial ideologies and to become sensible to distracting argumentative strategies like buck passing and scapegoats building, as well as to other variously fallacious arguments.###Fiammetta Corradi is currently a Senior Researcher in Sociology at the University of Pavia, Italy, where she teaches Sociology and Economic Sociology at the Department of Economics and Management. Her main academic interest concerns the rationality/irrationality of social institutions and public discourses. Recently, she has focused on financial markets, proposing a new research agenda for the sociology of the stock exchange (Social Spirits, 2016) and approaching the analysis of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin from a critical perspective (The disenchantment of Bitcoin, with P. Höfner, 2018; The double Embeddedness of Bitcoin, 2018).