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date: 17 February 2020

Abstract and Keywords

This article has four main objectives: To provide concise, descriptive, sociologically informed accounts of financial markets and auction markets with particular attention to their interconnections, similarities and differences. To illustrate the central role that ‘pricing’ plays in both structuring and validating these markets. To examine the different ways in which market narratives and practices mould pricing. Finally, to review some of the various changes associated with technological developments and globalization that have transformed these markets including the way they price.

Keywords: auction markets, financial markets, pricing, globalization

Charles W. Smith

Charles W. Smith, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Queens College and the Graduate Schools of CUNY, has been engaged in ethnographic research of auction, primarily financial, markets since the mid-1960s. His books include The Mind of the Market (1981), Auctions (1989), and Success and Survival on Wall Street (1999). His more recent publications include “Coping with Contingencies in Equity Option Markets: The ‘Rationality’ of Pricing” in The Worth of Goods (2011), “Staging Auctions: Enabling Exchange Values to be Contested and Established” in Negotiating Value in the Creative Industries; “Markets as Definitional Practices,” CJS (2007); and “Financial Edgework: Trading in Market Currents,” in Edgework: The Sociology of Risk Taking (2005). His primary focus has been on how markets cope with ambiguity and contingencies.

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