Narrative Authority: Rethinking Speculation and the Construction of Economic Expertise

Leins, Stefan (2022). Narrative Authority: Rethinking Speculation and the Construction of Economic Expertise. Ethnos, 87(2), pp. 347-364. Taylor & Francis 10.1080/00141844.2020.1765832

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ABSTRACT
Financial Analysts as Economic Experts
Developing a Feeling for the Market
Finding an Individualised Way to Read the Market
Turning Expectations Into Narratives
Conclusion: Narrative Authority in Economic Expertise
Acknowledgements
Footnotes
References
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ABSTRACT
Understanding and anticipating market movements plays a critical role in current capitalist activity. Through the assessment of the present and the engagement in the unknowable future, financial-market participants create financial opportunities. At the heart of this process is the work of experts who claim to provide ‘thorough analyses’ of economic trends and market movements. In this article, I illustrate how analysts – a powerful guild of economic experts – capitalise on ‘feeling’, individualised strategies and storytelling to come up with explanatory narratives about possible future market scenarios. In doing so, I build upon the notion of speculation as a practice that is grounded in imagination and show that narrativization of such futured-oriented images is a vital – yet often neglected – process: it allows to treat the unknowable as if it was anticipatable, uncertainty as if it was calculable risk, and thus speculation as if it was ‘investment’.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Social Anthropology

UniBE Contributor:

Leins, Stefan

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology

ISSN:

0014-1844

Publisher:

Taylor & Francis

Language:

English

Submitter:

Jana Samira Lamatsch

Date Deposited:

06 Feb 2024 07:26

Last Modified:

06 Feb 2024 07:26

Publisher DOI:

10.1080/00141844.2020.1765832

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/192378

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/192378

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