What is the organizational basis of responsiveness under conditions of crisis? In this essay we examine a trading room that was damaged in the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. What did the crisis reveal about the social practices and the technological tools of trading? Drawing on...

What is the organizational basis of responsiveness under conditions of crisis? In this essay we examine a trading room that was damaged in the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center (WTC). What did the crisis reveal about the social practices and the technological tools of trading?...

How did companies at the Trade Center respond to the destruction brought about by the attack on September 11th? In this paper we look through the concrete and glass facade of the twin towers into the socio-technical networks of people, machines, and ideas that constituted the trading rooms. We...

Our task in this paper is to analyze the organization of trading in the era of quantitative finance. To do so, we conduct an ethnography of arbitrage, the trading strategy that best exemplifies finance in the wake of the quantitative revolution. In contrast to value and momentum investing, we...

This study explores the elusive social dimension of quantitative finance. We conducted three years of observations in the derivatives trading room of a major investment bank. We found that traders use models to translate stock prices into estimates of what their rivals think. Traders use these...