The aim of the paper is to understand how one particular financial innovation, namely credit derivatives, has become a market and what kind of obstacles the promoters of the product have to face to achieve success. Following MacKenzie and Millo (2003) we focus on legitimacy issues taking into...

Le cas français est exemplaire en tant qu'exception dans une économie globalisée : l'injonction étatique pour un "rendre compte social" complet coexiste avec les réticences explicites et implicites du monde des affaires et la divulgation des informations sociales restent plus empreinte par...

We examine in this paper the issue of how institutions are maintained and the role of agency in this process. We investigate more specifically the efforts of actors to maintain the institutional order through discourse. We approach this issue through an in-depth and longitudinal study of...

This paper examines the impact of contemporary pressures on industrial districts and analyses the changes that are taking place in an industrial district confronted with disembedding and globalisation. We discuss the following questions: What are the processes and consequences of disembedding...

In this paper, we examine the issue of how certain actors tend to maintain institutionalized elements, in spite of significant technological and social change. In particular, we focus on the notion of artifacts, which represent one type of institutional carriers, but mostly overlooked in the...

Building on Smith (1989), we describe the social processes surrounding a new financial OTC derivatives market, the market for credit derivatives. We show that in contradiction to more traditional derivatives, credit derivatives generate ambiguities of a cognitive and political nature. By...