2005, Knorr, Karin, Brügger, Urs

Der Artikel untersucht Integrationsmuster globaler Finanzmärkte auf der Basis von Daten, die auf den Handelsetagen des Interbank-Währungshandels globaler Banken erhoben wurden. Für diese Muster wird der Begriff Globale MikroStrukturen eingefuhrt. Wir argumentieren, dass Mechanismen der Interaktionsordnung solche Märkte aufspannen und konstitutiv für globale soziale Formen werden. Die Untersuchung nutzt Schütz' Konzept zeitlicher Koordination als Basis für das Argument, dass für die entsprechenden Märkte eine Ebene von InterSubjektivität behauptet werden kann. Ebenso sind diese Märkte durch eine Ebene globaler Konversationen gekennzeichnet, die sie sozial liquide halten und durch die Marktzusammenbrüche und Lücken überbrückt werden. Der Artikel zeigt auf, welche Formen der Sozialität Märkten inhärent sein können, und stellt gleichzeitig dar, wie globale soziale Formen auf der Basis von MikroStrukturen funktionieren können.

2002, Knorr, Karin, Brügger, Urs

Using participant-observation data, interviews, and trading transcripts drawn from interbank currency trading in global investment banks, this article examines regular patterns of integration that characterize the global social system embedded in economic transactions. To interpret these patterns, which are global in scope but microsocial in character, this article uses the term "global microstructures." Features of the interaction order, loosely defined, have become constitutive of and implanted in processes that have global breadth. This study draws on Schutz in the development ofthe concept of temporal coordination as the basis for the level of intersubjectivity discerned in global markets. This article contributes to economic sociology through the analysis of cambist (Le., trading) markets, which are distinguished from producer markets, and by positing a form of market coordination that supplements relational or network forms of coordination.

2003, Knorr, Karin, Brügger, Urs

This paper focuses on institutional currency transactions as a global lifeform that inhabits technology during waking hours, is distributed across the three major time zones, and is nonetheless centred in and on itself the lifeform constituted by the respective markets and participants in them. The authors argue that distribution and centring are not at odds with each other in the lifeform of these markets; that notions of interactions and networks embracing all social domains give short shrift to the actual realization of the networks as centred post-network spheres at odds with the idea of distantiated units or nodes connected only by business linkages and social relationships. The paper also submits that the notion of technology as an external artefact or infrastructure carrying information flows distracts from the world-constitutive role of a particular component of this technology, the screen, and appresentational work of traders and a secondary information supply economy that create this world.

2001, Knorr, Karin, Brügger, Urs

Argues that informational arrangement may make an organization less of a cumbersome machine by exteriorizing organizational processes on screen, making them transparent, witnessable and (reflexively) selfchanging.The platform organization addresses how some organizations - global investment banks engaged in institutional currency trading and big science collaborations engaged in high energy physics knowledge production - implement a transparency regime of information that extends to local and implicit knowledge. In otherwords, through being exteriorized, knowledge is kept current, alive and distributed in the respective organizations; to a significant degree, it is effectively precluded from becoming implicit and embodied in places and persons. Corresponds to a form of coordination that is content-driven rather than social authority based. "Management by contact" is a knowledge-enhancing, specialist activity closer to mediating and coaching than to "governing" and deciding.

2002, Knorr, Karin, Brügger, Urs

2000, Knorr, Karin, Brügger, Urs

This paper rests on the assumption of an increased presence and relevance of object worlds in the social world. !t holds that this influx of object worlds coincides with changing patterns of human relatedness that can be gIossed by the notion postsocial forms. Postsocial forms include object-relationships where the objects are non-human entities. One characteristic of the present situation is that perhaps for the first time in recent history it appears unclear whether other persons are, for human beings. the most fascinating part of their environment. Objects rnay also be the risk winners of the relationship risks which many authors find inherent in contemporary human relations. Postsocial forms "step into the place" of social relations where these empty out, where they lose some of the meaningfulness they have had in earlier periods. A condition for understanding Ihis role of objects is that we develop, in sodal theory, adequate concepts of objects that break with the tradition of seeing them merely as abstract technologies that promote alienation or as fetishized commodities that freeze and numb any human or political potential (Marx). In this paper, we use a different conception developed in an earlier paper. We also explore in some detail a notion of postsocial relatedness that is based on the idea of a dynamie of warnings and Iacks of fulfilment. The paper explores this framework in the area of financial markets, where traders relate to the market as an object of attachmentt within an environment of reiterated Iacks.