Timing practices and material markers in coordinating collective market patterns

Bednarek, Rebecca and Cabantous, L. (2017) Timing practices and material markers in coordinating collective market patterns. Academy of Management Proceedings , ISSN 0065-0668.

Abstract

This paper considers the practices of coordination in financial markets that do not rely on a common market device (e.g., trading platform or calculative tool) to organize trading between buyers and sellers. Our case focuses on the coordination of the pricing cycle within the reinsurance sector. Building on social studies of finance, we adopt a practice-theoretical perspective. Our study goes beyond existing work in showing the importance, and inherently strategic nature, of timing practices in financial markets. Specifically, our ethnographic study of coordination in the reinsurance market shows the recursive interplay between four types of timing practices – delaying, readying, rushing and settling – and the various material artifacts that reinsurers (i.e., sellers) create in shaping the unfolding market pricing cycle. We show how market actors shape the temporal flow of the markets by strategically manipulating time, to both position themselves favorably on individual deals and to collectively push the pricing cycle up. In theorizing the interplay between timing practices and material markers in financial markets, our study advance theory on financial market coordination in three ways. First, we bring to the foreground the strategic nature of financial actors’ sociomaterial practices and show how such practices can impact on broader market outcomes, in our case the market cycle. Second, our exploration of material markers extends concepts of materiality in financial markets beyond the technological affordance of a common trading platform or pricing tool. Third, we further our understanding of the complex relationships between the temporality of financial market microstructures and their coordination practices.

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• Timing practices and material markers in coordinating collective market patterns. (deposited 08 May 2017 10:08)
  • Timing practices and material markers in coordinating collective market patterns. (deposited 01 Aug 2017 08:48) [Currently Displayed]

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