Exploring technological instantiation of regulatory practices in entangled financial markets

Wendy Currie (1) , Jonathan Jm Seddon (1)

1 Audencia Business School

The literature on the sociology of financial markets and institutional theory promotes concepts of field, networks, performativity, agencement and financial entropy. This study builds a conceptual model of technological instantiation of regulatory practices in financial markets. We observe how asset management firms instantiate technology as a material and social artefact to regulate the actions and behaviour of human agents. The structural-agency divide reveals the coercive role of regulators who impose stringent compliance practices on financial organizations by embedding formal rules and regulations in the software. Socio-technical conditions show how human agents interpret and apply these rules to circumvent formal regulatory policies and practices. Context-specific analysis shows technological performativity and agencement co-exist in financial fields that are becoming more entangled and fragmented. Regulators respond with more complex mandates to reduce entropy in financial markets characterized by extreme volatility and instability.

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Economics and Finance; Humanities and Social Sciences; Library and information sciences

Wendy Currie, Jonathan Jm Seddon. Exploring technological instantiation of regulatory practices in entangled financial markets. Journal of Information Technology, 2022, 37 (1), pp.31-50. ⟨10.1177/02683962211027308⟩. ⟨hal-03599145⟩