Narrative Authority: Rethinking Speculation and the Construction of Economic Expertise

ABSTRACT

Understanding and anticipating market movements plays a critical role in current capitalist activity. Through the assessment of the present and the engagement in the unknowable future, financial-market participants create financial opportunities. At the heart of this process is the work of experts who claim to provide ‘thorough analyses’ of economic trends and market movements. In this article, I illustrate how analysts – a powerful guild of economic experts – capitalise on ‘feeling’, individualised strategies and storytelling to come up with explanatory narratives about possible future market scenarios. In doing so, I build upon the notion of speculation as a practice that is grounded in imagination and show that narrativization of such futured-oriented images is a vital – yet often neglected – process: it allows to treat the unknowable as if it was anticipatable, uncertainty as if it was calculable risk, and thus speculation as if it was ‘investment’.

KEYWORDS:

• Expert knowledge
• narration
• prediction
• speculation
• uncertainty

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors of Ethnos and the three anonymous reviewers for their challenging yet productive comments. Part of the argument I make here is based on a collaborative effort lead by Laura Bear to rethink and study speculation. I wish to thank her and everyone who has been involved in this exciting endeavor.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Knorr Cetina (2010) explains that the value of information in financial markets is radically different from the value of information in areas such as science. While scientific information (and knowledge) stabilises over time, information in financial markets loses its value over time: ‘Information knowledge’ in financial markets ‘has a time index: it loses its clout after a period of time and then is no longer considered informative’ (Knorr Cetina 2010:176).

2 For the application of this approach to speculation, see contributions of this special issue (Bear 2020a, 2020b; Ferry 2020; Gilbert 2020; Humphrey 2020; Leins 2020; Puri 2020; Upadhya 2020).

3 Bear borrows the concept of technology of imagination from Sneath et al. (2009), who used it for the anthropological study of divination.

4 The ethnographic material presented in this article is also used in my book (Leins 2018). Please consult the book for further data and reflection.

5 Technical analysis is a way for analysing and predicting market developments by looking at the visual representation of market movements (see Preda 2007, 2009; Tanner 2014; Zaloom 2003, 2006).

6 The importance of ‘feeling’ in interpreting financial markets is also brought forward by Zaloom (2006, 2009) and by Lépinay and Hertz (2005). Lavanchy (2014) and Valli et al. (2002) also stress the role of ‘feeling’ in governmental jurisdiction – a different field of expertise.

7 Contrarianism is a style of investment according to which a person always invests in a way contrary to market developments. If market prices decrease, a contrarian investor buys shares; if market prices increase, the contrarian investor sells shares.

8 See Riles (2006, 2011) for an analysis of the aesthetics of financial documents. In my book (Leins 2018), I also give a more detailed analysis of the structure, visual appearance and narrative function of a company report.

9 Rabinow’s elaborations on the future heavily draw upon the work of Luhmann (1998). See also Opitz and Tellmann 2015.

10 This perceived differentiation has been necessary for establishing financial markets as institutions where the guiding principle is not chance, but knowledge and reason (see de Goede 2005 for a historical analysis).