Practices and meanings of non-professional stock-trading in Taiwan: a case of relational work

Abstract

Non-professional investors, especially outside the Anglo-Saxon context, represent an important and under-researched topic for sociological studies of finance. The paper presents a qualitative study of non-professional investors in Taiwan, where levels of participation in the stock market are very high. It shows that investors are embedded in complex networks of social relations, cultural norms and economic projects. We use Zelizer’s notions of ‘relational work’ and ‘earmarking’ to explore how economic relations construct and reinforce social relations: investing is productive of, as well as derived from, social structures. Stock market participation secures access to social groupings and reproduces hierarchical relations in families and social networks. Our study seeks to highlight the relational content of financial markets, and calls for further investigation of the relational work performed by the material-calculative architectures of high finance.

Keywords:

• economic sociology
• embeddedness
• financial markets
• non-professional investors
• Zelizer
• earmarking

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor of Economy and Society along with the editorial board and two anonymous reviewers. The support and comments of all have greatly improved this paper. An early version of this paper was presented at ‘Everyday Market Lives’, University of Warwick, United Kingdom, February 2015, where it received much useful feedback. Errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yu-Hsiang Chen

Yu-Hsiang Chen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at National Taipei University. He has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Philip Roscoe

Philip Roscoe is a Reader in Management at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His research focuses on the role that markets play in contemporary organizing. He has published in leading journals in the fields of sociology and management. He has a PhD in management, an MPhil in medieval Arabic thought and a BA in theology.