| Since the mid-1990s, technological advances in futures trading changed how contracts are traded. The traditional organization of trading, known as face-to-face or open outcry trading, has been challenged by screen-based, electronic trading. Promising better, more efficient markets, electronic trading has largely supplanted open outcry trading. While most accounts treat this shift as a technological change, electronic trading has proved to be a more fundamental, institutional change in how markets are constituted and conducted. This dissertation examines this institutional change as it alters the relationships between market participants, as well as the overarching identities, uses of information, arenas of discretion, and organizational structures that make up a futures market. My research methods include six months participant observation as a clerk on the floor of a national open outcry futures exchange, site visits and observations on the floors of four electronic trading firms, and formal interviews with 60 traders, clerks, floor managers, and other trading personnel. I gathered secondary data on changes in the financial futures trading environments. I structure my findings with a framework that consists of four interconnected arenas, highlighting the institutional changes across the trading technologies: identities, information, discretion, and exteriority. The first arena identifies how masculinity is mobilized to solve the problem of creating a trading community and cultivating trust across open outcry and electronic trading, with physical, overtly sexualized masculinity dominated in open outcry, and a more technocratic, intellectualized masculinity predominating in electronic trading. What counts as information, both its form and its usage, is identified in the second arena. The third arena shows how discretion has shifted from trading community in open outcry to the mechanism of the trading medium in electronic trading. And the fourth arena ties these together by showing how electronic markets provide stability by treating the market not as a collectively-realized social process, but as an independent, already-existing entity. This dissertation reveals that sociological analyses of markets move beyond questions of economic efficiency towards a more nuanced, empirical view of how markets are made and how they operate. |
