How to stay on top of online education: Lessons from the New York Stock Exchange.

Daniel Beunza looks at how universities can continue to stay on top of technological change in the face of mounting start-up competition and debilitating institutional inertia. Drawing on his research on the transition to algorithmic trading at the New York Stock Exchange, Beunza argues that in order to have lasting success, online education and technology-mediated learning must be designed to complement rather than replace existing processes

Resolving identities: Successive crises in a trading room after 9/11

How do organizations cope with extreme uncertainty? The existing literature is divided on this issue: some argue that organizations deal best with uncertainty in the environment by reproducing it in the organization, whereas others contend that the orga nization should be protected from the environment. In this paper we study the case of a Wall Street investment bank that lost its entire office and trading technology in the terrorist attack of September 11 th. The traders survived, but were forced to relocate to a makeshift trading room in New Jersey. During the six months the traders spent outside New York City, they had to deal with fears and insecurities inside the company as well as outside it: anxiety about additional attacks, questions of professional identity, doubts about the future of the firm, and ambiguities about the future re-location of the trading room. The firm overcame these uncertainties by protecting the traders’ identities and their ability to engage in sensemaking. The organization held together through a leadership style that managed ambiguities and created the conditions for new solutions to emerge.Organizational responsiveness, uncertainty, september 11th

Impersonal efficiency and the dangers of a fully automated securities exchange

This report identifies impersonal efficiency as a driver of market automation during the past four decades, and speculates about the future problems it might pose. The ideology of impersonal efficiency is rooted in a mistrust of financial intermediaries such as floor brokers and specialists. Impersonal efficiency has guided the development of market automation towards transparency and impersonality, at the expense of human trading floors. The result has been an erosion of the informal norms and human judgment that characterize less anonymous markets. We call impersonal efficiency an ideology because we do not think that impersonal markets are always superior to markets built on social ties. This report traces the historical origins of this ideology, considers the problems it has already created in the recent Flash Crash of 2010, and asks what potential risks it might pose in the future

Genealogía social de una clase dirigente. Auge, reproducción y caída, 1700-1833

A través de la genealogía social y del análisis de redes, el trabajo reconstruye la evolución de un sector principal de la clase política y económica española, desde su emergencia a comienzos del siglo XVIII hasta su crisis final. En un primer momento, se observa la elevación al gobierno de la monarquía de una serie de grupos de parentesco, originarios del norte hidalgo de la península, en el contexto de la reordenación de las élites del reino que llevó a cabo Felipe V. Estos grupos se establecieron en las más elevadas posiciones de la administración real, el ejército y las finanzas de la corona. A continuación, se analizan los mecanismos que permitieron a estas redes reproducirse en lo más alto de la clase dirigente a lo largo de todo el siglo. Por último, se observa la desestabilización y el desclasamiento que sufrieron estos grupos con la crisis de la  monarquía, desde el reinado de Carlos IV hasta la primera guerra carlista

Performative Work: Bridging Performativity and Institutional Theory in the Responsible Investment Field

Callon’s performativity thesis has illuminated how economic theories and calculative devices shape markets, but has been challenged for its neglect of the organizational, institutional and political context. Our seven-year qualitative study of a large financial data company found that the company’s initial attempt to change the responsible investment field through a performative approach failed because of the constraints posed by field practices and organizational norms on the design of the calculative device. However, the company was subsequently able to put in place another form of performativity by attending to the normative and regulative associations of the device. We theorize this route to performativity by proposing the concept of performative work, which designates the necessary institutional work to enable translation and the subsequent adoption of the device. We conclude by considering the implications of performative work for the performativity and the institutional work literatures