Fabian Muniesa

fabian.muniesa [at] mines-paristech.fr

+33.1.40.51.92.88 (office phone) / +33.1.43.54.56.28 (office fax)

CSI, Ecole des Mines de Paris, 60 bd St-Michel, 75272 Paris cedex 06 FRANCE

Welcome to my personal homepage. My professional profile at the CSI website is here (in French) and here (in English). You will find a PDF version of my CV here (and you can see how I look like here or here).

In this webpage you can find access to some publications and further focus on some research areas.

I am a researcher at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI), within Mines ParisTech (formerly Ecole des Mines de Paris). I am also an external faculty affiliate at the Center on Organizational Innovation at Columbia University. I have a degree in sociology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. I also followed there an MSc program (at the Departamento de Cambio Social). I joined the social sciences laboratory at France Télécom R&D in Paris (formerly Centre National d'Etudes des Télécommunications) in 1999 as a PhD student. I defended my PhD thesis at the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 2003, and joined the Department of Information Systems at the London School of Economics for a post-doctoral research fellowship. Subsequently, I joined the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation with an international grant from the Ville de Paris. My current, permanent position is of "chargé de recherche" (researcher) at the Ecole des Mines de Paris. My main teaching activity is at the Ecole des Mines de Paris, where I teach a course on the sociology of markets (course S9525) for the third year students of the engineering programme. I am involved in other teaching activities, which include the ISIGE's master programme in environmental engineering and management and the "mapping controversies" course, also at the Ecole des Mines de Paris (course C9301). Other teaching collaborations include special-purpose seminars such as the Organizing Agents and Institutions PhD Course at the Copenhagen Business School or the MSc in Comparative Law, Economics and Finance at the International University College of Turin. I also act as a co-supervisor for a number of PhD candidates at the CSI, and I co-direct the CSI research workshop.

My primary research fields are science and technology studies and economic sociology. Most of my earlier focus is on the social studies of finance. My main research topics in this area are trading technologies and the automation of financial markets. This includes work on the automation of the Paris Bourse (the main topic of my PhD dissertation), on trading room telephony and on back-office management. My work in this area primarily aims at analysing the role of technical devices in the shaping of markets and at contributing to an empirical, pragmatist approach to the study of calculation. I am also interested in the sociology of economics, and in the study of economic experimental practices. My research interests also include the sociology of quantification, cultures of performance and transparency in management, the sociology of testing and the social studies of architecture. Further research projects includes one, in preparation, on performativity in the pedagogy of business.

If you are interested in the social studies of finance you may want to visit the website of the Association d'études sociales de la finance, a French academic society wich I presided for its first two years of existence. The website contains a useful set of links on research resources and financial markets. You may also want to register at the Social Studies of Finance Network international mailing list or visit the Social Studies of Finance website maintained by the University of Edinburgh. Check also the finance-related panels at the annual conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science. I've co-edited two journal special issues on the social studies of finance (in French): one in 2000 for Politix (available here) and another in 2003 for Réseaux (available here). I am currently writting a book on the anthropology of finance (in French). My overall position in the field is summarized in "The description of financial objects", a very brief call for a material, semiotic approach to the study of finance.

My own contribution to the field is mostly coming from my doctoral work on the automation of the Paris Bourse. Some aspects of this work have been elaborated in several papers: in "Contenir le marché", for instance, I provide a sociological analysis of the implementation of an electronic trading system at the Paris Bourse, and in "Un robot walrasien" I focus on how this technology is meant to achieve an idea of accuracy in the price discovery process. I use this material in "Market technologies and the pragmatics of prices" in order to elaborate a pragmatist, materialist theory of prices, based on C. S. Peirce's theory of signs. I look at the topic of anonymity, transparency and communication technologies in trading rooms in "Trading-room telephones and the identification of counterparts" (an analysis of the use of telephones in trading rooms) and in "Economies through transparency" (a co-authored essay on the politics of transparency in financial markets, corporate life and economic regulation).

I have been involved in a number of initiatives on the topic of the shaping of markets that are bringing together an interesting research agenda at the crossroad of science and technology studies, economic sociology, management sciences and economics. The annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science in 2004 (Paris) included three interelated sessions on "Economic experiments", "Social and consumer sciences shaping market(-ing) practices" and "The performativities of economics" (programme available here), that were at the origins of the Market Devices and Do Economists Make Markets? book projects. Several colloquium tracks at the annual meeting of the European Group for Organization Studies or the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics have also hosted a number of discussions on topics such as performativity, innovation, market technologies, path-dependence and marketing.

My latest contributions to the topic of the performativity of economics are "La performativité des sciences économiques" (a paper prepared with Michel Callon for a volume on economic sociology forthcoming at PUF) and "The problem with economics: naturalism, critique and performativity" (an anthropological reflexion on naturalism in economic thought, initially prepared for the 2006 Colloque de Cerisy). My interest in performativity is connected to my interest in the sociology of testing (latest work in this area consists in an ethnography of perfume testing, in collaboration with Anne-Sophie Trébuchet-Breitwiller).

In a new research projet titled "CASEFORM" I engage into an exploration of the performative aspects of business education, with special attention to the case method of instruction in business administration (funding pending).

I am currently working, together with Dominique Linhardt, on an exploration of some aspects of the implementation of the LOLF in France. The research project , titled "PRAGMALOLF", was funded by the ANR. Keywords such as "transparency" and "performance" are associated with this ambitious reform of public management and public finance in France. Our research project is particularly interested in the development of performance indicators whose aim is to account quantitatively for the shape and scope of public action. In "At stake with implementation: trials of explicitness in the description of the state" we use material from this research to develop the potentials of a pragmatist approach to the study of the state.

Issues of transparency and quantification are also at the center of ATACD, a project for the development of scholarly exchange around topics such as the cultures of quantification and network analysis. Quantitative analytical and visualization tools are also important in current developments at the CSI on the topic of "mapping controversies".

Sustainability in architectural and urban projects serves as a topic for a set of ongoing collaborations with a group of sociologists and architects (mainly in Spain), focused on the development of innovations in the context of architectural pedagogy. I've been involved in some of these collaborations, especially at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid and the Universidad de Alicante, in close collaboration with colleagues Emilio Luque and Izaskun Chinchilla. Some references about these experiments can be traced through here, here, here and here.