Conclusion

The market “flow” refers to these forwarded features as well as the aggregate positions and accounts that circle the globe while changing continuously with activities and events.

A flow “architecture” refers to the support systems of these flows, which I take to be the time-zone-specific trading floor settings with their global reflex systems. The global reflex systems provide for the market’s unity and movement across space. They also suggest a form of coordination of global fields that is to be distinguished from spatially embedded network structures. As the above examples show, the market’s movement across the globe has an accomplished sense; it cannot be detached from the activities of market participants who sustain the market in a particular time zone and then “compute” and discursively summarize a market’s features over time zone intervals as they forward these features to the next time zone. By the same token, participants provide for the continuation of global markets, but their activities are not the focus of this chapter. Also left unconsidered, given the limits of this chapter, are the activities of the information and service provider firms that develop and service the global reflex systems and assume much of the apresentation function.

Acknowledgements

I am heavily indebted to the managers, traders, salespersons, and analysts whose activities I studied together with Urs Bruegger, my co-author on other papers, and who so generously shared with us the information we collected. Research for this chapter is supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Notes

1 For a more general use of the term “architecture” in relation to market institutions approached from the angle of a theory of fields see Fligstein (2001).

2 The study is based on ethnographic research conducted from 1997 on the trading floor of a major global investment bank in Zurich and in several other banks.

For a description of this research, see Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger (2002a). See also Bruegger (1999) for an extensive description of currency trading in all its aspects.

3 These figures were reported in the New York Times, Sunday, 8 September 2002 (see Barringer 2002).

4 As Harvey has argued (1989: 239-59), increasing time-compression is a characteristic of the whole process of modernity and of post-industrialization. A similar argument had been advanced by McLuhan (1964: 358), who proposed that electricity establishes a global network of communication that enables us to apprehend and experience media-transmitted events nearly simultaneously, as in a common central nervous system. To date, however, few media events are “simultaneously” transmitted across time zones, and media content is adapted to local cultures and locally reinterpreted. We argue that many other mechanisms and infrastructures and in fact a secondary economy of information collection and transmission need to be in place to create a global social form.

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