Perception at Work: Attention as a Perception-based Mechanism of Global Collective Integration

• In Event: 359 - Regular Session. Economic Sociology 3

Abstract

This paper looks at a globally dispersed collective, that of traders in the largest (daily turnover) and most liquid financial market. Traders in such markets are not part of a common organization to which they all belong. A global market is a messy, swarm-like place; this may lead to the economic model of a market as a conglomerate of atomistic actors ruled by self-interest that simply adjust to price signals in a process of “tatonnement.” However, empirically, participants in these unbounded collectives conform to a particular form of behavior, they have their eyes glued to their six and more trading screens, or in other words, they use perception to observe and understand the signals on screen, and on that basis, to engage in transaction. This paper theorized this sort of perception in terms of a regime of coercive attention, and the resulting form of global integration as a form of attentional integration. Thus while solidarity, hierarchy, or relational mechanisms of integration are not in place in global markets, attentional integration—enabled and mediated by computer screens—connects participants on a cognitive level, leading to shared awareness, consciousness and narrations of events, but not to shared or identical response transactions. The paper connects these findings to a particular mode of cognitive-emotional processing whose main advantage is speed and a relatively limitless capacity for taking into account information. It asks to what degree attentional integration is a general mechanism at work in media-based globalized societies.

Author

• Karin D. Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago