Useful Information: Exchanges, Information Technologies, and the Mediation of Power

• In Event: 2124 - Economic Sociology: Maintaining Markets

Abstract

One of the core features of exchanges is that they utilize wide-ranging technological systems to gather and centralize information for the use of market actors. This paper asks how such information technology systems are created and implemented, taking as its empirical focus the aggregation of two types of information—price quotations and crop statistics—on two major commodity exchanges of the post-bellum United States—the Chicago Board of Trade and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. My findings show how the two exchanges occupied unique positions of power and influence within their price quotation and crop statistic systems, resulting in them bringing opposed types of information to their markets. I trace these differences to three socio-technical features of these systems themselves: network geometry, direction(s) in which information moves, and resources and expertise required by central information hubs. This suggests that technological systems themselves differentially distribute power and resources among actors by virtue of their operation, in addition to the power that various actors in the system (e.g., exchanges, telegraph companies, states) bring to bear on their construction. I make the related theoretical suggestions that scholars of market information should pay closer attention to a technology’s function and functioning. With regard to the first, I offer a typology of market technologies—executive, informative, and interpretive—that highlights each type’s distinct functions and social requirements. Addressing the functioning of technology, I invoke “usefulness” as a feature of information. The concept of usefulness underpins a broader perspective that theorizes the relation between the information technologies which provide information to the market and the market devices which facilitate its interpretation.

Author

• David L. Pinzur, University of California-San Diego