Professor Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh)
The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge
This article examines the role in the current credit crisis of "evaluation cultures" (shared beliefs, practices, ways of calculating, and technical systems that are employed when market participants evaluate financial instruments) and "metadevices" (relatively durable configurations of social relations and technical systems, such as the "canonical mechanism," largely identified by Carruthers and Stinchcombe, and the credit ratings system). Employing documentary sources and a set of 55 predominantly oral-history interviews, the article presents a historical sociology of the two categories of financial instrument crucial to the crisis (ABSs, asset-backed securities, and CDOs, collateralized debt obligations), and in particular discusses the evaluation of and the role played by a fateful concatenation of the two, ABS CDOs.
