Karin Knorr Cetina
· Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor (Jointly Appointed in Anthropology)University of Chicago · History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Active 1983–2024
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About
Karin Knorr Cetina is a Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor, jointly appointed in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include financial markets, knowledge and information, globalization, theory, and culture. She is engaged in projects such as a book on global foreign exchange markets and on post-social knowledge societies. Her work continues to explore the information architecture of financial markets, their 'global microstructures'—the social and cultural forms these markets take—and trader markets in contrast to producer markets. She studies globalization from a microsociological perspective using ethnographic methods and maintains an interest in laboratory studies, focusing on science, technology, and information at sites of knowledge production, particularly in the life sciences and particle physics. Her scholarly contributions include examining the role of material, epistemic, consumer, and artificial objects in social life, with current dissertation projects exploring topics like global debt relief technologies, software systems within international organizations, and the conception and use of social robots across different countries.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Geography
- Biology
- Art
- Philosophy
- Ecology
- Epistemology
Selected publications
Elsevier eBooks · 2015-01-01 · 62 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingSocial ritual and relative truth in natural language
2014-08-21 · 23 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingWhat is a Financial Market? Global Markets as Media-Institutional Forms
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015-11-01 · 18 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter presents the contours of a media-institutional model of contemporary financial markets based on the following observations: first, media technologies are now constitutive of these markets; second, the institution of the market resides in substantial part in the algorithms, temporal and dramaturgical resources encoded in scopic media; and third, the media-institutional market leads to a level of attentional integration as a core dimension of the sociology of these markets. T…
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies · 2015-03-24 · 16 citations
other1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Finance has evolved historically as a distinctive system of activities. If production, consumption, and distribution or exchange – the market interface between production and consumption – are three different spheres of economic activity, then finance is a fourth sphere. It fulfills a specialized function: that of supplying and controlling credit. In a capitalist economy, credit needs to be obtained before a production cycle can start; credit, Keynes argued, is prior to production. Only…
Professional Epistemic Cultures
2015-01-01 · 15 citations
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 178 shared
Jörg Rössel
University of Zurich
- 178 shared
Stefan Hinz
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- 178 shared
Sabine Adam
Walter de Gruyter (Germany)
- 155 shared
Werner Preisendörfer
University of Kaiserslautern
- 153 shared
Ilona Nunner-Winkler
Walter de Gruyter (Germany)
- 151 shared
Hendrik Bielefeld
University of Kaiserslautern
- 133 shared
Wolfgang Schmidt
Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Academia Sinica
- 123 shared
Hartmann Tyrell
Awards & honors
- Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor
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