"Narrative Authority:Rethinking Speculation and the Construction of Economic Expertise"

Accounting and Management Control

Speaker: Stefan Leins (University of Konstans, Germany)

Video conferencing

Abstract:

Understanding and anticipating market movements plays a critical role in current
capitalist activity. Through the assessment of the present and the engagement in
the unknowable future, !nancial-market participants create !nancial opportunities.
At the heart of this process is the work of experts who claim to provide ‘thorough
analyses’ of economic trends and market movements. In this article, I illustrate how
analysts – a powerful guild of economic experts – capitalise on ‘feeling’,
individualised strategies and storytelling to come up with explanatory narratives
about possible future market scenarios. In doing so, I build upon the notion of
speculation as a practice that is grounded in imagination and show that
narrativization of such futured-oriented images is a vital – yet often neglected –
process: it allows to treat the unknowable as if it was anticipatable, uncertainty as if
it was calculable risk, and thus speculation as if it was ‘investment’.