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Inspired by Austin's conceptualisation of utterances as performative, that is, they do things rat... more Inspired by Austin's conceptualisation of utterances as performative, that is, they do things rather than merely represent, research has shown how scientific theories can become performative in financial markets. Research also shows that brokerage and investment work is as much about using everyday knowledge of markets as it is about performing scientific theories. We investigate whether and how this knowledge or what Swedberg calls 'folk economics' can also be performative. We focus on Borsa Istanbul, an emerging market where market actors perform what we call 'the American Spirit'a ubiquitous folk theory that frames and plots the Turkish market as one that moves in tandem with American and other developed marketsand in the process become better market forecasters. Our findings have implications for the study of folk economics and performativity in global economy and finance.

We compare and contrast the UK and China as maximum variation cases for understanding long energy... more We compare and contrast the UK and China as maximum variation cases for understanding long energy transitions from the state and the firm perspectives. We present case histories and corpus-based computer-assisted textual analyses on the long energy transitions in both countries. With these, we explore and explain how and why energy supply firms respond the way they do to the institutional ambiguities and complexities that characterize the long energy transitions in each case. Our findings demonstrate that a centrally coordinated and imposed approach by the state can generate institutional clarity in long energy transitions, which is quickly seized on by firms striving to preserve and increase their resources and influence. Such clarity and transition processes lose momentum owing to the perennial trilemma of energy affordability, security and sustainability. Market-based mechanisms to trigger and sustain long energy transitions, complemented with focused and continuous state interventions (e.g. incentives, taxation), provide a more effective and accountable institutional framework for the state and energy firms to deal with the energy trilemma. Irrespective of the logic of the type of economy that manifests the backdrop for any long energy transition process, institutional ambiguity and complexity never disappear completely, owing to both the energy trilemma and the institutional multiplicities.

Papers by Emre Tarım

The Anthropocene, as a geological epoch, has come to be defined in terms of the variability withi... more The Anthropocene, as a geological epoch, has come to be defined in terms of the variability within the Earth System’s operations as measured through various markers such as surface temperatures and CO2 emissions. These variations are generated by human activity, characterised by catastrophic processes and outcomes, and beyond any previous natural variability. This paper focuses on how modern finance theory and practice respond to one of the overflows that it has helped generate – namely, adverse anthropogenic effects such as climate change and soil degradation. Although modern finance theory and practice are capable of generating alternative socio-technical arrangements such as socially responsible investing and abatement markets to alleviate such adverse effects, these alternatives, for the very fact of their embeddedness in the financialised form of thermo-industrial capitalism, are prone to suffer from what some scholars describe as capitalism’s creative self-destruction.

Editions, Oct 2016

Istanbul's place in the global financial system has become regionally prominent as Turkey has ope... more Istanbul's place in the global financial system has become regionally prominent as Turkey has opened up to a globalizing economy since the 1980s. The AKP government now wants to not only entrench Istanbul's status as an attractive emerging market but also make Istanbul a globally important financial services centre. For this, a project of reforms, initiatives and building work has recently been put in motion. The article contextualizes this project by looking at the politics, economy and markets nexus in Turkey since the 1980s. It then reviews the project's progress in various domains and comments on its future by taking cues from recent political turns in the AKP leadership concerning economy and financial system.

in Barbara Czarniawska and Orvar Löfgren (Eds) Coping with excess: How organizations, communities and individuals manage overflows, pp 81-98 / Edwar Elgar, Dec 27, 2013

In this chapter, I describe the role of storytelling as a framing device for helping to manage in... more In this chapter, I describe the role of storytelling as a framing device for helping to manage information flows in financial markets. In doing so, I draw on Michel Callon’s conceptual discussion of the importance of framing to the success of market-based exchange relationships. Callon has argued that frames imposed on phenomena and their relationships can disentangle things and render them calculable. To summarize his arguments, I begin with Callon’s discussion on framing in financial markets (1998b, 1999), in order to highlight the neglected role of storytelling in the framing of market phenomena and overflow management in financial markets. I then take this theoretical conversation with Callon to Istanbul, where I have conducted fieldwork research on the ways in which investors and brokerage firms have made sense of financial markets. I thereby demonstrate how storytelling has served to manage flows of information by generating and maintaining shared frames and interpretive templates (Czarniawska, 2008), and how these frames were subjected to occasional overflows. Callon has suggested that a market is a coordination device by which individuals can enter and leave the economic exchange as strangers (1998b, 1999). Frames, a notion Callon borrowed from Goffman (1974), can be seen as brackets or stabilizing devices which create ‘a clear and precise boundary’ (Callon, 1999: 187) among connections to be considered, and connections which can be ignored by actors in their calculations on market exchanges.

Book available at http://www.keele.ac.uk/journal-globalfaultlines/publications/geziReflections.pdf, Sep 2013

A very short essay on the Turkish government's and its supporters' discourses on the link betwe... more A very short essay on the Turkish government's and its supporters' discourses on the link between foreign investors and recent social protests in Turkey (written in early June 2013)

In this paper, I discuss how a situated cognition perspective can reveal the socially constructed... more In this paper, I discuss how a situated cognition perspective can reveal the socially constructed nature of seemingly psychological heuristics and errors in market actors’ judgements and decisions in financial markets. In doing so, I present a complementary approach to the heuristics and biases research in psychology and behavioural finance. More specifically, I draw on the narrative mode of knowing and explanation in real market settings as a framework to understand the content and the process of socially constructed knowledge in financial markets. Here, narratives of market actors and their underlying frames and causal schemas are assumed to function as a judgement heuristic in processing information flows. I then discuss an application of this approach to a sample of brokerage firms and investment advisers serving retail investors in the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE). My findings focus on a shared frame and the associated causal schema about the ISE and global financial markets. This observed interpretive model underpinned my interlocutors’ narrative judgements and forecasts about the ISE's movements and constituted a form of representativeness heuristic and anchoring.

Sociological Research Online, Nov 2013

This book is a bold attempt to generate an integrated theory of social change and social order in... more This book is a bold attempt to generate an integrated theory of social change and social order in circumscribed social arenas. Fligstein and McAdam see many issues in contemporary sociological theories. What are these? At a broader level, they do not approve of what one could call the sociological theories of helplessness...

Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, Jun 1, 2012

This article presents a sociological–narrative approach to studying sensemaking and legitimation ... more This article presents a sociological–narrative approach to studying sensemaking and legitimation in financial markets, and applies this to the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE). The sociological–narrative approach taken here differs from standard economics and psychology theories on market behaviour and outcomes. It draws on the existing literature on sensemaking and legitimation in organizations and financial markets, and postulates that financial markets, as realms of meaning and practice, are prone to be structurally incoherent. The incoherence is argued to stem from positionality of market actors. By positionality, I refer to an actor’s position in division of labour in market organizations and to an investor’s place in market-specific investor classifications. These imply different epistemic resources at the disposal of different actors, and hence structural incoherence in meanings and practices in financial markets. The article demonstrates an example of this incoherence in the case of the ISE by looking at sensemaking and legitimation stories and practices of brokers, investment analysts, media figures and regulators in this market.

Susan Long and Burkard Sievers (eds) Towards a Socioanalysis of Money, Finance and Capitalism: Beneath the Surface of the Financial Industry, 2012

This chapter discusses research on how fund managers cope with the uncertainty of the past, prese... more This chapter discusses research on how fund managers cope with the uncertainty of the past, present and future of markets and their investments by observation and narration of contents available on scopic market screens (Knorr Cetina and Preda 2007). I will argue that “evaluative cultures” in both public and private spheres help shape the narratives used to make sense of market information on the scopic market screens.

Competition & Change, Dec 2010

This paper reviews the quarter century of the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) since its opening in ... more This paper reviews the quarter century of the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) since its opening in 1985. The review focuses on the ISE's articulation to the global financial system in two different macro-economic modalities in the 1990s and the new millennium and its repercussions for domestic retail investors (DRIs). It is argued that macroeconomic business cycles and inadequate institutionalization of the ISE in the 1990s and early 2000s have generated a domestic investor profile which is short-termist, opportunistic and relatively ill-informed about the markets in general and fundamentals of equity investment in particular. The post-2000–01 crisis period has structurally transformed the Turkish economy and boosted the ISE's performance with a new wave of global institutional investor interest. Despite these positive changes, the domestic retail investor profile of the 1990s has largel y remained the same in the present decade but with positive aggregate market returns for domestic investors and better and more democratic access to market information and knowledge.

Sociological Research Online, Nov 30, 2009

In this article, I follow the lead opened up by Tilly (1999, 2002) who was interested in people's... more In this article, I follow the lead opened up by Tilly (1999, 2002) who was interested in people's storytelling. I do so by looking at sense-making and the legitimacy narratives of market actors in the Istanbul Stock Exchange. Tilly (2006, 2008) himself walked the narrative path and investigated Why and how people give reasons and how people attribute Credit and Blame to other's actions. These books provide insights into people's storytelling in the everyday situations of the home, courtrooms, hospitals, and so on. Nevertheless, Tilly's faith in the prevalence of technical accounts as modes of explanation in intra and inter organisational settings, and superior stories as mode of communication between expert givers and non-specialized receivers, seems to ignore informational uncertainties, intra and inter organisational hierarchies and conflicts pertinent to organisations. It is these factors that push standard stories (Tilly, 1999) into the forefront at the expense of technical stories within the story exchanges of market actors. I demonstrate this by presenting a sample of story exchanges from the Istanbul Stock Exchange under situations of informational uncertainties and organisational conflicts.

Sociological Research Online, Jan 20, 2009

Cover of book Galit Ailon illustrates the significance of'otherness' in identity construction in ... more Cover of book Galit Ailon illustrates the significance of'otherness' in identity construction in global work environments. Drawing on a year-long participatory fieldwork between 1998 and 1999 in an Israeli software company, pseudo-named Isrocom that provides telecommunication solutions all over the world, Ailon demonstrates how Isrocoms employees socially (re) construct their identities in the face of stimulus coming from the merger partners, the pseudo-named Amerotech.

Financial markets have become a central aspect of our daily lives due to deregulation and liberal... more Financial markets have become a central aspect of our daily lives due to deregulation and liberalization in national economies and financial and technological innovation in the last few decades. The amounts traded in financial markets daily, monthly, annually, are sometimes at par and sometimes much bigger than the GDPs of the five biggest economies in the world. The immense growth in financial markets affects our daily lives not only during times of crises but also on a daily basis because of their ups and downs. A phenomenon sopervasive in daily life has brought great interest from different fields of social sciences. This paper looks at how the social sciences study financial markets by making a very short survey of Financial Economics, Behavioural Finance, Sociology and International Political Economy in an attempt to comment on disciplinary boundaries

Book Reviews by Emre Tarım

Published in Symbolic Interaction November 2015 DOI: 10.1002/symb.187 In recent decades, ethnog... more Published in Symbolic Interaction November 2015 DOI: 10.1002/symb.187

In recent decades, ethnography has become a methodology employed by scholars in various social science fields and applied areas of education and medicine beyond its birth discipline of anthropology. Consequently, it has gained quite a centre stage in social science discussions. Applied Ethnography by Pelto (2013) unsurprisingly does not dedicate significant discussion to current debates surrounding ethnography. Written as a practical guide for field researchers for “applied studies in health, education, agriculture, geography and other topical areas” (Pelto 2013: 7), Applied Ethnography provides the reader a comprehensive yet scientifically informed account of “how-tos, dos and don’ts” in field research over 19 chapters. Pelto sets the tone of scientifically informed pragmatism in applied ethnography in the beginning of the book: “our work is a scientific attempt to add to useful knowledge...mainly intended for use in a specific, delimited location…perhaps in only one institutional setting. That is still science; it is still intended to add useful knowledge [, which] is practically never a final product. Additional research will suggest modifications in “what we know”” (Pelto 2013: 7).