New Perspectives on Emotions in Finance: The Sociology of Confidence, Fear and Betrayal

摘要

This volume is third in a series of the Emotions Network within the European Sociological Association, edited by the economic sociologist Jocelyn Pixley. Contributors to this volume use and modify sociological or social anthropological concepts to demonstrate the links between emotions and behavior, with a focus on the most recent financial crisis. Together with insights from economic psychology, this volume suggests that insights from economic sociology should be taken seriously in any model that claims to be contemporary. This is nothing new, per se; however, when it comes to hard-core finance, not much attention has been paid to the sociological underpinnings of trading and hedging. This volume tries to fill this gap by linking historical theories of money and emotions, analyzing the incentive structure behind traders and bankers by looking at organizational structures in the financial industry, inspecting the fragility of trust underpinning money circulation between financial institutions and throwing light on how investors have come to terms with the obvious fraud leading up to the financial crisis. In addition, cultural aspects are studied from narratives of prisoners of war camps in Japan, where different trading mechanisms established themselves depending on the origin of the majority of the prisoners in a given camp. Plus, a European perspective on the financial crisis is given.