ABSTRACT
Professional financial practices are today extremely standardised. In most jurisdictions, financial regulation establishes the category of the 'qualified', 'sophisticated' or simply 'professional' investor, defined by its command of a shared corpus of financial methodology and thanks to its material capacity to apply it. Participant observation research enables the contradictions, ambiguities and the often-fragmented nature of reasoning and justifications of everyday practices to be brought to light. The meaning and the legitimacy of professional practices in the financial industry do not function in isolation, but rather operate within this circulation, which must be understood in terms of its history and the global space it contributes towards producing. The global expansion of professional financial practices, with their financial, political and moral imaginaries, occurs together with more or less organised or developed contestations. These imaginaries have been developed, notably owing to changes in legislation, in macro-economic regulation, and in university settings since the end of the Second World War.
