ABSTRACT
Finance can be used as an observatory of society, because social outcomes, which are more fuzzy and mitigated elsewhere, are much more contrasted. Therefore, finance can help to discover, test and prove the underlying social mechanisms producing those outcomes. For instance, the tremendous level of inequality in financial outcomes, whether it be profits, bonuses, wages, or even prestige and popularity, enables us to establish inequality-generation mechanisms. Finance is good material for understanding winner-take-all or winner-take-almost-all phenomena, market arm's length ties and network embeddedness, market freedom and organisational interdependence. New rationalities, new forms of calculation, new ways of accounting activity, risk and profit, and new forms of incentives are experimented on first in finance and progressively spread out of their original sector. Therefore, there are very good reasons for social scientists to venture into the study of finance and not to leave this domain of social life to its traditional academic disciplines, such as economics and academic finance.
