ABSTRACT

While shares arguably are central objects in the financial industries, our empirical work suggests that there is no one single identity for these objects (see Winroth et al. 2010). Rather, shares are regularly qualified (Callon et al. 2002) as exchange objects on markets, as investment objects in portfolios, as knowledge objects in analyses, etc. That is, the identity of a share varies with the situation in which it is enacted. With the rise of investment banks in the financial industries (see Morrison and Wilhelm 2007), several such alternative versions of shares are actively being produced by experts working within the same organization, e.g. stockbrokers, stock traders and analysts. While these expert groups thus construct different share identities, they are typically able to cooperate and coordínate their various activities involving shares. In this sense, shares can be seen to work as boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989), being ‘plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints … yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites' (ibid.: 393).