Experts in currency markets

Before I can start my empirical account of analysts in the currency markets, let me take a last preparatory step and develop a heuristic for conceptualizing this expert group. It is common to speak of experts as those having professional roles in modern society, who mediate between domains of knowledge production and domains of its application (law, politics, the economy, etc.). ¹ Thus, experts are needed because they supposedly bring knowledge to those who have to take complex decisions. The performativity thesis, as discussed in Chapter 2, adds a constructivist twist to this line of thought: for Michel Callon et al., experts mediate between economics and its ‘performation’; they thus constitute or, at least, alter the spheres where knowledge is ‘applied’. In the case of economic markets, the idea is that there exists a laboratory for the production of calculative devices (economics), and there exist economic actors, who can only survive because they are capable of calculating alternatives and outcomes. According to the strong version of Callon’s concept, this implies that market experts are ‘those mediators which bind economics to the economy’ (Callon 1998: 28; 2007b: 332). According to a weaker version, one might presume that the laboratory is situated somewhere in the markets and their immediate surroundings. Market experts, according to this latter version, could then belong to a group that Callon calls ‘economists in the wild’; ² these are producers of non-theoretical economic knowledge (double-entry book keeping, accounting, marketing, etc.), which serves various calculative purposes. The strong and the weak version of Callon’s conception both imply, however, that there is a constitutive bind between experts’ production of calculative devices and the existence of markets.