University of Warwick Job Search: Research Fellow in OHRM
December 3, 2021
[link to the job post at WBS’s site: University of Warwick Job Search: Research Fellow in OHRM (104809-1221) (wcn.co.uk)]
We are seeking to recruit a PostDoctoral Research Fellow to work on a research project funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowship scheme on the theme of
“Financially redesigning the Anthropocene:
Investigating tools, data, and practices for climate risks and targets”
The four-year project is led by Dr. Katharina Dittrich and located within the Organisation and HRM (OHRM) group at Warwick Business School. It currently involves the principal investigator, a research fellow and a PhD student. The newly recruited fellow will join as the fourth team member.
This is an exciting opportunity to
- Conduct research on a pressing societal concern (climate change) and develop real-world impact
- Participate in the emerging design of the research and its outputs
- Work with a team of highly committed and motivated researchers
- Be part of a thriving community of organisational researchers working with practice, process and institutional approaches
- Develop your academic career and network
The project
Capital allocation is a powerful way of distributing agency – both diverting and directing it. The consequences of this feature of financial markets have never been limited to only direct market participants but, of course, stretch out into virtually all spheres of societies and environments. To a large extent, the global climate crisis is one of these consequences. This research project looks at the various finance-focused programmes that are currently pursued to manage the climate crisis as leveraging this feature of financial markets to redistribute – purposefully divert and direct – agency towards more sustainable economies and societies. These programmes could be described, in other words, as attempts to ‘financially re-design’ the Anthropocene.
This four-year academic research project, funded by the UK Research and Innovation Council and launched in October 2020, aims at tracing these attempts by focusing on one core challenge: the production of actionable data and analytics for climate risks and alignment targets which enable climate risk and impact management practices in the investment industry. While a lot of different high-level policy, NGO and industry programmes have recently been initiated, we are interested in how the proposed tools, data and manuals are actually implemented, used and combined in financial every-day practices. Through the practical integration of climate risk and impact programmes, we currently see an emerging, quickly evolving and still to-be-consolidated financial climate ‘knowledge infrastructure’, which draws on tools and data from an ecosystem of various actors. Four types of actors that are active in climate-related investment practices ‘on the ground’, and which we currently work with, are: institutional investors, investor networks, analytics and data providers, and NGOs. The project is international in scope, with a particular focus on the UK and Europe.
Following a qualitative research approach, we are a team of four researchers drawing on observations, interviews and documents to trace in real-time how those different organisations respond to and engage with climate-related financial risks and alignment targets through deploying and employing climate tools, data and practices. We have just completed the first round of data collection and analysis, and are now preparing for 2nd wave in which we will focus on three particular themes: the production, curation and use of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions data; the development of particular devices, such as portfolio temperature metrics; and the evolution of frameworks for science-based target setting. In addition, we will also expand data collection to additional research partners and sites.
More information about the project can be found here.
The position
This recruitment is for a full-time, 2.5 years fixed position. The anticipated starting date is February/ March 2022. If candidates live abroad, they will be required to move to the UK if the post is accepted.
As part of the project you will:
- Collect ethnographic data on the day-to-day activities of people in different organisations, through the use of observations, formal and informal interviews and the collection of documents. Data collection will likely involve a combination of online and face-to-face interactions. Participating organisations are located in the UK and in Europe, so some flexibility and willingness to travel is required.
- Participate in regular face-to-face or virtual team meetings to share insights from data collection and analysis.
- Contribute your insights and expertise to the evolving research design.
- Write or contribute to top academic publications.
- Attend and present research findings and papers at academic conferences, and contribute to the external visibility of the team and the department.
- Organise and deliver various impact activities aimed at disseminating research findings to project partners and other practitioners, including internal workshops with the organizations studied, targeted talks at practitioner conferences, conversations with policy-makers and practitioner-oriented reports & publications.
Requirements
The ideal candidate has a research background in Social studies of finance (SSF) and/ or Science and Technology Studies (STS) and/ or Sustainability/ Climate Change. Candidates should also have excellent skills and substantive experience with qualitative research (e.g., interviews, observations, ethnography). Experience with multi-sited or inter-organizational research sites would be advantageous.
We expect applicants to come from one of the following backgrounds or related disciplines.
- Organisation Studies, ideally with a practice and process perspective
- Accounting
- Sociology
- Anthropology
- Human Geography
Application
Candidates should provide their application form, a CV, list of publications and two selected papers, either published or unpublished. Informal enquiries to Katharina.dittrich@wbs.ac.uk are welcome.
Please submit your application here.
The Philosophy & Finance Network is hosting a terrific Zoom panel discussion of my book Taking the Floor. Four leading social scientists, Donald MacKenzie, Michael Barzelay, Katherine Chen, & Jose Ossandon, as well as my own sum-up of the book’s core message. Oct 13th, 4:00 PM UK time. https://uniroma1.zoom.us/j/83148274093
Two years after the book was published (and weeks after the paperback was released by Princeton), the event is particularly timely in that it speaks to multiple ongoing developments.
For instance, the threat posed by models & algorithms is now widely acknowledged thanks to Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism and the various Facebook and tech scandals. But the solutions are still the subject of much debate. Taking the Floor points to the use of models for the purpose of control – rather than for evaluation – as the core source of the problem, and specifically to people’s resistance to being mismanaged by an algorithm.
Also, the importance of face-to-face interaction at work is now much appreciated after two years of work-frorm-home. Yet the question of how to design spatial networks in offices to complement the digital tools used by employees remains unresolved. Taking the Floor explains how spatial networks in offices ought to change as the dominant digital tools evolve.
Finally, the shift to stress testing in the analysis of climate risk at institutions like the Bank of England entails an implicit acknowledgment of the limits of Value at Risk models in grappling with a radically uncertain future. Yet the world’s largest banks are all controlled by these outdated VaR models, and in fact, grew large in part thanks to them. The debate over alternatives to the current “VaR + megabank” regime on Wall Street (which brought to us the 08 crisis) is still in its infancy.
So… lots to talk about! The above is just a teaser for my own summary of the book; the discussants are by far the main act. I truly cannot wait to hear their take.
Hope to see you on Wed!
“Toward a sociology of climate risk” Online panel event Sept 7th, 2021, LSE Grantham Institute
September 2, 2021
Register for the event HERE
Ahead of the coming UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP26), this panel event is a call for social scientists and policy makers to take into account the social context in which climate risk modelling takes place.
Since the Paris Agreement of 2015, policy makers have called on the financial sector to address climate change. Central bankers have responded with efforts to model the financial impact of climate disruption — so-called “climate risk”— so as to prompt remedial action by investors and companies, as well as creating the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) in 2016 or the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) in 2017. Sociological studies of risk modelling, however, have established that the use of financial models for the purpose of estimating risk —whether Black-Scholes, Value at Risk, or the Gaussian Copula— is fraught with traps and blind spots that can derail the modeller’s original intent, leading to crises and economic losses. Such traps include unintended consequences, feedback loops, structural silos, and performative effects. Addressing climate risk thus calls for identifying potential traps in climate modelling, and considering what structural, organizational or policy remedies might be needed. Sociologists, alongside other social scientists such as organizational scholars, are uniquely equipped to fulfil this reflexive exercise.
The issues raised by climate risk, however, go well beyond technical accuracy. While quantifying the likely cost of climate disruption is practical for investors — because it translates the complex and uncertain prospect of climate disruption into economic dollars and pounds — such economization is bound to raise political and moral questions over how the burden of climate disruption is distributed. Debates about what to model are bound to spill over into controversies over whose interests are taken into account, raising questions over the governance regime of climate risk models. Sociologists are again ideally placed to bring these political and moral questions into the realm of climate risk modelling.
Given the above, our panel brings together several specialists in the emerging field of climate risk as well as economic sociology. The host, Rebecca Elliott, is Assistant Professor at LSE’s Department of Sociology. Elliott’s recent monograph, “Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States” documents the dramatic effects that climate risk representations such as flood maps have on housing, employment, and coastal communities — leading to protracted political disputes. Her work establishes that climate risk representations (e.g., financial models) are neither neutral nor purely technical in nature, highlighting their political and moral implications.
The first panellist, Nick Robins, is Professor of Practice at LSE’s Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and has long championed the integration of finance into climate policy. Robins leads the sustainable finance research theme. The focus of his work is on how to mobilise finance for climate action in ways that support a just transition, promoting the role of central banks and regulators in achieving sustainable development and investigating how the financial system can support the restoration of nature. Robins will discuss how climate risk became a legitimate topic within mainstream finance, as well as how the recent history how climate risk shapes how assessments are being thought of or done at the moment. For instance, what were the decision points where alternative histories and thus alternative versions of climate risk assessment could have emerged?
The second panellist, Emily Budgen, is Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge. She has previously worked on climate finance at the European Climate Foundation (ECF), where she developed technical knowledge of the field and supported research and action that leverages private financial tools to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Budgen’s presentation will focus on the various tools that have recently been released to measure alignment with the Paris Agreement, eg carbon alignment metrics: are the tools guiding us in the right direction? The question is of increasing importance as more and more organizations adopt these tools.
The third panellist, Tanya Fiedler, is a lecturer in the Discipline of Accounting at the University of Sidney Business School. Fiedler’s interests are concerned with the ways in which engineering, actuarial science and climate science integrate into work practices, business strategy and accounting. Her presentation will focus on the problems entailed in using climate projections for managing financial risk, including differences in scale and differences in focus. Fiedler will also explore several opportunities and design options to integrate climate and risk models.
The fourth panellist, Matthias Täger, is PhD candidate at the LSE’s Department of Environment and Geography and affiliated with the Grantham Institute. His dissertation examines the governance of the relationship between finance and climate, with a specific focus on the TCFD and NGFS. Täger will present a framework (jointly developed with Daniel Beunza) for the development of a sociology of climate risk, taking a micro-sociological approach with a particular focus on tools and models. This identifies three stages in the process of modelling of climate risk, locating existing sociological analyses within them. In the design stage an emphasis on usability can lead modellers to overlook less actionable but key variables. In the diffusion stage, modelling can fall prey to perverse incentives as its popularisation results in the abandonment of cultural norms of prudence. In the stage of implementation, modelling can end up fragmented by structural silos within the modelling organization.
A debate among the panellists will be moderated by Daniel Beunza, Associate Professor of Management at Bayes (formerly Cass) Business School of City, University of London. Beunza’s recent book, “Taking the Floor: Models, Morals and Management in a Wall Street Trading Room” considers the organisational challenges posed by financial model in a derivatives trading floor. His research has established the importance of the organisational context in which financial modelling takes place, both structural and cultural, and the need to actively manage such context to avoid modelling blind spots and moral disengagement.
The session will kick off with an introduction by Elliott, and continue with five-minute presentations by each of the panellists. This will be followed by a moderated debate led by Beunza, and by Q&A from the public, moderated by Elliott.
Among the questions to be addressed in the event, we highlight three. One is the extent to which climate risk models will mediate the outcomes of the upcoming COP26. Will they be a sideshow in an essentially political dispute, or will they prove a key factor with distinct influence, helping make transition and policy risks that lie ahead real? Put differently, how do political and calculative dynamics come together in shaping climate risk outcomes?
Second, what challenges arise when societies delegate responsibility for the climate emergency in risk modellers — that is, in unelected finance officials and executives? How should these risk specialists’ efforts be governed, and how to ensure that non-elite voices are included?
Finally, how can scholars and policy experts develop a better grasp of the nature and therefore the limits of climate risk assessment? What role does finance have or can have in the wider context of our climate emergency? What are the limits to a risk frame, and what alternative frames exist?
Taken together, we hope the panellists’ presentations and debate will stimulate a research and policy response to a key development — the integration of finance into climate policy, in the form of climate risk modelling. Models can harness the unique power of capital markets, but also derail them in disastrous ways if their social context is ignored. A sociology of climate risk will, we hope, contribute to bring about the former rather than the latter.
From Christian Borch
Ten years ago this day, US markets opened to a palpable sense of unease. Investors were concerned about the ongoing Greek debt crisis, which grew from the global financial meltdown in 2008.
At 2:32pm Eastern Daylight Time, what started as nervousness and hesitation collapsed into pure terror as US markets nosedived. In 36 minutes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 998.5 points – more than nine percent – in one of the largest and fastest same-day declines in the history of US markets. The greater part of this drop saw market values in the range of $1 trillion evaporate within five minutes.
As markets continued their free fall, trading was suspended in panic. When trading activity resumed, an equally remarkable and opposite phenomenon happened. Prices rebounded, and just half an hour later, US markets had recovered most of their losses.
Since all this happened in a blink, commentators have dubbed this astonishing event the “Flash Crash.” No solid estimates exist of specific investors’ gains and losses from the Flash Crash, but prices recovered quickly enough that the event had no demonstrable economic effects in the long term – unlike the 2008 global financial crisis and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
It might surprise some, however, that the Flash Crash had little to do with the European sovereign debt crisis itself. In fact, it was precipitated by a group of smaller, underestimated agents: fully automated, high-frequency trading algorithms. That afternoon in May, these algorithms entered an escalating feedback loop, their cascading orders triggering a brief but precipitous market crash.
The Flash Crash is a defining moment in the modern history of financial markets. It reveals the Janus face of present-day trading algorithms – algorithms can unleash great instability when tossed together, despite their reputation as impartial, rational actors. The Flash Crash also laid bare how little we know about the inner machinations of trading algorithms, as the confusion of US regulators investigating the phenomenon later showed.
In 2010, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a joint report arguing that a large sell order from Waddell & Reed Financial, a Kansas City-based asset management firm, had triggered unanticipated activity among high-frequency trading algorithms. The algorithms then engaged in a game of “hot potato,” swiftly buying and selling from one another in a downward spiral that caused the Flash Crash.
The CFTC–SEC explanation of the Flash Crash sparked controversy when it was released, and its findings have since been contested by academics and market observers. Years later, US regulators unexpectedly changed their tune when they identified the British trader Navinder Singh Sarao as the Flash Crash’s main culprit. Sarao had purportedly designed – out of his parents’ home in Hounslow in the outskirts of London – a set of high-frequency trading algorithms aimed at manipulating market prices, which ultimately caused the markets to crash. Sarao eventually pleaded guilty to charges of market manipulation, but experts remain divided on whether any individual’s manipulative algorithms can bring US markets to their knees. Are financial algorithms truly that powerful – or are markets penetrated by them inherently that fragile?
After the Flash Crash, regulatory authorities implemented “circuit breakers,” which halt trading if prices move too much too quickly, as their main line of defence. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck global markets in March this year, these circuit breakers kicked in to cushion the outbreak’s ripples in the market. But even circuit breakers – a triage rather than vaccination – have not deterred the several smaller flash crashes that have occurred since 2010.
Even though the Flash Crash occurred ten years ago, we are still in the dark about how algorithmic markets work and how to prevent their ills. One thing is clear, however: the algorithmic nature of contemporary financial markets renders them more vulnerable to crashes, which begs the question of whether we can prevent such sudden crashes when financial algorithms continue to operate in our markets.
In the past six years, colleagues and I have interviewed executives, traders, programmers, exchange officials, and regulators in the US and Europe to better understand how algorithms shape today’s financial markets. Through two research projects with high-frequency trading firms of all sizes and sorts, we have observed algorithmic traders at work and studied their daily operations, concerns, tasks, and overall cultures.
We have realized that individual firms with lax practices for development, testing, and monitoring algorithms face devastating risks. Take the example of Knight Capital, a major US trading firm that suffered a shattering algorithmic mishap in August 2012. The firm’s new software unexpectedly triggered dormant code, which generated orders that lost the company more than $460 million in just 45 minutes. Unable to recover from this mishap, Knight Capital was soon acquired by a competitor.
Though Knight Capital may seem an unlucky exception, a financial culture that does not support the rigorous use of financial algorithms risks markets themselves. Without a thorough understanding of their own algorithms, can firms avoid triggering devastating feedback loops once algorithmic interaction sets in? The cultures of algorithmic trading firms matter in designing more robust markets, and we need to better understand how these firms are organized, how they operate, and how their staff think and work. Crucially, we need to grasp their procedures for developing, testing, monitoring, and understanding trading algorithms long before their cascading effects begin.
There is good news, however – a small group of firms has developed organizational cultures that stress rigor at all levels of algorithmic design and trading. These firms strive to eliminate any negative effects their algorithms may have on markets, and they have developed an ethos built on ensuring market integrity in every respect.
This ethos involves establishing procedures to make sure financial algorithms cannot engage in manipulative behaviour. These firms obsess over bug detection as well as continuous monitoring and testing. They learn from the algorithmic incidents that inevitably occur, whether triggered internally or from outside their operations. Throughout, these firms expend massive, ongoing efforts to comprehend how and why their algorithms behave the way they do, alone and together with other algorithms.
Today, European regulators require some minimum testing and monitoring of firms’ trading algorithms. This is an important first step, but hardly a sufficient one if we wish to avoid a consistent stream of flash crashes. We need a more fundamental attention to the cultures of trading firms, and perhaps even a paradigm shift. After the 2008 financial crisis, many called for banks to implement a new corporate culture with fewer detrimental risk incentives, though little progress has since been made in that arena. Even so, the potential consequences of algorithmic spirals running amok suggest that we should not shy away from driving such change while we still can.
Firms whose cultures, business models, and algorithmic designs emphasize market integrity offer a way forward in ensuring the health and stability of financial markets. Avoiding future flash crashes and mastering the collective power of financial algorithms will require an industry-wide commitment to cultures of accountability, transparency, and integrity.
Our algorithms will settle for nothing less.
Christian Borch is Professor of Economic Sociology and Social Theory at the Copenhagen Business School and the PI of the ERC-funded AlgoFinance research project. His latest book is Social Avalanche: Crowds, Cities and Financial Markets (Cambridge UP, 2020).
Research seminar and ethnography workshop with Gary Alan Fine, FinWork Centre, June 11th
May 28, 2019
Financial Work Futures Research Centre Seminar & Workshop
“Dark Fun: The Cruelties of Hedonic Communities”
Professor Gary Alan Fine, Northwestern University
Tuesday 11th June 2019, 12:30PM – 1:30PM
Bush House (S) 3.01
Dear Colleague,
Please join us for the next FinWork Futures Research Seminar, by Professor Gary Fine from Northwestern University. Lunch will be provided.
Abstract: While fun is generally conceived as positive engagement and community building, we explore the linkage between fun and cruelty, suggesting that acts of violence and humiliation can be situated within hedonic experience. In this, we provide a meso-analysis of the occasions in which groups engage in activities that are widely judged to be disreputable and deviant, even if providing enjoyment and increasing group cohesion. By examining ethnographic observations of gang activity, bullying, hooliganism, political violence, and brutality in prison, we argue for the concept of “dark fun.” We focus on the role of collective effervescence, local group cultures, and moral ordering as contributing to dark fun. However, in considering fun and cruelty, we argue, following John Levi Martin, that the former is judged by first-person recognition and the latter through third-person analysis. The different perspectives of perpetrators and victims in the same situation suggest the challenge of interpreting a twined phenomenology, requiring different interpretive strategies for fun and cruelty.
Workshop – “How to Do Ethnographic Work in Organisations”
Tuesday 11th June, 3:00PM – 5:00PM
Bush House (S) 3.01
Professor Fine will also be running a workshop on the 11th of June, from 3:00 – 5:00pm in Bush House (S) 3.01. All are welcome to attend – this workshop should be of particular interest to PhD students who are going qualitative research.
In the current context of financialization, automation and political turbulence, the Social Studies of Finance holds a unique potential to illuminate contemporary economic and societal challenges. The classic research of MacKenzie, Callon, Knorr Cetina, Preda and Zaloom revealed the hidden relationships between the technical and the economic on Wall Street, but this work now needs to be critically broadened and reexamined against a context of political turmoil, insufficient financial reform, and the growing disruption posed by digital technologies.
Following my arrival at the Faculty of Management at Cass Business School this past September 2018, I am looking to hire an Assistant for the coming months to work with me in the Social Studies of Finance. The tasks entailed in the position include assistance in elaborating grant applications such as Leverhulme Fellowships, British Academy fellowships. It also entails assisting in assembling databases, organizing events, as well as communicating the findings of my research, including: (1) an ethnographic revisit of a Wall Street trading floor, (2) an analysis of the intermediary effects of securities analysts, (3) research in the growing field of responsible investment, including ESG factors and shareholder engagement, and (4) a grounded theory analysis of bank culture in the UK.
As part of the position, the candidate will come into contact with cutting-edge ideas in a vibrant academic field, meet world-leading academics, be part of field-building activities, and join in the excitement of dissecting and understanding financial capitalism from one of its global centers.
The candidate will ideally be a PhD student in sociology, management, or related discipline; be somewhat familiar with the sociology of finance literature as well as science studies and economic sociology, and based in London or near enough to be available to meet in person once every two weeks in my office at Cass Business School in Central London. Excellent writing skills are required. Strength in qualitative research methods is necessary. Good knowledge of economics and economic models (e.g., undergraduate courses in economics) would be a plus. The engagement is for five hours a week, at a City University Grade 5 Spine Point 33, which amounts to a rate of GBP 19.92 per hour.
The appointment is open-ended (subject to funding availability), starting in June 2019. To be considered, please send an email with a cover letter and CV to Daniel.beunza@city.ac.uk
“The Social Structure of Algorithmic Trading.” Christian Borch at Kings’ Financial Work Futures Research Centre
May 16, 2019
From Rita Samiolo
Financial Work Futures Research Centre Seminar: “The Social Structure of Algorithmic Trading”
Professor Christian Borch, Copenhagen Business SchoolWednesday 12th June 2019, 4:00PM – 5:30PM
Bush House (S) 3.01Dear colleague,
Please join us for the next FinWork Futures Research Seminar, by Professor Christian Borch from Copenhagen Business School. It will take place on the 12th of June, 4pm in BH (S) 3.01.
Abstract: The rise of new economic sociology in the early 1980s owed much of it success to advances in social network theory. Pioneering work, such as that of Wayne Baker, demonstrated that even the ‘engine room’ of financial markets – the so-called trading floors on which traders were competing with one another – were embedded in social networks. Interestingly, however, the traditional face-to-face networks of financial exchanges only play a marginal role in present-day markets, in which human traders are increasingly being replaced by fully automated algorithms. This prompts the question of whether the type of social network theory that has figured centrally within new economic sociology remains analytical useful when, in fact, it is fully automated algorithms which are behind the bulk of today’s trading. In other words, is social network theory still a potent framework with which to understand financial trading when such trading takes place in an increasingly non-human setting? In this paper, we update social network theory for an algorithmic, non-human market environment. By combining qualitative fieldwork and agent-based modelling, we examine the types of networks that exist between algorithmic market participants. Extending insights by Karin Knorr Cetina, Alex Preda and Donald MacKenzie, we suggest that algorithms engage in social relationships with one another and that social network theory is helpful in shedding light on this social structure of algorithmic trading.
Bio note: Christian Borch is Professor of Economic Sociology and Social Theory at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Christian’s current work focuses on algorithmic finance and he is the PI of an ERC-funded research project on this topic. His next book is titled Social Avalanche: Crowds, Cities and Financial Markets (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).
Join the PhD Program at Cass Business School and study with renown Social Studies of Finance scholars
February 18, 2019
With its central London location, unique research culture, and scholars like Paula Jarzabkowski, Hugh Wilmott, Jean-Pascal Gold, Andre Spicer or myself (Daniel Beunza) the PhD program at Cass Business School offers a unique opportunity to join the Social Studies of Finance community at one of Europe’s leading business schools.
With its young, international, and highly cohesive Management faculty, the PhD program at Cass offers candidates a wealth of opportunities to present in seminars, engage faculty, and join numerous social events. At Cass, PhD candidates will also be able to conduct rigorous research in Management and do fieldwork in the City of London. Located barely ten minutes away from the Bank of England, Cass is connected to the London Stock Exchange, the Financial Conduct Authority, and the Banking Standards Board through its wide network of faculty and alumni.
The PhD program in Management is directed by Elena Novelli, and offers scholarships for outstanding applicants. Applications are open till February 28th 2019. Please find a link here:
https://www.cass.city.ac.uk/study/phd/how-to-apply
See also attached flyer: Cass PhD flyer_2018
For questions or clarifications, feel free to contact me directly at daniel.beunza@city.ac.uk
If you are attending this summer’s Academy of Management Conference in Chicago, here’s three events that I have organized, and which explore topics on finance within organization theory.
Financial crisis
First, a symposium titled “Organizational Lessons, One Decade After the Financial Crisis.” The year 2018 marks the one-decade anniversary of the global financial crisis. In the ten years that elapsed since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, research in economics and finance has developed a robust literature that informs public policy. Conversely, this symposium considers the body of organizational research published on the financial crisis: what have organizational scholars learnt about the crisis by now? What managerial implications and conclusions stem from such lessons? What are organizational scholars missing? This symposium addresses this question with presentations on the use of models in organizations, the intersection between politics and derivatives, wellbeing in investment banks, bank culture, and the institutional dimension of the crisis.
It will do so through four presentations:
“Regulating through Culture? Cultures of Culture in the UK Retail Banking Industry,” by Simon Parker, Nottingham U. Business School, and Andre Spicer, City U. London.
“Embodying the Market,” by Alexandra Michel, U. of Pennsylvania.
“The crisis that won’t go away: Retrospective commentary on institutional analysis of the crisis,” by Suhaib Riaz, U. of Massachusetts, Boston.
“Financial innovation as tool of statecraft: implications for organization theory,” by Andrea Lagna, Loughborough U.
“A Village on Wall Street: From Models to Norms in a Derivatives Trading Room,” Daniel Beunza Ibanez, Copenhagen Business School and City U.
When and where: Monday, Aug 13 2018 1:15PM – 2:45PM at Marriott Chicago Downtown – Magnificent Mile in Clark Marriott Ballroom
Securities analysts
Second, a symposium titled, “The Future of Analysts’ Work: Importance and Challenges Ahead.” This event aims at promoting debate on the analyst profession by bringing several leading scholars in the study of equity analysts. Our symposium shares papers that highlight the role of analysts as information intermediaries but also as self-interested individuals performing careers, the significant part of which is providing insight and guidance to investors. We do not propose to solve the debate on whether or how analysts can be useful for understanding publicly traded firms and financial markets; rather, we hope to use the symposium as a platform to examine different ways in which the work of equity analysts can provide insight into important organizational phenomena. Each scholar studies analysts from a unique perspective, which combined with our discussant creates an opportunity for lively debate on the role, power, and importance of analysts in modern organizational and strategy research. It will do so through four presentations, and the discussion by Todd Zenger, of the David Eccles School of Business.
It will include four presentations:
“Two sides to the story? Positive and negative aspects of securities analysts,” Mary J. Benner, U. of Minnesota and Daniel Beunza, Copenhagen Business School and City U.
“Analysts’ intertemporal evaluations of firms’ resources during radical technological change.” Ram Ranganathan, U. of Texas, McCombs and Wei Yang, The U. of Texas at Austin.
“Organization’s Centrality in the Employee Mobility Network and Individual Performance.” Matteo Prato, USI (Lugano) and Pino G. Audia, Dartmouth College
“Does playing to type make you a star? Gender and gender-based categories in analyst research.” Anne Bowers, U. of Toronto and Matteo Prato, USI (Lugano)
“When do employees pursue firm goals versus their career concerns?” Viktorie Sevcenko, London Business School and Sendil Ethiraj, London Business School
When and where: Tuesday, Aug 14 2018 9:45AM – 11:15AM at Marriott Chicago Downtown – Magnificent Mile in Clark Marriott Ballroom
Derivatives exchange
Finally, Andrea Lagna and I have organized a tour of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (Cboe) as an OMT off-program event during the next AOM Annual Meeting. Cboe is one of largest options markets in the world. It was the first exchange to list standardized options in 1973 and, since then, it pioneered several financial innovations such as the Cboe Volatility Index and, more recently, Bitcoin futures. This visit is a great opportunity for OMT scholars to experience the fascinating world of derivatives trading in Chicago.
It includes:
- a) 1 hour tour of the Cboe trading floor during active trading.
- b) 1/2 hour Q&A session
- c) Cboe souvenir trading badges.
http://www.cboe.com/education/educational-tours
When and where: The tour will take place on 10 August 2018, 2-3.30pm. It is full already, but if you’d us to put you on the waiting list, please get in touch with me at dbe.ioa@cbs.dk
socializing finance 