The Spectacle of Expertise: Why Financial Analysts Perform in the Media 9780231554572

Citation preview

THE SPECTACLE OF EXPERTISE

THE SPECTACLE OF EXPERTISE W H Y F I NANC I AL ANA LYSTS PE R F OR M I N TH E M E D I A

ALEX PREDA

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Preda, Alex, 1960- author. Title: The spectacle of expertise : why financial analysts perform in the media / Alex Preda. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022025811 | ISBN 9780231202466 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231202473 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231554572 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Investment advisors. | Financial planners. | Finance, Personal. | Mass media. | Social media. Classification: LCC HG4621 .P77 2023 | DDC 332.6—dc23/eng/20220923 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025811

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Alamy

Faithful: Well, then, what shall we discuss now? Talkative: Whatever you desire. I will talk of heavenly things—or earthly things; moral things—or evangelical things; sacred things—or secular things; past things—or things to come; foreign things—or things at home; essential things— or extraneous things—provided that all is done to our profit. John Bunyan, “Talkative’s Fine Discourse,” in The Pilgrim’s Progress

Oppie: I feel that such a discussion in the lab, in the technical area, is quite inconsistent with what we talk about there. Wilson: These questions are not technical questions, but political and social questions . . . John Adams, Doctor Atomic, Act 1, Scene 1 (libretto by Peter Sellars)

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

1 What Is Financial Expertise?

31

2 Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

64

3 The Organization of Expert Talk

84

4 Strategic Facework: The Expert Presentation of Experts 5 Unfaultable Talk

131

6 Talk and Truth

158

7 Managing Audiences

185

Conclusion 209 Appendix 1. Hong Kong as a Global Financial Center Appendix 2. Ethnographic Methods 225 Acknowledgments 229 Notes References Index

231 243 257

221

107

THE SPECTACLE OF EXPERTISE

INTRODUCTION

I

n 1632, Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. It shows Dr. Tulp, a lecturer in anatomy to the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, talking while dissecting a body in front of an audience. Once per year, the city allowed a public dissection, so that the public could admire the expertise of the performing surgeon. The Anatomy Lesson—regarded as representing the triumph of scientific reason (Alpers 1988: 27)—renders a spectacle of expertise in which Dr. Tulp participates fully. It is a spectacle, as conveyed by the dramatic lighting, the postures of the participants, and the direction of their gaze. Some in the audience look directly at Dr. Tulp, not at his hands or the dissected body. We can get an idea of how important such spectacles were (and are) from one of their contemporary remnants, embedded in many an academic setting: the anatomical theater. (At my own institution, the Old Anatomy Lecture Theatre is reserved for special-occasion lectures.)

SPECTACLES AND GAMES OF EXPERTISE Making a spectacle of one’s expertise was a relative novelty in the baroque era and was done economically. The Amsterdam Guild allowed only one show per year. My point, however, is not the

2 Y Introduction

scarcity of such spectacles in bygone times, seemingly replaced in our days by endless flows of various experts appearing in front of publics. My point is that since at least the emergence of modern science, public expert talk has been treated as a special occasion and recognized as such. Over time, it has become institutionalized in manifold formats. Public expert talk is part and parcel of many institutions— legal, educational, political, cultural. It is not the same as expertise though. We acknowledge a difference between expertly doing something and expertly talking about that something. To borrow a formulation from Erving Goffman, there is a difference between game and spectacle, “between the business at hand and the custard of interaction in which the business is embedded” (1981: 167). It should be clear from this discussion that “game” does not refer here to a playful, “as if ” activity—that is, to a make-believe keying of action “done with the knowledge that nothing practical will come out of the doing” (Goffman 1974: 48). Game, in this context, is the serious business of producing and expanding knowledge of a domain. In the case of Dr. Tulp, the game was a set of practical activities producing and expanding anatomical knowledge, activities done mostly in the absence of public audiences. After all, Leonardo da Vinci did not publicize his dissections ( Jones 2012), but those were different times. The “custard of interaction”— or “the environing social fuss” (Goffman 1981: 168)—is public expert talk performed as a special occasion. It is done in the presence of audiences watching for and expecting to witness a show of expertise. Audiences might ask questions or make comments or loud judgments. They might doubt the talk and call for responses. All this does not mean, however, that they do not treat expert talk as a special occasion. Quite the opposite. Why is expert talk treated as special, and what happens in this talk in its interaction with audiences?

Introduction Z 3

Dr. Tulp’s spectacle takes place at a time when scientists start to insist upon direct experience as the fountain of rigorous knowledge (Shapin 1994: 202). Direct experience means not only observing action but also experiencing talk. Talk, like observation, is a means of accessing knowledge. At least since the inception of modern science, conversation and talk have been regarded as tools of finding out the truth and producing solid knowledge. In the modern era, public expert talk becomes institutionalized as a special knowledge-producing activity in multiple contexts, not only within learned institutions. For instance, around 1820, expert witness talk about psychiatric cases becomes routine in British courts of law (Eigen and Andall 1986: 161). Before that, it was common to talk as a medical witness about friends and acquaintances, not about “cases.” Expert witness talk becomes widespread in Britain, beyond the confines of psychiatric cases, in the second half of the nineteenth century (Hamlin 1986). It is one of the many forms of public expert talk that become institutionalized during this period (e.g., Fyfe and Lightman 2007). Hence, we can speculate that the emergence of a domain of knowledge (be it anatomy, psychiatry, or finance) is accompanied by the establishment of forms of public expert talk about that domain, forms treated as special occasions.

FINANCE, EXPERT TALK, AND SPECTACLE At the time of Dr. Tulp, not far from where he delivered his expert talk on anatomy, another type of consequential talk was taking place: the shouts, cries, and murmurs of the financial transactions taking place on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and in coffee houses, in broad view of audiences. Financial knowledge, at least at the dawn of the modern era, is inextricably related to

4 Y Introduction

talk and spectacle. It is a domain that over centuries evolves into expert knowledge and that, perhaps more than many others, is tied to public talk, simply because oral transactions take place in open public spaces. Nowadays, finance is regarded as one of the premier domains of expert knowledge in economic life, as well as in the social sciences. The questions I examine in this book are as follows: How is public expert financial talk relevant to finance as a domain of expertise? How do we treat this talk as a special occasion? What are its properties, and what are its consequences? How do its practitioners gain expertise in handling it? I am answering these questions based on an ethnographic investigation of the “custard of interaction” as the stuff of public expert talk. I say this to underscore that expert talk does not take place in a void. It is not disembodied. It does not assume audiences to be passive. Many other studies have dealt with financial expertise, but not with expert financial talk. That is, they have dealt with how expert financial knowledge is produced, with the various groups, networks, cultures, controversies, institutions, and processes involved in producing expertise. At least in the context of the present book, I am a merchant of the custard of interaction, dealing with its spectacles—that is, with how expert talk is put on show in front of audiences and with the expertise of the spectacle of expertise. Does this matter? Should we care about this custard? More than once, expertise has come under debate in recent years. The more the terms “expert” and “expertise” are used, the more expertise seems to be contested (e.g., Eyal 2019: 9, 13; Chakraborty, Gosh, and Roy 2020). Gil Eyal (2019: 8) argues that expertise becomes contentious when it morphs into regulatory science— that is, when it is invoked in favor of or against specific policy measures. Yet, for many of us, what we know as expertise comes from spectacles thereof, not from directly witnessing laboratory

Introduction Z 5

work, data cleaning, coding, or the like. What we know as expertise comes largely from seeing experts debate, comment, interpret, and give advice on TV, radio, social media, vlogs, and podcasts—in other words, from being audiences of expert talk. Spectacles of expertise inform our lives. Seen like this, understanding what is going on in such spectacles—or how the custard of interaction shapes our own understanding of expertise—can inform discussions on the “crisis of expertise” so present in the public space.

PUBLIC EXPERT TALK AS SPECTACLE Public expert talk, I have argued, has been long understood as a special occasion, a spectacle. At this point, you may ask, What do I mean by “spectacle,” then? Is everything a spectacle? It is time to go back to the distinction I introduced earlier, namely that between game and spectacle. The notion of spectacle in the social sciences, particularly in sociology, goes back to at least the 1960s, when Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1994 [1967]) was published. Spectacle is more often than not associated with performance, media, drama, theater, ritual, consumption, text, or script. As far as I can see, it has rarely, if ever, been associated with expertise. It has a long-standing association with financial markets, one that has been drawing the attention of scholars for several decades now (Agnew 1986). More recently, it has been associated with finance, for instance in the notion of spectacular (financial) speculation (Staeheli 2013), but not with the notion of financial expertise. Some of these associations are more relevant to this book than others, and I will discuss them in more detail in chapter 2. For my present purposes, I should emphasize that

6 Y Introduction

spectacle is understood as public, embodied expert talk engaging audiences within specific action–response possibilities.1 Spectacles by definition involve audiences, and sometimes multiple layers of them. They are meant not only to convey particular states or narratives but also to display to audiences the speaker’s capacity of achieving talk with particular properties. Spectacles may, but do not necessarily, involve the media. From this perspective, a job talk or research seminar in finance is no less a spectacle than a TV debate among economists on the consequences of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing. It is a different kind of spectacle though. It may run according to different rules. Nevertheless, both are spectacles in the sense that they are open to audiences and designed not only to describe to audiences a particular state of, say, the money supply but also to demonstrate that the performers have the ability to achieve a particular form of talk on (in this example) the state of the money supply. Spectacles run on expression, and expression requires its own skills. When giving a job talk, an interview, or participating in an expert debate, we exude expression (Goffman 1969: 9). We seek dramaturgical discipline (Goffman 1959: 216), among others, by managing our visual appearance and voice. Many of us who have gone through job talks or who have sat in the audiences of job talks know how important expression is, and this is just one example of the myriad of mundane instances in which we seek such discipline. Expert talk is embodied and runs on expression, too. It cannot avoid dramaturgical discipline. This latter, however, can be itself the object of expertise and expert knowledge. It’s not for nothing that we encounter a whole raft of professions specialized in this discipline: actors, directors, camera directors, lighting directors, and makeup artists are just a few examples. Their expertise is in expression.

Introduction Z 7

Some spectacles might involve more (complex) expertise in expression than others. An expert panel on TV will involve camera and lighting directors, producers, and makeup artists, for instance, whereas most academic job talks will not. How does this dramaturgical discipline impact the substance of expert talk? We are back to my earlier point, where the business at hand, the substance of the talk, is mixed up with a custard of interaction that cannot be easily scooped out and put aside. Achieving dramaturgical discipline in expert talk may involve collaborations with expression experts. They are very dissimilar types of expertise, apparently. Expertise in financial analysis and expertise in facial makeup, positioning spotlights, or video color grading seemingly are far-apart domains. Yet these two kinds of expertise regularly come together in the TV or radio studio whenever we see or hear experts discussing the Dow Jones, the impact of quantitative easing, flows of capital, crude oil, the derivatives markets, and the like. The studio becomes a trading zone (Galison 1997: 803); that is, the site where two significantly different (some might even say incommensurable) forms of expertise come together. The explicit outcome of these collaborations is asymmetric: we are in the studio to talk about possible interest rate hikes, not about new makeup or hairdressing techniques. Yet somehow we sense that (new) makeup techniques might be relevant in that situation. If spectacles run on expression and dramaturgical discipline, do they produce any new knowledge? This might seem an outlandish question. Yet a closer look will reveal that some spectacles at least are geared toward producing expert knowledge. An example is the research seminar, a standard feature of academic life. Research seminars allow audiences to engage “with the talk’s conceptual narrative and technical and heuristic manipulations” (Barany and MacKenzie 2014: 110). They filter out claims that are

8 Y Introduction

well established among experts from claims that need further justification (111). Seen like this, the spectacle of the research seminar indeed produces knowledge, exactly because of this collective, collaborative work of filtering out various sorts of knowledge claims. Ideally, after a research seminar, we (including the presenters) will have a better idea which of the claims made by the authors are shaky, which are more established, and how to address some of the plausibility issues related to specific claims. We will also know more about who in the audience made salient points and who did not, which questions were answered, and which questions were avoided or ignored. In short, in an ideal situation, we will gain knowledge from the spectacle called the research seminar. Can we extend this claim though to expert talk unfolding in the TV studio or on social media? This seems a little more problematic, not least because it would mean that, say, expert talk on interest rates in the TV studio would produce substantive knowledge about interest rates. When it comes to whether the TV studio or the smartphone screen produces genuine knowledge, media scholars have tended to give one of two answers. The first is yes, because our realities are all mediated, that is, constituted within media apparatus (e.g., Couldry and Hepp 2017: 16). For finance, this argument has been made in relation to the trading screen as a scopic system that does not simply represent but constitutes market “realities” (e.g., Knorr Cetina 2003). Hence, what we know is also constituted within such apparatus. It would follow that financial expert talk in the TV studio could produce new knowledge about said interest rates. The second answer is no, because the media mix up fact and fiction and aestheticize the audiences, who regard everything as pure entertainment (e.g., R. Jacobs 2012: 322). We lack criteria for separating fact from fiction, and the audiences are not vested in this kind of

Introduction Z 9

painstaking work. Consequently, sorting out established claims from claims in need of more justification is not possible. Establishing this justification is not possible either, given the mix-up. At one end of the spectrum, then, we have the spectacle of the research seminar as an assembly of experts and audiences producing new knowledge. Expert witness talk in a court of law could be placed at this end, too. At the other end, we have the spectacles of the TV studio, radio studio, or social media. According to the second position stated in the previous paragraph, the production of knowledge here would be highly doubtful. According to the first one, however, market realities are constituted on screen and, by implication, in the TV studio as well. Thus, it becomes even more important to investigate what happens in such spectacles.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF EXPERT FINANCIAL TALK The following is an ethnography of expert financial talk, as produced in TV and radio studios or for YouTube and Meta (formerly Facebook). (I address its methodological challenges in appendix 2.) The studios where I spent time staying silent behind cameras or in the radio studio are part and parcel of Hong Kong’s media landscape. Why Hong Kong? This might seem an exotic locale, but there are several very good reasons for investigating the expert financial talk produced here. There is, of course, the issue of access, which is significant for any ethnographer. TV studios are not usually open to outsiders, and it was by luck that I became able to access Hong Kong’s studios (more about this later on). But, perhaps more importantly, there are the issues of Hong Kong’s standing as a global financial center and

10 Y Introduction

of some particularities of its financial markets (shared with other developed Asian markets). These particularities make Hong Kong somewhat different from “Western” financial markets and relevant beyond its geographic confines (see appendix 1). Having said that, I want to emphasize that expert financial talk is not only produced in local TV and radio studios but also situated within a specific web of financial activities that can have a global reach. In this respect, Hong Kong is anything but “exotic.” In fact, it is an exemplary site for understanding financial globalization and the role expert talk plays in it. In more than one way, being a global financial center also means being a center of financial expertise and, with it, expert talk that reaches beyond local confines.

HONG KONG AS A GLOBAL FINANCIAL CENTER AND AS A CENTER OF EXPERT TALK Since at least the late nineteenth century, Hong Kong has been a financial center that facilitates capital flows in and out of China. Its emergence as a “money metropolis” of Asia-wide relevance happened in the 1970s ( Jao 1979: 684). In the first part of the 1980s, several stock exchanges were merged, and in 1986 the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) began consolidated operations (I detail historical aspects in appendix 1). In July 2020, the HKEX was the fifth largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalization, with a total volume of over US$4 trillion and more than 2,500 listed companies (Statista 2020; HKEX 2020; see also appendix 1). What is more relevant for the present story, though, is the volume of callable bull and bear contracts (CBBCs)2 traded on the HKEX. They are popular both

Introduction Z 11

with individual and institutional investors, who use CBBCs as hedging instruments. CBBCs are issued daily by banks and were introduced in the early 2000s in Hong Kong by European banks. The average daily turnover of CBBCs in the first seven months of 2020 was US$1.25 billion, whereas the average daily turnover of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) over the same period was US$0.7 billion. Why are these numbers relevant in the present context? Because they tell us that financial contracts issued daily by banks (CBBCs) compose a little under 8 percent of the average daily turnover, making them more popular with investors than ETFs. In other words, they are very popular financial products issued daily that need to be sold daily to investors.

INDIVIDUAL INVESTORS IN A GLOBAL MARKET One aspect that distinguishes Hong Kong’s financial markets from the Western model is the broader, more active presence of individual investors. Until the early 1960s, when institutional investors became dominant in the United States (Useem 1996), and later in the United Kingdom, the market participation of individual investors was much more significant. More recently, the rise of discount brokerages combined with mobile trading apps have contributed to increased individual participation in financial transactions. In Hong Kong, this participation has been established since at least the 1970s, when the city became a hub for capital held by overseas Chinese families ( Jao 1979: 678).3 In the early 1970s, there were four active stock exchanges, three of which catered primarily to individual investors. Hong Kong shares this active presence of individual investors with financial markets not only in mainland China but also in other developed

12 Y Introduction

Asian economies, such as Japan and Taiwan. At the end of 2014, 36.2 percent of the adult population in Hong Kong were stock investors, with a median frequency of ten transactions per year (Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 2015: 3, 9).4 One reason that individual investors in Hong Kong engage regularly with the stock market is because, in the absence of a mature social security system,5 financial investments offer one of the few hopes of accumulating enough savings for the future: Owning shares is a way of ensuring your own security blanket because we have no social security in Hong Kong. . . . And so, because of all of this, the government is constantly . . . hamstringing themselves to take care of people because they’re assuming there’s not enough market education for these people to make educated decisions, because they’re always just stir-frying the shares and doing the walk. . . . So this is kind of just an insight on the mentality of life in Hong Kong.

(Securities lawyer)

Regular buying and selling by individuals, or “stir-frying the shares,” needs to be talked about (or intermediated, in sociological parlance) on a daily basis, not only in conversations at the dinner table (I address these in chapter 7) but also in public talk. To keep within the vocabulary I am using, the daily game of financial analysis needs to be made into a spectacle on a daily basis, too. This means that analysts working for brokerage houses and investment banks have to make daily appearances in the media talking about these and other contracts, the underlying assets, indices, and so on. And this in turn means that said analysts, as financial experts, have to collaborate on a daily basis with anchors, TV producers, camera directors, and the like. The

Introduction Z 13

collaborations within which expert talk is produced become permanent. Their output consists in the manifold of TV, radio, and social media programs dedicated exclusively to finance, produced both for local audiences and for export to mainland China. These programs are different from the financial segments of daily news programs. They consist of chat shows, game shows, and commentaries on financial and investment topics.

EXPERT FINANCIAL TALK IN THE MEDIA Often when one needs to put more effort into capturing capital for investments, one needs more (expert) talk, talk that cannot be done in small groups. TV, radio, and the internet offer themselves as media for such talk. With the help of Sayaka Shiba, an amazing research assistant, I tried to count the number of daily finance programs in Hong Kong’s media. A significant distinction here is that between a finance channel and a finance program. A channel exclusively and continuously broadcasts a stream of finance programs all day long. A finance program is a set, recurring spectacle. Hence, a channel is a stream of finance spectacles. A TV station that does not have a dedicated finance channel can have finance programs. We counted three finance channels and three TV stations offering daily finance programs in Hong Kong, in English, Cantonese, and Putonghua6 (see appendix 2 for ethnographic access). This excludes channels such as Bloomberg TV and Bloomberg Radio, whose Asian headquarters is in Hong Kong. Finance channels broadcast finance programs all day long. When looking at mainland China, the data was more difficult to gather, but we counted seventeen daily radio finance programs, one TV finance channel, and eleven

14 Y Introduction

daily TV finance programs. In contrast to Hong Kong is Japan, where there are at least six daily TV finance programs for a population about eighteen times larger. Relative to population size, the number of finance channels and daily radio and TV finance programs in Hong Kong is noticeable. This number is also remarkable when compared with the number of daily radio and TV finance programs in the United Kingdom and United States. For the United Kingdom, we could not find any daily radio or TV programs exclusively focused on finance. We found only weekly or biweekly radio programs and some podcasts. For the United States, we counted six daily nationwide radio finance programs (there are many more weekly or biweekly programs) and fifteen daily nationwide TV finance programs. Even in this context, the number of finance programs in Hong Kong is remarkable.

EXPERT FINANCIAL TALK AND FREEDOM While doing fieldwork from 2016 to 2021, I heard time and again from the analysts I was accompanying that, in Hong Kong, finance is a domain in which one can freely express opinions and controversies are allowed. I was also told that Hong Kong as a city has always intermediated, not only culturally between the East and the West but also between financial markets. Financial talk surely must be important in such a space. Of course, public expert talk was tightly regulated in that it could not stealthily advertise for institutions or products, make direct investment recommendations, or provide financial advice to audiences. Within such regulatory confines, though, common in all developed financial markets, expert talk was free. Speaking in

Introduction Z 15

London with various social anthropologists, I heard again that in the broader space of China (including the mainland), finance and financial talk were areas in which freedom of opinion and expression were still possible. This was presented as one reason engagement with investments was so popular in China. Financial markets were a space in which different opinions could be expressed and different actions undertaken—in short, a space of cherished freedoms. It was nothing new since, for a long time, markets—and especially financial ones—have been stylized as the archetype of freely expressed opinions, of a constant positioning and repositioning of ideas and talk about the value of various assets. The association of financial markets with freedom of speech, culturally long stylized in Western discourses on the legitimacy of finance, was being reproduced not only locally among practitioners but also among social anthropologists. And then the summer of 2019 came, and after that 2020 and 2021. With the mass protests of the summer of 2019, followed by widespread student and youth unrest, it became apparent how fragile this space of free expert financial talk was. Several times, I heard analysts complain that it was difficult to keep financial topics separated from political ones. I heard that some financial topics were more sensitive than others and best to be avoided. I heard that access to TV and radio studios had become much more difficult and controlled during the second half of 2020 and that it would not have been possible anymore to do the kind of ethnographic observation I had done only a few months before. I heard from analysts who used to be on TV and radio all the time that they were significantly reducing their activities. I read in the newspapers that crypto assets were declared illegal overnight in mainland China—something that could not remain without consequences in Hong Kong. I returned for fieldwork in the autumn of 2021 (albeit for a different project) and met

16 Y Introduction

with the analysts I used to accompany to TV and radio studios. They had scaled back their public talk and were focusing now on fund management, under difficult conditions. Those who were not fund managers, I heard, had perceptibly changed their talk and were much less outspoken than before. All this revealed, and rather abruptly, that public expert talk on finance is neither insulated from nor unconstrained by politics. It is not a space of pure freedom of opinions. It is a space in which political forces can intervene in manifold ways. It is a space in which political and social issues, big and small, seep in all the time. This reminded me that the politics of financial markets go hand in hand with the politics of financial expert talk.

EXPERT TALK AND EXPERT TEXT As such, this book is not an analysis of financial narratives produced by analysts. The focus is not on financial writing. The focus is on expert financial talk and on the collaborative efforts in producing expert talk. Work in economic sociology, and in the sociology of finance in particular, has recently privileged the written word, either by focusing on financial texts or on textual transcripts of financial debates as prerequisites of policy-making (e.g., Leins 2018; Ortiz 2014, 2021; Appadurai 2015; Abolafia 2020; Holmes 2014). I take a different road here and focus on the production of fresh talk. The importance of talk in economic transactions has not escaped sociologists, as the fabric of so many transactions is talk—auctions probably showcase this best (e.g., Heath 2013). As we know, on the floors of stock exchanges, before the advent of automation, transactions used to be conducted as talk. Perhaps the attention given recently to texts has come as a consequence of transactional talk disappearing from the floor of the exchange,

Introduction Z 17

replaced by algorithms searching for the best execution opportunities (e.g., MacKenzie 2021; Bondo Hansen and Borch 2021). Not all talk has disappeared from the floor of the stock exchange though. It’s just that one form of talk, the transactional one, has been replaced by algorithms. The dominant form of talk on the floor of the exchange is now the TV commentary, as part and parcel of spectacles of finance. Take the HKEX: its trading floor has been carefully preserved as it was when it still had traders while being repurposed as a TV studio. I argue here for giving financial talk the attention it deserves. It is important for understanding how finance works, consequential, and irreducible to texts. Expert financial talk is not spoken financial text. It is not memorized. It is not recitation. It is fresh talk. It is, as I shall show, not individually but collaboratively produced. We all too often consider talk as an individual accomplishment when, in fact, it is often collaborative (on political talk, see Laube, Schenk, and Scheffer 2020). Expert financial talk is embodied talk: after all, we see financial experts and hear their voices, and we should therefore investigate whether body and voice play a role when it comes to how expertise is put on display. Expert financial talk is both technologically enabled and constrained by the scaffoldings of TV and radio studios: microphones, cameras, lights, makeup boxes, editing screens. It is directed at specific audiences, which are temporally and/ or spatially co-present. Audiences react to talk: they can inquire, talk back, and ignore; they can be friendly, hostile, indifferent, and so on. They can try to fault expert talk. And expert speakers have to react to audiences in ways in which texts do not: they can scold, praise, ignore, encourage, discourage, talk past, and joke with their audiences. An ethnography of the spectacle of finance, with talk at its core, cannot neglect these aspects, which are absent from texts.

18 Y Introduction

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF EXPERT TALK This book, therefore, is not a general ethnography of TV or radio studios (see appendix 2 for ethnographic methods). It is an ethnography of collaborative productions of expert talk on finance, collaborations involving financial experts and the expression experts of the studio. It is based on participant observations I conducted in Hong Kong, in TV and radio studios and in the studios of financial brokerages, and on interviews I conducted with financial analysts, TV anchors, producers, financial journalists, and audiences of expert talk. This enterprise started in May 2016 when, on my way to Beijing, I stopped in Hong Kong for a few days to meet a financial analyst. I discovered that a sizable group of financial analysts (about one hundred) were exclusively dedicated to appearing on TV and radio finance shows: in other words, they derived their livelihoods (or a large portion thereof ) from financial talk. These analysts are colloquially called financial actors. That intrigued me. There are Shakespearean actors, Victorian actors, method actors, and so on, but financial actors? There was a tension in this name that required exploration. This is how this ethnography started. However, I use the term “analyst” throughout the book to underscore the expert character of financial talk. Corresponding with the number of financial analysts engaged in public expert talk, the number of daily financial shows was higher than that of the United Kingdom. They were also much more varied and not restricted to the financial segment of daily news broadcasts. While most financial analysts, at least in Western countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, derive their income from writing financial reports, in the local context of Hong Kong financial talk occupied a place prominent enough to offer a livelihood to a distinct professional subgroup.

Introduction Z 19

I wanted to understand the significance of public financial talk as revealed by its prominent presence in Hong Kong, believing that its relevance went well beyond the boundaries of the city. Over the next four years, I became a regular guest of TV and radio studios in Hong Kong. I spent time in the studio before, during, and after the production of shows. I became acquainted with several analysts who regularly appeared on TV and radio programs, and spent time in their company, meeting them many times. I met financial analysts focused on writing reports to better understand the differences between these two groups producing different outputs: talk and text. I interviewed finance academics and participated regularly in finance research seminars. I talked to lawyers working with expert witnesses in courtrooms to better understand how expert talk is organized in contexts different from the TV and radio studio. With the help of friends from London and Hong Kong, I met and talked to a variety of Hong Kong residents who watched finance shows, from students to retirees, from workers to businesspeople, to understand whether watching finance shows was consequential for their investment decisions, the motivations for watching such shows, and the reactions to and evaluations of the shows. During my fieldwork, I witnessed analysts being recognized on the street and approached in restaurants by members of their audiences. Over the years, I witnessed the development of some of the analysts’ careers. I discovered that appearing daily on TV and radio is, for some at least, a stage in their professional trajectory in finance. I also observed how they had been impacted by the protests of the summer of 2019 and by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21. Yet I am an Eastern European academic working and living in Western Europe, not a citizen of Hong Kong. At best I can be considered a learner of Cantonese. How did I access and navigate the local media and financial landscapes? At the time

20 Y Introduction

of my fieldwork, Hong Kong’s financial sector and media were largely cosmopolitan, elite milieus in which English was the lingua franca alongside Cantonese. (This has changed since 2020 with respect to the media, with a much greater emphasis being put now on “patriotic” media and journalists.) It was not only the analysts’ regular use of English that made these milieus cosmopolitan but also, among others, their international education. Language was a bridge between my informants and me. Reminiscing about academic campuses in the United Kingdom proved to be a good icebreaker in many a situation. So did casual conversations about bachelor’s programs. I conducted all interviews in English. I also benefited enormously from my contacts procuring me textbooks for learning Cantonese, in addition to those I obtained myself. In addition to interviews, analysts patiently spent time with me before and after shows discussing what they were planning to talk about, what they had just said, why, and what the responses were. Former students, friends, colleagues, and collaborators opened up local avenues for interviewing audience members about finance shows, ranging from businesspeople to workers. In London, research assistants who were native speakers of Cantonese helped transcribe and translate some public expert talk from Cantonese. In short, I was able to muster a number of professional and personal contacts I had made over the years in unrelated circumstances to gain access to a cosmopolitan field that saw itself as such in both its makeup and activities.

EXPERT TALK AND THE MEDIA STUDIO If expert talk is produced in the radio and TV studio, then an ethnography of this production would be expected to follow the pathways set by ethnographies of scientific laboratories as

Introduction Z 21

settings dedicated to producing new knowledge (e.g., Stephens and Lewis 2017). Such an ethnography should also follow the pathways established in ethnographies of collaborative workplaces in which screenwork takes a prominent role (e.g., Luff and Heath 2019). In a certain sense, an ethnography of how expert talk is produced fits the canon of spatial and temporal circumscription encountered in workplace and laboratory ethnographies. There is a clear setting, represented by the studio and the production room, and a clear duration: that of the broadcast. Ethnographies in this mold are not uncommon in the sociology of finance, the best example probably provided by ethnographies of trading rooms and trading floors (e.g., Zaloom 2006; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002; Laube 2016; Beunza 2019). Even in this age of electronic, automated trading, it has been argued that locales continue to play a significant role because they help participants coordinate, circulate, and interpret information better. Even if markets are located on computer screens, these screens have to be located somewhere, so place still counts. Even if traders use sophisticated quantitative tools, these tools became so dominant because of their initial adoption in the trading pits (MacKenzie and Millo 2003). Hence, physical space continues to be relevant to financial markets. At the same time, though, I discovered that some important actors enabling collaborations within the space of the TV and radio studios remained unseen. Take for instance the research assistants of financial analysts who, although playing a significant role, never made it into the studio during my fieldwork. Or take the technological scaffolding of the production room, which is actually connected to similar scaffoldings in other studios. These connections suddenly became relevant when I started looking into how financial topics are chosen. Later, talking to TV producers, I learned that there are other, unseen technological

22 Y Introduction

aspects that play an even more significant role. Take for instance the “central kitchen” of media producers, which, as I discovered, is an assemblage of servers serving as a repository of sounds and images that are assembled and inserted into a show. While collaborations apparently concentrate in the spaces of TV and radio studios and production rooms, many activities enabling such collaborations remain invisible to audiences and even to some participants. Studios and production rooms are spaces in which images and sounds—intrinsic to spectacles—are produced. Assembling expert talk necessarily entails expertise activities and technological scaffoldings that are neither visible to audiences nor concentrated in the studio. Therefore, I took as a guiding principle the identification and analysis of collaborative activities that produce spectacles of finance, their core elements, and their consequentiality (hence my statement that this is an ethnography of financial talk). In my own way, I followed a prescription stemming from Erving Goffman (1967: 185), namely that of identifying and following actions, understood as “activities that are consequential, problematic, and undertaken for what is felt to be their own sake.” That spectacles contain actions, or even are anchored in actions, might now raise objections from some corners of sociological academia. I will make my case in the next chapters, so bear with me for now.

PLACES OUTSIDE THE WORKPLACE Identifying action relevant to spectacles requires a reconsideration of how the ethnographic enterprise deals with space, rather than discarding the latter as irrelevant or, at the other extreme,

Introduction Z 23

focusing exclusively on studio spaces. Take for instance the audiences of TV finance shows: some are located in the studio, and some are dispersed all over Hong Kong and all over mainland China (Hong Kong produces finance shows for mainland China’s TV stations as well). What is more, when talking about their audiences, producers and financial actors used tropes associating said audiences with particular spaces. “Housewives” and “taxi drivers” were common figures of speech in comments about audiences and talked about as major audience segments.7 However, when it came to financial power, others were judged as far more relevant: professionals with significant disposable income. They were engaged with in manifold concrete ways, more so than the “housewives.” Different audiences occupy different spaces across the city. These spaces need to be investigated ethnographically as well. For instance, analysts engage with audiences of well-to-do professionals (from whom larger investments are hoped for and expected) at art auctions, banquets, and financial award ceremonies—spaces much less frequented by taxi drivers. On a different level, some of Hong Kong’s public spaces are suffused with financial imagery: giant screens placed at eye level on the sidewalk provide an almost uninterrupted flow of financial data: “talking heads,” financial graphs, and ticker tapes. They reminded me of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), whose main characters, Packer and Kinski, drive through Manhattan’s public spaces, which are suffused with electronic displays of financial data. Advertisements featuring financial analysts and investment opportunities are a common occurrence on taxis and in Hong Kong’s subway system, the MTR. These are, at least in part, spillover effects of the spectacles of finance manufactured in the TV and radio studios—visible in both public and exclusivist spaces.

24 Y Introduction

Talking about money, financial matters, and investments is not subjected to the prudish conventions usually associated with Britain, where supposedly one never talks about money (although one cares a lot about it). Even in Britain, I have never noticed such conventions being entirely respected. Hong Kong citizens of various ages and backgrounds were happy to talk to me about finance and investments and happy to boast about their prowess at investing money. They were happy to discuss their investment strategies, the types of assets they invested in, and the markets they followed. Then, again, the greater individual participation in financial investments observed in Asian markets should go hand in hand with a greater eagerness to talk about financial investments. While conducting this ethnography I became acutely aware of the complex ways in which investing is superimposed on economic and social inequalities. In casual conversations, tropes of inclusivity were a regular occurrence, such as the need to include more “housewives” and “taxi drivers” in investment activities or to educate them financially (some analysts were indeed teaching evening classes in finance, which I attended). The relatively large number of individual investors seems to point to a significant degree of inclusion in financial investments. This is not to say that all, or even a majority, of them were successful investors. Yet I witnessed a wide chasm between the rarefied spaces of art auctions and exhibitions, at which potential upscale investors congregated, and the improvised cardboard mats laid out in public spaces, on which migrant domestic helpers (almost exclusively women) spent their Sundays, sometimes only a few feet away from the screens on which financial data flowed uninterruptedly. Financial investing included some audiences and excluded others. Spectacles of finance seemingly engulfed everybody.

Introduction Z 25

AN OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK The first chapter of this book, “What Is Financial Expertise?,” takes a closer look at what it means to have financial expertise and be a financial expert and what kinds of activities this implies. Seen close up, the variety of financial experts (and of financial expertise) is bewildering: there are experts in financial risk management (with subvarieties such as credit risk and market exposure), computational finance, mergers and acquisitions, financial econometrics, corporate finance, banking, fintech, mathematical finance, auditing, and accounting, to name just a few. Financial experts can be academics or they can be employed by investment banks, commercial banks, central banks, corporations, hedge funds, private equity firms, venture capital firms, family offices, and more. In this book, I introduce and discuss three relevant categories of financial experts: academics, analysts, and journalists. I discuss the differences among these three forms of financial expertise, the activities they imply, and the collaborations among these groups. I examine the role of these experts and their expertise with respect to how capital is captured and channeled into investments. Based on this, I zoom out onto a broader issue, namely financialization, and discuss the role of financial expertise in this process. I focus on two aspects here: the legitimatory role of financial expertise and the globalization of financial expertise since the 1990s. In chapter 2, “Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise,” I turn to how these three forms of expertise are put on display in various contexts, including in collaborations with the media. I start by discussing how spectacle, theater, and performance have been conceptualized in relation to financial markets. Against this background, I focus on the role played by expression and expression experts in producing spectacles. Incidentally, while there are

26 Y Introduction

many sociological analyses of professions and their expertise, I could not find many sociological works on expression experts such as actors; directors of theater, film, and TV; camera directors; or makeup artists (and much less so an ethnography of these professions and their expertise). Yet their importance has been growing over the past decades, and some of them (actors for instance) have a long history of professionalization. Acting expertise has been the object of psychological investigations (e.g., Noice and Noice 2009 [1997]). I discuss the collaborations between financial and expression experts and argue that such collaborations produce public expert financial talk. I discuss the emergence of expert financial talk in the U.S. media in the 1980s, starting with cable TV, and its professionalization within a short period of time. Zooming in on Hong Kong’s situation, I explain how financial and media experts collaborate on daily basis and how the necessity of such collaborations derives from the daily necessity of capturing capital for investments. I present and discuss a group of financial analysts making daily media appearances. I discuss the formats of these shows, on TV, radio, and social media, together with the differences between them and financial news, as well as the financial incentives on both sides for organizing them. Chapter 3, “The Organization of Expert Talk,” begins by examining how financial analysts are recruited to talk regularly in the media. Subsequently, I discuss their professional backgrounds and careers, as well as the career plans of media professionals who work with the analysts. This combination is relevant because both sides, the media experts and the finance experts, fashion cross-domain careers as a consequence of their collaborations in the studio. Afterward, I examine the daily organization of talk in the media studios and the technologies around which these collaborations are organized. Technology

Introduction Z 27

has been extensively discussed in relation to financial expertise; for instance, trading screen technologies, technologies for data transmission, and calculative tools such as spreadsheets and formulas. However, the technologies enabling expert talk have been much less discussed in the sociology of finance. Here I introduce readers to the technologies of the TV and radio studios that enable the production of finance shows, discussing how they impact not only representations of finance but also the selection of topics deemed important by experts. I discuss both the technologies of the production room and those of the TV and radio studios proper. I show that media technologies have been integrated into the fabric of financial institutions, with executive suites serving as improvised TV studios and investment banks having studios built on their premises. These technologies enable the permanent presence of financial expertise in the public sphere, with consequences for how broader publics understand finance. Often, financial expertise has been regarded as being completely disembodied, in the sense that the bodies of the experts and their (self-)presentations in front of an audience do not matter—all that matters is the expert text or some abstract “expertise.” In fact, when in front of an audience, experts are first seen and credentialed, before their expertise is heard, seen, or read. In chapter 4, “Strategic Facework: The Expert Presentation of Experts,” I examine how financial actors fashion “expert bodies” by consciously adopting particular looks, often in collaboration with media experts or by using makeup techniques and clothing styles. I discuss how the adoption of a specific look is itself a strategy directly related to conveying expert knowledge, how it is part and parcel of what I call expressive expertise. I also examine how financial analysts appearing on TV, radio, or social media introduce themselves and are introduced by others using

28 Y Introduction

credentials geared toward not only conveying expertise but also establishing a particular relationship with the audience. In chapter 5, “Unfaultable Talk,” I examine talk as a form of expertise and its properties. Texts written by financial experts such as analysts have received much attention recently. A large chunk of analysts’ work, though, is talking, not writing. The same goes for finance academics and for financial journalists. This talk is freshly produced. It is neither the recitation of a memorized text nor the reading of one aloud. What does it mean to talk freshly like an expert, and what does it mean to talk expertly in the media as a financial expert? Based on an analysis of talk from a variety of TV and radio finance shows, I discuss both the formal properties of expert talk in the media and the ways in which this expert talk deals with financial issues. I discuss the strategies used by analysts in dealing with producers and anchors when producing expert talk, and I examine the roles of producers and show formats in shaping what counts as expert talk. I argue that expert talk in the media shouldn’t be seen as the individual accomplishment of the expert but as a collaborative and sometimes tensioned enterprise involving technology, producers, and anchors. In chapter 6, “Talk and Truth,” I examine the relationship between expert talk and truth. Expert knowledge is ultimately supposed to discover truth. The dialogic method plays a key role here, together with audiences who witness the discovery process. To discover truth, experts engage in dialogues with one another and with the public. This raises the question of whether truth can be discovered in expert talk. This chapter examines how the production of expert talk relates to finding truth (or not) and whether truth figures (or does not figure) into the collaborative productions of expert talk in the media. I analyze how producers, anchors, and analysts, as well as audiences, perceive the issue of

Introduction Z 29

truthful expert talk, how they evaluate this quality, and how the preparation of and the very production of fresh expert talk relate to truthfulness. I examine here a specific case: two locally wellknown rival analysts who once agreed to appear on the same talk show to discuss their opposing points of view. Who speaks the truth, and how is this determined in the debate itself ? In chapter 7, “Managing Audiences,” I cross the aisle to examine how audiences participate in and relate to spectacles of expertise. We often hear complaints about the public not listening to experts or not respecting expertise enough. How do real audiences react to expert talk, which, after all, should be for their own benefit, as experts claim? Do they seek or accept expert verdicts? Do they develop antagonisms with the experts in front of them? How do experts treat their audiences? Based on interviews with audience members of finance shows, as well as on analyses of recordings, I investigate how relationships between experts and their audiences develop not only during shows but also outside them. Audiences can be quite complex: they can have elements planted by an expert’s rivals (e.g., viewers or listeners who call to make disparaging remarks about the expert), and they can be either immediate (present in the TV studio) or mediated (participating from outside the studio). I analyze how audiences value experts and expert talk and demonstrate that audiences do not accept spectacles of expertise uncritically. A tensioned and sometimes even conflictual relationship can develop between experts and their audiences. Against this background, expert talk can acquire a fragile character. Above all, it must be kept as expert talk and not allowed to morph into something else, such as advertising for a financial product or firm. I analyze the collaborative efforts deployed by producers, anchors, and experts in keeping expert talk intact and preventing audiences from faulting it.

30 Y Introduction

In the conclusion, I revisit the question of what constitutes expertise for audiences. The increased presence of experts in the media, as well as the public discussions and sometimes the outright conflicts we witness around various forms of expertise in public life, require close examination. Such an examination, though, is not possible without taking into account public expert talk, or what I call the spectacle of expertise. After all, few of us stand in the lab together with experts and peer over their shoulder, examining their expert activities up close. For our individual and collective judgments, most of us rely on public displays of expertise. This makes it critically important that we understand how spectacles of expertise are manufactured and their relationships to particular audiences. My overall argument in this book is that spectacles of expertise cannot be dismissed. We must pay attention to them because they shape both our understanding of important issues and our reactions to them.

1 WHAT IS FINANCIAL EXPERTISE?

D

r. Tulp, introduced in the opening of this book, happened to be active at the time of the tulip mania, a period of intense financial speculation in commodities (primarily tulip bulbs) in Amsterdam, a city well versed in financial transactions. Although respectable citizens wouldn’t show themselves in the “undignified bazaar” of the Bourse, they wouldn’t hesitate to engage in financial speculation through intermediaries such as brokers (Schama 1987: 348–49). We know that while Dr. Tulp pushed through a law against extravagant wedding feasts, he also participated in lavish banquets (186). It is thus reasonable to assume that he might have speculated while claiming to be against financial speculation. Had he done so, he would have made use of the financial expertise of brokers who knew well “not just [of ] the commodities represented by stock, but [of ] the peculiar ways of its trade at the Bourse itself ” (349). We can argue that, albeit unrelated, public expert talk and modern finance emerged at about the same time. One emerged in the anatomy theater, the other in the coffee houses. The latter required expertise and operated on talk. Financial transactions are nothing else but talk, talk that requires certain skills and knowledge. What was this expertise though? What kind of

32 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

knowledge did it involve? In the markets of Amsterdam at the time, one needed knowledge not only of the many tulip varieties and their prices but also of the varieties more susceptible to the viral disease producing patterns on the flower petals, since these patterns strongly impacted price (Garber 2001: 40–41). Additionally, one needed knowledge of the many types of deals being transacted, how futures markets worked (43–44), how to price a stock, and how to think about the value of a commodity, not to mention knowledge of the players on the Bourse, of who traded what, who was trustworthy, and the like. While all this knowledge enmeshed with financial speculation was regarded by some contemporaries as problematic and contested, it was also seen as requiring techniques of calculation and abstraction (Deringer 2018: 225). Higher education programs in financial economics were more than three hundred years away, and it would be difficult to ascribe such knowledge to formal education and credentialization. Finance academics as a professional group who should formalize financial expertise and claim jurisdiction over it emerged much later. Nor were there financial analysts trained in academic programs in finance who should value tulip growers and write company analyses. While financial transactions were conducted in formally organized groups known as Colleges, these sought to be free of official regulation (Schama 1987: 359) and lacked any formal transactional jurisdiction. Hence, there was a form of specialized financial knowledge—acknowledged as such by contemporaries, grounded in abstraction, techniques, and skills but not truly supported by formal education, credentials, or jurisdiction. To navigate the conceptual and empirical space between this specialized knowledge and contemporary expert talk, I will assemble in this chapter, discursively, the following compass:

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 33

first, I am going to discuss expertise in light of contemporary sociological approaches. Then, I am going to introduce three varieties of financial expertise—academic, the analysts’, and the journalists’—and discuss the role played by talk with regard to each. Afterward, in a final move, I am going to discuss the globalization of financial expertise and how the local context— namely, Hong Kong’s—fits into this process.

TWO VIEWS ON EXPERTISE Was the skill set of the Amsterdam brokers real? Were their techniques of calculation consequential and effective, or was their financial expertise just a show staged to capture the savings of credulous investors? If we adopt the latter perspective, expertise would consist merely in knowledge claims conjugated with status claims made by group members vis-à-vis specific audiences (Collins, Evans, and Weinel 2017: 765, 770). Such claims can be accepted or denied, and denials can be consequential: perhaps the most common example of this is the courtroom, where the credibility, credentials, and status of expert witnesses are both attacked and defended by parties during hearings (e.g., Lynch and Cole 2005). Thus, one would relativize expertise as being constituted within a network of actors and objects (Eyal 2013: 873). Expertise is then understood as a “network that produces, reproduces, and disseminates expert statements and performances” (875). The implication here is that expertise consists primarily in making oral and written statements, possibly with a theatrical character (hence the performance), which are then broadly disseminated. This network includes audiences, and when the latter change, experts redefine their expertise (Anteby and Holm 2021). There is a difference in this account between

34 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

professional knowledge and expertise: “professional knowledge only results in expertise when produced within specific social arrangements” (313). The consequence here is that someone can have professional knowledge (including skills) of, say, financial arbitrage, without having arbitrage expertise. At the same time, following the definition of expertise as a network that disseminates statements and performances would mean that skills (such as being able to do a statistical analysis) matter less than a performance directed at a particular audience. This issue raises the question of what a performance is, which I will address in the next chapter. This view of expertise ultimately implies that even if we were to assume a “hard core” of expert financial knowledge, we could not access it as audience members. All we can witness and access are claims of expertise (conjoined with claims of expert authority) staged for different audiences, claims around which contestations and even conflicts can unfold. Being able only to witness such claims opens the possibility of completely decoupling them from the hard core of expert knowledge and skills. Instead of experts, we would have only performers of expertise (or, in the case at hand, expert talkers). One of the best illustrations of the consequences of such decoupling is provided by the “Duke of Bilgewater” and the “rightful King of France” (the Dauphin), the two drifting characters from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1999 [1884]).1 The duke and the king are con men alternately impersonating famous English actors and English countryside characters. They stage absurdist theater plays (such as “The Royal Nonesuch, or The King’s Giraffe”) in small towns along the Mississippi, swindling credulous audiences of their money and trying to con other audiences out of an inheritance.2 The figure of the financial con man, present in many works of fiction, illustrates the problem of authenticity when

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 35

we are spectators of theatrical performances involving financial values (Shonkwiler 2017: 47). If we were to adopt this relativistic view, we would have only impersonators of expertise. Financial expertise would be reduced to a variety of performances, staged for particular audiences. The only relevant skills would be performance-relevant ones. The other view on expertise, the realist one, implies not only that there is a real set of skills and knowledge, consequential and effective, but also that this set is, at least in certain dimensions, accessible from the outside. However, this view raises the question of to what extent and how performances of expertise (such as expert talk) are coupled with or even intrinsic to this real set. I shall have a closer look at the realist argument now. The realists share with the relativists the tenet that expertise is “inherently interactional” (Carr 2010: 18). Expertise is something one does, not something one has—although we often use “X has expertise in Y” as a shorthand for “X knows how to do a variety of practical actions within Y,” where Y is a domain of (systematically producing new) knowledge. As Harry Collins and Robert Evans put it, “acquiring expertise is . . . a matter of socialization into the practices of an expert group” (2007: 3). The differences arise when defining “interactional.” In the relativist view, “interactional” primarily means displaying either to an audience (who is more or less passive and ill defined) or within a network of performers. In the realist view, “interactional” means taking into account the varied, often laminated interaction layers in which a domain of knowledge is embedded. At a basic level, we have the interactions constituting the social life of a domain. The expertise of Dr. Tulp’s brokers (assuming he used their services) was provided by what they did as a group, not by their credentials, formal education in finance, or jurisdictional claims (all three, at the time, were largely absent). If we are to

36 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

follow Harry Collins (2018: 68), “to become an expert in some domain is a matter of becoming embedded in the social life of the domain, acquiring what is, to a large extent, tacit knowledge, so as to internalize the associated concepts and skillful actions to the point of fluency.” Expertise is thus a game unfolding within particular domains of knowledge, a game requiring not only tacit knowledge but also an internalization of the rules of the domain, skills, and fluency. That I am calling it a game doesn’t mean that expertise is playful or inconsequential or that it does not produce new knowledge. Quite the contrary: games can be very serious, have consequences, and produce knowledge. Players in a game—be it of particle physics, biochemistry, or finance—specialize in particular practical activities and coordinate their actions “via common sets of concepts and a common spoken discourse—the ‘practice language’” of a domain (Collins 2018: 68).3 The core of the expertise is contributory. In the case of financial expertise examined here, this would be represented by the ability to make extensionary contributions to academic finance, financial analysis, or financial journalism. An extensionary contribution expands the skills, concepts, and discursive practices the activities of the expert group rely upon. It can be, for instance, a new metric for financial herding, a new explanatory account, or a new empirical observation on a company’s financial performance. If we shift our lens to the interactions of domain practitioners with participant outsiders, we encounter interactional expertise, understood as “expertise in the language of a specialism in the absence of expertise in its practice” (Collins and Evans 2007: 28).4 Interactional expertise in finance would imply the ability to speak and comprehend the language of finance, understand concepts, and ask meaningful questions.5

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 37

Expertise, both contributory and interactional, can be regularly submitted to internal and external judgments, implying claims to meta-expertise (Collins and Evans 2007: 46). In other words, I have enough expertise to be able to judge an expert. I can say, for instance, “Oh, but this analyst has an MBA from this or that premier business school.” In this case, I am judging expertise based on credentials as a meta-criterion, but I can also make judgments based on experience or track record. In this view, expertise in finance can be partly accessed through acquiring fluency in the language of finance. This notion of acquiring fluency in an expert language is actually explicitly derived from the ethnographic practice of “participant comprehension” (Collins 2004: 771) required by the internalist approach of the sociology of scientific knowledge and technology. It is predicated on the model of a reasoned conversation between the ethnographer and the natural scientist(s), conversation that allows the ethnographer to investigate the production of scientific knowledge. What enables this conversation, ultimately, is the ethnographer’s observation of the practices of the knowledge domain and the group activities associated with it. Reasoned conversation, which is key for comprehension, requires a sustained engagement between ethnographer and scientist, as well as observational participation in the practices of the domain. It is not just the scientist talking to the ethnographer, but an action–response system. Comprehension allows for detecting and rectifying performance pieces of expertise that are decoupled from the actual (and best) practices of the domain. Going back to the previous example from Huckleberry Finn: anyone who had observed the actor David Garrick at work would immediately have seen that the Duke of Bilgewater was no expert actor, let alone Garrick

38 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

himself. This has consequences for the argument I am going to make in the next chapter. I have talked until now about expertise within a domain: skills, technical knowledge, concepts, discursive fluency. Experts in a domain not only have skills and discursive fluency but also know who else within their domain knows what, who has which skills, and how to harness group knowledge to attain particular aims (Sandefur 2015). As becoming an expert means socialization into the practices of an expert group, it also means learning to know who knows what within the group and how to mobilize that knowledge. We can well imagine for instance that the brokers on the Amsterdam Bourse, invoked in the opening of this chapter, not only knew how to conduct “wind trades” but also knew what their peers knew and what they did. It has been ethnographically reported that participants in trading rooms observe not only the market but one another as well (Laube 2016: 71) and that financial analysts in brokerages do so, too (Mao 2018: 123). All in all, then, a realist view on expertise distinguishes between its substantive dimension and how this dimension is mapped onto peers by practitioners. This view takes into account that expertise has gradations, not all of which directly contribute to expanding given domains of knowledge. With these distinctions in mind, the time has come to discuss what financial expertise actually consists of. As stated earlier, I will not discuss all groups involved in producing financial expertise (the field is too broad for that). I will focus instead on three: finance academics, financial analysts, and financial journalists. And when I say “finance,” I do not mean here the broader fields of expertise that have to do with money, such as central banking and monetary policies, interest rates, balances of trade, and the like. I mean something much narrower, and much more specific: money as investments, as flows of capital being captured and steered into financial

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 39

markets, into transacting property rights in various corporations and making profits (or, in the parlance of the domain, positive returns) on such flows. As you may already have recognized, this is the domain in which investment advisers, banks, and brokers like to tout their expertise and track records in glossy ads. I will start, though, with finance academics as the group some claim to be the epitome of this expertise (Mata and Medema 2013: 4).

THE EXPERTISE OF FINANCE ACADEMICS Finance as a science of investments came to be seen as a field of formal academic expertise only relatively recently, in the early 1960s. Previously it was seen as distinct from economics and, initially at least, as having decidedly less prestige compared with the latter. Of course, claims about investments and market transactions being a science had existed for a long time (Preda 2009: 88), not only as a marketing gimmick practiced by brokers but also as a genuine effort to study and understand the dynamics of stock prices and to estimate the value of stocks as different from their momentary prices. Such efforts went back at least to the days of trading the stock of the South Sea Company and the Compagnie du Mississippi in the eighteenth century (e.g., Deringer 2018: 195). Over the course of the nineteenth century and up to the 1930s, authors of investment manuals propagated the idea that there is a “science of the market” that they would reveal to readers (e.g., Preda 2004). All these efforts, however, didn’t make expertise in investments into an academic discipline. Before the late 1950s, academics who devoted attention to the movement of stock prices were not located in economics departments and often had difficulties having their efforts acknowledged as being academic enough ( Jovanovic 2008: 231–33). For a long time, economists

40 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

had regarded finance as a kind of ethnography lacking rigorous method, only little better than financial journalism. They wanted to distance themselves from journalists as “practical economists.” Financial expertise, as it was practiced, was too close to journalism (Alborn 1997: 216, 218). Neither did the existence of professional associations and journals make finance into an academic discipline: the American Finance Association, for instance, split from the American Economic Association in 1940, and from 1946 onward the Journal of Finance was published (Harrison 1997: 176). The number of papers on investments remained relatively small, though, and most were descriptive. Professors of finance started being hired by business schools only in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Harrison 1997: 182), when finance became incorporated into economics (173). This movement coincided with a broader effort to make business schools scientific (Fourcade and Khurana 2017: 357). Before 1960, finance had been perceived as inferior compared with other established academic departments, including economics. Finance academics joined the family of economists when their expertise shifted to model building in the early 1960s, supported by the use of computers in research and by having built databases of stock prices in the late 1950s, with the assistance of investment firms (e.g., Fourcade and Khurana 2017: 359; Jovanovic 2008: 228). Neither the existence of academic jurisdictions as such nor professional associations nor publications per se can tell us what financial academic expertise actually consists in, and what kind of shifts in the epistemic practices of finance academics led ultimately to the incorporation of finance into economics. If we are to follow ethnographic studies of the conceptual practices of economists, at the core of the discipline is model building and testing, understood as formalized, abstract miniworlds

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 41

that include a limited number of actors. Their goals, resources, knowledge, patterns of behavior, and external conditions are expressed by mathematical functions (Yonay and Breslau 2006: 365–67). The aim of the model is to identify the conditions for a state of equilibrium, in which actors can keep reaching their goals without changing their behavior. A model thus translates (investment) problems into the terms of a mechanical system searching for equilibrium (Breslau 2003: 399). To build models, one needs mathematical skills, including in statistics, the ability to manipulate and interpret numerical data, to instruct a computer to perform statistical operations, read computer outputs, access numerical databases, read graphic displays of numerical outputs, and construct a fluent discourse including model-relevant concepts, numerical outputs, and visualizations. Therefore, having contributory expertise means being able to contribute to group practices through all these activities and to the expansion of this domain of models. Saying that models are miniworlds does not mean that they necessarily are representational. We often hear the criticism that abstract models in finance are too disconnected from the real-life experiences of financial actors, thus opening a chasm to other forms of representation (Shonkwiler 2017: xxv). Financial models, however, do not present us with simplified, schematic representations of real-world financial transactions and markets (MacKenzie 2009: 30–31). Models allow users to forecast numerical values of assets and instruments and are conjugated with prescriptive narratives that provide a justification for the forecasts. Thus, models are rather calculative tools used strategically by market actors (MacKenzie 2009: 181). What are the models of academic financial expertise, then? The dynamics of stock prices had preoccupied investors for a

42 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

long time, and some had noticed that these prices seemed to move randomly. However, there was no model that could explain why the movement appeared to be random in stock price series. This allowed analysts who read graphic visualizations of price movements (chartists) and analysts of business cycles to interpret and forecast price movements. Once a model of the market was created, chartism, or technical analysis, became unscientific ( Jovanovic 2008: 220). This development doesn’t mean that technical analysts and their expertise ceased to exist, just that they moved away from academic financial expertise. At the core of financial academic expertise are three components ( Jovanovic 2008: 216; Harrison 1997: 177): a market model expressed in the efficient market theory (EMT), an investment model expressed in the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), and a model of the capital structure of the corporation, which is consequential for its valuation (the Modigliani–Miller theorem, or MMT). Taken together, they constitute what is called the benchmark model of financial markets. These models allow for many variations and contestations, and for alternative partial models. Developing these, however, requires the same set of numerical skills and discursive abilities as the benchmark model. All these models, or miniworlds, contain a very limited number of actors and parts: informed and noise traders (EMT), risk-free and risky investments (CAPM), or leveraged versus unleveraged corporations (MMT). The relationships among parts in each of these miniworlds are expressed in mathematical equations and discursive forms at the same time. For instance, EMT states that markets are efficient in that information is incorporated into prices quickly. Depending on how we define “information,” several versions are possible. CAPM states that investors will seek a risk premium if they are to invest in securities and that risk should be diversified. Whatever momentary

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 43

discrepancies may arise (e.g., overpriced or underpriced securities), they will be exploited by investors (arbitraged away) and will disappear. Thus, markets will return to a state of equilibrium. MMT states that the capital structure of a firm (i.e., whether a firm uses debt or equity) does not affect its valuation, which will be impacted by future earnings. Markets for capital and property rights, corporations that have value, and (risky) assets, as formulated in these models, are the fundamental building blocks of finance, on the top of which various extensionary contributions are built.

ACADEMIC FINANCIAL EXPERTISE AND TALK Being able to utter these statements does not make me a contributory financial expert though. What would make me a contributory financial expert is developing, expanding, and testing a multitude of ramifications (contradictory or not) of these components. For finance academics, these activities gear up toward publishing research papers in peer-reviewed journals, an activity considered the outmost indicator of expertise and a consequential one with respect to reputation, academic career, and standing. Being an academic (financial) expert means first and foremost (albeit not exclusively) being expert at producing, assembling, and publishing research papers. As practitioners attest, one of the most important elements of this process is finding the right research question: The first thing is almost certainly the research question. But it’s one thing to ask a good question and [another to] answer it badly. I think you need to ask a question and answer it well, and

4 4 Y What Is Financial Expertise? that means [having] the right data and the right technique. But that’s not hard. I mean, I think if you were advised well, and if you have the resources, we have limited techniques in finance [i.e., a finite number]. We run regressions, we do our research methods [and] courses. I think that’s one of the things that any institution teaches quite well. The hardest thing is to ask, What’s the important question right now? That hasn’t been answered that needs answering? And that I can answer? And then [to] decide how best to answer that question. So, I think the first thing you drive into the ground, the first stake, that determines the quality of the paper is the research question. And, of course, the first paper doesn’t necessarily answer the research question in its entirety. So you don’t have to come up with a brand new idea. But you have to be quick off the mark . . . identifying that this is an interesting topic. And then the execution has to be fast.

(Finance academic and department head, United Kingdom)

This excerpt highlights three elements of contributory academic expertise: the ability to recognize a good research question (i.e., one recognized as such by the community of practitioners) and the ability to fit it to the right data and the right analytical techniques. One does not need to have an entirely new idea or answer the question completely: this points to the necessity of operating within the parameters established by the core models of finance (even if one were to reject these models, as behavioral finance does) and the necessity of expanding expertise in a cumulative fashion. Time and again, though, in my interviews with finance academics, the research question was viewed as crucial: a paper can be rejected because the research question is seen

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 45

as uninteresting or inappropriate, which calls into question the degree of expertise of the academic. Situationally recognizing a good research question also requires the ability to engage in discussions of various technical and conceptual details of, say, a research paper, with a contributory expert, without having made a contribution. This is why participating in research seminars and conferences, especially North American ones, is seen as key: We don’t necessarily know what the questions are that the editors think of as the most interesting. I don’t go to every single top American conference; I will go once in a blue moon, if I had to write a paper accepted [i.e., develop further a paper accepted for presentation]. I don’t know anybody in the room. Typically, networking is more difficult. I don’t know what’s the state of the art necessarily in the eyes of the editors. We had a distinguished associate editor come to talk to us at [a business school] a few weeks ago. And he was very explicit, even though it’s an area I work on. He was very explicit to say, “We’ve now moved on from this topic”—this whole topic here where I happen to have a paper that I’m working on. . . . So it’s a very clear signal that I’m behind the curve.

(Finance academic and department head, United Kingdom)

To have proper contributory expertise one needs to know what journal editors think an interesting research question is—and be able to invite them to talks, fireside chats, and the like, where these journal-worthy topics are explored, together with the right kind of data and the right kind of analytical techniques. If these interactions are not warranted, then

46 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

contributions to expertise become more difficult, as some have experienced: There is a question that is unanswered. And usually more than one team works on it anyway. And then the competition is in the speed of it. And in . . . one of the papers, for example, I remember, it was with a PhD student . . . the results were very strong. And very much antiestablishment. . . . And we don’t get the empirical tests all right; [we] even suspected that we might be doing a mechanical error. So, we did the estimations again and again and again. And no, we’re doing it [correctly]. But the empirics is not what the theory says. And we send it up, at about the same time a working paper appeared from [an Ivy League school]. Same question, similar approach, similar data. But us, we were working on a UK database. And we learned about it because we sent the paper to one of those American journals, and it was rejected with a comment from the editor saying, “I read it.” One of the associates later stated, “Yes, this is correct, but I’m not going to publish it.”

(Finance academic, United Kingdom)

As this excerpt illustrates, learning what is not working so well in one’s contributory expertise requires learning what peers know and how they judge research topics, methods, and data. This is put on display in a multitude of talk occasions, both formal and informal. In fact, as many of us know only too well, before it reaches the final stages of a source of potential contributory expertise (i.e., a journal submission), a research paper will go through many oral presentations at conferences, research seminars, and workshops, where it will be honed in interactions with peers who might not necessarily be experts on the topic (they rarely are) but who can contribute to a fluent conversation on the research topic in question, data, techniques, and the

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 47

like. However, producing a fluent conversation is not enough. In  other words, it is not enough to be fluent in talking about appropriate research questions on, say, abnormal returns; one also needs to be able to talk in the style appropriate to the domain and the style seen by participants as appropriate. In the context of academic financial expertise, expert talk directed at peer audiences is crucial with respect to how research topics are identified and evaluated, how the expertise of peers is evaluated, and how expert domains establish their own “style.”

THE EXPERTISE OF FINANCIAL ANALYSTS Financial analysts became a full-fledged, established profession in the early 1960s, at about the same time financial economics became established as a distinct field of expertise in academia (Sidaway and Bryson 2002: 407; Groysberg and Healy 2013: 47). This does not mean that financial research hadn’t been done in banks, brokerages, and other financial institutions before. In fact, since the 1920s in the United States, economists had been involved in the business of not only academia but also forecasting economic activity and securities prices, running various commercial activities around the latter (Stapleford 2017: 245). It was in the early 1960s, though, that investment banks and brokerages in the United States first established analyst departments and began selling research to institutional investors, so that the number of analysts more than doubled in less than twenty years (Groysberg and Healy 2013: 48–49). What was this research about? Already in the 1920s, two kinds of expertise in forecasting stock prices had emerged, based on different approaches: one made use of visual aids such as price charts and attempted to identify (and extrapolate) patterns of price movements. This was done by the technical analysts,

48 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

whose work was made possible by technologies of the ticker tape, which generated a continuous flow of prices (Preda 2007: 42). The other kind of expertise was that of the fundamental analysts, who gathered and analyzed information about listed companies, including accounting information (e.g., on debt versus equity, profits, earnings, expenditure, and the like). Fundamental analysts were not so much interested in forecasting stock price movements as in establishing whether a company was over- or undervalued in the market at a given time, based on accounting and other kinds of information about the company in question (Wansleben 2012: 252–53). The establishment of financial economics in academia in the 1960s discredited the expertise of technical analysts as unscientific since, according to the tenets of the efficient market model, prices cannot be forecast (but can deviate from intrinsic value— see Preda 2021: 98). This didn’t make technical analysis disappear as a domain of expertise, and it didn’t prevent major investment banks from employing smaller teams of technical analysts to this day (Leins 2018: 53). Nor did it prevent technical analysts from establishing their own professional organizations, such as the Chartered Market Technician Association, which as of this writing has more than 4,500 members worldwide and runs various credentialing programs. However, since the expertise of fundamental analysts is the only one accepted by finance academics, the former became an object of expert investigations conducted by the latter. A relatively large number of research papers investigate whether financial analysts are indeed accurate in their earnings forecasts, whether they understand derivatives (Chang, Donohoe, and Sougiannis 2016), whether their recommendations impact stock price dynamics (Castellano and Ferrari 2019), and whether they herd in their recommendations (Boyson 2010). The list goes on.

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 49

The dual status of financial analysts’ work (both expertise and the object of finance academics’ expertise) is a direct consequence of the model of efficient markets, which postulates that information is efficiently incorporated into prices. Since financial analysts intermediate between markets and investors, it is important to ask whether the results of their expert work impact prices and whether they have any ability to forecast. What does the analysts’ contributory expertise consist of though? If we are to follow finance academics, it consists of making earnings forecasts, revising such forecasts, and making stock recommendations (Bradley, Gokkaya, and Liu 2017: 755; Bradshaw 2012: 123). As the vast majority of financial analysts are trained in financial economics, they are skilled in statistical techniques and fluent in the discourse of asset pricing and efficient markets (which does not mean that all necessarily have to adopt this model). Additionally, their true expertise is considered to reside in knowledge of a particular industry sector and experience in that sector (Bradshaw 2012: 125; Bradley, Gokkaya, and Liu 2017: 756, 785). Ethnographic investigations on the work done by financial analysts in investment banks highlight the research report as the product of their expertise, with the latter being a combination of calculative outputs (value estimates of earnings and/or of the company’s value), visualizations (price charts and other graphic displays), and a narrative that rationalizes a recommendation by projecting a future for the company in question (Leins 2018: 109). This combination of numerical data, visualizations, and a narrative creates a financial imaginary presented to investors, a possibly true projection (but by no means a certain one) that depends on epistemological and ontological assumptions that can well be contradictory across various such combinations (Ortiz 2014: 130). Regardless of such assumptions, knowledge of financial theory (i.e., of the models of financial

50 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

economists) is regarded both as a condition for accessing the institutional realms of financial analysts and as legitimizing their practices. While research reports can be seen as akin to the research papers published by financial economists, their authors’ contributory expertise primarily resides in expanding not varieties of models but varieties of narratives on economic sectors and companies that assume such models. A significant part of these narratives is provided by knowledge of companies and industrial sectors, knowledge honed not only in studying company reports and financial statements but also in visits on the ground and meetings with management.

ANALYSTS’ EXPERTISE AND TALK When I asked analysts about their contributory expertise, they emphasized two things: the ability to find “good ideas around the world” and the ability to tell a story. While knowledge of formal valuation models is important, the latter need to be regarded with caution, because “in the short term, everything that happened, and, for example, in the past three, four years, I would argue that valuation tools have been absolutely useless. Because markets don’t care about valuations. It’s all about investment flows” (fund manager and former analyst). Finding good ideas requires searching for written information but also talking to other analysts, making calls to company managers, and knowing what others in the industry know: From my perspective, rarely an idea comes from [the] sell side, although I would say a lot of people on the buy side get, it’s difficult to put a percentage, but they’ll say that more than 50 percent of fund managers and buy-side analysts source their ideas from the sell side. And which . . . I don’t think is the right approach.

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 51 Because I like to think I’m a bit of a contrarian; I like to find ideas [that] nobody else is looking at.  .  .  . So one of the ways I find ideas is by just looking at what other people are looking at, and then doing the opposite. So right now, for example, everybody loves the U.S. markets. So everybody is investing in the U.S. And the U.S. market has outperformed for ten years. But when everybody’s looking on the left, just look on the right. So I am looking at places that nobody cares about.

(Fund manager and former analyst)

The implication of such a statement is that finding a “good idea” depends on knowing what other fund managers know and what sell-side analysts know. Good investment ideas, however, cannot remain just ideas. They must be shaped into stories that can be put on paper or told to investors in meetings. It is as important to be able to tell a story as it is to be able to write one: The numbers are important.  .  .  . Kind of as a valuation tool, [they are] probably the most important thing to talk about. But I think [that] every investment model, every valuation tool, has a story. And so, yeah, being able to tell a story, I think, is the most important thing [and being able to tell it] in a very simple and short way. So nobody wants to read the 150-page note; they want to read a one-page note, maximum, which tells you, “I think this is a very cheap stock, because of these three issues. And the market is wrong because of this.” And so I think that is the first thing that kind of attracts the attention of someone like me, a very simple story. . . . I think the ability to tell a story in a concise, yet powerful way . . . [is] the main attribute required to be a successful analyst.

(Fund manager and former analyst)

52 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

A story can be written for or told to investors, and the latter play no small role. During a period when the fund he helped manage was very successful, the fund manager quoted here was spending about 50 percent of his working time meeting with various institutional investors and analysts, which implies that face-to-face storytelling cannot be entirely superseded by written reports. Indeed, this fund manager stated that written reports are mostly used as a “foot in the door,” a means of catching the attention of managers, so that a face-to-face meeting can be arranged. This view is corroborated by research I discuss later in the chapter. However, if oral storytelling is important (I come back to this in the next chapter), then talk must be, too. While there are no systematic studies of the significance of talk in hiring finance academics, we do know from several studies that it occupies a central place in hiring financial analysts (Groysberg and Healy 2013: 35, 39; Leins 2018: 63). Newly hired financial analysts are tested on their oral and written communication skills because their employers know that “this business is call, visit, or write” (Groysberg and Healy 2013: 35). Analysts in some Western European investment banks spend about 50 percent of their working time communicating with investors and 20 percent presenting to companies (Zu Knyphausen-Aufseß, Mirow, and Schweizer 2011: 1158). In surveys of analysts’ attributes conducted in 2007, communication skills were ranked eighth most important, and (knowledge of ) financial models ranked ninth. In 2009, “useful and timely calls and visits” were ranked eighth (they had ranked seventh in previous surveys). Earnings estimates regularly ranked lower than communication skills, calls, and visits in several consecutive surveys (Bradley, Gokkaya, and Liu 2017: 785–86). In other words, from the perspective of institutional investors, talk counts for more than accurate estimates. The centrality of communication includes the argument that written reports (which actually rank highly in

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 53

the judgment of institutional investors) act as relational devices, enabling analysts to gain access to companies and intermediate between them and fund managers (Spence, Aleksanyan, Millo, Imam, and Abhayawansa 2019: 2652). Simply put, written reports are gateways for expert talk. In the previous section, I showed how finance academics (including journal editors) get invitations specifically to perform a mapping of expertise through talk: we give talks to one another because we want to know who knows what, who judges which research topics to be worthwhile (and which not), who projects which topics to be worthy of investigation, and so on. Based on the interviews I have conducted, these aspects of expert talk appear to be less important for financial analysts than for finance academics: if analysts write papers mainly as devices for initiating face-to-face meetings, it is less important for fund managers to map written knowledge onto various analysts than for finance academics to map it onto their colleagues and journal editors. The relationship between expertise and talk appears to be structured differently for finance analysts and academics, respectively, but the audiences for their talk are different as well. While finance academics highlighted talking to their peers as playing a key role in identifying research topics, analysts highlighted talking to a different audience: fund managers who are participants in investment activities but not in the work of discovering investment ideas. For now, though, a third kind of expertise remains to be examined: that of financial journalists.

THE EXPERTISE OF FINANCIAL JOURNALISTS Financial journalists are acknowledged by finance academics as having an impact on capital markets: press coverage of

54 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

companies influences share prices (H. Jacobs 2020; Call, Emett, Maksymov, and Sharp 2021: 1; Bushee, Core, Guay, and Hamm 2010: 2). Academic research treats financial journalists as information intermediaries in that they (a) facilitate the dissemination of information released by companies, (b) gather and package information from multiple sources, and (c) create new information, for instance by soliciting commentary from company managers or by investigating companies (Bushee, Core, Guay, and Hamm 2010: 3). Seen like this, finance journalists are another intermediation layer on top of that constituted by financial analysts; the latter constitute a major source of information for the former (H. Jacobs 2020: 563; Call, Emett, Maksymov, and Sharp 2021: 6). This view, which focuses on the print media (e.g., newspapers, business magazines addressing the general public, industry publications), does not address the features of TV, radio, or social media financial journalism and does not ultimately tell us what the expertise of financial journalists consists of. It is implied that the latter relies heavily on social relationships and talk and that its contributory side consists in compiling and assembling narratives on financial topics. Financial journalism emerged as a distinct genre in the midnineteenth century as part of a broader process separating imaginative writing from factual writing on economic topics (Poovey 2008: 34).6 In fact, prominent financial journalists of nineteenthcentury Britain did not shy away from borrowing from true crime writing and sensational fiction, both popular with the working and middle classes (Poovey 2008: 261). Fiction writers, too, engaged in depictions of imaginary financial manias, and both fiction writers and financial journalists explored the psychological dimensions of speculation (268). At the same time, writers in the genre of political economy engaged in providing abstract accounts of economic events. Together with financial

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 55

journalists, they helped naturalize the operations of the credit economy in Britain (275). In this account, what makes the emergence of financial journalism distinct from that of fiction writing is a particular set of social relationships among practitioners (fiction writers competed with one another, whereas journalists collaborated) and the strategies adopted for defining a literary form of value (285). Over the course of the nineteenth century, distinct genres emerged in financial journalism, such as commentary on financial and economic affairs and the investigation of companies’ financial affairs, with the latter modeled on the genre of true crime writing. In Britain, at least, financial journalism was initially concentrated in specialized publications such as the Financial Times and the Economist and newspapers addressing the upper-middle classes (such as the Daily Telegraph). From the 1920s and again from the 1960s, large-circulation newspapers appointed city editors, specialized in financial affairs, and introduced finance pages to their editions (Butterick 2015: 74, 76). In 1970, the first finance public relations (PR) firm was founded; from the 1980s, PR firms played an important role as an intermediary layer between financial journalists and public companies (144, 147). Generally speaking, the expertise of journalism is considered to consist in “the discovery, articulation, and radial messaging of publicly relevant information” (Boyer 2013: 141). For news journalism, expertise transforms occurrences into publicly discussable events (Tuchman 1978: 3). It is provided by the beat as a combination of territorial and topical jurisdiction resulting in a network of informants (Fishman 1980: 29), together with the ability to build topical narratives within particular formats (Tuchman 1978: 105). The few ethnographic accounts of the work of financial journalists indicate that, at least in the cases studied, a minority have a background in journalism, with backgrounds

56 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

in science and business dominating (Cooper and Ebeling 2007: 1.5). Financial journalists relied upon experts in the companies reported on, including engineering experts, to verify claims of scientific and financial facticity (2.2). Their expertise seemed to consist primarily in locating trustworthy sources and establishing relationships with them (2.2, 2.8) and in searching for stories (3.8). In establishing the newsworthiness of a financial story, journalists first use copy created by PR firms working on behalf of companies: PR firms thus act as a filter for selecting stories worth pursuing, developing, and bringing through the editorial decision-making process (4.5–4.7). Deciding which financial story is worth pursuing editorially also depends on what stories other media outlets are reporting. Thus, instead of competing to find relevant neglected stories to report, financial journalists tend to report similar ones, or on the same companies or technological developments (4.4).

JOURNALISTIC EXPERTISE AND TALK Overall, the argument is that the practical epistemologies of financial journalists—epistemologies that define their expertise— are akin to those of social scientists, and especially to sociologists conducting fieldwork (Cooper and Ebeling 2007: 5.2): finding sources, evaluating trustworthiness and credibility, and establishing relationships with sources, with a view to writing a story on a financial topic. This gives talk a prominent role: the expertise of financial journalists appears to be in locating and evaluating relevant sources for stories, given the constraints of preexisting filters (PR agencies) and of what in the journalistic community counts as a story at a given moment. In written journalism at least, expertise in writing stories is a collaborative enterprise between reporters

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 57

and editors. TV financial journalism has a series of distinctive features that I discuss in the next chapter.

EXPERTISE AND TALK The links between expertise and talk appear to be structured differently for the three domains I have discussed in this chapter: finance academics’ model markets, investments, and the capital structure of corporations. Finance academics talk mainly about models to peers, mapping research ideas onto peers. Financial analysts search for investment ideas and put them into stories, which they present orally and in writing to investors. Financial journalists locate sources of stories likely to becoming news and rely on these sources for claims of facticity. For a financial journalist, finding privileged sources of talk plays a significant role. For a financial analyst, the ability to talk persuasively to investors about the analyst’s unique story takes center stage. Financial journalists might transform stories into news, but they rely in this process on a web of facticity (Tuchman 1978: 86) involving the mutually reinforcing voices of financial analysts, PR people, company managers, and the like. At the same time, financial analysts seem to occupy an intermediary position between finance academics and journalists: their expertise is an object of investigation for academics and a source of news for financial journalists.

FINANCIAL INTERMEDIATIONS, TALK, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF EXPERTISE Taken together, the forms of expertise I have discussed intermediate the transformation of money (e.g., savings) into financial

58 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

capital. Intermediation is understood as transformations of liquidity and assets (Brine and Poovey 2017: 270–73) accompanied by a growing complexity of the investment chain (Arjaliès, Grant, Hardie, MacKenzie, and Svetlova 2017: 5). This growing complexity includes the transfer of bank-intermediation functions to nonbanking institutions such as hedge funds, a transfer that expands financial expertise (Brine and Poovey 2017: 362–63). Hence, we see more, not less, financial expertise as part of an overall process of the financialization of advanced economies.7 This has several consequences: first, along with financialization, we should see a global expansion of financial expertise, not only in the sense of its geographic diffusion but also in that of a globalization of particular topics and models. Second, we should see an expansion not only of contributory expertise but also of expert talk. Third, we should not expect this diffusion process to happen at the same speed everywhere. Earlier studies on the academic finance profession found that in the early 2000s, in the United States, the average age of tenured finance professors had increased by four years since the early 1990s, while the most common rank was tenured full professor. In the early 1990s, it had been assistant professor. Also in the early 1990s, 89 percent of finance professors were male, but by the end of the decade, this had dropped to 85 percent (Lahey and Vihtelic 2000: 113). During the same decade, the average number of courses taught was 5.7 (116). This indicates an expansion and consolidation of academic financial expertise: at the beginning of the 1990s, assistant professors dominated, but in time they got tenured, published an average of ten papers in refereed journals (115), and taught a relatively high number of courses. While we lack this kind of data on a global scale, we can take as a proxy for globalization the number of refereed papers published in the thirty top-ranked finance journals that focus on

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 59

international topics. The assumption is that the higher the proportion of papers on international topics compared with those exclusively focused on the United States, the more globalized academic financial expertise has become. From 2001 to 2008, the proportion of refereed finance papers with an international focus published in the top journals increased from 14.8 percent to 25 percent (Millet-Reyes 2013: 138). Citations of international finance papers also increased over the same period. However, it is not just international finance topics that have increased in importance. Finance topics that were typically seen as “American topics” became globalized, in the sense of being replicated by international scholars: Finance academic: I think the main difference between [journals] is not in the quality of the publication but is in the topic of the publication. So, most of the top journals are American journals. So . . . they do work on mainly American issues. And these, these see the American issues as world issues [my emphasis]. So, I think the main difference is in the topicality of it. And also  .  .  . when you look at the people who publish in those journals, so they’re basically [from] the Ivy League schools in America. So the topics are the same, it’s a community, and it’s easier if you’re part of the community, because . . . before you [send] it, it’s blind refereed, but I don’t know how blind it is. Because you have presented to almost every school in the Ivy League before you submitted it, and you have heard every comment, and you have addressed that requirement. So  .  .  . there is a club thing as well. And more  .  .  . around many of those journals. Ethnographer: Assuming I were to produce a piece of technically very sophisticated work on, say, finance in India, and on a financial topic that is relevant to India, but not relevant at all . . .

60 Y What Is Financial Expertise? Finance academic (interrupting): No, no, no, that doesn’t have a chance. . . . That doesn’t have a chance. . . . Maybe . . . in, I don’t know, development journals, or maybe in economics journals, but definitely not in finance journals. No matter how sophisticated the analysis is, no, it’s not about the analysis. I think in the top three journals . . . what makes the paper published, let’s say, in the top twenty to thirty journals as well: it’s the topic, it’s the question [my emphasis]. It’s impossible even to publish a paper with weak analysis in a one-star-rated journal, Alex. But the question is mainly, To [whom] is the question of interest? If the question is of interest, then that’s the issue for the journal. And that’s the issue for that country itself.

Finding the right topic is, as I have argued, intrinsic to financial academic expertise. Such topics are, in many accounts of my interviewees, American research topics that have been adopted and reproduced on a global scale. In parallel with the globalization of American research topics, academic financial expertise became globalized from the 1990s onward simply by the establishment of more and more positions in finance, either in newly created or existing business schools, and by the hiring of academics with expertise in modeling efficient markets, asset pricing, and the capital structure of the corporation.

THE GLOBALIZATION OF FINANCIAL EXPERTISE IN THE LOCAL CONTEXT In mainland China, however, this globalization process was markedly slower than (and different from that) in neighboring Hong Kong. In the 1980s, economists were not yet a profession in China (Li 2015: 74). While the first students trained

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 61

in Western universities started to return to mainland China in the 1990s, and American visiting academics taught at Chinese universities during the same period, interest lay with issues of macroeconomic policies, monetary policies, and growth, not finance (107, 139). Economic and financial expertise was redefined around modeling starting only around 2000, and financial economists expanded into the financial services industry only during the period from 2003 to 2012 (256). Hong Kong universities, however, had globalized their financial expertise earlier: already in the late 1980s they had separated finance from accounting departments (the old UK model was to have an “accounting and finance department”), and they had started hiring graduates of U.S. universities, who brought with them not only a set of analytical skills but also a set of American topics: For the most part, we have hired graduate PhD graduates from North America. For the most part, that has been the case for a long time. So even going back thirty years, that was the common approach. Although we probably do now hire more people with PhDs from European universities, including the UK, than before, including continental Europe as well. . . . I think that’s probably because business schools in continental Europe, and also the UK, have [a] better profile than before, maybe better PhD programs than twenty to thirty years ago. So, that’s probably the source of that. So, we do have a few, often Chinese, people doing programs overseas in Europe, but I would still say that most of the people we hire are graduates from  .  .  . the U.S., a small number from Canada, but principally still from the U.S.

(Finance academic teaching in Hong Kong since the 1980s)

62 Y What Is Financial Expertise?

Hong Kong universities participated in the earlier globalization of academic financial expertise (in sync with Western universities). This allowed for an earlier expansion into the financial services industry as well, simply by placing graduates of local finance programs in industry positions. This expanded the pool of expertise outside local academic groups and made it easier for contributory expertise to circulate across groups within industry and academia: Some of the PhD students would, particularly in the past, go into investment banking. But we do try to discourage that, not myself, but the dean and the faculty have tried to discourage that because they feel that it’s better to place people within academia. But I don’t necessarily agree with that. Because I think you can have, in some ways, just as much impact if you get people into senior positions in the industry, in some ways a lot more impact. Because we already have good networks into other universities. So we . . . know what’s happening there. But if you want impact in the community, I think getting people into big banks, big insurance companies, consultancy firms, may not be a bad thing.

(Finance academic)

This circulation of academic financial expertise across academia and finance institutions is not particular to Hong Kong, of course. What is particular to Hong Kong, and what plays a role in my analysis, is the constitution of a pool of globalized financial expertise (hence a pool of expert talk) next to a vast source of capital (mainland China) that developed such expertise only a decade or so later. The growth in the pool of academic expertise since the early 1990s was mirrored by the growth in analyst expertise: in 1992, the Hong Kong Society of Financial

What Is Financial Expertise? Z 63

Analysts (HKSFA) was founded with forty members. On its twentieth anniversary in 2012, it had more than 5,300 members. By comparison, the whole of mainland China had just a little more than 2,000 (HKSFA 2012: 24). In 2021, according to data from the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), there were more than 47,000 licensed brokers, investment advisers, and fund managers in the city (SFC 2021: table C). Since the mid2010s, Hong Kong universities have introduced programs in financial journalism. I will venture here that this pool of expertise, which for more than two decades had a privileged position, played a significant role in capturing and steering capital into investments. In this chapter, I have argued that financial expertise has become globalized since the 1990s and that this globalization is reflected not only in the creation of research topics that are circulated globally but also in the emergence of local pools of experts who not only do research on global financial topics but also talk about them. Talk in relation to financial expertise is viewed by participants differently, depending on the kinds of audience it is oriented to. This raises the question of expert financial talk that addresses audiences other than peers, professional investors, or insiders—audiences generally conceived of as “the public.” I examine this topic in the next chapter.

2 TALK, SPECTACLE, AND EXPERTISE

I

started this book by introducing a distinction between game and spectacle. Dr. Tulp played a game of contributory expertise, but once per year, as prescribed by his guild, he made a spectacle of his expertise—that is, he gave a public expert talk and demonstration. Having dealt with three varieties of financial expertise in the previous chapter, I will now focus on how financial expert talk is staged and made into a special occasion: a spectacle for an audience who are not participants in the domain. Before doing that, though, I will ask the reader to follow me through two discursive preliminaries: one clarifies the notion of spectacle, and the other examines the staging of expert talk. Ultimately, my argument in this chapter is that if we want to understand how public expert talk works, we need to understand its spectacular qualities.

FINANCE AND SPECTACLE For centuries now, cultural imaginaries (Taylor 2004: 23) have associated financial markets with spectacle. The spectacular, theatrical elements of markets have been long acknowledged

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 65

by scholars from the social sciences and the humanities, so that an exploration of these associations, however brief, is needed. Perhaps it is needed even more because these associations present us with contradictory takes on the spectacular character of markets. We can broadly distinguish three positions: (1) As financial knowledge is difficult to comprehend, the theatrical frame provides outside observers with a mode of accessing financial transactions through expressive stunts, one that reinforces the cognitive distance between observers and financial actors. Cognition and expression are separated, and this separation allows for the introduction of make-believe into markets. (2) Tools of financial action have a performative character in the sense that markets are produced as these tools are used. Observers can understand how markets come into being, but a condition of this understanding is a comprehension of tools (e.g., of models of derivatives pricing), at least on the level of familiarity with financial concepts. This position, derived from science and technology studies, does not preclude expertise and does not treat financial action as fully incomprehensible to all outsiders. (3)  Financial expertise cannot completely eliminate the uncertainties related to market action and therefore must be accompanied by ritual. Market actions thus include ritual performances with a theatrical character that convey the illusion that the participants are in control. From the start, the theatrical has been perceived as intrinsic to markets and as defining observers’ attitudes vis-à-vis transactions, including here judgments of their moral character (e.g., Crosthwaithe 2014: 37–38). From London’s coffee houses at the time of the South Sea Bubble, from the tumult of the rue Quincampoix to the pits of the Chicago Board of Trade and, closer to our days, the screens of electronic trading, trading financial assets has been seen through the prism of theatrical analogies,

66 Y Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

as dramas unfolding before the eyes of (more often than not) befuddled spectators. A rich portfolio of visual allegories spanning centuries portrays markets as either a moral or hard-tocomprehend theater, or both. Various artistic techniques, from engravings and oil paintings to photography, have also been used to illustrate markets. From this perspective, financial markets appear to external observers to have a visual dynamic that cannot be made sense of on its own. The hustle and bustle, the crowds of traders, and traders’ continuous gesturing raise questions of comprehensibility, even more so because all the hustle and bustle is about difficult-to-understand financial assets. As Paul Crosthwaithe (2014: 39) notes, “Assets, rights and obligations being bought and sold in these sites of financial exchange . . . occupied the realm of fantasy, magic, and make believe.” Therefore, the theatrical frame of the make-believe appears to be the most appropriate for making sense of markets, exactly because the experience of observing financial transactions is so unusual for viewers (Staeheli 2013: 16). To quote Erving Goffman again, “Staged interactions are systematically designed to be exposed to large audiences that can only be expected to have very general knowledge in common with the play characters performing this interaction” (1974: 142). In other words, the gap between what audiences know and what traders know makes the theatrical frame the main mode of comprehending what is going on. When nineteenth-century novels addressed financial markets and speculation, they often did so through a theatrical lens emphasizing dramas of consciousness of the main characters, as well as through dramatic scenes of financial panic (Shonkwiler 2017: 18, 27). Scenes of talk play a prominent role both in visual representations of markets and in fictional narratives of finance: it is not only the gossip of the coffee houses (which can well be deceiving) but also the incomprehensible shouts and cries of the

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 67

marketplace that stun observers. The illusory project talk, the talk of the con man, and the bragging reveal a lack of substance and cast doubt on the substance of the financial transactions themselves. We can well argue that representations of financial talk are intrinsic to this perceived theatricality. The theatrical frame is the most appropriate representational mode because the cognitive distance between financial speculators and spectators is a large one: the former know how to make money out of imagined assets, whereas the latter cannot comprehend how. Speculators talk; spectators do not understand the talk. In acknowledging cognitive distance, educated spectators also acknowledge moral distance and situate themselves in a realm different from that of utility, namely that of propriety (Agnew 1986: 188). The market makes money, but it does not have moral propriety. Spectators do not understand how the market makes money but do have moral propriety. We should note here that, in this account, the esoteric knowledge of speculators (that is, their expertise) prevents genuine, cognate participation on the part of audiences (Kelty 2019: 32). The spectacle is a substitute that puts (cognitive and moral) distance between audiences and actors, replacing any genuine knowledge with expressive stunts (the cries, contortions, and crowding of speculators in the marketplace). Expression and expertise are separated and separate. The second position on the theatricality of markets, the performative one, is different. Financial models and formulas are not mere representations of markets but tools used in market actions (e.g., MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007; MacKenzie 2009: 31). As if on stage, market performers (analysts, academics, and traders) construct a reality in front of their audiences’ eyes by using various tools, such as derivative pricing formulas, in market transactions. As tools are grounded in expertise, the very use of them creates financial markets (in the sense of bringing to

68 Y Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

life through action), the consequences of which audiences experience directly. This argument takes its inspiration directly and explicitly from J. L. Austin’s notion of performative utterances (1979) as communicative forms that are not merely descriptive but also endowed with the institutional force of intervening directly in social reality. In this account, the relationship between audiences and performers is conceived differently from the understanding of the theatrical frame. Whereas in the first account audiences do not know anything about the knowledge of speculators (except that it is esoteric), in this case audiences must have interactional expertise (grounded in participant comprehension) to grasp how the use of expert tools creates markets. Not by chance, one of the first empirical studies promoting this understanding of performativity (MacKenzie and Millo 2003) examined the pits of the Chicago Board of Trade (which have the quality of theatrical stages), in which traders were using calculation outputs (i.e., rolled-up computer printouts) to price and trade derivatives. The third way of associating finance with spectacle and the theatrical is through ritual. Arjun Appadurai, for instance, makes the argument that financial transactions, conducted under uncertainty, should be understood in terms of “collective ritual occasions” that recast uncertainty and make the market visible and accessible to observers within a ritual frame (2015: 93–94). Rituals, as we know, have a theatrical character. This argument is made with regard to derivative transactions, a class of financial instruments that give parties the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a particular asset (such as a stock) at a fixed price at a set date in the future. The uncertainty comes from the temporal gap between the moment when the transaction is closed and the moment, in the future, when the right to buy or sell may be exercised. As calculative tools (expertise) cannot

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 69

completely eliminate uncertainties, market actors resort to rituals as a tried-and-tested cultural way of dealing with uncertainty. The argument is that understanding transactions in terms of ritual accounts for the ontological reality of what is ultimately a social fiction, namely financial markets (LiPuma 2017: 221). Any observer of the market observes rituals, too, dramaturgical performances that create, for both actors and audiences, the illusion that expertise is effective. Ultimately, then, there is no way of deciding upon this effectiveness. This position is not far from the first one, implying that financial expert knowledge is ultimately neither accessible to outsiders nor sufficient for market actors to handle the uncertainties they are confronted with. This insufficiency is supplanted by rituals, which make possible the emergence of a meta-theater, understood as “dramaturgical language about the language of ordinary role-playing and status-maintenance” (Turner 1987: 76). With respect to finance, this could be illustrated by dramatic narratives of financial crises and bubbles (e.g., Shiller 2019). One could argue that this position blurs the conceptual distinctions between narrative and lived spectacle, with the consequence that audiences are abstracted as general addressees of financial storytelling (of the dramatic kind). No distinction is left between written and spoken narrative, between written document and expert talk. The boundaries of the theatrical frame, one could argue, are thinly stretched. Irrespective of this, the preceding accounts highlight at least two things: First, there is a relationship between spectacle and game, between expert talk and expertise, a relationship that needs to be clarified. Second, the ways in which audiences relate to expertise depend on how we conceptualize this relationship. Some of the preceding accounts imply that talk and expertise are entirely dissociated: rituals, for instance, obscure either a lack of

70 Y Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

expertise or an insufficiency thereof. Theatrical expressions are meant to obscure the knowledge traders use in their dealings. Yet for knowledgeable audiences, talk provides access (as is the case with the performativity argument). Shall we understand, then, that talk either obscures expert financial knowledge from audiences or that it hides the limits of this knowledge? The realist view on expertise asserts that a condition of meaningful talk is participant comprehension; that is, parties in conversation have to at least observe and comprehend the practices of a domain of expertise to achieve proficiency in the language of that domain. Talk adds to contributory financial expertise exactly because this participant comprehension is warranted and supported by special arrangements (e.g., fireside chats, meetings, seminars). Participant comprehension, though, is not always warranted, and not for all audiences. Its lack seems to open a gap in which talk, instead of adding to expertise, obscures or distorts it in one form or another. What happens with expert talk in this gap? Answering this question requires examining the ways in which expert talk is produced in front of audiences.

EXPERT TALK AND EXPRESSION To do this, however, the relationship between expert talk and its audiences shouldn’t be seen as abstract or generic. It is a relationship shaped by particular interactions. It is not abstract talk we should investigate but rather talk performed by embodied experts, in specific situations, to specific audiences. Audiences, in their turn, cannot be assumed to be passive or ignorant by definition: what they know (or do not know) and whether they choose to hide or reveal their knowledge first become apparent during the interaction with the experts. While the notion of

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 7 1

interactional expertise discussed in the previous chapter refers to the ability to speak the language of a domain (grounded in participant comprehension), we should also keep in mind that this is not an abstract ability but a lived one. When audiences have the interactional expertise to grasp how a bond pricing model works, for instance, they have this as a lived ability, displayed in interactions with modelers. Expressions intervene in such interactions in the sense that we as audience members put a face to experts, and they put a face to us. I mean this literally: as ethnographers and other social scientists know, interactions are filtered through expressions, not only in the sense of consciously conveying and maintaining an impression (of social propriety) on the counterpart (Goffman 1967: 12) but also, and more importantly, in that expression is a condition of interaction. Hence, expert talk is also inextricably tied to expression. Going back to finance understood as spectacle, this argument means that expression is intrinsic to expert talk. Expression mediates between the substance of talk and audiences. This means that what is viewed and accepted by audiences as expert knowledge is filtered through expression, through the expressive means used by experts in their interactions with audiences. How should we then understand expression? Should we understand it as an emotional, affective display or as a judgmental one? My answer is neither. Let me start by providing a few examples: in courts of law, expert witnesses are called not only to express opinions on technical aspects of the contested matter but also to be crossexamined about their past expert activities (e.g., research in the domain, published papers). Their credentials will be mentioned, although they can be questioned. Other meta-criteria, such as the standards of evidence used in a particular field or procedures for the handling and storage of laboratory probes, can also

72 Y Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

become the object of challenge and contestation with the aim of shaping the jury’s perception of the witness as an expert. The expert witness has to present their expertise and likely defend it against attacks from the other party (Lynch 2007). The exact form of such attacks cannot be known in advance, although it can be anticipated. In this situation, expert witnesses do not reperform a lab analysis in front of the jury. Rather, they display their expertise by answering questions, using a range of expressions in their answers. Or take experts that appear in documentary films, or weather anchors. Documentary filmmakers may invite a variety of experts to talk about an issue. A documentary, or a portion of it, may be narrated by an expert, be they a physicist or a biologist (Dornfeld 1998: 105). Additionally, more than one expert may make cameo appearances as “expert observers” who deliver information and provide on- or off-camera commentary (108). All these experts, be they astrophysicists, marine biologists, immunologists, or pediatricians, are not there to reconduct their research in front of the public. Rather, they are there to demonstrate that they are experts in the domain at hand and that they can talk meaningfully about research in that domain. Similarly, not all weather anchors are journalists; many are trained meteorologists. As Gary Alan Fine notices, “Weather girls have been nudged off stage by broadcast meteorologists of both genders” (2007: 228). Weather anchors are there not only to inform but also to display their expertise in handling weather data—indeed, little information, if any, could be conveyed if they were unable to convey that they are experts in what they are doing. Meteorologists, astrophysicists, and marine biologists, for example, are not identical to what Ronald N. Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley call “pundits” or “media intellectuals,” a.k.a. “political pontificators who make their living offering ‘insider political

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 73

opinions and forecasts’” (2011: 17).1 Rather, they are experts, and they appear as such. We would not have expected Carl Sagan to utter an insider opinion (e.g., “Unverified yet trusted sources tell me that dwarf stars . . .”) but rather to offer audiences a talk about the evolution of the universe, grounded in his own expert knowledge and research. What expert witnesses, meteorologists, documentary film hosts, expert observers, and financial analysts have in common is that they display their expertise to audiences through expressive means, without directly undertaking expert activities relevant to their field of knowledge in front of audiences. What does it mean to use expressive means? It means that expert speakers use both visual and auditory means to produce a specific form of talk that I call public expert talk. For instance, bodily appearance, the use of specific formal properties (e.g., fluency in a topic), and particular conversational conventions (supported by technology) all pertain to how public expert talk is produced. One corollary is that expert talk is not disembodied; I examine this in the coming chapters. Embodied expert talk is how we gain expertise outside our own domains: it is both a gateway and a limitation to knowledge. Expression is intrinsic to it. By positioning expression as a mediating layer between expert knowledge and audiences, I depart from Goffman’s argument that expression is exclusively impression management (1959: 248). Yet I take seriously the notion that “the more the individual is concerned with the reality that is not available to perception, the more must he concentrate his attention to appearances” (249). It is only that I interpret this statement somewhat differently: the more experts are concerned with displaying their expertise, the more they must concentrate their attention on appearances. I also venture the hypothesis that when there are gaps in participant comprehension, this intermediating layer becomes even more important.

74 Y Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

COLLABORATIONS AND THE PRODUCTION OF APPEARANCES These appearances, a.k.a. expression, can themselves be the object of expertise. In fact, a whole spectrum of expert activities deals with expression, such as those of photographers, camera directors, makeup artists, media producers, and the like. While the expressions of experts are usually assumed to be the outcome of their own effort, I argue that there are many situations in which they emerge out of a collaborative effort. Let me go back to the previous examples: when expert witnesses take the stand, they have to produce expert talk related to the contested matter. Their display of expertise is the outcome of a collaboration with the attorney or barrister who has called them to take the stand. Typically together, the attorney and the expert witness go over not only the substance of the testimony but also how this substance has to be expressed—that is, how the expert talk is to be produced as embodied talk. They try to anticipate together the strategy of the cross-examining attorney and how to resist or counter it. Successfully resisting the cross-examiner requires that both the attorney and expert witness pay attention to expression (e.g., to how the expert answers questions and to the expert’s appearance and posture), since all elements of expression are consequential with respect to the expert’s credibility in front of the jury. As cross-examination is a live dialogue and not reducible to reading a prepared script, it has a series of contingencies in which the expert’s expression can play a significant role (Lynch 2007: 941). Hence, how expert witnesses look on the stand and how they say what they say—in short, the expressions they convey (Goffman 1959: 4)—are consequential with respect to both their credibility in front of the jury and to their being potentially vulnerable to attacks from

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 75

the cross-examiner. Hence, aspects of expression cannot be left to chance; they must be prepared collaboratively with the party summoning the expert witness. Or take experts who appear in documentaries as hosts or expert observers. They have to produce embodied expert talk that is consequential with respect to audiences. This embodied expert talk requires expression: appearance, line of sight, voice modulation, phrasing, and the like. All expression being left to chance (as given off )2 would mean that expert talk, and expertise with it, are a matter of chance, which would radically undermine the very notion of expertise. This expression is neither left to chance (given off inadvertently) nor an individual accomplishment. Rather, it is the outcome of a collaborative effort involving producers, camera directors, and the like. In his ethnography of documentary filmmaking, Barry Dornfeld shows how experts appearing in front of the camera do not find producing expert talk effortless. It is actually quite difficult. First, the content of the talk is not the sole domain of the expert. Producers intervene and, in Dornfeld’s words, are “the ghostwriters for these author/observers” (1998: 75). Producers “quote the observers,” but these quotations have to be staged within the limits of the expert observers’ performances in front of the camera. In other words, the expressions of the experts in front of the camera constrain the kind of content selected by the producers. At the same time, when it comes to expression, producers treat experts as actors, as performers who deliver expressions of varying quality (107). While they admire some experts for their accomplished delivery, they worry about the performance of others in front of the camera and devise ways to handle low-quality performances (211n23). The attention given by producers to what they hope will be flawless talk underscores the fact that we consider public expert

76 Y Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

talk to be a special occasion, to be treated as such in both its production and by audiences. Whereas in a casual conversation we would tolerate a certain number of flaws in formality (e.g., pauses, hiccups, hesitations, mispronunciations, grammatical errors), we hold expert talk to a higher standard. In collaborations between experts and producers, experts are neither solely in control of the content of their talk, nor are producers (experts in expression) solely in control of the delivery of this talk. What is selected in the editing process—in a documentary at least—depends on the quality of the expression, on how the content has been conveyed. From the standpoint of the audience, this means that the verbal knowledge of a domain of expertise that is accessible to them through talk is constrained by and filtered through expression. In a particular setting, it is not only the ability to speak a particular language—in the case at hand, that of finance—that matters but also how that ability is expressed toward a particular audience. If expert talk produces knowledge, then what is produced is shaped by the expressions given in a talk situation. And if expert talk is an intrinsic part of expertise, it follows that expressions given during a talk are intrinsic to expertise, too. Public expert talk is part and parcel of what I have defined in this book as the spectacle of expertise. As spectacle, expert talk does not belong entirely to a pure, ideal-typical theatrical frame within which audiences have an exclusive claim on the activity they watch (Goffman 1974: 125–26). It is not conducted in a playful, make-believe key (48),3 although it can occasionally include such elements. Yet expert talk requires “platform skills”—that is, skills in expression (Goffman 1981: 165) that are not easy to attain and that can be produced collaboratively. The collaborative production of platform skills—expression in an expert manner—prima facie pertains to interactional expertise.

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 77

It is, however, also a trading zone. I have previously pointed to documentary film producers learning about the research of experts and experts making efforts to learn expression skills (Dornfeld 1998). The same pertains to expert witnesses and attorneys—the latter learn about the activities of engineers or medics, and the former learn legal notions useful for understanding court proceedings. Also, attorneys at law, barristers, or documentary film makers can, through repeated collaborations, acquire a degree of participant comprehension not always warranted when it comes to broad audiences. This, however, does not obscure the fact that ultimately it is the expert who does the talking, whether in a court of law or on the screen. My overall argument is that we should see expertise both as game and as spectacle. The game is played in laboratories, observational fields, experimental settings, and the like. The spectacle is played in front of audiences, in an array of formats, some of which involve collaborations with expression experts. One of the consequences of this argument is as follows: when we say that institutions rely on expertise (in their policies or decisionmaking processes), they also rely on spectacles of expertise. In the following chapters, I investigate spectacles of financial expertise and their consequences for financial institutions. I have argued that financial experts must regularly produce embodied expert talk geared toward specific audiences. A subset of such situations is provided by those in which financial expert talk is performed publicly and produced collaboratively with expression experts. This is what I call the spectacle of finance. In this sense, finance is spectacular indeed, but not necessarily because it is make-believe strategically used to obscure “real” knowledge. It is not performative in the sense that spectacles of finance create realities, although such spectacles can have real consequences. And it is not pure ritual either, designed to

78 Y Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

compensate for uncertainties and knowledge gaps. The spectacle of finance, in this context, refers to something less grand, albeit (I argue) more consequential: the collaborative production of public, embodied, expert financial talk within specific settings, talk that has real consequences.

FINANCIAL EXPERT TALK AS SPECTACLE The talk I am going to analyze in the following chapters is that produced by financial analysts, economists, and financial journalists in collaboration with TV and radio producers, anchors, lighting directors, and makeup artists, among others. In short, it is produced in collaboration with expression experts. It is produced in radio and TV studios and streamed on various internet platforms such as YouTube and Meta. Financial expert talk is distinct from financial news, such as that provided by a TV news anchor reading the Dow Jones index. It is clearly marked as produced by experts, both in form and content. Its very production marks it as distinct from advertising or advice, and there would be legal consequences if these boundaries were crossed. However, neither expert financial talk nor anchor-style reading of financial news should be taken as a natural part of TV and radio programming, easy to produce, or the exclusive domain of journalism. In fact, as I argued in the previous chapter, the expertise of financial journalism is primarily associated with producing written texts, not with producing talk. Public, expert financial talk is relatively new, much newer than the media of radio and TV. In the United States, financial talk on TV emerged in 1981, with the advent of cable TV. A little less than two decades after financial economics emerged as a domain of academic expertise, expert financial talk made

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 79

its entrance into the media. Attempts to add a business news and commentary segment to news broadcasts on ABC and PBS were made in the 1960s, and later on CBS. However, according to oral histories, in the early 1980s there was no previous generation of financial and business broadcast reporters who could pass their skills on to incoming ones (Griffeth 2004). When the Financial News Network (FNN) was founded in 1981 as a fledgling cable channel, it hired a group of young graduates of the media program at California State University at Northridge who knew nothing about finance. Some were hired as producers because their youthful looks made them less credible as business reporters. They understood themselves not as investigative reporters but as interpretive ones. In the words of one of the hires, Bob Griffeth (2004): We didn’t have investigative reporters per se. I’ve always said I’m not an investigative reporter. That’s not my job. I’m an interpretive reporter. My job of necessity is as the news comes in . . . I’m sitting at the anchor desk as news is happening during the day and as the news comes in my job is to interpret it for the viewing audience, to put it in perspective, to make something of it, to make it understandable.

In practice, “interpretive reporting” meant improvising on the ticker tape: “They [the FNN producers] split eight hours of programming between them every day, and it was an adlib shop from that point on. There was no production support of any kind” (Insana 2004). In 1984, FNN asked an intern, Ron Insana, to improvise talk about financial data coming in on the ticker tape. Insana obliged, and the audience began to demand commentary on other financial data as well (e.g., commodities, currencies). According to Insana, he was just out of college and had

80 Y Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

no financial background at the time, but FNN had no money to pay a financial analyst (2004). One of the innovations of FNN was that it let the ticker tape run continuously, even during political and news broadcasts not directly related to financial market data. For instance, according to oral histories, FNN ran a ticker tape while broadcasting the first televised press conferences of Ronald Reagan, a fact that angered some viewers but was seen by others as innovative and attracted audiences (Griffeth 2004). Audience members could call in and ask questions related to the commentary that was delivered. Relevant in this context are the improvisational nature of financial talk and the quasi-constraint to have this talk while data is being displayed. In the beginning, FNN producers and interns delivered an improvised running commentary on what they were seeing on the screen (the ticker tape), without having any financial expertise or expertise in financial journalism. As they recognized, and as other broadcasters later recognized, the mere fact of having financial numbers running uninterruptedly on the screen required a spoken narrative, a commentary (Griffeth 2004): If we just threw up some numbers—we had joked about that once in a while, if we just threw up numbers and made it a text service would they still watch? Who knows? But the demand was there, and I think that was what NBC realized; it’s what Dow Jones certainly realized when they were willing to spend as much money as they were in a bidding war for a bankrupt cable network.

During the financial crisis of 1987, FNN delivered an uninterrupted flow of financial data, together with commentary delivered by hired analysts and invited guests. This caught the attention not only of the public but also of prominent financial

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 81

academics who praised the broadcasts for bringing in experts who could speak knowledgeably about the crisis (Moss 1987). This contributed to conferring legitimacy to public financial talk. What had begun as improvisation performed by fresh media graduates with no background in finance became within a short time expert financial talk. In the early 1990s, FNN, which by then was close to bankruptcy and embroiled in financial scandals, was acquired by CNBC. But its format of financial expert talk was kept in place and adopted by other channels as well. CNBC became the home of shows such as Mad Money, hosted by Jim Cramer. The show’s commentary and recommendations on stocks influenced the decisions of an affluent segment of viewership (though not all viewers). These decisions, in turn, led to abnormal overnight returns that later became negative (Engelberg, Sasseville, and Williams 2012: 352). In other words, more affluent viewers invested in the recommended stocks the day after the show aired; these stocks then increased in value but lost their value months later. One insight to be gained from this event is that, no matter how one chooses to view Mad Money or Jim Cramer, his expert talk was consequential in that it convinced a segment of the audience (paradoxically, perhaps, the more affluent one) to follow his recommendations. Another insight is that over the course of decades, financial talk in the media evolved from an improvisational activity to an expert one. This is not to say that expert talk cannot have improvisational elements (I will talk more about this). However, in the beginning it was explicitly seen as improvisational by those performing it. But in the space of a few years, the same performers were describing it as professional. Public statements, made not least by finance academics, also described it as an expert activity. And segments of the public followed it. Finally, this expert talk was collaborative.

82 Y Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise

Whereas in the beginning improvisations were largely the work of a single person, part anchor and part producer, with the growth of viewership and acceptance collaborations came in, and these were intrinsic to the professionalization of the talk. Of course, one could argue that even in the beginning there were collaborations with camera directors and lighting technicians in the studio. Over the course of a few years in the 1980s, though, guest financial analysts became fixtures, anchor and producer became separate roles, and the content of financial talk became more complex than that of improvised commentary on a running ticker tape. This professionalization of expert talk cannot be reduced to credentials: in fact, according to oral histories, the initial protagonists had none, a fact that did not prevent them from having decades-long careers in financial talk. According to the same oral histories, some of the invited analysts were technical analysts or chartists, lacking the professional credentials of the more established financial economists. Hence, in the 1980s and 1990s, a format of public, expert financial talk emerged in the media, in parallel with the globalization of U.S. academic topics in finance. An additional aspect of this discussion is that in a period in which financial markets were moving away from talk as a medium of conducting transactions, which were increasingly becoming automated (e.g., Pardo-Guerra 2019), expert financial talk was gaining prominence elsewhere (see also Clark, Thrift, and Tickell 2004). When market automation started, financial expert talk didn’t necessarily lose its significance; it just changed format and moved from the trading pit to radio and TV studios, and later to the internet. Its resilience is remarkable. Understanding finance as a field of expertise and understanding how capital flows are captured require an understanding of the properties of financial expert talk. While many recent studies have

Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 83

paid attention to written texts such as analysts’ reports (e.g., Leins 2018) and text messaging (e.g., Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002), studies of expert financial talk are few and far between and limited to financial transactions (Laube 2016). What is special about expert financial talk in the media? What properties of this talk make it consequential with respect to audiences? If we see expert talk as spectacle (along the lines I have previously discussed), this is not its only form; for instance, expert witnesses appearing in court have to produce expert talk, too.4 They have to collaborate closely with the attorney calling them in front of the jury. Financial experts appearing in documentaries (admittedly a rarer instance) have to produce expert talk in collaboration with producers, hosts, camera directors, and so on. And yet we feel that the properties of financial expert talk, such as that provided by Jim Cramer’s Mad Money, are different from those of the expert talk of a witness in court or those of an expert appearing in a documentary film. It is worth investigating this talk as it is produced on site, as a collaborative endeavor, in its relationship to audiences. It is worth analyzing its properties and its consequentiality. Its properties cannot be reduced to credentials; saying that it is professionalized does not help us gain an understanding of these properties, without which we can grasp neither its consequentiality nor its role with respect to capturing flows of capital. Having argued that talk should be paid proper attention, I will turn now to its organization and properties.

3 THE ORGANIZATION OF EXPERT TALK

EXPERT TALK AS A COMMODITY The sourcing of expert talk depends on various institutional logics, the spectrum of domain talks that need to be summoned, and the frequency of such summons. In some institutional settings, expert talk is largely commodified as well. While academic environments might provide (some) exceptions, in significant others expert talk is treated as a commodity, and an expensive one. Giving a talk in a research seminar is sometimes, but not always, remunerated with a modest honorarium. Weather anchors who are also meteorologists will draw salaries as compensation for their daily talk. In courts of law, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, expert talk is treated as a commodity and provided as one in an organized fashion. Litigation attorneys (barristers in the United Kingdom), for instance, work together with firms specialized in sourcing and providing expert witnesses not only to write expert reports but also to appear in front of judges and juries and do expert talk. The spectrum of expertise provided by such firms ranges from neurologists to mechanical engineers to finance professionals. While attorneys sometimes use their social networks to find an expert witness, they most

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 85

often go to a firm that supplies expert talk and expert talkers. I emphasize here that expert talk has to be supplied. An expert witness who delivers a written report—but no talk in front of the jury—opens a pathway for the opposing party to discredit the report. Hence, when contracting an expert witness, attorneys establish from the start that the expert is willing to be called as a witness and will deliver talk in person in the courtroom. In a setting such as a court of law, expert talk does not come cheap, and daily fees are set according to how specialized the expert is, the income level of the profession, and their track record in previous appearances as an expert witness. Not surprisingly, experts who have successfully performed in multiple previous appearances command higher fees. The expert testimonial of a neurologist, for instance, can be billed at US$15,000 per day. Expert talk from other domains comes cheaper. As a rule, a winning attorney or barrister tries to convince the judge to award them the costs of expert talk from the other party’s damages. In the United Kingdom, if the expert talk in court is presented on behalf of a public body, a set of procurement rules must be followed, with maximum fees set for the remuneration of the talk. The litigation attorneys and barristers I interviewed for this book stated, without exception, that the cost of expert talk in court is a significant factor when deciding whether to use an expert witness. In other words, expert witness talk is treated as a commodified service required in particular situations, a cost factor, acknowledged as such for its consequentiality, and sourced from established providers. It is not left to chance; it is commercially organized; it is treated as a major, yet necessary, cost of litigation. The sourcing of expert talk is only loosely coupled with the sourcing of other expert activities: an expert witness can be tasked with conducting a lab analysis of their own, for instance, but not necessarily so. An expert witness can be—and very often

86 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

is—tasked with appearing in court to talk expertly about (lab) analyses, data, or documents produced by other experts in the same field. In some UK parliamentary hearings I have observed, participating experts did not produce analyses of their own. They could in principle be tasked with them but often are not. The sourcing of talk through commercial organizations that act as intermediaries, instead of leaving it to chance or to networks of professional or personal relationships, comes from the fact that reliable and tested pools of potential talk (and expert talkers) are intrinsic to standardized legal procedures that rely on witnessing as part of a truth-finding process. However, expert talk in court is regarded as external to legal (or political) processes of truth finding, and it is summoned as such only when necessary, through intermediating organizations. In documentary film productions, expert talk is sourced by the producers and their staff during the preproduction stages based on questionnaires, literature reviews, and recommendations from other experts (Dornfeld 1998: 55–56). For daytime talk shows, experts are sourced by producers from pools of academics with a variety of incentives for being on the show (Grindstaff 2002). When it comes to expert financial talk in the media, though, the necessities are different, and the process of sourcing expert talk, its remuneration, and its organization are different, too.

THE SOURCING OF FINANCIAL TALK I argued in the previous chapter that when cable TV stations introduced expert financial talk in 1981, it was the ad lib talk of an intern. It was made necessary by the fact that the ticker tape with stock data was running uninterruptedly at the bottom of the screen—including during the broadcast of completely

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 87

unrelated events, such as the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. The flow of financial data on the screen—numbers and symbols—made commentary necessary. If we are to follow here the argument made by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp (2017: 31), namely that a meaningful social world is constituted in acts of (mediated) communication, from the moment financial numbers become a fixture of such acts, they become a fixture of the social world, and as such they are necessarily subjected to processes of interpretation through talk. If financial numbers require interpretation, they require talk; over a short period of time in the 1980s, this talk had already morphed from an intern’s improvisations into expert talk. And what better expert talkers about numbers than those producing them? Conversely, producing new financial numbers all the time required those producers to accompany them with expert talk. Therefore, the organization of financial expert talk in the media and its sourcing were, at least in the case at hand, closely related to how financial numbers were produced and thrown into the world daily. Let me unpack this. At the time of my fieldwork, Hong Kong’s financial universe had been expanding for about a decade, as part of a broader process of financial globalization, into which China was becoming more and more integrated (Chong 2018). A particular class of financial derivatives, callable bull and bear contracts (CBBCs), were being emitted daily by large banks, targeting both retail and professional investors. CBBCs were not a local creation though. They were a Western one. They emerged in 2001 and were introduced to Hong Kong in June 2006, launched first by a major Swiss bank. (Interviews with both fund managers and financial journalists confirmed the daily issuance of CBBCs and their introduction in 2006.) CBBCs are similar to warrants: their value is determined by the value of an underlying asset,

88 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

which can be a specific security, a category of securities, or an index such as the Hang Seng. They have an expiry date, which is the end of the contract’s life, and, as new issuances are launched daily, there are consecutive expiry dates for each issuance. They are commonly advertised in public spaces, for example on public transport vehicles. As new contracts were being issued daily, the financial universe was expanding at a rapid pace. But this expansion could not go on without expanding financial talk as well. All these CBBCs had to be sold to investors, be they institutional or individual ones. Selling required not only interpretations of financial numbers but also renewed interpretations of a financial universe in expansion. In short, it required renewed and frequent, if not permanent, expert talk as a baseline from which to integrate these numbers into the daily lives of citizens. This talk had to make sense of a social world that with every passing day included more and more financial numbers. Its organization had to be such that frequent, if not permanent, expert talk became the norm. Documentary films, even those addressing financial matters, are rather one-off occasions. The frequency of expert witnessing, in turn, depends on the rhythms of legal processes and procedures. The organization of frequent, even daily, expert talk, by contrast, required not only dedication to the task but also collaborations enabling experts to perform talk routinely, and for a broader public. This organization required the transformation of expert talk into a full-time (or quasi-full-time) activity. It required a group of individuals skilled in and ready to do expert talk quasi-permanently, collaborating in this work with media professionals. At the time of my fieldwork and for about ten years before, a sizable number of financial analysts from brokerage houses and investment funds had been collaborating with TV and

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 89

radio producers and anchors to appear daily on finance shows.1 Several journalists and financial analysts I interviewed stated that daily finance shows became more and more frequent at the time CBBCs were launched. Initially, I was told, analysts and fund managers made appearances without any financial compensation. During my fieldwork, the situation pointed to a stratification that had already occurred: very few of them (less than a handful, I was told) had exclusive contracts with a TV station; the majority did not have such contracts and appeared on multiple stations and programs. In fact, they stated that the honoraria they received from the studios were only a small fraction of their incomes. Some analysts (especially those at the start of their careers and those from smaller brokerages) did not receive any honorarium. The brokerages they worked for had to buy advertising on a station as a way of smoothing the path for their analysts to be invited to talk. Finance shows were lucrative for TV and radio studios: they were inexpensive to produce and attracted advertising from financial institutions.2 Some were producing internet shows of their own, uploading them to platforms such as Facebook (now Meta). Over time, appearances on financial shows became so frequent that some analysts spent most of their working hours touring studios and appearing on shows, where they were often joined by finance academics and fund managers. In other words, these analysts had become specialized in producing expert talk. However, as I will show, this does not mean that all of them were going to spend the rest of their careers producing expert financial talk on TV and the radio. In fact, for many analysts, producing expert talk as a full-time job was one stage in a career progression that could lead to managing investment funds. In this sense, expert talk was consequential not with respect to attracting investors but for the very careers of the experts themselves, and for their capacity to attract additional sources of income.

90 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

The TV and radio producers I interviewed stated that they forged personal relationships with the financial analysts appearing on their shows, so that at the time I conducted my fieldwork they had a steady pool of individuals to provide financial expert talk. Distinct from that of expert witnesses, the sourcing of financial expert talk was initially neither intermediated by commercial or quasi-professional organizations nor left to chance, nor decided solely by analysts’ publications. It was also different from sourcing relationship experts for daytime talk shows based on academic or trade publications (Grindstaff 2002). This sourcing was supported by a network of personal and professional relationships, and in this sense it was fully organized. A professional organization of expert financial talkers (literally, commentators) had been incorporated in 2015 (one year before I started fieldwork), comprising only analysts who made daily media appearances. Over time, this specialization led to the emergence of a distinct terminology for these analysts. Analysts appearing on daily finance shows were colloquially called “financial actors” by media professionals, other analysts, and audiences. Actually, three terms were used interchangeably: “financial actor” (choi king yin yuen), the more colloquial “famous mouth” (choi king ming zeoi), and “stock commentator” (gu ping yan).3 As my informants told me, the term “financial actor” was first used in 2002 in a column written by Yuen Fook-sang (a pen name used by the CEO of a Hong Kong–listed company). Yuen was making reference to (the U.S. analysts) Henry Blodget and Jim Cramer, but the term took root and has become part of the vernacular. During my fieldwork, “financial actor” was casually used by participants. Their organization, the Hong Kong Institute of Financial Analysts and Professional Commentators (IFAPC), had about one hundred members at the time of my fieldwork. This was a

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 91

remarkable number, even for a global financial city. The IFAPC was distinct from other professional organizations of financial analysts. The organization became active in supplying TV and radio studios with financial talk and organized an annual dinner, workshops, and charity events. In addition to the professional institute, they had WhatsApp groups (where they gossiped) and their own soccer team (different from that of financial journalists). The fact that professional networks rather than (quasi-) commercial organizations continued supporting the sourcing of expert talk had to do with the fact that the careers of the collaborating parties were not necessarily confined to the domains of finance and media. As I discovered later, there were significant crossovers into both domains.

EXPERT TALK AND CAREERS On its surface, expert talk appeared to be located in media organizations, simply because it took place in TV and radio studios (although internet productions were being made in bank and brokerage offices). However, we can also look at how expert talk was situated within the careers of participants and how it was situated in relation to financial research (evaluating prospects, investing in funds, making decisions) and to other activities that, while not pertaining to finance, can constitute sources of income. When it came to educational credentials, expert financial talk performed on TV, radio, or the internet was being performed by graduates of finance, economics, or accounting programs from Western and local universities. All the analysts appearing regularly had such degrees, and so did the fund managers and financial academics who appeared occasionally. The sole exception

92 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

was a veteran figure who had only a high school diploma. This fact is relevant not only because it demonstrates that expert talk was being produced by individuals with credentials in the domain (master’s degrees, diplomas, and CFA accreditations) but also because such credentials could (or could not) be invoked when the experts were introduced on shows as a means of establishing their claims to authority. However, as expert talk is produced collaboratively, we also need to consider the credentials of the anchors and producers working with the analysts. The anchors and the producers I interviewed and observed had degrees in media studies. TV anchors had backgrounds in media and communications, and some had worked in the music and entertainment departments of TV and radio stations before switching to finance shows. After they switched, they took classes in finance and got diplomas or BSc degrees. They planned to move on to working in banks as sellside analysts and regarded a finance education as useful in this respect.4 Show producers had backgrounds in media and communications but had not taken finance courses, even though they were producing finance shows. Camera directors, sound technicians, production assistants, and editors did not have any formal financial training. Hence, it wasn’t just the analysts who had educational credentials in finance; to a lesser degree, some of the anchors did, too. And yet, when it came to mentioning such credentials in the introductions of anchor and experts before the expert talk began, things became more complicated, as I show in the next chapters. One puzzle is why so many analysts—about one hundred of them—devoted most of their working time to media appearances. Many (but not all) were paid for their appearances, but, in their own words, this was only a fraction of their income. As I discovered later, some also made appearances in various

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 93

commercials for mundane products such as herbal teas or shampoo, for local restaurant chains, or for mutual funds promoted by global banks.5 The income derived from appearing in commercials was substantial—about US$200,000 per year, according to my informants’ estimates. The more important career move for many, though, was from TV analyst to fund manager. The income derived from managing a hedge fund could be a multiple of that derived from appearing in commercials. Having followed analysts over the years, I know that some indeed established their own funds and then scaled back their media appearances. For instance, one analyst I followed would do only phone interviews once he had established his own fund. Before that, he had worked the TV and radio studios from dawn to dusk. To be able to start a fund, analysts had to attract capital. They targeted capital not from investment banks (considered to be too conservative in their approach) but from family offices and the upper-middle classes. For that, though, they had to become known, which required public talk. One analyst who had switched from a media-focused career to managing a family office told me that his TV appearances had played a significant role in his being hired, because his talk had aligned with the beliefs and interests of the family patriarch in macroeconomic issues and disruptive technologies: So he [the family patriarch] wanted someone who understands macroeconomic issues to help managers know. And those are the things I appeal with, and I used to be on TV three times a week. Having said that, when I started to do media, TV, columns, it was not my intention to promote myself; I didn’t really think about a career in investment at all. So, I didn’t get any professional licenses. It was never my intention.  .  .  . I still volunteer as the apostle of the sharing economy.

94 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

For this analyst, a career transition happened without thinking too much, and professional credentials were not necessary at the beginning. Yet such transitions require alignments between managers on the one hand and available pools of money on the other. The latter come with beliefs or philosophies expressed by those who control the money. Alignment of investment beliefs requires identifying the beliefs or philosophies of managers, and here is where public expert talk plays its role. Seen like this, public talk not only helped the careers of analysts but also helped identify alignments between those who controlled pools of money and those who could manage such pools.

TALK AND ITS COLLABORATIONS Expert financial talk might be sourced through professional networks and organizations; it might be remunerated and attract additional sources of income. It might facilitate cross-domain career transitions. To achieve all that, it must have a set of properties that make it recognizable as such for all talkers and their audiences. For a number of reasons, including legal ones, no one regarded this talk as anything but expert talk. It was not regarded as advertising. It was not regarded as opinion, informed or not. The speakers were neither pontificators nor advisers ( Jacobs and Townsley 2011: 17, 29). In fact, advice was scrupulously avoided, as it could have triggered serious trouble with regulators. This was expert talk, distinct from advertising, giving investment advice, and gossiping about companies. Producing this particular kind of talk was widely regarded as expertise in and of itself. Second, producing expert talk was only loosely connected to domain credentials and to jurisdictional claims based on such credentials

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 95

(Abbott 1988: 89). The expertise of producing financial talk could not be reduced to such meta-criteria (Collins and Evans 2007: 14). This talk had to display a particular set of qualities that made it recognizably different from (potentially troublesome) advertising and mere opinion. It had to maintain these qualities not only across a variety of both participants and registers but also in relation to its publics. As I discovered, producing expert talk daily is not easy. Its production starts in the morning, with the radio and TV morning shows and ends with the evening programs. On days during fieldwork when I was accompanying financial analysts on their studio tours, I had to be at the studio at 7 a.m. and wasn’t finished with my participant observations until 10 p.m. Analysts toured TV and radio studios6 all day long (in the evening, too), participating in a number of programs dedicated exclusively to finance. The workday started at around 7 a.m., when analysts arrived on site for the first show of the day. The site could be the TV or radio studio of a major station or a TV studio embedded in the offices of an investment bank. From there, the analysts went from studio to studio until 9 or 10 p.m. During breaks, they went back to their offices to meet with their assistants or (occasionally) visited local listed companies. Some taught night classes in finance. The week’s show schedule was known in advance, and changes, such as an appearance being scheduled or canceled at short notice, were rare. On their arrival at the studio, analysts met with the producer, the anchor, and the technicians and briefly discussed the run of the show. After that, they went to the makeup artist. Some male analysts put on a tie and suit jacket they had brought with them (if they hadn’t arrived suited) and then went straight to the broadcasting room, where they briefly talked to the camera director before the start of the show.

96 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

The shows had various formats, but none were scripted. No sequence of talk was fixed in advance or written down, although the topics were discussed among the producer, anchor, and financial actors the day before the show. In fact, the shows were full of uncertainties. Sometimes, the producers would bring their own charts, informing analysts of them right at the beginning of the show. In their turn, analysts did not tell producers or anchors what their research assistants had prepared for them. The topics discussed were all circumscribed to financial markets and ranged from global outlooks (Where are financial markets going? What is happening in North American and European, including UK, financial markets? How will Brexit impact financial markets? What is the situation with London’s property market?) and market-relevant policy decisions (Is the Fed going to raise rates?) to markets in mainland China and local real estate and stock markets (What is happening with the Hang Seng? Which stocks are the winners, and which are the losers this week?). To various extents, all these topics were relevant to the lives of local citizens; for instance, because the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the U.S. dollar, Fed policy decisions would have impacted (albeit indirectly) the exchange rate of the Hong Kong dollar. And, as the upper-middle classes were known to invest in the London property market, topics such as Brexit and its impact were more relevant to Hong Kong’s moneyed groups than one might think. Analysts had one or two research assistants who worked from their brokerage offices and prepared data and diagrams for them every day, according to instructions. This was invisible work, similar to that of political staff advisers (Laube, Schenk, and Scheffer 2020). Each evening before office closure and also during daytime breaks, analysts would return to their offices to get the data and charts from their assistants and give instructions

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 97

for the next day. Instructions and demands for data would also be given via text messaging during the day, and a stream of messages would be received from the research assistants. Some analysts would regularly stay awake past midnight to get the latest financial data from European and North American markets. About once or twice per week they would also visit companies listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and a few times per quarter they would undertake overseas trips to visit other listed Asian companies. The interactional expertise discussed by Harry Collins, Robert Evans, and Michael Gorman (2010) seemed to be well present in these collaborations, though asymmetric and arranged along a continuum: TV anchors had more interactional expertise in finance compared with producers, and other studio participants had less than that of producers. Analysts were well versed in the technical terms of the TV studio and the formal logic of the shows, understood how cameras worked, and so on. At the same time, no analysts reported having taken formal drama classes (though some had taken drama in high school). Sometimes, on purpose and in a playful manner, anchors and producers addressed analysts as if they were professionally trained actors (I discuss this in chapter 6).

TALK AND ITS UNCERTAINTIES The way talk was organized among producer, anchor, and analysts during a show made it very difficult, if not impossible, to use a preset script. The producer, anchor, and camera director wore earpieces. Sometimes, analysts did not wear earpieces, but more often than not they did. The producer, sitting in the control room with the sound and video technicians, had access to

98 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

switches that activated each earpiece or all of them. Producers could talk only to the anchor, only to the analysts, or to both. They controlled whom they talked to while live talk was occurring on set. Hence, in some situations at least, analysts had to anticipate or guess what the producer was telling the anchor and react accordingly. In addition, additional anchors and analysts were sometimes “switched on” live during the talk, for instance from the floor of the stock exchange or from an investment bank. The exact moment this would happen was unknown in advance of the show, being coordinated only during the talk, which made the use of a precise script impossible. Besides that, shows had both live and remote audiences, who intervened with questions, and managing audiences was fraught with uncertainties (more about this to come). Investment banks had their own TV studios embedded in their offices. Additionally, the former trading floor of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was primarily used as a TV studio. Sometimes, talk had to be coordinated across two or three locations: the TV studio, a TV studio in an investment bank, and the floor of the exchange. Coordination was not always easy; it could be marred by technical problems, and analysts and other guests could be late. Overall, the use of a script was impossible, given the kind of coordination and collaborative work required to produce the talk. Another kind of uncertainty came from the show’s format: although formats were preset, some preempted the use of a script. There were chat shows on financial topics, but there were also comedy and game shows. A popular financial game show, for instance, pitted four analysts against one another on the accuracy of their investment predictions, with the analysts making predictions about stock prices and investing their own money. Each week, their performances from the previous week were

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 99

compared against one another, and a ranking was produced. As a strong reputational incentive was at play (with direct financial consequences for the individual actors as well as for the brokerages they represented), analysts did their own research (with the help of assistants) and revealed their investment decisions only during the show. This format and its associated incentives preempted the use of a preset script. Overall, the collaborations I observed did not focus on producing contributory expertise—in the sense of producing new analytical methods, data sets, or concepts. Producers and anchors did not work together with the analysts or their assistants in producing data for use during the show, although producers could come up with substantive surprises, for example in the form of a chart or piece of information they would ask the analysts to comment on. Producers also chose the daily topics of the show; thus, analysts, supported by their assistants, had to prepare substantive expertise within these topical frames daily. There was no clearcut jurisdiction over financial expertise that analysts could claim only for themselves. Collaborations centered on producing the talk itself: they required coordination before and after the show but above all during the broadcast, when, without exception, all participants were physically present and in constant communication with one another. I never observed scripted shows, in the sense of following a set text that was performed by the actors or strict preset rules. Expert talk was produced as fresh talk, which had significant consequences. The uncertainties inherent in the formats of shows, in how talk was structured, and in how interactions with audiences were managed during tapings of shows required flexible collaborations. I also never observed analysts arriving at the studio unprepared or only simulating substantive expertise. In fact, contact with their research assistants was a significant part of their daily routine. Also, their financial expertise

100 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

did not appear staged in the sense of being carefully selected according to a plan. Producers could surprise an analyst with a chart or a set of numbers, and anchors, too, could ask surprising, not always pleasant questions (as I discuss in the next chapters). While expert talk was not scripted, it was not fully improvised either. Analysts didn’t decide a topic at random or on the spot; they didn’t change topic midcourse (although they could make strategic attempts to duck it); they didn’t veer off into topics of, say, finance, art, or music. While the oral history accounts of the beginning of financial talk on TV (discussed in the previous chapter) indicate that this talk was initially an improvised, solo commentary on the ticker tape, the expert talk I observed was a much more complex affair, involving the coordination of various professionals, some co-present and some not: producer, anchor, analyst, research assistant, cameraperson, lighting technician, sound technician. The production of financial expert talk stands in contrast to expert witnessing, which, while also collaborative, does not involve the coordination of so many and such a diverse range of actors. Another key difference is how much technology is involved in the production of the talk itself.

TECHNOLOGIES OF EXPERT TALK Sociologists of finance have argued that technology and financial expertise go hand in hand (Pardo-Guerra 2019: 157, 182) in that technologies of data transmission and registration (1) provide a scaffolding on which professional relationships are organized (Pardo-Guerra 2019: 32); (2) allow financial experts to coordinate with one another (e.g., Callon 2005); and (3) provide cognitive artifacts enabling financial transactions (e.g., Knorr Cetina and

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 101

Bruegger 2002; MacKenzie and Millo 2003). Financial expert activities rely on assemblages of artifacts and technologies such as spreadsheets, computing devices, computer printouts, and computer screens (e.g., MacKenzie 2009, 2018; Leins 2018; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002). Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002; Knorr Cetina 2003) have drawn attention to the technological scaffolding of markets as assemblages of computer screens enabling the temporal coordination of market actors who observe the same financial numbers at the same time. Donald MacKenzie and Yuval Millo (2003), as well as Michel Callon (2005), together with others have emphasized the use of performative calculative technologies (such as spreadsheets). Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (2019) has shed light on back office technologies that automate transactions and the transmission of price data. The skills of financial experts are geared toward manipulating such assemblages and interpreting their outputs. None of these has anything directly to do with expert talk. They are, to follow the distinction introduced earlier, technologies of the game, not of the spectacle. However, most of this technological scaffolding remains hidden to audiences when it comes to the display of expertise, although some elements are foregrounded and combined with technologies of visual and auditory presentation. Analysts collaborate with camera directors, producers, anchors, and makeup artists, among others; these collaborations shift focus to the cameras, studio spotlights, teleprompter, makeup desk, headphones, sound control devices, antennae, or outfits worn by the financial actors.7 While some computer outputs (e.g., financial charts) may be used as conversational or discursive props, they are integrated into a larger scaffolding geared toward expertly producing financial talk.

102 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

Spectacles are no less dependent on technology: producing expert finance talk requires replicating key elements of the financial infrastructure (e.g., the computer screen) outside trading rooms and combining them with technologies of naturalistic visual representation and unseen coordination.8 Producing expert talk means participants coordinating not only with one another but also with other expert talk (e.g., what other analysts are saying on other programs) and with the markets. This production enables the observation of both markets and expert talk, as well as the production of further expert talk in real time, in relation to other running expert commentaries. While parts of the technological scaffolding of markets are replicated outside the trading room, technologies of expert talk are replicated within market settings, such as the investment bank or the brokerage house. This makes possible the (often concomitant) presentation of financial experts to audiences in both their “natural” setting and the artificial setting of the studio. I found that this production primarily took place in two spaces crammed with technology: the studio and the control room. The former was not necessarily located within a media company. Some investment banks had their own TV studios, and the floor of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was regularly used as a TV studio (in fact, with trading being conducted electronically, that was its main use). The executive office of brokerage houses could be quickly converted into a TV studio, and some offices were equipped with spotlights and makeup desks. In this respect, the spaces used for conducting financial transactions (e.g., the investment bank or the brokerage house) contained areas for producing public expert talk in addition to other financial technologies. More than anywhere else perhaps, this was visible on the floor of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, a space now empty of traders but furnished with large screens displaying financial

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 103

data, as well as rows of desks equipped, for some reason, with fax machines that nobody used, complete with sheets of paper hanging out of them. TV studios contained spotlights, cameras, sound equipment, floor-to-ceiling screens, and pieces of furniture that mimicked a domestic (e.g., a kitchen or living room) or office setting. The control room contained audio equipment, as well as rows of TV and computer screens on which TV programs and expert financial information (e.g., dedicated Bloomberg and Reuters screens) were continuously displayed. These enabled technicians and producers to monitor Bloomberg and Reuters, as well as TV stations, in real time, while a show was running. In one production room, I counted twenty-four TV screens and twelve computer screens that were continuously monitored during the show by the producer and her assistants, who would pick up cues from Bloomberg or from a rival financial program airing at the same time, for instance, and instruct the anchor via ear loop to ask a question based on what was running on the screens at the moment. The ear loop, which features more prominently in the chapters to come, was a small, hard-to-spot, yet key piece of technology, as it allowed the producer to choose with whom to coordinate during the production of expert talk and whether to include certain participants (i.e., financial analysts) in this coordination. Financial analysts who made daily appearances were aware of the importance of the ear loop, but occasional guests were much less so. Productions of expert talk meant for the internet (e.g., for YouTube or Meta) were much cheaper and could be done in brokerage offices. In one instance I observed, the analyst talking was filmed by an assistant on her iPhone, with the editing also being done by the assistant. The office was equipped with spotlights

104 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

and a makeup table. However, this much simpler setup was used primarily for one talk format: the analyst alone talking straight into the camera. I never observed more complex formats, such as an anchor speaking with an analyst or multiple anchors speaking with multiple analysts and an audience, being produced by a single assistant on a smartphone. The combination of technologies coming from finance and the media resonated in the absence of a clear-cut jurisdiction of financial experts over technological artifacts related to their expertise. In some instances during my fieldwork, producers chose the charts to be shown during a show without consulting the analysts, who were informed only just before the beginning of the broadcast about the charts they would have to comment on. Elements pertaining to substantive expertise (such as a price chart) could be chosen by the producer without the analyst complaining that this was outside of the producer’s jurisdiction and field of expertise. However, the introduction of these elements had to be in line with the topic of conversation (also chosen by the producer). Similarly, analysts typically did not inform the producer or anchor in detail about what financial data they were going to use on the show or what information they had requested from their research assistants, which was often sent via email or text to the analysts at the last minute. This lack of close coordination and collaboration was echoed in the lack of a shared script, which figures prominently in professional acting (Davies 2008). Yet collaborations were organized on complex technological scaffoldings, irreducible to a single object. I will close this chapter by making two arguments, one related to expert talk, the other to how expert collaborations intervene in the organization of talk. Financial markets have been investigated mostly from the perspective of their social networks, their institutions, and their technologies. They have

The Organization of Expert Talk Z 105

rarely been investigated from the perspective of their talk, with the exception of works emphasizing the conversational character of financial transactions. Nevertheless, I argue that financial markets are largely composed of expert talk, which is therefore consequential. Financial markets are assemblages within which participants observe and coordinate one another’s talk and produce more talk, which is fed into actions. In his oral history of the beginnings of the first U.S. financial TV channel, Ron Insana (2004) reminisces about the ticker tape running at the bottom of the screen forcing him to continuously improvise talk to keep up with the flow of the tape. Similarly, I argue, the flow of expert talk runs in conjunction with the flow of the transactions that feed it. Talk creates a baseline for integrating financial numbers (and events) into people’s daily lives and public spaces. As for the collaborations involved in the production of expert financial talk that I observed, they relied heavily on heterogeneous technologies from both finance and the media but without a professional group making an exclusive claim over any of them. Financial analysts and brokers would handle their own makeup box with the help of an assistant, while producers would handle Bloomberg screens without consulting the financial analysts they were working with. Both financial analysts and producers had an understanding of the media and financial technologies used in the assemblage required for the production of expert talk. In this assemblage, the key pieces were the ear loop and the array of computer screens running financial data and other talk flows. They enabled participants to coordinate in the production of talk, not only among themselves but also with talk produced elsewhere. If we are to contemplate this from the perspective of a fractionated trading zone (Galison 1997: 803; Collins, Evans, and Gorman 2010: 12)—that is, a collaboration that involves not entire media or finance cultures but fractions of them—how

106 Y The Organization of Expert Talk

can we characterize this technological assemblage? It is not a single boundary object (Leigh Star and Griesemer 1989)—that is, a single artifact participants use in different ways and with different aims. Rather, it is the simultaneous use of heterogeneous coordination technologies—one designed to bridge short distances (the ear loop), the other long distances (the screen)— that enables the production of expert financial talk as intrinsic to both finance and ordinary lives.

4 STRATEGIC FACEWORK The Expert Presentation of Experts

THE EXPERT’S BODY To a large extent, financial expertise has been regarded as disembodied: ethnographies of financial analysts, for instance, have emphasized written texts and the activity of writing as being central to expertise. Historical approaches, in their turn, have stressed either the links between writing and the emergence of financial expertise as distinct from fiction (e.g., Poovey 1998) or calculation as a material process of writing (e.g., Deringer 2018). More broadly, when it comes to financial and economic communication, the document, the written word, takes primacy (e.g., Holmes 2014; Appadurai 2015). Embodied expert talk has rarely been paid attention to; when it has, it has been mostly in conjunction with how financial transactions on the floor of the exchange are conducted and with the role played by emotions in coordinating the actions of participants (e.g., Zaloom 2006; Laube 2019). Much less attention has been paid to expert financial talk as an activity done outside transactions and outside trading rooms. Accordingly, its embodiment (and the consequences thereof ) has not been much investigated either. Should we care about it at all?

108 Y Str ategic Facework

There are at least two arguments to be made in this respect. The first is that in other settings in which expert talk matters, its embodiment matters, too. An expert talking in front of an audience will come equipped with a body (Goffman 1981: 183). Take expert witnessing for instance: when appearing in court, expert witnesses and attorneys pay attention to the witnesses’ physical appearance. Experts who make routine appearances in court have internalized the expectations of a certain appearance. This is not to say that there is a standardized “embodiment of the expert.” U.S. attorneys I interviewed mentioned that on occasion they had to correct the appearance of an expert witness before an appearance in court, but seasoned expert witnesses typically do not need such correction. As one UK barrister explained to me, expert witnesses have to be physically present, which produces certain expectations about the embodiment of expertise: I think if you’re dealing with a jury  .  .  . those types of issues are very, very important to get right.  .  .  . I think experienced experts . . . will have their . . . routine for going to court. They will know . . . how to just be physically present. So, I think [for] a lot of them, lots of that probably is sort of related to experience and sort of [to] how long the person has been an expert witness.

Producing expert talk is different from writing an expert report or analysis: it requires a physical presence directed toward an audience. Because of this, the body is important, as it is the first point of contact for the audience. Before starting a talk in court, an expert witness is seen. One might argue that in radio or podcast talk, there is no physical presence; therefore, the body does not matter. However, radio or podcast talk is no less embodied than a court appearance: the first point of contact

Str ategic Facework Z 109

between an audience and an expert is the physical quality of the expert’s voice. Therefore, if expert talk is to be produced as such, it has to be produced as embodied talk, with proper attention given to how it is embodied by the producers. Members of an audience may make different judgments upon hearing the talk, and they might apply different criteria to its expert qualities, but they will always, by definition, make their judgments and apply their criteria to embodied talk. The second argument with respect to the significance of embodied expert talk concerns finance itself. Contrary to the assumption that financial analysts almost exclusively produce written reports that are disseminated to the clients of investment banks, they regularly produce expert talk as intrinsic to financial intermediations—that is, to the work of capturing capital and steering it into markets. Analysts regularly meet with institutional clients (e.g., pension funds, corporations), make presentations to them, and organize client visits to their premises. They have to produce embodied expert talk in front of their clients if they want to capture capital. They have to produce expert talk in fund meetings to justify their investment decisions in front of their peers. Brokers and analysts targeting retail clients, too, have to produce expert talk at road shows and trade fairs where individual investors congregate. Analysts with whom I spoke who did not appear in finance shows stated that at least half their working time (sometimes much more) was dedicated to talking to clients and making presentations— that is, to producing embodied expert talk. They were well aware of the importance of physical presence. As with experienced expert witnesses, they had developed a sense of “expert appearance” and were consciously attending only to deviations from expectations. Expectations and conventions about expert

110 Y Str ategic Facework

appearances had also evolved over time, but that doesn’t mean they were inconsequential: There are some rituals, like owning, having, a tie, or shaving the beard, which I just thought was very odd when I joined the industry in 2011. . . . When [I] went to work . . . I [had] to have a tie, which I really don’t like, because it makes me feel like I’m choking really. [Having] to shave every single morning; again, I did that. I prefer to have a beard. But interestingly, today, I think nobody has a tie. And a lot of people on the investment floor have a beard. So that has really changed over the past few years. But I think it’s just become gradually more acceptable not to have ties. Albeit, I think in most meetings, people still prototype, sort of, the investment floor. We never have a tie, but just before going into a meeting with a client, we will put on a tie.

(Fund manager, male)

This fund manager (and former analyst) acknowledged that conventions of physical appearance have evolved in the industry over a short period of time, between 2011 and 2020. The evolution of conventions, however, doesn’t mean that physical presence no longer plays a role. In meetings, analysts use elements of bodily attire to signal who will be talking to whom: If I go to a meeting with a sell-side analyst, I will not put [on] a tie because they are pitching to me. So I think that dynamic is quite interesting, that most sell-side analysts, when they come to pitch to fund managers, they wear a tie. We don’t, but if we go to a client meeting, we will wear a tie, but many times the client will not wear a tie. . . . In a meeting, you know who is pitching to whom, and the person who is being pitched.

Str ategic Facework Z 111

Based on these appearances, an observer sitting in such a meeting would be able to infer not only who is talking to whom, who the presenter is, and who the audience is but also the situational power dynamic. Sell-side analysts are there to sell something to the fund managers listening to them, and the fund managers go to pension funds to capture capital—that is, to get money. Simple elements of bodily attire, such as a tie, are used to display a power dynamic related to talk and to signal how the money will flow. This use of physical appearance to signal power is not limited to expert talk: Most CEOs are wearing a tie, except for founders, founders of companies, so people that have built a business from the bottom up, they will usually just wear what they want to. Instead, people that have been hired, and they’re the CEO . . . they will usually have a lot more polished look.

From a wider perspective, this means that (for male analysts) not wearing a tie isn’t simply a dismantling of conventions but rather the reconfiguration of said conventions to signal specific positions (speaker versus audience) and situational power dynamics that fit into broader ones. Bodily appearance, including attire, is program (Stone 2009 [1975]: 141), and not only for men. In her ethnography of women in financial professions, Melissa Fisher notes that in the 1980s, women in financial firms developed a set of appearance conventions that helped distinguish them as professionals (2012: 81). This program isn’t reducible to a limited set of clothing conventions. It is the strategic use of a variety of configurations through which the identities and attitudes of the “personin-communication” are placed (Stone 2009 [1975]: 148). Thus, expertise is not disembodied (Boyer 2005). Experts come equipped with bodies that matter. In the world of finance,

112 Y Str ategic Facework

traders use their bodies as instruments in coordinating and conducting transactions (as it once happened on the trading floor) and to situationally signal speech positions and power dynamics.

BODIES AND EXPERT TALK As I have argued, before starting to produce expert talk, the experts themselves, with their bodies, are put on display to their audience. Their physical appearance is part and parcel of embodied expert talk and attended to as such. When I started my fieldwork in TV studios, this aspect didn’t seem very obvious: it appeared that the financial analysts I was accompanying were not paying much attention to physical appearance beyond the conventions of the business suit (conventions that were valid for the female analysts I observed, as well). One feature that was immediately apparent was that anchors sometimes attended only to the parts of the body visible to the audience. In a few situations, I observed anchors wearing a suit jacket and tie— but with shorts and flip-flops that could not be seen on the TV screen. Another feature that was immediately visible was that in the studios, participants often had to wear makeup: without it, the studio lighting gave their faces an unnatural appearance. Yet, over the course of many observations, the embodiment of expertise was thematized by financial analysts in more ways than one, going well beyond the technological limitations that forced them to wear makeup.1 These ways, however, were different from those of the anchors. In one instance, a male anchor was introduced to me by an analyst as “the most handsome anchor in [this TV station].” This could mean that it is acceptable to make a professional introduction with reference to bodily

Str ategic Facework Z 113

appearance for someone who is a TV anchor. During several years of fieldwork in Hong Kong, and over two decades of fieldwork in several countries, I never witnessed a financial analyst being introduced to me or someone else in a similar way. However, references to bodily appearance were present in the gossip analysts spread about one another behind the scenes. In my presence, one prominent analyst complained to another that her competitors maliciously called her “fat.”2 As some financial analysts derived (significant) additional income from appearing in TV commercials and billboard advertisements, physical appearance mattered. In one of the instances I observed, an ad placed in several subway stations featured a prominent female analyst touting the benefits of a line of hair care products with the slogan “a  good investment.”3 This indicated that for some analysts at least, doing expert talk on TV had a spillover effect in that they could use their bodily image in advertising for mundane products and thus earn an additional substantial income. At the same time, their participation in commercials for mundane products contributed to associating, sometimes explicitly, investment activities with objects of everyday life and with taking care of one’s body and health. This, in turn, contributed to investments being represented as aspects of everyday life. Thinking of financialization as having a mundane dimension (Davis and Kim 2015: 213) emphasizes individual participation in investments and selfdiscipline (Fridman 2017; van der Zwan 2014), and the ways in which financial analysts used their bodily image in commercials certainly contributed to this process. Physical appearance wasn’t important only with respect to this financialization of everyday life and the banalization of investments. TV stations edited and recycled finance shows over time; they wanted to create a particular look for each analyst to

114 Y Str ategic Facework

make this process possible. One analyst told me that, in a financial game show, he had to wear exactly the same outfit every time so that the TV studio could recombine and recycle bits of the show. Thus, a particular appearance became associated with a particular way of talking and recognizable as such. This cultivation of a recognizable bodily appearance was something that preoccupied analysts, not only because it made them easily recognizable4 but also because it contributed to a particular style of expert talk. A male analyst told me that he was aware of being overweight, but for him this was actually an advantage on TV. Remaining “fat” was a conscious choice he had made related to his profession: “Most people prefer to look slim; I prefer to look fat, smile like a Buddha—not laugh, smile [my emphasis]—[and audiences] like it. [Smiling] and speaking slowly, it works for me at least; it comes very naturally.” Appearance and manner of speech were adapted to produce an identity that expressed expertise: one has to smile but not laugh.5 As analysts could derive additional revenue from advertising, cultivating a particular physical appearance helped them in this respect, too. Others adopted comical costumes to create a distinct visual identity and neutralize the doubts of audiences about their substantive expertise. In describing an analyst popular for his inaccurate forecasting, one journalist told me the following: There was a time when a newspaper made fun of him, saying his prediction is a misfortune master [i.e., did not have the fortune of being correct]. He always gets his prediction[s] wrong. And one time he was very angry at that. But later on, he rethought that and said it’s fine. There are people who make fun of him by creating or Photoshopping some pictures and posters on the internet. And he dresses exactly the same way as those pictures that make fun of him [my emphasis]. . . . And then he knows there are

Str ategic Facework Z 115 a lot of people criticizing and making fun of him on the internet, and after he settled for some time, he’s like, “If you laugh at me, I will join the game. I will dress exactly the same as the posters.” And people are like, “OK, this man is good because he can accept criticism and so on.” People like him. It goes like that.

Thus, analysts did not have to achieve a uniform look, to conform to generic standards of beauty or stereotypes of a “financial analyst look.” They had to consciously achieve a look that expressed financial expertise (or neutralized doubts about it) while allowing them a distinct identity in relationship to their expertise (more on this in the following sections). I found that there was no single “analyst look” but rather several types (e.g., the Buddha, the comic) that had to be geared to a particular style ( Jacobs and Townsley 2018), particular strategies of neutralizing criticism, and particular audiences. The same analyst who developed the “Buddha look” commented to me that one’s appearance had to be designed to appeal to the audiences one was targeting and had to convey financial expertise: “You don’t have to look very attractive or very handsome to appeal on the show. I think the housewives6 don’t look for handsome guys in this area [i.e., finance]. You just talk naturally.” This notion indicates that adopting and maintaining a distinct physical appearance is a strategic dimension of expert talk, and, while not tightly coupled with substantive expertise, appearance is used to mitigate or neutralize contestations of expertise, or to signal it. Thus, if financial forecasts regularly go wrong, a comical appearance can neutralize an audience’s critical reactions. On the contrary, a “Buddha look” is meant to signal control of substantive expertise. What, then, is the consequentiality of the embodiment of expert talk? First, this embodiment is situational. Second, its

116 Y Str ategic Facework

consequences differ according not only to the kind of collaborative effort (or not) within which it has been achieved but also to the conventions and rules of the setting within which it is achieved. In a courtroom, embodied talk by expert witnesses is produced in a type of collaboration different from that of a TV studio. Embodied talk produced in the boardroom of an investment fund is different from that produced at an investment fair for retail investors.7 There is no single style or stereotype of the “financial expert” but rather a variety of styles that can be achieved by combining elements of attire and bodily appearance. The embodiment of expert financial talk was used strategically by participants to produce hierarchies, banalize investments, mobilize additional income, signal substantive expertise, or deflect criticism and questions about one’s expertise. It had more than one consequence, depending on how participants assembled and used it situationally and the purposes for which it was being used.

THE INTRODUCTION OF EXPERTS TO AUDIENCES In many situations, expert talk is introduced to audiences many times and in many formats. It is introduced on stage and backstage, in front of formal gatherings, and in small informal gatherings. Its auspices, occasion, and subject can be announced ahead of time through posters, fliers, or websites. In research seminar and conference announcements, for instance, names of expert speakers are displayed together with profile photos and professional affiliations, and sometimes short biographical notes, too, or links to experts’ online presences, as a means of claiming both intellectual and institutional authority (Goffman 1981: 167). In other instances, such as appearing as an expert witness in a

Str ategic Facework Z 117

court of law, the expert will be summoned but not announced ahead of time to the public in any way. In all these situations, however, and in others, expert talk appears a special occasion, one that requires multiple, repeated, and layered announcements alerting audiences that a special kind of talk, not an ordinary, casual one, is going to take place. We do not make posters for coffee klatches or online chats. We do, however, repeatedly and insistently announce that expert talk will take place on a specific date for a particular occasion under particular auspices. Before being able to start talking, financial analysts (among other experts) are introduced to audiences as experts. The public first sees them, hears their names announced, or both. In a research seminar, we see the guest speakers before having them introduced to us as experts on the topic at hand. Only then do they have the right to provide expert talk. In rounds of expert talk, experts usually have their talking rights administered by a third party, an emcee or an anchor—more generally, the organizer of the talk. In courts of law, expert witnesses are called to the stand, and their right to provide expert talk is administered by attorneys, barristers, or judges. The administration of talking rights for the expert pertains to the organization of the talk. Those administering these rights can participate in the talking round themselves; attorneys questioning an expert witness is a case in point. Before experts can begin to provide expert talk, both the occasion of the talk and its auspices (Goffman 1981: 169) are often mentioned; for instance, a talk being part of a seminar series organized by a professional organization with the support of a sponsoring organization. The identity and qualifications of the speaker as an expert are expected to fit both occasion and auspices. This identity, however, is not reducible to professional or academic credentials, and the presentation of credentials is

118 Y Str ategic Facework

not always a prerequisite of expert talk. In courts of law, expert witnesses are not introduced with their academic or educational credentials but are questioned on these. Credentials can become part of the contestation of expertise in court, and in some situations expert witnesses must discuss and defend their credentials as experts (e.g., Lynch and Cole 2005). Seen like this, the qualifications of expert speakers are neither necessarily reducible to nor coextensive with their academic or professional credentials. While credentials are abstractly considered a meta-criterion for (substantive) expertise, they are not necessarily an exclusive qualification for expert talk, to be mentioned as such before a speaker is given the right to speak. Even when speakers possess such credentials in abundance, they are not necessarily used as an introduction for expert talk. There are two further aspects to the introduction of experts to be considered: one is that credentials, both academic and professional, can be embellished or outright faked. In her investigation of financial risk-taking in mainland China, Zhifei Mao (2018: 119, 124, 128, 131) notices that when they appear on TV, financial analysts often self-credential by having their official license number displayed on screen, declaring their wealth (wealth is seen as an indicator of professionalism), or displaying screenshots of their own trades. However, Mao also notes that such credentials are sometimes faked and that neither audiences nor analysts see them as indications of financial expertise. We can speculate then whether such credentials are seen as a mere convention without much substantive meaning. Over the duration of my fieldwork, I never witnessed financial analysts who appeared on TV and radio shows being credentialed with their education by anchors, despite the fact that all analysts I observed, bar one, had a background in economics and finance, some with degrees from prestigious universities. Neither were they credentialed with their

Str ategic Facework Z 119

license numbers, although all were licensed, or signals of wealth. Some were successful fund managers, yet I never observed them displaying their trades on screen. The only instance in which their financial performance played a role was in an investment competition in which participating analysts had to make weekly investment decisions with their own money. The other additional aspect of expert introductions to note is that credentials cannot be taken as a guarantee, or even a signal, that expert talk will be produced in a satisfactory manner. One can have impeccable credentials but be a poor lecturer or have credibility or probity issues. In courts of law, for instance, attorneys pay as much attention to the latter as to credentials, if not more. As one attorney put it to me, if an expert witness is the key or sole authority in a narrow domain, credibility is less of an issue. Otherwise, attorneys and barristers will scrutinize not only credentials but also past experiences and past performances in court: I think that the flip side is when it comes to selecting an expert witness you want as the instructing lawyer. It’s very important to be satisfied that the person you’re going to use has a good . . . track record of credibility, [that] there are no questions over the probity, that there are no instances, because often [for] people’s evidence given, certainly in the court of the tribunal, where most of my cases are, we get transcripts of hearings, so it’s very easy to see what someone said. And in the judgment, it’s not uncommon for the judges to comment on the evidence that experts have given. So we want to make sure that someone has not got . . . any potential risks arising from those sorts of things.

While professional qualifications and a track record of publications pertain to “pedigree,” in many cases evaluations of past

120 Y Str ategic Facework

expert talk appear to play the primary role when selecting an expert witness. There can, of course, be exceptions, such as in the case of a unique or narrow domain of substantive expertise. Professional credentials as such, though, are not seen as an automatic guarantee of expert talk being delivered and are only situationally used in introducing speakers. In some situations, a speaker is introduced to an audience twice: once from backstage, before the occasion of the talk begins, and once on stage, before the talk itself begins. In research seminar talks, for instance, it is not unusual to have an informal round of conversation with the audience before the seminar proper starts. The speaker is introduced to the audience informally, and when the seminar starts, the host provides a more formal introduction. In both introductions, the qualifications of the speaker are mentioned, but the same qualifications may not be mentioned each time. But each set of qualifications will complement the other: moderators and emcees make sure that the informal and formal qualifications mentioned in the two introductions align. For instance, a speaker may first be introduced informally as a friend or longtime collaborator and then formally introduced as an individual with a number of well-known publications. The informal and formal qualifications given for an expert speaker align in the situation, and this alignment is consequential for how the audience will react. Overall, my argument is that the introduction of speakers to audiences is not limited to professional or educational credentials. Introductions of expert speakers do not necessarily concern the speaker claiming jurisdiction over a substantive domain or having contributed to the expansion of a domain. Credentials are but one of many resources for establishing the situational qualifications of a speaker. Introductions are situational, directed at both the audience and speaker. They establish the auspices

Str ategic Facework Z 121

and the occasion of the talk. They initiate and frame a temporary reciprocal orientation between speaker and audience, an orientation that is consequential for the talk. For instance, the informal introduction of an expert speaker as “a long-standing friend” frames an orientation different from that of “a guest from the Northeast.” Introductions put a series of constraints on the expert talk but also provide occasions for the speaker to reference their own expertise and to credential themselves. When it comes to expert financial talk (but not only this type of talk), the job of introducing the speakers is performed by a third party: a moderator, host, or emcee. This is the case with financial analysts when speaking at trade fairs, conferences, and shows, whereas in the TV or radio studio, the job is performed by the anchor of the show. During their talk, analysts are given a number of opportunities to reference their expertise and their status as experts. They are also given many opportunities to reference their status as experts by reacting to questions from the audience. The introduction initiates and frames the mutual orientation of the parties: moderator, speaker, and audience. First, the ways in which both the experts and their expertise are introduced, displayed, and referenced provide valuable insights into which aspects of their expertise are deemed relevant with respect to the audience, themselves, and third parties, as well as which aspects are considered intrinsic to their identities. In other words, an introduction answers the question of what is worth saying about an expert to introduce their talk to an audience. Second, an introduction is an occasion for the moderator, emcee, or anchor to establish themselves in relationship to the speaker. This is particularly important, as in many occasions the moderator, emcee, or anchor features regularly throughout the talk. Anchors, for instance, do not leave the stage after the

122 Y Str ategic Facework

introduction of guest speakers but remain present. They are expected to contribute to the expert talk. Their qualifications as contributors can be established not in talking about themselves but in talking about their guests. In other words, when introducing speakers as qualified to provide expert talk, anchors also introduce themselves as qualified to talk to experts. As I argue in the following chapter, however, not all anchors have these qualifications. Hence, the introduction of experts by an anchor is always also the anchor’s self-introduction as a qualified counterparty in expert talk. What is worth saying about an expert always says something about the moderator, too. Third, analysts can reintroduce themselves by sharing autobiographical details with the audience or even by stating their patriotic credentials. At an investors’ meeting I attended in the Midwest, the analyst who was speaking (who represented an investment fund) reintroduced himself with the words, “I believe in capitalism, I believe in America,” and proceeded by telling the obviously affluent audience, “I am like you, the old Midwest grandson of a farmer.” This shows that introductions are more than mere opening sequences that facilitate expert talk. They are intrinsic to facework (Goffman 1967: 6) that is strategic. Introductions are used not only to manage uncertainties of professional identity (e.g., Scarborough 2012; Dellwing 2012; Merkin 2006) but also to establish similarity with (or difference from) one’s audience while maintaining the position of an expert. An introduction can say, “I am not only a financial analyst but also a patriot and a person with a humble background, just like you.” A consequence of this is that any poor financial performance that might be criticized by the audience (as happened with this analyst) cannot be attributed to a lack of commitment to capitalism or a lack of expertise (“As a believer in capitalism, as a patriot and grandson of a farmer, I work hard on your behalf ”).

Str ategic Facework Z 123

Limits to one’s expertise can also be openly acknowledged without the audience sanctioning the speaker—after all, the expert is one of them. Similar to using physical appearance as a way to deflect criticism while staying in the good graces of the audience, analysts can use self-introductions to preempt certain possibilities of the audience contesting their expertise. As such, both physical appearance and (self-) introductions are intrinsic to the strategic facework that prepares expert talk. Strategies of introduction of and by analysts allow them to manage how knowledge is disclosed to audiences without putting expertise in doubt. Disclosure can be denied to audiences, and this denial can act as a signal of expertise in itself. During the Q&A sessions of several face-to-face talks by analysts, I witnessed the analysts refusing to answer questions from the audience by saying, “It’s really advanced stuff,” or “I don’t have time now.” In other instances, analysts said, “I know nothing about technical analysis,”8 or “I wish our [electrical engineering company] analyst was here.” Thus, analysts can express expertise by providing—or refusing to provide—factual information and explanations to the audience. In her analysis of mediators, Deborah Kolb (2009 [1985]: 322) shows that their expertise is derived from factual knowledge the audiences do not possess and that revelations of such knowledge are controlled.9 Refusing to reveal knowledge or claiming one is not in possession of it are also ways of expressing expertise.

ESTABLISHING THE TALKING PARTIES During my fieldwork, I never noticed introduction sequences that appeared to be scripted. The anchor and analysts or the analysts and producers would sometimes briefly discuss how to do

124 Y Str ategic Facework

the introductions before the show started, but they did not necessarily stick to what had been agreed. They would sketch only in the most general terms what they were going to discuss on the show. In some instances, the anchor and an analyst disagreed on the interpretation of financial data until just before the start of the show. What they had to agree on, though, before the start of the show and at its start was which parties would be doing the expert talk and which parties would be doing the “nonexpert” talk. Not only that: this preparation also establishes the keying of the talk and its footing.10 Are the parties going to talk in a serious or make-believe mode? Are they going to adopt their own voice or the voice of a character? At the opening of a broadcast, financial analysts were introduced only by name, sometimes with the addition of their position in a fund management or as something like “big guns from the [real estate] market.” They were supposed to be household names, not needing any mention of their education. By contrast, when a show had both a financial analyst and an external guest, for instance an academic from a university economics department, the academic would be credentialed but the analyst would not. Also, when an analyst had not appeared on a particular show for several weeks, they were introduced with their name and position, as well as mention that the analyst had not been a guest in the studio for some time. (An example of this situation is provided in the next excerpts.) In one recording I observed, a financial analyst who regularly appeared on a particular show and a guest who was the chief financial officer of an investment fund were introduced by the anchor before announcing the topic of that day’s show: “Today we have our expert in market regulation, James, and Adrian11 here. The case we will discuss today is [company] holdings, actually having been rather controversial for around eight years.” Both guests had advanced degrees in finance

Str ategic Facework Z 125

from North American universities, but the one-time guest was introduced as “our expert in market regulation, James,” whereas the regular guest was introduced only as “Adrian here.” As I have argued, expert talk is a collaborative enterprise. The moderator or anchor will have their own expertise, which is not necessarily, or not exclusively, in finance. This expertise may be in professional acting, for instance, or in entertainment. How did anchors present and introduce their own expertise? Some anchors I interviewed came from the music and entertainment segments of TV stations and had to take courses in finance after switching to finance shows. Some had acting careers in addition to their anchoring jobs. Some had acquired additional degrees and diplomas in finance. They also had to get to know fund managers and analysts, what these individuals knew, and what they were doing now and establish a rapport with them. Some considered networking within the financial services industry to be easy, because they had honed their skills in the entertainment industry: “I had a very good relationship with all the singers when I worked in entertainment,” declared an anchor when he told me about his plans to move to the sales department of a bank. Yet despite the considerable effort put into acquiring expertise in finance, anchors did not provide any of their finance credentials during shows. They had to establish themselves as qualified talkers but without saying anything as direct as “I took some finance classes to be qualified to participate in this talk.” Not only did anchors have to keep up with guests from the financial industry and academia, but they also had to coordinate the conversation and their actions with a producer and technician. They also had to be well networked in both worlds: finance and television (or radio). This points to the limited role of metacriteria (such as educational credentials) when it comes to introducing expertise and signaling to audiences the qualifications of

126 Y Str ategic Facework

a speaker. This is not to say that anchors didn’t introduce themselves or their qualifications at all; they did, but without referring to finance directly. References to anchors’ qualifications were also made by guests, but they pointed to a different kind of expertise: that of being an actor or a talker. Expression, how a person conveys a message through words and actions, appeared to be far more important than financial knowledge when anchors referred to themselves or were referred to by their guests.

SWITCHING FRAMES As I will illustrate, participants in expert talk use introductions to establish multiple footings and switch among them. They also use introductions to frame the talk to come as deriving from two kinds of expertise: acting and expression on the one hand and finance on the other. This makes it possible to switch footings, cross-reference frames, and identify which party in the talk has which type of expertise; that is, to identify an analyst as an actor and, sometimes, an actor as an analyst. When a financial analyst talks to an actor about financial matters in a TV studio, are they an actor, too? And when an actor talks to a financial analyst about financial matters, is the actor a financial analyst, too? In such a fractionated trading zone, introductions can switch back and forth between footing participants in one or the other type of expertise. This blurs the lines between the types of expertise at work and between the possible keyings of the talk. The introduction of a speaker to an audience can draw the latter into accepting a frame switch as defining for expert talk in a given situation. At the opening of the taping of a show I observed, before introducing the two guest speakers, the anchor addressed the studio audience directly. He not only provided

Str ategic Facework Z 127

audience members with instructions on how they should react during the taping but also introduced and credentialed the financial analysts who would be appearing and instructed the audience on how to welcome them. The analysts were introduced twice: before they appeared in the studio, they were introduced collectively to the studio audience; as they made their appearance, they were introduced again and greeted one by one. The first introduction, to the studio audience, went as follows: Anchor: Tonight we have two financial actors. They went through years of training and learned from An Actor Prepares by Russian theater [director] Konstantin Stanislavski. They will analyze financial information for you in a different way. Let’s give some applause for the first actor.

Both guest speakers were financial analysts, and one was the director of a brokerage house. Despite the anchor’s introduction, neither had a background in acting, although the anchor himself had an ongoing acting career. The anchor announced the expert activity of the two analysts (whom he referred to as financial actors in front of the audience): they were there to analyze financial information. Before that, however, the anchor credentialed them not by education or employment but by his own area of expertise, stating that they had prepared as actors. It is less relevant in this context whether the analysts had truly studied Stanislavski’s book; another analyst told me that having taken drama classes in high school had helped him in his job. What is relevant is that they were introduced as performing a specific activity—analyzing financial information—but credentialed as experts in a different activity—acting, which was practiced by the anchor.12 Switching frames is thus not only legitimate within the conversational format but also toward an audience.

128 Y Str ategic Facework

When one learns that actors will be analyzing financial information, the distinction between a grounding of the talk in reality versus make-believe becomes blurred. Acting has a different key from that of finance. The first is make-believe; the second is (expected to be) reality. If acting expertise and financial expertise encounter each other in expert talk, is it possible to switch key from serious to “as if ” and then back to serious? In the following excerpt, also from the taping of the show described in the previous two paragraphs, the anchor is hosting a show with the straightforward title Money Smart. The anchor has a dual career as TV show host and film actor. He has started the show by giving instructions to the studio audience. After that, he plays a video sequence, after which the first guest (the analyst from the brokerage house) is introduced. After a second video sequence, the second analyst is introduced. The following excerpt is from the anchor’s introduction of the first analyst: Anchor: [Analyst 1]! Analyst 1: Hello, everybody.  .  .  . Today, are you Superman or [name]? Anchor: Today, I am [name], who hosts Money Smart [a financial program]. Everybody, do you miss Money Smart? [showing an applause sign to the audience] Thanks! OK, [Analyst 1], today you need to play all kinds of roles as an actor here. Analyst 1: I have no alternative but to play different roles here. [Analyst 2] told me that we should be provocative. But this is not right for me. You know I am a humble person. But to host the show with him, I am forced to be provocative.

When the anchor greets the analyst, the latter asks whether the anchor is currently Superman (a character the anchor has

Str ategic Facework Z 129

played) or the anchor of a finance show. The anchor retorts that the analyst will need to play “all kinds of roles as an actor.” The introduction of the guest speakers credentials them as having a particular kind of expertise, namely that of the anchor: acting. But the talk itself is anchored in a different kind of expertise, which works in the realistic key. This allows the anchor and the analyst to switch the keying of the talk between the primary key of real talk about finance and a make-believe key. Both the anchor and the analyst acknowledge key switching when they say that they have to “play all kinds of roles.” This acknowledgment is counterintuitive, as we usually expect financial expert talk to take place in one of a limited number of keys, such as the primary key—that of reality—or one of a technical redoing; for example, a demonstration. Make-believe isn’t one of them. We also do not expect expert talk to switch keys. We can expect, for instance, that a lecture on astrophysics will open with a joke, but we do not expect the speaker to regularly switch between keys or to deliver the whole lecture as a joke. We expect that an expert witness in a court of law will talk in one of two possible keys: the primary one or that of a technical redoing. The expectation for expert talk such as that of a lecture, research seminar, or expert witness testimony is that the primary key will be the only or dominant one. And yet in the opening of expert financial talk, it becomes possible to switch among apparently incongruent frames and keys, because at least one of the collaborating areas of expertise is geared toward makebelieve. The anchor described in the previous excerpt was essentially saying, “Right now, I am not Superman, but I can be him in the next minute.” When the framing of a talk is ambivalent, the criteria by which the expert speakers are evaluated become ambivalent, too: does the audience evaluate the speakers as actors or as analysts?

130 Y Str ategic Facework

Expert speakers can use this ambiguity strategically to avoid their talk being faulted. In the same way that bodily appearance can be used to neutralize criticism of inaccurate financial forecasts, switching the keys in which financial expert talk is produced becomes a strategic resource for avoiding the talk being faulted. Talk, as we know it from causal conversation, is both faulty and faultable: it contains hiccups, mispronunciations, pauses, and various other formal lapses, faults that participants in a conversation can impute to the speaker.13 Yet, in the context of financial analysts speaking on a finance show at least, expert speakers seem to deploy efforts to ensure their talk cannot be faulted. I discuss the production of unfaultable expert talk next.

5 UNFAULTABLE TALK

EXPERT TALK AS A SPECIAL OCCASION I have previously argued that while public expert talk is seen as a special occasion, we know little about its properties and features. The question thus arises: What kind of public expert financial talk is produced, and what are its properties? Is it memorized talk, rehearsed talk, reading aloud, fresh talk, or something else (Goffman 1981: 227)? Moreover, it is relevant to ask what happens when expertise in financial talk is achieved collaboratively and subjected to technological and format constraints provided by such collaborations. Who talks expertly to whom about stocks, bonds, indices, inflation, and the like? Whose expert talk is audible to whom, and to what effect? And  what kind of expertise is primarily displayed through financial talk: that of a talker or a financial expert? I closed the previous chapter by examining how collaborations in the studio allow switching between frames of talk, making the keying of the talk ambivalent. I argued that participants use such switches strategically to counter the potential exposure of faults in their talk. If public expert talk is a special occasion, it has to be preserved as such and not exposed to possible faults.

132 Y Unfaultable Talk

Public expert talk is scheduled, announced in advance, prepared, and introduced accordingly. It is timed, and its length is usually preset. Audiences are summoned, prepared, and given occasions for specific interventions. The lecture, research seminar, conference presentation, investment pitch, thesis defense, expert witnessing, expert interviewing, and many more types of expert talk are instances of carefully prepared, scheduled talk occasions that are not treated by participants as casual, random, spontaneous, irrelevant, or effortless. In fact, often a lot of effort is put into such talk occasions. A casual in-person conversation can happen unannounced or be initiated. Its length is usually not preset by participants, and an external audience is not summoned to witness, let alone participate in, the conversation. We studiously proffer civil inattention in such occasions if we are not directly part of them (Goffman 1963: 84). Expert talk is not a casual conversation, even though it can sometimes be designed to appear as one. Nor is it the same as experts engaging in a casual conversation at, say, a dinner party. Participants and publics are aware of the special character of expert talk and contribute to it accordingly. The mere fact that we usually distinguish between experts engaging in casual conversations (in which they can draw upon their expert knowledge) and public expert talk as a special occasion, one necessitating effort, points to the fact that participants, including audiences, ascribe a special relevance to it. This relevance isn’t reducible to ritual, no matter how important the latter may be on some occasions. It is not reducible to institutional anchoring or status either: if it were, it would suffice to know, for instance, that a talk is hosted by this or that (prestigious) institution without having to attend it. Expert talk can be supplanted, but not substituted, by written documents. I can send out the draft paper for my research seminar talk, but I cannot replace

Unfaultable Talk Z 133

the talk merely by sending out the paper. The fact that expert talk has to be executed, attended to, witnessed by an audience, and participated in indicates that participants expect something special from it. How does this something—which is not necessarily the same in each case—relate to the properties of expert talk, and what are these properties?

FRESH EXPERT TALK One possibility for producing expert financial talk is to script it. This could take the form of producing a written text that is either read aloud in front of an audience or memorized and then recited in front of an audience. Such readings and recitations can then be repeated and reproduced nearly identically in various situations. The other possibility is to produce fresh expert talk—that is, to generate it anew in each situation. While scripted talk is subject to its own uncertainties, such as memory lapses or misplacing the script, fresh talk is subject to uncertainties related not only to its delivery but also to its very production. It has to be produced anew in each situation. Its iterations have to be recognizably fresh—as produced for and in a particular situation—while also clearly identifiable as part of a series that retains topicality and salience. We could thus argue that producing and delivering fresh expert talk is laden with more uncertainties and problems than producing written text, memorizing and reciting text, and reading text aloud in front of an audience. Yet we see time and again that producing fresh expert talk is expected and preferred to scripted talk. While in some cases (e.g., some types of hearings), expert witnesses are allowed to produce scripted talk, in courts of law they are expected to produce and

134 Y Unfaultable Talk

deliver fresh talk. On some ritual occasions such as celebratory lectures, experts are allowed scripted talk. Otherwise, though, research seminars and lectures are expected to consist of fresh talk, produced and delivered on site, with the help of aids such as slides or draft papers. A thesis defense has to consist of fresh talk, not of a statement read aloud. Hence, it can be argued that a mark of expertise—and therefore of being an expert—is the capacity to produce and deliver series of fresh talk, each instance being both situational and recognizable as part of something larger. As it is fraught with uncertainties and problems (more so than is scripted talk), the question of the unique properties of fresh expert talk becomes even more important.

FRESH EXPERT FINANCIAL TALK Producing and delivering fresh talk played a significant part in the activities of the financial analysts and academics I observed and interviewed. None, including those who never appeared on TV or radio, limited their activities to producing written texts. Buy-side analysts, for instance, met with and made regular presentations to pension fund managers. They didn’t limit themselves to sending in a written analysis or written communication via email. When they met with fund managers, they didn’t read aloud a prepared statement, and they didn’t memorize one. They had to produce fresh talk anew each time, as a condition for the fund manager to consider allocating a portion of their capital with them. That was in addition to frequently talking to buy-side and sell-side analysts about investment ideas and to the research seminars they were participating in. All this talk didn’t diminish the importance of writing reports. Reports, however, were not treated as a substitute for fresh talk.

Unfaultable Talk Z 135

Producing talk was not seen as easy or unproblematic. First, topical continuity and congruence had to be assured. When meeting with fund managers, analysts had to make sure that what they were going to say was aligned with the reports they had produced, without merely reproducing the reports. Writing a good story and telling a good story are both important but are not the same thing. One analyst said to me, “I think being able to tell a story and [add] feel[ing] to something, that’s not something many people think about when they enter this industry, but . . . they need to be able to be a good narrator and storyteller. And I think that is basically . . . being able to either write or tell a story  .  .  . that really catches people’s attention immediately.” Second, fresh talk directed at fund managers had to signal that the speaker was invested and participating in the story they were telling. This, analysts noted, was valid for everyone, including fund managers pitching to their investors: Fund managers have to have good communication skills or acting skills when they’re pitching their funds to clients. . . . And I think you can really spot when someone is picking through something that they really believe is a good investment decision or someone that kind of is just doing the job. . . . And so I think just acting isn’t enough. . . . Yeah, acting and being a good communicator, but at the same time . . . believing in what you do. . . . So I think it’s a dual thing. . . . When we [i.e., analyst and fund manager] go and pitch to clients, I mean, we really believe in what we do; we really believe in our fund. We have our personal money invested in the fund. So we’re very solid. We can, we really believe in this. But plus, we’re trying to create a story that the clients will understand. They might decide to invest alongside us.

(Fund manager)

136 Y Unfaultable Talk

While the story has to be good to make it authentic, to elevate it above mere acting, the speaker has to be a character in the story as well. As analysts of oral storytelling have emphasized, a central feature of this genre is the emphasis put on the identity of the person telling the story to a particular audience, an identity that crystallizes in the process of telling (e.g., Schiffrin 2009). You don’t know who the storyteller really is until the story has been told. The identity of the storyteller is shaped not by the story’s accuracy but by how the act of expressive telling is performed. Similarly, according to the account given in the previous excerpt, the identities of the analyst and fund manager crystallized during the talk when they revealed that they were both speakers and characters in the story (i.e., they had their own money invested). It is this double footing that makes the story authentic and the talk different from merely having good communication (or acting) skills. Having to produce an oral story and be a character in it, as well as its narrator, doesn’t remove all uncertainties for financial analysts and fund managers in their production of fresh talk. When analysts meet investors, they do not know from the start whether they will be allowed a separate narrative segment to begin their talk with or whether they will have to construct their talk in a different format. They do not know in advance the precise topic of the talk either: When we go to talk to clients  .  .  . we never really know what we will be talking about. I mean, obviously, if we do one hundred clients’ meetings, then the kind of . . . questions that come, we’ll probably have heard them before. But it’s really interesting how often every time the meeting is different, because  .  .  . we don’t tend to have a forty-minute presentation followed by Q&A. Usually, we’ll go straight into Q&A, because our clients will

Unfaultable Talk Z 137 probably know the front [i.e., the investment suggestion] or probably they know what we do. So they start with questions. And they might start to ask about the economy or about performance or about an individual stock. So we never really know what we’re going to talk about.

(Fund manager)

Fresh expert talk truly has to be fresh: one can come prepared to recite a memorized story, but one doesn’t know in advance whether the audience will allow it or impose a format of talk that the speaker is unaware of in advance, either in form or content.1 This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate the talk, except in very broad strokes. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, to fully script the talk.

THE EDGE Analysts, as well as investors, are aware of the fact that investors will have heard several talks from competing analysts but will give their investment capital to only a few speakers. At some moment, not known in advance, analysts must insert the “edge” into their talk; that is, sentences that make their talk distinct: So initially, I never did meetings alone. I always started by going with my mentor and observing him. So maybe after twenty meetings that I was in with [my mentor] . . . I started to do meetings alone, so [before then] I was busy observing. . . . Since we’re managing the fund, I would basically repeat what he would say about the edge. And then with time, I would maybe tweak it a bit. I [would] see how clients would react, if they would react with

138 Y Unfaultable Talk interest or with boredom, or [if ] they would be following up with questions. So I think it was just a very adaptive process. It was always kind of a reaction to clients, [although] the central message was the same. So we know what our edge is. . . . The words that we use I think evolve over time, kind of by observing the reaction of clients.

In this excerpt, a young financial analyst reveals how he has learned how to talk by observing his mentor over several meetings and then trying to mimic his mentor’s talk. But producing the edge is not mere imitation; it is adapting one’s talk to the audience’s reactions on the spot. It is not reducible to an abstract idea (words themselves have to be adapted); it is expert talk but also a response to the audience. This again reveals the challenges of producing fresh talk as opposed to merely delivering talk. For fresh talk, both speaker and audience have to be physically embodied, so that their voices and bodies can be read. As these reactions can be different with each situation, talk has to be produced anew every time. Nevertheless, with experience, it can be distilled into a few sentences: I think we arrived [at] a point in which every meeting, when we’re talking about edge, we would use the exact five or six sentences kind of word for word. And . . . it’s not that we ever wrote it down. I don’t think I’ve ever written it down. I might have if a client kind of wrote to me by email, asking me what the edge is; [then] I might have actually written [it] down. But I’d never kind of really [written] it down before going into my first client meeting. It was always about observing and then adapting.

Even if the possibility of writing down “the edge” cannot be discarded, this analyst (the same as in the previous excerpt)

Unfaultable Talk Z 139

makes clear that it evolves from talk in an adaptive and iterative process. It is not the production of a script but the formation of a restricted set of talk routines capable of withstanding uncertainties. These routines have been tested on and adapted to multiple audiences, and they can be further adapted if need arises. They have to withstand the possible exposure of faults, as the analysts’ reputations—and their ability to attract capital—are on the line. However, one cannot make a talk routine unfaultable in advance: in interactions with audiences, unforeseen opportunities for one’s talk to be faulted, both substantively and formally, can always arise. To recap: when referring to their own expert talk, analysts emphasized that it had to be fresh but formed through an iterative process and consistent within a series. They had to be both animators and characters in the talk, and they had to produce fresh talk capable of withstanding a range of uncertainties (not least those coming from audiences) while allowing for segments of distinctive talk routines.

THE UNCERTAINTIES OF TALK For those financial analysts who appeared on TV and radio, the production of fresh talk was confronted with additional uncertainties. These came from being part of a global talk flow, from structuring the talk in standardized segments, and from the peculiarities of coordinating the production of the talk. TV financial analysts also saw producing fresh talk as an essential part of their job, and not an easy one. They had learned by observing others or had received advice from more seasoned speakers. In addition to all this, however, their talk had to be smoothly coordinated with sequences from other financial experts, as well as with written documents. Producers sat in the production room during the

140 Y Unfaultable Talk

show, monitoring the fresh talk being produced on Bloomberg TV and other TV channels, in newspapers, and elsewhere. They gave instructions to the anchor, the analysts, or both during the show (through the ear loop) based on the talk produced by other experts. The analysts’ talk was part of a stream of talk flowing uninterruptedly through New York City, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris, and Frankfurt, circling the globe. Consequently, their own talk had to flow. Talk had to be effortless, flowing uninterruptedly, and the analysts had to have something to say all the time. This was critical, especially on days with little or no financial news, because, according to the analysts I spoke with, “the show must go on, that’s the point,” and “you cannot not say anything for one or two seconds.” While in a presentation being made to investors, a pause of one or two seconds might be taken as a signal that the analyst is reflecting and choosing their words carefully, when one is part of a flow of talk but with limited structured talk time, such pauses cannot be afforded. Anchors and producers also considered that finding a good talker was not at all easy. Some analysts, who had started as research assistants and then worked for a while as financial analysts writing reports, found that switching from writing to producing fresh financial talk was more difficult than they had expected. They had to learn how to improve their oral expression skills and how to work “in front of the curtain.” Knowing how to write and knowing how to produce fresh talk were two entirely different things. In collaborative productions of fresh expert talk in a TV or radio studio, constraints and uncertainties came from (1) the technological assemblages of the studio; (2) the production format of the show; and (3) collaborating with anchors, producers, and other studio guests. The flow of talk didn’t occur randomly or without constraints. Quite the contrary: it had to be orderly, and it had to handle the uncertainties inherent in its organization.

Unfaultable Talk Z 141

It is puzzling, though, to observe that in spite of the complexity of this organization and in spite of the uncertainties inherent in producing and delivering fresh talk, both off and on screen, analysts chose this format. After all, they could have read from or recited a script (this format would particularly lend itself to radio appearances). They could have memorized a few figures of speech. Yet, in none of the instances I observed did they choose to do any of those. Even when they could use a teleprompter, they blended reading aloud with fresh talk. But the reading aloud was performed in such a way as to resemble fresh talk.2 To a large extent, producing fresh talk was taken as a sign of, if not intrinsic to, having expertise. The production format of most TV and radio finance shows was a maximum of fifteen minutes of talk on one topic, followed by advertising, followed by fifteen minutes of talk on a new topic. Analysts had to be prepared to fit their talk within each fifteenminute segment and knew that the anchor would be managing the turn-taking of the speakers. This format is different from that of an academic lecture on finance, in which the expert lecturer manages turn-taking rights. Finance show talk segments are also significantly shorter than trade fair talks, which usually run thirty minutes to one hour. And finance show talk is different from talk produced by fund managers and analysts for investors: in face-to-face meetings, analysts might know that thirty or forty minutes have been scheduled for the meeting, but they do not know in advance how that time will be segmented or how topics will change from segment to segment. They do not even know if they will be allowed to provide some expert talk before being questioned by investors. On TV, the talk segments and topical changes across segments are planned, perhaps decided only a few minutes before the show begins, but participants know and will stick to this order.

142 Y Unfaultable Talk

Within the constraints of having to speak on two topics within two fifteen-minute segments, analysts had to produce topically salient and self-contained fresh talk. In an academic lecture, for instance, the lecturer can say, “I will deal with this question next time,” but in a finance show, there is no “next time” after the commercial break. The time following the ads is a totally different time. There is no “next time” to expand, explain, examine hypotheses, develop ideas, or the like. The content of the second segment will be recognizable as expert talk, but totally different from that of the first segment. The outcome is a chain of highly structured segments of fresh talk that span the globe (because producers coordinate the talk of the show with that of other programs running on their screens), a chain in which each segment is self-contained but recognizable as part of a larger whole. A casual face-to-face conversation offers participants multiple occasions to continue discussing, explain, elaborate on, and revisit a previously discussed topic. Such opportunities are not possible for fresh expert talk produced within short, highly structured segments. When fifteen minutes have passed, the global conversational flow moves on. Expert talk must move on, too.

THE BOUNDARIES OF TALK In addition to the constraints just described, talk segments on finance shows must also be recognizably distinct from advertising. Failure to make this distinction can incur fines from regulators. However, it is not usual to explicitly label different segments as “expert talk” and “advertising.” Both consist of talk. The topic of both is finance. If analysts talk about the financial products being advertised in commercials, this can be construed

Unfaultable Talk Z 143

as hidden advertising. Licenses can be suspended, and fines can be handed out. If, however, analysts choose not to talk at all about stocks or warrants or bonds, they miss an occasion to showcase themselves as experts. As some analysts plan to become fund managers, not talking at all about financial products could be counterproductive to their ability to attract customers. Hence, the boundary between advertising and expert talk has to be managed strategically but not rigidly. The main tool for managing this boundary is talk. During my fieldwork, there were many TV commercials for financial products such as callable bull and bear contracts (CBBCs)—a product introduced by Western banks and popular with Hong Kong investors. However, analysts couldn’t talk too much about CBBCs because doing so would appear to be advertising, not expertise, and the anchor would interrupt. As interruptions were undesirable, analysts tried to minimize the time they spent discussing advertised products. Nevertheless, it was important to talk about them to some degree, because doing so was intrinsic to demonstrating their expertise. According to one analyst, “The major talking points should be about the warrants, but you cannot give the impression of advertising; you speak just a few words. You have just a supporting role, you cannot talk over twenty seconds, maybe fifteen  .  .  . you’ll be stopped immediately, and the anchor will ask another question.” In this excerpt, the analyst chooses an acting metaphor (“supporting role”) to describe how to keep within the boundaries of expert financial talk on TV. Switching frames of reference (from financial to acting expertise) is a way of explaining how the boundaries of talk are kept in place, and hence rationalizing it. Boundaries between financial and political talk need to be carefully threaded, too. While finance was touted as a domain of free speech, it was so only as long as it stayed within unspoken

14 4 Y Unfaultable Talk

yet acknowledged boundaries. More than once, this proved to be problematic. One analyst described a situation to me in which, on live TV, he had to refuse to answer an unanticipated question from the anchor. He was upset about the question having been asked and saw it as detrimental to his expertise, which he felt the need to circumscribe: For example, this morning in a . . . TV live interview, the anchor asked a very complex question with lots of background information including all bearish factors like trade war, currency devaluation, and finally the Hong Kong political arrest [of ] some leaders of some activists, protesters, before coming back to his question to me on my view of the Hang Seng Index. You know, it is ridiculous to add that to the question because it is highly sensitive politically. . . . So, I resolutely refused to answer without significant qualification before proceeding to the plain question of [the] HSI forecast.

The question was not staged or shared with the analyst ahead of time; it was a genuine, unpleasant surprise. It blurred the boundaries between finance and politics. The analyst felt that by introducing political aspects into a question about index forecasting, the anchor was damaging the credibility of the analyst’s expertise. (It is important to note, too, that the anchor wouldn’t have done that without an instruction in his ear loop from the producer.) He said that what the anchor did damaged the logical links in his argument. However, refusing to answer the question was damaging, too, because some of his audience criticized him online. He felt compelled to formally complain to the TV studio and explain his decision to his audience. Boundaries are problematic: one can be pushed beyond them and then be faulted for their talk being something different from what

Unfaultable Talk Z 145

it claimed to be. Hence, the first mark of fresh expert talk is that it needs to be produced in such a way that it cannot be faulted for being something else.

EXPERT TALK ABOUT FRESH EXPERT TALK During finance shows on TV and radio, financial actors talk as part of an ongoing collaboration with anchors and producers. Without this collaboration, there can be no expert talk—not on radio or TV, anyway. The collaborative production of fresh talk is multilayered, as collaborators produce one layer of talk available only to themselves, or only to some of them, and another layer available to both collaborators and their audience. The first layer involves the production of sequences of fresh expert talk. The second layer is the fresh expert talk itself. The two layers are also laminated: while distinct, they are so tightly enmeshed that talk addressed to an audience cannot be produced without talk available only to some or all collaborators. The audience is aware of and participates only in the fresh expert talk produced and distributed to them. During the show, the anchor, the producer, and most times the analysts, too, wear earpieces. The producer sits in the control room monitoring screens on which a flow of financial talk and texts runs continuously. Producers control a switch that activates the ear loops. They can choose to talk only to the anchor,3 giving them instructions about what to say or ask. Financial analysts and academic guests are left to guess what the producer is instructing the anchor to say, anticipate the anchor’s actions, and react to this anticipation. Some shows I observed had two anchors and multiple guests; for instance, one anchor

146 Y Unfaultable Talk

was in the main TV studio, and the other was in the TV studio of an investment bank. Each anchor had studio guests, who had to guess what the producer was instructing each anchor to say, anticipate how to react, and respond to the other guests. This guessing is consequential, because the anchor is expected to direct the financial analyst’s talk by asking questions. The anchor will have prepared in advance and described to the analyst the general nature of the questions to be asked, but the producer can intervene at any time to direct the anchor to ask a different question or change the direction of a conversation. Analysts will have prepared, too, in that their research assistants will have produced charts, data, and other pieces of financial information and made them available to the analyst before the show. However, the analyst will not know in advance which bits of prepared research are going to be useful. They will want to avoid surprises, particularly unpleasant ones. Above all, they want to avoid situations in which they cannot or are unwilling to answer a question. Even if the producer does not intervene in the flow of the talk, they always tell the anchor when time is up and the conversation must stop. Analysts do not want to be cut off in the middle of a sentence or caught without a response to a question, because either will damage their reputation as experts. Together with everybody else in the studio, they know that each talk segment is only fifteen minutes long and that they cannot continue their talk after the commercials. Therefore, anticipating the end of the conversation by glancing at the control room to see if the producer is talking is very important. According to one analyst, “One little trick is that the anchor will try to stop you when the time is up, and you don’t know what the producer has told the anchor in the ear loop, but you know it’s about time.” What you say and how you say it in front of the camera thus depends on what the producer tells the anchor in their private conversation during the show. Analysts

Unfaultable Talk Z 147

do not want to be cut off or left without the possibility of an answer, while producers need to manage the time allocated to a conversation. A second mark of fresh expert talk is that it cannot be faulted for incompleteness or lengthiness. Producers sometimes try to create or maintain a sense of competition among analysts. Every now and then, they let an uncomfortable question slip through all the way to the analyst. In the taping of a game show organized as an investment competition among five analysts that I observed, the producer asked each analyst to comment on the investment performance of the others. One said to me that he had had to be careful with his comments, as the producer could edit them to make the comments appear more critical of the others’ performance than intended, thus generating animosity. The goals of producers and analysts appeared to be aligned only to a certain extent. Expert financial talk in such situations cannot exist but as a tripartite conversation (producer–anchor–analyst), only some parts of which are publicly visible and audible. However, while trying to guess what the producer is telling the anchor and preparing responses to the anchor’s anticipated questions, analysts cannot show any emotional reaction to this tripartite conversation. This is not to say that they cannot react emotionally but that their emotions have to be oriented to the topic of their expertise (e.g., Laube 2016), not to the conversation. Analysts also cannot break the collaboration on the spot and walk out if they do not like what the anchor asks them (whether instructed by the producer or not). They have to keep the talk flowing. Anticipating what the producer is saying to the anchor and expressive composure are things analysts have to learn, and they can do so only from repeated interactions in the TV studio. These abilities are also consequential for their credibility as experts. Hence, fresh expert talk should not be faulted for sudden breakdowns and should not be hesitant.

148 Y Unfaultable Talk

FORMAL UNFAULTABILITY Collaborative talk is produced within segments of fifteen minutes, and within each segment, time and again, expert talk has to demonstrate specific properties that distinguish it from mundane talk. Even when expert talk takes the form of a conversation, it is a public conversation of experts and will thus have to display, not merely announce, its differences from a casual chat. The latter can have long pauses, hesitations, interruptions, mispronunciations, and hiccups of all sorts. Expert talk is “talkative.” As argued, analysts and anchors must prove capable of producing fresh talk uninterruptedly, seemingly spontaneously, unhesitatingly, and faultlessly. They must prove capable of resuming talking after an interruption without any apparent effort of remembering where in their talk they had been interrupted. They have to produce talk that, on a formal level, does not display flaws (Goffman 1981: 240, 242). Analysts and anchors have to show oral presence, hence the attention given to body and voice as strategic resources. These properties of fresh expert talk were regarded as essential by the analysts I observed during my fieldwork. One analyst told me that a locally prominent academic economist was completely unsuited for appearing on finance shows (which he had done in the past) because he could not effortlessly remember where in his own talk sequence he had been when interrupted by the anchor or other guests, and resume talking from that spot: “Some people cannot present themselves . . . they cannot remember what they are talking about. They do not know how to act in front of the camera.” This performance made the economist in question appear hesitant and unsure of his statements, and the audience cast doubt upon his economic expertise (although his prominence among academic economists was unchallenged). This suggests that, from the viewpoint of the analysts I spoke with, economic substantive expertise is not only different from but, in

Unfaultable Talk Z 149

this situation, also subordinate to the expertise of fresh talk. One must speak in a specific, “talkative way” to demonstrate expertise in providing fresh expert financial talk. Another property of fresh expert talk on a financial show is the ability to adapt to the audience and format of a show. There are daily shows and evening shows; there are various show formats, such as game shows, comedy shows, talk shows, and news shows. They have different anchors and employ different linguistic registers; financial news shows, for instance, are anchored by financial journalists, whereas the anchors of daytime finance shows come from the entertainment and music departments of TV stations.4 Analysts have to adapt to the linguistic register of each show and switch between colloquialisms and the jargon of economics, irrespective of how well educated in economics they are. As one analyst told me, “Most of the youngest generation have the highest qualifications, but they still have to care for the needs of the housewives.” Talking about a particular show, this analyst went on to say the following: [That program] is targeted at housewives . . . very layman . . . in that program, people just like talking in their usual daily conversation, but some other programs are produced by the reporters; they try to imitate the journalism practice. . . . We are quite versatile, we change all the time, and the show is different; you immediately change. If you are in a journalistic program, you act like you have knowledge [my emphasis], we talk in jargon, but if the show is for housewives, we talk in the natural language. . . . You have to choose the channels. [Program name], that’s more like the elites, the professionals, the intelligentsia . . . you can use as much jargon as possible; that’s fine.

What this excerpt highlights is the need to master various linguistic registers: substantive knowledge has to be there, yet

150 Y Unfaultable Talk

filtered and adapted to these registers. What this analyst emphasizes is that on a more pretentious program, one has to show mastery of economics jargon. “You act like you have knowledge” refers to using this jargon as opposed to the natural language of colloquial talk. Seen from the angle of interactional expertise, this was not so much about mastering different professional jargons. Ultimately, the topical domain was one and the same, namely finance. Analysts had to master different registers of fresh talk according to how they prefigured their audiences, from colloquial talk to academic jargon, while keeping within the given topical domain. The ability to switch registers, often during the same day, was seen by analysts as difficult and as a marker of their skill.5 Hence, when one is producing fresh expert talk, one has to be unfaultable in multiple registers. On TV and radio, analysts display a particular “style.” In the same way that an audience expects a particular look from a particular analyst, they expect a particular selection of substantive expertise to be put on display, and analysts will have to make this choice consciously: Different people [other analysts] have different styles. I don’t prefer the buy-sell-hold style, but other stock commentators, maybe they are more well trained in accounting, they read the balance sheet, brokers have access [to] stories. . . . Different people prefer different indicators, just like in the movies [my emphasis] . . . not just one way [but] many, many ways. . . . You have to find out what you’re really good at, what the audience wants . . . you have to know what you’re really up to. If you don’t position yourself, then others will position you. [Stock commentators] have to know who they are. . . . my image has already been established in a certain style [my emphasis].

(Financial analyst, regular on TV and radio)

Unfaultable Talk Z 151

This analyst had undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in economics and finance, and it was highly implausible that he would have been unfamiliar with balance sheets. Yet he treated his substantive expertise (and that of his fellows) as a matter not just of covering the whole area of finance or differentiating oneself from fellow analysts (which would point to relational expertise). He treated his substantive expertise as a matter of developing a distinctive style at the intersection of what he was good at and what the audience wanted. This was in line with and related to developing a distinct expressive style, “just like in the movies.” Image (understood as bodily presence, voice presence, and way of talking) and selective financial expertise (understood as choice of topics and indicators) had to fit together in a stable manner, in something called “style.” Analysts had to show that they were good at displaying their expertise in an established style; consequently, they could not allow it to be faulted.

SUBSTANTIVE UNFAULTABILITY A question arising is, How do financial analysts see their fresh talk in relation to their substantive expertise? If they are experts at fresh talk but appear on shows as financial experts, they have to articulate the relationship between (their own) talk and substantive expertise in finance. The analysts I observed and talked to were at pains to define themselves as different from theater and film actors. In the early stages of my fieldwork, an analyst I was accompanying to TV studios arranged a meeting with a film director who explained to me the work of film actors, insisting that it was completely different from that of financial analysts. I was taken aback, as

152 Y Unfaultable Talk

I hadn’t thought of the two as being the same despite the colloquial term “financial actor.” Another prominent female analyst (with an economics degree from a UK university) told me that the profession of financial actor was “all about expressing information” and not “financial play.” This implied that substantive expertise in finance was genuine, not simulated. At the same time, however, analysts I accompanied to studios and interviewed made regular reference to the acting profession when it came to characterizing their activities. I was told that “we are like actors trying to make it in Hollywood” and that “stock commentators are just like artists.” During several interviews, an analyst repeatedly referred to finance shows using the term “show biz” (comparing them with the shows running in neighboring Macao’s casinos) and said that answers given to an audience had to be good enough for the show but not specific enough that they could be falsified. This implied that there was a tension between substantive expertise and formal unfaultability. So much attention is given to producing formally unfaultable fresh talk. Does it have to be substantively unfaultable, too? In some situations at least, analysts had to be knowledgeable enough to give answers that were just plausible but not testable. They had to express that which they knew in such a way as to preempt the skepticism to which talk could be subjected. Because of how talk is structured as a collaborative enterprise, maintaining talk flow takes primacy. Producing an effortless flow of fresh expert talk on finance depends on how well analysts can anticipate the anchor’s talk and guess the instructions of the producer to the anchor while remaining effortlessly talkative (Goffman 1981: 198). In addition to the uncertainties involved in this process, fresh talk has to handle the uncertainties inherent in any conversation, in which each person’s turn cannot be anticipated from the start. Knowing the topic in advance doesn’t

Unfaultable Talk Z 153

supplant the need for analysts to try to anticipate what the other speakers will say, when they will be given their turn to speak, and what to say when their turn comes. An example is provided by the following excerpt from a “highbrow” financial show bringing together the anchor [A], an academic economist [AE], and a financial analyst [FA]. The discussion centers on central bank interest rates in Hong Kong and the United States. As the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the U.S. dollar,6 an increase in the interest rate by the Federal Reserve is likely to trigger capital flight (referred to as interest arbitrage) from Hong Kong if it is not followed by an increase in interest rates by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. The anchor asks for a projection of the consequences: A: Just now, we talked about the Hong Kong interest rate and how many increases in the U.S. interest rate Hong Kong will follow. I want to ask, If the interest arbitrage is triggered, how will the market react, and which areas will be affected? AE: The market’s reaction last time was very mild. Because last time Hong Kong’s economy was at the lowest point. FA: You are talking about 2005? AE: Yes, around 2004 and 2005. The property price, secondhand price [meaning the secondary market], dropped to the level of 32.5. The outflow of money happened in early 2005. The property price rose back to around 50 points. But bear in mind, in 1997, the property price once reached the level of 102. When the market started to normalize, the secondhand property price, on the contrary, was quiet, with lateral changes. . . . The simplest thing . . . the most significant thing is when the Federal Reserve continues to raise the interest rate and the U.S. dollar remains strong, see what happens to the inflation? A: Is it not deflation?

154 Y Unfaultable Talk

The academic economist starts with reference to past events in the real estate market and then implies that if the Fed continues raising interest rates, there will be inflation. However, his reference to past values of the property index opens the possibility of faulting his talk, as it is not clear how lower values of the property price index are conducive to inflation. When the anchor asks, the economist does not correct himself but selects an item from the previous turn (the U.S. dollar) and continues talking about it: AE: Not necessarily deflation; the current level on average is 0.6 percent, because of the underlying inflation. Hence, one thing we need to pay attention to is the U.S. dollar and inflation. . . . People should be mindful about when this phenomenon happens. The psychological effect will be huge. FA: According to some studies, an interest rate raise only comes when the economy is performing well and [an increase] will be beneficial to the stock market. Some people refer to some analysis and claim that an interest rate raise will favor the stock market but worsen the bond market. It is actually a bull market. But some interest rate raise is implemented when the interest rate is already at its peak. Some crisis only bursts out years after the raise. It really depends on how you see our position right now. If you think we are at the bottom of this cycle, then the stock market will tick up, and the bond market will decline. And then everyone should expect a beneficial circumstance. A: But we are actually at the top of the cycle.

The academic economist answered the anchor’s initial question by forecasting an interest rate rise and inflation. At this point, the financial analyst voices the economist (i.e., talks as if he were the latter): “It really depends on how you see our

Unfaultable Talk Z 155

position right now,” and “If you think we are at the bottom of this cycle, then the stock market will tick up, and the bond market will decline. And then everyone should expect a beneficial circumstance.” At this point, the anchor intervenes with a diagnostic, namely that the situation is the opposite—“But we are actually at the top of the cycle”—which confirms the projection of the academic economist. All participants in this talk had to display financial expertise and do this in ways that not only kept the conversation going (an immediate, blanket agreement or a conflict would have stopped it) but also distinguished each speaker from the others and displayed their own expertise. For instance, no one asked what interest rate arbitrage is, which would have reframed the conversation as an explanatory one. During each turn, the speaker selected a cognitive element from the previous intervention and challenged it to elicit a response. This element could be factual (e.g., how much inflation do we have?), diagnostic (is this inflation or deflation? Are we at the top or the bottom of the cycle?), or counterfactual (some studies show otherwise), or it could provide a link between factual and diagnostic elements. It is impossible to know in advance which element will be selected and challenged in the next turn, as the elements of each intervention become available only during a given turn. As they changed footings voicing one another, they collaboratively selected elements (evidence, diagnostics, or projection) that produced talk everyone agrees with. Elements that could substantively fault the ongoing talk (evidence that does not fit, faulty premises, or contradictions) were deselected. The three-party structure of the conversation (with the anchor intermediating) allowed participants to collaboratively construct diagnostics simply by changing footing and voicing another’s position. Expert talk as it is produced by analysts is substantively unfaultable in the situation

156 Y Unfaultable Talk

in that it is subjected to alignments that eliminate the possibility of the talk being substantively disputed. Given all the uncertainties and constraints under which fresh expert financial talk has to be produced, it appears to be a true accomplishment. It is not easy to provide fresh talk under these conditions, to master the formal properties of talk while participating in a complex collaboration in a flow of talk that is spanning the globe. It is not easy to iterate fresh talk time and time again while maintaining flow, managing boundaries with other forms of talk, keeping within time limits, and avoiding breakdowns or open conflicts. It is perhaps time to come back to the question: Why is fresh talk preferred to talk that is memorized and recited or read aloud when it comes to displaying financial expertise? The analysts in my fieldwork were aware of the difficulties of producing it, of its inherent uncertainties, and of the learning process it required. They were also aware that they needed to keep their fresh talk unfaultable: within its boundaries, unbreakable, complete, and unhesitant. They treated the ability to provide effective fresh talk as a skill requiring craftmanship and irreducible to “communication skills” (which were viewed as superficial) or mere knowledge of financial terminology. This display of skill and craftmanship is not the same as that, or part of the game, of financial research. It is not skill and craftmanship in developing and testing hypotheses, thinking through financial theory, examining and interpreting computational outputs, or similar processes. True statistical data can be used as a prop in this skilled activity, but the skills and the craftmanship lie elsewhere. They lie in the ability to produce segments of fresh talk with specific properties, segments that can be inserted into a flow of financial talk spanning the globe. These are prized skills, deemed valuable and, in the eyes of analysts, representative of expertise. It is, however, not the expertise of

Unfaultable Talk Z 157

a game but a spectacle. Why do analysts, and audiences as well, prize such skills? Why do they see them as valuable? As I have argued, educational or professional credentials were not always seen by analysts as signs of value and expertise. To evaluate the latter, even if only temporarily and in a limited way, expertise has to be put on display, put into action, with uncertainties thrown at it throughout. This action, however, is that of fresh talk, an action that fits the continuous flow of financial data, an action with a predetermined time horizon (in this case, fifteen minutes), capable of adapting to and inserting itself in the flow of similar actions across the globe. Further, the action of producing fresh expert talk is witnessable. It allows for not just one but multiple audiences to observe and evaluate it. If the public are to judge experts, they have to see them at work—only this work is of a particular kind: producing fresh expert financial talk and making it unfaultable. Yet the rapport with the audience is established first through expression, which raises questions regarding audiences’ evaluations of expressive and substantive expertise and the attempts of financial actors to control their audiences through talk.

6 TALK AND TRUTH

U

ntil now, I have examined how fresh expert financial talk on TV and the radio is constrained by its material scaffoldings and collaborations within and outside studios; the integration within a flow of expert talk; its sequenced format, which requires that each element be self-contained and unique yet iterable, distinct from other elements in the talk chain and from other talk formats such as advertising. I have examined the challenges of producing formally and substantively unfaultable talk across a variety of “styles,” understood in terms of both topical specialization and differentiation and in terms of the mastery of multiple idioms. These features, taken together, distinguish fresh expert financial talk from other formats of talk present in the media that may require occasional, punctual interventions from experts but are not classified as fresh expert talk; for instance, relationship experts and therapists being invited onto talk shows to give their opinions on relationship issues. These interventions are punctual and often meant to conclude the show. However, this talk is not fresh expert talk. It is a different enchainment of talk sequences, including but irreducible to elements of expert talk (Grindstaff 2002: 220). “Style” is not expected from the experts’ talk on

Talk and Truth Z 159

relationship talk shows, nor are coordination and integration into a global flow of talk, nor is participation in all segments of a talk sequence. These features of fresh expert talk, however, do not tell us much about its relationship with truth. The fact that such talk is produced as unfaultable does not make it true.1 This is neither self-evident nor unproblematic nor guaranteed. We know that in particular settings, such as courts of law (and research seminars for that matter), extensive attention is given to probing this relationship through particular conversational arrangements such as questioning. Therefore, it is legitimate to ask to what extent the relationship between financial expert talk and truth is probed in the situations in which this talk takes place. To turn the question around, we should ask to what extent do the formats of fresh expert financial talk in the media provide occasions for questioning, probing, criticizing, or correcting that talk’s relationship with the truth. As I have mentioned, we know of at least two instances in which providing such occasions is intrinsic to the character of expert talk: expert witnessing and the research seminar. In each, expert talk, by its very definition in the given situation, is structured to provide occasions for being probed repeatedly with regard to its truth. One might argue that one instance, the research seminar, is within the jurisdiction of science, whereas the other, expert witnessing, pertains to a different domain (O’Brien 2013: 20). This means, however, that in multiple jurisdictions, expert talk is organized to provide occasions for probing its relationship with truth. Is the media one of these jurisdictions? A different way of looking at this issue is to start by asking what talk procedures, recognized as such by the participants, are tasked with probing the relationship between expert talk and truth. Legal systems (but not only those) have a range

160 Y Talk and Truth

of procedures for establishing the relationship between expert talk and facts. In various legal systems, for instance, such procedures can be inquisitorial or adversarial (Philips 1993: 252). In courts of law, expert talk, in contrast to ordinary witness talk, is allowed to present opinions about evidence, opinions that must be backed by evidence of training and/or experience as a basis for specialized knowledge (254). Research seminars also have a range of talk procedures for establishing relationships with evidence. Such talk procedures concern, among other elements, the quality and completeness of the evidence, the procedures through which it was obtained, the processes and techniques applied to it, the extent to which such processes and techniques are standard in the scientific community, what is warranted in the interpretation of evidence, and the limits of the evidence. When it comes to probing the relationship between expert talk and truth, we encounter procedures of organized skepticism (Ramírez-i-Ollé 2018) that are recognized as such by the participants and followed in their talk. These procedures are irreducible to the institutional rules and constraints in which expert talk takes places and to admissibility procedures. Appearances as an expert witness in a court of law or as an expert in a research seminar might be subject to admissibility procedures; controversies over how such procedures are applied might ensue. Nevertheless, once procedures have been applied and controversies settled, expert talk has to follow procedures of organized skepticism, recognized and expected as such by all participants. Hence the question: does financial expert talk in the media, through its properties and otherwise, make room for procedures of organized skepticism, recognizable as such by participants? We would expect that if participants are to engage in organized skepticism in their talk, they would make this engagement visible and audible to all.

Talk and Truth Z 161

At a more general level and from a historical perspective, we know that observers have characterized merchant talk as being routinely fraught with mendacity (Shapin 1994: 94). At the same time, the conventions of civil conversation incorporated into scientific talk do not preclude probing the relationship between talk and truth. Quite the contrary: procedures for a “vigilant protection of the factual domain” (125) are historically developed and incorporated into conversational conventions so that talk retains its links to truth. These procedures are not hidden but displayed in talk, providing opportunities for contestation, dissent, and controversy without descending into quarrel. This makes the question even more salient, because (accepting financial talk as a variety of merchant talk) we would expect, even more so in cases of expert financial talk, that participants will use talk procedures to signal and express skepticism and to detect mendacious statements and refute them.

TRUTH AND EXPERT TALK IN THE MEDIA Ethnographies of daytime talk shows have discussed how expert talk is used as a way of providing legitimacy to the show but allotted only a limited amount of time at the end of a discussion sequence (Grindstaff 2002: 208, 216, 221). Experts are not seated among the show’s regular speakers but in the audience, and their closing interventions are managed by the host. The allotted time, the placing of their interventions in the discussion sequence, and their positioning vis-à-vis the speakers restrict possibilities for developing an argument or more nuanced point of view and for refuting an argument presented by the other speakers. The most an expert can do in their talk

162 Y Talk and Truth

is try to reframe a question from the host. In short, if we are to follow Grindstaff ’s observations, expert talk isn’t provided with occasions to express skepticism and is not subjected to it either. This would imply that, at least on daytime talk shows, the relationship between expert talk and truth is a nonissue and that experts are not held epistemically responsible for their talk. Epistemic responsibility would imply—even require!—an investigative effort into the relationship between “word and world” (Heffer 2020: 177), and there is no room for such an effort on a daytime talk show.2 The situation with expert financial talk is different though. On the shows I observed, expert talk was not brought in as an afterthought at the closing of a discussion. It was not brought in to legitimize “trash talk” either. It was not a mix of lay and expert talk on financial matters. It was billed to audiences exclusively as expert talk on finance and was required to keep itself distinct as such. Disparaging talk about specific companies, unsupported by evidence, could bring lawsuits.3 Giving tailored financial advice to an audience about a specific asset could entail lawsuits from both the audience and asset issuers. Given all this, we could expect that participants in financial expert talk would engage in organized skepticism as way of marking their talk as distinctly expert (by displaying epistemic responsibility) and as a way of hedging against possible legal action. Even if the institutional setting does not systematically demand organized skepticism (as is the case with a court of law or a research seminar), this does not mean that organized skepticism cannot happen. Yet, fresh expert talk is produced as unfaultable. There is a tension here, because making room for truth requires that one be prepared to admit that one’s talk might be substantively faulty.

Talk and Truth Z 163

TRUTH, TALK, AND RIVALRY At least in some instances I observed, participants in expert talk engaged in organized skepticism and at least tried to stick closely to epistemic responsibility. This engagement, however, was neither random nor universal. It was not the default mode. It was shaped by a long-standing rivalry among the analysts appearing on the show, and it was negotiated before the show started. In one instance, two locally well-known financial analysts systematically expressed opposing viewpoints on financial matters without meeting face to face on the same show but also without publicly mentioning each other by name. I had met and interviewed both several times. This rivalry wasn’t mentioned to me directly or from the start. Over the course of my fieldwork, analysts started discussing it in my presence, and I came to understand that it was a staple of the local financial scene.4 On one occasion, both analysts agreed to appear on the same show to present and discuss their positions without explicitly thematizing the rivalry (which was an open secret anyway). A rivalry between financial analysts providing expert talk means that the stakes are high, especially if they are known for systematically representing opposing points of view and systematically making statements that contradict their rival’s. Not agreeing to engage in or avoiding organized skepticism would simply weaken their standing, a standing on which investment flows depend (one of the analysts in the rivalry I observed managed a fund). Being too aggressive toward their rival in the debate would mean that they take the rivalry personally, which would also weaken their standing. However, if the rivals’ rules of engagement with each other could be negotiated beforehand, then each could seek opportunities for organized skepticism and

164 Y Talk and Truth

for displaying epistemic responsibility as resources for enhancing their standing. This would mean that the absence of institutional constraint to engage with the truth does not preclude such an engagement. At the same time, it means that expert talk’s engagement with the truth depends on who talks with whom and how this talk relates to a series of past statements that, in their turn, were oriented toward other analysts, not only toward investors. The topic of the discussion was the real estate market in Hong Kong. The talk was not explicitly organized as a debate or as a controversy between clashing viewpoints but as an expert discussion of a salient topic for the citizens of the city: the prices and rental rates of homes in Hong Kong appeared to be growing beyond what was affordable even for the middle classes. Concomitantly, living area was shrinking: shortly before the talk took place, “nano flats” had been introduced to Hong Kong buyers—flats (apartments) whose total area was often less than two hundred square feet but whose prices were often around US$500,000. The expert talk didn’t aim to suggest housing policies or discuss the construction industry. It was not a policy talk. It aimed to discuss the growth in price of a particular financial asset (a flat) against other types of financial assets and explain what this meant for Hong Kong investors.5

TALK, TRUTH, AND MORAL OBLIGATIONS Taking into account the salience of the topic for the local audience, as well as the personal rivalry between the two analysts, both the producer and anchor were excited to bring them together for the talk. Before the show started, a group gathered, including the producer, anchor, another analyst, the two guests,

Talk and Truth Z 165

and me. During this conversation, the producer mentioned that the studio was proud to have brought the two analysts together (it was considered difficult) and that they were hoping to have a larger audience than that of the day before (which was ten thousand). Then one of the analysts said, “We each present our own ideas. And consult each other.” This was repeated almost word for word after the anchor gave a mock introduction of the two analysts as “two big guns” having “a tug of war”: Analyst 1: The most important thing is having harmony in diversity. Analyst 2: We each present our own ideas and are respectful of each other. Anchor: Is it all right for [Analyst 2] to start first? He says he is not always overly positive, and he is speaking the truth. I remember you saying that people often twist your words. Is it possible for [Analyst 2] to start first? Analyst 1: Of course! Anchor: Give him this opportunity to clarify himself.

These statements, made right before the start of the exchange, frame the ambivalent character of the talk and its conditions. It is a “tug of war” but also a “consultation” in which each speaker will present their own ideas with “harmony in diversity.” More important perhaps is the statement of the anchor who, in asking for consensus that Analyst 2 start the talk, changes footing twice. First, she animates Analyst 2 as “speaking the truth” and then animates Analyst 1 as complaining that people often twist his words. These shifts in footing are followed by what amounts to a summons to give each other opportunities for clarifications. Taken together, actions such as these introduce moral obligations for participants: speak the truth and clarify. While footing shifts can be used by anchors in interviews to produce neutrality

166 Y Talk and Truth

in collaboration with the interviewees (Clayman 1993: 194), they can also be used to introduce obligations for speakers and make them acknowledge such obligations. Once the anchor animates one speaker as “speaking the truth,” an obligation to speak the truth is placed on all participants. It is perhaps this moral obligation to speak the truth and to give each other time for clarification, called upon by the anchor, that made the participants acknowledge their rivalry in the ensuing informal discussion, which was full of recriminations about past statements made by each rival about the other. Immediately after calling for truth, the anchor felt compelled to give those not in the know a bit of information about the rivalry, which led to the following exchange: Anchor (speaking to the others present in the group, in English): For a long time, [Analyst 2] has [made] some cynical comments on [Analyst 1]. But without naming . . . without making him public. Only making some comments, but everyone knows he was commenting on [Analyst 1]. And [Analyst 1], in his own live show [name], he tried [to] rebuke those kinds of criticisms as nonsense . . . one by one . . . analytically one by one. Analyst 1 (to Anchor): He is a common enemy. If I asked him about other tactics, he’d be dead. Anchor: Even if you defeat him, there’ll be more [laughter]. Analyst 1: I’m not too sure about others. . . . The second question is that if you twist my words and add more to that, then that becomes intolerable . . . Anchor: When I write, I will always apologize [inaudible]. I will apologize if I have offended anyone. If this is not OK, then it is as if you are saying I am wrong. . . . The good thing is that if the points you reply [to] him with [are] something he agrees with, then it’s OK.

Talk and Truth Z 167 Analyst 1: I don’t think there is anything wrong with speaking directly, as long as you are not doing it in a malevolent way or hurting others.

What happens in this exchange is that information given to third parties about a rivalry that is being played out in oblique comments (although it is common knowledge for audiences in the know) elicits issues that must at least be mentioned, if not solved, when it comes to the rivals engaging directly with each other in expert talk. First, when Analyst 1 rebukes Analyst 2’s comments “analytically one by one,” his rival is an enemy (perhaps the most dangerous of many) who twists his words. The rival is also someone with whom he can engage. The anchor’s strategy is to apologize in advance for any possible personal offense. A preemptive apology has to be issued (and accepted) for expert statements to be taken as valid outside a personal relationship. In other words, preemptive apologies are meant to make impossible not the interpretation of expert statements as judgments of a rival’s character but rather the rival’s reactions to that judgment. This informal exchange, which took place before the broadcast began, shows how much entangled (rivalrous) relationships circumscribe the links between expert talk and truth. Speakers have to be summoned in advance to be truthful—which is something the anchor did by placing an obligation upon the participants. Speaking the truth also requires speakers to find strategies to ensure their words are not taken personally, because it is always about “speaking the truth”—not only to the audience but also to the other expert speakers. Once all participants committed to speaking the truth, they also committed to not being “malevolent.” Despite the lack of formal institutional constraints for speaking the truth, informal reciprocal obligations can be

168 Y Talk and Truth

(and are) introduced, but they need to make reference to the relationship between the speakers (in this case, a long-standing one) and construe each speaker as one another’s audience. This suspends the conventions of unfaultable talk since speakers commit to offering one another possibilities to fault their talk. Of course, one could ask how we know that speakers will stick to such obligations. The answer is that we should expect that, in their turns, speakers will hold one another to account with regard to speaking the truth and that such signals of holding to account will be visible and audible to all participants. As has been noted, the organizational structure of the media interview deviates from the baseline of the ordinary conversation, providing for the possibility of overt disagreements, as well as for their potential attenuation (Greatbatch 1993: 299). Therefore, we can examine how such disagreements in expert talk are managed by the speakers and how the presentation of empirical evidence intervenes in this management.

TRUTH AND DISAGREEMENT IN EXPERT TALK I will now analyze an apparently simple disagreement that arose at the start of the rival analysts’ expert talk: What does “long term” mean? How long is long term? One year? Five years? Twenty? This might seem a minor issue, to be quickly resolved through agreement, perhaps based on intuition. It is not even something experts should debate about. And yet, in financial economics, long term versus short term is not an easy issue to resolve, especially when it comes to investments. It is related to problems of consumption versus investment, choices across asset classes (for instance, real estate versus equities versus bonds), and risk versus loss aversion. All these problems have been debated

Talk and Truth Z 169

by financial economists for a long while. They have been made the object of experiments, field studies, and secondary data studies, and they have been tackled with the help of many a formal model. In short, long term versus short term is a significant issue in financial economics. At the start of the rivals’ debate, this is tackled head on. Yet, neither gives a simple definition of “long term.” Nor does either directly contest the other’s understanding of what “long term” means. They launch into long sequences of expert talk that situate the issue within economic and financial models, revealing further disagreements that need to be resolved before “long term” can be defined. Thus, an apparently simple issue takes a lot of time to discuss, and extensive sequences of expert talk ensue. At the beginning of the show, the anchor seizes upon the agreement made before the taping began and gives Analyst 2 the first turn to speak, stating that “[Analyst 2] often feels misunderstood as being overly positive about the property stock market.” As a reminder, one key element of the rivalry between the analysts was that Analyst 2 was seen as overly optimistic whereas Analyst 1 was seen as overly pessimistic. The debate begins as follows: Analyst 2: I don’t think I only talk about the positives of the market. I also talk about the negatives. I talked about this in 2018 where there might [have been] two or three rebounds in the market. Of course, when it increases, we will talk about that, too. I think I am optimistic about the market in the long term, but I do not agree that I am overly positive. Analyst 1: What do you mean by “long term”? How long are you talking about?

Analyst 2 replies by saying that for him, “long term” means two to five years and then moves on to talk about quantitative

170 Y Talk and Truth

easing, trade wars between the United States and China, excess demand for properties, and the issue of land supply in Hong Kong to justify his understanding of “long term.” This begins a long debate, which, toward the end, comes back to the issue of what “long term” means. It is a debate during which the meanings of supply and demand, capital flows, and other key elements of economic and financial models come to the fore, each triggering disagreement. Immediately after Analyst 2’s reply that “long term” means two to five years, another disagreement arises around the meaning of (inelastic) supply and demand, its impact on rising housing prices in Hong Kong, and whether quantitative easing has an impact on housing prices.6 As mentioned, with Hong Kong’s real estate market being one of the most expensive in the world, this was a salient topic. We assume that it is important for audiences to understand what drives prices up. I will reproduce here only relevant excerpts from the analysts’ extensive exchange, during which the anchor does not set time limits for the participants’ turns: Anchor: So [Analyst 2] thinks there will be quantitative easing and that even if property supply increases, it won’t be enough. [Analyst 1] also talked about having too many unfinished properties. Those who purchase them almost always lose out. Analyst 1: All right! Round 1 [laughter]. The main thing I keep talking about is . . . the fact that we can never get over the issue of supply and demand. We have data . . . regarding supply that we can see. But I think that people just say there is not enough demand without much fact. Is it true that if demand is high, then supply is low? I really want to ask this. How do you calculate demand and conclude there is not enough demand? . . . Supply will always be under the control of developers. . . . The second

Talk and Truth Z 17 1 thing is that the idea of demand is very conceptual. . . . Another thing is about rigid/inelastic demand. I will ask [Analyst  2] about that later. Because if we are talking rigid/inelastic demand in economics, it means that no matter how the price changes, demand does not change. . . . However, when a price increases to a point where it is no longer accepted, then people will start to look for replacements. Then rigid/inelastic demand will in turn become no longer in demand but a want. That is why I think it is necessary to clearly define and distinguish between demand and want. Demand only exists when you can afford it. So the issue that is currently making me feel unsure is this relationship between supply and demand.

After the anchor voices each analyst, Analyst 1 takes the turn and revoices himself (“The main thing I keep talking about . . .”) as talking about supply and demand. This provides him with an opportunity to (a) introduce distinctions between want and demand, and (b) position the understanding of demand as the main difference between him and Analyst 2. This shifts the discussion from the empirical and local question of how many housing units (newly built or preowned) are available for sale to defining demand on a more abstract level as a basis for understanding numbers: Analyst 2: I will try and make this short. Thank you, thank you. First, I would like to respond to [Analyst 1]. I agree with your point on the sale of unfinished property units. It is very difficult to earn a profit within a few years with unfinished properties. But this is not the focus of our discussion. Going back to the second point regarding supply and demand. I think I have a different opinion from [Analyst 1]. Let me try to explain my thoughts or use numbers to provide an answer. The relationship

172 Y Talk and Truth of supply and demand is relatively unstable, meaning there is huge flexibility . . . which . . . is something that I believe everyone understands. Meaning when the property market is good, then rigid/inelastic demand will be high. And when the market is bad, demand can suddenly disappear. . . . I do not agree, because even supply can be unstable. . . . It must be unstable, since it is highly influenced by the market. Secondly, demand is also unstable and will also be influenced by the market. So how do we read the market then? If we say “unstable,” then everything can be unstable! So we need to acknowledge all supplies and demands. What [Analyst 1] said was very good. So how does a need become a demand? I’ll make it short, because I want to hear what [Analyst 1] has to say about it. I think the current demand also includes firsthand properties. . . . Secondly, there are more than one hundred thousand secondhand properties on the market. This is potential demand. Market optimism and pessimism, as well as market “hot tips” are all influential factors on the supply of properties. We have at least seventy thousand incomplete properties.  .  .  . Secondhand properties can be a huge source of supply, as we have around one hundred thousand properties, and this can be described as a potential supply. But what if we talk about need? . . . How do we calculate a market? First, we look at the number of transactions. . . . We would then put the number of transactions at the top of the consumer pyramid . . . meaning the lower the number of transactions, the higher the cost; the higher the number of transactions, the more balanced it would become. This is if we see the market as . . . if government policies on the property markets resulted in only achieving five thousand successful transactions. Then it would mean that they are the wealthiest five thousand potential purchasing powers. In other words, these five thousand potential purchasing powers would be the ones who have a say in the pricing of properties. . . . So why are interests and quan-

Talk and Truth Z 173 titative easing of currencies important then? It is a given that when there is more money and lower interest rates, property owners are more reluctant to sell.

Analyst 2 accepts Analyst 1’s claim that their understanding of demand defines the difference between them and then contradicts the claim that demand is rigid. He introduces the “market” as a factor influencing demand and in a more convoluted way defines the market as being constituted by the number of successful transactions (i.e., by resourceful buyers at the top of the pyramid). This contradicts the notion that supply and demand are the basis of the price mechanism. The claim of rigid demand impacting real estate prices is different from the claim of prices being determined by the demand of a small number of affluent buyers. Which is true? The anchor is left to summarize this difference: Anchor: Someone in our audience just mentioned something very interesting. [Name] says potential is sunken power, something that needs to be discovered. But what if potential has no power? Just now, Analyst 2 said that supply and demand can be influenced by various factors, which is very different from Analyst 1’s explanation of rigid/inelastic demand. Since Analyst 2 mentioned . . . instability . . .

In the opening of this sequence, the anchor animates the two analysts as talking about different issues: Analyst 1 is talking about buyers losing out by purchasing properties off plan, and Analyst 2 is talking about quantitative easing making properties more expensive.7 Their explanations of the same phenomenon (why housing is unaffordable) are not aligned: one points to the construction and real estate industry, the other to a monetary policy. This is why both analysts are working to align their expert talk on supply and demand, pointing to empirical evidence as

174 Y Talk and Truth

part of this alignment. In this process, fundamental issues of how to understand financial phenomena are laid bare. The alignment is undertaken around issues intrinsic to what I have called the game of finance (supply and demand, what a market is), one that allows for empirical evidence to be mobilized in support or refutation of each rival’s claim. This is illustrated by Analyst 1 claiming voice (“I keep talking about . . . supply and demand”), Analyst 2’s agreement, and Analyst 2’s rejection of the issue of unfinished properties as irrelevant. Explicit references to economic models of supply and demand, definitions of elasticity, distinctions between demand and want, and definitions of “market” are all introduced. Analyst 2 repeatedly states that he will be brief (but is the exact opposite) because he wants to hear what Analyst 1 has to say, while acknowledging his opponent (“What [Analyst 1] said was very good”). This realignment, performed in front of an audience, seeks to establish a conceptual baseline. It explicitly brackets out the anchor as a party to the conversation (Analyst 2 responds to Analyst 1, not the anchor). The anchor will intervene at the end to summarize the outcome of the alignment: the analysts have opposing points of view about supply and demand. Previous studies have shown that an anchor can be used by the speaking parties as an intermediary to deflect criticism or contestations (Clayman 1993). Conversely, if the parties explicitly bracket out intermediaries, we can assume that they accept the rival’s challenges.

THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH In the ensuing conversation, the analysts repeatedly utter apologies for not having clarified enough previous statements. They make even longer interventions. They introduce and define new

Talk and Truth Z 175

terms, such as “capital flows.” They make reference to empirical evidence regarding such flows from mainland China, the number of available properties in Hong Kong, and government housing policies. All this without intervention from the anchor, who repeatedly summarizes only the divergent points of view, as in the following instance: Anchor (after two long interventions from each analyst, following the interventions reproduced in the previous excerpt): Let me summarize what’s been said so far. I think both [Analyst 1] and [Analyst 2] have touched upon how there are various influential factors on demand and supply. But both also had very different perspectives. [Analyst 1] talked about monetary capital, unfinished properties, physical supply, and the fact that there is no such thing as rigid/inelastic demand. Whereas [Analyst 2] made it clear that potential purchasing power equates to a positive property market, which allows for this potential to be released.

This summary, whether accurate or not, allows the analysts to subsequently talk about their disagreements on capital flows from mainland China, equilibrium between supply and demand, and the top end of the real estate market as factors impacting real estate prices. They bring up numbers as evidence for or against the influence of such factors. While the anchor tries to animate them (“Analyst 1 talked about . . . Whereas Analyst 2 made it clear that  .  .  .”), the analysts are quick to regain footing. It is only from this moment on that a relationship between expert talk and financial realities can be investigated, not as a given but as an issue both analysts grapple with in their talk. As such, this relationship allows for disagreements and weighing the role of various factors (e.g., capital flows, local purchasing power)—in short, for uncertainties.

176 Y Talk and Truth

However, it was not easy to establish the conditions under which, at least in this case, expert public talk engages with the truth. It took considerable work for the parties to agree to and practice an engagement with each other and with the audience that allowed for uncertainties and disagreements. It took the analysts about fifteen minutes of negotiation before the show started to agree that they would search for the truth. It took a recounting of their history of rivalry and their oblique comments made against each other. It took a call by the anchor to the parties to speak the truth as a moral obligation. The analysts had to make an effort to align their talk around a set of issues that are the object of controversy between them. And it took their effort to nearly restrict the anchor from intermediating with summaries of previous turns (albeit temporarily) to regain their footing. When it comes to expert talk in the media, engagement with the truth does not appear to be natural, easy, or automatically expected by the parties involved. At least in cases such as this one, it appears to be difficult, requiring a summoning of moral obligations, negotiations, agreement, alignment, and direct engagement of the parties. One argument that could be made in this case is that each party offered their own narrative; for instance, a narrative about capital flows, another about purchasing power, and yet another about inelastic demand, and so on. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to establish the truth about such narratives, as each is equally plausible, and each analyst would try to promote his own version of the story. “Narrative” in this case would mean a relatively coherent telling of a “causally related series of events” (Richardson 2000: 170), such as “Developers who do not finish buildings on time lead to a housing crisis,” or “Capital flowing into Hong Kong leads to very high real estate prices, which lead to a housing crisis.”

Talk and Truth Z 177

If that were the case, though, efforts to align talk would be superfluous, and so would summons to moral obligations. We would have seen a number of narratives being proffered by each party, and perhaps attempts to drown each other and talk past each other. However, this is not what we observe in this case. What we would call fresh talk—talk that is different from a preset narrative—depends on a common frame of reference. This frame is provided by models, miniworlds produced within the game of finance, according to the rules of that game. This miniworld includes, among other elements, supply and demand, elasticity, equilibrium, capital flows, and markets. It includes numbers with the help of which each element of the miniworld can be evaluated. Each analyst takes a particular evaluative position, one that can be acknowledged or contested by the other. If there is a search for plausibility in this debate, it is conducted according to specific rules, which took some effort to negotiate. The narratives proffered are not random. They are not simply about a past chain of events but can be projected into the future. Such projections, in their turn, require recourse to the properties of the miniworld in question, which raises the question whether engagement with the truth is about a particular narrative or something else. In other words, what is at stake here? The truth of one narrative versus another, or the truth of something bigger?

MODEL AND WORLD In the following excerpt from the same talk, the anchor offers an intervention that abandons a neutral stance: Anchor (to Analyst 2): We put out a poll just now asking about this year’s property market. Eleven percent voted for a big

178 Y Talk and Truth increase, 33 percent voted for stable, and 28 percent voted for unpredictable, and even when there is a big drop it will still be relatively stable. Then this is similar to what [Analyst 2] just said: stably increasing upward. Analyst 2: I agree with stably increasing upward. Because we have more money now than we did six months ago. Also because we’ve reached a record high in the M3’s8 latest bulletin, [the] December report. This achievement has several indications. First, even if mainland funds are not being invested in stocks, more than 10 percent of RMB will continue to flow into Hong Kong. Second, there is a very high savings rate in Hong Kong, whereas the mortgage level is very low. Some banks have four times more savings than mortgages, which is why it is very difficult to increase interest rates. That is why it is hard for us to escape from low interest rates. We are currently in an era of low interest rates. We also have a low level of debt. If the number of transactions is low, then why would people borrow money? This, I think, will result to the market being unsteady. However, even if it is unsteady, it will still rise upward. I’m talking about the first and second phases of the property market. You will hear many disagreements in between because there are many perspectives regarding the trade war; you know Trump [laughter].

The anchor refers to a poll of viewers that indicated that a third considered the real estate market stable and just 11 percent believed there had been a big price jump. She conflates these two positions (which are not compatible) as supporting Analyst 2’s statement. Analyst 2 had stated, “There will be a reduction in prices by individual developers,” a position that is not among the poll results mentioned by the anchor. He seizes this abandonment of neutrality to revisit his statement, but in doing so he also produces a new narrative about too much money being

Talk and Truth Z 179

available. He also simultaneously revisits his prediction of “stably increasing upward,” changing it to “unstable” and then back to “rising upward, even if unsteady,” seemingly unaware that he is contradicting himself in the same sentence. This is not the only inconsistency in this intervention (it is hard to see the link between number of transactions, borrowing, and the market being unsteady). His rival seizes the opportunity to rebut. I reproduce this in its entirety: Analyst 1: So on various things. Let’s talk about monetary capital first. We are currently facing two main questions. The first is that if everyone is worried about the increase of interest, saving, and not spending, then this will in turn have an effect on the economy. But if you say that it is because there is a decrease in interest and/or the implementation of quantitative easing, it will make it seem asset prices are continuing to rise, but this is actually an indication of a deteriorating economy. So is a decrease in interest rate a good thing or a bad thing then?

This is a challenge for Analyst 2 to decide whether low interest rates are good or bad. Analyst 1 also animates his rival as saying that quantitative easing leads to low interest rates and an increase in asset prices but frames this as an indication of a deteriorating economy. The topic is not real estate prices anymore but the impact of quantitative easing on interest rates, savings, and consumption. Analyst 1 continues: We have always looked at a decrease in interest as an indication that the economy is bad, as the stock market reflects the economy. Similarly, if the property market price level is low, then various economic factors have a negative effect on it. However, what we are currently seeing is high price levels within the property market,

180 Y Talk and Truth as well as very low interest rates in the past decade. Because everyone is very calculative, plus property prices are high, people would calculate the most they are able to pay in order to borrow the least for their mortgage.

Analyst 1 asserts his diagnostic as the established view (“We have always looked  .  .  .”) and then establishes a gap between what “we are currently seeing” (low interest rates correlated with high prices) and what should be seen (low interest rates correlated with low prices). After that, he simply asserts a standard behavioral assumption of the model (people are calculative and act to maximize their utility) and uses it to explain low levels of borrowing, which in turn impact consumption and the economy with it. What he is doing here is identifying misalignment between the miniworld of the model and the local world of citizens saving to buy a home: For example, in 1997. Back then, the total amount of mortgages made by banks was around HK$300 billion. But when we look at the statistics for the end of 1998, the total amount of mortgages was around HK$3 trillion. What was the reason? It was because of rising property prices. Yet, the ratio between the rise in prices and [number] of mortgages [is] not proportional. This borrowing and lending situation can become a potential economic risk: banks increasing [their] interest rates or banks going under financial pressure.

This historical excursus is meant to support the puzzle identified earlier (high prices, low mortgages). The statement that higher borrowing can create economic risks contradicts the previous one (lower borrowing creates risks, too) but is meant to support the overall pessimistic outlook the analyst is known for.

Talk and Truth Z 181

After this, he moves abruptly to the capitalization of local banks, the injection of money into the local economy, and flows of capital, topics apparently unrelated to mortgages: Another thing is everyone overlooks where the capital of Hong Kong banks come from. In fact, hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars are actually from the [Hong Kong] Monetary Authority. And this amount of capital flowed into Hong Kong before and after the financial recession of 2008. We can’t expect this sum of money will forever be placed within Hong Kong. When a global situation occurs, potential risks will appear, and there will be a possibility the funds will then be taken away. This is what makes me feel wary about various property markets.

Here the possibility of capital outflows is invoked as a justification for a broader pessimistic outlook about the real estate market. Analyst 1 is trying to justify his predictions (contested by his rival) as being derived from the risks posed by a broader model with policy implications: capital outflows could pose a risk to the stability of markets if banks decide to call loans. Recourse to a model allows the analyst to define a collective position as an expert talker, one that includes his rival: Analyst 1: The main thing for us is to educate those who wish to invest in properties on risk. It’s true, like we always say, just do your best. And what do we mean by that? It means if anything happens, like you suddenly lose your job, you can still manage. So even if the unfortunate happens, and you can still manage, you will then be able to hold on to the next rise and fall of the market. That is why I asked [Analyst 2] what his definition of “long term” is, because to me, “long term” means ten to twenty years. Three to five years is really just a short or medium term.

182 Y Talk and Truth Analyst 2: Three to five years.  .  .  . This concept [inaudible 00:46:23] is not an issue. I see it this way. I’ve really learned a lot from [Analyst 1], he put out many concrete information and I am worried I haven’t been able to note everything down [continues with a long talk about economic cycles].

The issue of defining a long-term perspective was raised by Analyst 1 at the start of the talk, but only now, after long talk sequences, does the disagreement come to the fore. According to Analyst 1, “long term” is ten to twenty years, whereas three to five years (Analyst 2 had actually stated two to five years) is only short or medium term. It is puzzling that this apparently simple definitional issue, which could have been settled by fiat from the start, needs such long sequences of expert talk, in which each participant makes recourse to financial models and data. However, this is not to say that the issue is not settled at all. It is taken by Analyst 2 as an occasion to talk about economic cycles, followed by Analyst 1 talking about mortgage data, followed by Analyst 2 talking about cash flow and debt ratios. Even more puzzling perhaps is the fact that it takes so much pretalk negotiation and alignment to talk truthfully about an issue that cannot be settled once and for all with talk. Why do we need fresh talk to tackle these issues? Why can’t we settle an apparently simple issue by fiat or simple convention? What is the truth about the long term? Did the analysts find it in their rounds of expert talk? And why is such an apparently simple issue not simple at all? I would argue that the truth the analysts are seeking is less about the definition of “long term” than about the model they are operating with. Models have long-term and short-term features, but these depend on rationality assumptions, the types of assets provided for in the model, investment horizons, capital flows, assumptions about

Talk and Truth Z 183

risk aversion, and so on. These elements are not observable on the ground. What is observable on the ground are flats for sale and rent, interest rates, mortgage offers, and prices that may vary from one building to the next. Explaining these issues in terms that go beyond local specificities means accounting in terms of a miniworld where capital flows and debt–cash ratios are observable—the miniworld of the game of finance. This is not simply a global world or an abstract one. In fact, for participants in the game, it is a very concrete one, as the sequences of expert talk in this chapter illustrate. There is a gap between this miniworld and the world of local Hong Kongers searching for affordable flats, and the job of the analysts is to fill this gap in accountable, durable ways. The analysts do not know how big this gap is—it needs to be probed. This is why “long term” becomes an important issue. Such connections that can be made through talk are not easy, though. They are not necessarily stable. They can be contested. The search for truth in expert talk—which at least in this case happens—is the search for ways to fit together worlds that are not necessarily compatible with each other, but which—given the situation—must be fitted together. After all, this is expert talk about the real estate market, a topic highly salient for the analysts’ audience. The world of ordinary Hong Kongers cannot be ignored. But the game of finance—the miniworld of models—cannot be ignored either. So, the job is to try to fit the two together, even if it is an unstable, temporary, problematic, shaky fit. Despite the difficulty of this, it is something in which the two rival analysts seriously engage, as per the anchor’s summons. How is this relevant? First, the search for truth can occur even in the absence of explicit institutional constraints, such as those provided by a court of law or a research seminar. Second, at least in the case examined here, this search is summoned and

184 Y Talk and Truth

negotiated ahead of time, and an alignment is reached before the search starts. There is a rivalry relationship in the background, partly made explicit to the ethnographer, partly left implicit to the audience (although an open secret), and obliquely referred to more than once by the anchor during the show. This relationship, I argue, plays a constraining role for the analysts, who take turns being each other’s audience. This makes the issue of audiences more complicated than expected: while apparently addressing the remote audience in their living rooms or kitchens, the expert is actually talking to the rival sitting next to them. While recent studies have emphasized relationality as a counterweight to the realist view of contributory expertise, this relationality is not an abstract, amorphous orientation toward an anonymous audience. Audiences are not simple or passive either. Their presence does not preclude engagement with and reference to contributory expertise. Thus, given certain conditions, a search for truth can well occur. Talking about audiences not being passive, who are they and how do they react to expert talk? This is what I examine in the next and final chapter.

7 MANAGING AUDIENCES

E

very spectacle must have its audience. Expert financial talk is no exception. Yet the problem of audiences in financial marketplaces has always been a vexing one. Financial transactions appeared to outside observers as theater, a spectacle that audiences didn’t comprehend (Agnew 1986). Why are they there then? Plus, audiences can be unruly; they can boo performers; they can leave before the show ends. Why do analysts talk to them, and sometimes even with them? Do they expect audiences to invest their savings according to their recommendations? To entrust their savings to them? To “absorb” information? In the previous chapter, I argued that talking experts are sometimes each other’s audience, even if they appear to be addressing people sitting in the studio or in their living rooms in front of the TV. This is especially so if there is a long-standing rivalry between them. Since I have talked about both audiences and relationships, it is time to address these issues. Who are the audiences of so much expert financial talk, and what kind of relationships (if any) do they establish with experts? Audiences are not necessarily simple, and they are not necessarily passive either (especially when it comes to money).

186 Y Managing Audiences

After all, the very exhortation to save and invest requires an active attitude on the part of those interested in financial talk. Investigations, both historical and ethnographic, have pointed to the active attitude required from audiences of investors (e.g., Ott 2011; Ailon 2019). If such audiences have historically been encouraged to have an active attitude, then surely we should not expect them to passively absorb information. When it comes to expert financial talk (but not only this type), we need to distinguish between who speakers explicitly consider (or imagine) the audiences of their media talk to be1 and their actual audiences. The first category can include studio audiences as well as remote ones, thus audiences who may or may not be able to respond to the talk. The second category can be decidedly smaller than the first, yet more consequential when it comes to capturing capital. These categories, broadly speaking, are the audiences of expert financial talk I have observed. Analysts treated them as neither homogeneous nor passive. Some of the recurring tropes in conversations with analysts were that their audiences were “housewives” and “taxi drivers.” The latter were supposed to be a significant audience because they keep the radio on while working. Homemakers were considered a major audience not primarily because of the supposed available time they had, but because they were expected to be the ones who controlled the family’s finances and savings. Yet there were shows with smaller audiences, in which analysts did not hesitate to use economic jargon. The more time I spent with analysts, the more I discovered that they were cultivating differentiated, discrete audiences who probably rarely met with one another. First, there were the upper middle classes who had considerable disposable income to invest. One analyst featured in the previous chapter told me that he was targeting lawyers, doctors, government employees, and other high-income professionals

Managing Audiences Z 187

who had savings of more than US$400,000 to invest. This audience may or may not have watched shows, but they mingled with TV analysts in face-to-face settings such as banquets, art shows, and other similar events. On one occasion, another analyst invited me to a private art show at a luxury hotel, where I could observe an audience of investors who otherwise was not visible and didn’t ask many questions on TV shows. Talking to the gallerists (who came from Asia, Europe, and North America), I learned that they periodically came to sell art as an investment.2 On a later occasion, at another art show, I was able to observe firsthand how much the financial industry of the city was entangled with art as an investment: venture capital firms sponsored the show, and venture capitalists were present almost daily. For the kind of audience who invested in art, I was told by analysts, expert talk on TV was a means of getting one name’s out and obtaining opportunities for face-to-face talk, followed by possible investments. This, however, meant that expert talk on TV was one of several tools for capturing capital. Among other purposes, it served to make one’s face recognizable at an art show and facilitate introductions. It was talk at shows, banquets, and receptions that played a role with respect to how capital was steered into markets.3 Another kind of audience, who was more visible, were the middle classes who had some disposable income, but not the kind of savings of the clientele of private art shows. Analysts interacted with these individuals at meetings organized by the financial media, albeit without necessarily trying to capture the kind of six-digit investments the upper-middle classes could muster. I attended a social event organized by a local financial publication, where analysts gave speeches and mingled with groups of small investors. My understanding was that while the latter were encouraged to participate in financial investments on their own or to put their money into mutual funds, there was

188 Y Managing Audiences

no sustained effort on the part of the analysts to capture their savings and manage them as investments. Then there were the ordinary office workers, salesclerks, supermarket attendants, and the like, who in the evening, after work, attended various schools and community centers to be taught financial analysis by the analysts who appeared on TV. The government subsidized about 80 percent of the costs of such evening classes, making them affordable to those with lower incomes. The classes covered standard subjects such as equities and derivatives products, how to read a financial statement, various financial ratios, and the like. Not all analysts I met taught evening classes. Some did, not only as a kind of public service but also as a way of enhancing their visibility. The pay for teaching evening classes was much less than what they could make from advertising or managing funds. Occasionally, analysts were invited to give financial talks to various audiences of professionals in government offices, hospitals, or company offices. Other than these face-to-face interactions, I observed little systematic interactions between analysts and their audiences. Of course, analysts could be recognized and greeted by members of their audiences in the street or at a restaurant, but these interactions were not sustained engagements. The most sustained forms were situated at the opposite ends of the audience spectrum: the public evening lessons in finance targeting lower-income investors and the closeted world of well-to-do investors who met analysts at art exhibitions and banquets. The latter were difficult to observe, yet they were the ones in whom analysts had the most direct interest, as the analysts were aiming to manage the savings of the upper-middle classes. However, they were also  the most difficult to recruit. A host of other experts were also competing for their attention: art gallerists, real estate developers, and the like. TV and online audiences ranged from college students to retirees, from restaurant workers to businesspeople.4 They could

Managing Audiences Z 189

invest their savings in the stock market, and for those who did, analysts were not necessarily aiming at managing their money. Nor were analysts necessarily directly aiming at making their audiences buy or sell a particular financial product. In fact, there were strict rules about advertising financial products, and advertising was not something analysts could do during their talks. Buy or sell recommendations were made in the most general terms, and various financial products were discussed, not just a specific one. Together with anchors and producers, analysts made an effort to avoid giving any impression of advertising certain financial products. They also regularly disclosed whether they personally held specific stocks or financial products, when they had bought them, and at what price. It was difficult to believe that analysts were manipulating their TV audiences to buy or sell any particular financial security. However, they all had a vested interest in audiences trading on their own, as a higher volume of trading generated a higher volume of brokerage fees. There were also the audiences of journalists and media professionals who watched or listened to expert financial talk not necessarily because they had a direct interest in financial investments, or in the kind of investments the analysts talked about, but because they had an interest in that kind of media talk, similar to the interest of an audiovisual technician in the AV setup functioning smoothly. Media insiders watched finance shows simply because they wanted to appreciate their quality and because they were integrated in the media flow all the time: Journalist: I watch a lot of these [finance shows]. Because . . . I [have worked] in TV myself for several years, sometimes when I go back from interview shooting, when I am doing my interview log-in or transcription from the interviewee, the TV is always [on]. So I have to listen . . . or even if I don’t listen to them, I watch them. At least I know what’s going on.

190 Y Managing Audiences Ethnographer: But you don’t watch with an interest or with an eye to invest in. Journalist: Because I am trading with other tools. Basically, I  don’t trade warrants [i.e., CBBCs]. That’s the bottom line. I usually trade Hang Seng Stock Index futures and options. Those are the tools with the smallest amount of transaction fees and levies. That’s why I trade those. And they have [a] very large gearing ratio. Ethnographer: And you think . . . because you are a journalist and you also trade, do you think these shows have ever influenced your decisions? Journalist: No. I [don’t].

This leaves us with a puzzle: audiences do not necessarily watch shows for investment tips. Analysts do not necessarily want to recruit all their audiences into investments. The audiences that analysts had a material interest in were recruited through face-to-face interactions, whereas the audiences that analysts did not have a particular interest in as sources of (investment fee) income were a constant presence in front of the screen or next to the radio.

WHAT AUDIENCES EXPECT What did these audiences expect from analysts and their expert talk, and how did they evaluate expert talk? Arguing that they wanted financial information or to be entertained or to be confirmed in their beliefs is problematic. As I have shown in the previous chapter, expert talk could be difficult to comprehend without a knowledge of economic models, as it could be less about the real financial experiences of Hong Kong citizens and

Managing Audiences Z 191

more about the gaps between the model worlds and real experiences. And expert talk wasn’t entertaining in the way of, say, daytime trash-talk shows. It was not about the drama of personal relationships, and it did not necessarily dramatize financial phenomena. True, there was sometimes gossip about various stocks, but it was carefully controlled, as it could lead (and has led) to lawsuits. Saying that audiences wanted to learn how to invest or how financial markets work or that they wanted some entertainment with a veneer of earnestness does not provide us with a satisfactory explanation. Nor does saying that audiences simply wanted to be confirmed in their beliefs about the stock market or wanted tips about stocks. It could well happen that analysts scolded audiences for their beliefs or disconfirmed such beliefs. Tips about stocks could be construed as advertising, and analysts carefully avoided making specific recommendations. Audiences were not assured that they would get any positive reinforcement of their investment ideas. Plus, a good number of shows were not about such ideas at all, but about the general financial outlook or, at a more abstract level, financial models. And yet, despite the fact that they could be guaranteed neither information nor entertainment nor confirmation of their beliefs, audiences interacted with analysts all the time.5 They watched the shows, called in, and wrote messages via channels such as WhatsApp, a Meta-owned messaging application popular in Hong Kong and Western Europe. What were they expecting from expert talk then? First, expert financial talk delivered conversation topics for the dinner table: Male viewer 2 (in his early twenties): Sometimes maybe we will watch it with our mom and dad, just [to] learn more about finance and the stock market.

192 Y Managing Audiences Ethnographer: So for some people, it’s just family watching; they watch it together. Female viewer 1 (in her early twenties): Yes. I don’t usually watch [shows featuring] financial reports. I usually hear from my parents during dinnertime at home.

In the words of an older male viewer, “The whole [of ] Hong Kong was talking about these shows.” Besides delivering conversational topics, expert talk lent itself to checking and to comparisons with other talk on financial matters. Viewers could check things like explanations and financial terminology and compare expert financial talk with talk they had heard elsewhere, for example when going to the bank: Male viewer 3: But I will actually try to see how they interact. Sometimes, when the guests have some answers or explanations, I will check and see how it is correct. Sometimes I will have my own mind, my own opinions, and I will add to it. Male viewer 4: I didn’t participate in any of these shows, but I did participate in some interactions with the bank staff. And they will do something like the guests [on] the shows. Sometimes they are talking about which bond is good, which stock is good, or which has higher potential.

If we have ever wondered how mundane (i.e., family) life gets connected to the broader world of finance, here’s the answer. Expert financial talk not only brings the broader world of finance into people’s homes but can also help make sense of financial models or of family finances within the context of the world, global markets, or Hong Kong’s markets. Not only that: at least some viewers will compare expert talk with talk heard in other contexts; they will get into imagined conversations with

Managing Audiences Z 193

the experts, without necessarily calling into the show. Expert talk is not necessarily accepted as received wisdom. It doesn’t have to be. Nevertheless, it provides an occasion to make up one’s mind and add to the conversation. Internal or imagined dialogues can include expert talk on TV and expert talk in the classroom. Some audiences I interviewed in Hong Kong were studying business and finance at local, internationally known universities. They were comparing expert talk on TV with the talk heard during their lectures, treating both as tools for navigating the gaps between the world of models and the reality of concrete financial markets: Male viewer 1: Sometimes what is talked about [on] the [TV ] programs, it’s just the personal opinions of the guests [on] the programs. But meanwhile, what we learn in class is also personal opinions. In the stock market, you can never predict what will happen in the next second. So it’s basically personal opinions. Female viewer 2: But I will say the financial lessons that we’ve learnt are mainly about theories, some basic concepts. We don’t really have much to compare with the real stock market. So I will say the financial knowledge we acquire now is not enough for us for now to make a really good comparison with the real stock market.

If the uncertainty inherent in markets makes everything a personal opinion, then expert talk on TV can enter into a dialogue with financial lectures, and the two can complement each other. Neither is sufficient on its own terms. The statements made by my interviewees make clear that at least some audiences (those who are young and educated) do not regard expert financial talk as inferior to that provided in an academic lecture

194 Y Managing Audiences

but as another source of information that can be used to complement their class lessons. The statements in the excerpts I have provided are relevant against the background of debates about what has been called “financialization from below” or the “financialization of everyday life” (Davis and Kim 2015: 212). This has been understood mostly as a set of institutional arrangements providing access to financial products tailored to nonspecialist audiences, supplemented by discourses or narratives supporting, for instance, notions such as active risk management and personal responsibility (van der Zwan 2014: 213; Fridman 2017: 23). Narrative elements are used to legitimate finance and make it appear to be serving social goals; everyday social relationships are harnessed to support a logic of financial valuation (e.g., LiPuma and Lee 2012: 309; Arvidsson 2016). Cultural products (such as films and literary fiction) provide general narrative strands that can be used as legitimatory props for finance (e.g., narratives of self-reliance or taking chances) while, at the same time, serving as venues to represent (critically or not) financial activities and institutions. What we have lacked in accounts of financialization from below are specific interactional arrangements showing how vocabularies of finance and views on the financial world are acquired by nonexperts and used in everyday interactions. After all, narratives of self-reliance are neither specific nor limited to finance. Social relationships that support logics of valuation need to be spelled out. Expert financial talk provides a missing link, helping us to better understand not only how financial topics can become the object of mundane conversations but also how audiences can enter into imagined dialogues with experts, without even having to call or text them.

Managing Audiences Z 195

EVALUATING EXPERTS AND EXPERT TALK I was told on several occasions that financial actors “express the feelings of Hong Kong people” and that “it is not acting, it’s feeling.” A TV producer described the finance show he was producing by saying, “We are kind of like a psychiatrist.” Another indication that an expressive rapport with the audience acts as a condition for presenting information comes from the instructions given to studio audiences by the anchor immediately before the start of a show: Before the show starts, I want to have a discussion with you first. When you see this [applause] sign, I hope you can all have a warm round of applause. We did not have any rehearsal beforehand, and everything is broadcast live. Therefore, if there is any accident that happens, in order to make our speakers feel more comfortable, when shown this sign, everyone should pretend to understand and have the “Oh . . . ” reaction. Is it okay? Let’s try this once. One, two, three. . . . And let’s see your reaction to this sign. Okay, Hong Kong audiences are better than those in the mainland. They only have the reaction of crying.

What is required from the audience in this case is not primarily an understanding of the financial issues being discussed (let alone probing criticism) or a debate, but an expression of understanding and efforts to make the financial actors feel comfortable. This is in line with unfaultable talk. Are audiences that obedient though? In face-to-face meetings, analysts adapt their talk to the reactions observed in the fund managers they talk to. Here, though, audiences are asked to display a range of reactions

196 Y Managing Audiences

that reinforce the unfaultable character of talk. These reactions, in the words of the anchor, make them better suited for their role as an audience, when compared with others. Both sides— audiences and analysts—are expected to engage in reciprocal positive valuations via expressive means (Goffman 1967: 5, 19) as a preliminary condition for accessing fresh talk and, with it, financial information. According to Erving Goffman (1981: 187), expression, including here emotional aspects, provides audiences with ritual access to the subject matter of talk.6 In chapter 4, I argued that what an audience perceive first are the physical presence and voice of the analyst. These are the first aspects of the analyst subjected to their evaluation. Consequently, the combination of physical appearance, manner of talk, and style (understood as distinctive cognitive choices) acquires a particular significance in the audience’s evaluation of expertise: Ethnographer: In your opinion, what makes the show attractive? Female viewer 3: It is quite important, the person who chairs the show, how famous he is. Male viewer 5: How accurate his or her prediction. Male viewer 2: When to make profits. Female viewer 3: People want to make profits from listening to the shows of course. Male viewer 2: Their humor? Male viewer 5: Charisma. Maybe some of the analysts, I heard from some of the female investors, if the analysts are handsome . . . Male viewer 2: There are also opinion stars. They used to be working at the security firms. They maybe become famous for the accuracy of [their] speculation in the market.

Managing Audiences Z 197

In this excerpt, five middle-aged, highly educated viewers with a background in finance and business (two female and three male) reflect on the question of what makes a finance show attractive to them. Only twice in the discussion is substantive expertise in finance mentioned (accurate predictions), although, taking into account the educational and professional backgrounds of the participants (male viewer 5 is a financial analyst himself, and female viewer 3 is a businessperson), one would have expected substantive expertise in finance to figure prominently. Instead, it is a mix of expressive features (charisma, humor, physical appearance), forecasting accuracy, and celebrity status that are considered important, indicating that evaluations are made based on expressive and substantive features taken together, and the expressivity is not seen as subordinate to substantive expertise or irrelevant. This view was echoed by other viewers I interviewed. Since expert talk is preceded by the appearance of the expert, it makes sense for analysts to cultivate a distinct appearance and style of talk, recognizable as such by audiences. A particular style can very well include admonitions and castigations, without the audience necessarily taking a negative view of them. Male viewer (in his early seventies, college educated): Actually they [have] got different styles. Some just give some information. Their voices are very kind and just talking to people. Sometimes they let people ask questions.  .  .  . Sometimes if people [have] already [made] a big loss in the stock [market], [analysts] just talk to them like a counsellor. Some of them are very kind. But some of them will tell the people, “You are so stupid. You buy this stock.” They [have] got different styles. It’s just some of them. “You are so stupid that you buy this stock. You should sell it. You buy it and sell it immediately.” They [have] got different styles.

198 Y Managing Audiences

Rapport with the audience becomes part of what is called “style.” In this account, style encompasses a range of attitudes, from paternalistic and benevolent to scolding. Analysts considered that their style was defined by what they were talking about, whereas audience members saw it as also being defined by how the analysts talked to them. We have to remember here that analysts are not necessarily interested in directly capturing the savings of this type of audience. Neither is this audience necessarily interested in the information provided by the analysts. When I asked whether they use or learn financial information gained from expert talk, many viewers stated that information was for the “housewives.” The viewers I spoke with had their own mind, a “scientific mind.” They could do their own analyses and obtain their own information. This indicated that the attitudes imputed to analysts in the rapport with the audience were not necessarily accepted as such by the latter. Neither were they openly contested. Audiences did not really “listen to the analyst,” and any admonitions were always for others. Here again, the trope of the “housewives” was proving useful. A “housewife” in need of advice is always someone else. When I talked with lowerincome audiences taking evening classes in finance, they did not seem more inclined to accept a paternalistic attitude. They told me that they, too, had their own mind. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for me as an ethnographer to accept the notion that audiences had a passive attitude, ready to accept instructions from the financial analysts. At the same time, this audience group—one who had some savings but not enough to be managed by professionals—wanted to present themselves as able to make their own investment decisions, rather than as a vague category (the “housewives”7), and not following instructions.

Managing Audiences Z 199

This is perhaps best illustrated by the following statement, which contains a bundle of contradictions expressed with apparent ease: Male viewer: Yes, you know some people just talk every day. And some [company] directors, they always have some news with the TV [anchors] or movie actresses. I will never buy their stocks. Ethnographer: So if they appear too often on TV, you don’t trust them? Male viewer: I don’t trust them. But I just take some information from them. Basic information. Usually, I just listen to the graphic analysis. And that’s all. Especially when I do some short-term trading, I tend to emphasize the ten-day average curve. That’s for the short-term trading. Ethnographer: So this diagram, this graphic information you see on TV, that would be the useful part of the show. Male viewer: I don’t think so.

This viewer expresses the viewpoint of agency, predicated for a long time on investors: if the latter are to be self-reliant, risktaking, and individualistic, then of course they cannot submit to or trust those appearing on TV. Neither can they simply accept the information presented there. Why do such recalcitrant audiences watch, then? I would argue that trading requires not merely individual observation but also coordination with other observations and with the flow of talk that constitutes markets. I have argued earlier that finance shows on TV do not pick serendipitous or idiosyncratic topics but rather coordinate with a flow of topics running on different channels. Observing the markets would thus include listening to this flow of talk, even if it is not trusted or taken at face value. The interviewee (speaking in English) makes clear that he doesn’t simply watch but listens

200 Y Managing Audiences

to the graphic analysis. We know from previous studies of professional traders that they coordinate by observing screens and observing one another (e.g., Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002; Laube 2016). I would argue that expert talk should be counted among the coordination mechanisms of market actors. This would explain why the interviewee rejects its direct usefulness (understood as usefulness for specific trading decisions) but does listen to it. One has to coordinate with markets, regardless of what one decides to do. When occasions arise, audiences will try to fault unfaultable talk. Expert talkers have to anticipate and preempt such situations, if possible. What kind of relationship is this? Analysts are not trusted but are evaluated nevertheless; the audiences watch but purport not to care about the information provided. They do not go away either. Are they waiting for an appropriate moment to try to fault expert talk?

THE COLLABORATIVE MANAGEMENT OF AUDIENCES Audiences, I have argued, are recalcitrant. They do not necessarily obey admonitions. They listen to expert talk but do not necessarily trust it. They do not necessarily take talk as a true revelation of substantive expertise. (I have also argued that engagement with truth is not easy.) An important task of those producing expert talk is to circumscribe as much as possible the reactions of the audience by trying to screen out or counter hostile questions and insults, as well as questions that fundamentally fault the talk. At trade fairs and shows targeting retail investors, analysts do not know in advance who will be in the audience of their talks, although they will have a general idea about their level of wealth and education. At institutional trade shows, analysts will know at

Managing Audiences Z 201

least some of the members of their audience because of professional connections. In both situations, though, it is difficult for analysts to anticipate audience reactions to how they express their expertise and how to control these reactions. I  have witnessed several instances in which the audience developed a hostile attitude toward the analyst, contesting their expertise, not paying attention, or even insulting them. In some instances, in which a panel of analysts was having a debate in front of the audience, the panelists themselves contested one another’s expertise, which led to negative audience reactions. It is also difficult for analysts to anticipate and screen out potentially unfriendly questions, because they have little knowledge of where these might come from in the audience. At trade shows, analysts control turns, but giving a turn to the audience is fraught with uncertainties. During an analyst’s presentation at a conference on exchange-traded funds, a member of the audience stood up and stated that the financial product the analyst was talking about should simply be banned—implying that the entire talk was fundamentally misplaced. While a style of “belligerent broadcasting” emphasizing conflictual talk has been documented before (e.g., Higgins 2012; Lorenzo-Dus 2008), open conflict is not a usual part of financial expert talk. But analysts do have to anticipate and handle complex, sometimes unfriendly audience reactions to their talk. In some situations, they have to face both studio and remote audiences, which are selected, screened, and primed. Studio audiences are selected and primed by the anchor before the show starts. Remote audiences who call in to ask a question are screened and selected by production assistants before being connected to the anchor in the studio. In this sense, the work of selecting audiences and circumscribing their reactions is collaborative as well, and different from that of analysts at trade fairs. Audiences of finance shows have to be collaboratively controlled in their reactions by producer, anchor, analysts, and

202 Y Managing Audiences

assistants so that their interventions do not fault the expert talk. Faulting expert talk can occur in several ways: one is to directly evaluate expertise as being of lesser quality or value than what it proffers to be; in other words, to fault it within its own boundaries. The other is to intervene in such a way as to reframe the expression of financial expertise as something else. This also faults expert talk as not being what it claims to be. Of the two, it is the second that is the more dangerous, because it has broader, institutional implications. Faulting the financial expertise put on display as being of lesser quality or value than purported implies that audiences, in their turn, are displaying their meta-expertise in the questions they address to the analyst (Collins and Evans 2007). At trade shows, this happens when members of the audience question the definitions, actions, or statements of an analyst, offering rationales for doing or stating exactly the opposite. In finance shows on TV and radio, the challenge is double: contesting a definition or statement requires that the audience displays meta-expertise about expression and substance (about what is being said and how it is being said), and that judgments made about one reverberate in judgments made about the other. However, as expert talk is a collaborative production and relies on a technical assemblage of cameras, microphones, and transmission lines, faulting talk must be filtered through this assemblage, too—an assemblage controlled by producer, anchor, and actors: Ethnographer: Do audiences ever call in angrily? Do they ever get angry at the commentators? Journalist: Usually they won’t. Usually they are like the worshippers of the actors. They are very nice to the so-called financial actors. They worship them, they believe in them.

Managing Audiences Z 203 They always ask, “Master, I have certain derivatives or warrants that I want to buy or [have] already bought. . . . Should I continue to hold them, or should I buy them, or should I just settle the trading?” . . . Because they know the rule, because the TV anchor, the background production team would only limit the airtime [my  emphasis]. So after they have pronounced what stocks they want to buy or the trading in numbers, they want to converse in a more efficient way. And then the financial actors would answer the questions. Sometimes the conversation would go like this: “Okay, my trading . . . I bought in the stock number 775,8 and I want your opinion. I bought it at one dollar. I want to know at which price I should settle the trading. Thank you. Bye-bye.” And then he or she would just hang up. And then the financial actor would continue to give the answer. So that people would just save some time for other people who are seeking for opinions.

This excerpt suggests that audiences are queuing for opinions that actually cannot be given. As potential interventions are placed in a queue, and as each intervention and the queue are controlled by the team producing expert talk, it becomes much more difficult to fault the expert talk. A questioner’s airtime is controlled by the studio, and a questioner can be interrupted. An additional factor explaining why faulting expertise is bound to be difficult is that displays of substantive expertise are dissociated from advice and presented as having no agentic implications. This is part and parcel of how financial expertise is expressed expertly: Ethnographer: Tell me, have you heard anybody on the shows calling in and complaining, “Oh, you gave me the wrong advice, and I lost money because of you?”

204 Y Managing Audiences Male viewer: Yes, but seldom. People would say, “I already told you this is only my suggestion. I cannot make sure you would earn money. I just told you if it drops by 10 percent, you should cut [your] loss. If you don’t cut [your] loss, you will make a big loss.” Actually these clever persons, after their suggestion, they always say, “I cannot make sure my suggestion is right.” These clever persons, they will always say this: “You should make your decision. Don’t follow my suggestion directly.” These clever persons just add one or two words after their suggestions.

The analyst’s rapport with the audience is a strategic one. While substantive expertise in finance can be expected to make a recommendation (after all, in so many life situations, we defer to expert advice), this expertise is reframed as a suggestion that shouldn’t even be followed, and this reframing happens in the process of making the expert suggestion. Ascriptions of expertise should not be taken as ascriptions of responsibility, and this is what is expertly expressed here (by “clever persons”). Thus, expertly expressed financial expertise is redefined in the very process of expressing it. The following excerpt illustrates the opening of the Q&A session of a TV show when a caller is put on the air to ask a question: Anchor: So now let’s continue the call-in session of [show name]. We are now having a call from the audience at home. Analyst: Hi, how can we help you? [declares reorientation to audience] Anchor: Maybe there is some connection problem. Audience member: Is it me? [asks for permission to participate in conversation]

Managing Audiences Z 205 Anchor: Yes. The staff told me you are Ms. [name] and want to ask about [name], stock number [number]? Is that right? [gives permission, identifies caller, and voices her question] Audience member: [Name], hello. I really like your program. Analyst: [Name’s] program is on Wednesday, and I am on Friday. Ms. [name], I recognize your voice. Was it you who asked me a question during the program on [name] TV? [acknowledges the caller directly and faults her] Audience member: Yes, it was me. Analyst: I know it’s you. [direct engagement with faulty caller] Audience member: I want to ask about [stock number]. Master, you asked me to buy in at HK$140, and you said the price would rise to HK$200. [reframes past conversation as individual prescription-cum-prediction] Analyst: Buying in shares of [stock number] at HK$140 . . . when was it? Audience member: Master, you told me to buy shares of [name] Properties. [recalls second individual prescription] Analyst: Oh, [name] Properties . . . Audience member: Yes, prices of [name] Properties rose up very well, but how come there is no change in the prices of [stock number]? [faults first prescription] Analyst: It’s not reasonable. Anchor: You are usually bearish about property stocks, aren’t you? Analyst: Yes, I am always bearish about property stocks. Are you mistaking me for another master? [faults caller] Audience member: “Master” is the name only for the Master. [rejects faulting] Anchor: There are lots of masters in this world. Analyst: Was that master like this: “You definitely should buy in [name] Properties . . .”?

206 Y Managing Audiences Audience member: So what should I do now? Do you have any suggestion for me? [asks for individual prescription]

It is telling that from the moment analysts declare themselves available to a conversation with an audience, they run the risk of a caller who will fault them repeatedly with regard to both their past and current talk. Trying to qualify callers as faulty (i.e., confused or misremembering) does not work, because the call is not about the caller’s quality but about the qualities of the expert talk. Callers fault talk and ask for more talk to be faulted: if the analyst makes one additional prediction, as it is requested of them, that prediction will be open to future faulting, too. Audiences do not appear to be passive; they profess not to follow advice, yet ask for it. One has to wonder, then, whether audiences’ asking for more talk is just a way of asking for more occasions to fault it. This excerpt reveals several aspects of audience expectations from experts, including their rapport and style, as well as the strategies through which such expectations are deflected. One revealing element of this excerpt is that this conversation, which was visible and audible to the audience, was part of a larger, collaboratively produced and inaudible conversation, which is hinted at by the anchor who says, “The staff told me that you are Ms. [name].” The anchor, who is wearing an earpiece, is informed by assistants who screen callers. The analyst, however, is not wearing an earpiece and recognizes the caller’s voice as familiar from another show he appears on. The  claim of having followed an expert command (“you told me to buy”), the request for an explanation (“how come there is no change?”), and the reference to past successful commands (“prices rose up very well”) are successfully and collaboratively deflected by the anchor and the financial actor, who essentially says, “That was not me. It must have been another master. I am always bearish.”

Managing Audiences Z 207

KEEPING EXPERT TALK EXPERT There are potentially more dangerous situations than accusations of having lost money based on expert recommendations. While producers and anchors control the turns and the queue, and thus make direct contestations of substantive expertise difficult, audiences can act strategically. They call in and pretend to ask a question they will not really ask, thus passing screening by production assistants. This can pose problems for all collaborators involved: if the answer to a question is seen as promoting a particular financial product, the show and the broadcaster can be accused of blurring the show’s distinction from advertising and of being in breach of regulations. They might get fined by the financial regulator, and their reputation (and stream of income from advertisers) will suffer. This is also why they take particular care not to have the analysts make any explicit recommendations for a particular financial product. Sometimes, though, planted audience members call in pretending to ask a question but, when on air, instead promote a financial product or brokerage house. Planted audience members can do this with impunity. Producers try to screen them out, but it is not always possible to detect them in a timely fashion. It is then the job of the financial analyst to react to the attempted promotion in such a way that the turn is taken and expertise is displayed, but the response cannot be construed as advertising. One analyst described this situation to me in the following way: Some pretend [to be] asking questions about [company], but after you take the call, they suddenly change question. Then maybe the anchor will have to be very smart to change the question back. Sometimes, these people, they insist, and then the stock

208 Y Managing Audiences commentator has to change the tone: you ask, “Why are you looking for such a change?,” then still [answer] the question, but we do it in a more analytical way. It happens all the time. Some PR firm or even you don’t know who they are, they just call, you know. These are not normally the investors we talk about. You cannot cut it off directly, you cannot say it is manipulated. . . . We change the way we talk about [a topic], but of course the experienced media producers, they will screen it out.

Analysts, anchors, and producers appear to be bound by specific and asymmetric obligations toward their audiences: they cannot cut an audience member off abruptly once they are on air (although they can interrupt the caller), and they cannot openly accuse audience members of being plants. Within these obligations, though, the team collaboratively producing talk has to screen out and counter all audience interventions that might jeopardize it. While talk is collaboratively produced, it is also collaboratively defended. The lines of this collaborative defense are laid out in the previous excerpt: if the producer hasn’t managed to screen out a planted caller, then it is the job of the anchor to revert to the question the caller claimed to want to ask. If the anchor doesn’t manage to do that, it is the job of the analyst to “get analytical”—that is, to emphasize that what is being expressed is a particular body of substantive expertise. Thus, while the coupling of spectacle with the game of finance is not a tight one, it has to be maintained as such. This becomes visible in moments when the spectacle is put in danger, not as much by faulting past instances as by its very character being fundamentally faulted.

CONCLUSION

I

n the introduction to this book, I argued that we treat public expert talk as a special occasion, one to be held under good auspices, with the audience summoned in advance. We may expect it to be an occasion during which talk searches for truth and thus one during which we collectively engage in detecting and weighing faults that make expert talk less truthful. Meanwhile, though, at least when it comes to finance, public expert talk has become a daily occurrence: we see and hear it on a multitude of channels several times per day as talk that circles the globe in well-ordered segments. There is perhaps a fundamental tension here: special occasions require a heightened attention (if not an obligation) to producing talk that stands in a relationship with truth and a heightened attention to giving the audience repeated opportunities to test this relationship. Yet when expert talk becomes a daily occurrence, less attention may be made to this relationship than to strategically ensuring that talk is produced unfaultably by collaboratively controlling and restricting possibilities to fault it. Producing daily talk in well-ordered segments that circle the globe and enchain each other requires a heightened attention to protecting such segments from being faulted. It is said that a chain (of talk segments) is only as strong

210 Y Conclusion

as its weakest link; hence, making segments of talk unfaultable makes the global flow of financial talk unfaultable.

WHY TALK MATTERS I have argued repeatedly that, to understand financialization, we need to pay proper attention to expert talk. Expert talk is globalized, paralleling the globalization of financial expertise. I have argued that the globalization of academic research topics, among others, illustrates the globalization of financial expertise. I have shown how local issues (such as housing prices) are talked about in terms of global models and how this talk flows around the globe. This has consequences with respect to at least (1) the banalization of finance on a global scale, and (2) how capital is attracted into investments. Expert talk does not necessarily create investment recommendations or admonitions that have to be followed. Expert talk creates topics for the dinner table; it creates recognizable public figures; it associates finance with mundane objects by simple juxtaposition. In all these ways and many others, it contributes to the financialization of everyday lives and legitimates finance, not as an abstract, remote domain of knowledge but as one enmeshed with mundane activities. As for creating public figures, finance has a long history of producing “titans” and “barons,” characters to whom daring feats are ascribed. In addition to these figures, though, and perhaps partly substituting them in our era, the publicly talking financial expert has emerged as a figure who lends legitimacy to the domain. Financial expert talk embodies the domain at least as much as “legendary financiers” embody it. While the latter may fall from their pedestal, unfaultable talk cannot but legitimize finance.

Conclusion Z 211

Expert talk also plays a significant role in how capital flows are captured and channeled into financial investments. Studies have repeatedly shown that written analyses are used more as door openers, creating occasions for expert talk. It is expert talk that plays a critical function in capturing capital. Yet, as such, it remains completely under-investigated. Both quantitative and qualitative evidence suggest that public expert talk has consequences with respect to investments. How is public expert talk conducive (or not) to private expert talk, and how does it relate to private expert talk? To give an example, presentations behind closed doors to family offices would count as private expert talk. But is this type of talk constructed unfaultably, too? Evidence points to the fact that talk formats are interlinked: public talk in the media is not separate from private expert talk, such as that provided in investment presentations. We do not know which features of financial expert talk make it effective (or how) in capturing capital. Does its imaginary feature, its capacity to imagine a future for particular investments, play a role here? We know, for instance, that already by the eighteenth century projectors were present in London’s coffee houses (e.g., Dale 2004) and that speakers specialized in publicly imagining rosy futures for investing in the era’s joint stock companies. Is contemporary expert talk in finance similar to that of eighteenth-century projectors? Or is its unfaultable character more important than its capacity to imagine a future—that is, the fact that expert talk is routinely produced in ways that control the possibilities of its being challenged? In this conclusion, which makes an overall plea to pay due attention to talk in the sociology of finance and in economic sociology, I argue that we need a systematic investigation into the interactional arrangements, including expert talk, through which capital is captured.

212 Y Conclusion

EXPERT TALK AND SOCIAL CLASS In her ethnography of daytime talk shows, Laura Grindstaff (2002: 273) makes the argument that the media give ordinary people a voice but only a certain kind of voice: they can talk about specific topics (e.g., personal issues, relationships, their own appearance). Their talk is made into an object of expert discussion. It is also a type of talk expected to be faulty but without being faulted for that. Public talk about personal issues (e.g., relationships or appearance) is taken as a marker of lower class: bourgeois ethics privileges distance and restraint when it comes to publicly discussing personal issues (266). If particular forms of public talk contribute to the constitution of “ordinariness” by giving middle-class audiences opportunities to distance themselves, what about public expert financial talk? Public expert financial talk professes to make sense of ordinary yet important topics—such as inflation and housing prices—in terms different from those of a visceral reaction, in a discourse that at least in principle seeks the truth. It professes to address everybody—in different registers, of course—and seeks to be unfaultable. One might think that expert financial talk in the media offers everyone the same window onto financial knowledge and investments. And yet there’s the private expert talk that takes place at art shows and banquets. At least since the publication of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, there has been a public awareness that talk, in its formal aspects, is a device of social stratification. If public talk formats are connected to social class and stratification (as they are, in more than one way), it is necessary to examine the role played by public expert talk in these processes, with respect not only to formal aspects or choice of topics but also to: Why are some public talk formats represented as faultable, whereas others

Conclusion Z 213

are taken as the opposite? How do public and private expert talk relate to each other? Why does financial expert talk include some groups but exclude others? During my fieldwork on many a Sunday, I passed by large groups of migrant domestic workers spending their only free day out, sitting on the sidewalks next to the screens on which experts talked uninterruptedly about financial markets. In more than one sense, the workers were talked by, not talked to: they were seeing everything but remained unseen while in an open public space.

FRESH EXPERT TALK AS EXPERTISE I have argued that on multiple occasions, and regularly in the media, financial expert talk is produced as fresh talk. Fresh talk is itself taken as a mark of expertise and as an accomplishment. Producing fresh talk is not easy; it is bound with uncertainties, decidedly more so than merely reading a text aloud or reciting a memorized one. In fact, producing fresh expert talk in public is often bound with so many difficulties and uncertainties that complex collaborations are required, even if most remain invisible to audiences, and intentionally so. If we take the casual conversation as a baseline, speakers and audiences are largely willing to tolerate faults, both formal and substantive: mispronunciations, hesitations, pauses, grammatical errors, inaccuracies, contradictions, and inconsistencies. Yet casual conversations have the means to address the faults they tolerate: they have built-in repair mechanisms because so many faults can happen. Fresh expert talk, in its turn, is confronted with a different set of expectations, and the toleration of faults is not one of them. Nor does fresh expert talk—in the format discussed here—seem prepared to address a larger number of faults in the

214 Y Conclusion

sense of having built-in mechanisms to openly acknowledge and address them. The segmented structure of fresh talk leaves little room to go back to address faults from past segments or even immediate past faults. Expert speakers thus go to great lengths to produce public expert talk that is formally and substantively unfaultable, not necessarily by always addressing its relationship to the truth but by restricting and controlling the possibilities for it to be faulted. Rather than fault each other, participants in expert talk collaborate to avoid their productions being faulted. In expert talk, speakers participate with their entire body, which they use strategically in many ways; for example, to neutralize doubt or signal a hierarchy. Faultings of their talk could be seen as faultings of their entire presence and of their identities. The stakes are too high to let this happen. Seen like this, we should not wonder that analysts and anchors collaborate to ward off such situations. At least when it comes to finance in the media, fresh talk is subjected to a series of institutional constraints that require it to remain within boundaries that are both clearly defined and easily transgressed. It is not difficult to slip into advertising or the provision of financial advice. It is not difficult to slip or be nudged into providing political talk either. Hence, expert financial speakers take much care to ensure their talk cannot be faulted for being something other than financial expertise, with the (unwarranted) implication that the relationship between their expert talk and truth shouldn’t be faulted either.

EXPERT TALK AND AUDIENCES What about audiences? My argument is that expert talk does not have abstract audiences. We cannot consider audiences in an amorphous, abstract, or general fashion. We cannot expect

Conclusion Z 215

them to be passive or in awe of expert talk. There is no reason for that. In fact, when it comes to finance, audiences have always been exhorted to be active and independently minded and to make their own decisions. It would be difficult to fault them for being exactly this. In the cases analyzed here, audiences developed a curious rapport with expert talk: they claimed that financial shows provided no useful information, yet they watched them. They emphasized that they made their own decisions but also that the shows could influence “housewives.” Accounts of watching financial shows were used by viewers to position themselves against (and above) tropes and figures propagated by the very expert talk they were watching. Audiences seemed to probe for opportunities to fault expert talk, while speakers engaged in strategic facework and tried to limit the openings they gave to audiences as much as possible. Compare this with audiences of, say, research seminars. Research seminars are expected to involve systematic opportunities to fault the talk of the speaker. If they are not offered such opportunities, or not enough of them, the audience might loudly claim their right to fault the talk. In fact, anyone who has attended a research seminar on finance in a finance department knows full well how actively audiences seek opportunities to fault talk. An audience’s expectation of being offered opportunities to fault talk is built into the structure of the occasion, just as the speakers (and organizers) expect that they will have to plan for, actively offer, and anticipate such opportunities. Yet the expert talk I have analyzed here does not plan for such opportunities, let alone actively offer them. The collaborators do not willingly expose themselves to being faulted. Quite the contrary. One of the few options audiences are then left with is to strategically seek such opportunities and exploit them as they arise. Thus, instead of conceiving the relationship between expert talkers and audiences as one of domination and subordination

216 Y Conclusion

or as an openly conflictual one, I suggest that we conceive it as a strategic interaction. If the relationship were one of subordination, we would see audiences accepting the financial experts’ statements and following them. But this is not what audiences are doing, at least not in the instances I observed. If the relationship were an openly conflictual one, we would see audiences protesting against expert talk or speakers protesting against or avoiding audiences. However, this is not what we see either. What is left for audiences is to probe for holes in the talk, for inconsistencies, to wait for the right moment to come, and then to use that moment wisely. They do this by observing polite conventions and by knowing that producers of talk control access to the microphone. I discussed such a moment in chapter 7, when a caller recalls an analyst’s past statements and uses them to fault his talk. Why do audiences watch these shows? One important reason is that they can keep track of past instances of talk and use them to try to fault a speaker when the appropriate moment comes. For audiences, this is the only way, in the given situation, of probing the gap between talk and reality.

EXPERT TALK AND EXPERTISE In the introduction, I discussed two views on expertise: relativist and realist. The relativist view sees expertise as consisting of statements and performances produced and disseminated within a specific network. The realist view sees substantive expertise, which has a contributory dimension, as being real. The case discussed here, that of public expert talk on finance, prima facie supports the relativist view. What did the analysts do but collaboratively produce statements and performances that were disseminated within networks? Such collaborations, however, did

Conclusion Z 217

not treat substantive expertise in finance as a fiction or as irrelevant. An invisible, yet important part of such collaborations was the research assistants tasked with assembling financial data and information for the speakers’ expert talk. An important factor in producing financial talk was monitoring the flow of talk on TV and computer screens: if we are to assume that the collaborations I observed were not atypical, then there were many more research assistants doing the invisible work of assembling data for expert talk. According to this logic, the producers of expert talk on finance whom I observed treated substantive financial expertise as real and as connected to, but not coextensive with, what they were doing. That substantive expertise on finance was treated by participants as real perhaps best comes to the fore in the debate I analyzed in chapter 6. Had participants not treated substantive expertise in a realist key, they would not have spent so much time discussing the definition of “long term.” This is an issue that could have been quickly solved by fiat or convention had they treated substantive expertise as a mere convention or fiction. Participants repeatedly raised—in a realist fashion—issues of supply and demand, markets, and inflation. At the same time, in none of the instances I analyzed here did speakers see their expert talk as coextensive with doing financial analysis or with expanding the boundaries of financial knowledge by developing or producing a new model of real estate prices, for instance. Speakers saw their production of expert talk as skilled, complex, fraught with uncertainty, and (loosely) coupled to substantive expertise in finance. If such a coupling did not exist, we wouldn’t see career transitions from TV talk to fund management. The analysts I observed saw themselves as experts, but in the realm of providing expert talk on finance shows, they were experts at spectacle, not at the game of finance.

218 Y Conclusion

This does not mean that the analysts simply saw themselves as public communicators or explainers of finance. Expert talk is not about the public’s understanding of finance or about increasing financial literacy. As the analysts made clear, they would not have hesitated to use the jargon of economics in some situations. Expert talk is intrinsic to a global flow of finance, in the same way that academic financial models and stock analyses are. Financial expert talk is also not reducible to mastering a specialist language (a.k.a. interactional expertise). Being able to produce fresh talk required research that remained largely invisible. It required daily collaborations with research assistants, collaborations taken seriously by the analysts. This also indicates that the analysts viewed substantive expertise in finance in a realist key. Additionally, it was not a specialist language that was mastered but several registers needed to speak to different types of audiences. The analysts regarded their fresh talk as a difficult, skilled activity that required collaboration and expertise. When it came to reflecting on what they were doing, they repeatedly used theatrical and cinematic metaphors: working in front of the curtain, actors in Hollywood, showbiz. They wanted to emphasize their orientation to audiences and collaborators, as well as the fact that their activities required a bodily engagement different from that of, say, laboratory work or statistical analyses. They also regarded what they were doing as necessary to attract investments, flows of capital. Financial flows required flows of expert talk, too, and they were providing just that. They were experts at the spectacle of finance, not the game of finance. The analysis I have undertaken in this book suggests a distinction between spectacle expertise and game expertise, one that might help us advance the conversation beyond relativist versus realist positions. Expert talk is important, and public, fresh expert

Conclusion Z 219

talk is not easy. Its practitioners regard it as a skilled, difficult activity, connected to, albeit not coextensive with, game expertise. That does not mean that game expertise (in finance, in this case) is treated as a mere convention or not needed to produce a spectacle of expert talk. Yet spectacle expertise and game expertise are neither coextensive nor tightly coupled. Spectacle expertise lives off game expertise, almost parasitically, one could say. At the same time, to a certain extent, spectacle expertise also obscures game expertise. It is perhaps this obscured game that audiences try to reach by engaging with spectacles of expert talk. As I have mentioned (following Goffman), embodied expert talk provides access to knowledge, albeit an uncertain one. We, as the audience, do not fully know the relationship between the talk at hand and truth. Seeking occasions to fault talk is a way of trying to reduce some of the uncertainties surrounding it. Seen from the other side, this makes the speaker’s presence a fragile one: at any time, faulting some talk could morph into faulting the speaker’s entire presence or even identity. At least for the time spent in front of the curtain, this is a presence to be defended, a defense in which speakers invest their whole body and speech.

APPENDIX 1 Hong Kong as a Global Financial Center

B

ecause I conducted my fieldwork in Hong Kong, it makes sense to discuss, albeit briefly, the significance of this locale as a global financial center. After 1945, when capital controls were imposed in the West (but not only there), Hong Kong was one of the few trading centers worldwide that maintained free foreign currency and gold markets, providing vital financial services to (communist) mainland China (Schenk 2018: 69). During the post-1945 civil war in China, Hong Kong received large flows of capital fleeing the war. During the 1970s, it emerged as an internationally significant center for banking services, having the largest number of foreign banking and near banking institutions after New York City and London ( Jao 1979: 677). A brokers’ association called the Hong Kong Stock Exchange had existed since the late nineteenth century, but during World War II stockbrokers left Hong Kong; after 1945, it took a few years until trading was allowed again. In 1946, two associations existed in Hong Kong— the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Sharebrokers Association—along with informal markets in Chinese stocks (“Stocks and Share Business” 1946: 7). Until 1969, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was an elitist club comprising sixty members licensed by the government,

222 Y Appendix 1

many representing the large British- and Chinese-controlled trading and finance companies called hongs (Sacklyn 2015: 12). Brokers, British as well as Chinese, were of an upper-class background. The minimum investment was HK$100,000 (at that time, the price of a flat in a middle-class neighborhood). Brokers traded with one other around the table and, during the dry season only, visited clients at their offices. Visitors and observers were not allowed in the room in which brokers traded. In October 1969, though, a group of well-to-do local professionals (e.g., accountants, councillors, and lawyers) and businesspeople founded the Far East Exchange, with a minimum investment threshold of HK$2,000. The Far East Exchange attracted trading in a larger variety of stocks and became popular with the middle classes (Sacklyn 2015: 41). In 1970, the Kowloon Stock Exchange was established and became operational two years later; in 1971, the Kam Ngan Stock Exchange followed (54, 64). The four exchanges were merged in 1986, forming the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Overall, the pattern that emerged over time was that of an elitist institution that tried to hold on to a monopoly and was challenged by competitors from within the upper-middle classes. In the present context, however, it is relevant that this challenge included an effort to make financial investments more accessible to the local middle classes, as well as to capture some of the capital flows coming to Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange is significantly larger than any Continental European stock exchange, although smaller than the New York Stock Exchange. The average daily turnover in the securities market was more than US$21 billion in July 2020. The average over the first seven months of 2020 was a little more than US$16 billion. In the derivatives markets, the average daily turnover for the first seven months of 2020 was more than 1.2 million contracts.

Appendix 1 Z 223

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which switched to full electronic trading in 2017, has introduced after-hours trading as well, extending the close of trading time from 5:15 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. (HKEX 2017). This, among other factors, allows individual investors to conduct market transactions after work; trading hours overlap with daytime and evening finance shows and with retail investors’ after-work availability. This is important, because individual investors play a major role in several Asian financial markets. In 2018, 75 percent of all transactions on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange were less than US$6,300 in size, consistent with a significant participation of individual investors. In 1999 (when automated trading was in its infancy), 65 percent of all transactions were less than US$6,300 in size (SFC 2018: table B13).1 A study published in 2019 estimated the share of retail investors in overall trading at over 35 percent in 2014/15, 29.89 percent in 2016, and 22.89 percent in 2018 (HKEX 2019: 5). For the same period, the Wall Street Journal estimated the share of U.S. retail investors in the total market turnover in equities in the United States at around 15 percent (Osipovich 2020).2 The share of retail investors in the total trading volume on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in the mid-2010s was estimated at around 80 percent (Osipovich 2020). As for Japan, statistics made public by the Japan Exchange Group (which includes the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the third largest exchange worldwide), the share of retail traders in the total trading volume varied in 2019 between 23 percent and 75 percent, according to the type of shares ( JPX 2020). The share of retail traders in the overall value of stocks traded in the same period varied between 19 percent and 47 percent. A study conducted by the Hong Kong Investor Education Centre in 2017 found that 59 percent of all Hong Kong adults aged eighteen to seventy years had invested in at least one financial product in the previous twelve months (48 percent had

224 Y Appendix 1

invested in at least one stock). Retail investors in Hong Kong on average held liquid assets to the value of US$55,500 and allocated 45 percent of this liquidity to transactions in financial products (Investor Education Centre 2017: 9). A follow-up study from 2019 found that the average value of liquid assets had grown, while the share allocated to financial products had grown from 45 percent to 46 percent (IFEC 2019: 7). In other words, more money from individual investors was flowing into financial markets. When it comes to expected returns on their investments, half of the investors expected an annual return of 10 percent to 20 percent (12), which would be very hard to achieve, even for a seasoned professional fund manager, without taking some risks. When it came to the sources influencing their investment decisions, 68 percent declared TV and radio financial programs as a key influence (14). Another characteristic of Hong Kong’s financial markets is the significant capital flows from mainland China’s wealthy individuals, not only from firms; in 2017, for instance, RMB deposits in Hong Kong totaled RMB520 billion (Yeung 2017), the city being the largest offshore RMB liquidity pool in the world (Chan 2014). The number of high-net-worth individuals in mainland China (with assets of at least US$1.5 million) was estimated at 1.6 million in 2016. Of those, 63 percent relied on financial service providers for money management, but only half of these 63 percent relied on private banking, indicating that the other half relied on fund managers. “Brand” was ranked higher than “expertise” as a selection criterion for money managers (Bain 2017). Mainland investors can direct capital flows to Hong Kong, among other locations, via the Hong Kong-ShanghaiShenzhen Stock Connect launched in 2014, which allows investors (including individuals) to cross-trade companies listed on one of the three exchanges (e.g., investors can buy a stock in Shanghai and sell it in Hong Kong).

APPENDIX 2 Ethnographic Methods

C

onducting ethnographic fieldwork on financial expert talk requires access to professional, cosmopolitan groups. By definition, with finance having a global dimension, these groups will have one, too, not only through the reach of their activities but also through their education and outlook. Thus, while conducting fieldwork in Hong Kong—a city with a culture different from that of my own and that of London, where I live and work—I primarily interacted with and interviewed professional, cosmopolitan milieus comprising financial analysts, media professionals, journalists, and finance academics who were bilingual in English and Cantonese. Former students and colleagues in London facilitated access to these professional groups and to their audiences. I was thus accepted with relative ease as a foreign academic who was not entirely foreign. My lack of linguistic abilities in Cantonese was a bridge rather than a barrier, as some of my interviewees not only enthusiastically supported my learning of Cantonese (by teaching me local expressions and supplying me with learning materials) but also insisted that everyone speak English during further introductions. I conducted fourteen weeks of ethnographic observation in three TV and two radio studios, averaging six hours of observation

226 Y Appendix 2

per day. My strategy was to accompany analysts to their shows and sit in the studio during the broadcast. Before and after each show, the analyst I was accompanying gave me an account of the background of the show: who the speakers, producers, and anchors were; what the topics of the day were expected to be; the profile of the TV studio; and for how long the show has been running. I also accompanied analysts to their brokerage offices (where they met with their research assistants) and walked with them in the streets of Hong Kong. I audio-recorded the shows I observed in the TV and radio studios. Many were broadcast in Cantonese, but some were broadcast in Mandarin or English. I asked the analysts for preand post-show accounts and took notes of these accounts. With the help of research assistants who were native speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin, I obtained English transcriptions of the shows. In addition to ethnographic observations, I interviewed twenty analysts multiple times (at least two rounds of interviews for each). These analysts represented a fifth of the entire body of analysts appearing on TV and radio in Hong Kong at the time of my fieldwork. I interviewed five TV and radio producers and anchors, as well as thirty TV viewers and radio listeners. I also interviewed three journalists with long-standing experience in the Hong Kong media to learn more about the emergence of daily shows of financial expertise. I interviewed a film director, as well, to learn about performance acting. All interviews were conducted in English. I conducted thirty interviews, in English, with audience members of finance shows in Hong Kong. I intentionally did not select a representative cross section of all viewers of TV finance shows produced in Hong Kong. (As some of the shows were broadcast in mainland China, the relevant audiences were

Appendix 2 Z 227

not all in Hong Kong anyway.) From the analysts, I wanted to investigate first how they perceived and evaluated their audiences and what kind of audiences they had, both in their shows and in face-to-face interactions. I also wanted to learn how the analysts had (or did not have) a stake in encouraging their audiences into specific (investment) activities. The premise was that by being active in the local markets, analysts knew specifically which audiences were relevant to them and how. Based on what I learned, I targeted specific audience groups, such as professionals with a disposable income and working-class audiences engaging in investments. The ages of my audience interviewees ranged from twenty to seventy years. I recruited them through contacts with local student investment clubs and professional networks and at local events organized by financial publications. In addition to these interviewees, who were all middle-class professionals, I recruited working-class interviewees from evening classes on finance taught by analysts appearing on TV and radio. These interviewees were mostly male, in their thirties, and had much less disposable income than the professionals but were eager to learn finance concepts and computational skills (e.g., how derivatives are priced). To understand expert financial talk, I had to understand not only what financial expertise is but also how it has evolved in the context of my ethnography. Financial expertise is admittedly a broad and complex topic, but as I was observing expert talk done by analysts and finance academics, I focused on these participants’ understanding of expertise. I interviewed finance academics in Hong Kong and London, and I participated in more than fifty finance research seminars in London. When interviewing finance academics in Hong Kong, I focused on how the discipline had evolved in the local context. I also interviewed

228 Y Appendix 2

financial analysts who were not appearing on TV in both London and Hong Kong. All these interviews were conducted in English. I wanted to compare expert financial talk with other forms of public expert talk to work out the similarities and differences in their organization and in their expectations. Of course, when it comes to financial expertise, research seminar talk comes to mind immediately. However, this form of expert talk claims to contribute to substantive domain knowledge. Thus, I also wanted to compare expert financial talk with a type of expert talk that does not necessarily claim this: expert witness talk is one such format. Hence, I interviewed barristers and attorneys in London and New York, respectively, who regularly worked with expert witnesses. I wanted to better understand not only the assumptions and organization of this talk format but also the role played by physical presence in expert talk. I also participated in the audience of parliamentary hearings in the United Kingdom, at which various expert witnesses were called to talk about specific matters; the talk I observed was focused on finance and related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. While these topics are different from the matters discussed in this book, the expert witness talk I observed was directly pertinent to investments produced by financial and technology experts. Incidentally, while I was finishing this manuscript, I was contacted by a consultancy firm looking for an expert witness for a financial litigation case to be held in a U.S. circuit court. The instructions and explanations I received fully triangulated the insights I had gained from interviews and observations in parliamentary hearings.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

finalized the draft of this manuscript in the spring of 2022, the one hundredth anniversary of Erving Goffman’s birth. This book is a modest homage. While homages are more often than not seen as individual acts, mine could not have been possible without the help and support of so many friends and collaborators, in Hong Kong as well as in London. I am heavily indebted to all the financial analysts, anchors, TV producers, and journalists from Hong Kong who agreed to let me interview them and observe their activities in the TV and radio studios. This book would not exist without them allowing an ethnographer into the world of TV and radio studios or without them having repeatedly sacrificed time to talk to me. I am indebted to colleagues and friends, from London and from Hong Kong, who introduced me to viewers of finance shows, often mobilizing their friends, relatives, and professional connections to this aim. I am particularly grateful to Lucia Siu, Raymond So, Siu-kai Choy, and Ivan Liu Tsz Fung for opening doors to local audiences. In addition, Lucia Siu has been a constant support in facilitating contacts in the media world of Hong Kong and in explaining its intricacies. Another debt of gratitude goes to colleagues in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. I am grateful

230 Y Acknowledgments

to Cheris Chan for our collaboration over the years: parts of my fieldwork were made possible by joint projects we developed on financial globalization. Sylvia Martin provided useful information about the development of acting as a profession. Zhifei Mao, from Shenzhen University, helped me better understand the world of individual investors in mainland China. Garfield Lam, the head of Special Collections at the University of Hong Kong, was an invaluable help in the documentbased reconstruction of the early days of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Sayaka Shiba was an amazing research assistant, and I am heavily indebted to her for all the work she did in tracking finance shows across the media in developed Asian economies, the United States, and the United Kingdom. I am particularly grateful to Christian Heath for reading parts of this manuscript and providing helpful suggestions with respect to the logic of the analysis and chapter titles. Richard Gu, Donald MacKenzie, Crawford Spence, Syrus Tsui, and Stefan Laube read parts of the manuscript and provided critical comments. Ruowen Xu helped with checking translations. I am indebted to them all. A special word of thanks goes to Eric Schwartz from Columbia University Press, who has constantly supported this book project from the very start. My fieldwork was supported by a research grant from King’s College London and a collaborative grant between King’s College London and the University of Hong Kong (in collaboration with Cheris Chan). Parts and previous versions of this book were presented in a research seminar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong and at the 2017 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. I am grateful to audiences there for their constructive comments.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. I emphasize here the public character of expert talk to distinguish it from other forms of expert talk that can be private (e.g., Maynard 2003). 2. CBBCs are derivative products similar to warrants and linked to an underlying asset (e.g., a stock traded on the HKEX or the Hang Seng Index). A bull contract will rise in value if the price of the underlying asset rises, whereas a bear contract will rise in value if the price of the underlying asset drops. 3. According to Hong Kong regulations, any individual with financial assets under US$1 million is classified as an individual investor. Above that, individuals are classified as professional investors. Also, by law, any new initial public offering of a company’s equity must first be allocated to individual investors, with the remainder allocated to institutional ones. 4. In Taiwan, the percentage of the adult population engaged in the stock market is even higher (50 percent), with retail investors and traders providing 60 percent of the equity market value (Chen 2014: 3). Participation in financial transactions is facilitated by products tailored to retail investors. 5. Hong Kong’s occupational pension scheme, the Mandatory Provident Fund, was created in 1995 and fully implemented in 2000, being at the time of fieldwork less than twenty years old. 6. Putonghua is the spoken form of the official language of mainland China.

232 Y Introduction 7. Such tropes are not unique to Hong Kong. While doing fieldwork in Japan for a different project, I repeatedly heard about “Ms. Watanabe” as the archetype of the local individual investor; that is, the matriarch who manages the family money and invests in markets.

1. WHAT IS FINANCIAL EXPERTISE? 1. Erving Goffman (1967: 69) discusses a similar problem in his analysis of strategic action: under certain conditions, expressive moves can become entirely decoupled from action moves and become autonomous (while retaining their original, fundamental keying). They are undertaken by participants for their own sake. In such situations, expression games degenerate, in the sense that participants cannot evaluate anymore whether the basic properties of interactions retain validity. 2. Harry Collins, Robert Evans, and their collaborators deal with this situation in their imitation game, which follows an argument developed by Alan Turing (Collins, Evans, Hall, O’Mahoney, and Weinel 2019: 114). Their argument is that an impersonator of expertise would be able to pass as an expert outside the context of the domain only if the impersonator had acquired interactional expertise by spending extensive time with practitioners of the domain. 3. Even activities considered mundane and unproblematic may require a considerable degree of expertise. Learning one’s native language is estimated to require around ten thousand hours (Collins and Evans 2017: 446): assuming uninterrupted learning for eight hours per day, 250 days per year, that is five years exclusively devoted to learning one’s native language. It would be difficult to say that speaking one’s native language is not expertise, or that it is done only (or primarily) as a status claim. In the context of the present discussion, this is relevant because (a) it allows the introduction of a distinction between ubiquitous and esoteric expertise (Collins and Evans 2017: 447), and (b) it allows us to conceptualize ubiquitous expertise as a common ground on which various gradients of domain-specific expertise can develop, allowing experts to interact with their audiences and allowing for interaction among groups with different degrees of expertise. This means that, rather than assuming a clear-cut divide between expertise and nonexpertise, various degrees of expertise can be arranged along a continuum. It also means that expertise is not reducible to professional

2. Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise Z 233

4.

5.

6.

7.

jurisdiction or credentialization (Abbott 1988: 20). Groups that are not part of established professional jurisdictions or not credentialized can possess a degree of expertise, including skills, a degree of fluency in the domain, knowledge of at least some rules, and tacit understandings when it comes to financial investments. Recent ethnographic investigations such as Daniel Fridman’s analysis of self-help groups (2017: 61) show the systematic efforts to teach ordinary people financial concepts, skills, and attitudes as a prerequisite to involving them in investment activities. Harry Collins and Robert Evans predicate interactional expertise on long-standing, repeated interactions between ethnographer and natural scientist, which has consequences for how this kind of expertise is understood. It presupposes not only a comprehension of the language of, say, physics, but also a deeper comprehension of the practical activities of the physicist, of formal models and the like. Sharon Conley and collaborators (Conley, Foley, Gorman, Denham, and Coleman 2017: 166) argue that interactional expertise can be seen as a subcategory of T-shaped expertise; that is, expertise that is broad across an entire domain but specializes in a particular subdomain. As fiction writing became distinct from journalism and professionalized after World War II (McGurl 2009), financial journalism has become distinct from other forms of journalism and professionalized (via credentialing and specialized education programs) only very recently. Financialization is understood as a set of processes unfolding, at least since the 1970s, on multiple levels: on a macro-scale, it is a regime of capital accumulation different from that of industrialization; on a meso-scale, it comprises organizational shifts in the structure of corporations (and associated managerial positions), shifts that privilege financial activities as centers of profit; on a micro-scale, it includes diffuse changes in the organization of the everyday lives of citizens, with an emphasis on individual financial planning, individual responsibility, and participation in market activities (van der Zwan 2014: 102).

2. TALK, SPECTACLE, AND EXPERTISE 1. In her analysis of punditry in the U.S. media, Lynn Letukas (2012: 51, 54) highlights that this genre of talk emerged over a period of twenty years (from 1960 to 1980) in relationship to a shift from providing

234 Y 2. Talk, Spectacle, and Expertise information to providing commentary on public affairs. The genre became widespread with the advent of cable TV. Punditry does not necessarily require expertise in a substantive domain and is largely practiced by journalists. 2. In Goffman’s analysis, the distinction between given and given-off expressions is that the former are controlled by the actor, whereas the latter are inadvertent. In Goffman’s understanding, control of one’s expressions is never perfect and is marred by uncertainties. Hence, what we exude is a mix of (mostly) given and given-off expressions. 3. Here I follow Erving Goffman (1974: 43–44) in his definition of “keys” and “keying”: keys are sets of conventions that allow participants in an activity (and observers thereof ) to understand said activity as departing (or not) from a basic framework of reference. For instance, an activity such as cooking can be understood as unfolding in a basic key (real cooking, with the aim of consuming the cooked food), in a makebelieve key (in children’s play or on stage), or as a technical redoing (e.g., a cooking demonstration). 4. Expert talk in courts of law has been covered in the media at least since the broadcast of the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995.

3. THE ORGANIZATION OF EXPERT TALK 1. Buy-side financial analysts specialize in stocks, commodities, fixed income, or currencies, among other products, and work exclusively for an investment bank or brokerage house, producing internal reports (Leins 2018: 52). Sell-side financial analysts specialize in industrial sectors or companies, producing reports for institutional investors while also making occasional media appearances (e.g., Beunza and Garud 2007). The financial analysts I observed did not produce written reports for investors (although some occasionally wrote short newspaper columns). They did not specialize in an industrial sector. They appeared daily on a variety of TV and radio finance shows. 2. On cable TV, finance shows are bundled into packages with sports and entertainment programs and sold to subscribers. 3. In mainland China, state-licensed and unlicensed financial analysts also appear regularly on TV, radio, and internet programs as stock commentators (licensed) or stock “opinionators” (unlicensed; see Mao 2018: 118, 126).

4. Str ategic Facework Z 235

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Additionally, investors without an economics background produce their own internet broadcasts. This indicates a continuum of financial expertise rather than clear-cut distinctions. With a few exceptions, the status and pay of radio and TV anchors were significantly lower than those of the analysts who appeared on their shows. The exceptions were those anchors who also had acting careers. One analyst I followed over two years had a daily radio show, wrote two short newspaper articles per day, and had a paid-access website for which he wrote daily. Additionally, he appeared on TV shows and was preparing a comedy show. He held an annual live show in an arena that could seat two thousand people and an annual paid banquet at which he entertained clients. Hong Kong has three major commercial TV stations and two commercial radio stations. There are also internet radio stations. The visual appearance of financial actors to their audiences is framed by camera and screen technologies, which participants paid close attention to. In TV broadcasts, where only their upper body is made visible, for instance, participants would wear a formal shirt, tie, and jacket, combined with summer shorts and flip-flops or tracksuit pants. James Baughman (2007: 42, 155) details how in the beginning TV studios struggled to produce naturalistic images of the human face. Camera technology initially required very powerful lighting, and actors needed to wear thick makeup that made them sweat under the lights.

4. STRATEGIC FACEWORK: THE EXPERT PRESENTATION OF EXPERTS 1. In her ethnography of filmmaking in Hollywood and Hong Kong, Sylvia Martin (2017) emphasizes the key role of makeup artists in producing varied “looks” for characters in feature films, as well as the fact that looks are always the outcome of a collaborative (and sometimes conflict-laden) effort among hairstylists, makeup artists, lighting directors, and camera directors. I found that the physical appearance of financial analysts, too, had to be produced collaboratively (with makeup artists and camerapeople) but also learned from anchors and producers. A financial analyst commented to me that when he first started appearing on finance shows, he did not know what to look like and made

236 Y 4. Str ategic Facework

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

mistakes in his early appearances until a producer gave him tips on how to improve his appearance. There was intense competition behind the scenes among some analysts who, while maintaining the appearance of friendly relationships, tried to undermine one another by strategically spreading gossip or badmouthing one another’s abilities. Interestingly, at least in the cases I witnessed, this badmouthing was related to appearance and talk. Female analysts being called “fat” by their fellow analysts is a case in point here. In another instance, in my presence, a popular female analyst told a male analyst that he might be a good teacher, which implied that although he had substantive expertise, he was not good on TV. After this remark, the male analyst told me that this had been a deliberate insult to his expressive abilities. Other ads featured smiling financial analysts eating a bowl of shrimp fried rice or touting the benefits of herbal teas, products tied to bodily satisfaction and health. The ways in which analysts derived additional income from appearing in ads is similar to that of livestreamers (e.g., on YouTube) who derive income from product sponsorship. On many occasions, financial analysts I was accompanying were recognized and greeted in the street or in restaurants by members of their audiences. Affective components (or emotional labor; e.g., Martin 2017: 154) can also pertain to style. For instance, a prominent female analyst was well known for having cried on live TV when a major stock suddenly dropped. However, this emotional display did not undermine but rather cemented her reputation as an analyst. The emic term “housewife,” which was used regularly by my interviewees, had a double meaning. On the one hand, it was used to refer to homemakers who, together with taxi drivers, were thought to constitute a large proportion of the audience of daytime radio and TV finance shows. On the other hand, it was used to refer to lower-income groups who did not have the financial means of Hong Kong’s professional classes (e.g., lawyers, doctors, accountants) and therefore invested less. At the investment fairs I attended, I never noticed any analyst or broker using character costumes (or the same suit time and time again). Analysts did not appear to pay much attention to how their appearance could convey financial expertise and did not mention a relationship between physical appearance and the conveying of financial expertise.

4. Str ategic Facework Z 237

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

In collaborative efforts on TV, though, achieving a distinct appearance to convey individualized expertise (or neutralize doubts and criticism) played a prominent role. Technical analysis is not part of academic financial expertise, yet it is practiced by analysts, and investment banks employ technical analysts. In this instance, the analyst could have contested the status of technical analysis as an element of expertise but chose to frame it as existing outside his area of expertise, in line with other similar answers he gave to the audience. Marianna Patrona (2005: 242) and Sharon Coen and collaborators (Coen, Meredith, Woods, and Fernandez 2021: 408) have shown that assertions of expertise both orally and in writing are supported by representing arguments as facts. The concept of footing designates the conventions of a production format and participation framework that align speaker and audience (Goffman 1981: 513). For instance, the speaker can align him- or herself with the audience in various ways; for example, as “I” or “we” or in the voice of a character or another person. The audience, in their turn, can participate in different formats (for instance, “Today, we are going to study . . .” or “I am going to teach you how to . . .”). All proper names in the text are fictionalized. In her ethnography of Hong Kong filmmakers, Sylvia Martin (2017) notes that method acting, to which the anchor refers here, was not widespread among Hong Kong’s professional actors. In his analysis of radio talk, Erving Goffman (1981: 198) argues that in any activity they undertake, participants must display both substantive and expressive competencies. Failure to do so will trigger social controls: the activity in question will be faulted and with it the competency and moral character of the participant. To counter social controls when failure occurs, participants initiate ritual remedies. Competency in speech production is one of the expected mundane abilities; therefore, when this production is faulty in mundane conversations, participants initiate repairs. However, some speech formats (e.g., public talks) have heightened expectations with respect to their faultless production, especially when speech production is a professional activity (e.g., that of a radio announcer). Hence, when speaking formally, speakers pay particular attention to formal faults and strive to deliver their speech flawlessly (203).

238 Y 5. Unfaultable Talk

5. UNFAULTABLE TALK 1. The analyst in question acknowledged that when meeting a new client, they are allowed to talk for about twenty minutes, with or without an accompanying slide presentation. Investors who have met the analyst or fund manager more than once usually do not allow this introductory presentation, since they are already familiar with it. In both cases, a key task of the analyst is to present “the edge”: a few sentences that state what makes them distinct. 2. Additionally, for shows that are not broadcast live, expert financial talk is edited, and the analyst has no control over the editing. The edit is decided by the producer and the audio technician. At trade fairs, where analysts directly face the audience, I did not observe any situation in which a teleprompter was used. Analysts spoke freely and did not read from a prepared text. Another significant difference here is that at trade fairs, talk is rarely processed after the event concludes. Most trade fairs do not post online recordings of expert talk, so as not to deter audiences from attending. 3. Sometimes the producer can talk directly to the analysts, telling them that they are out of time or that they are talking too much. 4. Some anchors of finance shows with a background in the music and entertainment sector had acquired interactional expertise in finance: they had learned the vocabulary, indicators, and instruments of finance and the significance of certain topics, and they had even taken formal classes in finance. Based on this interactional expertise, some anchors I interviewed were planning to start new careers in the sales departments of banks and told me that other anchors had previously succeeded in doing so. This indicated that anchors with interactional expertise in finance and relational expertise across two domains, media and finance, were occupying a structural hole (Barley and Kunda 2004: 269; Burt 2005: 18), enabling them to switch jobs across radically different domains. 5. Sometimes, in my presence, when analysts wanted to slight one another, they offered a backhanded compliment of being professorial in their talk. This was understood by the counterparty as an insult, as they remarked to me in private. It meant that they couldn’t master a full range of fresh talk.

6. Talk and Truth Z 239 6. The Hong Kong dollar has been tied to the U.S. dollar since 1983 in a system that allows the Hong Kong currency to fluctuate within set, narrow limits and that obliges the local administration to maintain large reserves of U.S. currency.

6. TALK AND TRUTH 1. In this context, I distinguish talk formats that occlude possibilities of being faulted from talk formats that are indifferent to truth or truthful inquiry, the kind analyzed by Harry Frankfurt (2005) and, more recently, André Spicer (2020: 5), among others. 2. This raises the question: If talk shows leave no room for epistemic responsibility, why do experts agree to participate on them? In her ethnography, Laura Grindstaff (2002) mentions a number of reasons, such as a desire for public exposure and to advocate for particular policies or groups. 3. During my fieldwork, a prominent analyst was facing a slander lawsuit from a company because of statements made on TV disparaging the technology of that company. Other analysts I talked to were well aware of the situation and following its development. 4. As I was told, the rivalry got serious when one analyst learned that his clients were paying attention to his rival’s statements. 5. In Hong Kong, only about 30 percent of the total area is built up; the remaining 70 percent consists of natural parks. The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region owns the land, which is only leased for construction. Many middle-class citizens invest their savings in a range of financial assets (e.g., equities, warrants) hoping to make a positive return and accumulate enough money for a deposit on a flat. This explains why a financial discussion of the real estate market is often tied to a discussion of other financial assets: retail investors hope that the growth of the equities market will outpace that of real estate prices, making it easier for them to have enough for a deposit on a flat. 6. Quantitative easing is a monetary policy by which the central bank (or monetary authority) purchases government (and corporate) debt to lower the yield and consequently interest rates. Lower interest rates have an impact on mortgage loans and hence on housing prices.

240 Y 6. Talk and Truth 7. By the time they are finished, such properties can become more expensive. By contrast, quantitative easing would make properties more expensive (and hence unaffordable to the middle classes) because more money would be pumped into the economy. 8. M3 is a broad measure of money supply including currency in circulation, deposits (with agreed maturity and redeemable at notice), repurchase agreements, money market fund shares, and debt securities.

7. MANAGING AUDIENCES 1. Interviews with media producers and audiences document that producers can have a distorted image of the real audiences of their shows (Ross 2019: 138). 2. The other important art investment hub was Singapore. While the art show I observed might not be typical, most of the artwork exhibited there was priced in the range of US$20,000 to US$40,000. 3. In her ethnography of wealth managers, Brooke Harrington (2016: 91) notes that elite recreational activities are used as occasions to identify investment opportunities. 4. During my fieldwork, the analysts I interviewed were concerned that younger audiences were abandoning TV and radio in favor of YouTube and Meta. Consequently, they wanted to produce more talk for these platforms. However, the interviews I conducted with viewers in their twenties gave no indication that they favored internet productions of financial talk. While I often witnessed people in public places checking stock prices on their smartphones, I never witnessed them watching finance shows on their phones. Several public plazas in the city provided financial talk on large screens, most prominently in the plaza in front of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Lobbies of office towers were also (as a rule) equipped with TV screens running financial talk from Bloomberg TV or local channels. Public buses and train cars on some lines also had TV screens on which financial data was displayed alongside news and advertising. 5. With the advent of digital TV and radio, studios abandoned audience surveys. They knew precisely how many viewers or listeners they had, which analysts were popular, and which topics attracted audiences.

Appendix 1. Z 241 6. This expression-based rapport with the audience, demanded by the anchor—as grounds for displaying or enunciating financial information— was different from what I witnessed at trade fairs, where occasionally financial analysts and their audiences would develop hostility toward each other, hurl insults (e.g., the audience being told directly that they are dumb), or simply ignore each other. 7. This is not to say that homemakers cannot be savvy money managers. In the conversations I had, though, audiences did not refer to real, specific homemakers but used this trope to represent themselves as autonomous decision-makers, thus justifying why they did not need a fund manager (whom they could not afford). One interviewee stated that an “educated housewife” would not ask questions on a finance show. This is entirely in line with the historically developed discourse of the individualistic risk-taking of financial actors, which precludes submitting to paternalistic instructions. 8. On the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, listed stocks are individually numbered, and it is common to refer to a stock by its number, with numbers being memorized by audiences.

APPENDIX 1. HONG KONG AS A GLOBAL FINANCIAL CENTER 1. The dominant share of smaller transactions in the overall market turnover is in line with trends brought by market automation, in which a reduction in average transaction size has been observed. At the same time, this makes it possible for the transactions of individual investors (who are considered to have less capital than institutional ones) to have a significant market impact. 2. This appears to have changed during 2020, when U.S. retail investors’ share of the total turnover rose to 20 percent.

REFERENCES

Abbott, Andrew. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Abolafia, Mitchell. 2020. Stewards of the Market: How the Federal Reserve Made Sense of the Financial Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Agnew, Jean-Christophe. 1986. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ailon, Galit. 2019. “Bracketing the Nation: Lay Financial Trading in Israel.” Current Anthropology 60, no. 2: 245–61. Alborn, Timothy. 1997. “Persuading by the Numbers: The Balance Sheet in Late Victorian Journalism.” History of Political Economy 29, no. S1: 212–30. Alpers, Svetlana. 1988. Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anteby, Michel, and Audrey L. Holm. 2021. “Translating Expertise Across Work Contexts: U.S. Puppeteers Move from Stage to Screen.” American Sociological Review 86, no. 2: 310–40. Appadurai, Arjun. 2015. Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arjaliès, Diane-Laure, Philip Grant, Iain Hardie, Donald MacKenzie, and Ekaterina Svetlova. 2017. Chains of Finance: How Investment Management Is Shaped. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arvidsson, Adam. 2016. “Facebook and Finance: On the Social Logic of the Derivative.” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 6: 3–23. Austin, J. L. 1979. “Performative Utterances.” In Philosophical Papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, 233–52. Oxford: Clarendon.

24 4 Y References Bain & Company. 2017. “China’s Private Wealth Market Continues to Expand at a Significant Rate Creating Opportunities and Challenges for Financial Services Providers.” August 1, 2017. https://www.bain.com /about/media-center/press-releases/2017/chinas-private-wealth-market -continues-to-expand-at-a-significant-rate/. Barany, Michael J., and Donald MacKenzie. 2014. “Chalk: Materials and Concepts in Mathematics Research.” In Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, edited by Catelijne Coopmans, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar, 107–30. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barley, Stephen, and Gideon Kunda. 2004. Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Baughman, James L. 2007. Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948–1961. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Beunza, Daniel. 2019. Taking the Floor: Models, Morals, and Management in a Wall Street Trading Room. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beunza, Daniel, and Raghu Garud. 2007. “Calculators, Lemmings, or FrameMakers? The Intermediary Role of Securities Analysts.” In Market Devices, edited by Michel Callon, Yuval Millo, and Fabian Muniesa, 13–39. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bondo Hansen, Kristian, and Christian Borch. 2021. “The Absorption and Multiplication of Uncertainty in Machine-Learning-Driven Finance.” British Journal of Sociology 72, no. 4: 1015–29. Boyer, Dominic. 2005. “The Corporeality of Expertise.” Ethnos 70, no. 2: 243–66. ——. 2013. The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Boyson, Nicole M. 2010. “Implicit Incentives and Reputational Herding by Hedge Fund Managers.” Journal of Empirical Finance 17, no. 3: 283–99. Bradley, Daniel, Sinan Gokkaya, and Xi Liu. 2017. “Before an Analyst Becomes an Analyst: Does Industry Experience Matter?” Journal of Finance 72, no. 2: 751–92. Bradshaw, Mark T. 2012. “Discussion of ‘Analysts’ Industry Expertise.” Journal of Accounting and Economics 54, nos. 2–3: 121–31. Breslau, Daniel. 2003. “Economics Invents the Economy: Mathematics, Statistics, and Models in the Work of Irving Fisher and Wesley Mitchell.” Theory and Society 32, no. 3: 379–411.

References Z 245 Brine, Kevin R., and Mary Poovey. 2017. Finance in America: An Unfinished Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burt, Ronald S. 2005. Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bushee, Brian J., John E. Core, Wayne Guay, and Sophia J. W. Hamm. 2010. “The Role of the Business Press as an Information Intermediary.” Journal of Accounting Research 48, no. 1: 1–19. Butterick, Keith. 2015. Complacency and Collusion: A Critical Introduction to Business and Financial Journalism. London: Pluto. Call, Andrew C., Scott A. Emett, Eldar Maksymov, and Nathan Y. Sharp. 2020. “Meet the Press: Survey Evidence on Financial Journalists as Information Intermediaries.” (November 2021). Available at SSRN: https:// ssrn.com/abstract=3279453 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3279453. Callon, Michel. 2005. “Peripheral Vision: Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices.” Organization Studies 26, no. 8: 1229–50. Carr, E. Summerson. 2010. “Enactments of Expertise.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 17–32. Castellano, Rosella, and Annalisa Ferrari. 2019. “Are Stock Price Dynamics Affected by Financial Analysts Recommendations? Evidence from Italian Green Energy Stocks.” Quality & Quantity 53: 2535–44. Chakraborty, Archishman, Parikshit Ghosh, and Jaideep Roy. 2020. “ExpertCaptured Democracies.” American Economic Review 110, no. 6: 1713–51. Chan, Norman. 2014. “What Does It Take to Develop a Global Offshore RMB Hub?” Speech at the Treasury Markets Summit 2014. https://www .hkma.gov.hk/eng/key-information/speech-speakers/ntlchan/20140915-1 .shtml. Chang, Hye Sun, Michael Donohoe, and Theodore Sougiannis. 2016. “Do  Analysts Understand the Economic and Reporting Complexities of Derivatives?” Journal of Accounting and Economics 61, nos. 2–3: 584–604. Chen, Yu-Hsiang. 2014. “Stock Trading and Daily Life: Lay Stock Investors in Taiwan.” PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh. Chong, Kimberley. 2018. Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clark, Gordon, Nigel Thrift, and Adam Tickell. 2004. “Performing Finance: The Industry, the Media, and Its Image.” Review of International Political Economy 11, no. 2: 289–310.

246 Y References Clayman, Steven E. 1993. “Footing in the Achievement of Neutrality: The Case of News-Interview Discourse.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, edited by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 163–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coen, Sharon, Joanne Meredith, Ruth Woods, and Anna Fernandez. 2021. “Talk Like an Expert: The Construction of Expertise in News Comments Concerning Climate Change.” Public Understanding of Science 30, no. 4: 400–16. Collins, Harry. 2004. Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2018. “Studies of Expertise and Experience.” Topoi 37: 67–77. Collins, Harry, and Robert Evans. 2007. Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2017. “The Bearing of Studies of Expertise and Experience on Ethnography.” Qualitative Inquiry 23, no. 6: 445–51. Collins, Harry, Robert Evans, and Michael Gorman. 2010. “Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise.” In Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise: Creating New Kinds of Collaboration, edited by Michael Gorman, 7–24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Collins, Harry, Robert Evans, Martin Hall, Hannah O’Mahoney, and Martin Weinel. 2019. “Bonfire Night and Burns Night: Using the Imitation Game to Research English and Scottish Identities.” In The Third Wave in Science and Technology Studies: Future Research Directions on Expertise and Experience, edited by David S. Caudill, Shannon N. Conley, Michael E. Gorman, and Martin Weinel, 109–32. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Collins, Harry, Robert Evans, and Martin Weinel. 2017. “Interactional Expertise.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 4th ed., edited by Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouché, Clark A. Miller, and Laurel Smith-Doerr, 765–92. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Conley, Shannon, Rider Foley, Michael Gorman, Jessica Denham, and Kevin Coleman. 2017. “Acquisition of T-Shaped Expertise: An Exploratory Study.” Social Epistemology 31, no. 2: 165–83. Cooper, Geoff, and Mary Ebeling. 2007. “Epistemology, Structure, and Urgency: The Sociology of Financial and Scientific Journalists.” Sociological Research Online 12, no. 3, https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.1558. Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. 2017. The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Polity.

References Z 247 Crosthwaithe, Paul. 2014. “Framing Finance.” In Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present, edited by Paul Crosthwaithe, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh, 35–61. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dale, Richard. 2004. The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Davies, Elisabeth. 2008. “The Script as Mediating Artifact in Professional Theater Production.” Archives and Museum Informatics 8, no. 3: 181–98. Davis, Gerald, and Suntae Kim. 2015. “Financialization of the Economy.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 203–21. DeLillo, Don. 2003. Cosmopolis. London: Picador. Debord, Guy. 1994 [1967]. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel. Dellwing, Michael. 2012. “Little Drama of Decomposure: On Doing Facework with Disaligning Actions.” Symbolic Interaction 35, no. 2: 146–61. Deringer, William. 2018. Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dornfeld, Barry. 1998. Producing Public Television, Producing Public Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eigen, Joel Peter, and Gregory Andall. 1986. “From Mad Doctor to Forensic Witness: The Evolution of Early English Court Psychiatry.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 9: 159–69. Engelberg, Joseph, Caroline Sasseville, and Jared Williams. 2012. “Market Madness? The Case of Mad Money.” Management Science 58, no. 2: 351–64. Eyal, Gil. 2013. “For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic.” American Journal of Sociology 118: 863–907. ——. 2019. The Crisis of Expertise. Cambridge: Polity. Fine, Gary Alan. 2007. Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Cultures of Prediction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fisher, Melissa S. 2012. Wall Street Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fishman, Mark. 1980. Manufacturing the News. Austin: University of Texas Press. Fourcade, Marion, and Rakesh Khurana. 2017. “The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital.” History of Political Economy 49, no. 2: 347–81. Frankfurt, Harry G. 2005. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

248 Y References Fridman, Daniel. 2017. Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fyfe, Aileen, and Bernard Lightman, eds. 2007. Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Galison, Peter. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garber, Peter. 2001. Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor. ——. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. ——. 1967. Where the Action Is: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon. ——. 1969. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ——. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. ——. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Greatbatch, David. 1993. “On the Management of Disagreement between News Interviewees.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, edited by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 268–301. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Griffeth, Bill. 2004. Interview by Steve Nelson, CNBC, September 14, 2004. Hauser Oral History Project. The Cable Center. https://www.cablecenter .org/the-barco-library/the-hauser-oral-history-project/g-listings /bill-griffeth. Grindstaff, Laura. 2002. The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Groysberg, Boris, and Paul M. Healy. 2013. Wall Street Research: Past, Present, and Future. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hamlin, Christopher. 1986. “Scientific Method and Expert Witnessing: Victorian Perspectives on a Modern Problem.” Social Studies of Science 16, no. 3: 458–513. Harrington, Brooke. 2016. Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

References Z 249 Harrison, Paul. 1997. “A History of an Intellectual Arbitrage: The Evolution of Financial Economics.” History of Political Economy 29, no. S1: 172–87. Heath, Christian. 2013. The Dynamics of Auction: Social Interaction and the Sale of Fine Art and Antiques. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heffer, Chris. 2020. All Bullshit and Lies? Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higgins, Michael. 2012. “Belligerent Broadcasting and Makeover Television.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 5: 501–18. HKEX (Hong Kong Stock Exchange). 2017. “HKEX to Start Its After Hours Trading Enhancement on 6 November.” News release, October 12, 2017. https://www.hkex.com.hk/News/News-Release/2017/171012news?sc _lang=en. ——. 2019. Cash Market Transaction Survey 2018 (Full Report). HKEX. https:// www.hkex.com.hk/-/media/HKEX-Market/News/Research-Reports /HKEX-Surveys/Cash-Market-Transaction-Survey-2018/cmts2018 _fullreport.pdf. ——. 2020. HKEX Monthly Market Highlights July 2020. HKEX. https:// www.hkex.com.hk/Market-Data/Statistics/Consolidated-Reports /HKEX-Monthly-Market-Highlights?sc_lang=en. HKSFA (Hong Kong Society of Financial Analysts). 2012. Serving Hong Kong and Financial Analysts for 20 Years. Hong Kong: HKSFA. Holmes, Douglas R. 2014. Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing. 2015. Retail Investor Survey 2014. https://www.hkex.com.hk/-/media/HKEX-Market/News/Research -Reports/HKEX-Surveys/Retail-Investor-Survey_2014/RIS2014.pdf. IFEC (Investor and Financial Education Council). 2019. Retail Investor Study 2019.IFEC.https://www.ifec.org.hk/common/pdf/about_iec/ifec-retail -investor-study2019.pdf. Insana, Ron. 2004. Interview by Steve Nelson, CNBC, August 4, 2004. Hauser Oral History Project. The Cable Center. https://www.cablecenter .org/the-barco-library/the-hauser-oral-history-project/i-j-listings /ron-insana. Investor Education Centre. 2017. Retail Investor Study Research Report. Investor and Financial Education Centre. https://www.ifec.org.hk/common /pdf/about_iec/IEC-Retail-Investor-Study-report.pdf.

250 Y References Jacobs, Heiko. 2020. “Hype or Help? Journalists’ Perceptions of Mispriced Stocks.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 178: 550–65. Jacobs, Ronald. 2012. “Entertainment Media and the Aesthetic Public Sphere.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith, 318–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacobs, Ronald N., and Eleanor Townsley. 2011. The Space of Opinion: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 2018. “Media Meta-Commentary and the Performance of Expertise.” European Journal of Social Theory 21, no. 3: 340–56. Jao, Y. C. 1979. “The Rise of Hong Kong as a Financial Center.” Asian Survey 19, no. 7: 674–94. Jones, Roger. 2012. “Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist.” British Journal of General Practice 62, no. 599: 319, https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp12X649241. Jovanovic, Franck. 2008. “The Construction of the Canonical History of Financial Economics.” History of Political Economy 40, no. 2: 213–42. JPX ( Japan Exchange Group). 2020. Trading by Types of Investors 2019. JPX. https://www.jpx.co.jp/english/markets/statistics-equities/investor-type /b5b4pj00000390ps-att/stock_vol_1_y19.pdf. Kelty, Christopher. 2019. The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kolb, Deborah. 2009 [1985]. “To Be a Mediator: Expressive Tactics in Mediation.” In Life as Theater. A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, Second Edition, edited by Dennis Brissett and Charles Edgley, 317–32. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Knorr Cetina, Karin. 2003. “From Pipes to Scopes: The Flow Architecture of Financial Markets.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 4, no. 2: 7–23. Knorr Cetina, Karin, and Urs Bruegger. 2002. “Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets.” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 4: 905–50. Lahey, Karen Eilers, and Jill Lynn Vihtelic. 2000. “Finance Faculty Demographics, Career History, Diversity, and Job Satisfaction.” Financial Practice and Education 10, no. 1: 111–22. Laube, Stefan. 2016. Nervöse Märkte: Materielle und leibliche Praktiken im virtuellen Finanzhandel [Nervous Markets: Material and Bodily Practices in Online Financial Trading]. Oldebourg: De Gruyter.

References Z 251 ——. 2019. “The Embodied Market: Emotional Observation and Evaluation in Digital Financial Trading.” Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie 48, no. 4: 263–78. Laube, Stefan, Jan Schenk, and Thomas Scheffer. 2020. “Constitutive Invisibility: Exploring the Work of Staff Advisers in Political PositionMaking.” Social Studies of Science 50, no. 2: 292–316. Leigh Star, Susan, and James Griesemer. 1989. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3: 387–420. Leins, Stefan. 2018. Stories of Capitalism: Inside the Role of Financial Analysts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Letukas, Lynn. 2012. “The Ascent of Punditry: Media and the Construction of Cable News.” PhD dissertation, University of Maryland. Li, Jing. 2015. “Taming a Profession: State and Economists During China’s Economic Reform, 1978–2012.” PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Albany. LiPuma, Edward. 2017. The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. LiPuma, Edward, and Benjamin Lee. 2012. “A Social Approach to the Financial Derivatives Markets.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 2: 289–316. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria. 2008. “Real Disorder in the Court.” Media, Culture & Society 30, no. 1: 81–107. Luff, Paul, and Christian Heath. 2019. “Visible Objects of Concern: Issues and Challenges for Workplace Ethnographies in Complex Environments.” Organization 26, no. 4: 578–97. Lynch, Michael. 2007. “Expertise in Action: Presenting and Attacking Expert Evidence in DNA ‘Fingerprinting’ Cases.” Villanova Law Review 52, no. 4: 925–52. Lynch, Michael, and Simon Cole. 2005. “Science and Technology Studies on Trial: Dilemmas of Expertise.” Social Studies of Science 35, no. 2: 269–311. MacKenzie, Donald. 2009. Material Markets: How Economic Agents Are Constructed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 2018. “Material Signals: A Historical Sociology of High-Frequency Trading.” American Journal of Sociology 123, no. 6: 1635–83. ——. 2021. Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

252 Y References MacKenzie, Donald, and Yuval Millo. 2003. “Constructing a Market, Performing a Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange.” American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 1: 107–45. MacKenzie, Donald, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu. 2007. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mao, Zhifei. 2018. Digital Media and Risk Culture in China’s Financial Markets. New York: Routledge. Martin, Sylvia J. 2017. Haunted: An Ethnography of the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mata, Tiago, and Steven G. Medema. 2013. “Cultures of Expertise and the Public Interventions of Economists.” History of Political Economy 45, no. S1: 1–19. Maynard, Douglas. 2003. Good News, Bad News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merkin, Rebecca. 2006. “Uncertainty Avoidance and Facework: A Test of the Hofstede Model.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 30, no. 2: 213–28. Millet-Reyes, Benedicte. 2013. “The Impact of Citations in International Finance.” Global Finance Journal 24: 129–39. Moss, Brian. 1987. “Cable’s FNN: The Little Network That Could.” New York Times, October 26, 1987: 72. Noice, Tony, and Helga Noice. 2009 [1997]. The Nature of Expertise in Professional Acting: A Cognitive View. New York: Psychology Press. O’Brien, Timothy. 2013. “Witnessing Expertise: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Legal Determinations of Expert Authority in United States District Courts.” PhD dissertation, Indiana University. Ortiz, Horacio. 2014. Valeur financière et verité [Financial Value and Truth]. Paris: Sciences Po. Les Presses. ——. 2021. The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment: Political Imaginaries of Shareholder Value. New York: Columbia University Press. Osipovich, Alexander. 2020. “Individual Investor Boom Reshapes U.S. Stock Market.” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles /individual-investor-boom-reshapes-u-s-stock-market-11598866200.

References Z 253 Ott, Julia C. 2011. When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investor Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pardo-Guerra, Juan Pablo. 2019. Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patrona, Marianna. 2005. “Speaking Authoritatively: On the Modality and Factuality of Expert Talk in Greek Television Studio Discussion Programs.” Text 25, no. 2: 233–67. Philips, Susan U. 1993. “Evidentiary Standards for American Trials: Just the Facts.” In Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse, edited by Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine, 248–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2008. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Preda, Alex. 2004. “Informative Prices, Rational Investors: The Emergence of the Random Walk Hypothesis and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Science of Financial Investments.’” History of Political Economy 36, no. 2: 351–86. ——. 2007. “Where Do Analysts Come From? The Case of Financial Chartism.” In Market Devices, edited by Michel Callon, Yuval Millo, and Fabian Muniesa, 40–64. Oxford: Blackwell. ——. 2009. Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2021. “Financial Noise.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, edited by Christian Borch and Robert Wosnitzer, 96–114. New York: Routledge. Ramírez-i-Ollé, Meritxell. 2018. “Trust, Scepticism, and Social Order: A Contribution from the Sociology of Knowledge.” Sociology Compass 13, no. 2: 1–12. Richardson, Brian. 2000. “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory.” Style 34, no. 2: 168–75. Ross, Philippe. 2019. “How (Well) Do Media Professionals Know Their Audiences? SEE Meets Media Studies.” In The Third Wave in Science and Technology Studies: Future Research Directions on Expertise and Experience, edited by David S. Caudill, Shannon N. Conley, Michael E. Gorman, and Martin Weinel, 133–50. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

254 Y References Sacklyn, Raymonde. 2015. A Short History of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and of Its (Important) People. Hong Kong: Historic Publishing House of Hong Kong. Sandefur, Rebecca. 2015. “Elements of Professional Expertise: Understanding Relational and Substantive Expertise Through Lawyers’ Impact.” American Sociological Review 80, no. 5: 909–33. Scarborough, Roscoe C. 2012. “Managing Challenges on the Front Stage: The Facework Strategies of Musicians.” Poetics 40, no. 6: 542–64. Schama, Simon. 1987. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Random House. Schenk, Catherine R. 2018. “Hong Kong and Global Finance: The Limits to Free Market Foundations.” Monde(s) 13: 67–88. Schiffrin, Deborah. 2009. “Crossing Boundaries: The Nexus of Time, Space, Person, and Place in Narrative.” Language in Society 38, no. 4: 421–45. SFC (Securities and Futures Commission Hong Kong). 2018. “Table B13: Number of Transactions by Transaction Size and by Category of Brokers.” https://www.sfc.hk/web/EN/files/SOM/MarketStatistics/b13.pdf. ——. 2021. “Table C1: Number of Licensees/Registrants.” https://www.sfc.hk /-/media/EN/files/SOM/MarketStatistics/c01.pdf. Shapin, Steven. 1994. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shiller, Robert J. 2019. Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shonkwiler, Alison. 2017. The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sidaway, James D., and John R. Bryson. 2002. “Constructing Knowledges of ‘Emerging Markets.’ UK-Based Investment Managers and Their Overseas Connections.” Environment and Planning A 34: 401–16. Spence, Crawford, Mark Aleksanyan, Yuval Millo, Shahed Imam, and Subhash Abhayawansa. 2019. “Earning the ‘Write to Speak’: Sell-Side Analysts and Their Struggle to Be Heard.” Contemporary Accounting Research 36, no. 4: 2635–62. Spicer, André. 2020. “Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations.” Organization Theory 1: 1–26. Staeheli, Urs. 2013. Spectacular Speculation: Thrills, the Economy, and Popular Discourse. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stapleford, Thomas A. 2017. “Business and the Making of American Econometrics, 1910–1940.” History of Political Economy 49, no. 2: 233–65.

References Z 255 Statista. 2020. “Largest Stock Exchange Operators Worldwide as of March 2020, by Market Capitalization of Listed Companies (in Trillion U.S. Dollars).” Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/270126/largest -stock-exchange-operators-by-market-capitalization-of-listed-companies/. Stephens, Neil, and Jamie Lewis. 2017. “Doing Laboratory Ethnography: Reflections on Method in Scientific Workplaces.” Qualitative Research 17, no. 2: 202–16. “Stocks and Share Business.” 1946. Far Eastern Economic Review 1, no. 1: 7. Stone, Gregory P. 2009 [1975]. “Appearance and the Self: A Slightly Revised Version.” In Life as Theater: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Dennis Brissett and Charles Edgley, 141–62. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tuchman, Gaye. 1978. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: Free Press. Turner, Victor. 1987. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ. Twain, Mark. 1999 [1884]. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton. Useem, Michael. 1996. Investor Capitalism: How Money Managers Are Changing the Face of Corporate America. New York: Basic Books. Van der Zwan, Natascha. 2014. “Making Sense of Financialization.” SocioEconomic Review 12: 99–129. Wansleben, Leon. 2012. “Financial Analysts.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance, edited by Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda, 250–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeung, Karen. 2017. “Yuan’s Growing Influence Seen as Factor Keeping Hong Kong Dollar Weak.” August 29, 2017. https://www.scmp.com/business /money/markets-investing/article/2108800/yuans-growing-influence -seen-factor-keeping-hong. Yonay, Yuval, and Daniel Breslau. 2006. “Marketing Models: The Culture of Mathematical Economics.” Sociological Forum 21, no. 3: 345–86. Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology Between Chicago and London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zu Knyphausen-Aufseß, Dodo, Michael Mirow, and Lars Schweizer. 2011. “The Role of Financial Analysts in the Strategy Formation Process of Business Firms.” Industrial and Corporate Change 20, no. 4: 1153–87.

INDEX

actor, 6, 18, 21, 26, 33–34, 37, 41–42, 67, 69, 75, 97, 99–101, 126, 128–29, 151, 200, 202, 218, 234n2, 237n12; financial actor, 18, 23, 27, 41, 65, 90, 96–97, 101, 115, 127, 145, 152, 157, 195, 203–4, 235n7, 241n7 advertising, 29, 78, 89, 94–95, 113–14, 141–43, 158, 188, 191, 207, 214, 240n8 advertisements, 23, 113. See also commercials advice, financial, 5, 14, 78, 94, 139, 162, 198, 203–4, 206, 214 analysis, financial, 7, 12, 36, 60, 188, 217 analysts, 14–15, 18–21, 26, 29, 32, 53–54, 63, 67, 91–92, 94, 98–99, 107, 112, 119, 137–38, 156–57, 177, 183–84, 196, 225–29, 239n4; and audiences, 24, 185–86, 188–91, 198, 200–1, 204, 208, 240n4, 241n6; buy-side, 50, 134, 234n1; as financial experts, 12, 25, 33, 37–38, 42, 47, 49–50, 57, 62, 118,

202, 207, 217–18; fundamental, 48; and the media, 16, 23, 27–28, 80, 88–90, 93, 95–97, 101, 105, 113–15, 124–25, 145–46, 152, 163–64, 187, 234n3n4n5, 236n2n3n4n5n7, 238n2n3, 239n3, 240n5; sell-side, 51, 111, 134, 234n1; and talk, 28, 52, 73, 78, 83, 100, 103–4, 109–10, 117, 121–23, 126–29, 135–36, 139–44, 147–51, 153–55, 165–76, 178–82, 195, 197, 205–6, 214, 216, 238n1n5; technical, 48, 82, 237n8 anchor, 12, 16, 28–29, 72, 78–79, 82, 84, 89, 92, 95–101, 103–4, 112–13, 117–18, 121–29, 140–41, 143–49, 152–55, 164–67, 169–71, 173–78, 183–84, 189, 195–96, 199, 201–8, 214, 226, 235n4, 237n12, 238n4, 241n6 appearance, 6, 12, 72–75, 108–16, 123, 130, 196–97, 212, 235n7, 236n1n2n7. See also expression attorney, 74, 77, 83–85, 88, 108, 117, 119, 228

258 Y Index audience, 2–9, 13–14, 17–20, 22–24, 27–30, 33–35, 53, 63–64, 66–71, 73, 75–77, 79–83, 90, 94, 98–99, 101–2, 104, 108–9, 111–12, 114–18, 120–23, 125–29, 132–33, 137–39, 144–45, 148–52, 157, 161–62, 165–68, 173–74, 176, 183–91, 193–209, 212–16, 218–19, 225–29, 232n3, 235n7, 236n4, 237n8n10, 238n2, 240n1n4n5, 241n6n7n8. See also analysts barrister, 74, 77, 84–85, 108, 117, 119, 228 brokerage, 11–12, 18, 47, 88–89, 91, 96, 99, 102, 127–28, 207, 226, 234n1 brokers, 31, 33, 35, 38–39, 63, 105, 109, 150, 221–22 business schools, 37, 40, 45, 60–61 callable bull and bear contracts. See CBBCs capital asset pricing model. See CAPM CAPM, 42 career, 19, 26, 43, 82, 89, 91, 94, 125, 127–28, 217, 235n4, 238n4 CBBCs, 10–11, 87–89, 143, 190, 231n2 channel, 13–14, 79, 81, 105, 140, 149, 199, 209, 211, 240n4. See also TV China, 10–11, 13, 15, 23, 60–63, 87, 96, 118, 170, 175, 221, 224, 226, 231n6, 234n3 cognition. See knowledge collaboration, 7, 13, 21–22, 25–26, 74, 76–78, 82–83, 88, 97, 99, 101, 104–5, 116, 131, 145, 147, 156, 158, 166, 213, 216–18

Collins, Harry, 33, 35–37, 95, 97, 105, 202, 232n2, 233n4 commentary, 17, 54–55, 72, 79–82, 87, 100, 234n1 commercials, 93, 113, 142–43, 146, 235. See also advertisements commodity, 32, 84 communication, 52, 87, 111, 134–35, 156 consumption, 5, 168, 179–80 contracts, 11–12, 87–89, 143, 222, 231n2. See also CBBCs credential, 27–28, 32–33, 35, 37, 48, 71, 82–83, 91–92, 94, 117–22, 124–25, 127, 129, 157, 233n3 Debord, Guy, 5 disagreement, 168–70, 175–76, 178, 182. See also truth discipline, academic, 39–40, 113, 227 discipline, dramaturgical, 6–7. See also expression; spectacle documentary, 72–73, 75, 77, 83, 88 ear loop, 103, 105–6, 140, 144–46. See also earpiece earpiece, 97–98, 145, 206. See also ear loop economics, 39–40, 60, 91, 118, 124, 149–52, 171, 218, 235n3; economics, financial, 32, 47–49, 78, 168–69 economists, 6, 39–40, 47, 50, 60–61, 78, 148; economists, financial, 50, 82, 153, 169 efficient market theory, 42, 48–49, 60. See also EMT EMT, 42

Index Z 259 ethnography, 9, 17–18, 20–22, 24, 26, 40, 75, 111, 212, 227, 235n1, 237n12, 240n3 event, 54–55, 81, 87, 91, 105, 154, 176–77, 187, 227, 238n2 expertise: of analysts, 28, 32, 38, 42, 47–53, 57, 73, 99, 115, 118, 121, 123, 151, 201, 218, 236n2, 237n8; contributory, 36–37, 41, 44–46, 49–50, 54, 58, 62, 64, 70; of financial academics, 32–33, 39–44, 47, 49, 53–54, 58–60, 62, 78, 222, 227, 237n8; interactional, 36–37, 68, 71, 76, 97, 150, 218, 232n2, 233n4n5, 238n4; of journalists, 53–57, 234n1; realist view of, 35, 38, 70, 184, 216, 218; relational, 38, 151, 238n4; relativist view of, 33, 35, 216, 218; substantive, 38, 99, 104, 114–16, 118, 120, 139, 148–52, 157, 197, 200, 203–4, 207–8, 216–18, 228, 234n1, 236n2; T-shaped, 233n5. See also analysts; journalists expression, 6, 18, 25–26, 65, 67, 70–71, 73–75, 126, 140, 196; and audience, 241n6; and dramaturgical discipline, 7; and expertise, 77–78, 202; and expression games, 232n1; given off, 234n2; and knowledge, 76 facework, 122; strategic, 123, 215 facticity, 56–57. See also truth filmmaker, 72, 237n12 finance, academic, 28, 32, 36, 38–40, 43–46, 48–49, 52–53, 57, 59–62, 81,

89, 225, 227; educational program in, 14, 62–63, 91, 224, 234 financial intermediation, 54, 58, 109 financial markets, 5, 10–11, 14–15, 21, 38, 42, 64, 66–67, 69, 96, 104–5, 191, 193, 223–24 financialization, 25, 58, 233n7; and everyday life, 113, 194, 210 footing, 124, 126, 136, 155, 165, 175–76, 237n10 frame, 99, 121, 126–27, 129, 131, 143, 165, 177, 179, 235n7, 237n8; framing, 129; reframing, 202, 204–5; theatrical, 65–69, 76 fund manager, 16, 50–53, 63, 87, 89, 91, 93, 110–11, 119, 125, 134–37, 141, 143, 195, 224, 238n1, 241n7. See also analysts game, 2, 5, 12–13, 36, 64, 69, 77, 98, 101; of imitation, 232n2 globalization, 25, 33, 58, 60, 63, 82, 87, 210. See also financialization Goffman, Erving, 2, 6, 22, 66, 71, 73–74, 76, 108, 116–17, 122, 131–32, 148, 152, 196, 219, 232n1, 234n2n3, 237n10n13 Hang Seng Index, 88, 96, 144, 190, 231n2 HKSFA, 63 Hong Kong, 9–14, 18–20, 23, 26, 33, 60–63, 87, 90, 96, 102, 113, 140, 143, 153, 164, 170, 175, 178, 181, 192–93, 195, 221, 224–28, 231n3, 232n7, 235n1n6, 236n6, 237n12, 239n5; as a financial center, 9–10, 221

260 Y Index Hong Kong dollar, 96, 153, 181, 239n6 Hong Kong Institute of Financial Analysts and Professional Commentators, 90. See also IFAPC Hong Kong Society of Financial Analysts. See HKSFA Hong Kong Stock Exchange, 10, 97–98, 102, 221–23, 240n4, 241n8 housewives, 23–24, 115, 149, 186, 196, 215 IFAPC, 90–91. See also Hong Kong Institute of Financial Analysts and Professional Commentators improvisation, 81–82, 87 inflation, 131, 153–55, 212, 217 interaction, 2, 4–5, 7, 35–36, 45–46, 66, 70–71, 139, 147, 188, 190, 192, 194, 227, 232n1, 233n4; strategic, 216, 232n1 interest rates, 7–8, 38, 153–55, 173, 178–80, 183, 239n6 interview, journalistic, 144, 189 investment, 12–15, 19, 23–26, 38–42, 47–49, 51–53, 57–58, 63, 88–89, 94, 99, 109, 113, 116, 119, 122, 124, 132, 134–35, 137, 147, 163, 168, 182, 187–91, 198, 210–12, 218, 222, 224, 227–28, 233n3, 236n7, 240n2n3 investment banking, 62, 93, 95, 98, 102, 146, 234n1, 237n8 investment floor, 110 investors, 11–12, 24, 33, 41–43, 47, 49, 51–53, 57, 63, 87–88, 109, 116, 122, 135–37, 140–41, 143, 164, 186–88, 196, 199–200, 208, 223–24, 230,

231n3n4, 234n1, 235n3, 238n1, 239n5, 241n1 journalists, 20, 33, 40, 72; financial journalists, 28, 38, 53–57, 87, 89, 91, 149 jurisdiction, 32, 35, 40, 55, 94, 99, 104, 120, 159, 233n3 keying, 124, 126, 129, 232n1, 234n3 knowledge, 2, 8–9, 21, 31–33, 35–38, 41, 49–50, 52–53, 65–68, 76–78, 81, 123, 126, 149–50, 156, 160, 167, 190, 193, 201, 210, 212, 217, 219, 228, 233n3; expert, 3–4, 6–7, 27–28, 34, 69–71, 73, 132; tacit, 36, 233n3 legitimacy, 15, 81, 161, 210 Lynch, Michael, 33, 72, 74, 118 MacKenzie, Donald, 68 Mad Money, 81, 83 make-believe, 2, 65–66, 76–77, 124, 128–29, 234ch2n3 makeup, 6–7, 17, 20, 26–27, 74, 78, 95, 101–2, 104–5, 112, 235ch3n8 media, 6, 8–9, 12–13, 19–20, 22, 25–28, 30, 54, 56, 74, 78–79, 81–83, 87–88, 90–93, 102, 104–5, 158–60, 168, 176, 186–87, 189, 208, 211–14, 225–26, 229–30, 233n1n4, 238n4, 240n1; media intellectual, 72; media program, 13, 19, 78–79, 89, 95, 102–3, 142, 149–50, 193, 205 meta-expertise, 37, 71, 95, 118, 125 miniworld, 40–42, 177, 180, 183. See also model

Index Z 261 MMT, 42–43 model, 40–44, 48–52, 57–58, 61, 65, 67, 71, 169–70, 174, 177, 180–83, 190–93, 210, 217–18, 233n4. See also miniworld Modigliani-Miller theorem. See MMT money, 6, 10, 24, 34, 38, 57, 67, 80–83, 94, 98, 111, 119, 128, 135–36, 153, 173, 178, 181, 185, 187, 189, 203–4, 207, 224, 232n7, 239n5, 240n7n8, 241n7 narrative, 6–7, 16, 41, 49–50, 54–55, 66, 69, 80, 136, 176–78, 194 network: cable TV, 79–80; professional, 33–35, 45, 55, 62, 84, 90–91, 104, 125, 216, 277 news, 13, 18, 26, 55, 57, 78–80, 140, 149, 199, 240n4 oral history, 100, 105 organization, 48, 86, 91, 94, 104, 117, 140–41, 168, 228, 233n7 performance, 5, 25, 33–36, 75, 98, 119, 137, 147–48, 216, 226 performativity, 68, 70 performer, 6, 34–35, 67–68, 81, 185 PR, 55–56, 208 prices, 32, 39–42, 47–49, 54, 98, 164, 170, 173, 175–76, 178–80, 183, 205–6, 210, 212, 217, 239n5, 240n4 producer, 7, 12, 18, 21–23, 28–29, 74–80, 82–83, 86–87, 89–90, 92, 95–101, 103–5, 109, 123, 125, 139–40, 142, 144–47, 152, 164–65,

189, 195, 201–2, 207–8, 216–17, 226, 235n1, 236n1, 238n2n3, 240n1 profession, 6, 26, 47, 58, 85, 111, 114, 152 professionalization, 26, 82 public relations. See PR pundit, 72, 233n1. See also media intellectual punditry, 233n1. See also talk Putonghua, 13, 231n6 radio, 5, 7, 9–10, 13–23, 26–28, 54, 78, 82, 89–92, 95, 108, 118, 121, 125, 134, 139–41, 145, 150, 158, 186, 190, 202, 224–27, 229, 234n1, 235n4, 236n6, 237n13, 240n4n5 relationships, 29, 42, 55–56, 86, 90, 100, 167, 185, 191, 194, 212, 236n2 reporting, interpretive, 79 research, 40, 46, 48, 52–54, 57, 60, 63, 71–73, 77, 91, 156, 210; assistants, 13, 20–21, 96–97, 99–100, 104, 140, 146, 217–18, 226; question, 43–45, 47; report, 19, 49–50; seminar, 6–9, 84, 116–17, 120, 129, 132, 134, 159–60, 162, 183, 215, 227–28 ritual, 5, 65, 68–69, 77, 110, 132, 134, 196, 237n13 rivalry, 163–64, 166–67, 169, 176, 184–85, 239n4 screen, 8–9, 17, 21, 23–24, 27, 65, 77, 80, 86–87, 101–3, 105–6, 112, 118–19, 141–42, 145, 190, 199, 213, 217, 235n7, 240n4 Securities and Futures Commission. See SFC

262 Y Index SFC, 63, 223 show, 2, 13, 18–20, 22–23, 26–29, 31, 81, 86, 89–90, 92, 95–99, 103–4, 109, 113–15, 118, 121, 124–26, 128–30, 140–49, 151–53, 158–59, 161–64, 166, 169, 176, 184–93, 195–97, 199–204, 206–7, 212, 215–17, 223, 226, 227, 233n3, 234ch2n1ch3n1, 235n4n5, 236n6, 237n9, 238n2n4, 239n2, 240n1n2n4, 241n7. See also anchor; producer; spectacle skills, 6, 31–32, 34–36, 38, 41–42, 52, 61, 76–79, 101, 125, 135–36, 140, 156–57, 227, 233n3 social media, 5, 8–9, 13, 26–27, 54. See also media; network space, 4–5, 14–16, 21–24, 32, 81, 88, 102, 105, 213 spectacle, 1–9, 12–13, 17, 22–25, 29–30, 64, 67–69, 71, 76–78, 83, 101–2, 157, 185, 208, 217–19 speculation, 5, 31–32, 54, 196 stock commentators, 90, 150, 152. See also analysts stocks, 39, 81, 96, 131, 143, 178, 189, 191, 199, 203, 205, 221–23, 234n1, 241n8 story, 50–52, 56–57, 69, 135–37, 176. See also narrative storytelling, 52, 136 talk: of analysts, 103–4, 110, 146, 175, 182, 185, 189, 198, 228; embodied, 4, 6, 17, 70, 73–75, 77–78, 107–9, 112, 116, 138, 219; expert, 2–10, 13–22, 26–29, 31–32, 35, 47, 53, 62–64, 69–71, 73–78, 81–83, 85–92, 94–95, 99–109, 111–29; of expert witnesses, 3, 9, 19, 85; fresh, 16–17,

28–29, 81, 99, 131, 133–42, 145, 147–52, 156–59, 162, 177, 182, 196, 213–14, 218, 238n5; faultless, 2–6, 14, 16, 18–20, 26, 30–31, 64, 73, 75–76, 78, 82, 93–94, 102, 131–32, 176, 209, 211–14, 216, 228, 231n1, 237n13; organization of expert talk, 26, 83, 87–88, 90; sourcing of expert talk, 84; unfaultable, 130, 139, 150, 152, 155–59, 162, 168, 195–96, 200, 210–12, 214 talk show, 212, 239n2 text, written, 16, 28, 78, 83, 107, 133–34 theater, 1, 5, 25–26, 31, 34, 66, 69, 127, 151, 185. See also spectacle ticker tape, 23, 48, 79–80, 82, 86, 100, 105 tool, 3, 21, 143, 190, 193; of financial action, 65; of calculation, 27, 41, 58; of capturing capital, 187; of valuation, 50–51 traders, 17, 42, 66–68, 70, 102, 112, 199, 223, 231n4 truth, 3, 28–29, 86, 159–62, 164–68, 176–77 TV, 5–10, 12–16; cable TV, 26, 78–80, 86, 234n1. See also media; screen; spectacle uncertainty, 65, 68–69, 78, 96, 98–99, 122, 133–34, 136, 139–41, 152, 156–57, 175–76, 193, 201, 213, 217, 219, 234n2 warrants, 87, 143, 190, 231n2, 239n5. See also CBBCs writing, 16, 18–19, 28, 54–57, 107–8, 134–35, 138, 140, 233n6. See also text