Taking the Floor: Models, Morals and Management in a Wall Street Trading Floor was published by Princeton University Press in 2019. It has been reviewed in Organisation Studies (see here), the Journal of Cultural Economy (see here), and the LSE Review of Books (see here). It is available for purchase at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk and other bookstores.
I am represented by Michael Dougherty at Dougherty and Associates.
Endorsements
“This is a remarkable look inside a Wall Street trading room through the years. The account of the organization of the trading room, its traders, and the methods and tools they use is compellingly told, and the level of engagement with the subjects is an extraordinary accomplishment.”—Walter W. Powell, Stanford University
“Beunza opens up the black box of a Wall Street trading room and reveals, surprisingly, a form of morality and governance grounded in unique face-to-face, trader-supervisor relationships. This book is high quality sociology at the front line of financial markets, with important lessons for the contemporary debate about banking culture.”—Michael Power, London School of Economics and Political Science
“I am hugely enthusiastic about this engaging book. Beunza’s original work has been influential in the social studies of finance and in Taking the Floor he introduces ideas clearly and with great skill. This is a significant contribution to the field.”—Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh
Donald Angus MacKenzie
Taking the Floor is “the story of a 20-year intellectual odyssey, by Daniel Beunza, one of the world’s most insightful analysts of the financial system”. He delves in-depth into the organization of a Wall Street trading room, beginning with him negotiating access to it when he was working on his PhD. He also reveals how later conversations with key people in the trading room made him rethink many of his first impressions, showing him that what he took to be a typical form of organization was actually very deliberately designed to be unusual.
I particularly admire Beunza’s nuanced take (co-developed with the sociologist David Stark) on how traders use mathematical models. Traders are far from the naïve users of models that they are often portrayed as being, and instead often use models in a sophisticated way, not as guides to the truth of markets but as insights into what their competitors are thinking. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us can relax because over the years Beunza has also become sharply aware of how easily the elite world of finance can succumb to misjudgments and amorality.
From Donald's list on financial trading and the global financial system.