1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Social studies of finance is an interdisciplinary research area that combines perspectives from anthropology, economic sociology, science and technology studies, international political economy, behavioral finance, and cultural studies in the study of financial markets and financial instruments.
Financial markets have been an object for sociological inquiry since, at least, Max Weber’s Die Börse.
In the 1980s, a number of economic sociologists developed empirical investigation on the social structure and cultural characteristics of financial markets, especially in the US.
Such pioneering researcher included contributions from Wayne E. Baker, Mitchel Y. Abolafia and Charles W. Smith, and was based on methods such as ethnographic observation or social network analysis.
In the 1990s, a number of researchers from the field of science and technology studies such as Karin Knorr-Cetina and Donald A. MacKenzie started also developing empirical research in this area, with close attention to the role of expert knowledge and technology in financial activities.